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Personal Note Archive November 2007

 

3rd November 2007

The Gunpowder Treason of November 1605 was an attempt by a group of Catholic plotters to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The plot was defeated when Guy Fawkes was discovered in the Parliament cellars with a huge quantity of explosives. Those of the group who survived arrest were sent to the Tower and executed. This event has reverberated through history as Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night, which takes place every year on the 5th of November. Fireworks are let off and bonfires are lit. On some bonfires effigies of Guy are still thrown. It is interesting to ask why the Gunpowder Plot has had such a resonance down the years. My own personal theory is that Guy Fawkes Night fulfills the desire to welcome the new without saying goodbye to the old... read more

 

10th November 2007

People have gone to war through history for many reasons. Religion has been involved, national prestige, even the love of a beautiful woman called Helen. But as ever in history, writers reveal as much about their own time as they do about the times they write about. We've recently completed a new section on the Crimean War. In the twentieth century this war was written about as a struggle between nations, because that's the sort of war people tended to go in for then. In the twenty first century we seem to be involved in a different kind of war, and the Crimean War has been now interpreted by some historians as resulting from religious tensions in the Middle East. I visited Pembroke Lodge recently in Richmond Park where the decision was made to proceed with the Crimean War. There's a wonderful view from Pembroke Lodge. I picked out the places important to me. Ham House, Twickenham Stadium, aircraft going into land at Heathrow. As for all the other countless details in the view, I just skimmed over them. Such is also the way with history it seems.

 

 

 

15th November 2007

I went to Richmond Park recently to take some photos of the autumn colours. I had arrived at Victoria station to find the Underground line closed. So I look a train to a vast wilderness of railway lines called Clapham Junction. There I found the line to Richmond closed. So I caught a bus, which made slow and painful progress through heavy traffic on the South Circular. Whilst stationary at a set of traffic lights, an ambulance squeezed by the bus, followed by two opportunistic motorcycle couriers. Then we came to a halt for twenty minutes, caught in the queue which built up behind the road accident the ambulance was attending. Finally after two hours in the traffic of south London I walked out into the open space of Richmond Park.

In the park there is a memorial to the eighteenth century nature poet James Thompson, who spent the last twelve years of his life in Richmond. The memorial carries a poem by John Heneage Jesse dedicated to Thompson, which begins:

Ye who from London's smoke and turmoil fly

To seek a purer and a brighter sky...

It was wonderful to leave behind the smoke and turmoil. Parks came into their own in the nineteenth century, when most people lived in the new industrial towns, and yearned for a nostalgic vision of the countryside they had lost. Richmond Park, a deer park created by Charles the First, is just the kind of idealised natural landscape that urban people valued. Following my long trip through the streets of south London, I can confirm that Richmond Park, and other places like it, continue to serve the same purpose.

20th November 2007

Law and order is always a big story. The current debate concerns the length of time for which people can be held without charge or trial. And of course the debate won't end, and crime won't disappear, not least because we keep changing our minds about what constitutes a crime. At the end of the nineteenth century a judge at the Old Bailey was able to declare "no worse crime than this existed" referring to Oscar Wilde's homosexuality. Today the former worst crime in existence isn't a crime at all. Oscar Wilde wrote in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism: "As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes the wicked have committed, but by the punishment the good have inflicted." After reading lots of history I know what Wilde means. You can hardly read a page of history without someone's head being chopped off, or worse. And those heads usually roll for the crime of treason. Today in democratic countries opposition to a government is accepted. It is even built into the daily business of government, with official opposition parties having the job of holding the party in power to account. Until fairly recently the creation of an opposition party was the worst of crimes. Particularly gruesome punishments were reserved for perpetrators of the idea that a monarch should be replaced. The idea that a leader could be challenged and replaced as a matter of course was absolutely unthinkable. Today that worst of crimes is part of a system we think of as a huge advance in the way we order our lives.