Bad King Research Articles

ANDREW HADFIELD. Shakespeare and Republicanism.

Anyone with a fresh, persuasive interpretation of ‘To be or not to be’ has made a major contribution. For Andrew Hadfield the speech raises a political question: should subjects resist a bad king like Claudius (‘take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them’), or should they accept their lot, perhaps rationalising it as divine punishment? The speech is not about suicide in the metaphysical sense that moderns reared on Beckett or Camus might suppose it to be. The ‘end’ Hamlet speaks of is not so much his as Claudius's, and political assassinations are often suicide missions. Hamlet's great speech is about the rights and wrongs of tyrannicide, a problem with which many intellectuals and activists, Catholic and Protestant, wrestled during the confessional conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Love, Sodomy, and Scandal: Controlling the Sexual Reputation of Henry III

In 1589 III, king of France, was addressed by an outraged subject as Henry of Valois, buggerer, son ofa whore, tyrant.1 The audacity of calling a king by his family name and then attacking him in sexu? ally pejorative terms indicates not just the intensity ofthe anger directed at but the inclusion in popular fiiry of markers of sexual deviance. Indeed, the legacy of III, who reigned from 1574 to 1589, has been fraught with sexual innuendo. Assumptions of deviance, formulated in his lifetime, have been used ever since to explain the problems of his reign, which ended with his assassination in the midst of a bloody civil war. Among the recent iterations of that negative image is Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth^ which represents Henry, then duke of Anjou, as a silly, cross-dressing fop, more interested in the men ofhis entourage than in courting the queen of England. In this instance, as in others, the film is inaccurate: it conflates Henry, who never visited England, with his younger brother, Francis, duke of Alencon, who did court Elizabeth in person but was not renowned for flamboyant behavior. Kapur's film presents sexual deviance not merely as fact but as explanatory fact: he was a bad king because he was deviant. sexuality is depicted similarly in Patrice Chereau's 1994 film La Reine Margot, based upon Alexandre Dumas pere's 1845 novel ofthe same name. The film presents as having both an incestuous desire for his sister, Marguerite, and a preference for male com? pany. French history textbooks also include III's alleged sexual misdeeds in discussions ofhis reign. James B. Collins describes him as cross-dressing and asserts that Henry's contemporaries believed him to

King John: New Interpretations (review)

146 Reviews Church, S. D., ed., King John: New Interpretations, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1999; cloth; pp. xxvi, 361; 34 tables; 9 figures, 2 maps; R R P £45, US$75; ISBN 085115736X. This important collection of 15 essays on the hapless King John leaves the the abiding impression that John, for all his faults as politician, monarch, economist diplomat and husband, was a man embattled - under siege from all comers ofthe western European world including his own. This is no revelation, as S. D. Church's introduction makes clear. Nor is it the ultimate judgment of this collection, which attributes major personality and character defects to John, including the treachery long ago asserted by Bishop Stubbs. The collection claims to represent new interpretations, then, not on the basis ofthe question asked (was John a good or bad king?) but rather on the basis ofwhat a critical reading ofa variety ofsources might tell the m o d e m reader about this most complex of early thirteenth-century rulers. The collection begins and ends with essays on contemporary representations ofthe king. John Gillinghatn's exploration of'historians without hindsight', that is, those historians who wrote prior to the loss ofNormandy in 1204, demonstrates that even early on in John's reign, he was subject to criticism and distrust. Jim Bradbury's concluding piece compares John with his nemesis, Phillip Augustus,findingthat Phillip Augustus fared much better in contemporary opinion. The highlight of the collection is four essays on the English economy in the early thirteenth century. Here w e find just h o w important finance and economic policies were in contributing to political outcomes such as the loss of Normandy. In comparison to Richard I, V. D. Moss tells us that John's fiscal performance 'appears truly awful' (p. 116). John's incessant financial demands to fund his military campaigns and his policy of hoarding led to a reduction in money supply and higher prices throughout England. This period ofhigh inflation from 1199-1204, as J. L. Bolton points out, was followed by price stability, but at a higher level. This can be illustrated by Paul Latimer's study of wheat and oxen prices for the period. Overall, a recession lasting from 1204-14 was the result of poor economic management and increased military expenditure. An interesting comparison is teased out by Nick Barrat, who looks at the concomitant fiscal performance ofPhillip Augustus. Again, John does not acquit himselfwell. Three essays resist the notion of a 'Celtic fringe' to elucidate successfully the different political frameworks of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and John's encounters with each. As a separate kingdom, Scotland was already a 'distant political culture', according to A. A. M . Duncan, w h o asserts the consolidation of Reviews 147 Scottish autonomy in the early thirteenth century as a result ofJohn's minimal role in Scottish affairs. In Ireland, however, things were different. Sean Duffy describes the 'dubious legacy' (p. 245) lefttoHenry III by King John, whose military lordship ofIreland saw this 'unruly frontier society' (p. 239) demand more and more ofthe monarch's attention. In Wales, which was neither kingdom or lordship, conspiracy and split allegiances were the order ofthe day. For Ifor Rowlands, John's failure can be discerned in the stark contrast between the fairly strong position of the monarch in Wales in 1211, and the collapse of royal power there by 1216. Wales had been implicated so deeply in the affairs of England, that when John's power began to collapse in England, it could not help but fall apart in Wales, too. 'There was a stench of failure everywhere', concludes Rowlands glumly (p. 286). The situation in France is explored in detail, and, not surprisingly, we find that John was in some ways peripheral to the events that unfolded so disastrously around him. Jane Martindale reveals the fundamental political role still played by Eleanor ofAquitaine after 1199, while Nicholas Vincent shows that Isabella ofAngouleme also played a central role in Capetian advances and John's losses. Daniel Power argues that the disunited Norman aristocracy were variously happy to accommodate Phillip Augustus, indifferent to John, actively hostile to John or simply unable to...

Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory

Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory what we make of it. When I went back to two documents: and Sellers & Yeatman's J066 Eugen Weber Memory was asked is what we make it. Memory Memory, is I to talk about Sites of Pierre Nora's great monument first to the subject, and All includes That. Les Lieux de Memoire, in case you don't know, consists of seven volumes, the of which came out in 1984, the last in 1992, and it 4710 pages and 155 essays by 106 contributors. J 066 came out in 1931 and its subtitle reads A Memorable History of England, comprising all the points you can remember, including 103 good things, 5 bad kings, and 2 genuine dates. The dates are 55 BC when the Romans invaded England and 1066 when the Normans landed at Hastings. The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from that time on England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation. The book is 1 16 pages long, including five test papers with questions like: Which came first, AD or BC? (be careful) What is a Plantagenet? Do you agree? Gunpowder Plot. Deplore the failure of the And so on. We have here two conflicting approaches to memorable memory, and I But if serious subjects deserve to be treated seriously (sometimes). Sellers & Yeatman also make a serious point that has often been made more pretentiously and at greater length: that memory is what you remember, but also misremember, invent, are told or taught. It shall not try to reconcile them. becomes part of our mind's furniture and that of the society or social groups in which we move, a symbolic capital of commonalities, commonplaces, cliches that acquire significance and force by being held in common, that mold a particular idiom of the mind, that act as passwords and as bonds (remember that this is what religio means). There are, of course, memories madeleines, if you like. But that function as personal and private affairs these only become significant when they go public: when they are shared with a friend, a lover, an audience, after which they also operate as bonds and identifiers to initiates until, precisely as in the case of Proust's madeleine, they enter the baggage, and the flow, of public memory. To a historian, events, doings, lives matter as part of a public story. Most of the time, the personal and private counts when it ceases to be per- sonal and private and becomes part of the public sphere. And all, or almost

James I and the Historians: Not a Bad King After All?

In 1974 Professor Marc Schwarz published a review article on the historical reputation of King James I, in which he pointed out that that reputation had considerably improved in recent years. The slobbering pedant, lazy, conceited, cowardly, alcoholic, spendthrift, fancying pretty young men and giving them far too much influence in court and council: the lineaments of this caricature, first drawn by that foul-mouthed discharged officeholder Anthony Weldon, have not altogether vanished. But as historians have examined various aspects of the king's reign, reread the sources un-blinkered by the biases and assumptions characteristic of the Victorians and perpetuated in this century, from their widely varying points of view, by the disciples of Gloriana and of Karl Marx, a different view of King James has begun to emerge. The new picture of the king is that of a seeker of the via media at home and of peace abroad, a man with acute political antennae whose style was anything but confrontational and whose success in achieving that via media, and in keeping the peace, was comparable to that of his much-admired predecessor. Typical of the converts is Professor J.P. Kenyon, who in 1958 adopted the traditional view of James in his collection of essays on the Stuart kings, but who twenty years later described him as “a strange medley of opposites: he was a fool in some sense, but in others a great man.”Professor Schwarz's analysis of the recent literature dealt in some detail with four areas: the king's policy toward the church and especially toward the Puritans; foreign affairs; James's views of the constitution and his relations with parliament; and his rule in Scotland. On some other matters there had been no attempt to defend the king: his disastrous economic and fiscal policies, including the inflation of honors, and his predilection for favorites like Somerset and Buckingham. In a number of these areas the work of the past ten years has done nothing to alter Schwarz's verdicts. No significant new work on foreign policy has appeared save in connection with other matters, to be discussed below; the era awaits its R.B. Wernham. There has been no attempt to defend James's irresponsible attitude toward money, which was by far his worst failing as a king, and there is reason to suppose that his financial reputation is irredeemable. It might be pointed out, however, that the Jacobean age was a postwar era, a period of relaxation after the long period of domestic and foreign tension which began when Henry VIII decided to put aside his wife.

The British Food Journal Volume 59 Issue 7 1957

According to our favourite but unreliable history book, James I slobbered at the mouth and was “a bad king”, but it is somewhat doubtful whether this is a fair summing up of this frequently foolish monarch. He had his points, and he certainly had opinions he did not hesitate to voice. On the smoking of tobacco he wrote: “It is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs …” and much more besides, to the same effect, but he was quite unsuccessful in checking the growth of a habit (pleasant or pernicious, as you prefer) that during the last half‐century has reached dimensions far exceeding anything dreamed of by the wisest fool in Christendom. Right up to the present time, however, there has persisted in various places and among various classes of people, the feeling that there was something inherently near‐evil in tobacco smoking and there have long been organized movements to discourage the habit, although the grounds for these activities have often been rather vague. Smoking was said to stunt a boy's growth, it was a waste of money, and anyway it was something done purely for pleasure and must therefore by Victorian standards be “wrong”, or at least not quite proper.

San Francisco's Blind Boss

BY SOME UNCANNY METAMORPHOSIS of opinion, bad kings sometimes become good kings when they die. On April 22, 1922, a former political king of San Francisco passed away. If this man had died in 1890, instead of 1922, the newspapers would quickly have suggested that his death by acute indigestion was in some way connected to the manner by which he had gained his wealth. But in 1922, the same newspapers that had once plumbed the depths of language to find words of abuse to describe a man they found depraved and the scourge of San Francisco, now set in motion the process of myth making. The former political king passed into San Franciscans' memories not as an ex-tyrant, but as an oldtimer, a colorful character. This man was Christopher Augustine Buckley, whose only virtues, his political enemies declared, consisted in being named after a Christian holiday (sic) and a Christian theologian. From his saloon on Bush Street, Christopher Buckley ruled San Francisco with intelligence, efficiency, and calculated corruption. Any history of San Francisco, or indeed, of the Democratic party during the last fourth of the nineteenth century, without the story of the Blind Boss, would be as incomplete as Hamlet without the Melancholy Dane. Time and place conspired to give Buckley an advantage in becoming a successful city boss in San Francisco. He was born in 1845 in Ireland. His family immigrated to New York, where he spent his years of youth and adolescence. In 1862, at the age of seventeen, he came to San Francisco and took a job as a horse-car conductor on the old North Beach and South Park line.

The Case Against the King: The Virginia Gazettes Indict George III

IN their Declaration of Independence the thirteen American colonies presented a scorching denunciation of their king, George III, on whom they blamed the sorry state of affairs which had deprived them of their traditional British liberties. He had caused the Revolution; he was a bad king, the villain of the story. The Americans listed explicitly the crimes of which he was guilty; in fact, almost two-thirds of the Declaration hammers at the king's specific sins. How long had this hatred existed? Was its documentation nothing but an emotional tirade well calculated to swing over the fence-sitters who had hitherto not been able to deny their king? Or, was it the climax of a gradual development which by honest logic had arrived at the conclusion that George III was personally intent on enslaving the British colonies? The colonists had acclaimed George III at his coronation-they had every reason to believe that he would be a good king. He had been educated in England; his tutor, Lord Bute, had instructed him in the duties of his office. George III presumably understood the position which the British king occupied in government; it was known that he took the job seriously. The very blundering colonial policy that developed after his accession to the throne was not foreseen by the colonists. But, expected or not, they could not overlook the meaning behind the passage of the Stamp Act and then, following its repeal, of the Townshend Acts whose provisions for taxation emphasized the evils inherent in the Declaratory Act. The neglect of their petitions, the dissolution of assemblies, and the quartering of troops were all overt indications of tyranny. Virginians, and surely they are typical of the other colonists, did not fail so to interpret them. Their newspapers, the Virginia Gazettes, 1 conclusively prove their awareness of George III's ultimate responsibility for colonial policy after 1767. For them, the Declaration of Independence with its vigorous

Tύpannoς, Kέpδoς, and the Modest Measure in three Plays of Euripides

In a paper recently published in this Review, I tried to show that part of the formal beauty of the Hercules Furens is due to a subtle treatment of the familiar doctrine that the tyrant's wealth and power are of trifling value compared with Sophrosune, the gain that is really gain. Perhaps some further notes on the dramatic use made by Euripides of these familiar ideas may be of interest. One object with which I started was to observe the use of the word τúραννος in Greek drama. Though the poets frequently enough use it merely as a convenient equivalent for βασιλεúσetc., popular feeling made it easy to suggest the meaning ‘tyrant,’ ‘bad King,’ or ‘Usurper’; and the poets use the ambiguity with great subtlety and in a manner which enables them to obtain fine effects of irony and scorn. What is more important is the fact that the notion of a tyrant with which we are acquainted in later Greek literature was already common-place in the fifth century, and that many dramatic effects depend on the recognition by the audience of the commonplace as such. Indeed, it is often the adaptation by the poet of the familiar ideas that lends formal beauty to compositions which, if we think simply of the plot, appear at first sight jerky or ‘epeisodic.’