Glimpses of Britain. Reader
Автор-составитель А. Г. Минченков

Prescott’s folly

   by Roy Strong
   Daily Mail, August 5, 2004

   So, New Labour’s control police have struck again. In its infinite wisdom, John Prescott’s department has announced that all new large country houses must be based on modern and innovative architecture rather than replication of the past.
   The ignorant Keith Hill, Housing and Planning Minister, wants to change “the face of new country house architecture from a pastiche of historical styles to innovative cutting-edge design… creating buildings that people will want to visit in 100 years’ time”.
   The arrogance of such a remark is mind-blowing. What right has any government, short of a fascist Mussolini-style dictatorship, to lay down architectural style for anyone? What right has Hill – no architectural expert himself – to dismiss the distinguished work of a raft of today’s architects as “pastiche”?
   And is it any surprise that New Labour crony Lord Rogers – he of the ghastly Dome, which is still swallowing oceans of taxpayers’ money four years on from the millennium – is one of the few who welcomes the decision as “tremendous news”?
   This appalling ignorance of our architectural history is shared, somewhat surprisingly, by George Ferguson, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who also applauds the Government’s stance with these words: “The country house has, throughout the ages, been one of the defining elements of our architectural and social history.”
   That sounds all right, but what he does not say is that the architectural and social history to which he refers has been written by our ability to use the architectural styles of past and adapt them for modern-day living. But this “revivalism” is the very concept that is now so abhorred. What Mr Ferguson, Mr Hill and the lumpen John Prescott betray is a profound ignorance of this country’s architectural history. At no period in that history has the past not been relived. We have always looked back while simultaneously embracing the new. That is why so many Victorian country houses were built in the style of the 14th century and yet included every up-to-date mod con. Take the medieval form of the castle. If the likes of Hill and Prescott had been around in 1485, no one would have been allowed to build one after the Wars of the Roses.
   And yet the Elizabethans built medieval castles, so did the Georgians. Castles sprang up everywhere through the Regency and Victorian periods, and medieval castles were still being built after 1914 as anyone who visits Sir Edwin Lutyens’ masterpiece Castle Drogo in Devon – which went up between 1910 and 1930 – knows.
   Or, to take another instance. The Gothic style didn’t die with the Middle Ages. Gothic churches were erected in the 17th century and Gothic took off again in the 18th, rising to a floodtide in the Victorian period.
   If Prescott and Hill had their way, all those Gothic country house masterpieces such as Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham or Tyntesfield in Somerset – which has just been bought by the National Trust – would never have been built.
   Or, to expose the absurdity even further, Inigo Jones’s 17th century Queen’s House at Greenwich – the foundation stone of the Renaissance classical style in England and based on the architecture of ancient Rome – would have been vetoed. You could even say that Chatsworth and Blenheim would not have been allowed.
   There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in an architectural style which offers a strong evocation of the past. Almost everyone feels comfortable with something that recalls our common history.
   The last time the Government exercised this kind of control was in the post-war period when, under the aegis of Labour, the modernists dominated local planning.
   We now lament the horrors perpetrated during the Sixties by architects driven on by disastrous social-engineering projects which resulted in hideous tower blocks, the wiping out of historic town centres and horrendous shopping malls and community centres.
   Let me say at once that I have nothing against modernist architecture if it is good. But, like New Labour, it is and has always been essentially urban – a style not easily transported to rural locations.
   The Tories introduced legislation known as Gummer’s Law, which allowed new country houses to arise in whatever style the owner opted for, whether classical, gothic, modernist or indeed post-modernist.
   As a consequence there was a renaissance in country house building – beautiful houses which often utilise the classical repertory of the past but are, at the same time, very much of their own day. They epitomise the way that we have always built country houses.
   But New Labour, in its ignorance and desire to control how people should live, has simply flushed this proud tradition down the plughole.

The first media queen

   by Dr John Plunkett
   BBC History, April 2003
   The Queen’s diaries are a popular bestseller, yet her photographs are allegedly manipulated by retouchers. There are calls for the Prince of Wales to show himself more to the people, yet his engagement photographs are criticised for being too intimate and revealing. No, these are not the feverish dreams of an editor of one of today’s Fleet Street tabloids, but episodes that did take place – in the 19th century.
   A charged relationship between the monarchy and the media is not a new concern. Queen Victoria was the first monarch to cope with the type of attention that has since become the norm for the British monarchy. During Victoria’s reign, the royal family was a beneficiary of a new mass print and visual culture, but was subjected simultaneously to its demands and intrusions. In conjunction with industrialisation and constitutional reform, a popular publishing industry helped reinvent the position of the monarchy in national life.
   The first decade of the reign coincided with the growth of popular weekly newspapers and the first periodicals devoted to graphic news. The News of the World began publication in October 1843, six years after Victoria’s accession. It belonged to a new genre of newspapers aimed at a readership unable to afford a daily paper, and which lacked the leisure to read one. Matching this growth were the more expensive illustrated periodicals supplying graphic news. The Illustrated London News began its long life in May 1842, and was soon joined by several imitators. Prior to this, very few newspapers had provided illustrations of contemporary events. The development of illustrated periodicals and a popular press played a significant role in creating a new style of monarchy, one built around an increasingly public role. During the 1840s and 1850s, Victoria and her husband Albert undertook an unprecedented number of civic engagements, regional tours and international visits. The publicity these received helped promote an image of a monarchy in touch with its subjects.
//-- Emotional interaction --//
   Illustrated newspapers also created an emotional interaction with the royal family by showing intimate details of palace life. Its artists adopted the position of confidential onlookers. In an engraving produced by The Illustrated London News of the visit of the French king, Louis-Philippe, a state visit was turned into a domestic occasion. Press coverage provided an intimate experience of the public and domestic activities of the royal family. The creation of Victoria as a popular monarch was inseparable from the way her life was presented as royal news. In 1868, extracts from her journal of her journeys in the Scottish Highlands sold over 100,000 copies.
   Despite the political benefits that Victoria and Albert received from their fulsome coverage, reporters were kept at arm’s length by the court. Newspapers were only allowed limited access to royal events. Journalists had a low social status and were far from being regarded as “Gentlemen of the Press”. Courtiers were unwilling to acknowledge their role in creating an intimate bond between monarchy and subject. At the wedding of the Princess Royal in January 1857, only ten journalists were granted official access to St James’s Palace. Reporters were seated high up in the Chapel Royal. Spencer Ponsonby, the Lord Chamberlain’s assistant, chose this position because “it would be more out of the way than any other place in the Chapel, for I suppose we could not call upon the reporters to wear full [Court] dress”. Reporters could not be excluded; nevertheless they were placed at the edge of proceedings. Ponsonby compensated for the reporters’ lack of court dress by having a red silk curtain screen off the members of the press.
   The wedding established an etiquette of journalistic invisibility. This semiofficial understanding between reporters and courtiers did not, however, prevent fractious encounters. At Balmoral in the early 1870s, there was often a carriage of journalists ever eager to follow Victoria. Protocol meant that they were nevertheless expected to stay out of sight. On one occasion, a carriage of reporters was following Victoria on a drive, only to be caught unawares when her carriage suddenly turned around. The reporters’ carriage was forced into a ditch in order to let her pass. She reportedly had a hearty laugh at their expense.
   The wariness of the royal household towards the media was far from unwarranted. Royal reportage was attacked for its intrusive practices and purple prose. Journalists veered between intrusion and idolatry. Satirical journals such as Punch frequently attacked the sycophantic coverage of Victoria. The deferential language of royal reporting was claimed to falsify the gloss of the monarchy in the same way that its true nature had formerly been hidden by the ceremonial court splendour. In 1846, Punch published a mock proclamation from Victoria to the press, demanding that “all Vain, Silly, and Sycophantic verbiage shall cease, and good, Straightforward, Simple English be used in all descriptions of all Progresses made by Ourself, Our Royal Consort and Our Dearly Beloved Children”.
   The court newsman was one means by which the monarchy pro-actively influenced its press coverage. Photographs of the royal family were subject to an even more subtle form of manipulation. The release of the first public royal photographs, in August 1860, was a huge success. The intimacy and realism of the camera emphasized Victoria’s ordinariness. Indeed, Victoria’s initial photographs were renowned for being less than flattering, while engagement pictures of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra in 1862 were criticized for being too intimate. After the 1880s, though, many royal photographs were retouched in the same way that celebrity photographs are now digitally airbrushed. Blemishes and wrinkles were removed, waistlines narrowed and dark shadows lightened. Retouching was common, undertaken partly due to sitter’s vanity and partly to technical imperfections in the negative.
   A photograph taken by the Bassano Studio in 1882 demonstrates the extent to which Victoria’s photographs were altered. In the picture, her cheeks and jowls have received attention from the retoucher. The removal of flesh from under her chin is evident in that the area there has a lighter tone. The tiny queen has also been placed on a platform to accentuate her height. Reviews of Victoria’s later photographs complained that her subjects were unable to get a truthful portrait. In August 1887, Photographic News disparagingly noted that a new set of pictures, were, like all published portraits of the Queen, fabricated. It complained that the public had to be content with a “mixture of photography and monochrome intricacy”. Significantly, the Photographic News presumed that, because the photographs had been made available, they had inevitably been manipulated. The Crown might never die but Victoria’s photographs were concerned with showing a monarch whom age did not touch. It was not simply that Victoria seemed an unchanging figure in a disorienting world: judging by her photographs she was unchanging.
//-- A dying Queen --//
   The media attention received by the royal family during the 19th century culminated in the death and funeral of Queen Victoria in January 1901. As the Queen lay dying at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, hundreds of British and foreign journalists gathered at the gates to receive the latest bulletins on her condition. Crowds waited at telegraph stations all over the British Empire for news of the Great White Empress. The telegraph network helped to bring together nation and empire in one global community. There were nevertheless numerous incidents of disreputable journalistic behaviour during Victoria’s final illness. The episode that caused the most public outrage took place after the Queen’s death was announced to the press pack waiting at the Osborne gates. Immediately, they rushed to East Cowes telegraph office to relay the news to the waiting world, some running, some on bikes, and some on horseback. Many shouted “The Queen is Dead!” in their headlong charge. Such disrespect was widely condemned.
   Several newspapers also printed fake reports of the events around the Queen’s deathbed. The Press Association news agency put out a spurious interview with one of the physicians attending the Queen, while one illustrated newspaper published a sketch of a touching death-bed reconciliation between Victoria and her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Court officials were assiduous in tracking down those responsible for these fabrications. With access to all messages sent from Osborne, they were able to confirm which reports had been invented. At least two correspondents promptly found themselves recalled to their newspaper’s offices after the intervention of courtiers. All these incidents of journalistic sharp practice were widely commented upon, accentuating Victoria’s death as a media event.
   The growth of a mass media helped to maintain the royal family as an overarching yet intimate presence. Like a Russian doll, the icon of Victoria was made up of countless different smaller versions. Her status as national and imperial figurehead and her promotion as the Mother of her People, have to be understood in relation to the growth of different media. In terms of the media making of the monarchy, Victoria and Albert set precedents that continue to play an important role in defining the representation of the royal family today. Subsequently the media were assimilated into practices that they had first established. Thus, whereas Victoria and Albert’s royal tours were broadcast via the new illustrated press, the imperial tours of their children and grandchildren received comparably novel coverage from the new cinematograph. Important 20th century continuations of this relationship include the first Christmas Day radio broadcast by George V in 1932; the televising of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953; and the royal wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981.

1966 and all what?

   by Laura Clark
   Daily Mail, August 5, 2004
   The past seems to be something of a closed book to many young Britons. William the Conqueror, for example, may have changed the course of our history in 1066, but he remains largely a mystery man.
   In a survey, almost half of 16 to 24-year-olds could not identify him as the victor of the Battle of Hastings.
   Amazingly, more than one in five believed it was Alexander the Great and 13 per cent said it was Napoleon.
   The BBC poll, published today, also reveals that less than half of the young Britons knew Sir Francis Drake fought in the English fleet against the Spanish Armada. One in five believed the hero of England’s victory in 1588 was Christopher Columbus. And the same number thought it was either Horatio Hornblower or Gandalf – both fictional characters.
   The findings left education campaigners aghast at young people’s lack of knowledge about their nation’s past.
   Ignorance, however, was not entirely confined to the younger age groups. The survey of 1,000 Britons from 16-year-olds to pensioners uncovered glaring gaps in many people’s knowledge of key historical events that shaped our history.
   They may have given us our calendar, our roads, the first modern toilet and contributed to our language, but one in five Britons were unaware the Romans ever came here at all.
   One in ten 16 to 24-year-olds actually thought Britain was conquered by Germany.
   And despite this year’s widespread coverage of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, a third of respondents failed to answer a basic question about the Second World War.
   Just 69 per cent knew the Battle of Britain took place during the 1939–45 conflict, with the figure dropping to 51 per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds.
   A fifth of that age group believed it occurred during the First World War, while 12 per cent said it was fought 600 years earlier, during the Hundred Years War involving England and France.
   Just half of those polled knew the name of the battle celebrated by Orangemen in Northern Ireland every July 12.
   Only 18 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds correctly identified it as the Battle of the Boyne, where Catholic King James II’s troops were defeated by Protestant William III in1690.
   A quarter believed the Orangemen were celebrating the battle of “Stamford Bridge” while one in ten answered the Battle of the Bulge.
   An astonishing 15 per cent thought the answer was “Helmsdeep” – the fictional battle that marked the climax of The Two Towers, the second novel in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
   The figures, released to mark the start tomorrow of BBC2’s Battlefield Britain series on landmark conflicts, prompted calls for history to be made more prominent in the school curriculum.
   Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “The survey clearly shows that our state education system has got a lot to answer for.
   A grounding in national history is essential for all young people in order to understand the present. This is extremely shocking. Last month, education watchdog Ofsted said secondary schools spent too little time teaching teenagers about the British Empire and too much on Nazi Germany.
   Time spent on the Empire as a topic could amount to one lesson a year for 11 to 14-year-olds and almost nothing for GCSE pupils.”
   Peter Snow, who presents Battlefield Britain with his son Dan, said: “It’s at once a shock and a challenge that so many people can be so wrong about some of the key moments in Britain’s past.”

How I see it

   by Robert Hardman
   Daily Mail, August 4, 2004
   They all thought it was going to be a bit of a lark on the other side of the Channel. No one expected to see their best mate liquidised by a shell or choke to death on mud and gas in a rat-infested quagmire. As far as Fred Lloyd and his pals were concerned, they were just going to give the Kaiser a bloody nose.
   Back then, it was simple. Germany had rejected Britain’s ultimatum to uninvade Belgium and so mighty Britain was at war with silly Germany. It would all be over by Christmas, of course.
   Today, Mr Lloyd and an extraordinary little band will bring Whitehall to a halt as they gather to recall how horribly wrong the world got it that fateful day – August 4, 1914.
   It seems incredible that there is anyone alive with a first-hand story of World War I. But Britain still boasts 23 veterans of that monstrous conflict.
   And at 11 this morning, four of George V’s men will be at the Cenotaph to mark the day the world changed.
   “We never thought it would last long. No one thought of it as the Great War then. It was just going to be a skirmish,” says Mr Lloyd, 106, still shuddering at the naivety of it all. “All those boys. Thousands of young boys dying in an hour. It’s just so stupid.”
   It certainly did not seem stupid to 16-year-old Fred Lloyd, then a gardener on a country estate at Uckfield, Sussex. Nor did it seem stupid to William Stone, then a 14-year-old farmhand at Sherford Down Farm in Devon.
   “I was working with the cows at the time. The postman came up and told us: ‘We are at war with Germany,’ ” says Mr Stone, now 103. “We were all anxious to join as soon as we could.”
   He was too young to enlist at the time but remembers that one of the other lads on the farm went straight off to the Royal Marines and thence to a watery grave off the Orkneys in HMS Hampshire, alongside Lord Kitchener and 641 other men.
   Mr Stone, who went on to serve in the Royal Navy in both World Wars, is due to give a reading shortly after Big Ben chimes 11am. Alongside him will be Henry Allingham, Britain’s oldest war veteran. He turned 108 two months ago, on the very day that those young pups, the Normandy veterans, were marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
   He was yet another excited young man on August 4, 1914. Already obsessed with motorbikes, he saw the war as an opportunity to ride a racier model and immediately tried to enlist as a dispatch rider at a London recruiting office.
   But the Royal Engineers had enough riders already and Mr Allingham’s widowed mother was unwell. So he remained at home until her death the following year when he promptly entered the Royal Naval Air Service.
   The fourth member of this morning’s gallant quartet will be Jack Oborne, who was a 14-year-old apprentice carpenter on the day that war broke out.
   It would be another three years before he put on a uniform, although he would still have more than enough time to experience the very worst that the Western Front had to offer.
   This morning may be the anniversary of the day it all began. But August 4, 1914, will not be uppermost in the minds of these men. As a bugler sounds the Last Post, they will be remembering what happened next.
   Fred Lloyd, the youngest of 16 orphaned children, wanted to follow his three older brothers into the Army but was turned down by the local Sussex Regiment for being too short. He was, though, allowed to join the Royal Artillery to look after the horses which were still vital to trench warfare. Despite an attack of meningitis which nearly killed him, Private Lloyd made it out to northern France, where it was his task to take fresh horses up to the line and bring the sick ones back. To this day, he is baffled by the number which lost their sight. “Hundreds of horses went blind in that war, but I don’t think anyone ever worked out why that was.”
   He remains very reluctant to discuss the sights he saw, so much so that he has never even shared them with his family. “He opened up to me once about it, telling me how everything from thoroughbreds to old nags were just blown to pieces. But it made him very distressed,” says Dee Johnson, who looks after Mr Lloyd at the Thornbury Residential Home in East Sussex.
   Of his three brothers, one was killed at Arras, one died at the Somme and the third returned home with shrapnel in his head. Mr Lloyd still regards himself as one of the lucky ones.
   So, too, does Mr Stone. “Every day, I think what a bloody lucky man I am to be here,” he tells me from the Oxfordshire home where he still lives alone, doing his daily exercises with his chest-expanders and handgrips: “I’ve got such a strong handshake, people won’t shake hands with me.”
   By the time he joined the Royal Navy, the war was nearly over, although he still remembers seeing the German fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow. But if his youth was an asset in the First World War, it did him no favours when the Second broke out.
   Just as he should have been retiring, he was sent back to sea in 1940. He made five desperate trips to Dunkirk, watching his sister ship and her cargo of fleeing soldiers blown to pieces. Chief Petty Officer Stone was mentioned in dispatches after his ship was torpedoed off Sicily in 1943 and endured the horrors of the Russian convoys.
   And still, he cannot believe his good fortune. “I survived the first war, then the influenza which killed even more people, then the second war. That’s why I trust in God.”
   You won’t hear much grumbling from any of this lot. Whatever subsequent hardships life threw at them, they still see themselves as the Lottery winners of their generation.
   “I reckon I’ve had this guardian angel sitting on my shoulder,” says Henry Allingham as he recalls his Great War, one which took him to the three most infamous battlegrounds of the lot.
   As an air mechanic in HMS Kingfisher, he witnessed the great Battle of Jutland which effectively neutralised the German fleet – not that he sensed its significance at the time. “We didn’t do much. We just watched the shells ricochet.”
   The First Mechanic and his squadron were then moved ashore to the Western Front – Ypres and the Somme – where one of his most vivid memories is of nearly drowning in a huge, festering shellhole filled with human remains, rats and mud.
   “It was night. I couldn’t see and the sides were crumbling. I thought I’d drown, but I put my foot the right way and managed to drag myself out. But I couldn’t move until dawn because there might be booby-traps.”
   In his darker moments, he can still see his pilots turn to “jelly” in the wreckage of their burning planes just yards in front of his position.
   Nine decades on, the memory still brings back the tears. He prefers to dwell on the few happier moments of the war. “There was great camaraderie. You knew you could bank on the other bloke.”
   And he is as modest as the next man. “It was those poor devils in the trenches, marching 20 miles with all their kit on a bowl of soup, it was them who won the war.”
   One of those “poor devils” was Private Jack Oborne of the 52nd Devonshire Light Infantry, although, like all the rest, he sees himself as lucky. Certainly, if it wasn’t for the pocket watch which his father gave him in 1917, he wouldn’t be at the Cenotaph this morning.
   He had already taken one bullet in the leg at Passchendaele – otherwise known as the Third Battle of Ypres – when a German bullet hit him in the chest. It hit the watch instead of Mr Oborne.
   “He has never talked about it much,” says his son, David Oborne, 77. “If you’ve seen a shell throw up bodies blown up by a previous shell, you just try to block it out. I’ve tried to get things out of him but I can’t.”
   All of these men – two of whom span three centuries – are still haunted by the events of 90 years ago. We may not share their ghosts. But we should never ignore their memories.

Why I’ll keep on riding to the rescue of Blenheim

   By John Spencer Churchill,
   11th Duke of Marlborough
   The Mail on Sunday, August 8, 2004
   Running a stately home today is very much a business – that’s the way it has to be. It has to be well thought-out, well organised and well run. It’s something we have developed over a period of time and will continue to do so.
   The first paying visitors were admitted to the house in 1950. In those days, we opened only four days a week. Then I managed to persuade my father to open for five days a week. When I took over in 1972 I realised we had to be open seven days a week.
   Recently we increased the number of days that we’re open by extending the season – this improves the bottom line. We have to open more days because the expenses are going up all the time. This year, for example, we’re staying open until December 12 – and will re-open next year in February.
   It worries me slightly that we’re opening this long because the only way you can keep a house in good tip-top order is to close it down for a certain number of weeks so you can give it a proper spring clean. Maintenance is crucial because the future of the house is all-important.
   Now it is in quite good order, something I can say with pride and satisfaction. But there is a lot of stone work that needs replacing and we also have to replace the six statues that used to be on the roof. We haven’t been able to do a lot of restoration over the past four years because all the monies have been drawn to rewiring, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. If John Churchill were to return here today I think he would be delighted to see that the place is still in reasonably good nick. The other thing is that one has constantly got to think of other means of attracting outside events. It’s no use sitting back and thinking you can carry on the business in the same way that it was done 25 years ago. There’s a lot of outside competition now.
   The one thing that has really hit the stately homes business quite badly is Sunday opening. There has been a huge change to the way of life in this country on Sundays. Fifteen to 20 years ago there was very little that people could do on Sundays except visit a stately home. The shops were shut, no race meetings took place. That’s all changed.
   So we have to keep innovating. This year we have restored the Secret Garden, a treasure that has remained hidden for more than 30 years.
   The garden was conceived by my father, the 10th Duke, and work began in 1960 on creating a romantic and secluded haven which broke away from the formal nature of traditional Victorian gardens.
   My father was a keen gardener and planted unusual species of trees, shrubs and flowers to create a Four Seasons garden comprising winding paths, soothing water features, bridges, fountains, ponds and streams.
   Over the past 30 years, the garden has grown wild and remained inaccessible to all but the most intrepid of explorers. However, a team of dedicated gardeners set about restoring it to its former glory.
   We are constantly having to come up with things to make people aware that there is more to Blenheim than just the house.
   At our music festival this year, for example, we had Barry Manilow performing on the final night. I’m a great Barry Manilow fan – he’s performed here before and I know him quite well.
   You have to cater to all sections of the community, especially children, because they quite often tell the parents what they’ll be doing at weekends.
   If anybody is interested in history or heritage then automatically they’ll want to come to Blenheim. Here, you will find not just the history of our family but to some extent an insight into the history of Britain since the 1700s.
   Our special exhibition on the Battle of Blenheim explains just how important that victory was. If the French had won they would have dominated the world – the Americans might well have ended up speaking French.
   Whenever I’ve been away from home, it is still a great thrill to return. I love seeing the house again as I come down the drive but I also have a nagging anxiety: “What new problem is there now to fix?”
//-- My Favourite Room --//
   It has to be that incredible room the Long Library – it’s 180ft long and was designed by Vanbrugh as a picture gallery. The room’s proportions are amazing.
   From here you look out over the Water Terrace Gardens laid by my grandfather down towards the lake. It’s a very big room. It needs quite a lot of people in there, say 300, to make you realise just how big.
   My Favourite Painting
   I would choose that 1905 painting of my grandfather and grandmother by John Singer Sargent. The painting hangs in the Red Drawing Room and shows my father standing between his father Charles, the 9th Duke, and his mother Consuelo with the Blenheim spaniels. It’s quite magnificent – a wonderful composition.
//-- My Favourite View --//
   That first glimpse of the house as you come down the drive from Woodstock has been described as “the finest view in England”. You have the towers of the palace to the left, to the right is the Column of Victory with its statue of the 1st Duke of Marlborough and in front is the great lake with Vanbrugh’s Grand Bridge. When George III saw this view he exclaimed: “We have nothing to equal this!”
//-- My Favourite Ancestor --//
   I have a particular affection for my cousin Sir Winston Churchill who was born here on November 30, 1874. He proposed to his wife Clementine in the Temple of Diana and was buried near Blenheim Palace in the church at Bladon near his mother and father.
   We have an excellent exhibition about Sir Winston near the room where he was born. The letters to his father are fascinating.
   Winston was a great friend of my grandfather, and my father and mother. He was my godfather and I knew him quite well. He loved Blenheim. One of his biggest works was the four-volume biography of the 1st Duke.
   It was very moving that he made the decision to come back here to be buried. On January 30 1965, I was fortunate enough to travel on the train which brought his body from Waterloo down to the station at Long Hanborough near Bladon. It was the most amazing day, nobody has ever seen a day like it.

Sex war

   by Melanie Phillips
   Daily Mail, March 29, 2003
   The violence swept the country. Windows and street lamps were smashed, the cushions of train carriages slashed, phone wires severed, golf greens burned with acid and buildings razed to the ground. Thirteen paintings were hacked to bits in a Manchester art gallery and bombs were placed near the Bank of England.
   Senior politicians were ambushed and assaulted. A package containing sulphuric acid was sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and burst into flames when opened. An attempt was made to burn down his country home.
   Even the Prime Minister was a target. On a golf links in Scotland, attackers tried to tear off his clothes and were prevented from doing so only by the intervention of his daughter, who protected him with her fists.
   On another occasion, an axe was thrown at the Premier. It missed him, but grazed the ear of an MP sitting alongside.
   Britain had never seen anything quite like it. And the most shocking thing of all was that every one of these outrages was perpetrated by women.
   They were the suffragettes – a term first coined by the Daily Mail to describe the militant activists who crusaded for female suffrage, or the right to vote, in the late 19th and early 20th century.
   Today, these women are widely regarded with uncritical veneration; their cause so manifestly just, and their one-time opponents so manifestly wrong, that their status as modern heroines goes unchallenged.
   Last year, Emmeline Pankhurst, their radical leader, was put by BBC viewers near the top of a list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. Her statue stands outside the Houses of Parliament.
   But the story of the suffragettes – or at least, the most militant among them – is much stranger than most people realise. Far from being a simple battle for equality at the ballot box, their campaign was driven by a deep-rooted distaste for male sexuality.
   Quite simply, the more extreme suffragettes were man-haters, waging what amounted to a sex war. They regarded men as a lower form of life, whose untrammelled sexual appetites were the root of all evil – from physical disease to every kind of moral degeneracy.
   For these women, winning the vote was merely a means to an end: the reining in of male lust, which they thought would raise the whole of society to a higher spiritual plane.
   What is more, they were prepared to adopt virtually any tactics to achieve it – even those we would now call terrorism.
   The explanation for this sexual fervour lies in the squalid world of Victorian vice, with its huge and highly visible trade in prostitution. In 1841 the Chief Commissioner of Police estimated there were 3,325 brothels in Central London alone.
   Thirty years later, a French visitor to the East End reported that “all the houses, except one or two, are evidently inhabited by harlots”. According to Scotland Yard’s director of CID, it was impossible for a respectable woman to walk through the West End in mid-afternoon because of the number of prostitutes openly soliciting.
   Droves of girls were seen huddling along Regent Street, Piccadilly and Haymarket, urinating and defecating in public. For men of such tastes, children were easily procured: the age of consent was just 12.
   Domestic servants joined the trade at night, desperate to supplement their meagre wages. Shop assistants did the same, with the encouragement of West End dress-shop managers who hired out clothes to them by way of advertising.
   The phenomenon gave rise to endless scandalised discussion. At first, conventional opinion held that the prostitutes were corrupting the nation’s morals, whereas the men who patronised them were merely satisfying their natural inclinations while leaving respectable women unsullied. Gradually, however, the climate changed. Under the influence of evangelical reformers, the public began to see prostitutes as victims exploited by profligate males.
   Rescuing “fallen women” became a national pastime. Reformers would seek out girls in the streets, give them improving tracts and plead with them to change their ways. The Liberal leader William Gladstone frequently took prostitutes home, where his wife gave them food and shelter.
   But compassion was mixed with a morbid fear of venereal disease, which was especially rife among the Armed Forces. One in three cases of sickness in the Army was due to VD.
   MPs responded by passing the Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed police to arrest suspected prostitutes within a ten-mile radius of garrison towns, hold them for several days and order them to undergo an internal examination with a speculum.
   The results were deeply unpleasant. Women, not always prostitutes, could have their most intimate privacy invaded, often brutally, on the say-so of a single policeman.
   For many women, it crystallised the feeling that they and their kind were being victimised when the real fault lay with amoral men looking for sex. When doctors tried to extend the legislation nationwide in 1869, there was uproar.
   Under the leadership of a charismatic clergyman’s wife, Josephine Butler, women across the country banded together to campaign for the law’s repeal. It was 16 years before they succeeded, but the crusade had far-reaching effects.
   Butler and her colleagues saw their job as the reform of promiscuous men as much as the rescue of fallen women. In their eyes, it was men who funded prostitutes, and men who passed the laws degrading them.
   The only solution was for women to enter public life and sort things out. “Male vice” would only end if women had the vote and the chance to purify politics.
   It proved a popular rallying cry. Women’s emancipation became a crusade to save humanity from men’s corrupting influence. The battle for the vote became inextricably tangled up with a campaign for sexual purity.
   The year 1886 saw the final repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. It was a watershed in the women’s movement. Feminists redoubled their demands for the vote and became ever more outspoken in their attacks on men. To some extent, this was a natural reaction to the horrors they had uncovered. In part, however, it arose from a sense of moral superiority that was rapidly tipping over into puritanical self-righteousness.
   The most militant now argued that marriage was as exploitative as prostitution – just another way of purchasing women. Some saw all sexual relations with men as abhorrent. Women like the veteran feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy believed that male sexuality was an expression of the bestial side of human nature, and that to indulge it threatened the very existence of society.
   Indeed, she considered that nearly all “diseases of woman” – including, bizarrely, menstruation – were due “to one form or other of masculine excess or abuse”.
   This man-hating agenda encouraged a move towards sexual separatism, with many campaigners turning their backs on marriage and remaining defiantly single. At the time, they were simply called spinsters; in many cases, we would now consider them to have been lesbians.
   In an atmosphere of growing fundamentalism, the hardliners were in the mood for open revolt. All that was needed was a suitably reckless and fanatical leader to show the way.
   This is where Emmeline Pankhurst came in. She and her equally formidable daughter, Christabel, would take the sex war to a new level.
   Raised in Manchester but educated in Paris, Emmeline was strikingly beautiful, yet her ambition and ruthlessness were evident from the start.
   “She should have been a lad,” said her father. He meant it as a compliment, but she heard him “with rebellion in her heart”.
   Ironically, she inherited the cause of women’s liberation from her husband, Richard Pankhurst, a failed politician who in 1870 had drafted the first women’s suffrage bill to be put before Parliament. After his death, she set up her own movement called the Women’s Social and Political Union. Such was her personal magnetism that disciples flocked to her like bees to honey. In time, hero-worshipping crowds would throw jewels and watches at her feet.
   Her daughter Christabel was even more charismatic and became the pin-up of the suffragette cause. Slender, graceful, and with “the flawless colouring of a briar rose”, she was physically enchanting to men and women alike.
   But like her mother, Christabel was utterly ruthless. “In spite of her charm and feminine attraction,” wrote one admirer, “there was in her soul a core as hard and brilliant as steel, and I sometimes thought as pitiless.”
   It was Christabel who established the suffragettes’ strategy of deliberately courting martyrdom to win the propaganda war. In 1905, after disrupting a political meeting, she and a colleague spat at a policeman and refused to pay the fine, ensuring they were sent to jail.
   She and Emmeline then encouraged their supporters to follow suit, and milked every drop of publicity when they were punished.
   Some of the protests were little more than stunts. Burning rags were stuffed into letterboxes, keyholes blocked with lead, chairs flung into the Serpentine, flower beds damaged, and envelopes containing red pepper and snuff sent to every Cabinet minister.
   But as we have already seen, there was also real violence – with repeated attempts to assault the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. Amid police reports of suffragettes practising with revolvers, there were even fears he might be assassinated. On one occasion, his car was forced to slow down to avoid a woman lying in the road. Other women promptly jumped out and belaboured him over the head with dog whips, his head protected only by his top hat.
   Many of the suffragettes jailed for such attacks won further celebrity by going on hunger strike. The Government introduced force-feeding, inserting tubes through their noses and down their throats while warders held them down.
   It was exactly what the Pankhursts wanted. They intended their violence to provoke an extreme reaction and produce the impression of innocent women being persecuted by an oppressive state.
   Harsh though the word may seem, such manipulative cynicism is the hallmark of terrorism. Worse still, the suffragette leaders washed their hands of any responsibility for the followers they lured into violence.
   It was an act of monstrous cowardice that made victims of the very women they were purporting to lead to liberation. But such tactics were typical of the Pankhursts, who ran their movement in autocratic style and cast out any colleagues who dared to voice dissent.
   Both women adored the limelight and the opportunity it gave them to strike melodramatic poses. They shared a pathological self-importance and gloried in their chosen role as martyrs.
   Christabel, however, spoilt the effect by running away to Paris in 1912 to avoid further risk of being jailed. There she spent her time sightseeing and visiting fashionable shops, while encouraging those she had left behind to launch a campaign of arson.
   In truth, these militant tactics were counter-productive and merely made the Government more resistant to reform. The Pankhursts’ response was to crank up the idea of the war against male lust. Stone-throwing, arson and physical attacks, argued Emmeline, were all a means of cleansing society – the only way to eradicate the “Social Evil” of prostitution.
   “As a result of the Social Evil,” she thundered, “the nation is poisoned morally, mentally and physically. Women are only just finding this out.” “As their knowledge grows, they will look upon militancy as a surgical operation – a violence fraught with mercy and healing.”

Puritanism of the rich

   by George Monbiot
   The Guardian, November 9, 2004
   “If Bush wins,” the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, “fascism is possible in the United States.” Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
   She’s wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush’s security state as “soft fascism” in the Guardian last month. So is the endless traffic on the internet.
   In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as “… a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity”. It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
   But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don’t understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.
   Puritanism is perhaps the least understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation.
   In England in the first half of the 17th century, the remnants of the feudal state performed a role analogous to that of social democracy in the second half of the 20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the monarchy and clergy. But it also regulated the economic exploitation of the lower orders. As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Charles I sought to nationalise industries, control foreign exchange and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land, employers who refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to give relief to the poor.
   But this model was no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, “the rise of commercial companies, no longer local, but international” led in Europe to “a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before” and “the subjection of the collegiate industrial organisation of the Middle Ages to a new money-power”. The economy was “swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry”. The kings and princes of Europe had become “puppets dancing on wires” held by the financiers.
   In England the dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive seizure of wealth by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing (“enclosing”) the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a mania for land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of sophisticated financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and almost all the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.
   All this was furiously denounced by the early theologists of the English Reformation. The first Puritans preached that men should be charitable, encourage justice and punish exploitation. This character persisted through the 17th century among the settlers of New England. But in the old country it didn’t stand a chance.
   Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.
   At its heart was an “idealisation of personal responsibility” before God. This rapidly turned into “a theory of individual rights” in which “the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed”. By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty “not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion… but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will”.
   This leap wasn’t hard to make. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant. “Individualism in religion led… to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric.”
   To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. “Next to the saving of his soul,” the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman’s “care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go.” Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele’s words, that “God has blessed his trade”. The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smith’s invisible hand by more than a century, when he claimed that “the advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public”. By private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.
   Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to “administrative nihilism”: the doctrine we now call the minimal state. “Business affairs,” they believed, “should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality.” They owed nothing to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.
   Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush’s people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that “the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian.”
   There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.
   Ronan Bennett’s excellent new novel, Havoc in its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable. An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush’s America.
   So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.

History washes up ancient bathroom

   by Martin Wainwright
   The Guardian, May 19, 2005
   Five blocks of stone prised out of a castle wall are thought to have revealed what may be the first bathroom built in Britain after the long and grubby interlude of the Middle Ages. Archaeologists are carrying out a preliminary search of two chambers unearthed this week in a long-abandoned outbuilding at Bolsover in Derbyshire, where Sir William Cavendish, a fastidious aristocrat, is known to have started a fashion for “bathing rooms” after the English civil war. Inside the room, a narrow slit running round all four walls shows where flagstones once formed a floor at a level leaving ample room for a sunken bath. The main chamber also has a recess at one end the width of lead piping, which tallies with a similar feature on a well house in the castle garden immediately outside. “It is looking very promising,” said John Burditt of English Heritage, which is gradually restoring the castle – a grandiose mixture of mansion and fortress which dominates the pit village constituency of leftwing Labour MP Denis Skinner. “Another piece of evidence is the smaller second chamber which has blackened stone on one wall,” Mr Burditt said. “The historical record describes how Sir William’s bath could be filled with hot water. This room may well turn out to have been the boiler house.” Sir William’s experiments in hygiene were inspired in part by his exile on the continent, following Oliver Cromwell’s victory. In Europe, washing was generally more sophisticated than in England. But Sir William is also thought to have been keen to help his first wife, Lady Madge, overcome her problems in conceiving. “Immersion in warm water was thought to be a way of treating infertility at the time,” said Mr Burditt. “Cavendish had the resources and room to make this possible on a large scale.” The 17th-century bathing room craze was the first real revival in Britain of the fastidious habits of the Romans, whose elaborate public baths were left in ruins during the Dark Ages. Bolsover’s hidden rooms, which were sealed over a century ago when they fell into disrepair and became structurally dangerous, are likely to go on show after a full archaeological survey this summer. The find, if the bathing theory is confirmed, will add another laurel to Britain’s considerable plumbing heritage, which famously includes the perfector of the modern flush lavatory, Thomas Crapper. The first bathroom to be installed in the US was also the work of a man who knew Bolsover well, the 18th-century Leeds architect Benjamin LaTrobe whose other commissions included collaborative design on the White House.

Letter from Victoria points to affair with Brown

   by Stephen Bates
   The Guardian, December 16, 2004
   A newly discovered letter from Queen Victoria, revealing her innermost feelings for her Highland servant John Brown, reignited speculation yesterday that their relationship was more than platonic. The handwritten note, uncovered by accident by a PhD student in the family archives of Lord Cranbrook, one of Queen Victoria’s ministers, in the Suffolk record office indicates just how distraught she was when Brown died unexpectedly in March 1883. The letter was revealed in an article in History Today magazine by Bendor Grosvenor, its discoverer. It is not the magazine’s first royal scoop – it revealed how the royal doctor hastened the death of George V in 1936 so that it could be announced in the morning papers. Queen Victoria wrote – characteristically in the third person – to Cranbrook two days after the former ghillie’s death: “The Queen has let her pen run on… The Queen is not ill, but terribly shaken and quite unable to walk… missing more than ever her dear faithful friend’s strong arm.” The letter is written in the queen’s nearly indecipherable scrawl on black-bordered note paper and speaks of her “present, unbounded grief for the loss of the best, most devoted of servants and truest and dearest of friends.” Speculation about Queen Victoria’s 20 year relationship with Brown, following the early death of her husband Albert in 1861, started in court circles almost as soon as the unlikely friendship itself did when the queen was in her mid-forties. Victoria’s daughters joked about “Mama’s lover”, and the then Duke of Edinburgh (the queen’s second son) claimed he had been evicted from Buckingham Palace because he refused to shake the servant’s hand. A court source, probably the dean of Windsor, told Lord Derby, foreign secretary, that Brown had taken to sleeping in the room adjoining the queen’s bedroom, “contrary to etiquette and even decency.” The queen’s letter reads: “Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant… Strength of character as well as power of frame – the most fearless uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence and unselfishness combined with a tender, warm heart… made him one of the most remarkable men. The Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs… the blow has fallen too heavily not to be very heavily felt.” While the letter does not conclusively reveal whether the pair were lovers in the modern sense – the heightened sentiment was not unknown in the queen’s correspondence – it does show a strength of feeling that was disguised when her diaries were edited by her daughter Beatrice after Victoria’s death. Grosvenor believes the friendship was more than platonic. “The similarities between Victoria’s treatment of Albert and Brown in death are too numerous to ignore,” he writes. When the queen died, she left instructions that a lock of Brown’s hair, his photograph, a handkerchief and some letters should be placed in her coffin alongside mementoes of Albert. Any secrets in the letters will presumably remain firmly in the Queen’s mausoleum.

At last contentment

   by Cristina Odone
   The Observer, April 10, 2005
   In the end, it was a sigh of relief rather than the cheer of well-wishers that saw off Charles and Camilla as they left for Northolt and their honeymoon at Balmoral. The lead-up to the wedding had become almost excruciating, a huge, slow-motion social disaster that took place right before our eyes. The final act, though, went off smoothly.
   Second time around, Prince Charles had to fight humiliation and adversity all the way to the register office. A dying pontiff may choose to turn his fatal illness into a public Calvary, but it seems a bit harsh that the Prince of Wales should be forced to do the same with his marriage. Yet from the Queen’s no-show to the snide press reports and the public mea culpa about his adultery, the path to Windsor Guildhall was strewn with thorns. Even those who have long branded the heir to the throne a petulant crank must have felt a twinge of sympathy as the mishaps unfolded. The venue was wrong, security a shambles, PR bungled. Even fate conspired against them; the Pope’s death cheated Charles and Camilla of the limelight and his funeral forced them to postpone their big day.
   The succession of obstacles offered a bleak commentary on the fraying of the British establishment. The Queen announced she would not be attending the civil marriage, allegedly telling a friend that she felt obliged to put her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England “before her role as a mother”. Yet the established church for most of her subjects commands far less loyalty and sympathy than motherhood and, to millions, the Queen’s stance seemed more like outdated posturing rather than admirable conviction.
   It also reminded us of the fragility of a church whose symbolic head is the monarch: she who must embody all virtues is so plainly human. Forget divine, the Queen strikes us as dysfunctional, a mum whose brood bumbles through life botching their marriages and their work, a wife whose husband regularly embarrasses her. The ambiguity of the Queen as head of the established church becomes all the more pronounced with the thought of Charles inheriting the role. This royal marriage was the first, ever, to be celebrated in a civil rather than a religious ceremony; even Edward VIII and the divorced Mrs Simpson managed to be married in church, by a maverick Anglican clergyman acting in defiance of his bishop. Can Charles, banned as an adulterer from a church wedding, really ever take on the mantle of temporal head of the national church?
   The timing of the wedding threw light on another anomaly. As Prince Charles joined Tony Blair, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders at John Paul II’s funeral in Rome, the provisions of the Act of Succession seemed, more than ever, an anachronistic injustice. Here were the heads of Britain’s establishment paying tribute to the leader of a faith against which, back home, discrimination is still enshrined in 300-year-old legislation.
   No one had expected a second, civil royal marriage to bring out more than a hardcore of flag-waving royalists, let alone bring the country to a standstill in the way that Charles’s wedding to Diana Spencer did.
   Church bells pealing up and down the land, street parties toasting the newlyweds, and tearful vox pops on the telly wishing the prince and his bride all the happiness in the world: these were the images that in 1981 reassured the monarchy and its supporters that this land was still their land. A very different reception has greeted this union. Reactions to the announcement of the wedding have run the whole negative gamut, from muted to open hostility. Charles and Camilla have had to suffer the slights of outrageous tabloids – the Mirror even pronounced that Charles shouldn’t inherit the throne – and Channel 4’s Not the Royal Wedding, with its grotesque Camilla lookalike caught squawking hysterically.
   Even staunch royalists who scan newspapers for royal engagements and will travel miles to catch a glimpse of the Princess Royal cutting a ribbon to open a village hall in Derbyshire are divided: some remain true to the monarchy and queued since the small hours to get right up to the crush barriers, but many still resent Camilla as the “other woman” and hold her responsible for the royal divorce.
   For most of us, the atmosphere is not one of rampant republicanism so much as inherent indifference: 15 million viewers may have tuned in yesterday afternoon (and God help those who tuned in earlier, to be subjected to many hours of Piers Morgan) but millions watched the Grand National and cheered Hedgehunter on, or drove to Homebase to choose decking or cruised the aisles at Tesco for the special offers.
   As for the foreigners – 500 million of them were expected to watch the ceremony – they will have felt short-changed. The Queen, Windsor Castle, Handel’s Water Music, Princes William and Harry (both looking unexpectedly relaxed, William blowing a kiss in St George’s Chapel): the event bore some of the hallmarks beloved by people who bring back a royal mug from their visit to London and a Peter Rabbit tea cosy from the Lake District.
   But the great royal procession, the splendour of St Paul’s and a kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace were missing. Britain was not delivering the royal extravaganza foreigners expect of it.
   And yet. This second marriage between two long-time lovers feels real in a way that the first Barbara Cartland romance never did. Where Charles and Di struck a note of fairytale magic that soon grew flat, Charles and Camilla offer something altogether more convincing.
   This is marriage as give and take rather than happily ever after. Indeed, that there should be a marriage at all, that Charles and Camilla should seek official sanction for their de facto union will strike many as genuinely touching in an era of cynicism and spiralling divorce rates. But then, we know that these two, even after three decades, still want each other. Sexual attraction, even obsession, has hovered over this marriage from the start, a more powerful ghost than the late princess.
   Play word association with “Charles” and you quickly get “tampon”. The intimate telephone conversation that we were privy to more than a decade ago revealed the prince and his mistress as lusty, bawdy and in tune with one another.
   The only time I met them, at a friend’s wedding, Camilla oozed sexual confidence and wherever she moved in the reception, she drew not only the prince’s gaze but many other men’s. Among the Gloucestershire set, Camilla is known as a “bit of all right” – earthy, fun and just what the doctor ordered.
   Perhaps it is Camilla’s earthiness, coupled with the very ordinary stumbling blocks that she and Charles have had to overcome en route – down to the disapproving mother-in-law, the glitch in the arrangements, and the sudden death that precipitated a rescheduling – that ultimately won us over. In the event, the mellow, piano mood of this latest royal wedding suited Britons.
   It was in a way an apt image for the country itself. No one would be fooled now by a high-voltage show of grandeur or claims of greatness. Here, instead, was a mature and thoughtful recognition of limitations and past wrongs, of compromise but also – dare we say it? – contentment.

Wedded to a Quango Lords

   by Andrew Adonis
   The Guardian, May 19, 2005
   The least sentimental of Tories, Salisbury would have approved of Tony Blair’s current plan for House of Lords reform. He himself tried to introduce appointed life peers in the 1880s, 70 years before Harold Macmillan carried through the reform.
   Salisbury would have seen Blair’s removal of the hereditary peers – leaving a house of prime ministerial patronage – as an excellent Tory reform. Lords and ladies will flourish. Patronage will abound. And in an ironic inversion of former Tory beliefs in a strong aristocractic house, the continuation of what is now an extremely weak second chamber will uphold, in today’s conditions, a central plank of Salisbury’s statecraft: his determination to ensure that government remained as unaccountable to the people as possible in a “democracy”.
   It is less evident, however, why the left should be happy with the proposal. If history says anything, it is that the first Lords reform is likely to be the last for a long while. The 1911 Parliament Act, which curbed the Lords’ powers, included a pledge to replace the hereditary chamber with an elected one. Ninety years later, we are still waiting. If we want an elected second chamber there is no reason why a combined Lab-Lib majority of 301 over the Tories in the Commons cannot create it in one go.
   Yet ministers remain wedded to a quango Lords. Most Labour and Liberal Democrat life peers are enthusiastic, of course. No one likes being abolished, particularly when the perks of existence are as pleasant as those of a peer of the realm. And no government relishes parliamentary independence, whatever its members said in opposition.
   A stronger second chamber, with the legitimacy that could only come from elections, is desirable. The weakness of the Westminster system is the extreme subordination of the legislature to the executive. No conceivable reform of the Commons would do much to reduce it, since governments in Britain exist only by virtue of their control of the Commons.
   An elected second chamber is needed to provide a necessary measure of parliamentary independence. And it could easily be established, without duplicating the Commons, by having it elected by proportional representation on a different time cycle. Even if both chambers were ultimately elected by PR, the use of different PR systems and election dates would provide a varying balance of forces. As for the potential for conflict, provided the Commons retains sole power over national taxation, and an ability to enact other legislation on its own authority after a delaying period, there is no reason to fear gridlock.
   Could we get an elected second chamber in one leap? Just possibly, if the Tories wake up. As a party, they can only gain from a radical reform now that the hereditary peers are doomed. It all depends whether William Hague is a disciple of Salisbury or his arch-enemy Disraeli. The great marquess never sold the pass on such an issue of principle, the great adventurer couldn’t resist dishing the Whigs by out-democratising them. Hague looks more like Disraeli to me, so watch this space.

Royals in crisis as popularity nose-dives

   by Ben Summerskill
   The Observer, December 29, 2002
   The Golden Jubilee celebrations were the most carefully choreographed piece of royal theatre since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Years of planning by hundreds of courtiers went into commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession.
   But as the Queen marks the new year quietly at Sandringham this week, she will be desperately disappointed to find that public opinion has hardened against the monarchy during the past 12 months.
   An exclusive Observer poll has found that two in five of her subjects think that 2002 was a good year for the monarchy as an institution. However, almost exactly the same number think the opposite. And many members of the royal family are now regarded as less hard-working and less in touch with ordinary people than ever before.
   The year 2002 has been one of the Queen’s busiest years on record: she carried out more than 500 public engagements and visited every region of the country. The monarch herself is still regarded as hardworking by three in four of her subjects and as a “good ambassador for Britain” by 85 per cent, according to the YouGov poll of more than 2,000 people.
   But only one in two of us now believe that the monarchy will last more than 20 years, down from 58 per cent in just 12 months. And one in four think the monarchy will not survive more than 10 years after the death of the Queen, now 76.
   The number of people who think that the royal family should receive not a penny from the taxpayer has also soared in the last year, from 34 per cent to 41 per cent. Just one in 10 now thinks they should receive more than Ј20 million a year. This is less than half the current, highly complicated package of cash payments, allowances and concessions, such as inheritance tax exemption, that they receive from the public purse.
   The first six months of 2002 were regarded by many as a triumph for royal imagemakers. The deaths of Princess Margaret and then the Queen Mother distracted attention from the Golden Jubilee preparations, but raised much sympathy for the Queen and enabled her to preside over the pageantry of two royal funerals, carried out with the impressive precision which the Windsors regard as their trademark.
   The second half of the year began less well, with a scathing report by the House of Commons public accounts committee into the financial concessions provided to minor members of the royal family. Things went from bad to worse when the theft trial of royal butler Paul Burrell collapsed in October, after the Queen suddenly recalled Burrell had said to her that he would keep personal effects of the late Princess Diana which he was accused of stealing.
   “The Golden Jubilee was undoubtedly overshadowed by the royal butler scandals,” said veteran royal commentator Robert Lacey. “People’s whole reaction to the royal family is an emotional one. The issue of passing on or destroying gifts which emerged from the trials is terribly important because they are a token of people’s affection. It’s not surprising that this has all left a sour taste in the public mind.”
   The poll comes as analysis of the last year’s Court Circular shows some members of the royal family striving to cast off their reputations for laziness. The Earl and Countess of Wessex have worked harder than ever before, carrying out more than 350 engagements each.
   However, Prince Edward, who is famously sensitive, will be aghast to find that just one in 10 people considers him hardworking, down from 21 per cent 12 months ago. Only 7 per cent think the Queen’s youngest child, who has already failed in his chosen careers as a royal marine and a TV producer, is in touch with the concerns of everyday life in Britain today.
   “What becomes increasingly apparent,” said Labour MP Alan Williams, a senior member of the Public Accounts Committee, “is that the mythology of the royals has become damaged by their attitudes in financial areas. When I first raised questions about the cost of the royal yacht many years ago, we were fobbed off with the untrue claim that it was a hospital ship.
   “The younger generation in particular have started to look at the non-productive lives that these people lead. They compare them unfavourably with the circumstances they encounter in the real world.”
   The poll confirms that young people are considerably less sympathetic to the royal family than their grandparents. While one in four over-50s thinks the Queen should pay inheritance tax, the figure rises to to almost one in two among the under-29s.
   The poll also suggests, surprisingly, that many people in the DE social categories, often regarded as the stalwarts of British monarchism, are less sympathetic to the royal family than their more affluent counterparts.
   After a year in which their entitlement to free accommodation was questioned by MPs, some minor members of the royal family – in particular the Queen’s cousins, the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent – have worked as hard or harder than in the past, in spite of being at or beyond retirement age.
   The only royals who have no engagements listed on the Court Circular for the last 12 months are Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. The Queen has just agreed to divert Ј120,000 a year from her civil list allowance to pay rent for their lavish apartment in Kensington Palace, for which they were paying a fixed Ј69-a-week until MPs protested earlier this year.
   And even though the total number of visits carried out by some members of the royal family has risen, many still work on fewer than one in two days over the year as a whole.
   Having arrived at Sandringham shortly before Christmas, the Queen and Prince Philip are not expected to leave until after the anniversary of her father’s death there, on 6 February, as is her custom.
   “Part of what we are dealing with here is human chemistry,” said Lacey. “If Edward and Sophie were more likeable, their worth might be more realistically recognised. I’m sure that the moment Sophie becomes successfully pregnant we will see people warm to her emotionally. It’s irrational, but that’s so often the case where the appeal of the royal family is concerned.
   “At the end of the day the Queen and all members of her family will have to pay inheritance tax just like everyone else. Their exemption is all to do with their anxieties about losing Sandringham and Balmoral as private resorts.
   “They are entitled to have these reserves into which they can retreat, like any other endangered species, but they should be handled through a family trust, not a tax exemption.”

Queen’s speech stresses respect and reform

   by Matthew Tempest
   The Guardian, May 17, 2005
   Respect and reform emerged as the key themes of Labour’s third term today, as the Queen unveiled the government’s programme for the next 18 months.
   A total of 45 bills were set out for the coming parliamentary session, which lasts until next November. The programme shows a strong emphasis on low-level crime, on terrorism and on continuing health and education reform and expansion.
   The speech, written by Downing Street but delivered by the Queen in the House of Lords after a highly elaborate ceremony, said the government was committed to “fostering a culture of respect”.

   The most controversial measures are likely to be the reintroduced bills for identity cards and for an offence of inciting religious hatred, although a draft counter-terrorism bill could prove provocative too.
   With Labour’s majority reduced to 67 at the election, much will depend on the positions the Conservatives adopt under Michael Howard and their next leader. Only 19 Labour MPs voted against ID cards in the previous parliament.
   Mr Blair declared the agenda was “quintessentially new Labour” in the short debate that followed the Queen’s Speech.
   The Conservative leader Michael Howard, who will leave his post before all of the bills pass through parliament, pledged to support the government on changes to incapacity benefit and immigration measures, but stopped short of setting out the Tory position on ID cards.
   The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, told MPs his party would “certainly maintain our opposition to ID cards”, saying the Lib Dems alone had been “consistent in our arguments” on the issue.
   Combined Tory and Lib Dem opposition to any bill would mean only 34 Labour MPs would need to rebel to block the government.
   Although the Queen’s brief speech lists the bills only in cursory detail – and is supposed to be strictly embargoed – much of it had been heavily trailed in advance, in particular the emphasis on crime.
   A violent crime bill will include tougher laws on the sale of replica firearms, raising the minimum age on knife purchases from 16 to 18, and powers for headteachers to search pupils for knives.
   There will also be a new offence of using children or innocent parties to hide or carry knives or guns. The speech confirmed plans for police to impose “alcohol disorder zones” to combat local binge-drinking problems.
   The identity card bill allows for the gradual introduction of ID cards designed to combat benefit fraud. It will also include a new offence of having false identity documents.
   There will also be a draft counter-terrorism bill, one of five draft measures announced alongside the 45 bills. The draft bill is thought to include the creation of offences of “acts preparatory to terrorism” and of “glorifying or condoning” acts of terrorism – terms vague enough to worry Labour’s backbench civil rights lobby.
   On immigration and asylum, the speech confirms plans for a new bill including provisions to fingerprint visa applicants and introduce hi-tech travel documents.
   Much of the legislation was promised in Labour’s “little red book” election manifesto, but some is leftover legislation that did not get through before the dissolution of the last parliament in April. About 20 to 30 bills would usually be the norm for a 12-month session.
   On education, which the monarch described as “my government’s main priority”, the speech promises further reform “to improve quality and choice”.
   An education bill will enable primary schools for the first time to become “foundation schools” and give the private sector a greater role in sponsoring city academies within the state schooling system, subject to a “fair admissions” policy.
   The shake-up of the NHS will continue with a health bill introducing new measures designed to combat the MRSA hospital superbug. A separate bill will reform the NHS compensation system, designed to give more power to patients when their care goes wrong.
   One potential flashpoint for government rebels will come with confirmation of an incapacity benefits bill, already outlined last year, which will stop the escalation of payments for the longer-term ill, and bring in penalties for those who are seen to be reluctant to re-enter employment.
   On the thorny issue of pensions reform, the government promises a draft pensions bill based on the findings of the Turner review on the subject, expected later this year.
   Among other measures proposed are: a reform of legal aid; a consumer credit bill to give greater protection to the public; a road safety bill to codify offences and penalties; a bill to create an umbrella anti-discrimination body; an EU referendum bill; a bill giving greater powers to the Welsh assembly; and a bill to combat voter fraud and increase ballot security.
   One measure which has cross-party support is an Olympics bill, which would legislate necessary powers to construct the east London site if the capital is picked for the 2012 games in July.
   Addressing MPs crammed into the entrance lobby of the House of Lords, the Queen confirmed that “proposals” would be brought forward for reform of the upper chamber. Labour’s manifesto promised a free vote on an elected Lords, with a commitment to remove the last remaining hereditary peers.
   As is traditional, the Queen ended the address by announcing future royal visits, including trips to Canada, Malta, Australia and Singapore.

The New Edwardians

   By Anthony Sampson
   The Observer, July14, 2002
   Do you want a baroque country house in Somerset, with a ballroom, eight bedrooms and an orangery in 300 acres of parkland, to spend Ј40 million on a Renaissance palace in Sussex, or a Palladian villa in 3,000 acres of Oxfordshire? You can have what you want, brand new.
   Rich owners need no longer buy and renovate existing stately homes: they can build new ones, with both classical grandeur and modern luxuries. New country houses for the mega-rich – including City financiers, pop stars and foreign tax exiles – are rising up on a scale unknown since 1914. And the boom is transforming many rural areas, with social and political implications we are only now beginning to realise.
   The new stately homes not only provide extraordinary architectural spectacles: they also give clues to the political and economic conditions of our time. For the first time in 90 years, they show the rich wanting to impress the populace with their wealth and taste.
   The spate of mansion-building is partly the delayed result of the ambitions of John Gummer, Environment Secretary in the last Conservative government, to re-establish the country-house tradition. In 1997 “Gummer’s Law” allowed the rich to obtain special planning permission to build in open countryside – in places where more modest houses would be forbidden – provided that they were of architectural distinction.
   We are seeing Gummer’s dream come true, as bold new structures emerge from the landscape all over Britain. But Gummer was only the catalyst for a deeper social change. For the rich are now reacquiring the desire to make their mark with high-profile mansions, whether on green fields or on the sites of earlier houses, provoking angry local disputes about the environment.
   In south Wiltshire, where I spend weekends, a new palace designed by Quinlan Terry for the young Lord Rothermere has arisen below the downs, with rows of leylandii trees and elaborate security to protect it from the public. It is a much showier structure than the secluded old house in the next-door valley – once inhabited by Cecil Beaton – which has been bought by Madonna, who is more neighbour-friendly and visits the local shops and pubs.
   A few miles away in Somerset, another newspaper proprietor, Peter Fowler, who owns a chain of local newspapers in Scotland, is determined to build a baroque mansion for Ј7m, on the edge of Cranborne Chase. Fowler’s agents, Savills, say it is of “outstanding beauty” and the local council claims it qualifies as an exceptional plan under Gummer’s Law. But conservationists, including representatives of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Council for the Protection of Rural England, insist the plan is detrimental to the landscape in an “area of outstanding natural beauty”.
   The proposal will be debated by South Somerset Council on 23 July. The regional chairman of the CPRE, Roger Martin, warns that competition for personal space is acute. “The number of very rich people is rising, while open countryside is shrinking.”
   The architect Robert Adam (no relation to his illustrious namesake), who is advising Fowler, is the most successful beneficiary of the new country-house boom: he is planning 30 more stately homes, and champions the assertiveness of the new rich. “If anyone complains any more about toffs doing this,” he has said, “I’ll throttle him.”
   “There’s a lot of ebullient new money coming out, as well as old money,” he told me. “There’s no longer a negative attitude to new houses, or the inherent British modesty. New country houses provide one answer to the economic problems of the countryside, by helping to subsidise the land with jobs and building. It would be tragic if they were to be stopped by the politics of jealousy.”
   All over Britain there are similar controversies. In Staffordshire, brewery heir John Greenall has built a mansion on the edge of the Peak District. In Hampshire, near King’s Somborne, a rich farmer, Tim Everett, is building a Palladian mansion, designed by Adam, with 11 bedrooms and a 50-acre park.
   In the Chilterns, City banker Robert Gillespie is planning a Georgian pile on the site of an older house, designed by the neo-Georgian architect Giles Quarme. In Essex, businessman Peter Seers was given permission to build a nine-bedroom mansion at Great Canfield.
   In Sussex, property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten, now on trial at the Old Bailey accused of murdering a business associate, has built the most preposterous of the new piles, Hamilton Palace, costing Ј30m, as a mausoleum to commemorate his fame.
   In Oxfordshire, Arab arms dealer Wafic Said, who endowed the new business college at Oxford, is building a replica of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda in 3,000 acres of parkland for about Ј30m. In Scotland, Swedish heiress Lisbet Koerner is building a colossal hunting lodge designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, with granite imported from Portugal.
   This spate of building conspicuous private mansions suggests a new confidence and ostentation among the mega-rich, having significance in Blair’s Britain. And it corresponds with nostalgia for the Edwardian Age, of carefree luxury, peace and conspicuous wealth, broken by the catastrophe of 1914.
   Television programmes evoke the extravagance of the Edwardian country house and the materialism of the Forsytes. Architects look back longingly to the elegance of Lutyens and the Ritz. The blockbuster film about the Titanic relished the sumptuous lifestyle of first-class passengers. And the fantasy world of PG Wodehouse, of Lord Emsworth and Blanding’s Castle, is more popular than ever.
   New Edwardians are emerging all around us, as Britain in the twenty-first century bears more resemblance to the conditions of a century ago. The decades between 1914 and 1990 begin to look like a long aberration of wars, socialism and austerity, which interrupted the progress of global capitalism and wealth creation.
   When world trade closed down in 1914, it did not fully recover for 70 years; but since the end of the Cold War the global marketplace has been expanded and speeded up, to allow Western investors to exploit the world’s resources, on a scale the Edwardians could only dream of.
   The new rich are looking more like the Edwardian plutocracy, with their confidence and ostentation, merging with the old aristocracy to acquire status, honours and respectability. In some ways they can feel more secure than the Edwardians: the threats to wealth and power were already looming before the First World War, whether from trade unions, socialists or foreign powers; but today they seem to have virtually disappeared.
   The Labour Party, which seemed a potential menace when it was established in 1900, now appears as the ally of the rich, and Tony Blair is more sympathetic to big business than any Labour Prime Minister in history.
   Taxes, which so alarmed the Edwardians, have become much less menacing, and for many foreign exiles non-existent. Death duties, first imposed by Sir William Harcourt in 1894 and augmented by Lloyd George in 1909, have become so easy to avoid that accountants tell their clients they are a voluntary tax. Big landowners are specially favoured: many people have been surprised to find they need pay no death duties on agricultural land, under legislation made in 1995, and kept intact by Gordon Brown.
   The discrimination against “unearned income” has been turned upside down: Gordon Brown in his last Budget decreed that the extra costs of the health service would be financed by taxing employees through national insurance, while unearned income would bear no more taxes than before.
   The full social implications of the decline of death duties are still to show themselves in the next decades, as hundreds of large fortunes made in the Eighties and Nineties pass to the next generations. Thousands of young people will be able to live comfortably without the need to work, as the rentiers and men of leisure of Edwardian times, as Bertie Wooster did a bit later at the Drones’ Club.
   The desirability of tax-free inheritance has been much discussed, in both Britain and America; and the last Conservative Cabinet had lively debates about it. Chris Patten argued for abolishing death duties, while the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, opposed it. But the many loopholes for avoiding death duties are ensuring new heirs will be much more financially secure than their predecessors. Of course, the new rich have very different lifestyles to the Edwardians a century ago. They no longer employ armies of indoor servants and gardeners, like Lord Emsworth, to allow them to cultivate the art of leisure, or spend months on luxury yachts cruising between Mediterranean resorts. Many prefer to be mobile and busy-busy, flying between houses and hotels across the world, without too much responsibility for servants or estates.
   Robert Adam is naturally interested in the changing requirements of the rich. “They want three things – space, mobility and privacy.” They are much keener on family privacy than the Edwardians, he says: many of them prefer not to see their servants, while others treat them as friends. They see less need for philanthropy in an age of the cult of the individual, where there is much less hardship.
   But the new rich, it seems to me, still have an important resemblance to their Edwardian predecessors: they can separate themselves from the lives of ordinary people, whether in leisure or work, when the gap between the rich and poor is widening.
   Today’s corporate bosses, like plutocrats a century ago, can lead their daily lives without meeting junior employees or encountering the lives of ordinary people or their problems: they can be driven from their protected homes in company carsto the company plane to meet colleagues who are equally protected.
   Many of the new country mansions seem to be making statements about this need for segregation. They are as elaborately protected from neighbours and local influences as their forebears.
   The most spectacular monuments to Britain in the twenty-first century will not be striking housing estates, great public buildings or model villages, but neo-Palladian piles in the middle of open countryside, built by the rich to protect themselves from the populace.
   The Edwardian parallel is not in the end a reassuring one. For, with all their apparent confidence and ostentation, the Edwardians lived in an age of dangerous insecurity, of which they were only dimly aware, before their world was turned upside down in 1914.
   A century later, with a new global economic and political turbulence, the grand new palaces and parks may soon look less like a revival of architectural patronage and taste, than like monuments to the complacency and the ostentation of people who wanted only to turn their backs on the rest of the country’s problems.

Why stately homes need support

   by Catherine Bennett
   The Guardian, November 21, 2002
   For baroness enthusiasts, such as myself, Tessa “call me Baroness” Blackstone has always seemed, though full of comic potential, disappointing when it comes to delivery. Plainly she does not share that ready gift for inadvertent idiocy that once made my favourite baroness, Baroness Jay, such an asset – but then again, who does? Unlike Jay, Blackstone seems to retain a grip on reality that makes her mouth clamp shut the instant before treacherous lines like “pretty standard grammar”, or “little cottage”, can sneak out and undermine every arduous attempt to sound normal.
   So it was all the more rewarding this week, when, in an interview with the Times, Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington became relaxed enough, while outlining her planned lifeline for financially distressed stately home-owners, to confirm that she possesses all the talent we had suspected, and more. Her new wheeze, which she intends to put before Gordon Brown, is for owners of Grade I, II, and II listed properties to be able to offset maintenance bills of up to Ј40,000 a year. In exchange for this indulgence – something for which, in Thatcher’s time, the grandees had lobbied in vain – the relevant householders would have to open their properties to the public for a minimum of 28 days a year. Or just over two days a month.
   It was not constructive, the baroness warned, to “see this as the toffs and us”. Absolutely not: it is the toffs and her. Possibly recalling, from those distant, pre-baroness days, that stately home owners may not everywhere be considered the most deserving candidates for state assistance, the baroness was quick to explain that the scheme represents “part of our socialist agenda which is making it possible that these places are open and that the public can visit and enjoy their heritage”.
   Thus, in one sentence, the baroness simultaneously claimed support from old Labour types, who had never again thought to hear the words “socialist agenda” spoken outside a costume drama, and from everyone, from the owners of their ancestral homes to their paying visitors, who acknowledges the sacred importance of “heritage”. As David Lowenthal indicates in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, it is a word the ingratiating politician can hardly repeat too often: “To neglect heritage is a cardinal sin, to invoke it a national duty.”
   Arguably, if they can’t afford to maintain their portion of heritage then the baroness’s stately home-owners should simply sell it to someone who can, as the late Nicholas Ridley suggested in 1988: “There have to be the same opportunities for today’s nouveaux riches, so that I am not impressed by the case of the ancien pauvre.” He was challenged by Lord Saye and Sele: “Do you think that by removing us and installing a nouveau riche family, the heritage would be maintained in the way we maintain it? Would they want to open their Peter Jones furnished rooms to the public?” Happily this ghastly fate is unlikely to overtake Lord Saye and Sele’s ancestral home, Broughton Hall, where a recent 10-year programme of renovations was generously subsidised by English Heritage. Which is to say, by noovs.
   Leaving aside the fact that the relics of mid-80s Peter Jones will, at some point, have just as much right to call themselves heritage as Lord Saye and Sele’s late-18th century Hepplewhite-style, mahogany four-poster, it is true that most people would not build a tea shop and toilet block in their garden unless they absolutely had to. They would rather move house. But as anguished Anthony Jarvis, the owner of Doddington Hall, near Lincoln, told the Times, our heritage custodians do not have this freedom: “The difference is they will return to private households… they will be lost to public view.”
   This is why the protection of heritage from counter-jumpers with no sense of stewardship has become, for Blackstone, a pressing part of the left-wing agenda. Obviously she will be aware that continued occupation of their enormous houses by straitened Tory grandees is not a right that was ever sought by the proponents of socialism, who were apt to be more concerned with shared ownership. On the other hand, there is nothing to say that, in due course, having collectivised the means of production, distribution and exchange, they might not have got round to seeing the merits of the landed gentry and laying down recommendations for gift shop access and winter opening times. And this, really, is where one has to take issue with the baroness’s scheme. Is 28 days a year – which in stately home language usually translates into some inscrutable challenge – “alternate Wednesday afternoons June to Sept; every day July 20–21, 2–5, Friday mornings by appointment” – really adequate if the masses are, as the baroness wishes, to get the benefit? Do 28 days out of 365 even amount to “open”?
   If Gordon Brown agrees to the “Blackstone reliefs”, as the Times already calls them, then so many scores more country houses are likely to open up in order to qualify that there will soon not be enough days in the year, in this heritage-laden land, for, as David Lowenthal puts it, “the descendants of former serfs… [to] wander in wonder around one-time masters’ mansions”. How, unless recipients of the Blackstone relief open for at least five days a week, weekends included, are visitors to claim their full socialist share of country house heritage?
   Indeed, if the scheme is as popular as the baroness anticipates – “People are not coming here to burn their buns on beaches but they are coming here for the culture, the country houses and the countryside” – it may be necessary to extend viewing hours into the evening, possibly through the night. Naturally, the kind of people who furnish their house from Peter Jones would not be interested in this sort of sacrifice, but for men such as the 21st Baron Saye and Sele, one senses that duty comes first. Or maybe second. After socialism.
//-- Fergie in chop horror --//
   The rehabilitation of the Duchess of York, a task which only weeks ago seemed to stand about as much chance of success as the Integrated Transport System, is now hurtling towards completion faster than her in-laws can say “Sir Michael Peat”. Compared with the suppression of unwelcome court cases, flogging off unwanted gifts and choosing an in-house investigator to investigate charges of in-house malfeasance, the duchess’s previously heinous-seeming crimes of advertising cranberry juice, sitting under a plastic pyramid and exposing her daughters to a virtually naked, bald financial adviser, look more trivial by the day.
   Even her exertions as the face of Weightwatchers, once considered so tawdry for a woman who might have spent her life as Prince Andrew’s helpmeet, can now be recognised as the good, honest toil they are. Certainly no one at Weightwatchers could complain she has not given value for money. Interviewed last week by the Cincinnati Post, the duchess was asked whether – if invited – she would care to go on a date with George Clooney. “Are pork chops greasy?” the duchess replied.
   It is hard to believe that this unusual, probably unique spin on the rather tired “Is the pope a Catholic?”/“Do bears shit in the woods?” formulation for confirming the utterly obvious could have come about had the duchess not committed, in speech as well as in thought and diet, to live out the Weightwatching mission. And with dedication like that, it is unlikely she will leave it there. Not when there are so many other healthy variations on the theme. Stand by for Q: “Do you regret that holiday in Phuket?” A: “Do doughnuts clog up your arteries?” Q: “Have you regained your self-esteem?” A: “Are there 100 calories in a low-fat yogurt?” Q: “Do you feel you have been unfairly accused of exploiting your royal connections?” A: “Is a Weightwatchers pasta salad a scrumptious lunch or snack option, complete with handy fork?”

Spencer rejected Diana’s plea for home, letters reveal

   by Caroline Davies
   The Times, October 21, 2002
   EARL Spencer turned down a request from his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, for a home on the family’s Althorp estate just six months after her separation from the Prince of Wales, according to private letters read to a jury yesterday.
   Three letters found at the home of the Princess’s former butler, Paul Burrell, show she was rebuffed by her brother who feared her presence would cause too much disruption to his family.
   The issue caused a rift between the two, leading Lord Spencer to return one of the Princess’s letters unopened. The correspondence, found in a bench in the study at Burrell’s Cheshire home, centred on the Princess’s desire to move to the Garden House, on the estate where she had been raised as a child, and which her brother had inherited.
   Burrell, 44, denies three charges of theft, involving 310 items he is alleged to have taken from the late Princess’s Kensington Palace apartment.
   Dated in June 1993, and read aloud to the Old Bailey by Lord Carlile, QC, defence counsel for Burrell, the first letter begins “Dearest Duch”, the earl’s pet name for his sister, and is signed “Carlos”, her nickname for him. In it he writes: “I thought I should update you on the Garden House and keep you informed of developments. I am keen to have everything sorted out clearly in advance of any decision, so there are no problems if the whole thing goes ahead.
   “I see your clear need for a country retreat and I am happy to help provide it as long as there is not too much disruption to us or to the estate.
   “The Garden House seems to suit your needs perfectly. It has been previously let for Ј20,000 a year, although I don’t ask for as high rent from you, but for Ј12,000 to include cleaning inside and lawnmowing and tidying up outside, on the basis of one day a week cleaning and half-a-day gardening.
   “All in all there is a lot of room for conflict if everything is not sorted out in advance. I am sorry to be so businesslike about it, but it is vital that it is all sorted out now.
   “I have to look after Victoria and the girls first and therefore it is my responsibility that their privacy and quality of life is not undermined by your moving in. I thought it best to bring it all up before the police got involved, in case you decide to pull out.”
   Two weeks later, however, Lord Spencer had a change of heart. “Dearest Duch,” he wrote, “I am sorry but I have decided that the Garden House is not a possible move. There are many reasons, most of which centre on the inevitable police and press interference that will follow.”
   He adds that he is now employing a senior agent and the property is needed for him to live in. “I know you will be disappointed but I know I am doing the right thing for my wife and children. I am just sorry I cannot help my sister!
   “Seriously though, there are farmhouses around here that may well not interfere with us, but I cannot afford to give them rent free although I wish I could. In theory it would be lovely to help you out and I am sorry I can’t do that. Victoria and I really value our privacy and the combined pressure of the police, neighbours and friends have definitely compromised that.
   “If you are really interested in renting a farmhouse, either here or in Warwickshire or Norfolk, that would be wonderful.” The third letter, on June 28, shows the rift had developed, when Lord Spencer replied to a letter from the Princess with the words: “Dearest Duch, Knowing the state you were in the other night when you hung up on me, I doubt whether reading this will help our relationship. Therefore I am returning it unopened because it is the quickest way to rebuild our friendship.” He signs off with: “Have a very happy birthday on Thursday, Love Charles.”

£ 100,000 price on miniature head of Lord Damle

   by John Vincent
   The Times, March 11, 2000
   He was, according to Mary Queen of Scots, “the lustiest and best-proportionit lang man” she had ever seen.
   Lord Darnley’s physical attractions, however, served only to paper over his woeful moral and mental weaknesses.
   Two years after the couple’s controversial wedding in Edinburgh, Darnley was murdered following his involvement in the murder of the Queen’s private secretary, David Rizzio.
   Now, after more than 400 years, an exquisite portrait miniature of the spoiled, arrogant and vain nobleman who became King of the Scots has surfaced from a private collection.
   The tiny picture showing a teenage Darnley, clad in yellow doublet and white ruff, is attributed to Levina Teerlinc, the most prominent miniaturist of the period.
   Surrounded by an elaborate enamelled frame, the rare portrait of the descendant of Henry VII is expected to fetch up to Ј100,000 when it goes on sale at Bonhams next Thursday.
   Claudia Hill, a Bonhams specialist, said yesterday: “It is an extremely important portrait from a period when not only were very few miniatures produced, but those that were painted were confined to the royal entourage.
   “Levina Teerlinc was the most prominent limner of the period, serving four monarchs from Henry VIII’s later years until well into Elizabeth I’s reign.
   “The miniature, which is dated 1560, was, of course, portable and may have been secretly transported to Mary in prison,” added Miss Hill.
   Lord Darnley was born in December 1545, the eldest son of the Earl of Lennox. Through his mother, a Douglas, he was descended from Henry VII.
   In 1565, aged 19, he married the 22-year-old Mary Queen of Scots at Holyrood Palace to become King of the Scots. Their only child was a son, who became James I of England and VI of Scotland.
   Not only were they cousins and Catholics but, as great-grandchildren of Henry VII, both had claims to the English throne. But Mary was infatuated with Darnley, deaf to warnings about the political consequences.
   Mary was held prisoner in Scotland but escaped to England, where she was imprisoned by Elizabeth I for 19 years before being executed at Fotheringhay Castle on Feb 8, 1587.
   Darnley died when an explosion destroyed a house in Edinburgh. It is believed that he and his servant had already been strangled.

How the king was thwarted from making plea to natio

   by Alan Hamilton
   The Times, January 30, 2003
   Being summoned to the back gate of Buckingham Palace under cover of darkness and ushered into the royal presence through a window may have been the last straw for the Prime Minister. But Stanley Baldwin was already determined that the King would not make the broadcast that he wanted to.
   Documents released by the Public Record Office today detail Edward VIII’s final and futile attempt to bypass the opposition of Baldwin’s Government to his marrying Wallis Simpson, and appeal directly to the people.
   With the help of Winston Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, the King had drafted a speech that he proposed to deliver on BBC radio on December 4, 1936. In it, he was to announce his intention of marrying the twice-divorced American – the subject of rumour in foreign, hut not British, newspapers.
   In the draft speech, Edward offered to leave the country for a spell after the marriage to allow the fuss to die down, but he made no mention of abdication. He clearly still hoped to contract a marriage, even a morganatic one, and retain his place on the throne.
   He summoned Baldwin to discuss the planned broadcast in secret. The Cabinet papers of the day record the Prime Minister’s arrival.
   “On 3 December Baldwin was summoned to the Palace by the King’s Valet to come secretly at 9pm. He had been driven there and taken in by a back entrance; but all the same he had been photographed. Then he had been introduced through a window.”
   Next day, Baldwin gave his unequivocal answer to the King: it would be a grave breach of constitutional principles if the King were to broadcast a statement on a matter of public interest without the advice of his ministers, both in Britain and the Dominions.
   “If he does it without advice, he ceases to act as a constitutional monarch, and his intervention is calculated to divide his subjects into opposing camps. It is manifest that the King’s broadcast must have this result.”
   Baldwin, becoming more determined by the day that the King should go, offered a further raft of objections to the broadcast: “It would shock many people – especially womenfolk where sentiment for the monarchy is so strong – to hear directly from the King of his intention to marry a woman who is still another man’s wife.”
   The Prime Minister listed other objections: it would lead to adverse press comment on Mrs Simpson and her antecedents; it would encourage intervention in the divorce proceedings and could lead to a physical attack on Mrs Simpson; and the proper place for such an announcement was in the parliaments of Britain and the Dominions.
   “The proposed course would be regarded as an affront to the Governments and parliaments of the Empire,” Baldwin concluded. Such a broadcast could be made only on the advice of the King’s ministers, “who would be responsible for every sentence in it”.
   That evening, one of the King’s dinner guests was Winston Churchill, who on December 5 wrote to Baldwin pleading that the King be shown “kindness and chivalry” to help him to solve his dilemma.
   Churchill’s letter, released for the first time today, warned the Prime Minister of the King’s mental state.
   “I strongly urged his staff to call in a doctor. His Majesty appeared to me to be under the greatest strain and to be near breaking point.
   “He had two marked and prolonged blackouts in which he completely lost the thread of his conversation. Although he was gallant and debonair at the outset, this soon wore off and his mental exhaustion was painful to see.”
   Churchill went on: “I told the King that if he appealed to you to allow him time to recover himself and to consider now that things have reached their climax, the grave issues, constitutional and personal, with which you have found it your duty to confront him, you would I am sure not fail in kindness and chivalry.”
   But the plea fell on deaf ears. Baldwin told the Cabinet next day that he had never found the King more cool and clear-minded. The Abdication was finally announced, as Baldwin had wished, in the Commons and other Dominion parliaments on December 10. When Edward was allowed to broadcast his farewell message on December 12, he was no longer King.

Council tax bills to rise

   by Jill Sherman and Alexandra Frean
   The Times, February 5, 2003
   Council tax bills in England are set to rise by up to ten times the rate of inflation following Tony Blair’s decision to transfer government funds from Tory suburbs in the South to Labour heartlands in the North.
   The rise, the biggest since the council tax was introduced in 1993, was condemned by the Conservatives yesterday as a stealth tax that would raise bills for ordinary families to well over Ј1,000 a year. Local government experts called the rises shocking, and said that they would put pressure on John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, to reintroduce capping.
   A survey carried out by The Times shows that some districts will impose council tax rises of up to 27 per cent to meet government spending commitments and local demands. The increases, following the Government’s gamble to appease core Labour voters, could jeopardise the party’s chances in this year’s council elections and further erode the Prime Minister’s popularity.
   Most of the highest increases will be levied by Tory councils in the South, while many Labour authorities in the North and the Midlands have contained increases to below 10 per cent. The top rises are in London boroughs with several proposing hikes of over 23 per cent, partly owing to Ken Livingstone’s mayoral levy. But county councils such Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Devon and Suffolk have all approved increases of 17 to 20 per cent.
   The average increase in outer London is 19.2 per cent, bringing the Band D council tax to Ј1,165.90. In inner London the average increase is 15.9 per cent, giving a Band D tax of Ј1,030.07. The average rise in metropolitan boroughs is 8.8 per cent with the Band D tax at Ј1,094.12.
   The average increase in County Councils is 13 per cent bringing the Band D rate to Ј873.46. For district councils there is an average rise of 13.6 per cent giving a Band D rate of Ј1,126.77 and for unitary councils the average rise is 10.9 per cent and the average Band D tax is Ј1,014.63.
   The increases are highest in councils that do not have local elections this year, suggesting that many may have kept taxes down last year when they faced the polls. Experts also suggested that councils have taken the chance to inflate bills at a time when they could blame the Government for its decision to reform funding allocations. “These are socking great increases,” Tony Travers, local government expert at the London School of Economics, said. “If I was the Government I would be horrified, and it will undoubtedly put pressure on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to cap the increases.”
   Mr Travers said that the proposed bills would damage the Government’s reputation as a low-tax administration as well as its efforts to court the middle classes before this year’s local elections.
   Last autumn Tony Blair made the decision to appeal to core voters who had become increasingly disgruntled with Labour’s failure to address the North/South divide. Mr Prescott introduced a radical review of local government funding that penalised the South to give more to the North.

Kensington Palace

   The Daily Telegraph
   Plans by the Queen to turn Kensington Palace into a “people’s palace” are not inappropriate for a building that was never intended to be a front-line royal showpiece.
   The Jacobean mansion began its days as the home of Sir George Coppin, a wealthy landowner, and was known simply as Nottingham House on its completion in 1605.
   It became a royal residence 93 years later when its situation in the village of Kensington attracted the asthmatic William III and his Queen Mary. They bought it for Ј14,000.
   Although the King commissioned Christopher Wren to enlarge the building, it remained modest as palaces go. When part of the newly extended palace collapsed, there were suggestions that Wren and his assistant were too preoccupied with work on Hampton Court.
   Wren’s improvements included pavilions to each corner of the house and a new courtyard and entrance on the west side. Royal apartments were built in the south-east and north-west pavilions, and the Chapel Royal and the Great Stairs in the south-west pavilion.
   Royal apartments were divided in the traditional manner, between the King’s and Queen’s suites, each with its own entrance staircase. But there was no series of elaborate staterooms since the King decreed that he saw Kensington as a private residence.
   Despite its relative modesty, Kensington Palace was used by successive monarchs. George II died there in his water closet. Queen Victoria was born and brought up in the palace and the most impressive rooms are those designed by George I. Victoria saved the palace when it fell into disrepair in the second half of the 19th century. She talked of her love for her childhood home even though if had been “a rather melancholy childhood in the modest palace, the rooms of which were dreadfully dull, dark and gloomy”.
   George V once said he wanted to pull down Buckingham Palace and, with the money saved, rebuild Kensington on a grander scale as the main town residence, a wish never to be fulfilled.
   While the public has had access to the State apartments on the north side – these were first occupied by Mary II – and to the ground floor with its Court Dress Collection, the rest of the building contains the “grace and favour” private apartments of royals and their staff.
   Currently living there are Princess Margaret, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, Duke and Duchess of Kent and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
   The grace and favour apartments were the subject of controversy in the past. In July 1994, there were protests from Labour MPs when two officials moved into a pair of apartments being refurbished as part of repairs costing the taxpayer more than Ј750,000.
   One apartment had five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a sitting room, dining room, study, kitchen and utility room, basement room and two separate lavatories.
   The other had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, sitting room, dining room, a study, kitchen and utility room, basement room, shower room and separate lavatory.
   Later Buckingham Palace said the officials had each taken a big pay cut because of their accommodation.
   If the palace eventually houses the British Royal Collection, it will provide a fitting home for what has been described as one of the greatest private art collections on Earth, rivalling the Vatican.
   Held in trust by successive monarchs, it contains more than 7,000 paintings, 3,000 miniatures, 30,000 Old Master drawings and watercolours, 500,000 engravings and etchings and hundreds of thousands of other works.
   The collection, housed across the country’s royal castles, palaces and estates, reflects the personal tastes of sovereigns over five centuries, from the Tudors to the present day. Its sheer size and diversity has discouraged attempts even to estimate its worth.
   Among the paintings are masterpieces by Bruegel, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Canaletto. The collection also includes one of the world’s most important collections of Sevres porcelain.
   While the Queen cannot sell anything from the collection but must hand it on to her successor, she has been in favour of lending works for public exhibition. The National Gallery has 2,300 paintings from the collection.
   An expert with the British Royal Collection said: “Former royal collections in countries like France, Germany, Spain and Austria were ceded to the state and became the nucleus of national collections.
   “By contrast, the Royal Collection has remained intact as a private collection within buildings such as Buckingham Palace, Balmoral, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace.”

Special agent Holbein spied on Henry VIII

   by Richard Woods
   The Sunday Times, May 19, 1996
   Thinker, painter, socialite, spy. Hans Holbein, the great Renaissance artist who created the enduring image of stout Henry VIII, has been exposed as a secret agent deeply involved with intrigue in the king’s court.
   That is the picture painted in a new book by the historian Derek Wilson, who reveals Holbein as acting as an agent for Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry’s leading ministers; Holbein reported back information gleaned from the eminent courtiers whom he painted.
   The controversial study, the first significant biography of the artist for 80 years, argues Holbein also included in his paintings coded signals and propaganda about political figures of the time.
   Wilson, who has approached his subject as a historian rather than an art specialist, reinterprets Holbein’s motives and paintings through the religious and political tumult of the Reformation.
   “It is largely a question of getting a different focus. Many of the pictures talk about the siluation he was working in,” said Wilson, whose book, Hans Holbein, Portrait of an Unknown Man, will be published by Orion next month.
   Holbein, who was born in Germany, won early success, travelled widely and came to England where he fell under the patronage of Sir Thomas More.
   He returned briefly to Europe before spending the last 11 years of his life in England, rising to become the “king’s painter”. His patron then was Thomas Cromwell, who had supplanted More as the head of Henry’s government.
   The patronage system was a two-way street, argues Wilson. In return for material support, Cromwell required Holbein to act as his eyes and ears among the nobility whose portraits he executed.
   “Why, when he was the king’s painter, busy there and busy with Cromwell, was he also painting others outside that circle?” asks Wilson. The answer, he said, was that Holbein was seeking out commissions on Cromwell’s instruction. At the top of Cromwell’s hit-list were More and Bishop John Fisher, incarcerated in the Tower of London for refusing to follow Henry’s reformation and reject papal authority. Wilson argues that Holbein sketched Fisher while he was in the tower.
   “What was going on here? How could an artist get into the tower?” asks Wilson. The answer, he says, is that Cromwell was sending agents in to talk to More and Fisher. Certainly Cromwell attempted to gather information and prove treason against More and Fisher while they were imprisoned.
   Brian Sewell, the eminent art critic, said last week the thesis was “ingenious” and that Holbein’s connections would have made him an excellent spy. But he doubted the artist had the required skills. “Language is the real problem,” he said. “As far as we know Holbein never managed to learn English properly. He spoke a sort of Dennis the Dachshund English.”
   But Wilson also points to clever coded signals in Holbein’s paintings. “Renaissance artists loved words, puns and hidden messages,” said Wilson.
   Concealed in The Ambassadors, Holbein’s masterpiece, restored and rehung last month by the National Gallery, is a message about More. The picture shows two men standing either side of some shelves. Three elements of the painting – a dagger, one of the shelves and a wildly elongated skull – all point to one spot: one of the men’s garments. The cloth’s colour is an unusual mulberry or, in Latin, morus. The strange skull is a memento mori, a reminder of death. These two elements, said Wilson, secretly mean: remember More. A crucifix suggests the Christian faith was under threat.
   Even more daringly in one painting, Holbein appears to have secretly disparaged Anne of Cleves, who was to be Henry’s fourth wife. In 1539 Holbein was in the awkward position of being sent to Europe to paint Anne’s portrait. She was a noble whom Cromwell, for his own political reasons, wanted Henry to marry.
   Holbein found himself under pressure to produce a flattering portrait to take back for the king. But in truth Anne was plain and talentless and Holbein doubted that she was a suitable match. So he included a subtle message. The painting is packed with symmetry but with one omission, the jewelled bands on Anne’s skirt. One on the left is not complemented by one on the right. This, said Wilson, is meant to indicate Anne’s clumsiness.
   But he argues that it goes further. In court French, trait a gauche, pas а droit means band on the left, not on the right. But it sounds like trиs gauche, pas adroit (very awkward, not skilful), which summed up Anne’s faults.
   According to Sewell, visual puns and hidden messages are “precisely the kind of thing one should look for in Tudor painting”. Again he found Wilson’s interpretations ingenious, but open to question. “It is a very attractive solution: but I think it is too clever.” Holbein is not thought to have been fluent in French either.
   Wilson said: “Holbein found in Cromwell a man of ideals who was going to put them into practice, and a protйgй commits himself to his patron. He was his agent. I have tried to reveal the real Holbein.”
   As an agent, Holbein may have been smarter than his masters. Unlike More, Boleyn and Cromwell, the artist was not beheaded.

Mary, Mary, quite unwary

   by Anne Campbell Dixon
   The Daily Telegraph, November 4, 2000
   The Palace of Holyroodhouse has had almost as chequered a career as its most famous inhabitant, Mary Queen of Scots, but it has survived triumphantly, and is a working royal palace – only Mary’s private apartments have been preserved, almost untouched, as a shrine.
   Given Mary’s impact on British history, it is extraordinary to realise that she was Queen Regnant in Scotland for only six years and all the highest drama of her reign was crammed into the two years between July 29, 1565 – when Mary married the petulant pretty-boy, Henry-Stewart, Lord Darnley – and July 29, 1567, when she was forced to abdicate. The intervening months saw the murders of her secretary Rizzio and her husband Darnley (one of Rizzio’s killers), the birth of her son James, her subsequent marriage to Bothwell (one of Darnley’s killers) and the stillbirth of twins by him.
   The most traumatic event of all, for Mary personally, must have been the murder of Rizzio, her detested Italian favourite, who was stabbed over her shoulder while he cowered behind her – the knife passing so close to her throat, she said later, that “she felt the coldness of the steel”. Visitors to her bedchamber today approach it up the same little winding stair that Rizzio’s assassins used.
   The intimacy of the scale makes it easy to imagine the mayhem. The little, tapestry-lined turret closet, where Mary was dining with Rizzio and other members of her entourage on March 9, 1566, must already have been crammed with the nine or 10 people present. The first of the conspirators to enter was Darnley, soon followed by the ghastly figure of Lord Ruthven – an unsavoury dabbler in black magic, who had risen from his sickbed for the occasion and was dressed in full armour over a nightgown.
   While Darnley pinioned his wife’s arms and Ruthven pointed a pistol at the other guests, another 20 conspirators rushed in, overturning the dining table and sending its dishes and candlesticks crashing to the floor. The Countess of Argyll, Mary’s half-sister, caught one candle as it fell – only it, and the flames of the fire, lit the scene as Andrew Ker of Fawdonside grabbed the pregnant Queen and held a loaded pistol to her stomach while the first blow was struck at Rizzio. He was then dragged out, stabbed another 50 times and thrown down the stairs on Darnley’s command.
   The earliest buildings at Holyrood pre-date Mary’s reign by more than 400 years. The palace began as an Augustinian monastery, founded by King David I and taking its name from what was believed to be a fragment of Christ’s cross (or “rood”) brought to Scotland by David’s mother, St Margaret. When Edinburgh became Scotland’s capital, succeeding kings found the abbey in its parkland setting provided more comfortable quarters than the city’s draughty castle, perched on high rocks, and gradually the abbey was swallowed up by the palace. But the beautiful ruins of the Abbey Church, roofless since 1768, remain.
   Mary’s reign was brief and inglorious. I am not among the romantics who consider her the innocent victim of others’ machinations – although the Scotland of her day, with its murderous and conspicuously ignoble nobility, undoubtedly constituted shark-infested waters for any monarch. Mary made her ambition clear when she married her first husband, the French Dauphin, and they assumed the titles of King and Queen of England.
   Her devotees should be glad that she achieved her dynastic aim, after – and ironically, because of – her early death when her son became James I of England on the death of Elizabeth. As the current Hereditary Keeper of Holyroodhouse, the 15th Duke of Hamilton, points out in his book, Mary Queen of Scots – the Crucial Years, if Mary had outlived Elizabeth instead of being executed, she would not have been acceptable to the English as heir to the throne, whereas her son James was. A fascinating collection of Stuart relics and mementos was recently moved to Holyroodhouse from Windsor Castle and is on display in the room next to Mary’s bedchamber.
   The union of England and Scotland marginalised Scotland as a seat of government and Holyroodhouse languished for most of the next three centuries in consequence, with only sporadic bouts of royal attention. It was renovated for James I’s return home in 1617, and again for the coronation of his son Charles I in 1633. Charles II, who was crowned in Scotland in 1651, never went back afterwards, but he did commission a major restoration and extension of Holyroodhouse, giving us most of the palace we see today.
   James V’s tower was balanced by another, identical tower. Between and behind these towers, a far more sophisticated palace around a court was added – in style, not unlike Wren’s additions to Hampton Court 40 years later. The exteriors, by the King’s Surveyor of Royal Works, Sir William Bruce, followed the severe dictates of the classical orders of architecture, but the interiors, under the direction of the Earl of Lauderdale are sumptuously baroque.
   To the modern eye, this was a particularly pleasing phase in royal architecture: the panelled rooms are rich but in a restrained way – and not intimidating in scale, mainly because their ceilings, in proportion to their floor area, are not high.
   The decorative effects are achieved mainly by tapestries and needlework upholstery, and rich plasterwork on the ceilings – but even this is subtle, because painted a chalky white.
   Victoria was the first British monarch to revive serious interest in Holyroodhouse after centuries of neglect; George IV had already taken the significant step of making a state visit to Scotland in 1822, during which he pleased his Scottish subjects by wearing the kilt (albeit with the unorthodox addition of pink tights), but he stayed with the Duke of Buccleuch at Dalkeith.
   Victoria and Albert found Edinburgh a convenient staging post on their journeys to Balmoral, so Holyroodhouse fell victim to some well-meaning but tasteless Victorianisation – their pseudo-16th century Throne Room ceiling (now gone) was described as “dreadful” by George V’s more discriminating Queen. But some of Victoria’s other contributions to the palace, notably gorgeous tapestries, were good; while some of George V’s were rather dull, particularly the pedestrian plasterwork and panelling of the Throne Room, installed in 1929.
   Victoria and Albert’s florid taste is well displayed by an exhibition of watercolours they commissioned as souvenirs of their holidays in Albert’s homeland. Victoria was never happier than when at Rosenau, Albert’s childhood home, or visiting the other scenes of his youth. In Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – a realm on toytown scale compared with her own – she could relax to the extent of eating hot dogs in the street, and the exhibition depicts some of the open-air events she enjoyed there: the annual children’s and song festivals and – less attractively – a deer drive, during which Albert and other gentlemen picked off the terrified animals at conveniently close range from what looks like a bandstand, inside a small, fenced enclosure.

At her Majesty’s pleasure

   by Mary Riddell
   The Observer, November 3, 2002
   Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland Elizabeth Windsor is suspected of tailoring the law to her own agenda. Naturally, the off-with-her-head style of intervention does not fit the taste of a modern constitutional monarchy. But sins of omission also count.
   Five years ago, Princess Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, confided to the Queen that he was keeping some papers safe. Mr Burrell, branded a common thief in the Crown’s opening, was subsequently charged with theft of the dead princess’s possessions. He was about to enter the witness box and divulge secrets that might unsettle the monarchy when the Queen recalled their conversation. Off with the trial.
   Perhaps the explanation is pure incompetence. Amnesia is not a crime, even in the nation’s chief prosecutor. Maybe the police and the Crown Prosecution Service should take all the blame for bringing a shambolic case, but what’s new there? Paul Burrell, an innocent man, may have endured some very rough justice, but so do some of Her Majesty’s less prominent subjects.
   As for Mrs Justice Rafferty, her gagging orders and secretive ways rarely conveyed the impression that this Ј1.5 million charade was being conducted in the interests of the public who paid for it. A further overload of apparent deference from public servants reluctant to bother the monarch may have done the Queen, and the cause of justice, few favours.
   Still, the central issue is why she failed to divulge what she knew earlier. On that we may learn no more. When logic, plausibility and openness expire, the royal family can always revert to its default position of lofty omerta.
   Under the distinction drawn by Walter Bagehot, the monarchy is the “dignified” section of the constitution, as opposed to the “efficient”, or executive, parts. And now, in these undignified and inefficient times, the sovereign’s reputation rests on a bungled prosecution, undertaken in Her Majesty’s name, over whether Her Majesty’s former footman had stolen items including a pair of cream Ferragamo shoes and a Harrods black cloth bag containing chewing gum and a two-pence piece.
   Constitutional crises used to be confined to such rare events as an abdication or the House of Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s People’s Budget in 1909. Now they hinge on the disputed ownership of a Neil Diamond tape. True, the monarchy is many headlines short of a catastrophe, but what happened last week may prove a graver setback to the House of Windsor than scandals, divorce or burning castles ever wrought. Somewhere in the Old Bailey proceedings, a chronicle of rancour and resentments, the age of mystique died.
   It was doomed, perhaps, from the moment Paul Burrell walked into the dock and the story of unravelling lives began. On one side was the Spencer family, a dynasty so grand that it traditionally thought the Windsors slightly below the salt; on the other, Diana’s butler and “rock”.
   She and her mother, it emerged, had not spoken for four months before she died. Earl Spencer, who pledged to teach his nephews’ souls to sing, was exposed as being less saintly than his funeral oration might have indicated. The rules for his game of musical souls did not, it transpired, extend to offering his beleaguered sister the house she sought on the family estate.
   The secrets of the Windsors, due to be heard in court this week, will not now be revealed. Even so, few, with the exception of Princes Charles and William, who were gravely misled by the police as to Burrell’s conduct, emerge from this story of frigid snobbery and feuding without taint.
   Meanwhile, the British public is deemed too thick, or nosy, to deserve a full explanation. Here’s the one on offer. Paul Burrell meets the Queen in 1997 and tells her about the private papers. Charges of theft are brought against him, though the butler sold none of the many items in his possession. Stories emerge of document-shredding raids by Diana’s family.
   And, finally, Prince Philip, who is on the way to the Bali memorial service with the Queen and Charles, says: “You know the case about the butler. It’s a bit tricky for Mummy because she saw Paul.” Whereupon Charles, acting through channels, raises the alarm. The trial is off.
   There are constitutional issues here, but take the emotional ones first. The Queen, we are informed, first saw Mr Burrell, for three hours, because he was deeply upset by Diana’s death and because she wanted, in the words of Lord St John of Fawsley, “to bolster up a faithful old servant”.
   Leaving aside the fact that the royal family has a sterling record of paying its faithful old servants pitifully and disposing of them clinically, this explanation sounds out of character. The Queen is not Samaritans material. With the exception of childbirth, she may never have expended three hours on any interpersonal activity in her life. Her conversations, except on matters equine, are supposedly terse, and her communications with her oldest son, as emphasised in the Burrell case, vestigial.
   And yet the public is asked to believe that she spent three hours consoling a servant. Maybe. That makes it all the more surprising that she, who is certainly not in the habit of conducting gestalt sessions for below-stairs colleagues, would fail to recall every detail of such a rare encounter. (It is not clear either why Mr Burrell was so coy about mentioning the meeting, but then, unlike the monarch, he is not the fount of all justice.)
   All of that is speculation. It may well be that sheer bungling drove events, rather than any conspiracy. But when an innocent man gets so close to staring at a spell of Her Majesty’s hospitality, and when loyal subjects find their credulity so stretched, it is not surprising that some cynicism creeps in.
   The Queen is above the law. When the slightest suspicion emerges that she may not be above using it for her own ends, it is time that she should declare herself answerable – like all other citizens, however elevated – to the justice system she heads. The theoretical notion of a case labelled Regina v Regina may be a constitutional conundrum. It is not the most relevant problem facing an unwritten British constitution, built round a fairytale monarchy in which the head of state alone floats above the ruckus of her realm.
   The sovereign, as well as being head of state, is formally the head of the executive, which can proclaim war and ratify treaties without the consent of Parliament, She is part of the legislature able, theoretically, to assent or veto legislation according to personal taste. Justice is dispensed in her courts and in her name.
   This shopping-list, the argument goes, is purely formal, bereft of any practical dimension in the modern world. No doubt. But modernity also permits a monarch to be simultaneously ethereally distanced from and alarmingly close to the machinery of state. It is time for a constitutional rethink. In the wake of the Burrell case power without transparency looks more dubious than ever.

Myth of the few that does not add up

   by Stephen Bungay
   The Times, July 12, 2000
   Sixty years ago, two nations were ready for battle. On one side was a country with an economy working at full-steam, outproducing the other in key weaponry at the rate of two to one; fielding a force led by hard-bitten professionals working to a carefully prepared tactical plan informed by first-rate intelligence. They controlled a weapons system which not only exploited the latest applied technology brilliantly but was also extraordinarily robust; and fielded troops who fought as disciplined teams displaying ruthless determination. On the other side was a country with an economy so inefficient that, despite spending almost twice as much as its opponent, it failed to match its rival’s output; fielding a force led by a romantic amateur, who was a chaotic planner misled by faulty intelligence. Its weapons system neglected modern communications and lacked reserves. Its troops fought as gifted individuals, with an old-world ethos that was sporting and chivalrous.
   That was the Battle of Britain. The first side won, of course, but the remarkable thing is that it was the British. At a crucial moment in the history of each, the two countries exchanged their traditional national characteristics. That the British should convince themselves that they muddled through and won by being romantic amateurs is quite extraordinary.
   The popular view of the Battle of Britain was a deliberate piece of myth-making by Winston Churchill. He had announced on June 18, 1940 that the Battle of Britain was about to begin – Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding subsequently pinpointed the opening day of that aerial conflict as July 10 – and so gave it a dramatic name before it began in earnest. These young fighter pilots were exactly the sort of heroes that the nation needed.
   The fighter pilot as hero had its roots in the First World War. Revolted by the anonymity of the slaughter in the trenches, every belligerent country seized on the exploits of its airmen to create heroes for the public.
   Drawn at first mainly from the cavalry, the pilots liked to think of themselves as Knights of the Air, jousting man-to-man in fair fights. The whole ethos was symbolised by Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.
   The metaphor of Knights of the Air sits uneasily with the one used by the Baron, that of hunting. Most kills were achieved by diving on an opponent out of the sun, getting close and pumping bullets into the cockpit. The best way to become a great ace was to follow this method: creep up on your enemy, shoot him and then run for home. This worked equally well in 1940.
   The young bloods of the Luftwaffe fighter arm all wanted to be Red Barons. It got them some high personal scores, but it did not win battles. The British pilots were not a superior breed to the Germans. What made the difference was leadership.
   Hermann Gцring was a Fighter pilot in the First World War, and ended up commanding von Richthofen’s unit. It made good headlines to promote a one-time ace to head of the Luftwaffe, but Gцring had no understanding of, or interest in, modern technology, air strategy or running large organisations.
   Helped by Ernst Udet, the second highest scoring German pilot after von Richthofen, these two “practical men” introduced romantic amateurism at the top of Germany’s new air force.
   German aircraft production raced ahead to create enough frontline strength to add credence to the propaganda claims but, unlike the RAF, the Luftwaffe did not build up reserves. In Britain, the Air Ministry and private industry worked together to solve the enormous problems of mass-producing Hurricanes and Spitfires. But in Germany the Nazis intimidated industrialists such as Hugo Junkers and failed to exploit the advantages of production scale. In 1940, the Luftwaffe ran short of both new aircraft and spare parts. Fighter Command had plenty of both.
   Unlike Gцring, Dowding was not just an airman but an organiser with a deep understanding of technology. He was the builder of a battle-winning weapon. The man who laid the ground-plan was the now-forgotten Major General Ashmore, who took over London’s air defences in 1917 and created the plotting system, gun lines, barrage balloons and the Observer Corps. Without his work, Dowding could not have been ready in time.
   When he took on the new job of Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command in 1936, Dowding spent four years creating the most formidable air defence system in the world. At its centre was a unique, near-indestructible command, control and communications system that featured the world’s first large-scale intranet, using analogue technology, as well as radar. The system acted as a Force-multiplier, enabling Dowding to deploy his 600 to 700 fighters with the effectiveness of many more. Dowding’s right-hand man was Keith Park, who took over the forces covering the vital South East. Park used small formations to hack chunks out of the Luftwaffe’s bomber fleets. This has added to the impression that “The Few” were hopelessly outnumbered.
   The irony is that, of all the fighting forces in history, none have themselves eschewed heroics more than Fighter Command. One pilot, Brian Kingcome, wrote in 1990: “I think it quite wrong that, because the Battle of Britain turned out to be quite an important event in retrospect, the participants should be automatically classed as “heroes”. It denigrates all those others whose contribution and sacrifice were just as great, but whose exploits hadn’t been pushed into the public eye by Churchill’s splendid oratory.”
   All the veterans I have met are genuinely modest men who say they were just doing their jobs. One said he thinks the bomber crews were far braver – they had to fly on and take whatever was thrown at them. It does seem to be forgotten that during the Battle of Britain Bomber Command suffered heavier casualties than Fighter Command.
   Part of the reason that “The Few” became so celebrated was that their world was attractive and they were a charismatic group of young men. Their ironic humour contrasted with the self-important hubris of the Luftwaffe and their humility enabled Fighter Command rapidly to integrate the newcomers vitally needed after Dunkirk.
   If it was their leaders who enabled them to triumph, “The Few” still had to find the courage and resilience to keep on going up despite the losses and the exhaustion. “We were young,” they will tell you. “You can do anything when you are young.”
   The victory was created by a few men behind the scenes, but most of the fighting was done by youths who had scarcely left boyhood behind. So it was their youth that made a victory seem against the odds. It was not really against the odds at all but perhaps we can nevertheless join with the French novelist Georges Bernanos, who wrote in his Letters to the English in December 1940 that Britain’s stand was “a fairy-tale, a tale that no serious adult, no man of ability or experience, could possibly understand – a children’s tale”.

The blood that links the greatest Britons

   by Emma Soames
   The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, November 26, 2002
   THE nation has decided. Sir Winston Churchill was the greatest Briton of them all. No surprise there; even those who would have preferred to see the title bestowed upon another could hardly quarrel with the final choice.
   But perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the BBC poll was that members of the same family filled two of the top three places.
   With Diana, Princess of Wales finishing third in the survey, the Spencer-Churchills can justifiably claim to be the nation’s most successful dynasty.
   If anything, their light shines even brighter than the survey would suggest. Arguably, another family member should have been in the top 10 – John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, considered by many to have been the country’s greatest general.
   He did not even make the final 100. Maybe his stunning victories across Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession are no longer learned at school.
   But a case could be made to place him ahead of Nelson (9), Wellington (15) and Montgomery (88) as Britain’s most significant military figure.
   Over the centuries, the combined might of the Spencers and the Churchills has been greater even than the Royal dynasties. They played a crucial role in the revolution of 1688, which banished the Stuarts, changing the succession of the monarchy.
   The Spencers started out as Tudor sheep farmers and grew rich through the wool trade, reaching the upper aristocracy within 200 years. They were already installed at Althorp in 1506.
   The Churchills were a family of West Country gentry whose prominence largely derived from John’s military prowess. The rewards for his victories were great: a Dukedom and one of the country’s greatest homes, Blenheim Palace. The two clans were joined when Anne Churchill, daughter of the first Duke of Marlborough, married Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland. One branch of their line inherited the Althorp and Spencer estates; the other succeeded to the Duchy of Marlborough.
   In 1817, the 5th Duke of Marlborough was authorised “to take and use the name of Churchill, in addition to and after that of Spencer… in order to perpetuate in his family a surname to which his illustrious ancestor John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, added such imperishable lustre.”
   The Spencers built their influence by dynastic marriage and through Diana the line will claim its greatest inheritance when her son becomes King.
   However, their success is not confined to Britain.
   At least half a dozen American presidents have a Spencer ancestry, including George Washington, Franklin D Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and the two Bush presidents. The common line can be traced back to Henry Spencer, born around 1420. He married Isabella Lincoln and their son William founded the line that would produce Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales.
   The descendants of another son, John Spencer, settled in the New World, and they would be the ancestors of the American presidents. It is claimed – though this is disputed by some genealogists – that if you go back far enough, the common ancestor of the Spencers was a Norman, Robert le Despenser, William the Conqueror’s steward. The Churchills also trace their ancestry to a Norman, Roger de Courcil.
   So the common heritage of the greatest Britons turns out to be French, as indeed was that of Isambard Kingdom Brunei, who was second on the list. His father Marc Isambard Brunei, a French naval lieutenant, was a royalist who fled France in 1793. In England he was introduced to some aristocrats who would become his patrons: Earl and Countess Spencer.

Mystery lifted on queen’s powers

   The Guardian, Tuesday October 21, 2003
   by Clare Dyer
   One of the last great riddles of the British political system was solved yesterday when the powers wielded by the government in the name of the monarchy were set down on paper for the first time.
   The “veil of mystery” surrounding the royal prerogative was lifted when a list of them was published in a move intended to encourage greater transparency.
   The prerogative, which includes the power to declare war, is handed from monarchs to ministers and allows them to take action without the backing of parliament.
   In a move intended to encourage greater accountability, the Commons public administration committee (PAC) published a list of the little-understood powers which it persuaded Sir Hayden Phillips, permanent secretary to the Department of Constitutional Affairs, to supply.
   “Over the years when people have asked the government to say what prerogative powers there are, they have always refused to do so,” said the committee’s chairman, Labour MP Tony Wright.
   “It tells us largely what we know, but it is a small victory to have the government say at least what it thinks they are.”
   The PAC wants parliament to be given a say in how the powers are used. Although MPs were given a vote on the war in Iraq, there is no obligation on the government to let them have a say.
   The powers include those that allow governments to regulate the civil service, issue passports, make treaties, appoint and remove ministers and grant honours.
   They also include the prerogative of mercy, which is no longer used to save condemned men from the scaffold but can be exercised to remedy miscarriages of justice which are not put right by the courts.
   In its paper the government said new prerogative powers could not be invented and that some “have fallen out of use altogether, probably forever”, such as the power to press men into the navy. But it said there were still “significant aspects” of domestic affairs in which the powers could be used, despite legislation.
   And it accepted that the “conduct of foreign affairs remains very reliant on the exercise of prerogative powers” and that they can “still to some extent adapt to changed circumstances”.
   It also set out ways in which parliament and the courts have limited the powers through control of the supply of money, new laws and judicial review.
   Mr Wright said: “It should be a basic constitutional principle that ministers would be required to explain to parliament where their powers come from and how they intend to use them.”
   The committee is looking at proposals for an act which would force ministers to seek authorisation from parliament before they exercised some of the powers, which were “sometimes in effect powers of life and death”. These include the power to declare war.
   The government said it was not possible to give a comprehensive catalogue of prerogative powers. So there was scope for the courts to identify prerogative powers which had little previous recognition.
   In a case about whether the home secretary had power to issue baton rounds to a chief constable without the consent of the police authority, the court held that the crown had a prerogative power to keep the peace within the realm.
   Lord Justice Nourse commented: “The scarcity of references in the books to the prerogative of keeping the peace within the realm does not disprove that it exists. Rather it may point to an unspoken assumption that it does”.

Becket Abbey is found in Dublin

   The Times
   by Audrey Magee
   IRISH archaeologists believe that they have uncovered the ruins of a church built by Henry II in atonement for the murder of Thomas а Becket.
   The discovery was made during development of a derelict site in the centre of Dublin. Archaeologists uncovered walls, decorated window surrounds and painted floor tiles consistent with a 12th-century abbey. The site, near Meath Street, corresponds with a 1610 map showing the site of the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr.
   Daire O’Rourke, an archaeologist with Dublin Corporation, said: “It is a phenomenal find. It is very exciting.” The Corporation and National Monuments Service stopped the development and is to spend Ј250,000 excavating the site. The developer has been given an alternative site in the city.
   Henry II commissioned the abbey outside the walls of Dublin in 1177 as part of his penance for the murder in 1170 of Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was canonised in 1173. Becket was murdered in his cathedral by four knights who had reputedly overheard Henry ask if no one would “rid me of this turbulent priest”. The former friends had come into conflict over the relative powers of Church and State.
   The abbey built in St Thomas’s memory was a thriving Augustinian foundation and an important religious house for more than 350 years, until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.
   Excavation is not expected to begin until next year. The site has been recovered with earth to protect it from vandals or art thieves and there are security guards.

Pope had to push reluctant envoy

   by Robin Young
   Saint Augustine, whose arrival in Kent was commemorated yesterday, was not himself a valiant or resolute pilgrim.
   Sent by Pope Gregory the Great at the head of a band of 40 missionary-monks to renew Christianity in a land where it had been largely overrun by barbarous pagan hordes of Jutes, Angles and Saxons, he suffered a bad attack of cold feet en route through Gaul. He returned to Rome to beg the Pope to recall him and his men, explaining that his companions were “appalled at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce and pagan nation of whose very language they were ignorant.”
   The Pope, however, was firm. “My very dear sons,” he responded, “it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it once begun. So with the help of God you must carry out this task which you have started.”
   In fact, conditions were not quite as dreadful as Augustine had feared. There were already Christians in Britain and an established Christian tradition. St Alban had been martyred in about 209, but a Bishop of London had attended the Council of Arles in 314. In the North, St Columba, the 1,400th anniversary of whose death is also marked this year, had already spread Celtic Christianity from its outpost in Ireland.
   Indeed, when Augustine and his 40 monks came ashore at Ebbsfleet, on Pegwell Bay, in 597AD, they were to be welcomed by a Christian Queen, Bertha, a prankish princess who prayed for 35 years that her husband, Ethelbert, should also be converted.
   Ethelbert remained a pagan, but he allowed the saint’s monks to rebuild the Roman ruin of St Martin’s Church in Canterbury as a private chapel for his wife, and gave them the land for their abbey and for Canterbury’s first cathedral, which burnt down in 1067.

I lost my heart in Norton Conyers

   They wreck marriages, empty bank accounts and make absurd demands. Simon Jenkins on houses to die for.

   The Times, Saturday, September 27, 2003
   I shall never forget Norton Conyers. The Yorkshire seat of the Grahams has the plain exterior of true antiquity. It is a composition of Dutch gables, Great Hall, ancestral portraits and dusky corridors. In a battered walled garden, promiscuous peonies run wild. Visitors are shown round by Sir James Graham and his wife, who gaze reverentially at their majestic forebears, who gaze doubtfully back at them. Grahams fought at Marston Moor and hunted with the Quorn. Today they tight taxmen and hunt tourists.
   This is no stately pile. Norton is a rambling home where I felt I was more likely to be garrotted by a cobweb than fleeced by a corporate hostess. As Lady Graham paced the old rooms she cursed the Victorian baronet, “Number Seven”, for spending so much on “fast women and slow horses” and muttered of her husband that “it is divorce next year if he doesn’t get me a bathroom”. Yet hidden upstairs is Aladdin’s cave, the most atmospheric attic in England, a roofspace thick with unopened steamer trunks, old prints, books and paraphernalia, all joyfully uncatalogued. In a distant gable is a garret where a mad aunt was incarcerated in the 1830s, the original of Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte came to Norton as a governess in 1839. The rocking chair and hip bath remain to this day.
   Norton Conyers is one of the infantry houses of England. They march in a straggling line behind the squadrons of ducal estates and National Trust properties. Their charm lies as much in their present struggle as in their past. I must confess to having fallen in love with them. They are quite unlike my former obsession of parish churches. A church is a public building erected for one purpose. Most are dark and sombre places, each one like another to the untutored eye. Houses have minds and personalities of their own. They are doors to be unlocked by human interest.
   I first visited Eastnor in Herefordshire on a glorious summer day last year. Stone turrets rose over the green lake as if eager to escape across the Malvern Hills. The ancestral owner, James Hervey-Bathurst, had just finished restoring the Regency Picturesque castle that his mother had thought to blow up 50 years earlier. For more than a decade his wife, Sarah, had undertaken one of the boldest and most dramatic refurbishments of a stately home in England. Pugin interiors were brought back to life. Grey walls were softened with fabrics, furniture was chosen in keeping with the pictures. The place was glowing with dark, exciting colours.
   Yet no sooner was the work completed than Sarah Hervey-Bathurst left her husband and the gilded vaults of Eastnor to return to her roots in Yorkshire. It was as if the house itself had been the labour of love – as if the Hervey-Bathursts had been married to Eastnor, rather than each other. For all the personal sadness involved, I have to admit that the story of Eastnor’s recent past gives it most colour. Every house needs a story. Otherwise it lies flat on the landscape, a place of two dimensions.
   I have found that most historic houses become a mйnage а trois. At modest Detton Hall in Shropshire, Eric Radcliff showed me round the medieval manor which he has spent a lifetime unearthing, salvaging and moulding. In the kitchen his wife was silently making pies. Houses, he confided ominously, “are terrible wife-killers”. The owner of Jacobean Carnfield in Derbyshire emerged from the scaffolding to apologise that both his wife and his builder had just left him, the latter apparently the more serious loss. Small Wonder that at Higham Park in Kent Patricia Gibb and her partner, Amanda Harris-Deans, “amicably separated from their husbands” before teaming up to restore the house in 1995.
   The bonds that tie houses to people are the true guardians of these places. Together they constitute the greatest collective treasure trove in Europe. Cathedrals and churches have their place, as do historic towns. But nowhere can equal the splendour of these houses in both architecture and contents. And it is the staying power of the owners that is most astonishing.
   Death, revolution and taxes may come and go, but there are Marlboroughs still at Blenheim, Bedfords at Woburn, Buccleuchs at Boughton, Norfolks at Arundel, Exeters at Burghley, Rutlands at Haddon and Salisburys at Hatfield. Nor need we list only the grandees. There have been Berkeleys at Berkeley in Gloucestershire since the Conquest, Benthalls at Benthall in Shropshire and Comptons at Compton in Devon. Descendents of the ancient line of de Vere still preside over Norman Hedingham in Essex.
   I have visited well over a thousand houses to make my selection and have come to the conclusion that the English house is God’s gift to eccentricity. The astonishing neo-Jacobean mansion of Harlaxton in Lincolnshire, fantasy palace of the Victorian Gregory Gregory, was rescued by a coal porter’s daughter named Violet Van de Elst. She invented brushless shaving cream and amassed the fortune with which she not only bought the property but communed there with the spirits of the dead at nocturnal seances. She also conducted ceaseless litigation against all who crossed her, alive or dead. The house was finally consigned to the care of University of Indiana.
   When Chastieton in Oxfordshire passed to the National Trust in 1991 the owner, Mrs Clutton-Brock, pleaded for the cobwebs to be left in place on the plausible grounds that they were all that held the building together. Her family had always attributed their poverty to losing everything in the war – “the Civil War, of course”. Indeed, such old ladies are pure gold. Visiting Kentwell in Suffolk some 20 years ago I was mesmerised to see an old lady roped off in an armchair quietly watching the racing on television. The household granny had apparently refused to budge, despite being told that the public was arriving. People thought her a waxwork.
   Sometimes it became even harder to tell reality from invention. At Belmont in Cheshire, a minor gem by James Gibbs, “A Pair of Cher’s knickers” hangs in a glass case over the drawing-room fireplace. Nobody could tell me why. At Clarke Hall in Wakefield I noticed that the chamber pots were empty. At Dennis Severs’s bizarre house in Spitalfields they were alarmingly full.
   Such houses often play host to history. At ancient Hemmingford Grey in Huntingdonshire a trumpet gramophone still sits in the hall upstairs, awaiting the return of the young American pilots who came for tea dances during the war. At Deene Park in Northamptonshire, Lord Cardigan’s mummified horse, which brought him back safe from the Charge of the Light Brigade, has rotted away to just its head. At Charleston in Sussex, the country retreat of the Bloomsbury set, a “family tree” indicates the sexual as well as familial relations between the occupants. Holdsworth House in Yorkshire, now a hotel, carries the mind-boggling boast that “Jayne Mansfield and Alec Douglas-Home slept here”. At Freud’s House in Hampstead the objects are labelled not with names but with suitable dreams.
   Buried improbably in suburban Paignton, outside Torquay, I encountered the extraordinary creation of young Paris Singer, heir to Isaac Singer’s sewing machine fortune. In 1904 he decided to build a cross between Versailles and the Place de la Concorde, complete with Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors. Craftsmen were despatched to Paris for precise measurements. The great staircase was hung with David’s Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine, for which Singer outbid the Louvre. When the painting was finally sold to France after the last war, an armoured train was sent to collect it. The house stands to this day, occupied by the town council. While the mayor lives in Napoleonic splendour, local people can marry in the Hall of Mirrors.
   The struggle to keep these places upright can be titanic. In the two hours I spent with Sir Humphrey Wakefield at Chillingham Castle, he did not draw breath in describing his fight to restore the mighty Northumberland seat of the Greys. Enemies were once Scots marauders. Now they are taxmen, English Heritage and health and safety inspectors “in jackboots”. Farther south, on a bleak hill overlooking Burton-on-Trent, Kate Newton is battling against wind and rain to prop up collapsing Sinai House, living in one half of this medieval remain while the other is draped in dangerous-structure notices. She deserves a medal.
   The fact is that for every Lord Spencer of Althorp, whose jewelled wedding shoes were valued at Ј30,000 in the mid-18th century, there was a Verney, a Cobham or a Walpole reduced to poverty by architectural ambition. Wimpole Hall outside Cambridge is said to have ruined every owner for three hundred years. In 1845 the bankrupt Duke of Buckingham entertained Victoria and Albert at his family seat of Stowe, while the bailiffs waited behind bushes outside to pounce as soon as the monarch had departed. Architects have done more to undermine the English aristocracy than wars or death duties.
   Of my thousand houses roughly half are now in the public sector, divided between the National Trust, English Heritage and local councils. For all the criticism visited on these bodies and their often bloodless house style, they stopped the appalling demolitions in the decades after the Second World War. The National Trust was Britain’s finest “nationalisation”. It rescued not just buildings such as Knole, Hardwick and Kedleston but lesser pleasures such as Tintagel Post Office and the delightful farm of Townend in Cumbria.
   I have embraced in my list as many types and styles of house as possible. Smaller ones often depend on an association with a famous occupant, such as the four houses attributed to Dickens in London and Kent. Kipling’s home at Bateman’s in Sussex still reeks of Kim, India and pipe tobacco. Nobody can visit Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top in the Lake District and miss the ghosts of Tom Kitten, Pigling Bland and Jemima Puddleduck. As for Lawrence of Arabia’s Dorset cottage, it may be devoid of architectural distinction, but it sits in its wood as if waiting for that strange, secretive man to return from the fatal motorcycle ride over the hill outside. Such shrines are surely still inhabited.
   Anywhere that men and women have laid their heads is, to me, a house. I visited England’s grimmest jail, at Walsingham in Norfolk, and most charming almshouse, in Cobham in Kent. Hotel use has saved many buildings from demolition. Langley in Northumberland offers a chance to stay in a medieval pele tower in the woods. Off the Devon coast is Art Deco Burgh Island, built by an infatuated tycoon for his starlet wife. Now a hotel, it beams out over the bay where a jazz band once played on a raft for swimming parties.
   Most moving of all is Kingston Lacy. This magnificent house was created by the Regency rake William Bankes, after a youth so dissipated that even Byron described him as “my father of mischief”. Forced by his homosexuality to flee the country, Bankes built and filled his new house entirely by letter from Venice, sending packing cases crammed with pictures and furniture. Pledged never to return on pain of imprisonment, he paid his debt to his family’s past and future with this monument in his home estate.
   Many years later, when Bankes was forgotten in exile, it is said that a dark, cloaked figure arrived by coach one night at the Kingston gatehouse. The custodian unlocked the big house and torchlight illuminated each fine room in turn. The figure then vanished into the night. Bankes, we hope, was proud of his life’s work.
   The houses of England – palaces, mansions, terraces and huts – are its most precious relic because they are its most intimate creation. Most have been threatened and many have been lost, but an astonishing array survives. To visit them is still the nearest we get to shaking hands with history.

Dark depressions of lady with the lamp

   By Nigel Hawkes
   Florence Nightingale may have suffered from manic depression, according to an American psychiatrist.
   The posthumous diagnosis explains why the founder of modern nursing was subject to periods of ferocious and productive energy and spells of extreme self-doubt.
   Professor Kathy Wisner, an expert in mood disorders from the University of Pittsburgh, told a conference that such abrupt shifts characterised an illness psychiatriasts call bipolar disorder – more commonly known as manic depression.
   “Florence heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes in her teens and early 20s: symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder,” Professor Wisner said.
   She cited the diary and letters that Nightingale wrote throughout her life as evidence for the diagnosis.
   “Why, oh my God, can I not be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people and told that the conversation of all of these clever men ought to be enough for me,” Nightingale wrote in one letter. “Why am I starving, desperate and diseased on it?”
   But at almost the same time, she was capable of high exultation. “This is the life,” she later wrote. “Now I know what it’s like to live and love life, and I will be really sorry to leave life. I wish for no other earth, no other world, but this.”
   Nightingale’s health has long been the suject of biographical speculation. When she returned from the war in the Crimea she became an invalid, spending much of the next ten years in bed.
   Her symptoms have often been attributed to brucellosis, contracted from drinking un-pasteurised milk. “She may well have contracted the infection in the Crimean War,” Professor Wisner said.
   Speaking at a conference at the University of Marlyland, she added: “But that illness alone does not account for her severe mood swings, or the fact that she would be so incredibly productive and so sick at the same time. “In her teens and early 20s, Nightingale heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes, symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder,” Professor Wisner said.
   Although she lived to the age of 90, Nightingale was more or less an invalid for the last 50 of them. When she was 60 her mother died, leaving her in a state of nervous collapse, too ill with palpitations, insomnia, headaches and depression even to attend her funeral.
   Yet through much of this long illness she wrote reports and books, established the first modern nursing school, and was one of the first to apply statistical methods to public health. “The manic periods of bipolar disorder allow for extreme productivity, creativity and insight that go beyond what would normally be possible,” Professor Wisner said.
   Nightingale gained her reputation during the Crimean War when she was appointed to oversee the introduction of female nurses into military hospitals in Turkey in 1854. Once there, Nightingale found that unsanitary conditions were claiming more lives than the battlefield, and campaigned to improve hygiene and nutrition. The death rate fell and when she returned to Britain, Nightingale was hailed as a national heroine.
   Longfellow named her the Lady with the Lamp, and her fame and success transformed nursing into a respectable profession for women.
   Lesley Hall, of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, in London, described the diagnosis as an interesting theory. But she said that no one really knew what Nightingale suffered from: “I think retrospectively diagnosing distinguished Victorian invalids is a positive parlour game.”

Grandchildren cash in on legacies their parents don’t need

   The Times, Monday, February 3, 2003
   By Alexandra Frean
   Inherited wealth is increasingly skipping a generation and going straight from the estates of older people to their grandchildren, according to the first detailed analysis of inheritance in Britain.
   An estimated Ј4 billion of assets a year are left by grandparents to younger people to enable them to buy their first home or pay off student debts because their own parents are already comfortably off.
   Michael Willmott, of the Future Foundation and author of the study, said that it was also clear from the findings that, despite fears of a pensions crisis, a significant minority of people are “over-saving” – accumulating large amounts of wealth that they have no intention of spending on themselves. He predicts that the value of inherited wealth will continue to rise, despite increasing life expectancy forcing more people to eat into their savings before they die.
   The findings throw important new light on Britain’s wealth base and are likely to inform the debate on pension provision and financial planning for an ageing population. Mr Willmott said: “People living longer means quite naturally that inheritance often goes to those who are already financially independent – many being in their forties, fifties and sixties – thus making little fundamental difference to their life-styles. Much of this inheritance goes into savings or reducing debt, but some is skipping a generation and going to younger people who really need a helping hand getting a secure start in life.”

//-- Death dues --//
   + Inheritance tax (IHT) is payable only at 40 per cent on estates valued at more than £250,000.
   + Anything left to a spouse is free of tax.
   + IHT can be cut by making gifts in the seven years before death.
   + Some gifts are exempt: wedding gifts up to £5,000 to your children or those they marry; wedding gifts up to £2,500 to each grandchild; wedding gifts up to £1,000 to anyone else; other gifts up to £3,000, plus any unused balance of the £3,000 from the previous tax year, any gift up to £250 in any tax year to any number of people.

   Although the Inland Revenue collects figures on the value of estates for inheritance tax purposes, until now there has been no analysis of where this money goes and how it might affect people’s lives.
   Using data from the British Household Panel Survey of 10,000 individuals in 5,500 households, the study, commissioned by the International Longevity Centre UK, found that one in 40 Britons receives an inheritance every year. The total after tax is Ј31 billion.
   The average estate leaves Ј90,000 net of tax and the average amount received by each individual is Ј17,500, suggesting that, on average, people share out their bequests between five people. Some 10 per cent of beneficiaries receive Ј50,000 or more. A further 30 per cent receive Ј10,000 or more, enough to make a down-payment on a home or pay off a sizeable chunk of a mortgage.
   Although the most likely recipients are those aged 45 to 59, Mr Willmott also found that 30 per cent of inherited wealth goes to people under 45, with the under-30s getting 7 per cent. In any one year, about 17,000 people under 30 could be receiving more than Ј20,000, the report found. Some 48 per cent of inherited wealth comes in the form of property.
   The report also found that as many as 15 per cent of people aged 45 and over were saving not only for their retirement, but specifically so that they could leave money to future generations. Among people in managerial jobs, the figure rose to 25 per cent. Given these levels of savings and with growing numbers of people now having occupational and private pensions and a housing shortage set to boost house prices still further in the long term, Mr Willmott said that there was every reason to believe that the value of inherited wealth would continue to rise and that “generation skipping” would continue.
   “Despite longer lives suggesting longer retirement and a greater running down of savings, it is quite possible that total inheritance in future years might increase in real terms with the number of larger estates increasing too,” Mr Willmott said.
   Tony Mudd, of the wealth management group St James’s Place, which specialises in estate planning, said that there had been a steady increase over the past ten years in clients seeking to leave part or all of their estate to their grandchildren either in a trust or as an outright bequest. This was partly because their own middle-aged children did not need the money, but also for tax reasons.

Queen versus queen

   by Simon Schama
   The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, November 4, 2000
   After Mary’s escape from Lochleven Castle in 1568, there was only one way back, and it was a route she must have had deep anxieties about: a return to Scotland via England. Mary undoubtedly knew that Elizabeth’s disgust with the murder of Darnley was exceeded only by her horror of rebellion and abdications under duress, and she extrapolated from that the notion that Elizabeth would be prepared to help her, militarily if necessary, recover her throne.
   So, when she planned a flight across the border, Mary thought of it as merely a temporary refuge, pending a triumphal return. Had she known that her stay in England would last 19 years, she would surely have avoided the passage across the Solway Firth.
   But there she was, a bedraggled, dead-tired figure, the famous auburn tresses cropped for disguise, sitting in an open boat, hunched up against the wind, her eyes fixed on the disappearing shoreline of Scotland. At her back was the little Cumbrian fishing port of Workington and her cousin Elizabeth’s kingdom. Halfway across, she was said to have had a sudden premonition that she should have fled to France, not England, that she might never see Scotland again.
   Mary’s abrupt appearance in England threw Elizabeth’s government into turmoil. It was one thing to have made cousinly noises, sympathising with her plight and condemning rebellion; it was quite another to know what to do about it, especially since the new regent of Scotland, the Earl of Moray, was, of course, a committed Protestant.
   William Cecil, the powerful Secretary of State, perhaps hoped that Mary’s presence would have the effect of at last concentrating his procrastinating queen’s mind on her future, which was also the country’s. Elizabeth was not getting any younger – she was 55 when Mary fled to England. If she would not discuss marriage, surely she had a duty to provide for the succession, particularly as Mary had the greater claim and others might create an alternative court somewhere up there near the border.
   Elizabeth was deeply torn. Her strong sense of princely obligation disposed her to help Mary, but she still suspected Mary’s complicity in the murder of Darnley, and her grip on realpolitik told her that she had no interest at all in replacing a friendly, grateful Protestant regime in Scotland with a Catholic queen, who probably would open up the country to the French once again. As usual, when conflicting matters of state arose, Elizabeth did nothing.
   When her personal appeals for a meeting with Elizabeth went unheeded, Mary was puzzled, assuming that her letters had been intercepted. But when Elizabeth’s chosen messenger, Sir Francis Knollys, explained that Mary would not be received at court until her case had been thoroughly examined and her conduct exonerated, Mary began to understand that she was a captive not a guest. But the more she raved, the deafer Elizabeth became to her entreaties.
   By October, 1568, when the commission of inquiry opened at York, most of Elizabeth’s council were hoping that Moray would present such a damning case against Mary that her cause would be doomed. He did just that, bringing an incriminating casket of letters, perhaps forged, perhaps not, written by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley’s death, urging him to kill her husband.
   As she would for the rest of her life, Mary disdained to answer any charge of wrongdoing or even to accept the jurisdiction of an English court to try the conduct of a queen of Scotland. She had a point. But she could be under no illusion that she was anything except a prisoner. She was shuttled from house to house under the guard of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Mary was always watched, for she had become, as both Cecil and Francis Walsingham (who succeeded Cecil as Secretary of State) insisted, Elizabeth’s most dangerous security problem.
   Indeed, Mary did become a magnet for conspiracy. The most dangerous was a plan to spring her from prison and marry her to the premier peer of the realm, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk was officially a Protestant but a Catholic at heart, and he and his fellow plotters might well have imagined that marriage to Mary was a way to bind up the wounds of religious schism and seal all the old divisions – between English and Scots, Protestant and Catholic, north and south – at a stroke. Elizabeth did not see it this way. Norfolk went to the Tower in October, 1569.
   In the north and west, where Catholicism had not only not been uprooted but was flourishing on the resentments of the great dynasties, Mary Stuart was not just a successor to Elizabeth, she was a replacement. A month after Norfolk went to the Tower, the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland led a rebellion that swept through the north and reconsecrated Durham Cathedral for Rome. The rebels believed that if they could sit tight through the winter, Spanish help would arrive in the spring.
   But Elizabeth’s government now understood the gravity of the situation and that another act of the English wars of religion was being played out. In the nick of time, Mary was moved from Tutbury, where a flying squad of northerners was coming to get her, and taken instead to the massively defended Coventry.
   After some initial chaos, a formidable, overwhelmingly southern army of 12,000 men was mobilised, adding more to its numbers once it reached the north. The rebellion was brutally crushed, the earls fleeing over the border to Scotland.
   For the most passionately Catholic, however, 1570 brought a terrible dilemma. In that year, with poor timing, the Pope, Pius V, published a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and calling on the faithful to rise up and depose their heretic queen, lethally if necessary. The Catholics of England now had a choice of betrayals: their Church or their monarch.
   Some, inevitably, chose the latter. In 1571, a plot organised by the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolfi was discovered. Its aim had been to liberate Mary through the combined force of an uprising in England and a Spanish army of invasion, sent from the Netherlands. Elizabeth was to be killed and Mary enthroned in her place. Yet, despite parliament demonising the queen of the Scots as “the monstrous and huge dragon and mass of the earth”, Elizabeth was unwilling to have Mary attainted or even, at that stage, removed from the line of succession.
   By the mid-1580s, under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary had been leading the life of a country gentlewoman, permitted to keep a decent, if not extensive, household. Physically, she had deteriorated, the slender beauty thickening. But she had never become reconciled to her captivity, nor had she ever forgiven Elizabeth.
   Horrified when her son James made a treaty with England that repudiated his own mother, Mary signed her own rights of succession over to the King of Spain. This only confirmed Walsingham in his pessimistic view that, with a native-born heir to the throne no longer a possibility, the mere existence of Mary Stuart was a dagger pointed at the heart of Elizabeth.
   So he designed an elaborate entrapment to take care of the matter. In December, 1585, without telling Cecil, Walsingham made an important change in the conditions of Mary’s captivity. She and her household were suddenly packed up and sent to Chartley House, near Sheffield, and provided with a new and much harsher jailer, the puritanical Amyas Paulet, who made no attempt to hide his intense distaste for his prisoner. At Chartley, the conditions of her confinement could be minutely monitored. Imagine Mary’s happiness when she discovered that a new and ingenious method had been devised by parties working on her behalf to smuggle letters to and from her agent in Paris and to her latest sworn avenger and champion, the wealthy London merchant, Anthony Babington.
   The coded letters were put in a watertight pouch and slipped through the bung hole of beer casks delivered and removed from Chartley. What Mary did not know was that it was Walsingham who had thought this up and whose cipher clerks were busy decoding her messages hours after they had been sent. The entire Chartley regime had been rigged as a set-up designed to nail Mary once and for all.
   Nail her it did. Babington obligingly supplied Mary with details of his plot: the six gentlemen who would murder Elizabeth; how she would be freed; the expected invasion and rising. On July 19,1586, Mary replied, encouraging the plotters (but putting her own liberation at the top of their priorities).
   In Westminster, Elizabeth suddenly became inexplicably distraught, imagining the assassin’s knife behind every shadow and curtain. She fell deathly ill. At Chartley, however, Mary felt the skies lighten; her liberty and vindication were close. On August 11,1586, Paulet suggested she go for a ride. From a distance Mary saw a small group of riders approach. This was it, she must have imagined: deliverance. Instead, it was the warrant for her arrest. Babington and his fellow-plotters had been arrested and, under torture, had confessed. Elizabeth was ecstatic. Hanging and live disembowelment, she told Cecil, was not good enough for traitors as evil as the Babington plotters.
   There was just one more stop, one more castle in the tragic career of the wandering Mary, Queen of Scots: Fotheringhay, the great Yorkist pile in Northamptonshire where Richard III had been born.
   There, faced with the endgame, Mary drew on some inner resource that seemed to raise her above the squalid charades of power. Asked to own up to her crimes, Mary stood on her sovereignty. To Paulet’s hectoring demand that she confess, she replied:
   “As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator. I beg him to forgive me. But as Queen and sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below.”
   Her second tactic was to lie her head off, denying all knowledge of the Babington plot until, that is, she was shown the letters to him bearing her signature. But Walsingham had overreached himself by adding forged statements to the genuine article, thus allowing Mary to accuse him of having set up the entire conspiracy. This was, after all, not far from the truth, and she was even closer to the mark when she reminded her interrogators on the Privy Council that she had come to England freely and in response to a promise of aid against her enemies in Scotland. “I was at once imprisoned,” she added bluntly.
   Elizabeth didn’t exactly see it that way. She wrote to Mary as if the Queen of the Scots had been an ungrateful house-guest who, instead of writing thank-you notes for the hospitality, had made off with the towels. Mary “had planned in divers ways and manners to take my life and ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood. I never proceeded so hastily against you. On the contrary I have maintained you and preserved your life with the same care which I use for myself.”
   The formal trial began in the great hall of Fotheringhay on October 15,1586. Mary proved such an adroit defender of her actions that the trial was adjourned and resumed in London without her. Ten days later, the commission passed swiftly to her conviction. But when Parliament petitioned Elizabeth for a speedy execution, she rediscovered her old, deep horror of the axe at the neck of those she felt and knew were kin.
   For three months, Elizabeth agonised but on February 1, 1587, she finally signed the death warrant and asked her private secretary, William Davison, to attach the Great Seal of England and take it to Walsingham. The execution, she insisted, had to be done away from the public gaze, at Fotheringhay itself.
   If Elizabeth dreaded the publicity, Mary revelled in her coming martyrdom: a sacrifice for the truth and endurance of the eternal Church. So when Mary was informed by a weeping Scottish courtier that she would be executed the following morning, February 8, she told him to be joyful: “For the end of Mary Stuart’s troubles is now done… Carry this message from me and tell my friends that I died like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.”
   The incredible performance was played right to the end. Harangued by Richard Fletcher, the Dean of Peterborough, she turned her back on him, rejecting his invitation to join his prayers. “Mr Dean, I am settled in the ancient Roman Catholic religion and mind to spend my blood in defence of it.” Undeterred, Fletcher walked round to the other side of the scaffold and continued to berate Mary.
   When, finally, she undressed for the executioner, her black gown fell away to reveal a petticoat of blood-red crimson: the stain of the martyr. Her eyes were tied with a white silk cloth, embroidered in gold, and she lay with such stillness that it disturbed the executioner. His first blow cut deep into her head. She was heard to cry “sweet Jesus” before the second blow severed all but a hanging tendon so the executioner was forced to use his axe like a hacksaw.
   By the time Elizabeth died, in March 1603, she might well have been one of the few for whom the idea of “Britain” had some real meaning. For by remaining unmarried she had brought about a momentous union: that of Scotland and England, not yet in one kingdom but in one person – James, the child of Mary Stuart.

Stunning victory routed French and Spanish and changed history

   By John Keegan
   The Daily Telegraph
   Friday, October 21, 2005
   October 21, Trafalgar Day, used to be marked by the hoisting on Nelson’s column in London of Nelson’s Trafalgar signal – England expects that every man will do his duty.
   It made a brave display, the coloured bunting flapping against the grey stone column at Nelson’s feet, and it was popular with Londoners, but it isn’t to modern tastes.
   Curiously, the signal nearly didn’t appear. Nelson’s first version was that “Nelson confides” but his flag lieutenant pointed out that those words were not in the code book and would have to be spelled out letter by letter, so he changed his mind. The signal provoked grumbles in the fleet from old salts who mumbled that they had always done their duty. Nelson, however, was on tenterhooks. He had been planning the encounter with the French – with whom the Spanish had recently become allied – for months. He was determined to win and to destroy the combined fleet in the process.
   Only by a complete victory could he make England safe from Napoleon, who had filled every estuary and port on the Channel coast with invasion barges to carry his army, camped on the cliffs outside Boulogne, to England.
   Little as he knew of naval warfare, Napoleon did recognise that he could not risk the Grand Army at sea while the Royal Navy was still intact and near at hand.
   He had therefore charged his admiral Villeneuve to draw off the British squadrons which blockaded his fleet in its harbours. He rightly doubted that he could successfully challenge the British to action. The unfortunate Villeneuve found himself caught between two fires, the raging impatience of the Emperor and the massed guns of the Royal Navy.
   He sought a middle way out. On March 30 he sailed from Toulon for the West Indies, hoping to draw the British Mediterranean fleet behind him, lose it somewhere across the Atlantic and get back into European waters, free to mount an offensive against whatever British ship remained to menace the invasion barges.
   Villeneuve got to the West Indies but on arrival found Nelson attached as firmly to his tail as if he had been dragged behind. He could not break the attachment when he turned for home. Arriving in Spanish waters in August, he found Nelson still up with him, where he remained as summer turned to autumn. Villeneuve also found carping letters from Napoleon, accusing him of fearing to fight.
   In the end Villeneuve decided to fight, but wrote to the French navy minister that he did not know what to do. Nelson knew exactly what to do. He had worked out a method of fighting a large scale naval battle and now fretted to put it into effect.
   On leave at Merton, in what today is south London, he had his captains down to be instructed in the new tactics. He would brief them again when he saw them the day before the battle off Cadiz near Gibraltar.
   Nelson’s plan was to solve the problem of sailing down on the enemy with the wind, which always left the opponent with the option of sailing off when defeat threatened. Nelson now planned not to lay his fleet alongside the enemy on the windward side but to sail through the enemy line and lay alongside to leeward, thus putting the enemy between their opponents and the wind and trapping them so that they could be beaten down by the gunnery.
   By the morning of Oct 21, his captains knew exactly what they had to do. They were assured of victory, as long as the Combined Fleet left port to accept battle. Villeneuve decided to do so, though with a heavy heart; he feared defeat but he feared even more Napoleon’s disfavour if he did not fight.
   The morning of Oct 21,1805, was calm with light winds scarcely strong enough to move the two columns of Nelson’s fleet at more than walking pace. Nelson led the left-hand column, Admiral Collingwood the right-hand. Their ships were severely punished in the approach, Victory’s foresails today on display at Portsmouth show 100 shot holes. The two columns bore on inexorably however and once through the enemy line turned to cut off its retreat. The gunnery battle then began in earnest.
   British gunnery was greatly superior to the enemy’s and, as the British succeeded in surrounding several clusters of French ships, the execution done was frightful. Victory was joined by several ships around the French Redoubtable, commanded by the tiny captain Lucas, less than five feet tall.
   Lucas however was a fire eater and had crowded his tops with musketeers. It was one of these men firing down on to Victory’s quarterdeck who shot Nelson. The bullet lodged in his spine and though the admiral survived long enough to learn that the Combined Fleet was beaten, died before the end of the battle.
   The calm of the morning was succeeded by a violent storm, which drove many of the surviving enemy ships ashore, with terrible loss of life – 8,500 dead and wounded out of 50,000 present.
   Only 16 of the 28 enemy ships survived. None of the 23 British ships was lost. Victory of course survives to this day. And if Britain has such a thing as a national shrine she is it. At Trafalgar under Nelson’s command, she and her sisters assured that Britain would not be invaded and that Napoleon would have to look elsewhere for a victory.
   He kept on trying until 1815 when, at Waterloo, he was defeated on his own element, on land.

Ghost of Henry VIII casts shadow over summit

   The Times
   Wednesday, October 26, 2005
   By Helen Rumbelow and Will Pavia
   AS THE leaders of Europe are shown around Hampton Court tomorrow, they may wonder if the setting is some kind of joke.
   European summits first occurred at the palace half a millennium ago, when Henry VIII entertained the French King in an attempt to bring peace to the two countries.
   He succeeded in showing off so blatantly that the resulting series of treaties was doomed, and, the palace became a fraught setting for international summits over the next 500 years. President Chirac and others have made it plain that they do not wish to sleep with these ghosts and will, unusually, leave the palace on the day they arrive. Leaders will have no time to themselves in the famous maze in the Wilderness Garden, which has been compared with tortuous Brussels bureaucracy. But reminders of painful historic precedent, whose spirit lingers in tense Anglo-French relations to this day, are strewn around the building and will be evident as they meet for a “working lunch”.
   Nobody could accuse Henry VIII of disliking Europe: he married several women from the Continent and liked to commission foreign artwork for the palace, inspiring awe and jealousy from the French.
   In 1527 the French visited Hampton Court to ratify the peace Treaty of Hampton Court, and a feast with walls covered with silver plates meant, according to a witness, “that the Frenchmen were rapt into Paradise”.
   The next round of negotiations with the French took place at Hampton Court in 1546. Henry VIII ordered opulent tapestries, which still hang in the Great Hall.
   The set of “Abraham” tapestries from Belgium cost the same sum as a fully rigged battleship in Henry VIII’s navy, and were the backdrop for six days of banquets, masques and mummeries.
   After Henry VIII died, diplomatic occasions improved, with James I booking William Shakespeare to entertain foreign ambassadors in his first court in 1603.
   After James I a cosmopolitan series of monarchs transformed the palace into the embodiment of European cross-fertilisation.
   The French have managed their own linguistic joke at Hampton’s expense. The summit, criticised for being so short, was advertised on the European Commission website as “Short Hampton”.
   A Commission spokesman rapidly explained that this was not a gibe, but simply a mistake by a French translator who thought that “court” was the French word for short.

Blair sets record for rewarding party donors with life peerages

   The Times
   Monday, November 14, 2005
   By Andrew Pierce
   Almost one in ten of the life peers created by Tony Blair since he became Prime Minister is a Labour party donor. Between them, the donors have contributed close to Ј25 million.
   An investigation by The Times shows that at least 25 of the 292 peers created by Mr Blair since 1996 have made donations ranging from Ј6,000 to Ј13 million. Two of the most generous are now ministers.
   The investigation confirms that Mr Blair has been the biggest dispenser of political patronage in the Lords since life peerages were created in 1958. The 292 peers he has created in eight and a half years compare with 216 by Margaret Thatcher in her 11 years in Downing Street and John Major’s 171 in seven years. Labour is the largest party in the Lords for the first time.
   Other benefactors such as Christopher Ondaatje, who gave Ј2 million, and Ronald Cohen, the venture capitalist (Ј350,000), have received knighthoods.
   In 1996, when John Major was criticised by Labour for abusing the honours system by rewarding donors, Swarj Paul was made a Labour peer. He gave Ј109,000 that year and a furtner Ј200,000 later.
   In 1997, when Mr Blair became Prime Minister, six donors were elevated. They included Michael Levy, a music industry tycoon, who raised Ј7 million to bankroll Mr Blair in opposition. He is now Mr Blair’s unofficial treasurer and unofficial ambassador to the Middle East.
   Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who has given about Ј13 million since 1994, when Mr Blair became Labour leader, has been a minister since 1998. He gave Ј2 million this year.
   Other donors made peers included Ruth Rendell, the crime writer (Ј15,000), David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning film director, (Ј25,000), and Michael Montague, a businessman who died in 1999 (Ј1 million).
   Paul Drayson donated Ј100,000 in 2001 and his company won a Ј32 million smallpox vaccine contract from the Government the next year.
   In 2004 he was made a peer. He handed over Ј1 million in the same year. In May this year Lord Drayson was made Defence Minister.
   A peerage was given in 1998 to Paul Hamlyn, the publisher, who gave Ј600,000 before 1997. Lord Hamlyn, who died in 2001, left Labour Ј1 million in his will. Lord Haskins, the chairman of Northern Foods, donated Ј79,000. He was expelled from the party this year for giving Ј2,500 to a Liberal Democrat candidate. Waheed Alli, the multimillionaire founder of Planet 24 Television, made free party political films worth an estimated Ј100,000.
   Peter Facey, director of the New Politics Network think-tank, which specialises in party political funding, said: “Every time new appointments to the Lords are announced public trust is eroded more. People have every right to be cynical about a system where major party donors are repeatedly elevated to a place in the legislature where they can directly influence the law.
   In 1999 the list was led by the businessman Robert Gavron, 69, who gave Ј500,000 to Labour weeks after he was made a peer, having given Ј500,000 in 1996. Others included Melvyn Bragg, who helped to raise Ј79,000 for Mr Blair’s Labour leadership campaign. He has given Ј32,500. The barrister Peter Goldsmith made a donation in 1996. He became Attorney-General in 2001.
   In 2001 the only Labour life peers were retiring MPs and there were no further appointments until 2004.
   In the 2005 list, which was revealed in The Times last week, Sir David Garrard, a property developer, is the biggest surprise. He gave Ј70,000 to the Tories under William Hague. But in 2004 he changed sides and gave Ј200,000 to Labour. He invested Ј2.4 million in Mr Blair’s city academies’ project. Sir Gulan Noon, who made his fortune selling ready-cooked curries to supermarkets, donated Ј225,000. Chai Patel, the head of the Priory rehabilitation clinic, gave Ј10,000.

Lady Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday last night with 650 guests
Andrew Pierce reports

   The Times
   Friday, October 14, 2005
   Baroness Thatcher had the perfect excuse to be a little late last night for her 80th birthday party in the presence of the Queen, Tony Blair and some unlikely names from the show-business world.
   She was delayed by an unexpected telephone call from President Bush wishing her a happy birthday. The ten-minute call from the White House was the latest in a series of tributes that poured in from around the world. It marked yet another highlight in the life of a woman who still casts a huge shadow over the Conservative Party.
   The red carpet was rolled out for Lady Thatcher, who was dressed in a navy blue cocktail coat and silk chiffon dress designed by Camilla Milton.
   Lady Thatcher, who looked frail, made no public comment as a crowd of wellwishers lined the streets to catch a glimpse of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. The 650-strong guest list was a roll call of honour from the 1980s Thatcher heyday. Michael Portillo, who was once seen as her anointed heir, made a surprise appearance. He said: “She was influential in her day but not now.”
   But the former Prime Minister also sprinkled the list with some surprise names from both sides of the political divide.
   The Queen, in a shimmering silver dress, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Prime Minister were the principal guests at the drinks party in the gold-embossed ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Hyde Park, in Knightsbridge. The Queen and Lady Thatcher were said to have walked hand in hand to the party. One onlooker said: “It was a magical moment.” The sheer size of the guest list was an indication to some of the former Prime Minister’s associates that the party would be one of the last big public events that she would host.
   Joan Collins, Dame Shirley Bassey, the actress June Whitfield and the crime writer P. D. James were present. Terry Wogan, Lord Lloyd-Webber, the composer, Sir Jimmy Young, who was one of her favourite interviewers, and the television presenter Jeremy Clarkson mingled with Princess Alexandra and President Cossiga of Italy.
   Sir John Major, who for years was barely on speaking terms with Lady Thatcher, whom he accused of undermining his premiership, made a surprise appearance with his wife Norma. Sir John changed his travel plans at the last minute in a further sign that the feud between the two was at an end.
   Angela Merkel, Germany’s new Chancellor, sent a handwritten letter paying warm tribute to a fellow woman leader and “her remarkable achievements”. There were also messages from Helmut Kohl, the former German Chancellor, John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, his Italian counterpart.
   The two-hour party reunited Sir Rex Hunt, who was Governor of the Falklands during the Argentine invasion in 1982, with Lord Carrington, 86, who resigned as Foreign Secretary before the recapture of the islands. Lord Carrington made the toast. Virtually all her Cabinet colleagues from the 1980s, with the pointed exceptions of Kenneth Clarke and Lord Heseltine, who ended her chances in the first leadership contest in 1990, were invited. Lord Wakeham, who was injured in the Brighton bomb and whose first wife was killed in the 1984 attack, was one of the first to arrive.
   Lady Thatcher, who has been told by doctors not to make public speeches after suffering a series of minor strokes, was planning for once to obey orders. But none of her staff would swear to that. Lord McAlpine, who was her Treasurer, flew in from his home in Italy. Lord Bell of Belgravia, the advertising guru who masterminded her election victories, caught up with Lord Parkinson, who was party chairman in her second landslide victory, and Lord Tebbit, the third.
   John Bolton, the hawkish US ambassador to the UN who is a close ally of President Bush, came in from New York.
   David Davis and Liam Fox, two would-be Tory leaders, were present along with Michael Howard, the outgoing one, who said: “We all owe her an enormous debt.”
   There were rare appearances from John Profumo who retreated from public life in 1963 after he resigned as War Secretary after lying to the Commons over his relationship with Christine Keeler, and Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, who was jailed for perjury.
   Lady Archer said: “To the outside world, Lady Thatcher may appear to be the Iron Lady, but her friends saw a warm, kind and thoughtful person who does not desert you when you are not in vogue.”
   The hatchet was also buried with Lord Howe of Aberavon, whose resignation speech triggered her downfall. He said: “Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.”
   Other foes from the Thatcher era were reunited. Lord Lawson of Blaby, who resigned as chancellor in 1988, came face to face with Sir Alan Walters, the economics adviser whose presence in Downing Street forced his departure.
   Lord Powell, who was foreign policy adviser to Lady Thatcher, and his brother Jonathan, who is chief of staff to Tony Blair, chatted to Frank Field, her favourite Labour MR.

The generation game is rigged

   Today’s young will be crushed under the burden of paying for the retirement of wealthy babyboomers

   The Times
   Wednesday, November 30, 2005
   by Alice Miles
   The welfare state needs somebody to save it today. This morning, when Lord Turner of Ecchinswell publishes his mammoth tome on pensions, politicians must do something that they find very difficult – they must do nothing. Make no decision. Say nothing conclusive. Rule not a thing in or out. But, instead, read the report, think, debate it publicly. And then decide a course which, if chosen wrongly, could be the beginning of the end of the welfare state. I wonder whether Gordon Brown or David Cameron – for it will fall to the next leaders not the current ones to act – has it in him.
   The pensions problem is actually very simple, and it is this: there are going to be too many old people in 20 years’ time, and not enough young ones to support them. In 1950 there were more than five people of working age for every pensioner. For the past 20 years, because the baby boomer bulge offset the effects of increased longevity, there have been four. But towards the end of this decade, the ratio will start to fall and by 2050 there will be just two people of working age for every pensioner.
   Who will pay for all the pensioners? Should today’s 25-year-old be prepared to fund the retirement of today’s 50-year-old? In a brilliant speech on Monday, David Willetts, the Shadow Trade and Industry spokesman, set out why today’s 25-year-old will be significantly worse off in 25 years’ time than a 50-year-old is now. The decline in final salary pension schemes, the increasing difficulty of getting a toehold in a housing market that is still paying huge dividends to their parents, and the ending of free university education puts today’s 25-year-old at a number of disadvantages. They are far less likely to be home owners than they were 20 years ago. Because they cannot afford to buy a home, they will delay having families so will have children later and therefore have fewer of them, and so the cycle continues. In terms of opportunity and wealth, the postwar baby boomer generation has had and continues to have it all.
   Baby boomers, concluded Mr Willetts, “have shaped an economic and social environment that works for them very well. A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.”
   In many parts of the country, including West Sussex where I live, young families find it all but impossible to afford a home. Pretty much all the larger “family” properties are occupied by elderly empty-nesters, sometimes only using a single floor and closing off the rest of the house.
   Yet these are the people, sitting on property worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, to whom the Government has just sent a Ј1.6 billion council tax refund. That is the cost of the Ј200 council tax refund promised as a bribe to elderly voters at the last election and paid this month to the eight million pensioners not in receipt of the pension credit guarantee and therefore not on the breadline.
   Examine the logic: their council tax is high because they live in expensive homes larger than they need, thereby preventing young families from owning them. So instead of suggesting they move to smaller and lower-rated houses, the Government subsidises them. It is crazy.
   This is the sort of problem that arises when governments feel they must pander to a section of the electorate which, because of its growing numbers, decides who wins and loses general elections. The same eight million people have also just received a Ј200 winter fuel payment (in fact that goes to 11 million pensioners, but 3 million are on pension credit guarantee so presumably need the extra money). That makes Ј3.2 billion in handouts this month to elderly people, many of whom do not need it: a penny on income tax taken off people who probably do need it and given to wealthy retirees. As one brave pensioner wrote to The Times yesterday: “I do not need this money, nor, I suspect, do a sizeable number of other recipients.”
   Not all will be wealthy, of course, but the point is apt. Now imagine that situation getting worse as more and more older people with more and more electoral clout are given more and more sweeties by governments facing re-election.
   It will take bold politicians to unravel all this and find the right solutions. Yet the debate is being conducted with the usual rat-a-tat between № 10 and № 11 preventing serious discussion, while parts of the media seemed more exercised last Sunday about a “nanny tax” increasing the already phenomenal cost of employing a child-minder – not a nice thought, sure, but hardly the most important issue Lord Turner will introduce today.
   Looking to future taxpayers to fund an increased state pension for those with comparatively large reserves of wealth cannot be the answer. Today’s pensioners will receive more from the welfare state over their lifetime than they paid into it, a balance that is beginning to switch with the baby boomer generation and is heading firmly in the wrong direction for the generations following.
   Already, taxpayers in two decades’ time, and fewer of them, will be funding the hugely increased costs of NHS care for an ageing population, with all the expensive new technology that will be available. There won’t be enough money. And mightn’t these taxpayers be justified in arguing that they would sooner invest their money, if it comes to a choice, in improving their children’s educational chances? Or the trains that fail to get them to work on time? And sod the costs of healthcare, they might think, we can pay for it ourselves and so must they.
   Impose too many costs on this generation – which will not expect to see any state-funded pension provision for itself – and it will want to stop paying altogether. The whole of the welfare contract could break down if we get this one wrong.

Painted Lady of Kew uncovered

   The Times
   Monday, December 12, 2005
   By Dalya Alberge
   Experts have uncovered a painted female figure that is part of the original 17th-century decoration of Kew Palace, the summer residence of King George III and Queen Charlotte.
   It has emerged from beneath nearly 20 layers of paint in the King’s Library of the palace, which stands in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
   The discovery comes before the palace’s reopening to the public at the end of April.
   The work is a grisaille, a style of painting on walls or ceilings in greyish tints that imitate bas-reliefs. Although only a fraction of the decorative scheme has been uncovered so far, the figure – about 16in high – appears to represent a carving for a stone and marble fireplace overmantel.
   There is likely to be a corresponding male figure on the other side of the fireplace, but that section has yet to be explored. The 1630s brick building is the last survivor of several important royal residences. Kew was used by the Royal Family between 1729 and 1818. The figure is part of a scheme that is thought to date from the second half of the 17th century.
   John Burbidge, a consultant for Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) and a wall paintings conservator, said: “This is one of the earliest bits of decoration to be found in the house. HRP is presenting decoration from the early 19th century, but this predates it, right back to the origins of the house.”
   He described the figure as so finely executed that its artist may have been Antonio Verrio, who painted the King’s staircase in Hampton Court Palace, he added.
   The discovery was made by Catherine Hassall, a paint analyst. In a painstaking operation, she used a binocular microscope and surgical scalpels to remove the overpaint.
   The process is so slow that it takes about an hour for every square centimetre.
   Mr Burbidge said that while the results were tantalising, it was not known whether further work would continue: “You’re causing microscopic damage to the surface. Although the image looks intact, there is a conservation issue.”
   Kew Palace is one of five unoccupied palaces in the care of HRP, a charitable trust.
   The palace has undergone an ambitious restoration costing Ј6.6 million, but HRP is still seeking Ј700,000 to complete the project.
   Plans include a new visitor welcome centre and the conservation of objects for display such as the wax head of George III made from a life mask by Madame Tussaud.
   The palace was the family country home of George III and his queen between 1800 and 1818. In 1788 the monarch began to show symptoms of mental derangement.
   He convalesced at Kew under the watchful eyes of his many doctors, during his well-documented bouts of illness, presumed as madness but now known to have been porphyria. Large parts of the building have remained untouched since Queen Charlotte’s death in 1818, which brought to an end 90 years of royal residence at Kew Palace. Her possessions were removed or sold and a housekeeper was left in residence in the empty house, which was opened to the public in 1899 by Queen Victoria.

Al-Qaeda threat to Queen tightens Cenotaph security

   The Times
   Monday, November 14, 2005
   A warning by al-Qaeda that it views the Queen as an enemy of Islam led to unprecedented security for yesterday’s Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
   The Queen was identified as “one of the severest enemies of Islam” in an al-Qaeda video issued after the July 7 London suicide bombings. The full text, including the reference to the Queen, was not revealed at the time.
   Security sources confirmed that MI5 had carried out an assessment of the implied threat to the Queen, which had been passed to the Metropolitan Police Royalty Protection Branch (SO14).
   The sources said that any additional protection measures for the Queen and the Royal Family were a matter for the police. Tighter security for the Queen is also expected later this month at the Commonwealth heads of government conference in Malta.
   The video, which highlighted the Queen as an enemy of Islam for the first time, was broadcast in a statement by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is Osama bin Laden’s deputy. He accused the Queen of being ultimately responsible for Britain’s “crusader laws” against Muslims.
   With the memory of July’s London bombings still fresh in everyone’s minds, no one complained about the strict airport-style security at the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph.
   Good-humoured queues of veterans and spectators filed slowly through a bank of security gates at the top of Whitehall. Their bags were checked and their bodies screened by metal detectors as hundreds of police marshalled the crowds.
   On the stroke of 11am from Big Ben, those gathered fell silent to remember “The Glorious Dead”, as they are commemorated in the inscription on the white Portland stone. At that moment, the sun broke through the clouds, shining brightly on the assembled civic and military leaders.
   The Queen, dressed in black, was first to lay a wreath, followed by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and the Princess Royal, all in military uniform. Tony Blair, Michael Howard, Charles Kennedy and other political leaders also placed wreaths at the foot of the monument.
   Watching from a Foreign Office balcony were Prince William, an army recruit, and the Duchess of Cornwall, appearing at the commemoration for the first time. The duchess revealed a thrifty side by wearing the same hat for the second time in under a fortnight. The black and white creation by Philip Treacy appeared nine days earlier during her tour of the United States as she visited the Second World War memorial in Washington.
   After the service about 8,000 veterans paraded past the Cenotaph, their medals glinting in the autumn sunshine. From Gurkhas to the scarlet-coated Chelsea Pensioners, the former servicemen were a moving sight as they marched in time to music such as It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.
   At one point a walking stick was dropped, but the owner kept striding on and it was quickly retrieved by others further down the line. Every now and then a young boy would be among a detachment holding his grandfather’s hand or perhaps walking in his place.
   Joe Newman, 89, served with the Parachute Regiment and was present at Dunkirk and the D-Day landings. He also served in North Africa and Italy. “I like to remember my friends who fell,” he said, “I lost a lot of friends, especially at Dunkirk.”
   The crowds who thronged the pavements reserved their loudest applause for the oldest veterans, many of whom were in wheelchairs or motorised buggies.
   In a specially organised tribute, a silent message of remembrance was passed down the River Thames using semaphore. Veterans and signalmen, the first posted on the roof of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, used flags to make the secret code, which was decrypted at Whitehall and attached to a wreath which was laid at the Cenotaph.
   The 16 signalling posts included the Cutty Sark, HMS Belfast and HMS St Vincent. The message read: “War turns us to stone. In remembrance we shine and rise to new days.”
   In other services around the country, the Earl of Wessex laid a wreath in Sunderland, and in Liverpool a D-Day bomber dropped 100,000 poppies at the St George’s Hall Cenotaph.

If we don’t change now, we’ll all be poorer for it

   The Times
   Thursday, December 1, 2005
   By Christine Seib
   The Pensions Commission’s 459-page report and its 309-page appendices give warning that if we do not change our pensions system pensioners will become increasingly poor compared with the rest of society. The only other options – work longer, save more or pay higher tax – are equally unattractive.
   We must decide how to balance these choices. The debate has to start now.
//-- The Problem --//
   Pensioners in Britain today are, on average, the richest the country has had because they benefit from generous final-salary pensions and good state second-pension (S2P) rebates. But many pensioner groups are living in poverty, such as women and carers who were unable to work long enough to get a full state pension. Many factors, including meagre state pensions, unpredictable mortality improvements and stock market falls, are gradually increasing the number of people with inadequate retirement provision. The commission believes that the problem cannot be fixed by simple changes to the state pension system or small measures to encourage voluntary saving. Nor can rocketing house prices be considered a replacement for saving for most people.
//-- Solutions --//
   The commission divides its solutions into two “core” parts, with some important additional considerations. The core parts comprise a private sector initiative – a salary-related savings system that is not compulsory but gives workers a push toward saving – and state pension reforms to make state benefits easier to understand and less means-tested.
//-- Private Sector --//
   Lord Turner of Ecchinswell proposes a national pensions saving scheme (NPSS) that could be set up by 2010 or soon after. All workers who do not already have good pension provision would be automatically enrolled but with a right to opt out. They will pay in 4 per cent of their gross pay above Ј5,000 and below Ј33,000. The Government would contribute 1 per cent in tax relief and the employer 3 per cent.
   The money would be deducted either through the existing Pay As You Earn system or a new pension payment system and put into the NPSS. Both employee and employer could make higher voluntary contributions.
   The NPSS will bulk-buy fund management to keep the cost of managing the nation’s savings at about 0.3 per cent. Savers who want to keep their charges at that level could choose from one of up to ten investment options.
   People who want more exotic investments could choose to pay a higher charge. Those who did not want to make any investment choice at all would be put into a default investment fund.
//-- Pros And Cons --//
   Savings rates are declining as more employees are moved from final-salary to defined-contribution occupational pensions. The commission hopes that the NPSS will arrest this decline. But employers, particularly small businesses, complain that they cannot afford to make contributions to their workers’ retirement savings. Lord Turner calls these payments “contingent compulsion” and admits that wages may not grow as quickly because of them. He hopes that the 3 per cent employers’ contribution is not high enough to prompt most bosses to entice their workers out of the NPSS in return for a one-off bonus or other inducement.
//-- Public Sector --//
   The commission proposes a few changes to the state pension: increase the retirement age, increase the basic state pension and reduce means-testing. Lord Turner proposes that we move to a two-part state pension, comprising a basic state pension (BSP) and the S2P. The S2P is an earnings-related additional state pension that people can accrue over their working life. This allows people who do not want to leave their savings with the Government to “contract out” of the S2P and receive a cash rebate that they can pay into a company or personal pension fund.
   To create his two-part state pension, Lord Turner recommends that we freeze the upper earnings, Ј32,760, from which workers can accrue S2P. This would gradually reduce the amount of S2P that higher earners can put aside.
   Meanwhile, the lower amount at which people are entitled to accrue S2P, Ј12,100, would continue to rise so that over many years, the gap between the differing amounts of S2P accrued by high and low-paid workers would become a flat rate. The commission also wants contracting out of the S2P to be phased out by 2030 so that more money stays in the state system.
   By 2010 the commission wants the BSP’s growth to be linked to earnings rather than prices, making it more generous over time. Lord Turner also recommends that the Ј109 upper limit of the means-tested state pension increases only in line with prices, rather than with earnings, as it does currently. As the Ј80 BSP rises with earnings, the gap between the two will gradually close, drastically reducing the number of pensioners receiving means-tested benefits.
   To balance a more generous state pension, Britons would have to work longer. Lord Turner recommends that the age at which people could draw a state pension should rise to 66 by 2030 and to 67 by 2050. If mortality rates improve even more quickly than forecast, these figures would have to be adjusted to 69 by 2050.
   To address the problem of female pensioner poverty, the commission suggests a flat pension based on residency rather than years in work for the over-75s. But it did not say when this should be introduced, and gave warning that it would push up the commission’s projected costs.
//-- Means-testing --//
   The financial services industry argues that cutting means-testing, which penalises people for saving, will encourage people to put aside more for retirement. But the National Pensioners Convention works out that today’s pensioners will benefit by only Ј1.36 a week more from a BSP-earnings link than they would have under the Government’s current proposals for pension increases.
   The commission calculates that its proposed changes to the state pension would cost about Ј1.5 billion a year by 2020 and over the longer-term would take the Government’s expenditure on pensions to as much as 8 per cent of GDP, up from 6.2 per cent currently.

Warriors, statesmen, prelates. Can young David live up to his ancestors?

   The Times
   Monday October 24, 2005
   by William Rees-Mogg
   It all turns on Ferdinand Mount, the political columnist who once ran Baroness Thatcher’s policy unit and became a distinguished editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He is the 3rd baronet in the Mount line but does not use the title.
   If one wants to discover David Cameron’s genealogy, one has to look up the entry under Mount in Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage: at the foot of the entry appears David Cameron’s name. His mother was the daughter of the 2nd Baronet Mount, who had no male heirs, so she is Ferdy’s first cousin. David Cameron is, therefore, Ferdy’s first cousin once removed. The Mount family, the forebears both of Ferdy and David, married an heiress of the Talbot family in the mid-19th century, before they received their baronetcy. There is a cross-reference to the Talbot entry, which comes under the Earl of Shrewsbury and Waterford.
   The 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury is now the Premier Earl of England and Ireland; his original title was created in 1442 for John Talbot, the heroic general who lost his life at Castillon in the final battle of the Hundred Years War. Two of his sons were killed with him, one legitimate, the other a bastard. The French honoured his courage, calling him “the English Achilles”.
   John Talbot was a great national hero of the 15th century, second only to Henry V. He was nearly 80 when he fell in battle. They brought his heart home and buried it at Whitchurch in Shropshire under a great Gothic canopy.
   In terms of English history, the Talbots are one of the great families, like the Cecils or the Churchills, only much older. Perhaps the Howards are the closest parallel. The Talbots are an 11th-century family. The Cecils are 16th century and the Churchills, like the Foxes, are 17th century.
   In the old Dictionary of National Biography there are 20 entries for members of the Talbot family. The most eccentric is Mary Anne Talbot, the “British Amazon”, who joined the Royal Navy as a transvestite, was wounded, fought as a powder monkey in the battle of “The Glorious First of June”, 1794, and subsequently appeared on the stage in Babes in the Wood. She claimed to be an illegitimate daughter of the 1st Earl of Talbot, yet another family earldom.
   The more respectable Talbots, apart from their national hero, produced countless earls, two dukes, though one was only a Jacobite duke, a First Minister, one of Sir Robert Walpole’s Lord Chancellors, a Bishop of Durham, a Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, another medieval Archbishop of Dublin, the great building heiress Bess of Hardwick, and William Fox-Talbot, who invented photography. They married many interesting people, including William Herbert, who was Shakespeare’s patron. Through the Talbots of Malahide, they are connected to James Boswell.
   David Cameron aims to become Prime Minister; no one was called Prime Minister before Robert Wal-pole, but Cameron does have a family forebear who was First Minister. Charles Talbot, the 12th earl and the first and only Duke of Shrewsbury, was born in 1660. He was the first child after the Restoration to be christened with Charles II as his godfather.
   When he was only seven a scandalous tragedy happened in the family. His mother was having an affair with George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, a thoroughly contemptible man, even by the standards of the Restoration Court. His father, the 11th Earl, challenged Buckingham to a duel. Buckingham wounded him fatally. The countess is said to have watched the duel, disguised as a page in Buckingham’s retinue. Immediately after the duel contemporary rumours state that she and Buckingham made love; he was still wearing the shirt stained with her husband’s blood. Not an ideal start in life for her son. Shrewsbury had the knack of holding power at crucial moments in a revolutionary situation. He was the only Secretary of State, and therefore was First Minister, in the first administration appointed by William III in 1689, immediately after the Glorious Revolution. He had been a leading figure in inviting William to invade England, went to Holland to join him, helped to finance the invasion with a loan of Ј12,000, and even went to console James II and persuade him to abdicate. Shrewsbury was First Minister again in the later 1690s, when William spent a long time outside England. Early in the reign of Queen Anne he became disgusted with politics and spent some years on the Continent, but he came back and was appointed First Minister by Queen Anne on her death bed. He was therefore First Minister immediately after the accession of William III, again when Queen Anne died and on the arrival of King George I.
   How did he do it? Exactly as David Cameron proposes to do it. By charm and moderation. Of his charm and handsome appearance, there are many contemporary accounts. William III himself called Shrewsbury “the king of hearts”, the curmudgeonly Dean Swift said that he was “the finest gentleman we have” and at another time “the favourite of the nation”. Bishop Burnet, whom I always like to quote, wrote that he had “a sweetness of temper that charmed all who knew him”.
   Women loved him. He was a political moderate. He was decisive when the revolutionary situation required it, but was one of those politicians who stand above parties, and are seen as relatively non-partisan. According to one of his early biographers: “King William used to say that the Duke of Shrewsbury was the only man of whom the Whigs and Tories both spoke well.”
   In his career Shrewsbury helped to make a Whig settlement of our constitution, but for Tory reasons. David Cameron is a Tory with a liberal streak; it is the same combination – it seems to run in the family. The duke, of course, was even younger; he became First Minister at the age of 28.

The letter that saved Parliament

   DANIEL HAHN rereads the letter that betrayed the 1605 plotters and asks who wrote the words that prevented the fuse from being lit

   It’s not much to look at – a scrap of paper with a few quick lines, unsigned. It’s nothing grand or formal, there’s no seal or signature flourish; just 160 words or so, handwritten, on a yellowed page, a little smaller than A4. But though it’s barely known today, document SP 14/216 (2) has, arguably, more mystery and more immediacy than anything else in the vast National Archives collection, and is the trigger for one of the most engaging hypotheticals in British history: what if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded?
   The Monteagle Letter takes its popular name from William Parker, Lord Monteagle, the man who on 26 October 1605 had his dinner interrupted by a servant bearing this mysterious missive. The letter spoke of “a great blow” that Parliament would receive, and advised Monteagle to absent himself; it referred to “the love that I bear to some of your friends”. It rejoiced in the thought that the bloodshed was deserved, and planned not just by man but also by God.
   Monteagle was a Catholic, or had been once; the priest Oswald Tesimond described him as “a Catholic at least according to his innermost convictions”. He had this same summer written a letter to chief plotter Robert Catesby expressing his discontent at the standing of Catholics under the new regime. Besides this, Monteagle had very lately been imprisoned for his involvement in the Essex Rebellion. Although his status in court had lately been on the ascendant, he was perpetually under suspicion, so he greatly appreciated the chance to prove his loyalty to the King. He didn’t lose a moment, leaving his fellow diners and rushing the letter to Whitehall, to Secretary of State Robert Cecil.
   The King was out of town on a hunt, but on his return a few days later Cecil passed the letter on to him. The “divinely illuminated” James brilliantly deduced (from the word “blow” and the reference to burning) that the letter was warning of a plot to blow up Parliament. Cecil had surely worked out the barely hidden meaning long before, but was never one to miss an opportunity to flatter the vain King and so complimented him most enthusiastically on his God-sent inspiration and his incisive intelligence. And of course they were correct: there was indeed a plot to blow up Parliament, on 5 November. Cecil ordered a search of the rooms under the Parliament chamber – revealing 36 barrels of gunpowder and a startled Guy Fawkes.
   This much, at least, we know. The rest, as they say, is history; but of course history is never so simple.
   With his network of informers intercepting correspondence across the Continent, it may be that Cecil knew of the plot long before Monteagle rushed into his audience clutching the tip-off. But if Cecil didn’t know, or didn’t know for sure, if he had any doubts at all – then this old page now in the National Archives can be credited with preventing an extraordinary coup, an incomprehensibly audacious, ambitious attempt to eliminate monarchy and government and all establishment, and replace it with… who knows? A Catholic England?
   So to the letter itself. The writing has certainly been disguised. The hand is clumsy, but deliberately so – it’s easy enough to see places where it has been altered to hide the writer’s natural style. The prose and the vocabulary, meanwhile, are sophisticated. If we were meant to be fooled by the hand into thinking this the work of some barely literate servant, the words belie this.
   Prime suspect for writing the letter has always been Francis Tresham, the plotters’ last recruit, enrolled mainly for his recently inherited wealth. From the moment he joined the inner circle of plotters, Tresham had expressed his doubts about the justification for such massive loss of life, questioning whether, for instance, the Catholics in Parliament shouldn’t be saved. And Tresham’s sister Elizabeth was married to Lord Monteagle; does the wording in the letter – “some of your friends” – refer to Monteagle’s wife? Circumstantial evidence aplenty, then. And indeed, suspicion fell on Tresham from the start. Catesby and another plotter Thomas Wintour summoned him to meet them at once; these two dedicated men were quite prepared to kill their friend for his betrayal.
   And yet somehow Tresham was able to win them round. Whatever he said, whatever oaths he swore, Catesby and Wintour left the meeting convinced that Tresham was no traitor. And Catesby was not a man easily fooled. Maybe it wasn’t Tresham, then? After the failure of the plot Tresham spent weeks in the Tower of London signing statements, writing letters to Cecil, insisting that he’d opposed the plot all along and even offering assistance with the investigation – and yet never does he mention the letter. Odd, isn’t it? And besides, the tone of the letter does seem convinced by the righteousness of the plot and doesn’t sound like the voice of a waverer. But if not Tresham, then who?
//-- Unusual suspects --//
   There are at least as many possibilities as there were plotters. And no wonder there was a weak link. With so many men involved in the Gunpowder Plot – an unfortunate 13 – it would have been impressive if there had not been at least one Judas. And we mustn’t assume that the letter was necessarily the work of one of them. Couldn’t a devious Monteagle have written it himself? If he’d suspected something was afoot and feared he would be implicated (he knew many of the conspirators, after all), such a letter would be a fine way of preventing the plot, demonstrating his innocence, and proving his allegiance to the King, at a stroke. He did after all do extremely well out of the whole situation – earning the gratitude and trust of James and Cecil, along with a generous pension, and even a poem by Ben Jonson in his honour.
   Many historians have suggested something more Machiavellian still, that a well-informed Cecil wrote the letter himself (or had one of his many shady functionaries do it). This would be an excellent way of officially “discovering” the plot without having to reveal any of his sources – let the plotters entangle themselves in their scheme while you remain in apparent ignorance, and then swoop in and save the day – there’s even a contemporary woodcut of the letter being delivered from God by an eagle. Just the sort of political theatre that came easily to Robert Cecil. As an added bonus it’s a useful way of testing Monteagle too – have the letter delivered, and if it’s not back in your hand by nightfall you know the man is no friend of the King’s. And yet… And yet there are countless other possibilities. Was it Catesby’s cousin Anne Vaux? Or consipirator Thomas Percy (as Monteagle suggested)? Or Monteagle’s sister, Mary? And so many other questions, too…
   Among those who enjoy these things, the argument will continue to rage. In another four centuries we’ll still be questioning what it is we’re dealing with – a tip-off to blow the plotters’ cover, a planted excuse to officially discover an open secret, an attempt to save a friend, a test of loyalty? We’re sure that the letter exists, we know what it says, when it was delivered and to whom. And all the rest? Well, the rest is mystery. Historians have the luxury of doubt, of argument and counterargument, which is what makes it such fun after all.

Glimpses of Britain. Reader Автор-составитель А. Г. Минченков