Best of FiveBooks on History
Mary Queen of Scots, Wikimedia
Our end-of-year run collecting gems from the archives continues with history books – from when Anabaptists got violent to the story of Cromwell’s decapitated head
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Mary Beard recommends:
The Annals
By Tacitus
This is the best work of history ever written – and that’s a big claim.
It’s been described as tragic historiography and full of dramatic events.
Oh yes, just take the murder of Nero’s mother. There is no better story than Nero’s attempts to murder his mother, with whom he is finally very pissed off! Nero the mad boy emperor decides that he is going to get rid of mum by a rather clever collapsible boat. He has her to dinner, waves her fondly farewell. The boat collapses. Sadly for Nero, his mum, Agrippina, is a very strong swimmer and she makes it to the land and back home. And she’s clever, she knows boats don’t just collapse like that – it was a completely calm night, so she works out Nero was out to get her. She knows things are going to end badly.
Nero can’t let her off, so he sends round the tough guys to murder her. Agrippina looks them in the eye and says, “Strike me in the belly with your sword.” There are two things going on. One is: My son who came out of my belly is trying to murder me. But the other thing we know is that they were widely reputed to have had an incestuous relationship in the earlier days. So it’s not just Nero the son murdering his mother, but Nero the lover murdering his discarded mistress.
It’s better than a Hollywood plot.
Yes, but it’s not just that. What he does is seduce you with an extraordinary tale. But there is also a cynical, hard-hitting analysis of corruption. Reading Tacitus in Latin is like reading James Joyce. It’s language which is really at the margins of comprehensibility, as well as being very exciting. But actually he wants to talk about the corruption of autocracy. It’s about one-man rule going bad.
You teach Classics at Cambridge – in these recession-hit times, when students are struggling to get work, is a degree in Classics still relevant?
Well, it depends what you think education is for. There’s a terrible tendency for the present government and some mums and dads to see university as some kind of professional training. Of course, there are some excellent subjects like that – say, medicine and law. But for me university is all about training the brain. With Classics you are studying so many things – philosophy, archaeology, language – all of which help you in almost any job you want to go for. I know I would say that, but Classics is inherently interesting and absolutely relevant.
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Mike Dash recommends:
The Tailor-King
By Anthony Arthur
This is about the Anabaptist sect and the takeover of Münster in 1534-5. The Anabaptists now have the reputation of being the most pacifist people you could possibly meet. The Amish, a Mennonite group, are the most obvious representatives that most Americans know. They came into existence as a direct reaction against the unbelievable events that they were involved in during the 16th century. At core, Anabaptism was then a millenarian cult. One of their prime beliefs was the imminence of the second coming, which could only be achieved by building a new Jerusalem for Christ to return to. The central purpose of this religion in its early stage was to bring about the various prophecies in the Book of Revelations. So they looked for a town that they could take over and rebuild as a new Jerusalem, and Münster – which is in northern Germany, near the border with the Netherlands – was the one they managed to get hold of.
At first they infiltrated it peacefully, taking over elements of the town council. Eventually they issued a call to all their co-religionists to gather there, expelled everybody else and fortified themselves against the inevitable counter-strike. This was led by the Bishop of Münster, who was rather unhappy about being expelled from his bishopric and assembled a large army of Catholics outside. There was a year-long siege. Inside the town, things started to get really quite weird, very rapidly.
The Tailor-King is about what happened inside the town. The man named in the book, Jan van Leiden, came from a very humble background as a tailor’s apprentice, and ended up as the leader of these several thousand Anabaptists. It was essentially a prototype communist community there. Everything was to be held in common, all their goods and chattels were to be shared. But, of course, as is quite often the case with these types of leaders, they generally benefit themselves quite substantially. For example, one of the things Jan ordained was that there should be polygamy. He ended up with 16 wives, and the whole thing ended up rather horribly, with a massive assault on the walls. Almost all of the inhabitants, including women and children, were cut down and slaughtered, but Jan and two of his chief lieutenants were captured, tried, and torn apart with red-hot pincers.
I think of Anabaptists as referring to a belief in being baptised as an adult. But it sounds like they were rather more radical than that?
Yes. The sword side of Anabaptism – as some people call it – disappeared during the 16th century because of these incredible events that took place, and not just in Münster. There were several other similar incidents in the Netherlands, though not on such a large scale. The Anabaptists were heavily persecuted as a result, and treated as heretics. Even among the other Protestants of the Reformation, they were looked on with a great deal of suspicion, because they were bringing unwelcome attention down on the new religions and making it seem as if they were all fanatics. So they were nearly wiped out, and the only way of surviving was to remove the cancer that was part of their beliefs and switch to a profound form of pacifism. Menno Simons was the man who led them down that route, and that’s why they’re still called Mennonites today.
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Helen Castor recommends:
The Weaker Vessel
By Antonia Fraser
The Weaker Vessel, which is a social history of women in 17th century England, was the first book that, a long time ago, made me think about the experience of being female in history. All the pervasiveness of the social, cultural and historical assumptions about what it means to be male or female come into play in this book. Even though it’s a book about the 17th century and I work in previous centuries, I still find it very thought provoking about the personal experience and the social assumptions that have an effect when you’re confronted by the idea of a woman who rules. Antonia Fraser starts her preface by quoting another historian she’d been talking to, who asked, “Were there any women in 17th-century England?” – and I know exactly what it feels like to be confronted with that kind of question.
Women just weren’t chronicled in the same way as men.
Absolutely. Even [the 12th century English empress] Matilda – who clearly did end up featuring in the chronicles – was for a long time left in the margins of her own story, precisely because of the difficulty for a woman of having political agency. In fact, the striking thing writing about female rule in the medieval and Tudor periods is how striking the parallels are with 20th and 21st century politics.
Are you talking about Margaret Thatcher and Elizabeth I?
Yes, the parallels are extraordinary. People often say, “Well, these problems can be overcome – look at Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher.” But what those two women both did was not say, “Women can rule, women can hold power.” They both said, “Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.”
The Iron Lady of Britain.
Well, exactly. Look at the iconography of them both, and it’s all about being the exception to the rule. There was Margaret Thatcher presiding over an all-male cabinet. Both of them distanced themselves from other women. Elizabeth I said she had “the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king” – and that battle is still with us. Look at the [British] cabinet now. There’s Theresa May, and we know more about her shoes than anything else.
In other parts of the world where women have taken positions of leadership, it’s often been possible because politics is dynastic. If you look at India or Pakistan, it’s much more akin to a monarchical system where dynastic legitimacy can validate a woman. The parallels are very interesting. So there is a lot of continuity – but, within that, for example, there are much more clearly articulated arguments against women’s rule in the 16th century than there are in the 12th.
John Morrill recommends:
Cromwell’s Head
By Jonathan Fitzgibbons
John Fitzgibbons is a very gifted young scholar in Oxford – he is an expert on the short career of Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son, who was head of state for a year after his father’s death. So Fitzgibbons already has enormous expertise in the immediate period after Cromwell’s death. The extraordinary adventures that Cromwell’s head had – hung at Tyburn in 1661, exposed on a spike at the palace of Westminster for 20 years (it eventually fell off), used as a circus trick, kept in private houses and brought out at dinner parties, and, finally, buried at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge – allow Fitzgibbons to tell the story of the hugely conflicted history of Cromwell over the last 300 years. Why he matters, why he’s been so debated, how he is a key figure in many of the great arguments about political and religious liberty. So it’s really a history of English radicalism since the time of Cromwell, through the adventures of his head.
Why does it matter where Cromwell’s head is?
I don’t think it does, actually. I think I said once on the radio that it doesn’t matter where his head is, because his soul goes marching on. It matters only insofar as the story of the head is in some rather curious way the history of England. This might be a macabre detail to add, but when the head was buried, it was at a time when the Sidney Sussex College Chapel floor was being relaid, so the five people who witnessed the burial are taking the secret of exactly where it is to their graves (in fact, only one of them is still alive today). I think after this long, long period – during which the head had been handed around, sold, displayed and so on – the idea was that he should just be allowed to rest.
Ironically enough, the head was buried just before DNA testing came in, and we could actually have done some very interesting DNA tests on the head. First of all, to establish for absolutely certain that it is him, because there is a claim by another family that they’ve got the body buried in Yorkshire. I think it’s 90% certain that the head in Sidney is Cromwell’s, but there is another story which goes like this: After his death, the body is dug up at Westminster Abbey to be taken to be hanged at Tyburn, but on the way, it’s kept in the back room of a pub in High Holborn for two nights. Now why on earth, if you’re going from Westminster to Marble Arch, would you go via High Holborn? One of the theories is that it was so the body could be swapped – so the family of Cromwell’s son-in-law could actually buy the body from the soldiers, in order to give it a decent burial in Yorkshire.
If we go by this narrative, it was some other man’s corpse that was hung. So there is just a possibility that this thing isn’t Cromwell. On the other hand, the head in Sidney Sussex was examined by doctors before it was buried. They confirmed that it had been embalmed at death, and had been exposed to the air for a long time – not many heads in the early modern period would have had that experience. There’s obviously lots of macabre interest in this. There’s mystery involved. But there’s also the history of the head as it passes from being a freak-show, to dinner table treat, to being buried in a Cambridge college. It’s a fascinating story, and it’s a story linked to major issues in the history of Britain.
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Timothy Garton Ash recommends:
The Last Days of Hitler
By H. R Trevor Roper
Despite the appalling debacle of the Hitler diaries, I think that Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler is the most superb work of contemporary history. He has a series of absolutely brilliant imaginative insights into what it was like to be in the court of Adolf Hitler. For example, the kind of institutional Darwinism between the different organisations and movements. Armies of boring German scholars have spent decades in the archives producing 2000-page tomes to show that Trevor-Roper was right in this insight he got in a few months. He also had the dream situation for a contemporary historian, which is to have all your key witnesses locked up in prison, available for interrogation at any moment.
And did he talk to them all?
Of course he did. He was sent by the British military occupation authorities to do this study, which was to try to establish that Hitler had died, and how he’d died, because we didn’t have the corpse. Actually, the Russians had removed some of the charred remains. But he had all these Nazis who were locked up. We would all give our bottom dollar to have all our key witnesses locked up!
Do we get an insight into their personalities? Do we get a feeling of what these people were like?
Absolutely brilliantly. His valedictory lecture at Oxford, I think it was called “History and Imagination”, was about how important imagination is to the historian. When you’ve got the facts straight and read all the documents, then you have to imagine yourself, almost like a novelist, into that world, and that’s what he does.
Can you give me an example of some little insight into a big Nazi? Did he like any of them?
I think the figure who intrigued him and on whom he is very interesting was Albert Speer. Speer was much the most cultured, educated and apparently civilised person close to Hitler. I think Hugh was fascinated by this question – which also fascinates me – of how the genuinely cultured, educated person comes to be a servant of great evil.
Did he draw any conclusions?
Well, I think that’s what I like about the book. It shows rather than tells. He doesn’t give you a sermon at the end, he just shows you how people were drawn in.
I’m dying to read this now.
You should. You’ll give yourself a treat.
Published on Dec 29, 2011
http://thebrowser.com/interviews/history-best-fivebooks?print
