Subaltern Medievalisms : Medievalism 'from below' in Nineteenth-Century Britain 9781843845782, 9781787448575, 9781800101432, 1843845784

Citation preview

Volume XIX

Subaltern Medievalisms

ISSN 2043-8230 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Art Department Towson University 3103 Center for the Arts 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252-0001 USA [email protected]

Professor Chris Jones School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL UK [email protected]

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK

Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book

Subaltern Medievalisms Medievalism ‘from below’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Edited by

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2021 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  9781843845782 (hardcover) ISBN  9781787448575 (ePDF) ISBN  9781800101432 (ePUB) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Detail from Ford Madox Brown’s painting The Spirit of Justice (1844–45), submitted by Brown to the Fine Arts Commission’s competition for art to decorate the new Houses of Parliament. The painting was unsuccessful. Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images).

To the memory of Peggy Sanders (1940–88), and to Patricia Erasmus

Contents List of Illustrations ix List of Contributors xi Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious? David Matthews and Mike Sanders

1

Part I  Radicalism and Medievalism 1

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in William Cobbett’s English and Irish Medievalism Matthew Roberts

19

2

Resisting Medievalism: The ‘Mediaeval Mania’ and the Working-Class Press David Matthews

39

3

How Radical was Rienzi? The Nineteenth-Century Representation of the Roman Revolutionary Republican in the British Cultural Imagination Rosemary Mitchell

55

Part II  Chartism and Medievalism 4

Chartism and Medievalism: Retrospective Radicalism in the English Nineteenth Century Stephen Knight

5

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms Mike Sanders

6

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’: Chartist Newspaper Portrayals of the Rebel Leader Stephen Basdeo

77 91

110

viii

Contents

Part III  Socialism, Feminism and Medievalism 7

The Cause of Liberty: Ford Madox Brown, Augustus Welby Pugin and Victorian Medievalism Colin Trodd

127

8

Serfs, Saints and Comrades: Working-Class Medievalism and the Narratives of Victorian Socialism Ingrid Hanson

143

9

Morbid Solidarity: Remains, Afterlives and the Commune of Saints Stuart McWilliams

160

10 Finding the Present in the Past: Suffrage Medievalism in the Pages of Votes for Women 175 Carolyn P. Collette Bibliography 193 Index 205

Illustrations Plates Plate 1

Ford Madox Brown, The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in 1363 (1882). Manchester City Council/Bridgeman Images.

140

Figures Fig. 1.1. Image taken from an anonymous pamphlet entitled, ‘People of England!’, collected by James Collins, Drumcondra, Ireland, and purchased by the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1918. The pamphlet is included in the collection, Catholic Emancipation Tracts, 1826–1829, and is available through Google Books.

29

Fig. 2.1. Illustration to ‘Alfred the Great’ in British Workman in 1857.

48

Fig. 3.1. Rienzi in the Forum, 1844. Engraving from Alfred Elmore’s painting, London Illustrated News, 8 June 1844. 64 Fig. 3.2. William Holman Hunt, Rienzi vowing to obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions, 1849. © The National Gallery, London. On loan from The Ramsbury Manor Foundation.

65

Fig. 7.1. Ford Madox Brown, The Spirit of Justice (1844–45). Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

131

Fig. 10.1. Votes for Women, 18 November 1910. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

189

Fig. 10.2. Votes for Women, 5 May 1911. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

190

Fig. 10.3. Votes for Women, 30 June 1911. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

191

Fig. 10.4. Votes for Women, 1 September 1911. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

192

Contributors Stephen Basdeo is a lecturer at Richmond University, London. He is interested in Victorian cultural and social history and specialises in the post-medieval literary afterlives of Robin Hood and Wat Tyler. Carolyn Collette is emeritus professor of English and Medieval Studies at Mt Holyoke College. She has published widely on Chaucer and is currently working on women’s voices in medieval and early modern literature. Her edition of the writings of an early suffragette – In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette – appeared in the centenary of Davison’s death in 2013, with University of Michigan Press. Ingrid Hanson is honorary research fellow in English Literature at the University of Manchester. She is author of William Morris and the Uses of Violence (Anthem Press, 2013) as well as articles and book chapters on violence, peace protest and masculinities in Victorian literature and radical journalism. Stephen Knight is Honorary Research Professor in Literature at the University of Melbourne. He has published books and essays on medieval literature and later popular literature, notably the Robin Hood myth, crime fiction and nineteenth-century fiction. His most recent book is G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction: The Man Who Outsold Dickens (Routledge, 2019). David Matthews is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies in the English Department at the University of Manchester. His last book is Medievalism: A Critical History (D. S. Brewer, 2015). Matthew Roberts is Reader in Modern British History at Sheffield Hallam University. He works on popular politics, protest and the history of emotions. His latest book, Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero, was published by Routledge in 2020. Mike Sanders is senior lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Writing in the English Department at the University of Manchester. He is the author of many articles on Chartism and literature; his book, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2009.

xii

Contributors

Colin Trodd teaches Art History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World (Liverpool University Press, 2012) and Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester Murals (Manchester University Press, 2021). Stuart McWilliams is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. His work is particularly concerned with counter-modern narratives and the poetics of history.

Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge a British Academy Small Research Grant in 2011, which sparked off the project which resulted in this book. We are also deeply indebted to the research assistant we were able to employ as a result of the grant, Hannah Priest. Hannah’s researches convinced us that there was more to be done than the pair of journal articles we had originally envisaged and set us on the course of developing the present book. In particular, we acknowledge the way in which Hannah’s research is visible in the primary materials drawn on in the introduction and the chapter by David Matthews. We are very happy that the book found a home in Boydell’s Medievalism series, and would like to thank the general editors Chris Jones and Karl Fugelso, their external readers for many helpful suggestions, and all at Boydell for taking the book on and shepherding it through to completion. Finally, to all our contributors: thank you.

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious? David Matthews and Mike Sanders

I

n his 2015 novel Now is the Time, Melvin Bragg tells the story of the great rising of 1381 from the perspective of both the nobles and the rebels. The historical rebels were motivated by the imposition of a deeply unpopular poll tax by the government of Richard II. Marching on London from Kent and Essex, they sacked the Savoy palace of the widely disliked John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and occupied the city. Confronting the rebels himself, Richard promised concessions. In a further meeting, the rebel leader Wat Tyler was killed; the rebels then dispersed and Richard went back on most of his promises, though there were some improvements in the lot of the peasants and the poll tax itself was dropped (not to be revived again, equally unsuccessfully, until the late 1980s). In Bragg’s retelling the story ends, as it must, on a note of pessimism and tragedy. His sympathies are quite clearly with the rebels, and in a note he says that he wrote the novel out of a sense that the 1381 rebellion was one of the least known of English history. This uprising used to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt. Historians have for some time resisted this – the social origins of the rebels were more diverse than the word ‘peasant’ suggests.1 But the idea, with its accompanying jokes about ‘revolting peasants’, has proved difficult to dislodge (this is why we have persisted with the term ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ throughout this volume, as this was how it was understood in the nineteenth century). Bragg is probably right to say that the event is less well known in the public consciousness than its importance would suggest it ought to be. His own novelistic version of Tyler is a rare phenomenon, in recent literature

1 For the classic account, see Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Methuen, 1973); for a more recent succinct account, see G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 225–34.

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

2

at least. Among legendary medieval English heroes, the name of Wat Tyler, unlike Robin Hood or King Arthur, is not one that provokes instant recognition. Not long after the publication of Now is the Time, as the United Kingdom approached its deadline for leaving the European Union in March 2019, a leading figure in the right-wing anti-EU UK Independence Party, Martin Costello, drew on the rhetoric of the revolt, describing himself as a ‘modern-day Wat Tyler’.3 The reference was presumably meant to demonstrate Costello’s heroic opposition to parliamentary elites; such ostensive displays of historical knowledge have been common on the part of proponents of leaving the EU. It is perhaps the case that a contemporary mention of Tyler – unlike, say, the much better known Robin Hood – is precisely not meant to spark immediate awareness; instead, it is sufficiently obscure that the reference is intended to be impressively erudite. (In this case, the speaker, while identifying himself with Tyler, had presumably forgotten that the rebel’s ultimate fate was to be stabbed to death by the mayor of London.) Though Wat Tyler is relatively obscure today he was once a commonly invoked figure in political discourse. In youth, Robert Southey wrote a play about Tyler-ashero which was later, in 1817, hijacked and published in order to embarrass the now conservative author. The illicit play gave Tyler new popularity but even before then, the rebel’s name was frequently invoked in the working-class press. After the revival of Southey’s play, Tyler became at least as well known as Robin Hood. In fact, for several decades in the nineteenth century, in the print media at least, Tyler was more often invoked than the outlaw, with approving reference to his rebellious anti-taxation activities. Three chapters in this volume – those by Stephen Basdeo, Stephen Knight and David Matthews – show the extent to which the name of Wat Tyler penetrated working-class exploitation of medievalist discourses in the struggle for justice in the first half of the nineteenth century. As becomes clear in these essays, the name of Wat Tyler was everywhere in the working-class press in the period. It is unsurprising that in the 1840s, the Chartists in their turn enthusiastically took him up as a figure for working-class and artisan rebellion against injustices of all kinds. (While it is hard to say what levels of archness or irony might have been involved in giving the name ‘Wat Tyler’ to a racehorse owned by two aristocrats in 1827, this is at least testimony to how well known the rebel had become even before the zenith of Chartism.) As even these brief examples from the afterlife of Wat Tyler show, medieval figures, whether legendary or historical, can be invoked from opposing ends of the political spectrum. This ought to be obvious; medievalism is, as has often been observed, an inherently malleable discourse. But recognising that malleability, and actually tracing its effects in history, are two different things. The original impulse behind the project of Subaltern Medievalisms was a straightforward one: in the context of burgeoning studies of nineteenth-century medievalism over the past thirty 2

Perhaps it is simply the case that the novel of rebellion is not a major feature of English fiction, as it is for instance in French writing. The novelist C. J. Sansom, writing about the rebellion of 1549 (led by Robert Kett and sparked initially by resistance to land enclosure), claims that that ‘colossal event . . . has been much underplayed’ (C. J. Sansom, Tombland [London: Mantle, 2018], p. 806). 3 The Guardian, 4 March 2019. 2

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

3

years, the overwhelming focus has been on elite forms of medievalism, exemplified by the medievalism of Walter Scott, the Eglinton Tournament, of endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights, with occasional forays into its ‘liberal’ (but still elite) variant – in effect, the medievalism of the ‘ten per cent’. The Eglinton Tournament, as Clare A. Simmons suggests, ‘contributed to the common association of medievalism with elitism and quixoticism’.4 Nineteenth-century medievalism is still, in both popular and scholarly views, closely linked to the imagery of chivalry, of knighthood, of neo-gothic fancy. Without doubt, many Victorians did indeed regard medievalism as an essentially conservative reaction, an appeal to feudalism, to Merrie England, to knights in shining armour, in the face of an uncertain and changeful industrialising present. The scholarship of recent decades has implicitly accepted a broadly similar view of Victorian medievalism and has focused much of its analysis on such prominent instances of medievalism. Perhaps this is not surprising. Yet the pioneers of the study of medievalism themselves warned that it could not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appeal to the green, ordered and generally merrier England of the late Middle Ages. Charles Dellheim noted in 1992 that ‘it is assumed too readily that medievalism was simply a conservative revolt against modernity’. It was rarely so simple, as he contended: even as ‘conservative medievalists were enraptured by a “dream of order,” their liberal counterparts were inspired by a vision of liberty’.5 This volume argues that the ongoing exploration of liberal medievalism needs to be accompanied by a consideration of a cultural phenomenon which we call ‘subaltern medievalism’. Put simply, this collection begins the process of excavating and analysing the subaltern medievalist counter-blast to its conservative and liberal variants. Our use of the term ‘subaltern’ is derived from the work of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, where it functions as a capacious, necessarily heterogeneous category. In ‘Notes on Italian History’, Gramsci differentiates between ‘ruling’ and ‘subaltern’ classes. On one level, subaltern classes are simply not the ruling ones. However, subaltern groups (Gramsci uses the terms ‘class’ and ‘group’ interchangeably) operate in a matrix of overlapping, dialectical relationships with the dominant/ ruling groups, the state and other subaltern groups.6 In Gramsci’s historical schema, subaltern groups seek to become dominant and, in order to do so, must first exercise ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. Gramsci views this as a developmental process in which subaltern classes are, initially, intellectually and morally subordinated to the dominant groups, but develop increasing levels of intellectual and moral autonomy as they seek to influence those same Clare A. Simmons, ed., Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p. 7. 5 Charles Dellheim, ‘Interpreting Victorian Medievalism’, in Florence S. Boos, ed., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 39–58 (41, 49). 6 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’, in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed. and trans., Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), pp. 52–120 (52). 4

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

4

dominant groups. As this sketch suggests, ‘intellectuals’ have a key role to play in this process; Gramsci argues both that ‘every social group has its own stratum of intellectuals’, and that the exercise of moral and intellectual leadership requires the ‘subjugating [of] the intellectuals of the other social groups’.7 Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern provides a sufficiently flexible framework for analysing the various medievalisms discussed in this volume, all of which define themselves against existing elite structures and/or ideas (albeit with varying degrees of antagonism and militancy). Gramsci’s extended definition of ‘intellectuals’ similarly allows for the inclusion of ephemeral items, such as newspapers, alongside more prestigious and enduring cultural forms such as poetry and painting. His framework also allows us to grasp two key, complementary dynamics which structure this discursive field. Subaltern medievalism is simultaneously a process of self-definition, an attempt to build a self-conscious identity on the part of the subaltern group, and an active engagement with elite forms of medievalism. Crucially, the Gramscian subaltern, unlike its Spivakian counterpart, can speak.8 A final attraction of Gramsci’s understanding of the subaltern is his recognition of the difficulties of retrieving subaltern records from the archive. Gramsci’s observation that ‘[t]he history of subaltern groups is necessary fragmented and episodic [and] this kind of history . . . requires an immense quantity of material which is often hard to collect’ will doubtless elicit many sighs of recognition (not least from our indefatigable researcher, Hannah Priest).9 The difficulty of retrieval and the uncertainties surrounding the representative nature of that which survives, enjoin researchers to caution. This is another reason for preferring the looser term ‘subaltern’ to more precise, yet limited, definitions organised around political affiliations. When we know more, it may be appropriate to attempt a more complex taxonomy – for the present moment whilst we claim a degree of family resemblance between our subjects, we leave the establishing of precise degrees of kinship to the activity of future scholars who, we hope, will build on these beginnings. For Gramsci the key subaltern groups were the proletariat and the peasantry, and in our study too the ‘working classes’ are given a central position. (Our notion of the subaltern is nevertheless more capacious than this: the suffragettes, discussed by Carolyn Collette in this volume, were not necessarily proletarian.) We know that audiences – some of whom must have been working-class – flocked to theatrical Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’, pp. 57, 60. Gramsci offers a very broad definition of ‘intellectuals’ as ‘the entire social stratum which exercises an organisational function in the wide sense – whether in the field of production, or in that of culture, or in that of political administration’ (97n). 8 In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously concluded ‘The subaltern cannot speak’. Spivak’s scepticism regarding subaltern speech stems from her anxiety that the then current theoretical constructions of the subaltern ‘cohere with the work of imperialist subject-construction’. It is not that the subaltern is incapable of utterance, it is rather that the critical elaboration of the category of the subaltern is incapable (in Spivak’s eyes) of delivering the liberation which it promises. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 66–111 (104). 9 Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’, pp. 54–55. 7

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

5

productions of Scott’s Ivanhoe. But was there any space for a reinterpretation of Scott’s vision of chivalry? Can it be imagined that in the world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to or at best uninterested in, medievalism? While there are notable critics in addition to Dellheim who have maintained that nineteenth-century medievalism was not confined to the conservative version, the response of such figures as Rosemary Jann and Chris Waters is still based on a reading of ‘canonical’ historical sources.10 It is an ironic side effect of recent medievalism studies that it has ensured that non-canonical Victorian literature, including children’s literature, is far better understood than it was thirty years ago; in the field of architecture, such a figure as Augustus Pugin has been rehabilitated, with a major recent biography; interest in the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin and William Morris has greatly increased since the 1970s.11 In general we know a great deal more about such medievalism than we did. But one of the consequences is to suggest that there was far more medievalism in what we are calling the ‘canonical’ mould – that of Scott, Pugin or the Pre-Raphaelites – than we had ever realised. In this vision, Victorian medievalism emerges as an important force – but a force already hollowed out by political reaction and by its unrelenting focus on an imagined past of social and political order.12 The chief reason that we do not have easy answers to such questions is the obvious one that, as in so many eras, working-class cultural output did not leave much of a mark in canonical productions. Many expressions of Victorian medievalism are explicitly about the working classes. Thomas Carlyle evidently has the working population in mind in his 1839 essay on Chartism and in Past and Present (1843). Benjamin Disraeli is preoccupied with the working poor in his novel Sybil (1845; while it is set in the industrial present, the novel views England as still coming to terms with its split between the Norman and Saxon temperaments). But these and other ‘canonical’ medievalisms do not, of course, emerge from the working classes. Despite sympathy for the plight of the poor, and in Disraeli’s case, support of the Charter, in their paternalist tendencies these writers usually evince an ongoing fear of the workers. At the end of Sybil, the burning of Lord Mowbray’s castle by an enraged mob of workers is emblematic of an essentially fearful view of what the workers might do, fuelled by drink and allowed to assemble en masse. One of the assumptions concerning nineteenth-century medievalism is that it is largely a matter of the self-conscious retrieval and refashioning of ideals and styles, modes and manners that had been abandoned. This, in part, explains why Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour (first published in 1822, but frequently reprinted in revised and expanded editions throughout the century) and the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 frequently serve as exemplars of ‘Victorian Medievalism’. Rosemary Jann, ‘Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism’, Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980), 129–49; Chris Waters, ‘Marxism, Medievalism and Popular Culture’, in Florence S. Boos, ed., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 137–68. 11 Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2007). 12 One prominent and wide-ranging exception is Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 10

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

6

This is medievalism as resurrectionism; archaic practices brought back to life, suits of armour fashioned anew, medieval tales repurposed for the modern world. Conversely, we have no major novels, operas or paintings on which to base a case for the working-class refashioning of medievalism. Aside from a few instances, such as the Chartist Circular’s assessment of Scott (discussed below), we do not have the critical reaction, in the form of reviews in the quarterlies, which might point to an alternative view of the writings of Carlyle, or the work of painters and novelists. In considering these problems, it is also necessary to give attention to the neglected question of the extent to which the medieval remained a residual aspect of the economic and social order, and hence was a form of continuity rather than resurrectionism.13 For example, prior to the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, some key institutions of local government (such as the borough and town) were of medieval origin. Indeed, as Robert Poole observes of Regency Manchester, ‘[w]hat was called Manchester’s “town” was in fact the manor, a medieval institution’. Until its incorporation, Manchester held an annual court leet which chose the town’s officers, the Boroughreeve and two high Constables.14 Similarly, the office and duties of Coroner had remained largely unchanged since the thirteenth century.15 We are so used to thinking of the long nineteenth century as the age of political economy, with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the gospel heralding the new dispensation, that we are in danger of underestimating the tenacity with which the (essentially medieval) ideas and values of the ‘moral economy’ endured in the nineteenth century (and beyond).16 While the middle and upper classes largely, and often enthusiastically, embraced the strictures of political economy, particularly where it demonstrated the necessity and inevitability of reduced working-class living standards, the working classes themselves often demonstrated a much more sceptical attitude. As E. P. Thompson has shown, towards the end of the eighteenth century, croppers, stockingers and weavers appealed to sixteenth-century legislation in defence of their customary rights as skilled workers.17 Similarly, the moral economy is clearly informed by popular hostility to the practices of forestalling (buying goods in advance to raise prices), regrating (buying in order to resell at a We use ‘residual’ here in the sense identified by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 122. 14 Robert Poole, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 30. 15 ‘In 1275 the Statute of Westminster, the first enactment to set out the duties of the coroner was passed. It is sometimes argued that this was both the first and last defining legislation, as everything that followed, until the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 has been a consolidation in one form or another.’ Christopher Dorries, Coroners’ Courts: A Guide to Law and Practice, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 4. 16 For two important discussions of the tenacity of the moral economy, see E. P. Thompson ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ and ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). 17 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968), pp. 271, 279, 281, 303–4, 554, 565, 575–57, 593, 595. The two key statutes were the 1551 Act against gig mills (passed in the reign of Edward VI) and the Statute of Artificers 1563 (passed in the reign of Elizabeth I). Both of these Acts were informed by medieval economic thinking and practice, particularly the latter act which saw the state assume functions previously the preserve of the feudal craft guilds. 13

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

7

profit) and engrossing (buying large quantities with a view to reselling at a profit), all of which were recognised as criminal offences in the Middle Ages.18 Likewise, in terms of skill and technique, many nineteenth-century trades and occupations would have been recognisable to medieval eyes. For example, handloom weaving was essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages; the most significant technological innovation (prior to full mechanisation) – James Kay’s flying shuttle – had simply increased the speed at which the weaver could work by hand. It is also possible to identify medieval survivals at the level of local popular culture. For example, in the weaving villages surrounding Manchester the practice of rushbearing (the collecting and carrying of rushes to the parish church to be used as a floor covering) survived into the nineteenth century.19 Similarly, in Ashton-­ under-Lyne the ceremony of ‘Riding the Black Lad’ (which preserved the unsavoury reputation of the legendarily harsh landlord Sir Ralph de Assheton, fl. 1421–86) survived until the early 1830s.20 There are also survivals – albeit difficult to trace – at the level of oral culture: legends, tales, poems, songs and ballads which owe their origins to the Middle Ages. As the many antiquarian collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attest, a good number of these can claim a medieval pedigree of some description.21 Thus, at a local level, both governance and aspects of the justice system in the nineteenth century were still partially inflected by medieval practices. Similarly, that grand abstraction known as the ‘economy’ was still understood and judged by values and attitudes that were essentially medieval, while popular and customary culture also retained a significant medieval element. In short, for the working classes traces of the Middle Ages remained part of the fabric of everyday life. Admittedly, these values, attitudes and practices, were not consciously experienced as ‘medieval’, rather they were part of everyday common sense, a matter of custom. One question which this volume raises, then, is whether it might make sense to posit the existence of a subaltern ‘medieval unconscious’, a subset of the larger ‘political unconscious’, in Fredric Jameson’s terms.22

18 For a discussion of the laws against forestalling, see R. H. Britnell, ‘Forstall, Forestalling and the Statute of Forestallers’, English Historical Review 102 (1987), 89–102. 19 M. F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), p. 29. 20 Kate Griffith, ‘The Black Lad of Ashton-under-Lyne’, Folklore 8.4 (1898), 379–82. 21 The works of Joseph Ritson abound in such material, as for instance his A Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols (London, 1783); Ancient Songs, From the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution (London, 1790), Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry: From Authentic Manuscripts and Old Printed Copies (London, 1791) and Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which Are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life, 2 vols (London, 1795). Entirely medieval in content is Poems on Interesting Events in the Reign of King Edward III. Written, in the Year MCCCLII. By Laurence Minot (London, 1795). 22 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; London: Methuen, 1983).

8

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

‘Trickle Down’ or ‘From Below’? The Politics of Cultural Transmission The question of how cultural forms circulate within a given social order has been the subject of a long and vexed debate. Broadly speaking, we can identify two main theoretical models: ‘trickle-down’ and ‘from below’. The trickle-down model tends to see popular culture as variously adopting, reworking or reacting to elite or high culture. This model not only accords temporal primacy to elite culture as the original source of a cultural form, it frequently assigns aesthetic and/or intellectual value to the elite original, with the popular (or subaltern) form being seen as a debased or degraded copy. Conversely, the ‘from below’ model tends to see popular culture as arising from the largely autonomous practices of subaltern groups yet exerting pressure on elite culture.23 This model generally accords both temporal and aesthetic/intellectual primacy to the subaltern cultural form which is seen as largely self-originating and self-validating. Both of these models are politically inflected, with conservative cultural critics preferring ‘trickle-down’ and left-wing cultural critics privileging the ‘from below’ approach. Not the least of the difficulties when trying to decide on the appropriate theoretical model for nineteenth-century subaltern medievalism is the incomplete nature of the documentary record. As noted above, much of the textual evidence for subaltern medievalism is fragmented and ephemeral. Put simply, while contemporary records tell us there were thousands of lower-middle and working-class visitors at the 1839 Eglinton Tournament, they did not produce a subaltern equivalent to John Richardson’s sumptuous volume, The Eglinton Tournament, with its ‘eighteen superb coloured plates’.24 Moreover, the gaps in the textual evidence cut both ways. They provide as little evidence for ‘trickle-down’, as they do for ‘from below’. Occasionally, a subaltern response to elite medievalism is recorded, such as the Chartist Circular’s warning against the pernicious ideological influence of Walter Scott – a rare example of a direct invocation of an example of elite medievalism: The subtle effect of his grand historical panoramas is, to exalt the aristocracy, and debase the people; to excite veneration for Chiefs and Ladies, and contempt for the masses . . . He throws a false gloss over the political and social misery of the feudalism of olden times, and often dazzles his readers with a goodly band of knights and ladies, 23 For example, pioneering studies of Chartist literature such as Yuri Kovalev’s An Anthology of Chartist Literature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), and Martha Vicinus’s The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes, 1974), generally saw Chartist literary production as responding to canonical precursors. More recently, scholars have emphasised both the relatively autonomous origins of radical/working-class culture, and the pressure which it exerted on its middle class and elite counterparts; see for example, Ian Haywood’s The Revolution in Print: Print, Politics, and the People, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), or Greg Vargo’s notion of ‘generative exchange’ in his recent An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 24 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 105.

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

9

followed by a train of half-naked demi-savages, willingly yoked, like brutes, to the iron car of political despotism.25

However, it is difficult to generalise on the basis of such fragmentary evidence as we currently possess. In effect, the gaps in the textual evidence cut both ways. They provide as little evidence for ‘trickle-down’ as they do for ‘from below’. Conversely, the fact that, historically speaking. much of popular culture was transmitted orally, means that we have an even narrower textual base for the ‘from below’ model. Here, in particular, it is necessary to recall that well-worn phrase – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The difficulties of identifying the lines of cultural transmission are thrown into sharp relief by the uses of medievalism made by radical London artisans during the Queen Caroline agitation of 1820–21. Mark Girouard gives a detailed description of the procession in support of Caroline organised by the London trades on 12 January 1821, which included ‘eight knights on horseback in full armour . . . accompanied by squires or attendants on foot, wearing half-suits of armour’.26 However, Girouard’s account occludes the role played by the radical shoemaker and printer, Samuel Waddington (‘Little Waddy’), who appears as a mounted knight posing as the Queen’s Champion, in an 1821 satirical print entitled The RIVAL CHAMPION or LITTLE WADD preparing for the ONE EYED CORONATION.27 Is this a deliberate parody of the role of Royal Champion (‘trickle-down’) or an adaptation of the plebeian tradition of the Skimmington ride (‘from below’)? Rather than attempt a grand theorisation of the cultural transmission of nineteenth-century subaltern medievalism this volume has adopted a case-by-case approach. In some cases, as for example Rosemary Mitchell’s discussion of Rienzi’s literary afterlives, the evidence clearly supports a ‘trickle-down’ reading. In other cases, such as Stephen Basdeo’s analysis of Chartist appropriations of War Tyler, the emphasis falls on transmission from below. What is Subaltern Medievalism? For the most part, the historical events and characters discussed in the following chapters are recognisably and uncontroversially ‘medieval’, and include the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, the Hundred Years War, John Ball, Wat Tyler, Rienzi and Joan of Arc. Our time frame also admits discussions of Anglo-Saxon England through to the actions of the Tudor state. This may strike some readers as an unsatisfactory, too elastic, definition. We have followed the practice of the various subaltern groups under consideration by adopting an essentially pragmatic approach to the question of the historical duration of the ‘Middle Ages’. Broadly speaking, nineteenth-­ century subaltern medievalism is particularly concerned with the period of English history which runs from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the Dissolution of the ‘Literary Sketches. Sir Walter Scott’, Chartist Circular, No. 72, 13/2/1841, 306 (305/306). Girouard, Return to Camelot, p. 68. 27 For a discussion of Waddington’s role, see Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 173–76. 25

26

10

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

Monasteries (1536–41). But as will be clear from the chapters here, subaltern medievalism was vitally concerned with the two centuries before the Conquest (and in particular, the reign of Alfred) and, at the other end of the chronology, made little distinction between the times of the first and last Tudor monarchs. This brings us to a final question – how distinctive is subaltern medievalism? Is ‘subaltern’ merely an adjective indicating a different social origin for ideas and events already familiar to us from canonical medievalism? Or is subaltern medievalism sufficiently different in kind to qualify as a compound noun describing a distinct phenomenon? On the strength of the evidence assembled in the following chapters, we believe there are good grounds for choosing the latter. There are certainly ways in which canonical and subaltern medievalisms resemble one another; the single largest point of resemblance between them is perhaps in their almost exclusively masculine preoccupations. Even here, subaltern medievalism had a space for female agency, as Carolyn Collette shows in her essay in this volume. But aside from its privileging of masculinity, in most important respects subaltern medievalism shares only the most superficial similarities with its canonical counterpart. In particular, subaltern medievalism encodes a radically different philosophy of history. Unlike its canonical counterpart with its ‘dream of order’, subaltern medievalism privileges moments of conflict and contestation. Insofar as subaltern medievalism dreams of order, it is of an order which awaits future realisation rather than restoration (and hence, as Alice Chandler observed at the inception of ‘medievalism studies’, it is utopian).28 Admittedly, there are some points of similarity, but on closer inspection these are less secure than first appears. Thus, for example, both subaltern and canonical medievalism evince a hostility to the ‘market’ as a way of organising economic and social relations. However, where canonical medievalism frequently champions paternalism in the economic sphere and hierarchy with deference as its social counterpart, subaltern medievalism remains resolutely anti-paternalist. Similarly, the idea of ‘chivalry’, which plays such a key role in canonical medievalism is practically invisible in subaltern medievalism (other than as the object of critique). While subaltern medievalism is prepared to accept social distinctions arising from economic inequality, its insistence on the economic independence of the labourer as the precondition for harmonious social relations seeks to prevent the translation of social difference into political domination; in short, subaltern medievalism affirms the possibility of social hierarchy with political and economic independence. Ultimately, we suggest, it is subaltern medievalism’s insistence on English history as a sequence of ruptures and disturbances which is its most distinctive feature. Where Whig historians perceived a gradual, progressive unfolding of England’s liberal institutions, beginning with the Anglo-Saxons and continuing to the present day with only the occasional temporary interruption, and Tory medievalism imagined a largely static feudal order shattered by the onset of modernity, subaltern medievalism offers an almost Benjaminian vision of history as a series of disasters.29 28 Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (1970; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 102, see also pp. 227–28. 29 Joanne Parker, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred The Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 116–20; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 252–53.

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

11

From the imposition of the Norman Yoke, through the suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt, to the onset of the Reformation, subaltern medievalism understands English history as a series of unsettling losses which continue to resonate in the present.30 This is not a restorative medievalism which sees the return of medieval values and practices as a way of addressing current solutions; rather, it is a ‘resistive medievalism’, ready to use medievalism as a way of critiquing the present and as a source of past heroes to inspire present struggle. In attempting to trace this resistive medievalism, with all the difficulties attendant on capturing the subaltern voice, we looked first to non-elite periodical publications of the time. These of course present the problem of who it is that is actually doing the speaking; who is representing a still silent working class? While this problem might ultimately be intractable, the evidence here presented shows that without any doubt, medievalism was not the sole preserve of aristocratic conservatism in the nineteenth century. In fact, as soon as medievalism was deployed in the service of a notion of feudal order, it was also turned in the other direction by critics concerned to take progressive lessons from medieval legal, political or ethical examples. Hence, Magna Carta is frequently appealed to as an instance of correct law and King Alfred as exemplary of right and ethical rule. Even the elite event, the Eglinton Tournament, offers more purchase than might be thought: while it stands as the emblematic elite medievalist event of the beginning of Victoria’s reign, what is far less well known about it is that it was restaged at Cremorne Gardens in 1849 as a popular entertainment. In that role it was probably inspired by the example of the theatrical versions of Ivanhoe which successfully ran at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre – and which also complicate straightforward notions of that novel as the voice of elite medievalism. This book, and our attempt to trace such medievalisms, was initially assisted by the invaluable help of a British Academy Small Research Grant (which we gratefully acknowledge) and a superb research assistant the grant afforded us, Hannah Priest. Our initial suspicion that newspaper records would be a rich field was far exceeded by Hannah’s discoveries, which seemed to reshape what we had understood about uses of the medieval past in the period. The observation, alone, that Wat Tyler’s fame equalled and probably exceeded that of Robin Hood in the first half of the century strongly suggested that the working classes did indeed deploy the discourses of medievalism and did so in enthusiastic ways. The initial findings linked up with our own research interests as individuals: in the case of Mike Sanders, with a long-standing interest in the literary output of Chartism, and for David Matthews, with the popular uses of the newly emergent scholarly sense of the Middle Ages in the period immediately before Chartism and at its height in the 1840s. It became clear, however, that wider expertise would be needed to represent the full range of what was being uncovered. The idea of Subaltern Medievalisms as a collaborative collection was therefore conceived. The structure of the book reflects a 30 The classic statement on the Norman Yoke is Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 50–122; see also Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). For our use of the outmoded term ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, see p. 1.

12

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

wide range of scholars’ interests in the relationship between working-class thought, and medievalism. In Part I, David Matthews, Matthew Roberts and Rosemary Mitchell tackle the earliest phase of nineteenth-century medievalism, at a time when the new interest in the Middle Ages of the immediate post-Napoleonic period was still inchoate. Rosemary Mitchell’s chapter identifies the processes by which the figure of Rienzi (Nicola di Rienzo) – the leader of a popular revolt in mid-fourteenth-century Rome and self-styled ‘Tribune of the Roman people’ – was gradually recuperated for British radicalism across the nineteenth century. Mitchell shows that Rienzi’s reputation was revived in the eighteenth century and argues that Edward Gibbon’s critical, yet partially sympathetic, account of his career and character in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) provided the dominant account in the British cultural imagination. His assessment attributing Rienzi’s failure to the ‘lack of civic and patriotic virtue’ in Rienzi and the Roman populace alike set the terms of the subsequent debate. Thus, as Mitchell shows, one of the earliest positive reassessments of Rienzi, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), praises its titular character and blames his downfall on the degenerate people and aristocracy of Rome. Mitchell then traces the radical reinterpretation of Rienzi in, for instance, Friedrich Engels’ operatic libretto, Cola di Rienzi (1840/41), which offered a largely positive assessment of both Rienzi and the Roman populace. Mitchell concludes with an analysis of the use of Rienzi by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), whose painting ‘Rienzi’ (1848–49) dramatises the ideological ambivalences which attended the mobilisation of this medieval figure in relation to the events of 1848. Matthew Roberts’ chapter examines another example of the historical revisionism which characterises subaltern medievalism in the nineteenth century. In this case it is an historical event – the Reformation – rather than a person which is the subject under revision. Roberts demonstrates that William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1824–27, hereafter History) transformed popular understanding of the Reformation by inverting the standard Protestant account in which a corrupt, degraded, alien and oppressive medieval Catholicism was replaced by a purifying Protestantism which provided the foundations for English liberty. In so doing, Cobbett rejects Enlightenment hostility to the Middle Ages and, in a move that will become familiar in the Victorian period, deploys medievalism as a riposte to utilitarianism. Cobbett promotes the monasteries as places of hospitality, intellectual activity and good landlords who favoured social welfare. For Cobbett it is the early modern Tudor state (rather than the Middle Ages), especially via the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which is truly barbaric. Ultimately, Cobbett rejects the dominant radical view of the Reformation as a significant milestone on the road to human freedom, and instead offers an unsettling view of the Reformation as an economic and political disaster for the labouring classes, an ongoing trauma which remains a potent source of current woes. David Matthews’ chapter is concerned with mapping the major ideological coordinates of Victorian medievalism as a discursive field with a view to identifying not only the spaces occupied by ‘subaltern medievalism’, but also its implications for our understanding of the terrain. His chapter begins by noting the influence of

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

13

Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order (1971) and its analysis of the powerful cultural presence of ‘conservative’ medievalism exemplified by figures such as Scott, Pugin, Carlyle, Ruskin and Tennyson. As Matthews notes, Chandler demonstrated that this ‘conservative’ strain was the dominant, but by no means the exclusive, form of Victorian medievalism. However, despite the efforts of scholars (most notably Rosemary Jann, Charles Delheim and Chris Waters) to identify the presence of ‘Whig’ and ‘Socialist’ medievalisms in the nineteenth century, these have been insufficient to dislodge the hold of their ‘conservative’ counterpart. Matthews proposes reorienting the field on the basis of an important but underdeveloped observation made in A Dream of Order, namely that all Victorian medievalisms, regardless of their political affiliation, possess a utopian dimension and are, therefore, better understood as part of a ‘program of resistance’. Drawing in addition on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ modes of nostalgia, Matthews explores a wide range of non-canonical archives and ephemeral sources such as the working-class radical newspapers.31 He argues that working-class commentators and their sympathists largely worked within the limits of ‘reflective’ nostalgia and organised a ‘resistive medievalism’ around such tropes as the ‘Norman Yoke’ and a valorised Saxon past. They did not advocate a return to that past but rather the reactivating of democratic practices and values in ways suitable for the present moment. In its second part the book moves into the high days of working-class resistance via the Chartist movement. Here, Stephen Knight returns to the figure of Robin Hood, who became newly available to the early nineteenth century through the 1795 ballad anthology edited by Joseph Ritson (see note 21 above; it was reissued in augmented form by J. M. Gutch in 1847). While Robin, believed by Ritson to be in actuality a displaced aristocrat, could be only an equivocal hero for the working class, he was nevertheless appealing for nineteenth-century liberals at the radical end of the spectrum. Knight examines a range of non-canonical but influential Robin Hood texts through which the legendary hero was brought into the era of Chartism, before going on to analyses of the intersections of Chartism with popular literature. He begins with Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822) and examines in particular Thomas Miller’s Royston Gower (1838) a substantial novel which can be considered a radical riposte to Scott’s Ivanhoe. In the same period, in Pierce Egan the Younger’s first novel, Robin Hood and Little John, or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (serialised from 1838) the hero is presented in relatively unpolitical terms. But Egan’s later novel Wat Tyler, serialised in 1840, more explicitly presents radical politics through the figure of the poll tax resister, despite its somewhat politically bland ending. Knight goes on to analyse a wealth of nineteenth-century medievalist fiction and its relationship to radicalism, by such authors as Thomas Cooper, G. P. R. James and G. W. M. Reynolds. Mike Sanders re-examines the role of medievalism within Chartism between 1839 and 1852, commencing with the ‘Chartist’ sermons of the Rev. Joseph Rayner Stephens, taking in the English Chartist Circular (1839–42), Thomas Cooper’s Chartist epic The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), the late Chartist poetry of Gerald Massey and the lecture series delivered in 1851 by the movement’s final leader, Ernest Jones. 31

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

14

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

Sanders ends with W. J. Linton’s The Plaint of Freedom (1852), a series of poems meditating on England’s medieval history. In Sanders’ analysis, Chartism used three strategies of legitimisation: constitutionalism, natural rights and Christianity. Under the heading of constitutionalism Sanders re-examines the way in which early Chartists upheld the notion of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, reviving the old idea of the ‘Norman Yoke’ to make an argument for the native democracy of the English. The rights supposedly foregone in England as a result of the Norman Conquest then formed the subject of a further mythology espoused by Chartism. For Thomas Cooper in The Purgatory of Suicides, popular rights were degraded in the Middle Ages, partly because of foreign oppression. Consequently, Cooper searches for a medievalism of resistance, one worthy of emulation. He finds this, in part, in his own hostility to priestcraft, his suspicion of Roman Catholicism and championing of the Protestant Reformation as a proto-democratic struggle. Together, these form a resistant medievalism, sceptical of the claims made by its elite counterparts. Later, Ernest Jones builds on this to see the English heretic John Wyclif as the morning star of Reformation. The radical recuperation of another fourteenth-century insurrectionist provides the focus for Stephen Basdeo’s chapter, which turns back to the afterlife of Wat Tyler. Like Rienzi, Tyler enjoyed an unsavoury posthumous reputation until his rehabilitation by Thomas Paine and Robert Southey in the late eighteenth century. Paine and Southey celebrated Tyler as a medieval precursor of the struggle for popular freedoms. In that role, the Chartist press rehabilitated Tyler as a popular champion, and disseminated historical knowledge about the Peasants’ Revolt. Chartist writers drew links with other medieval rebellions to represent the Peasants’ Revolt as part of a wider, universal struggle for human freedom. Basdeo shows how the Tyler who emerges in Chartist discourse is a malleable figure, shaped by the contemporary needs of the movement; he can be patriot, insurgent, and can be mobilised in moments of defeat (as he was in the aftermath of the 1848 rebellions). Four essays in the final section address the period when several seemingly positive outcomes for working-class resistance are being felt in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, via socialism and feminism. Colin Trodd’s chapter, ‘The Cause of Liberty: Ford Madox Brown, Augustus Welby Pugin and Victorian Medievalism’, addresses the multiple uses of medievalism in early and mid-Victorian visual culture. In particular, Trodd analyses the contrasting ways in which Brown and Pugin developed and deployed a ‘polemical’ medievalism which (in the visual arts) challenged both the High Tory revivalism exemplified by the Eglinton Tournament, and the Whig historicism favoured by the Fine Art Commissioners overseeing the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament in the early 1840s. Trodd argues for an unlikely aesthetic affinity between Pugin and Brown insofar as both emphasise ‘seeing and sensation, not iconography and symbolism’ as a means of organising their respective medievalisms around the lived experiences of subaltern groups. The core of this chapter is an extended analysis of Ford Madox Brown’s Spirit of Justice (1844–45), an unsuccessful entry in a competition organised by the Fine Arts Commission. Trodd argues that this design (which shows a widow petitioning for justice), highlights Brown’s use of ‘medievalism as social activism’ by offering

Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?

15

a perspective from below. By both foregrounding and energising the figure of the plebeian subject (the widow) rather than that of the Baron, Brown depicts a scene in which an embodied representation of the ‘People’ stands in opposition to an abstraction of political and legal power. In the design, the widow also beckons towards the figures of Justice and Mercy by, literally, looking beyond those representatives of ecclesiastical and political power who are at best indifferent to the widow’s claim. Brown offers his audience a vision of a ‘rowdy and disordering medievalism’ which challenges the claim often made by elite medievalism that the feudal aristocracy were more caring than the lords of steam and money of the present day. In effect, Brown’s design is a visual counterpart to the petitions and demonstrations of the Chartist movement which challenged the ruling elites throughout the 1840s. Trodd ends his chapter by discussing Brown’s The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1368 (one of the panels painted for Manchester Town Hall) and concludes that this painting which also foregrounds the ‘People’ provides a further example of how Brown’s ‘radical activist medievalism’ stands as a refutation of the claims of elite medievalism in the Victorian period. In an essay which links up with earlier work in the volume, Ingrid Hanson examines the ongoing tradition of drawing on medievalism in the popular working-class press in the later nineteenth century. She is particularly concerned with William Morris, a central figure in both socialism and medievalism in the closing years. But the chief concern of her chapter lies with the discovery of the more ephemeral and non-canonical instances of the transmission of medievalism; Hanson’s researches reveal the widespread presence of medieval figures, themes and stories in the writings of working-class socialists beyond Morris. Indeed, the typical focus on Morris has distorted our picture of the field, Hanson argues. Less well-known socialists were also engaged in a far more pervasive and politically deliberate use of the Middle Ages than the concentration on Morris allows. Hanson analyses medievalism mainly in four newspapers: Justice, established in London in 1883 by H. M. Hyndman; the five issues in 1893 of the Leeds-based Labour Champion; the Clarion, founded in Manchester in 1891 by the journalist Robert Blatchford; and the Labour Leader, edited by Keir Hardie from 1893, first in Glasgow and then in London. Hanson detects a quite different form of medievalism in these newspapers from the nostalgic brand associated with Morris, and discusses the role of such medievalism in the service of narratives of cultural belonging in a history of political struggle. Like Hanson, Stuart McWilliams also begins with the legacy of William Morris. He starts with Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ and its injunction to let the past bury the past, but notes that the left has never banished its spectres. His essay invokes ‘remains’ and ‘afterlives’ in a way that is not intended to be solely metaphorical because in this context remains are not merely traces or survivals, but primarily the very human remains upon which radical medievalism builds its historical imagination. He goes on to examine Morris’s Dream of John Ball (1888) as ‘speculative medievalism’, and suggests that this text and News from Nowhere (1890) share a ‘reflective optic’ which is intended to defamiliarise the present, as Carlyle had done in Past and Present earlier in the century. This leads McWilliams to consideration of Arthur J. Penty and the guild socialist movement in the early twentieth century. Penty, in contrast to Morris, was convinced of the value of a traditional

16

David Matthews and Mike Sanders

conception of the medieval past, which was a ‘sane and reasonable form of society’. He argued for a renewed presence of guilds in modern life because they, and the Middle Ages as a whole, embodied a totality which had been lost in modernity. Following on from Matthews and Hanson with an interest in the radical press, Carolyn P. Collette is particularly focused on the later end of the chronological span and the struggle by suffragettes for the vote in the early twentieth century. The journal Votes for Women, edited jointly by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick Lawrence, recorded and valorised the struggle of the Women’s Social and Political Union. As Collette outlines, the paper frequently employed a medievalist discourse; at the height of the struggle, in 1909–11, it drew on narratives of medieval women scholars, warriors and saints as exemplary models of women’s public achievements and suppressed history. Suffragettes aimed to demonstrate that they were the spiritual daughters of earlier generations of strong women. Above all, Joan of Arc was the model for the combination of warrior-like determination and Christian virtue that Votes for Women celebrated. From ephemeral penny papers to William Morris, from political poetry to feminist cartoons, we have then what can confidently be put forward as a thoroughgoing medievalist counter-discourse to the elite medievalism first deployed in a widespread way after the Napoleonic period. The cumulative effect of the evidence gathered here shows that there always was a subaltern medievalism, and that the Middle Ages were never simply the domain of wistful dreams of order.

Part I

Radicalism and Medievalism

1 Catholicism and Constitutionalism in William Cobbett’s English and Irish Medievalism Matthew Roberts

T

he radical journalist William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (hereafter History) was one of the most famous and widely read pro-Catholic interventions in the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, finally conceded in 1829. This campaign was fought on both sides of the Irish Sea to repeal the remnants of the Penal Laws which branded British Catholics as the enemy within, stripping them of many of the civil and political rights that Protestants took for granted. Penned initially as a series of letters to the readers of his immensely popular periodical The Political Register, and then subsequently published in two volumes in 1824 and 1826, Cobbett in a characteristic display of arrogance had no doubt about the seismic impact of his History: ‘I have published a book that has exceeded all others in circulation, the Bible only excepted; and, my real belief is, that, in point of numbers of attentive readers, it exceeds even that.’1 Cobbett’s hyperbole aside, there is no doubt that his History sold extremely well, not just in Britain but throughout Europe and the Americas. By 1828, Cobbett had sold 700,000 copies of the History.2 At first glance, its success in England seems improbable: a book that turned the standard, popular Protestant histories of the Reformation on their head – the Protestant monarchs and reformers, not the Catholics were the real villains – until, that is, we recall what a master popular writer Cobbett was. The sensationalism, invective, outrage, sarcasm and the way in which Cobbett lays before the reader the evidence, all conspired to make his History a gripping read and to combat the centuries-old anti-Catholic prejudices of the English masses. Here was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments – ‘lying Fox’s lying

Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 26 Jan. 1828. George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 445. 1

2

Matthew Roberts

20

book of Protestant martyrs’ in Cobbett’s word – only inverted.3 Cobbett, no less than Foxe, was inviting the people ‘to participate vicariously in the historical epic of the English Reformation’.4 We learn that Anne Boleyn was none other than Henry VIII’s daughter, that Luther was a most profligate man, and that Elizabeth only partook of anal sex so as to preserve her virginity; though in fairness to Cobbett, these asides were peripheral to his argument. The Reformation, Cobbett revealed to his readers in the opening letter, ‘was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood’.5 The Reformation, in short, was nothing less than a fraud perpetrated against the people, the consequences of which were still being felt when Cobbett was writing. To distract the masses from this fraud, the beneficiaries and their descendants rang the cry of ‘No Popery’ in their ears. Cobbett’s History has attracted some attention from scholars, but little has been written about Cobbett’s medievalism. This is surprising on two counts. First, the History is a sustained attack on the Protestant Reformation, which Cobbett juxtaposes with a sympathetic portrait of medieval social Catholicism. Second, as Raymond Williams observed, Cobbett bears a great deal of responsibility ‘for that idealisation of the Middle Ages which is so characteristic of nineteenth-century social criticism’.6 It could be argued that this neglect stems from a perception that Cobbett was not really concerned with writing the history of the Middle Ages or even the religious history of the Reformation. On the surface, the History appears to be concerned with exposing (and most probably inventing at least some of) the vices, tyranny and cruelty of the Protestant reformers. While literary scholars in particular have done much to challenge the view that Cobbett’s History was little more than ‘manic polemicism’, by paying attention to the production of the History, the view persists that the book is not really concerned with the Reformation as a religious process or event, much less a work of history or theology: ‘the History has little to do with championing the Catholic religion. The History does not make an argument for inclusion, integrating Catholics into national politics’, argues Castellano.7 Leonora Nattrass goes one step further by suggesting that the History is not primarily a polemic in favour of Catholic Emancipation, but a tract on the past, present and future condition of the English labourer.8 As this chapter will suggest, modern scholars have been rather too quick in concluding that Cobbett’s History was unconcerned with religion.

William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 2 vols (London, 1824–27), 1:25. 4 Rosemary O’Day, The Debate on the English Reformation, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 19. 5 Cobbett, History, 1:4. 6 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), p. 19. 7 Katey Castellano, ‘Cobbett’s Commons: Monastic Economies in A History of the Protestant “Reformation”’, European Romantic Review 26 (2015), 575–90 (575). 8 Leonora Nattrass, ‘Introduction’ to William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation (London, 1998), pp. 8, 2, 4; idem, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 158. 3

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

21

Cobbett has been invariably presented as the classic restorationist radical who wished to turn the clock back to at least the last days of the ‘Merrie England’ that he remembered as a young boy growing up in rural Surrey, though as Dyck and Nattrass both emphasise, this was far from being a disabling nostalgia.9 What Cobbett’s many biographers have failed to appreciate is that he was a restorationist radical with a difference. Unlike other radicals such as Major Cartwright, there was little of the secular glories of Anglo-Saxon England in Cobbett’s medievalism; and there was virtually nothing on the foul imposition of the Norman Yoke: the successive attenuation of the ancient Saxon liberties of the freeborn Englishman by the Normans and the aristocratic descendants.10 Thus, Teutonism is largely absent from Cobbett’s medievalism, a hallmark of whig and much radical medievalism.11 Cobbett constructed a counter, subaltern British Catholic constitutionalism, which was fashioned in opposition to both the dominant British Protestant patriotism traced by Linda Colley and the popular English constitutionalism that gloried in Protestant-won liberties.12 A great deal of historiographical attention has been paid to British Protestant national identity and the Catholic ‘Other’; much less has been said about how Catholics and their advocates, like Cobbett, responded to the charge that they were the enemy within, at least for the period immediately preceding emancipation.13 As Michael Tonko has argued, the campaign for Catholic Emancipation became ‘intertwined with a larger cultural conflict about the Catholic Question involving religion, national history and the meaning of British national identity’.14 Far from being bounded by an exclusive Englishness, Cobbett’s medievalism was, in part, transatlantic in origin and genuinely British in its scope and register. Drawing on recent work on medievalism and on the historiography of the Reformation, the first section of this chapter focuses on the purpose, form and context Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 130; Nattrass, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 10 John Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth Century England’, Social History 6 (1981), 1–32; James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 1. Cobbett hardly features at all in Christopher Hill’s classic essay ‘The Norman Yoke’, reprinted in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretations of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 52, 118. 11 Rosemary Jann, ‘Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism’, Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980), 129–49. 12 Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 300–1; George Bernard Owers, ‘Common Law Jurisprudence and Ancient Constitutionalism in the Radical Thought of John Cartwright, Granville Sharp and Capel Lofft’, Historical Journal 58 (2015), 51–73 (67). 13 G. I. T. Machin, ‘The No Popery Movement in Britain, 1828–9’, Historical Journal 6 (1963), 193–211; J. C. D. Clark, ‘Protestantism, Nationalism, and National Identity, 1660– 1832’, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 249–76; Jörg Neuheiser, Crown, Church and Constitution: Popular Conservatism in England, 1815–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 14 Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3. 9

Matthew Roberts

22

of Cobbett’s History. The second section sketches out the content of Cobbett’s counter, Catholic British constitutionalism and begins by comparing it with other, largely neglected, individuals and groups who, like Cobbett, were constructing a populist medievalism. The third section highlights the transatlantic and British origins, framing and reach of Cobbett’s medievalism, focusing on the noted, though underexplored, impact of Cobbett’s History in Ireland.15 In making use of neglected archival material and the Irish press, it contrasts Cobbett’s medievalism with that of other varieties of Irish medievalism in the early nineteenth century. The chapter concludes by situating Cobbett’s subaltern project in relation to some of the more familiar late Georgian and Victorian reimaginings of the medieval past. Finally, the case study of Cobbett’s subaltern medievalism suggests that scholars might need to rethink some of the central assumptions, organising concepts and interpretative frameworks that they have brought to the study of Cobbett and popular radicalism. Searching for Cobbett’s Medievalism Cobbett never used the word ‘medieval’, but this is hardly surprising as it was still a new word in the 1820s. Perhaps more surprising is the almost complete absence of the term ‘Middle Ages’, the usage of which had been growing in the eighteenth century. Cobbett only used this term occasionally, though not in his History. What makes this absence surprising is that unlike other writers in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth century, he did have a very clear sense of the difference between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, with the watershed being the Reformation.16 Like other romantic writers, Cobbett rejected the mainstream Enlightenment’s hostility to the Middle Ages, and his sympathetic portrayal of the medieval was conceived in part as a riposte to the arrogance, utilitarianism and whiggish Enlightenment thinkers and their followers. It was the ‘Scotch feelosophers’ – the devotees of Adam Smith and especially David Hume – whose vision of the past Cobbett so often challenges in the pages of the History. Cobbett’s History was far from being anti-Scottish tout court. He was always clear that the Scottish people were exempt from any blame for the pernicious ‘enlightened’ ideas of the Scottish intellectuals who infected England and Ireland, and by the 1830s he was reaching out to the Scottish people to form an alliance with the English reformers just as he had with the Irish in the 1820s.17 Although himself English, it was Thomas Malthus who came to personify in Cobbett’s eyes this ‘Scotch’ philosophy. That a parson of the Church of England could recommend J. A. Reynolds, The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823–9 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 45–46, 67 and 79; Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin: Macmillan and Gill, 1985), pp. 80–81; Irene Whelan, The Bible War in Ireland: The Second Reformation and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 219. 16 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), p. x. 17 Alex Benchimol, ‘Scotland under the Scotch System: Narratives of Resistance from Cobbett’s Tour in Scotland’, in James Grande and John Stevenson, eds, William Cobbett, Romanticism and Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 94. 15

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

23

a policy of leaving the poor to suffer the fate nature had dealt them epitomised, for Cobbett, all that was wrong about the Reformation. The ‘devastation’, as Cobbett renamed the Reformation, had done nothing more than plunder the wealth of the Catholic Church, held in trust for the people and used generously to relieve poverty, to provide education and employment, and transfer it to the Church of England and the aristocracy who kept the wealth for themselves, thereby necessitating a poor law. Through the pages of his History Cobbett challenged the Enlightenment’s portrayal of the Middle Ages as barbaric. By presenting the monasteries as places of hospitality, refuge, intellectual endeavour, employment and healing, Cobbett punctures the myths of ‘monkish’ superstition, laziness and rapaciousness. The dark ages for Cobbett was the early modern period – Tudor barbarism, especially the reign of Elizabeth (Cobbett inverts the popular myth of ‘Bloody Mary’ and ‘Good Queen Bess’). The horrors and cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, Cobbett alleged, paled in comparison to Elizabeth’s reign of terror. At first glance, Cobbett deploys the two modern visions of the Middle Ages conceptualised by David Matthews: the gothic or grotesque Middle Ages – barbaric medievalism – and the romantic Middle Ages – of chivalry, simple communitarian living (epitomised by the monasteries for Cobbett), and humanely organised labour (the monks were easy, resident landlords).18 In Cobbett’s case, his objective in the History is to demolish the first vision and, in theory, furnish a case for the second. In practice, though, he devotes most of the History to demolishing the first vision, which is perfectly in keeping with Cobbett’s destructive style of writing. But even then there is a real sense in which Cobbett’s Middle Ages only emerge in the History implicitly through inference and lopsided juxtaposition; in other words, Pugin’s Contrasts with only one of the two plates. This blank medievalism is a product of the History’s almost exclusive focus on the early modern period, and Cobbett often struggles to go much beyond the specious logic that since the early modern era had been so awful the period preceding it must have been better. True, Cobbett does furnish some evidence about the medieval church, especially the monasteries, and the living standards of the people, but these are not really the main focus of the History. Far more central is the attack on the Protestant monarchs and their evil counsellors – Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer. Cobbett drew very little distinction between what Rosemary O’Day has termed the ‘“religious” reformers (those who saw the Reformation as the fulfilment of the Church’s need for renewal) and the “official” reformers (those who saw the Reformation as serving the needs of the monarchy or, at least, the English body politic)’.19 For Cobbett, what linked Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Henry VIII, Cranmer and Elizabeth I was that the Catholic Church had become inconvenient, an impediment to their worldly ambitions. Thus, Cobbett homogenises the Reformation into a single process, an interpretation that swathes of revisionist historiography has challenged.20 It is ironic that Cobbett devotes so many pages in the History to the doings of the elite Matthews, Medievalism, pp. 15, 24–25. O’Day, Debate on the English Reformation, p. 8. 20 Eamon Duffy, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 18

19

Matthew Roberts

24

when he himself spoke out against that kind of elitist history.21 Only at the end of volume 1, almost as an afterthought, does it occur to Cobbett that it might help his argument if he furnishes some evidence on the living standards of the people before the Reformation. Only in passing does Cobbett broach the question which has been at the forefront of the historiography on the Reformation: did the people want the Reformation and how accepting of it were they when it came, to paraphrase J. J. Scarisbrick.22 For obvious reasons, Cobbett does not acknowledge that there was widespread dissatisfaction with the late medieval church. The Lollards are mentioned only once and even then as an example of heresy. One could be forgiven for thinking that anti-clericalism was completely absent in pre-Reformation England. In other words, Cobbett does not tread similar ground to that of the modern revisionist historiography on the Reformation which has argued that the late medieval church was popular with the people.23 In a sense, the absence of these details lends itself to Cobbett’s purpose because it occludes the distinction between the Middle Ages ‘as it was’ and ‘as it might have been’.24 It was this sort of absence that was highlighted in some of the many rebuttals to Cobbett’s History.25 For all its polemical fire and subtext concerning the English poor laws, there were certainly similarities and parallels between Cobbett’s History and other contemporary, nineteenth-century Catholic writing. The History was also ‘concerned to display historical Catholicism in a more favourable light to their Protestant neighbours in order to improve the general attitude towards Catholicism’.26 Cobbett even registered the division within Catholicism between the Transalpinists (the ultramontanes) and their opponents, the Cisalpinists – the leaders of the Catholic Enlightenment. He sided firmly with the latter by playing down the ‘foreignness’ of Catholicism and by pointing out that papal supremacy had never really been recognised in ways that forced English Catholics to subordinate their loyalty to the English state. Cobbett reconceptualised papal power by arguing that it was underpinned by popular sovereignty – a highly unusual reading, of course, but one that was perfectly consistent with a popular radical: ‘The truth is, that the Pope had no power but that which he derived from the free will of the people.’27 Cobbett reminded his readers that one pope, Adrian IV – ‘the son of a very poor labouring man’ – was English and Cobbett, History, 1:38. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1984), p. 1. 23 Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Doubtless, Cobbett would have agreed with J. A. Froude’s later assessment that had manhood suffrage existed in Tudor England, the Reformation would have been reversed. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition (Chicago, IL: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 244. 24 For this distinction, see Matthews, Medievalism, p. 37. 25 E.g. Robert Oxlad, The Protestant Vindicator (London, 1826); Anon., A Brief History of the Protestant Reformation (Glasgow, 1831), p. 20. 26 O’Day, Debate on the English Reformation, p. 68. 27 Cobbett, History, 1:94. 21

22

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

25

that the papacy had granted a great deal of autonomy to English Catholics. Cobbett also recast St Austin, the Roman monk sent out by Pope Gregory to convert Britain to Christianity, as the first English Catholic: he was ‘the Apostle of England’.28 Apart from a few misguided and unrepresentative plotters – driven to their designs by Protestant persecution – Catholics, Cobbett maintained, had always been loyal subjects. Again, like a number of Catholic writers, Cobbett devoted the largest part of his account of the Reformation to the reign of Elizabeth whose historical reputation, as we have seen, Cobbett switched with that of Mary.29 The main reason why the English accepted the Elizabethan settlement in the end was because of the way in which it had come to stand for the independence of Britain from European rulers – pre-eminently the French and the Spanish, with whom Catholicism had become increasingly entangled. Hence the fate of Mary Queen of Scots and later on Jacobitism, Cobbett reasoned. After all, Cobbett reminded his readers, it had been English Catholic monarchs who had conquered parts of France. Cobbett also contributed to the construction of a rival Catholic martyrology that was central to the efforts of the Catholic writers John Milner, Charles Butler and John Lingard. Cobbett praised the principled stand of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher who were put to death for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Henry VIII. Cobbett’s biggest heroes were the ‘two poor friars’ Peyto and Elstow, two lonely voices who spoke out openly against Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn: ‘Before their conduct, how the heroism of the Hampdens and the Russells sinks from our sight.’30 Lord Russell along with Sir Algernon Sidney, incidentally, Cobbett insisted deserved their fate as plotters. This was an unusual stance for an English radical of his day, many of whom lauded the defiant stands of Hampden and Sidney as part of a whiggish, Protestant narrative of English liberties, hence the name given to the extra-parliamentary bodies which campaigned for radical reform in the 1810s: Hampden Clubs.31 Cobbett found himself constantly having to justify why he had written the History. His enemies never tired of casting aspersions at his motives. How could a eulogiser of the ‘atheist’ Thomas Paine, whose bones Cobbett had disinterred and brought back with him from the United States in 1819, defend the Catholic Church? Sir Robert Peel for one wondered how a pious Catholic like Daniel O’Connell could form an alliance with the gravedigger Cobbett, a damning association that was also played upon by other enemies of Cobbett and Catholic Emancipation.32 For Cobbett, of course, there was no contradiction at all. The Protestant Reformation was his latest discovery, a further instalment in the epic conspiracy waged by the elite, past and present, to impoverish the people, a conspiracy which Paine, above all others, had laid bare, albeit with different weapons from those employed by Cobbett. Cobbett was also a genuine believer in religious freedom and equality, and so Cobbett, History, 1:179. O’Day, Debate on the English Reformation, p. 72. 30 Cobbett, History, 1: 42, 89, 323, 292, 83. 31 For the Hampden Clubs, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 712–36. 32 Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America, 2 vols (London: J. Lane, 1913), 2:252. 28

29

Matthew Roberts

26

his support for Catholic Emancipation was hardly suspicious, though he certainly saw an opportunity to further the cause of English radicalism by enlisting the support of Irish Catholics. If Cobbett’s motives were genuine, it is also worth remembering just how embattled and defeated the English radicals were in the wake of the Six Acts, the draconian legislation enacted by the state following Peterloo and justified – in the view of the government – by the Cato Street conspiracy. For all his outspoken attacks on the political elite, there is no doubt that Cobbett, too, felt keenly the clampdown on radical expression. New and more subtle ways would have to be found to keep the radical critique alive. History was one possibility. As a number of female writers found in the 1790s, medievalism could be a useful cover for sedition. More than this, Cobbett like a number of women writers on medievalism, did not ‘unquestioningly hold to a vision of a Utopian past: they consistently use medievalism to highlight and critique what they viewed as a revival of past errors in the present age’.33 The Catholic Freeborn Englishman What distinguished Cobbett’s History from the ‘respectable’ Catholic writers like Lingard was its tone. As many commentators have observed, the arguments put forward in the History were very similar, if not identical, to those advanced by Lingard.34 But unlike Lingard, Cobbett was not content to offer judicious and restrained commentary, let alone allow the evidence to speak for itself; ‘with his usual fairness’ was Cobbett’s assessment of Lingard’s account of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.35 Even in its tone the History was hardly unique, or original. For in writing a scurrilous counter-Reformation narrative, Cobbett was the latest in a long line of such writers, dating back to Nicholas Sander(s) whose De Origine et Progressu Schismatis Anglicani libri tres (1585) was the original source of many of the more scandalous claims that later writers recycled. It was this tradition, rather than the respectable Catholic writing associated with writers like Lingard, to which Cobbett was most indebted. In fact, Lingard was only one of a number and arguably not the most important of Cobbett’s sources. Perhaps Lingard’s greatest service to Cobbett was not as source, but as a verifier. While Cobbett might be attacked for exaggeration and hyperbole, because Lingard was such a well-respected scholar it meant that Cobbett could not be entirely dismissed. As sources for sketching out his counter, British and Catholic constitutionalism, Sir William Blackstone certainly features, as one would expect given the emphasis that both placed on the common law, but he was tainted in Cobbett’s eyes because he ‘never lets slip an opportunity to rail against “Monkish ignorance and superstition”’.36 Clare Broome Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 27, 6. 34 For Lingard, see Peter Phillips, ed., Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard’s Death (London: Catholic Record Society, 2004), especially the essay by Rosemary O’Day for Cobbett’s indebtedness to Lingard: ‘John Lingard: Historians and Contemporary Politics, 1780–1850’, pp. 82–104. 35 Cobbett, History, 1:293. 36 Cobbett, History, 1:28. 33

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

27

Cobbett preferred the lawyers Sir John Fortescue, Thomas de Littleton, the clerics Peter Heylin and William Whitaker, and bishops Tanner and Fleetwood, as well as numerous others – many of whom, Cobbett was at pains to emphasise, were or became Protestants. In volume 2 of the History, he was more explicit about his sources: Cobbett had not consulted ‘the pages of lying, hired, place-hunting, pension-hunting, benefice-seeking, or romancing, historians; but the pages of the Statute Book and of the books of the ancient laws of my country’.37 Cobbett was not the first to articulate his revisionist account of the Reformation, or to advance the claims of Catholics to religious and civil equality, in a populist idiom. The real progenitor of Cobbett’s History was not Lingard, but the Catholic writer William Eusebius Andrews.38 Andrews, like Cobbett, was a prolific writer and journalist; and he, too, had populist aspirations, though he never came close to achieving Cobbett’s popularity. Hence there was on the part of Andrews an occasional sense of rivalry with Cobbett and pique at not being given the credit he felt he deserved.39 In a series of periodicals, tracts and books spanning the 1810s to the early 1830s, Andrews campaigned tirelessly for Catholic Emancipation. As the satirical serial Captain Rock in London observed, Cobbett was actually indebted not to Lingard but to Andrews for the ‘hint to write his history’, in particular the latter’s Orthodox Journal and Catholic Monthly Intelligencer and its successor the Truthteller. These periodicals had been promoting the kind of polemical historical revisionism of the Reformation that Cobbett would replicate in the History since at least 1818.40 Indeed, it may not be a coincidence that Cobbett later dated his conversion to the cause of Catholic Emancipation to that very year, though his hostility to the Reformation had been emerging for some time.41 The first volume of Lingard’s multi-­ volume history of England, which supposedly formed the basis of Cobbett’s History, did not appear until 1819. The volumes dealing with the Reformation appeared just as Cobbett was writing the History, of which he certainly made use. Perhaps it was in 1818 that Andrews’ pungent journalism first came to Cobbett’s attention. What is much more certain is that Andrews did more than act as handmaiden to Cobbett’s History. Through his periodicals and the organisations he set up to campaign for Catholic Emancipation, Andrews helped to give Cobbett and his History wings. He did this by giving Cobbett a lot of exposure in his periodicals and also through the dissemination of populist tracts under the auspices of the London-based Society of Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty (SFCRL), established in 1825. With most tracts accompanied by a relevant woodcut – for example, scenes depicting the execution of Catholics, another inversion of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – the tracts essentially disseminated the same message as Cobbett’s History. But they were snappier and more easily digestible by the masses. Undoubtedly, this was deliberate as there were faint traces of the satirical tradition of Hone and Cruikshank albeit rather Cobbett, History, 2:10. For biographical details, see Brian Carter, ‘Andrews, William Eusebius (1773–1837)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 39 Truthteller, 8 July 1826. 40 Captain Rock in London, 19 Nov. 1825; Orthodox Journal and Catholic Monthly Intelligencer, February 1818. 41 E.g. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 25 May 1811. 37

38

Matthew Roberts

28

more soberly in the style of the didactic literature of the mechanics institutes and religious missionary societies. Through juxtaposition, both textually and visually, the tracts established much more clearly the contrasts between pre- and post-Reformation England (see Figure 1.1). The SFCRL’s role in securing Catholic Emancipation, and in keeping popular radicalism alive in the lean years of the 1820s, has not been given the credit it deserves by historians.42 Ending Catholic disabilities was only one of the SFCRL’s objectives; the others were parliamentary reform, an end to paper money, a partial repudiation of the National Debt and improving the lot of the working classes; in short, the programme of Cobbett. Although London-based and led by gentlemen, working-class radicals were also involved and a number of satellite branches were established around the country.43 The central populist message in the periodicals and tracts that Andrews published was identical to that of Cobbett’s History: a counter, Catholic, British popular constitutionalism. In this narrative, the rights of the freeborn Englishman were recast as a distinctly Catholic bequest. Cobbett and Andrews advanced these claims in the following terms. The most cherished of constitutional liberties – ‘magna charta, trial by jury, the offices of sheriff, justice of the peace, constable’,44 habeas corpus, a wider and more popular suffrage, and the ‘British Constitution’ itself had been framed and secured by Catholics. After all, as Cobbett repeatedly reminded his readers, Britain had been Catholic for 900 years. Cobbett and Andrews went further by implying that there was something peculiar to Catholicism which lent itself to these liberties. Both emphasised that the great King Alfred was a Catholic; that not only was Magna Carta granted by a Catholic monarch, but more importantly it had been secured by the intervention of Archbishop Langton, who had prompted the barons to petition the king (Thomas à Beckett was another of Cobbett’s English Catholic hero-martyrs). Monasteries were also institutional repositories of the British constitution: copies of Magna Carta, Cobbett observed, were sent to abbeys in every county to be preserved. Of course, these are technically specious and anachronistic arguments as the distinctive concept of Catholicism was only fashioned in response to the provocation of the Reformation, but this did not stop Cobbett from asking his readers and his ‘No Popery’ enemies whether they believed that their illustrious Catholic forefathers – like King Alfred – were burning in Hell, for that was the implication of their prejudices, or so Cobbett claimed. The reason why the Catholic Church had been at the forefront of campaigns for civil liberties, Cobbett and Andrews alleged, was precisely because of its independence from state power; an independence that was underpinned, in part, by its very ‘foreignness’. Upholders of papal supremacy they might have been, but the flipside of this was that the Church was not beholden to the monarchy and aristocracy. John Belchem is one of the few historians to devote some attention to the SFCRL, though his focus on Henry Hunt has created the slightly misleading perception that the organisation was little more than an extension of Huntite radicalism. John Belchem, ‘Orator Hunt’: Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism (London: Breviary Stuff, 2012), pp. 145–47. 43 Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1979), p. 143. 44 Cobbett, History, 1:29. 42

Fig. 1.1. Image taken from an anonymous pamphlet entitled, ‘People of England!’, collected by James Collins, Drumcondra, Ireland, and purchased by the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1918. The pamphlet is included in the collection, Catholic Emancipation Tracts, 1826– 1829, and is available through Google Books.

Matthew Roberts

30

Thus, the Church had a central ‘checks and balance’ role to play in the constitution: ‘the moment [England] lost the protection of the POPE, its kings and nobles became horrid tyrants, and its people the most abject and most ill-treated slaves’, Cobbett stated.45 Cobbett then gives a neat twist to justify allegiance to the pope in a way that does not materially undermine his ‘Little Englandism’. John Bull, he acknowledges, does not like foreigners, but if forced to choose, Cobbett would prefer to ‘pay “pence to PETER” than pounds to Hessian Grenadiers’, Dutchmen, or German royals. ‘I, for my part, prefer Alien Priories to Alien armies.’46 Where did the rights of the people originate, Cobbett asks? ‘It was not a gift from Scotchmen, nor Dutchmen, nor Hessians; from Lutherans, Calvinists, nor Hugonots [sic]; but was the work of our brave and wise English Catholic ancestors.’47 We saw in the introduction to this chapter that all Cobbett’s biographers and those who have analysed his History are in agreement that it was totally unconcerned with theology. Perhaps one of the reasons why Cobbett’s History has been viewed as unconcerned with theology is because modern notions of what constitutes theology have become too specialised. Theology, in this reading, equals exegesis and critical engagement with the work of theologians, past and present, a body of specialist knowledge produced by religious scholars, and, at best, a critical reception by a lay audience; at worst, passive acceptance of half-understood religious truths handed down by clerics to the laity. But it was exactly this sort of passive and uncritical acceptance of truths, both historical and theological, handed down from above that Cobbett in particular was battling against. On several occasions in the History Cobbett attacks what he views as the theological basis of Protestantism: the doctrine of salvation by faith alone as opposed to the traditional (Catholic) emphasis on both faith and works. For Cobbett this ‘abominable doctrine of salvation by faith alone’ and the jettisoning of good works was no mere rarefied and insular intellectual debate amongst a few clerics; it sanctioned the plunder of the Reformation and the abdication of responsibility on the part of the elite towards the poor. In other words, the theological basis of faith and works guaranteed responsible rule; in the absence of this restraint, tyranny, plunder and poverty for the many: ‘The most profligate of men, the most brutal and bloody of tyrants may be a staunch believer; for the devils themselves believe.’48 Cobbett observed that the doctrine of salvation by faith alone was the only point on which all the Protestant reformers agreed.49 Thus, it was the theological praxis of Catholicism that won Cobbett’s approval: ‘the Catholic Church was not, and is not, an affair of mere abstract faith; that it was not so very spiritual a concern as to scorn all cares relative to the bodies of the people’. ‘The Catholic establishment interweaves deeds of constant and substantial charity with the faith itself. It makes the two inseparable.’ Cobbett was explicitly theological on this point: jettisoning works was to ‘expunge[] from the Bible the Epistle of SAINT JAMES’.50 45 46 47 48 49 50

Cobbett, History, 1:27. Cobbett, History, 1:89–90. Cobbett, History, 1:92. Cobbett, History, 1:101. Cobbett, History, 1:200. Cobbett, History, 1:328–9.

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

31

The Roman Catholic emphasis on faith and works was more than just a handy stick with which to beat the plundering reformers; it also provided a theological basis for Cobbett’s romantic vision of the Middle Ages. The reason why, at least in theory, the medieval period had witnessed a ‘Merrie England’ was because the polity had been governed in accordance with the common law (drawn up by Catholics), the basis of which was natural law. As Cobbett later informed the pope, in order to ascertain the sources from which the poor were relieved prior to the Reformation, ‘I went back to the very origin of the common law of England; I examined the canons of the Catholic church; I read all the acts of parliament relative to the subject.’51 On this basis, Cobbett reasons, ‘there never can have existed a state, without an obligation on the land-owners to take care of the necessitous’ because the whole point of civil society was to protect the individual’s right to property from spoliation. As for the poor, in giving up the common rights they had enjoyed in the state of nature, they were entitled to relief. Taking care of the poor was the price the rich paid for a ‘civilised society’; if they failed to provide this, then the poor were perfectly in the right to revert to the state of nature and take by force what they needed to survive.52 Prior to the Reformation, this responsibility was entrusted to the Church, paid for by the elite, who were the ideal group to minister to the poor because charity, hospitality, kindness and care ‘came always in company with the performance of services to God’.53 Further insurance that the Catholic clergy cared for the poor was furnished by the vows of chastity, and in the case of monastics, poverty. The clergy of the Church of England, Cobbett argues, always put the interests of themselves and their families before that of their parishioners. Monks were resident landlords, unlike much of the present-day aristocracy and the absentee pluralists in the Church of England. Just as the pope was independent, so too were the Catholic priests and monks, in contrast to their Church of England brethren who were beholden to the local squire. All this flowed from natural law and endured until: The ‘reformation’ despoiled the working classes of their patrimony; it tore from them that which nature and reason had assigned them; it robbed them of that relief for the necessitous, which was theirs by right imprescriptible, and which had been confirmed to them by the law of God and the law of the land. [The Reformation] brought a compulsory, a grudging, an unnatural mode of relief, calculated to make the poor and rich hate each other, instead of binding them together, as the Catholic mode did, by the bonds of christian charity.54

For Cobbett and Andrews, there was no escaping from the medieval past. Indeed, their impassioned invective should be seen, ultimately, as late contributions to the polemical history of the Reformation which began almost immediately after it commenced in Tudor England. The effects of the Reformation were far from being confined to the past; the way in which Cobbett conceptualised the Reformation as a long, drawn out process chimes with the more recent emphasis on the ‘long 51 52 53 54

William Cobbett, A Letter to his Holiness the Pope (London, 1828), p. 22. Cobbett, History, 2:20–1. Cobbett, History, 1:52. Cobbett, History, 1:127.

Matthew Roberts

32

Reformation’ while his breaking down of the process into sequential reformations – the first (Tudor), the second (the Godly Reformation of the puritans in the mid-seventeenth century), the third (the Glorious Revolution of 1688) and fourth (the American and French revolutions) – has parallels with the notion of ‘multiple Reformations’.55 Cobbett was a master reductionist when it came to explaining the relationship between the past, present and future, but in a way that resonated loud and clear for his working-class readers. What is the cause of poverty in the present day, Cobbett asks in volume 2: The DEBT is the sole cause; for that renders monstrous taxes necessary; they render a great standing army necessary; so that it is the Debt, and that alone, which has made England the most degraded and miserable of countries, Ireland always excepted. And what caused the Debt? An Act of Parliament for the making of loans and paper-money. And for what were the loans and paper-money made? Why, the very act itself declares, that they were made for the purposes of waging war, in order “to keep out Popery and to preserve the Protestant Church as by law established . . .”’56

Cobbett frequently draws parallels between the tyranny of the Protestant reformers and the draconian ways in which the state persecutes radicals in his own day: did Smithfield (the site of Catholic burnings of Protestants during the reign of Mary), Cobbett mused, ‘ever witness so great a mass of suffering as the Old Bailey has witnessed, on account of offences against the purely Protestant invention, bank notes?’, a reference to the high-profile forgery cases in 1818–19 that led to the execution of many poor, petty forgers.57 Just as the state used the Gunpowder Plot to tar all Catholics with the same brush, so did the Cato Street Conspiracy allow the government to tar all radicals with treason. Cobbett was of the view that both plots had been hatched by ministers to entrap, respectively, Catholics and radicals.58 As G. K. Chesterton implied, there is almost a Gothic preoccupation in Cobbett’s History with the ways in which the Middle Ages continue to erupt into the present, thus disturbing the temporal hegemony of those in the present who are the descendants of those who plundered the wealth of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation.59 In a classic Gothic plot device, Cobbett dates his first realisation that the medieval past was different to his amblings as a young boy in the ‘ivy-covered ruins’ of an abbey. As the later Cobbett comes to realise, despite the attempt of the plunderers and their descendants to confine the medieval safely to the past – as the ‘dark ages’ of barbarism – the visible remnants of the pre-Reformation landscape haunt the plunderers by reminding them of their misdeeds.60 The dissolution of the monasteries and wanton destruction of the fabric of the medieval Church ‘disfigured’ the landscape and conferred ‘the appearance of a land recently

55 56 57 58 59 60

O’Day, Debate on the English Reformation, pp. 3–5. Cobbett, History, 2:51. Cobbett, History, 1:258. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 13 November 1824. G. K. Chesterton, William Cobbett (Norfolk, VA: HIS Press, 2011), pp. 78–81. Cobbett, History, 1:184

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

33

invaded by the most brutal barbarians’. Crucially, as Cobbett reflects, this landscape also shows the people that an alternative, better, happier time once existed, and could potentially exist again. ‘Go into any county, and survey, even at this day’, Cobbett implored his readers, ‘the ruins of its, perhaps twenty Abbeys and Priories; and, then, ask yourself, “What have we in exchange for these?”’62 As if to cover their misdeeds, this was why the Church of England and its apologists always referred to it as ‘by LAW established’; for Cobbett this was nothing less than a tacit recognition of its illegality.63 By repositioning Catholicism as part of the English landscape, not least by showing how monasteries had been rooted in community life, and by reminding those in the present that their ancestors had been Catholic, Cobbett mobilises community, family and tradition in a characteristically Burkean way to domesticate and Anglicise Catholicism. Historically, the ‘little platoons’, so beloved by Cobbett and Burke, had been Catholic.64 61

Transatlantic and Irish Medievalism Cobbett’s decision to include Ireland in the History arguably stemmed less from any desire to make the Irish more English than from the dawning realisation that the English were becoming more like the Irish: degraded and impoverished because of years of English tyrannical and rapacious rule, the origins of which Cobbett traced back to the Reformation.65 But Cobbett was not just writing for an English audience; and even if he had been, it was soon clear that the impact of the History was being felt across the Irish Sea. Cobbett traced the roots of his conversion to the cause of Catholic Emancipation and the plight of the Irish to a transatlantic encounter, which anticipated the extensive transatlantic impact of the History itself.66 While resident once again in the United States in 1817–19, where he had exiled himself from Britain to escape what would most likely have been a period of further imprisonment for sedition, Cobbett later recalled that he had received a letter from an old adversary. The correspondent in question was Mathew Carey, an Irishman resident in Philadelphia with whom Cobbett had locked swords during the latter’s ‘Tory’ days as Peter Porcupine in the 1790s. Apparently they were friends in the radical cause by 1818, when Carey wrote to Cobbett on Long Island to inform him of a book he Cobbett, History, 1:182. Cobbett, History, 1:155. 63 Cobbett later elaborated on this argument in his Legacy to Parsons, noting that the constant reference to the Church of England ‘as by law established’ was confirmation that it was ‘not as by Christ established; not as established by the Apostles’. William Cobbett, Legacy to Parsons (London, 1835), p. 14. 64 For Cobbett as a Burkean radical, see James Grande, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 65 Timothy Keane, ‘Making the Irish “English”: William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant “Reformation” in England and Ireland’, in R. Gonzalez, ed., The Representation of Ireland/s: Images from Outside and from Within (Barcelona: PPU, 2003), pp. 89–100. 66 Not only were Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish translations published on the continent, but Spanish editions were also published in Philadelphia for circulation in Central and South America. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 29 Jan. 1825. 61

62

Matthew Roberts

34

had just published detailing the plight of his native countrymen.67 Cobbett claimed that it was this ‘eye opening’ by Carey, perhaps along with the populist Catholic polemics of W. E. Andrews, that first planted the seeds that would later flower into the History. Cobbett also later revealed that the main source for volume two of the History – the compendium, organised by county, of the religious institutions that were ‘confiscated, seized on, or alienated, by the Protestant “Reformation”’ was an Irish Catholic priest, Rev. J. O’Callaghan. O’Callaghan also later distinguished himself in Cobbett’s eye by authoring a pamphlet attacking usury, which, he argued, was contrary to the doctrines of the Catholic Church.68 As for the impact of Cobbett’s History in Ireland, it was probably the most widely read and discussed work by an Englishman in the 1820s, if not the whole first half of the nineteenth century. Publicly, his enemies claimed that the History had nothing like the impact that Cobbett and his supporters claimed. Privately, it was a different matter, and it speaks volumes for the avidity with which Cobbett’s History was taken up that one of the most widely circulated rebuttals of Cobbett was published in both London and Dublin.69 Dublin Castle was certainly aware of this anti-Cobbettite publication, and it was also receiving letters offering various suggestions on how to combat Cobbett’s influence.70 The Dublin-based Surveyor of Excise wrote to Peel that ‘the sale of Cobbett’s History of the Reformation in this city is quite astonishing’. The same correspondent had visited ‘three of the principal Catholic booksellers this day and it was absolutely like a mob pressing to the galleries of a theatre’, all jostling to try and purchase a copy of Cobbett’s History.71 But it was not just in Dublin that Cobbett’s History was circulating. The mayor of Wexford stated that Cobbett’s publications ‘are now widely circulating thro’ Ireland’, while the curate of Clashmore (Co. Waterford) informed Peel that Cobbett’s History ‘is now widely circulating among all classes in this country’ including in his own village where a man had recently sold many copies in the street.72 Reports to Dublin Castle from magistrates and informers reveal that it was circulating in counties Mayo, Sligo and Waterford, and that in some of those places the History was being disseminated by priests.73 The postmaster of Ballaghaderreen, County Mayo, who conducted business out of his dram shop, was promoting Cobbett’s History and other seditious works by, amongst other things, affixing advertisements to the casks in his shop for all to see.74 John

Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 11 Dec. 1824. M. L. Pearl, William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account of his Life and Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 136. 69 Cobbett’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church (London and Dublin, 1825), p. 4. 70 National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, Chief Secretary’s Office, Registered Papers (CSO/RP)/1825/240, Observations and Remarks on Cobbett’s ‘Book of the Roman Catholic Church’, n.d. 71 London, British Library, Add MS 40372, Peel Papers, G. G. Gordon to Robert Peel, 5 Jan. 1825, f.39. 72 BL, Add MS 40373, John B. Wallace to Peel, 14 Feb. 1825, f. 130v, Arthur Meadows to Peel, 14 Feb. 1825, f. 126. 73 CSO/RP/1825/1882, Robert H. Archer to Chief Secretary’s Office, 13 Feb. 1825; CSO/ RP/1825/1998, Samuel Harper to Chief Secretary’s Office, 31 May 1825. 74 CSO/RP/1825/733, Edward Smith Lees to Chief Secretary’s Office, 20 May 1825. 67

68

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

35

Lawless, one of the more radical members of the Catholic Association, also promoted Cobbett’s History through his Ulster-based newspaper the Irishman.75 The Catholic Association, the organisation that spearheaded the campaign for Emancipation in Ireland, endorsed Cobbett’s History, and promoted his other works, at least until Cobbett and Daniel O’Connell fell out over the latter’s willingness to sacrifice the forty-shilling freeholders as the price for Emancipation.76 Just as we saw with W. E. Andrews in England, Cobbett’s was not the only populist voice in Ireland to deploy a medievalism to further the cause of Catholic Emancipation. While most of the leadership within the Catholic Association remained wary of unleashing the kind of invective that Cobbett deployed, lest they alienated liberal Protestant opinion, there were those, notably John Lawless and R. L. Sheil, who preached an almost identical counter, Catholic British constitutionalism to that of Cobbett and Andrews.77 Lawless authored a multi-volume Compendium of the History of Ireland, which essentially traversed the same ground as Cobbett in its attack on the Reformation, though it lacked Cobbett’s polemical fire. Unlike Cobbett, Lawless was less reticent about the Middle Ages, observing that ‘there were fewer abuses to be complained of ’ in relation to the medieval church in Ireland than was the case in England. Lawless was also rather more even-handed than Cobbett, acknowledging, for example, that the reigns of both Mary and Elizabeth had been bloody.78 Thomas Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock – a hugely popular work which recounted the mythical(?) origins of the eponymous leader of the agrarian disturbances that swept across south-west Ireland in the 1820s – also covered similar ground to Cobbett and Lawless.79 The Memoirs appeared earlier in the year than the first volume of Cobbett’s History, and may well have created a favourable reception for it. Likewise the immensely popular prophecies of Signor Pastorini, which foretold of impending Protestant doom: indeed, one of Peel’s correspondents made that very point when trying to account for the popularity of Cobbett’s History.80 Complementing rather than duplicating, Moore’s semi-fictional account traced the history of Ireland from the twelfth century, and interprets the Reformation in virtually identical terms to Cobbett, even taking on some of the same targets – David Hume’s history, for example.81 Where Cobbett, and Lawless even more so, were unusual was in the attention they gave to the Middle Ages, scant though it was in Cobbett’s case. As Huw Pryce has recently observed, attempts to deploy a ‘medieval past as a critique – whether Irishman, 23 Apr. 1824, 26 Nov. 1824, 17 Dec. 1824. Dublin Diocesan Archives, Papers of the Catholic Association, File XI, Section 60/2, /2 Minutes, 16 Oct. 1824, /55 Minutes, 23 Dec. 1824, /56 Minutes, 30 Dec. 1824. 77 Kentish Weekly Post, 28 Oct. 1828. 78 John Lawless, Compendium of the History of Ireland, 3rd ed., 2 vols (Edinburgh: Michael Anderson, 1823), 1:203–17. 79 Thomas Moore (‘Rock’), The Memoirs of Captain Rock (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Brown and Green, 1824). See also Timothy Keane, ‘Thomas Moore’s Address to England: Memoirs of Captain Rock and the Irish Question’, in Francesca Benatti et al., Thomas Moore: Text, Contexts, Hypertexts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 61–79. 80 BL, Add MS 40373, Meadows to Peel, 14 Feb. 1825, f.126. 81 Emer Nolan, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas More, Memoirs of Captain Rock, ed. Emer Nolan (Dublin 2008), pp. xxv. 75

76

36

Matthew Roberts

radical or conservative – of the perceived failings of the present appear to have been very few in Victorian Ireland’. Thus, in contrast to England, medievalism was much less a feature of Irish history-writing prior to the beginnings of the Gaelic revival in the 1830s and 1840s. Far more popular, according to Pryce, was pride in ‘primitivist idealization[] . . . of a pre-Christian golden age’.82 Neither Cobbett, Lawless nor Moore had anything to say about this; indeed, what is perhaps remarkable about Lawless’ history is that it begins in the reign of Henry II, though for the very good reason that he is tracing the beginnings of the English conquest of Ireland, which began in earnest in that very reign. Perhaps more surprising is the absence in Lawless’ and Cobbett’s accounts of the glories of the early Christian church in Ireland, around the lives of saints like St Patrick, or the Irish heroic equivalents to King Alfred, such as Brian Boru, which was a feature of Irish Victorian medievalism. This period does feature in Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock, though only as something of a prelude.83 Cobbett was certainly aware of this tradition: in one of the most extensive entries in volume 2 of the History, Cobbett traces the origins of the Abbey of the Virgin Mary at Dublin to the Danes and then to the twelfth-century monks who brought the holy staff of Jesus which passed to the fifth century St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.84 But this sort of detail was unusual for Cobbett. Yet even here, Lawless and Cobbett were hardly exceptional as the later nineteenth-century Gaelic revival also tended to focus mostly, as did Cobbett, on the sixteenth century and after rather than the medieval period. It is, of course, unfair to expect Cobbett of all people to have deployed an Irish medievalism that was inflected by Celtic/Gaelic sensibilities. For one thing, Cobbett clearly did not view the Irish as a separate race in the way that he did Jews and blacks.85 As he later confessed, ‘I have never been able, for one single moment, to look upon Ireland or Scotland, other than as parts of my native country.’ His perspective, as he went on to explain, was British, taking in the whole kingdom, albeit invariably from the point of view of an Englishman. This did not blind him to the ‘wrongs done to Ireland’ by England which were ‘beyond all number, and beyond all calculations as to magnitude’.86 Prominent on this list of wrongs was the Reformation. In the History Cobbett was clear that the impact of the Reformation on Ireland was far more brutal than it was on England. Not only had an alien ‘English’ church been imposed on the Catholic Irish, but the resistance there had been much more implacable. Further, the battle between Catholic and Protestant inaugurated by the Reformation continued unabated into the present day as the violent ‘tithe-battles’ testified (the enforced requirement of Catholics to pay for the upkeep of the Church of Ireland) which had led to violence and bloodshed.87 Cobbett’s History, and by 82 Huw Pryce, ‘The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period’, in Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 83 Nolan, ‘Introduction’, p. xxix. 84 Cobbett, History, 2: entry for Dublin, n. p. 85 Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England, 1814–1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016), 103–23 (112–13). 86 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 17 May 1834. 87 Cobbett, History, 1:148.

Catholicism and Constitutionalism in Cobbett’s Medievalism

37

extension his medievalism, can be seen as mounting a less than subtle critique of English rule in Ireland. The Irish, far more than the English, were unable to escape from the nightmare, not of medieval barbarism, but the early-modern impositions of the English state: Tudor, Cromwellian (Oliver, not Thomas) and Williamite tyranny. For Cobbett, although the Catholic Church survived in Ireland in a way that it did not in England, the dissolution of the Irish monasteries marked the beginning of Ireland’s misrule by the English: ‘If Ireland had still her seven or eight hundred Monastic institutions . . . she would be, as she formerly was, prosperous and happy.’88 Of their many virtues, monastics had not been absentee landlords. So brutal was English rule of Ireland that they did not even enact a poor law to transfer responsibility for relieving poverty from the church to the parish as the 5th of Elizabeth did for England. In a less than subtle condoning of the violent outrages that were raging once again throughout the Irish countryside, Cobbett sardonically concluded: ‘Let us, at least, as long as this state of things [the absence of a poor law] shall be suffered to exist, have the decency not to cry out quite so loudly against the “outrages of the Irish”.’89 In a further elaboration of the ever-present early modern nightmare, Cobbett provides one of the fullest accounts of the Penal Laws, enacted following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which for many English readers then and now remain shadowy and, certainly by the time Cobbett was writing, viewed as little more than symbolic vestiges which branded Catholics as second-class citizens in theory, but less and less in practice. In Ireland from the outset of the Penal era, ‘the code was still more ferocious, more hideously bloody’.90 Conclusion Cobbett has been seen as a transitional figure in medievalism, linking the antiquarian and early romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages in the eighteenth century with the neo-Gothic, tory-radical and subsequently socialist medieval revival of the later nineteenth century.91 Clearly, there are broad parallels between Cobbett’s subaltern project and other medievalisms that were also celebrations of libertarian values or vehicles for oppositional stances in relation to the dominant ideologies of the age.92 But how precisely Cobbett was a transitional and linking figure is more difficult to judge, in part because with the exception of the monastic ideal of hospitality he did not devote much attention to sketching out his vision of the Middle Ages. At the level of values, the articulation was a little more explicit: happiness, kindness, charity and, above all, liberty were singled out by Cobbett as the basis of the medieval polity, each of which was subverted by the Reformation. But there was none of the flesh and bones to his medievalism in comparison with the romanticism of Walter Scott or the later anti-capitalist critique of William Morris. If Cobbett’s Cobbett, History, 1:150. Cobbett, History, 1:338. 90 Cobbett, History, 1:436. 91 Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 16–17. 92 Matthews, Medievalism, pp. 98, 19. 88

89

Matthew Roberts

38

medievalism lacked specificity, it functioned in quite complex ways. Unlike other incarnations of medievalism, Cobbett’s was not ‘peculiarly static’ in the sense that he did not simplistically juxtapose a golden past with a corrupt present.93 As we have seen, for Cobbett the past was not dead, but continuously erupting in the present. There are clear parallels here with other subaltern medievalisms, notably the Chartist project outlined by Mike Sanders in Chapter 5. But unlike other radical medievalisms, Cobbett fundamentally rejected the view that the Reformation was a milestone in the historical unfolding of human freedom. Furthermore, it is too reductionist to present Cobbett’s religious views as little more than a weapon with which to beat those in Cobbett’s own day who, in his view, were impoverishing the labouring classes.94 Clearly, this was a major preoccupation of Cobbett’s, but it was not the only one. Cobbett’s religious views merit closer attention; it would not be difficult to make the case that Cobbett was anti-Protestant, for in addition to his onslaughts on the Church of England Cobbett also railed against Methodists, Quakers and all evangelicals.95 Cobbett’s antisemitism is well known; indeed, the only group he does not appear to have attacked were the Catholics. Was Cobbett a crypto-Catholic? It seems unlikely, though far from implausible. What is clear is that there was a Catholic, British constitutional rebuttal to the hegemonic Protestant Britishness traced by Linda Colley. This suggests that historians need to rethink the nature and extent of the Englishness and constitutionalism which have been widely viewed as defining features of popular radicalism: after all, Cobbett was hugely influential and he played no small part in preparing the English ground for Catholic Emancipation. At the centre of this Catholic, radical constitutionalism stood, it has been argued, one of the most English men of his age. But appearances can be deceiving with Cobbett. His was a complex, hybrid, and, in some respects, an utterly un-English personality and radicalism. By the time he wrote the History he had spent nearly half his adult life in North America; he was fluent in French; he was a lynchpin of transatlantic radicalism; and was one of the few English radical leaders who not only reached out to the Irish but was knowledgeable of their plight and viewed them as equals. But this cosmopolitanism has to be balanced with his antisemitism, anti-black racism and patriotic ‘Little Englandism’.96 For Cobbett, one suspects, there was no contradiction at all: his prejudices were functions of his overriding pursuit of how to make England great again, by which he meant making its people contented. A central part of this project was the recovery of a Catholic bequest. Ultimately, Cobbett wanted his Christianity like his constitution: in its pristine medieval purity. 93

1985).

Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

John W. Osborne, William Cobbett: His Thought and His Times (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1966), pp. 209, 211, 215. Osborne, however, is one of the few historians to pay much attention to Cobbett’s religious views. 95 William Cobbett, ‘On Dissenters, Methodists and Catholics’, and ‘The Quakers’, in John Derry, ed., Cobbett’s England (London: Folio Society, 1968), pp. 105–12. 96 For these complexities, and the hybrid nature of Cobbett’s radicalism, see Linda Colley, ‘I am the Watchman’, London Review of Books (20 November 2003); Grande, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England. 94

2 Resisting Medievalism: The ‘Mediaeval Mania’ and the Working-Class Press David Matthews

The ‘Lost Home’ of the Middle Ages

I

t is easy to construct a history of British medievalism which, in a range of cultural spheres, leads from one notable high point to the next. It would begin with Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), which changed the historical novel and sparked a vogue for depictions of the medieval past. Twenty years later, inspired by the novel, the Eglinton Tournament made a conservative political statement in the guise of a medievalist re-enactment. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert appeared as Queen Philippa and Edward III at a ball in 1842, by which time the Palace of Westminster was being rebuilt in medievalist style as dozens of civic and ecclesiastical buildings around the country were being recreated in Gothic form along lines influentially proposed by Augustus Pugin.1 Medievalisms in this form have been charted in foundational work by Alice Chandler, which ultimately inspired the journal Studies in Medievalism and helped create the associated discipline. Chandler’s seminal book, A Dream of Order, was central in creating an idea of medievalism as taking an essentially conservative political role. As Chandler wrote, ‘Medievalism . . . often seems like a frightened response to the terrors of the French Revolution and all the subsequent fears of revolt that agitated England during the 1 On the 1842 bal costumé, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 113; Barbara Gribling, The Image of Edward the Black Prince in Georgian and Victorian England: Negotiating the Late Medieval Past (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), pp. 56–57. Victoria and Albert were painted in their medieval guise by Edwin Landseer, an image which has appeared on the covers of at least two recent books on medievalism: see for example, Katie Stevenson and Barbara Gribling, eds, Chivalry and the Medieval Past (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016); Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

40

David Matthews

turbulent teens and twenties.’2 There were also, of course, more reasoned forms of medievalism, including the singular vision of it maintained by William Cobbett, as Matthew Roberts has outlined in Chapter 1. There was the medievalism which, in the hands of Carlyle and Ruskin, attempted to respond to the iniquities of industrialism with the interests of the working man and woman at heart. But even this seemingly more benign form of medievalism has in common with the more conservative forms the appearance of a ‘top-down’ paternalism (and of course, it was largely a failure when it came to genuine mitigation of the circumstances of the working class). While Rosemary Jann, in 1980, criticised the overwhelming focus on the conservative form of medievalism, and pointed instead to the competing models of Whig and Socialist medievalisms, subsequent accounts have often focused on the same broad narrative as that first laid out by Chandler.3 Nineteenth-century medievalism in Britain has therefore come to be seen in a canonical guise, with a focus on the major Romantics, Scott, the important architects from Pugin onwards, Carlyle and Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Tennyson.4 In this narrative, whatever the liberating energies released in the Romantic Revival from the 1760s onwards, medievalism is seen as having rapidly turned to more conservative purpose, as it was by the ageing William Wordsworth (the particular subject of the words quoted from Chandler above). The maturer and more conservative Southey’s notorious disavowal of his own early play about Wat Tyler (discussed by Stephen Basdeo in this volume) is in this view emblematic of the fate of early nineteenth-century medievalism. With William Morris as only a partial exception, nineteenth-century medievalism of all kinds therefore comes to be seen as conforming, seemingly inevitably, to a de haut en bas tendency. Evidently nostalgic, medievalism takes the particular form of what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia, which ‘puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’.5 It is a medievalism invested in recreations of the historical past. This is, however, only a partial characterisation. As Chandler herself was careful to say, medievalism was not solely ‘a mask for reaction’. She stated that ‘If anything, it was allied with utopianism, though with a utopianism that created the ideal out of the past rather than the future.’ As she further notes, ‘In many ways medievalism, as it developed during the nineteenth century, was a program of resistance . . .’6 The exploration of medievalism in this alternative guise is not unprecedented, as the

2 Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (1970; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 102. 3 Rosemary Jann, ‘Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism’, Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980), 129–49. 4 See for example Girouard, Return to Camelot; Alexander, Medievalism. Both books, it should be noted, begin their accounts of medievalism before the nineteenth century and end after it. 5 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41. 6 Dream of Order, 152, 102; cf. Alexander, Medievalism, 95–96.

Resisting Medievalism

41

work of Jann, Charles Dellheim and Chris Waters, among others, suggests. But it is an incomplete project, as has been suggested in the Introduction. The recovery and exploration of the ways in which medievalism might have been used in opposition to the more canonical medievalisms imply a turn to new source material for medievalism, which will show that the social origins of any given medievalism are at least as important as any apparent ideological tendency. As other chapters here show, this is frequently a matter of delving deep into non-canonical archives. In the present chapter, my aim is to recover, from relatively ephemeral sources, what would nevertheless have been part of the everyday understanding of the Middle Ages on the part of literate working- and lower middle-class people, particularly in the period from the 1820s down to 1860. In an era when Ivanhoe was not only published and republished but also performed in a range of versions on stage, when the queen and aristocrats played at fancy-dress feudalism, what form if any did the use of the Middle Ages by the working man and woman take? How was the response to a broadly conservative use of medievalism fashioned and mobilised in the first half of the nineteenth century on behalf of, and often from interests specifically aligned with, the working class? Instead of viewing the Middle Ages as the nostos, the lost home from the past, to what extent was it possible to see the medieval past as offering exemplary lessons for the present? In her discussion of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym advances a second and less familiar category than restorative nostalgia: that of reflective nostalgia. This ‘dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’. While restorative nostalgia concerns itself with ‘total reconstructions of monuments of the past’, reflective nostalgia ‘lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and time’ (41). It uses ideas of the past in fashioning the present. In practice, as Boym concedes, the pair are not absolute categories and it is not always easy to be clear where nostalgic ‘restoration’ and ‘reflection’ begin and end. Looking at medievalist nostalgia from the romantic revival onwards, it is relatively easy to recognise a form of longing for the Middle Ages which constitutes an impulse towards restoration. There were some who apparently wished to dwell in the lost home of the Middle Ages – sometimes literally so, as in the case of those who like Scott, Horace Walpole or William Beckford built themselves elaborate medievalist castles. There were others who thought that medieval ethics should be adopted and in effect inhabited: Kenelm Henry Digby’s prolonged arguments for a revived chivalry, in the various mutations of The Broad Stone of Honour (1822, with an expanded five-volume edition in 1877), come to mind here.8 If such medievalisms as these are in the restorative mode, however, the neogothic building wave in general, and that form of it championed by Ruskin, is less clearly marked. The builders of neo-gothic churches and railway stations were in one obvious sense restoring an element of the medieval past and requiring people 7

Jann, ‘Democratic Myths’; Charles Dellheim, ‘Interpreting Victorian Medievalism’, and Chris Waters, ‘Marxism, Medievalism and Popular Culture’, both in Florence S. Boos, ed., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 39–58 (Dellheim) and 137–68 (Waters). Jann chiefly has Chandler in view; as is clear here, I take a different view of Chandler, though Jann’s 1980 comment remains largely true. 8 On the Broad Stone, see Girouard, ch. 5. 7

42

David Matthews

to inhabit that restored past, just as Augustus Pugin proposed was desirable.9 But it is arguably not possible to create the anachronism that is a medievalist railway station without engaging, in addition, in an element of reflection. Gothic stations and pumping houses are buildings that must operate according to the present state of technology. But even a church – a form of building that actually existed in the Middle Ages – can be rebuilt in a reflective manner.10 Whatever the thinking behind them, neo-gothic buildings were always experienced in different ways according to the social origin of the building’s user or beholder. The imposing medievalist tower of Manchester’s Strangeways prison (designed by Alfred Waterhouse) was likely to have had a more chilling effect on the working classes who would supply a disproportionately high percentage of its inmates; a few miles away, the neo-gothic buildings of Owens College, designed by the same architect, would be a more hospitable home to the middle-class students of what would become the Victoria University of Manchester. One thing is abundantly clear about the period itself: there was sufficient reflection about the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century for it to be clearly understood that the working class stood to lose from reconstructions of the Middle Ages that placed their emphasis, restoratively, on feudalism and chivalry. Medievalism as a major cultural theme was a clearly visible and identifiable discourse. Sceptical commentators frequently wrote (on behalf of the working class if not necessarily from within it) about its potentially oppressive effect, especially when it was couched in terms of restorative nostalgia. In 1855 the political and literary review, The Leader (a newspaper born from Radical politics in 1850), proposed that ‘In England there are two nations.’ The allusion is to Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), where the two nations are the rich and the poor. But here the two nations are different: [T]he modern, which tends to the realization of a social progress commensurate with the progress of sciences and arts – the mediaeval, which including royalty and feudalism, is unconsciously Pre-Raphaelite, and believes in King Arthur and the Round Table.11

As this wry comment hints, the tendency of medievalism towards paternalist solutions rooted in nostalgia was well understood by the 1850s at the latest. In the decade that followed it was even more common to see satirical comment on medievalism. The leading member of the Young England faction, Conservative MP Lord John Manners, author of the state-of-England pamphlet A Plea for

9 Ruskin did not uniformly champion neo-gothic, but criticised it when it could be regarded as a superficial addition without an underlying coherence of vision. See John Ruskin, ‘Traffic’, in The Political Economy of Art; Unto this Last; Sesame and Lilies; The Crown of Wild Olive (London: Macmillan, 1912; originally published 1866), pp. 322–44. 10 On railway stations and industrial medievalism more widely, see further David Matthews, ‘Ruined Medievalism’, in Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth, eds, Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), pp. 240–66. 11 The Leader, A Political and Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 295 (17 November 1855).

Resisting Medievalism

43

National Holy-Days (1843) was lampooned for his views by The Pall Mall Gazette in 1866: [His] political creed is very easily explained. He holds fast by all the feudal sentiments, loyalty in the Stuart sense of that term, paternal condescension to the people, a Puseyite creed – that is, an Anglicized mediaevalism – a benignant poor law, a chivalric sense of national honour . . . In short, Lord John Manners may be said to believe in Church, King, Land, and Maypoles.12

The Gazette itself had been founded as a conservative evening paper the year before; the comments reveal the scepticism within conservative circles themselves towards medievalism. By the 1860s criticism came from a broad range of perspectives and it may well be that medievalism had lost a great deal of its earlier force. It had always been easy to lampoon, nevertheless: the satirical magazine Punch, established in 1841 with radical intentions, from the beginning made frequent reference to the Middle Ages, usually to joke at the expense of the period. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, medievalism was also frequently invoked to very serious purpose across a spectrum of political opinion. Satirisable though it evidently was, medievalism was not automatically viewed with suspicion by pro-working-class commentators, who routinely adopted a stance which we can now class as reflective nostalgia, and deployed elements of the past in the service of a carefully thought-out critique. In what follows I will explore two main strands in resistive medievalist thinking in the period. In the first part, I look at the tradition of valorising the pre-Conquest, Saxon past. This was a standard move on the part of working-class writers, in which the old idea of the Norman Yoke was mobilised to present a time in which labourers had had a voice which their social superiors necessarily listened to. The second strand concerns the later Middle Ages, of which working-class polemic tended to be far more critical. Typically, the Norman Conquest was seen as having introduced continental feudalism with detrimental results for labourers. In the 1840s, a time of ‘mediaeval mania’ as some at the time noted, there were many who resisted the appeal to the later medieval centuries as any kind of utopia for the working man.13 And yet there was exemplarity to be found in this period as well; in the second section, I examine the two major instances of working-class retrieval of the later medieval past.

‘Lord John Manners’, The Pall Mall Gazette, issue 416 (Saturday June 9, 1866) 1. Manners’ A Plea for National Holy-Days (London: Painter, 1843) is not strictly medievalism but a call for the restoration of all kinds of past practices belonging to a generalised past in the pre-Civil War period, including the Middle Ages. It constitutes nostalgia in a pure restorative form. 13 The phrase is specifically used by ‘L.R.’ writing in Chambers’s Journal while decrying Pre-Raphaelitism as ‘only one form of a degradation of taste’ which must be combatted wherever it is encountered. 10 April 1852, no. 432. 12

44

David Matthews

Alfred and the Saxons One of the inherent disadvantages of medievalism for mobilisation by the working class was the way in which it appeared already to have been co-opted by the conservative forces to which it owed its very existence. Certainly before the 1830s, to invoke medievalism at all was to call on a world of feudalism with all the perceived injustice that came with that image, and which was restaged in such events as the Eglinton Tournament. At the same time, it is clear that from the beginning, medievalism was never solely the property of the landed classes but could be revalued and reappropriated by both middle- and working-class interests. While Eglinton was perhaps one of the most ridiculed medievalist events in the whole period,14 within a few years tournaments in direct imitation of Eglinton were being staged at Astley’s Circus and the Cremorne Gardens, now as middle-class entertainment. When the management of the Gardens was taken over by Renton Nicholson he staged a three-day fete which included a tournament in the summer of 1843; an explicit re-enactment of Eglinton took place at Cremorne in 1849. Nicholson, notorious, disreputable but also popular, had an acute sense of the kind of entertainment that would succeed in lower-class milieux. In his obituary in 1861 he would be described as ‘literally the Robin Hood of forty-years-ago Bohemia’ and as ‘a freebooter among the aristocratic pigeons, but literally a Good Samaritan to the impecunious and fallen of both sexes’.15 Such rewritings of aristocratic medievalism aside, one of the clearest and simplest ways in which medievalism could be revalued for explicitly resistive purposes was for a distinction to be drawn between the Anglo-Saxon period and the post-Conquest period. This was routinely done in the early nineteenth century through the deployment of a version of the ‘Norman Yoke’ thesis (even if it was not articulated as such). In this view of history, the Anglo-Saxons are depicted as having fashioned a proto-democratic state which fell into feudalism after the Norman Conquest.16 Consequently the ninth-century West Saxon king, Alfred, repeatedly occurs as a figure of good government in the nineteenth century.17 In an early instance in 1832, the historical opposition was clearly laid out in poetic form: 14 See on this the still standard account, Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of The Eglinton Tournament 1839 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963), and Girouard, Return to Camelot, ch. 7. 15 Clement Scott and Cecil Howard, The Life and Reminiscences of E.L. Blanchard: With Notes from the Diary of W.M. Blanchard, 2 vols (London: Hutchinson, 1891), 1:257n3. 16 The classic statement is Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 50–122; see also Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). See also the discussion of Alfred and the notion of ‘Saxon superiority’ as ‘an integral part of the British myth of origins’ in Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 187–92 (quotation on p. 192). 17 See further on the cult of Alfred in the nineteenth century, Joanne Parker, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007); my aim here in contrast is to offer more examples of the understanding of Alfred ‘from below’.

Resisting Medievalism

45

In great King Alfred’s glorious reign, The pride and boast of Englishmen, Albion’s brave sons (or history lies,) Were much more happy, quite as wise, As we, their ‘intellectual’ race, Under ‘the Brunswick reign of grace;’ Thrice happy people! great and free, And famous for morality; Such was their native honesty, That gems were safe on hedge or tree!!! . . . . . . . Of days of yore, I’ll sing the praise – The Normans? No! Great Alfred’s days.18

These lines appeared in The Poor Man’s Guardian, a radical working-class penny newspaper closely associated with Bronterre O’Brien (later the foremost Chartist intellectual) and established by the publisher Henry Hetherington, who was frequently in trouble over his refusal to collect the stamp duty to which all newspapers were legally subject. The paper’s position can be taken as something like an official reading of the Middle Ages for working-class readers. In its five years of operation, The Poor Man’s Guardian often had recourse to the Saxon past in a reflective mode and viewed the industrial revolution as a historical rupture on a par with that brought by the Norman Conquest. It warned against the reintroduction of economic serfdom, which it regarded as a possible consequence of the industrial revolution and concomitant with the political oppression already experienced by the working classes. One editorial noted that the times before the introduction of manufacturing were, ‘we are told, by those who presume unasked to teach us . . . times of barbarous ignorance . . .’ Yet in those times, ‘men were well-fed, moral, and consequently happy’.19 While that leaves it unclear precisely which time is being referred to, elsewhere it is more clearly the Anglo-Saxon period that is being held up. In a verse entitled ‘Monarchy Unmasked’, the author condemns a series of post-medieval monarchs down to the Hanoverians, before singling out William IV as worst of all: And from a height which ALFRED’s self alone Attained, – from something loftier than a throne, Even from a kingdom’s heart – thou fall’st; and shame, The scorn of millions, brands thy blighted name!20

Elsewhere a reference to the lack of a national guard in Britain is supplemented by an enthusiastic reference to ‘our old yeoman-cavalry’, and ‘the manner of the old burgher guard of our Saxon ancestors, in which every citizen was a soldier, and

‘The Contrast, or, Alfred and William’, Poor Man’s Guardian vol. II, no. 55 (30 June 1832), p. 445. 19 The Poor Man’s Guardian, no. 47 (5 May 1832), p. 377. 20 Vol. II, no. 76 (17 November 1832), p. 615. 18

David Matthews

46

every soldier a citizen – and the troops of the line we should send to the anvil, the loom, and the plough’.21 The Poor Man’s Guardian closed in 1835, the victim of its constant legal troubles in relation to stamp duty. In one issue in the final year, a more nostalgic note was sounded in a poem entitled ‘The Days of Yore’: ‘Awake the harp that slumbers – / The merry harp of old, / And tell, in lightsome numbers, / Of England’s age of gold’.22 But it was the notion of an originary robust democracy, specifically in Saxon times, which was more typically prevalent in a range of publications in the era of Chartism. This persisted in the immediate post-Chartist period. The short-lived Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, published by John Cassell, printed an article entitled ‘A Saxon Nobleman’s House’ in 1851, which described the equality between nobleman and labourers when the latter built a hall, using ‘the woods of his demesne’ and ‘the labour of his bondsmen’: it was thatched with reeds or straw, or roofed with wooden shingles. . . . The lord and his ‘hearthmen’ – a significant appellation given to the most familiar retainers – sat by the same fire at which their repast was cooked, and at night retired to share the same dormitory, which served also as a council-chamber.23

This vision of equality was supplemented in 1852 in the same journal by the printed version of two lectures on the Anglo-Saxon way of life given by the radical Birmingham preacher George Dawson. Dawson praised the hospitality of the Saxons, who ‘were of the free-and-easy sort’: [Y]ou were at home with them, and did what you liked. They held the fair sex in high estimation; they advocated women’s freedom, not rights; and they understood woman’s position, and were more influenced by woman than were the Jews. The Saxons believed that women have an inherent divinity.

This picture was contrasted with that of the post-Conquest period; the Normans, Dawson suggested, ‘had more wit than those they came among . . . The Saxons were admirable fellows, no doubt, but slowish.’24 Still more praise of Alfred was printed in 1852: To Alfred the Great, king of England, the old Latin maxim, De mortuis nil nisi bonum (let nothing but good be said of the dead), does not apply; for the historians have recorded no act of his which detracts from his character as a man or his honour as a king; and it would therefore be very difficult, at this distance of of [sic] time, to say any harm of him.25 Vol. II, no. 99 (27 April 1833), p. 131. Vol. IV, no. 189 (17 January 1835), p. 398. 23 Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, vol. I, new series, no. 12 (20 December 1851), p. 192. 24 Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, vol. II, new series, no. 33 (15 May 1852), pp. 106–8. 25 Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, vol. III, new series, no. 63 (11 December 1852), pp. 166–67. 21

22

Resisting Medievalism

47

Similarly, The British Workman, founded in 1855, soon engaged in the by then unsurprising praise of Alfred. In an 1857 issue Alfred was singled out specifically because of the translation program which he supposedly embarked on, empowering ordinary men and women. Alongside an illustration of Alfred sitting with the ‘learned men of his court’, the article argued for Alfred as ‘unsurpassed’ among monarchs and in some ways ‘unequalled, either in the history of our own or other countries’, chiefly because of his role in bringing learning to the people.26 There was no great originality in upholding the virtues of the Anglo-Saxon state in this regard; the ‘Norman Yoke’ was, as Hill has shown, a doctrine in existence long before the acceleration of industrial capitalism gave it particular appeal. But this working-class use of the idea is fundamentally different from the approach to the Anglo-Saxon past in Whig historiography that Jann has outlined. For E. A. Freeman, Thomas Macaulay and John Green, building on the work of Stubbs and the Anglo-Saxon history of Sharon Turner, there could not be a complete rupture at the Norman Conquest.27 Instead, in the classic Whig view it had to be the case that the native English predisposition to do things by democratic gatherings (such as the fabled ‘folkmoot’) would persist, and eventually overcome the Norman monarchs’ tyrannical tendencies. The Normans would in time be converted to the Germanic peoples’ innately democratic ways, thereby being recalled to their own Teutonic origins. Native English ‘constitutionalism’ could consequently be seen to have persisted continuously.28 The working-class response, less invested in the myth of continuity and inherently inclined to see rupture, could afford to describe a calamitous break at the time of the Conquest. But like conservative appropriators of the medieval historical past, the working-class papers were thoroughly invested in the most powerful myth of that history: the Norman Yoke with its ideas of the Saxon proto-democracy and equality, with Alfred as the benign centre of that state. As Mike Sanders discusses in his chapter in this volume, the myth of the Anglo-Saxon constitution had a role in legitimating Chartism. The difference is that these myths were not for the most part deployed in the service of a restorative nostalgia. For working-class commentators it was not a matter of trying to live, in some sense, in the Saxon past, but rather to refashion the industrial present with a new recognition of its inadequacies where working people were concerned. None of this was specifically revolutionary in its force. The exemplary character of this Saxon past lay in its democratic potential. This was a highly reflective form of nostalgia in which no one was seriously suggesting a return to the Saxon past, so much as a recalibration of the present so that capitalists and workers should exist in a relationship much more like that of Saxon lords and peasants, as they were imagined to have done in a better past. ‘Alfred the Great’, British Workman, no. 27 (1857), p. 108. E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (1867–79); William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England (1873–78); John Richard Green, Short History of the English People (1874); The Making of England (1882); The Conquest of England (1883). 28 Jann, ‘Democratic Myths’, 130–31. On the problem that Alfred posed to Victorian notions of progress (in that he was often put forward as the true innovator of many modern institutions), see Parker, England’s Darling, ch. 5. 26 27

48

David Matthews

Fig. 2.1. Illustration to ‘Alfred the Great’ in British Workman in 1857. The image shows two very popular ideas about Alfred. One is the notion of the witenagemot, the council of learned men who enhanced the democratic potential of Alfredian rule; the other is of Alfred as himself a learned figure.

From Charters to Tyler: Democracy and Revolution While espousing the notion of equality for labourers in the Saxon past, the working-class penny papers for the most part maintained a much more critical attitude to the post-Conquest Middle Ages, the time of feudal repression. A poem in The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor in 1852, with the title ‘The Age of Chivalry’, drily encapsulates the general attitude: The age of chivalry has gone, With all its feudal sheen; No knightly banners flout the sky, No men-at-arms are seen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The age of chivalry has gone, Its bondage passed away; And never may its age return, All English freemen say.29

29 S. B. Beal, ‘The Age of Chivalry’, The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, vol. III, n.s. no. 62 (4 December 1852), p. 154. The author was perhaps the country curate and future Sinologist Samuel Beal (see R. K. Douglas, revised by Janette Ryan, ‘Beal, Samuel

Resisting Medievalism

49

When this was published in 1852, there was already, as we have seen, a consciousness of ‘mediaeval mania’. Pre-Raphaelitism was under discussion, neo-gothic building was widespread and memories lingered of the Great Exhibition with its Mediaeval Court featuring the designs and artefacts of Pugin. There was deep scepticism across the political spectrum towards what would later be referred to as ‘paternal feudalism’.30 It was also in 1852 that the Star of Freedom (as the Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, was by then known) referred to the ‘moneyocracy’ of Manchester, describing the ‘tyranny’ it supported ‘as the most degrading and the most coldblooded that the world as [sic] ever yet submitted to. Feudalism was bad enough, but this is even worse.’31 Throughout the 1840s, when medievalism was on the rise and Chartism remained a powerful voice, the Northern Star consistently paralleled medieval feudalism with the contemporary oppression of workers, whose ‘state of bondage’, as one essay put it, was worse than the ‘feudal vassalage’ of the past.32 The way in which medieval feudalism led directly to a modern version of the same thing was encapsulated in number 29 of ‘Songs for the People’ in 1846: William with his brigand horde, First conquer’d us with fire and sword, And introduced the feudal Lord Who robbed us of our Land. Their base descendants laws have made, The commons lent a willing aid, Man’s dearest rights they did invade, To steal away our Land.33

Such papers did not, however, entirely ignore the later Middle Ages. Once again mirroring Whig historiography, when they turned to the period they fixed on the perceived importance of Magna Carta and the supposed origins of parliament in the thirteenth century. Hence in 1833 The Poor Man’s Guardian recorded the ‘Minutes of the National Union of the Working Classes’, which stated: ‘we go back to first principles [of equality] and will fight for our Magna Charta as the barons did at Runnymede’.34 Magna Carta was, obviously enough, the originary charter, to which Chartism was deeply committed. The powerful mythology of the ‘Great Charter’ of 1215 opened up the possibility that even under feudalism the medieval past might have some exemplarity for the working man and woman. But the mention in the minutes of ‘the barons’ at Runnymede also points up the potential difficulties of this historical moment. Magna Carta was essentially a baronial initiative, so the barons (1825–1889)’, ODNB. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1797). Beal’s title is likely a reference to Edmund Burke’s own lament for the passing of chivalry in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). 30 The term is used by the novelist James Payn in an essay entitled ‘A Mediaeval Mistake’ in Belgravia: A London Magazine, vol. 37, no. 148 (February 1879). Like his friend Dickens, the Cambridge-educated Payn was broadly sceptical about the mediaeval mania. 31 Star of Freedom, second series 1, no. 1 (22 May 1852). 32 Northern Star, and Leeds General Advertiser, vol. 3, no. 125 (4 April 1840). 33 Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal, vol. 10, no. 459 (29 August 1846). 34 Vol. III, No. 128 (16 November 1833), p. 368.

David Matthews

50

had to be seen to be working on behalf of those lower down the social scale or this would become simply another instance of paternal feudalism. The imagined events at Runnymede were, nevertheless, too useful to be ignored. ‘[I]n declaring that no scutage, or tax, should be raised in the kingdom without the consent of the Council of State’, ran one editorial in The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor in 1851, ‘the principle is involved, so dear to every Englishman, that THE CONSENT OF THE COMMUNITY IS ESSENTIAL TO JUST TAXATION.’35 The doctrine alluded to here was specifically associated with parliamentary struggles over monarchical taxation demands in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The differences between the working-class approach to Magna Carta and those of Whigs or conservatives were a matter of nuance. There was fundamental agreement on the importance of the charter because of the crucial role it played in the constitutionalist story. The charter could work for all sides because, as Chris Waters has noted of medievalism in general, it was not ‘a coherent discourse, a series of agreed upon images and metaphors which all could share’. Instead, its appeal lay in the fact that ‘it was suitably vague and malleable enough for individuals to assume various understandings of the medieval past within its frames of reference’.36 One way of dealing with the awkwardness of the role of the barons in forcing concessions from King John was simply to deny them their role. In 1846 the Northern Star published a ‘catechism proper for teaching in every school’ which began by asking, ‘Who laid the foundations of our free institutions, parliaments, representation, and trial by jury?’, to which the answer was, ‘The old Anglo-Saxon people’. It continued: Who attempted to wring the Magna Charta from King John, and failed? The barons. Who won it? The bowmen of England, who drove John and the barons too, and their invited French king, before them, and compelled Henry III. to give them a still better charter.37

This revisionist account refers to the period after the death of King John in 1216 and the succession of the nine-year-old Henry III. England was in the middle of civil war and Louis of France had occupied parts of the south-east. This foreign army was soon driven out by forces under William Marshal (which is where the heroic ‘bowmen of England’ must be imagined to feature). Magna Carta was revised and confirmed in this period. Through such adjustments of a malleable historical record the feudal period could be turned to account from the working-class viewpoint. The result, in this case, was not very divergent from Whig understandings. By contrast the other late medieval historical moment typically mobilised by working-class commentary involved a very sharp divergence between traditionalist views of the period, and the new political vision.

The Working Man’s Friend and Family Instructor, vol. VII, old series, no. 82 (26 July 1851), pp. 102–4. 36 Waters, ‘Marxism, Medievalism and Popular Culture’, p. 140. 37 Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal, vol. 9, no. 465 (10 October 1846). 35

Resisting Medievalism

51

Few medieval centuries are more politically malleable than the fourteenth. For some, it was a time of obvious calamity, of plague and war. ‘What a picture of English manners and morality in the fourteenth century!’ The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor noted in 1853: ‘The “good old times” were often very bad old times, viewed by the light of present-day civilisation.’38 Early in the nineteenth century, the fourteenth had been thoroughly co-opted by conservative interests, which saw in it the emergence of a strong national monarchy, especially via the figure of Edward III; later, Edward’s militarism was more widely condemned and thought to have held back the development of parliament.39 Nevertheless, the socialist William Morris was drawn to it. Indeed, his late nineteenth-century refashionings of the fourteenth century are not so very different from the Saxon way of life described above in the ‘Saxon Nobleman’s Home’. In News from Nowhere it is a version of the fourteenth century that serves as the basis for future utopia. For Chartists and their associates generally, however, the fourteenth century was an evil time. Yet it could offer some political purchase. One surprising rehabilitation of the fourteenth century is the reuse of the late fourteenth-century rebel, Wat Tyler. The emergence of Tyler, also explored by Stephen Basdeo and Stephen Knight in this volume, is a forgotten aspect of nineteenth-century medievalism. Two other popular heroes who emerged in the period, King Arthur and Robin Hood, remain well known today.40 Wat Tyler, the leader of the 1381 rebels, was as famous as this legendary pair in the early Victorian period. As Basdeo has explained, Tyler was a figure frequently invoked from within Chartism while in his chapter, Stephen Knight discusses Pierce Egan’s 1841 novel, Wat Tyler; or the Rebellion of 1381. Tyler’s reappearance in the 1840s must be connected to the well-known story of Robert Southey’s 1794 play Wat Tyler, revived to its author’s embarrassment in his less radical days in 1817. But Southey’s is only the most celebrated avatar of Wat Tyler in the period. An analysis of ephemeral media shows that Tyler was frequently and favourably cited as a heroic figure of rebellion. Among famous medieval rebel figures, historical and fictional, it is Robin Hood whose survivals are most plentiful in recent modernity. But in the early nineteenth century, there is a strong case to suggest that it was Tyler who was the more celebrated figure, frequently to be found behind the more revolutionary working-class energies of the time. Southey’s play was written in 1794, the year that such radicals as Thomas Holcroft were arrested and tried for sedition. On the fringes of radical circles was the scholar and editor Joseph Ritson. As Knight notes in his chapter, Ritson was an overt admirer of the French Revolution; given that he used the revolutionary calendar Vol. III, new series, no. 72 (12 February 1853), pp. 306–7. See Gribling, The Image of Edward the Black Prince, p. 68. 40 Before Malory’s Morte Darthur was revived in fresh editions which appeared in 1817, King Arthur had been largely a figure of fun in the eighteenth century. I have discussed this in ‘Scholarship and Popular Culture in the Nineteenth Century’ in Helen Fulton, ed., A Companion to Arthurian Literature (Maldon, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 355–67. See also Stephen Knight, ‘Robin Hood versus King Arthur’, in David Matthews, ed., In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 9–24. Parker, England’s Darling, traces the emergence of King Alfred as popular hero in the period and notes his eclipse by Arthur. 38 39

David Matthews

52

in dating his correspondence in this period, he was somewhat fortunate to have avoided attracting official attention himself when, in May 1794, various prominent radicals were arrested.41 A partial response came from him in the form of his celebrated 1795 Robin Hood anthology.42 But Robin Hood, again as Knight outlines, was politically compromised in the period by Ritson’s decision to accept the idea that he was in reality a displaced aristocrat. It was instead Wat Tyler who would appeal more strongly to radicals of the generation after 1794. Tyler, a historical figure, was a leader of the so-called Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, which was a response to the deeply unpopular Poll Tax levied in the time of Richard II.43 Tyler was believed to be unequivocally an artisan; his story was well known from the chronicle of Jean Froissart. Southey’s play established the outlines of his story, telling how he had killed a tax collector who had assaulted his daughter. Tyler led a huge band of rebels to Blackheath outside London where he spoke with Richard II himself, before he was murdered by William Walworth, Mayor of London, and the peasant rebels were dispersed with vague promises of change. While it is clear that to some in the early nineteenth century Tyler was nothing but an ‘insolent’ villain, he was already being invoked as a hero even before the 1817 revival of Southey’s play. In June 1817 the insurrectionary radical James Watson (not the future editor of The Working Man’s Friend and Political Magazine of the same name) was acquitted at his trial for high treason (after leading riots the previous December). He had addressed a meeting of radicals in which he referred in familiar fashion to the way in which ‘Ever since the Norman Conquest, Kings (and Lords) have been deluding you.’ He alluded to one of his co-defendants, who had been singled out ‘as a second Wat Tyler’. This was evidently intended by officialdom as a slur, but Watson went on to revalue the name: No bad title; for be it recollected that Wat Tyler stepped boldly forward for the purpose of resisting an oppressive tax – and would have succeeded had he not been basely murdered by William Walworth, then lord mayor of London. But we have no bull-rush lord-mayor now: and if he had been surrounded by thousands of his fellow countrymen as I am now, he need not doubt his success.44

From about this time onwards, the use of Tyler as positive exemplar of rebellion clearly became routine. In July 1819 Henry Hunt addressed a reform meeting in Smithfield. While Hunt, an associate of Watson’s, had resisted Watson’s inclination to violence, he still invoked Tyler as a figure of rebellion. Hunt asked his listeners Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1938), 1:159–60. 42 Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which Are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life, 2 vols (London: T. Egerton and J. Johnson, 1795). 43 As noted in the Introduction, ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ is today a term most historians resist; we use it throughout this volume as it reflects the typical nineteenth-century usage. 44 Observer, 9 June 1817. For Tyler as ‘insolent’ villain, see John Wilson Croker’s Stories selected from the History of England, from the Conquest to the Revolution. For Children (London: John Murray, 1817). 41

Resisting Medievalism

53

to avoid breaches of the peace, which would only ‘gratify the blood-thirsty villains who direct, or are employed to direct the venal press’. But, he continued, ‘if I receive the same provocation to-day that Watt Tyler did on a former occasion, I would put myself at the head of the people to obtain redress’.45 The words were prescient; the following month Hunt was at another rally, in Manchester, which was violently broken up by authorities: the infamous Peterloo Massacre. Once it appeared in its unlicensed printings Southey’s play about Tyler was a lively presence. Henry Hetherington was one publisher associated with its promotion in a cheap edition.46 Throughout 1831–33, Watson’s Working Man’s Friend and Political Magazine frequently began with a quotation from the play, as did The Republican in July 1831. Hence in the years before Chartism, it is clear that Wat Tyler’s fame as a rebel against unfair taxation was widespread. It is also clear that some of the voices, such as Hetherington’s and (newspaper editor) Watson’s, which judiciously called for democratic reform, were equally interested in the more explicitly revolutionary character of Tyler and what was then typically thought of as the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’. By the middle of the century Tyler was widely accepted as ‘that glorious hero of the proletarians’.47 A Chartist named Isaac Jefferson, arrested after disturbances in Bradford in 1848, was reportedly known as ‘Wat Tyler’.48 Tyler could be an antecedent for modern socialism: taking the well-known verse associated with 1381, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?’ and linking it to Tyler, the Northern Star said in 1850 that this had been ‘the motto of every servile and peasant insurrection recorded in history’.49 He could be mobilised against corporal punishment: a Colonel Thompson, in 1850, ‘appealed to the chronicles of Wat Tyler in proof that English reformers had always resisted its introduction’.50 By this time Tyler was clearly central to any working-class version of history. In a report of a lecture on the teaching of working-class history given at the inauguration of the Salford Working Men’s College in 1858, the lecturer (the great entrepreneur of medieval studies, Frederick Furnivall) advocated that his hearers should study ‘the working class in all past times, and the growth of their power, from the era of Wat Tyler’s rebellion to the day when the working men of England sent from their ranks the armies which fought in the Crimea and India’.51 The attraction of Tyler was in part that he was out of his time, a transtemporal figure. As with any martyr, his true appeal lay in the fact that he lived on. His importance was therefore as a resister which meant that his significance was enhanced rather than diminished by the fact that he lived in perhaps the worst of the feudal centuries from the point of view of working-class thinkers. Once again, then, there Observer, 25 July 1819. An advertisement in The Poor Man’s Guardian in 1834 for ‘Hetherington’s Unstamped Repository and General Periodical Publication Warehouse’ listed a printing of ‘Wat Tyler, by R. Southey, with Historical Engravings’ for 3d. Poor Man’s Guardian, no. 148 (5 April 1834). 47 Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal, vol. 13, no. 645 (2 March 1850). 48 The Manchester Guardian, 19 July 1848. 49 Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal, vol. 13, no. 676 (5 October 1850). The verse is in fact more usually associated with John Ball. 50 Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal, vol. 13, no. 652 (27 April 1850). 51 Salford Working Men’s College Inaugural Soiree, The Manchester Guardian, 29 June 1858. 45

46

David Matthews

54

is little ‘restorative’ nostalgia in sight where the valorisation of Tyler is concerned. The fourteenth century in fact for the most part represents all that the modern working class wants to resist and never revisit. The cult of Tyler is a form of reflective nostalgia promoted in the hope that a better future can be constructed out of those fleeting moments of exemplarity from the medieval past. Conclusion As this survey has shown – and as the cultural examples drawn upon in other chapters demonstrate – the working-class appropriation of medievalism in the first half of the nineteenth century took place largely in ephemeral and non-canonical sources: popular entertainments, popular novels, poetry found in cheap newspapers, and perhaps above all, anonymous comment in newspapers. The fact of this ephemerality, however, should not distract from the fact that the era of Ivanhoe and Eglinton was also the era of Wat Tyler and Cremorne. The feudalism so enthusiastically celebrated in one kind of history of the English constitution was as strongly resisted in another. While some of the sources I have cited here, such as the more middle-class newspapers, are not strictly working-class and do not necessarily even reflect working-class opinion, they are important as showing that the aristocratic-conservative vision of the ‘chivalric’ past did not at any time command hegemony. While it would be difficult to go further into the precise impact on readers of the kinds of attitudes described here, and to describe the extent of resistance to aristocratic medievalism in working-class discourse, as the closer look I have taken here at the records suggests, Jann, Dellheim and Waters were all correct about resistive medievalism.52 The essentially elastic nature of medievalism made it a viable resource for working-class political theory, one which was extensively drawn upon. There is every suggestion here that medievalism was never the preserve of conservative interests, but was in fact a commonplace of working-class discourse about, and use of, the past.

Jann, ‘Democratic Myths’; Dellheim, ‘Interpreting Victorian Medievalism’; Waters, ‘Marxism, Medievalism and Popular Culture’. 52

3 How Radical was Rienzi? The Nineteenth-Century Representation of the Roman Revolutionary Republican in the British Cultural Imagination Rosemary Mitchell

T

his chapter will explore a range of British representations of Cola di Rienzi (or, more accurately, Rienzo), the fourteenth-century Roman revolutionary leader whose attempt to restore Rome to its ancient republican glory and to curb aristocratic power ended in his own violent death. The reputation of Rienzi, considered for some three hundred years to be nothing more than a demagogic tyrant, began to rise in the late eighteenth century, influenced by both the Neo-Classical Revival and Romanticism, and events such as the American and French Revolutions. While scholars have already begun to explore Rienzi’s popularity in nineteenth-century historical and heritage cultures,1 I will focus, firstly, on how and why his reputation both grew and improved in the British cultural imagination. Secondly, I will compare these well-known representations with more radical ones – notably, the dramatic fragment by Friedrich Engels (1840/41), and Rienzi’s appearances in The Northern Star and other Chartist publications. I will explore how working-class Chartists, socialists and radicals reworked him to their purposes, and how their versions differed from those of their less radical and/or more middle-class contemporaries, demonstrating that a distinctively radical Rienzi existed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, a key element in what we might call the subaltern medievalisms of the nineteenth century explored in this volume. A. Collins, Greater than Emperor: Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313–54) and the World of Fourteenth-Century Rome (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Italo M. Battafarono, Cola di Rienzo: Mito e Rivoluzione nei Drammi di Engels, Gaillard, Mosen, e Wagner (Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento, 2006); Carie E. Beneš, ‘Mapping a Roman Legend: The House of Cola di Rienzo from Piranesi to Baedeker’, Italian Culture 26 (2008), 57–83. 1

Rosemary Mitchell

56

Born about 1313, Rienzi was the son of a tavern-keeper, but he received a classical education and become a city notary in Rome. In 1343, he was sent on a mission to Pope Clement VI, at Avignon (where the papacy was then established, to escape the internecine warfare of the Roman aristocracy). It was this state of lawlessness which Rienzi was anxious to end: with the initial support of the pope and many of the people, he staged a coup d’état in May 1347, was appointed tribune, and introduced stern measures against the aristocratic factions led by the Colonna and Orsini families. Additionally, he aimed to create an Italian federation of states, under the leadership of Rome, and disputed the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. His increasingly extravagant and authoritarian leadership undermined his regime, as too his introduction of new taxes and his excommunication by the now uneasy pope. An aristocratic attempt to bring him down by military force was defeated in November, but he was forced to flee in December 1347. After two years in hiding, he emerged at the court of Emperor Charles IV, who handed him over to the pope. After Clement died in 1352, the new pope supported his restoration with the title of senator, but his rule was short-lived: his execution of a soldier of fortune and new taxes brought him down after only two months, and he was murdered by a mob whilst attempting to escape in disguise in late 1354. From his death until the eighteenth century, Rienzi’s reputation was a largely negative one. Amanda Collins comments that ‘Cola would seem to have undergone a form of damnatio memoriae in the fifteenth century’, and – although Machiavelli’s account in his History of Florence (1532) was favourable – the ecclesiastical historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were highly critical. It was not until 1733, when the Jesuit Jean-Antoine de Cerceau’s Conjuration de Nicolas Gabrini, dit Rienzi, Tyran de Rome en 1347 gave a more positive account of Rienzi that his reputation began to revive: Cerceau’s account influenced both Schiller and Byron.2 However, for the British audience, the most influential late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts were those in English, and it is to these representations of Rienzi – which shaped his afterlife in Victorian medievalism – I will now turn. Enlightenment to Romanticism: The Rienzi of Gibbon, Sismondi and Byron While Gibbon’s Enlightenment narrative of Rienzi’s life and career was more sympathetic than many earlier accounts, it was still highly critical. For Gibbon, Rienzi’s story offered a narrative in miniature of the overarching thesis of his historical work – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) – which attributed the fall of the empire to its loss of civic virtues (partially as a result of the advent of otherworldly Christianity), which made it prey to decadence, division and barbarian attack.3 Gibbon recorded, with a patrician disdain, that Rienzi was lowborn, and that his ‘liberal education’ was eventually to be the cause of his downfall. While admitting that Rome was in public disorder because of aristocratic feuds, he did not endorse the effect of Rienzi’s ‘prompt and persuasive’ eloquence: ‘the Collins, Greater than Emperor, 4–5. The historiography on Gibbon and Decline and Fall is extensive, but a good starting point is the work of J. G. A. Pocock. 2 3

How Radical was Rienzi?

57

multitude is always prone to envy and censure’. Rienzi was, in Gibbon’s opinion, only able to secure his own elevation to the position of tribune because of the ‘supine ignorance of the aristocrats’, the support of the ‘simple’ bishop of Orvieto, and the adulation of the people who ‘understood little and hoped much’.5 Still, he found Rienzi’s ‘sudden, though transient, reformation of Rome’ praiseworthy, recognising the beneficial effects of his ‘salutary laws and reforms’, which restored order and justice, allowing trade and industry to revive.6 He also sympathised with Rienzi’s ‘vast, and perhaps visionary idea of uniting Italy in a great federative republic’, arguing that had ‘private interest’ had given way to ‘the public welfare’ in the other Italian states, Rienzi might have succeeded in ending Italy’s internecine divisions and ‘have closed the Alps against the Barbarians of the North’.7 Clearly, Gibbon was constantly referring back to the example of ancient Rome – as did Rienzi himself did – to explain the tribune’s actions and eventual failure, identifying as one of the causes the lack of patriotic virtue among the people themselves. However, despite his initial success, Gibbon argued, Rienzi’s downfall was inevitable – and it was largely to be attributed to Rienzi himself. If the people lacked the virtues of their predecessors, so too did their leader. ‘The faculties of Rienzi were not balanced by cool and commanding reason’, argued the Enlightenment historian, adding that his ‘virtues were insensibly tinctured with the adjacent vices: justice with cruelty, liberality with profusion, and the desire for fame with puerile and ostentatious vanity’.8 He deplored the ostentation of the tribune’s appearance in public, his departure from ‘the strict rule of frugality and abstinence’, his ‘presumption’ in sleeping in the sanctuary of a church the night before he was knighted, and his unwise humiliation of the aristocracy, culminating in a skirmish in which leading members of the Colonna family were killed.9 Gibbon concluded his account with a typically balanced assessment, putting the blame for the failure of his regime on both Rienzi himself and the lack of patriotic and civic virtue in medieval Italy: 4

Posterity will compare the virtues and failings of this extraordinary man: but in a long period of anarchy and servitude, the name of Rienzi has often been celebrated as the deliverer of his country, and the last of the Roman patriots.10

Thus Gibbon found many flaws in Rienzi, and no virtues in the Roman ‘mob’ who supported him. However, the most influential response to Gibbon by a Romantic historian did not arrive at entirely different conclusions. The Swiss-born liberal historian, Jean Charles Léonard Sismonde de Sismondi, showed more sympathy with both Rienzi and the Roman people, but still offered a surprisingly critical portrait of the medieval revolutionary. His Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen Age (1807–18) traced the struggle of the Italian people to achieve liberty, painting a E. Gibbon, The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (XXX; this edition, London: T. Cadell et al., 1820), pp. 331–32. Quotation is on 332. 5 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, pp. 333–36. Quotations on 333, 335. 6 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, pp. 336–39. Quotations on 336, 339. 7 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, p. 342. 8 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, p. 344. 9 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, pp. 342–54. Quotations on 347, 349. 10 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, p. 362. 4

58

Rosemary Mitchell

picture of the medieval context as one in which a quest for liberty and political unity was impeded by a selfish and divisive aristocracy, a grasping and manipulative church, and unhelpful foreign interventions. British readers were most likely to encounter Sismondi’s account in the abridged translation which he himself produced in the early 1830s at the request of Dionysius Lardner (1793–1859), the editor of the ‘Cabinet Cyclopædia’ (1830–44). Clearly, Sismondi was well aware of the context of the 1830 revolutions in Europe and the disturbances surrounding the 1832 Reform Act in Britain: he commented in the preface to this 1832 volume that ‘the rights of nations are weighed anew in the balance of public opinion’. Therefore, he informed his readers, this new version of his history was to be published in ‘two languages of freemen’ (French and English) to ‘lay before the two powerful nations which glory in being without a master, the claims of ill-fated Italy to enjoy the same freedom’.11 This edition carried on its title-page an illustration by Henry Corbould of ‘Cola di Rienzi interpreting the ancient inscriptions to the people of Rome’: it would be interesting to know whether Sismondi saw it as emblematic of his own role as a liberal historian. Adrian Lyttelton stresses that Sismondi’s original History had appealed to ‘aristocratic radicals’ such as Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, and that ‘between 1814 and 1821, [he] tried to intervene actively in English politics, in favour of Italian liberty’.12 Both Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe and Lyttelton point that it was not just the elite who were influenced by Sismondi’s History – working-class radicals and Chartists were also among his readership13 – and it is likely that this volume was the principal mode of dissemination. Sismondi’s 1832 account of Rienzi’s career began with a reference to his friendship with Petrarch and their shared interest in the revival of learning.14 While crediting Rienzi with ‘more elevation of soul and enthusiasm’ than his famous friend, he stressed that Rienzi should not be seen as primarily committed to liberty: ‘he was a more ardent Roman than republican; seeking rather to restore the ancient sovereignty of the city than the liberty of mankind’.15 Thus, for Sismondi, Rienzi was less of a liberal than a nationalist – and less of a revolutionary than a scholar and a dreamer: But Cola di Rienzo, though eloquent, learned, and a poet, was neither a statesman nor a warrior; he knew not how to consolidate this good state, to which he pretended to have restored the Romans. He continued to occupy them with allegories, festivals and processions, while they demanded of him something more positive . . .16 11 J. C. L. de Sismondi, A History of the Italian Republics, being a View of the Origin, Progress, and Fall of Italian Freedom (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1832), author’s preface, p. v. 12 Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Sismondi, the Republic and Liberty: between Italy and England, the City and the Nation’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17:2 (2012), 168–82. Quotations on 174. 13 Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats (London and Woodbridge: The Royal Historical Society and the Boydell Press, 2014), pp. 68–69. 14 Sismondi, History, pp. 154–55. 15 Sismondi, History, p. 155. 16 Sismondi, History, p. 156.

How Radical was Rienzi?

59

During his second period in power, Sismondi argued, Rienzi was even less effective: he was ‘now only an instrument in the hands of the [papal] legate, and it did not depend on him to realise the hopes which he had excited’.17 Sismondi, therefore, stressed Rienzi’s inadequacy as a popular leader, his ultimate failure to fulfil the aspirations of the people: for him, it was Rienzi who had failed the Romans, rather than the other way round. The influence of the original version of Sismondi’s History is apparent in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, although the poet offered a much more positive reading of Rienzi as a freedom-fighter and a rare example of Roman republican virtue, in the dark ages of medieval Italy. Canto IV (1818) described the world-weary protagonist’s journey through Italian cities, in which he reflects on the fate of civilisations and the fall of tyrants (including Napoleon) and empires: Then turn we to our latest tribune’s name, From her ten thousand tyrants turn to thee, Redeemer of dark centuries of shame – The friend of Petrarch – hope of Italy – Rienzi! last of Romans! While the tree Of freedom’s withered trunk puts forth a leaf, Even for thy tomb a garland let it be – The forum’s champion, and the people’s chief – Her new-born Numa thou, with reign, alas! too brief.18

Byron’s brief sketch of Rienzi’s career lacked the critical tone of both Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Sismondi’s 1832 account, offering an unambiguous celebration of the medieval revolutionary – which would be a key influence on radical and Chartist interpretations – and no explanation for his downfall.19 Mary Russell Mitford’s Rienzi: A Woman Writer’s Restatement of Gibbon’s Fallen Hero However, Byron’s allusion to Rienzi was not the most influential British Romantic response to the medieval revolutionary’s life and career. Mary Russell Mitford’s Rienzi: A Tragedy, In Five Acts (1828) played a greater role in his rehabilitation, even though her preface suggested a continuity with Enlightenment interpretations, citing Gibbon as a key source, in addition to Abbé de Sade’s Mémoires pour la Vie de François Pétrarque (1764–67).20 Although Mitford did not comment on the contemporary context in her preface, it is evident that Rienzi was partly a reflection on the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, as it detailed the rise and fall of an overly Sismondi, History, p. 157. H. F. Tozer, ed., Byron: Childe Harold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886; this impression, 1937), p. 171. 19 Carla Pomarè, Byron and the Discourses of History (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), explores Byron’s engagement with history and history-writing. 20 M. R. Mitford, Rienzi: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (London: John Cumberland, 1828), preface, v. 17

18

Rosemary Mitchell

60

ambitious republican hero: ‘though stained with much ambition, he was one/ of the earth’s great spirits’.21 In the course of the play, Mitford succeeded in shifting the sympathy of the audience from Rienzi to his aristocratic (and plebeian) opponents, particularly the character of (fictional) Angelo Colonna, an early ally of Rienzi, and his son-in-law. Ultimately, the drama suggested that the status quo – if not ideal – is a safer option than revolutionary republicanism, which inevitably declines into tyranny. As several critics note, there was also a strong emphasis on the destructive character of politics on the private life of the home and heart, and the women characters (all fictional) were given an unusually large amount of the dialogue, meaning that criticisms of Rienzi have a gendered dimension in Mitford’s drama.22 The first scene of the play establishes the dire state of the city in which lawless noblemen are oppressing the citizens, and presents Cola di Rienzi as the voice of the people’s ‘righteous indignation’ against ‘tyrants and tyranny’.23 But soon there are hints of the flawed character of the hero, who seems as much motivated by vengeance (for the death of his young brother at the hand of one of the Orsini) as a thirst for republican ‘freedom’.24 The nobles’ first attempt to bring down his regime – by assassination at the marriage banquet of Angelo and Rienzi’s daughter, Claudia – still shows Rienzi in a positive light, as he pardons the conspirators.25 But the next scene shows him issuing a ‘rash and insolent summons’ to the pope, and to the princely rivals for the position of Holy Roman Emperor. Mitford clearly believed that this was the point at which Rienzi became the architect of his own downfall, a ‘common tale of low ambition’.26 Hereafter, she directed the audience’s sympathies towards the nobility, as Rienzi has become a tyrant himself, rather than the scourge of tyranny. In the first scene of the final act, Rienzi – though he defeats the noble rebels – finds that his own soldiers ‘mutter low curses as they fight, and yearn/for their old leaders’, showing that the populace as well as the aristocracy are ranged against him. Hearing the approach of the nobility and the people to kill him, Rienzi realises the error of his ways, wishing that he had laid his love of pomp, ‘high ambition, and hot lust of rule . . . upon the altar/Of Liberty, divinest Liberty!’27 While Mitford presented Rienzi as the doomed Romantic hero, ultimately her account offered a critical assessment based on that of Gibbon, although – unlike the historian of Roman degeneracy – she did not criticise the people for their lack of civic virtue; to this extent, her interpretation shares ground with Sismondi’s, although he did not, as Mitford did, partially exonerate the nobles (once they become victims of tyranny themselves). Reviewers of Mitford’s play reflected this interpretation. The theatrical critic of The Examiner, for instance, offered a short account of Rienzi’s Mitford, Rienzi, act 5, sc. 2, p. 65. Greg Kucich, ‘Baillie, Mitford, and the ‘Different Track’ of Women’s Historical Drama on the Romantic Stage’, in L. M. Crisafulli and K. Elam, eds, Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 21–42, and Elizabeth Raisanen, ‘‘Speech/is your fit weapon’: Mary Russell Mitford’s Rienzi and the Gendering of Speech Acts’, European Romantic Review 22:2 (2011), 209–33. 23 Mitford, Rienzi, act 1, sc. 1, pp. 11–15. Quotations on 15. 24 Mitford, Rienzi, act 1, sc. 2, pp. 15–19. 25 Mitford, Rienzi, act 4, sc. 1, pp. 38–45. 26 Mitford, Rienzi, act 4, sc. 2, pp. 45–50. Quotations on 47–48. 27 Mitford, Rienzi, act 5, sc. 1, p. 64. 21

22

How Radical was Rienzi?

61

career for his readers, commenting that although the Roman tribune rose to power through ‘energy and eloquence’ and exercised his authority ‘wisely . . . for a time’, he brought about his own downfall: ‘Like many other demagogues . . . he soon began to abuse his power, lost the confidence of the people, and secretly withdrew from Rome.’28 Overall the reception of the play was highly favourable, and its long run at Drury Lane and elsewhere over the next twenty years meant that it was one of the key early nineteenth-century representations of Rienzi which shaped perceptions of him in British culture.29 The longevity of the play’s popularity may well be linked to the publication of the most influential British representation of all: Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi: A Republican Hero in an Unheroic Age Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1835 historical novel, Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes, presented a more sympathetic portrait of its hero than any previous representation, accrediting his downfall to the failings of other protagonists, rather than Rienzi himself. In his preface to the first edition, Bulwer-Lytton argued that ‘a very remarkable man has been superficially judged’, a belief which originally impelled him towards the writing of ‘a more serious work on the life and times of Rienzi’ than a novel. Despite later renouncing ‘the biography to commence the fiction’, he was anxious to stress that he would still present ‘a more full and detailed account of the rise and fall of Rienzi’ than in any other English work, and offer a riposte to the accounts produced by both Gibbon and Sismondi (although he paid a graceful tribute to Mitford as the ‘versatile and gifted Author of the beautiful Tragedy of Rienzi’).30 Bulwer-Lytton painted a picture of a degenerate Roman political culture early in his novel, thus establishing a context which explained the failure of Rienzi’s heroic attempt to restore the republic. The turbulent people have ‘degenerated from the iron virtues of the Republic’; the aristocracy consists of the rival factions of the Orsini and the Colonna, ‘relentless banditti’ who exploit the people, and engage in ‘lawless warfare’; and Pope Clement V, ‘with more prudence than valour’, has retreated to ‘the tranquil retreat of Avignon’. While the people still possess ‘the sense and desire of liberty’, they lack the courage to assert it.31 The people – personified in the blacksmith, Cecco del Vecchio – and the church – represented by Raimond, Bishop of Orvieto – do initially support Rienzi’s reforming government, but both fail to defend it when the nobles form an alliance and attack the city: the people out of a combination of resentment at Rienzi’s failure to execute nobles conspiring ‘The Theatrical Examiner – Drury Lane’, The Examiner, 12 October 1828, issue 1080. For productions in the first few years after its debut, see e.g. ‘Public Amusements – Theatre Royal’, Liverpool Mercury, 28 November 1828; ‘The Theatre’, The Hull Packet and Humber Mercury, 20 January 1829; ‘Theatre – Leeds’, Leeds Mercury, 30 May 1829. It also had a long run at Drury Lane, and frequent revivals in the next twenty years. 30 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835; this edition, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1876), preface to the first edition, ix–x. 31 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, pp. 27–32. This chapter is, Bulwer-Lytton comments firmly, ‘not to be passed, except by those who dislike to understand what they read’ (27). 28

29

Rosemary Mitchell

62

against him and disgruntlement with his taxes, and the church because of his reform of ecclesiastical abuses and his ‘sacrilege’ in bathing in a porphyry vessel once used by Constantine. While these were the immediate causes of Rienzi’s fall from power, the real problem, Bulwer-Lytton suggested, was the context of the medieval dark ages: ‘a genius of designs so bold’, he argued, with ‘a brave, noble, intelligent, and devoted people’ and a proper period in power, in which ‘his faults would have been insensibly checked’, would have freed Italy from its thraldom.32 The problem was essentially the lack of a history of the gradual growth of constitutional liberties (such as England, of course, had enjoyed). When Rienzi calls upon the people to help him to defend Rome against a mercenary force, this triggers: one of those listless panics . . . which often seize upon a people who make liberty a matter of impulse and caprice . . . To such prostration of soul, such blindness of intellect, even the noblest people will be subjected, when liberty, which should be the growth of ages . . . is raised, the exotic of an hour . . . and flourishes and withers with the single spirit that protects.33

Bulwer-Lytton reiterated his point in his description of the failure of Rienzi’s second regime, which leads to his death.34 Unlike Gibbon, Bulwer-Lytton believed that the restored Rienzi of 1354 was ‘cured of his faults’ and made not ‘a single error in point of policy’; his downfall was the result of ‘a corrupt and dastardly populace’, unable to live up to his vision. He falls as the victim of this mob, which delivers the city to her true tyrants, the nobles.35 Rienzi’s own attempts to preserve liberty and do justice have destroyed him, as the Roman people are ready for neither. Rienzi himself, in a final monologue, expresses Bulwer-Lytton’s sense of a man ahead of his time and standing above his contemporaries: ‘I have risked, dared, toiled enough for this dastard and degenerate race . . .– Let Rome perish! . . . I am nobler than my country!- She deserves not so high a sacrifice!’36 As Andrew Brown points out, it was Bulwer-Lytton’s conviction that ‘only a man such as this . . . can significantly advance the condition of mankind’ which made him omit the more negative aspects of Rienzi’s life and character recorded in the contemporary sources (and included by Gibbon).37 Instead, he constructed what is essentially a Carlylean hero, who endeavours – against terrible odds, with fanatic enthusiasm – to restore the republic to a degenerate people.38 Esther Schor has stressed the extent to which Bulwer-Lytton’s visit to Italy in the 1830s had left him Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, pp. 210–11. Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, p. 266. 34 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, pp. 425–27. 35 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, pp. 438–39. 36 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, p. 438. 37 Andrew Brown, ‘Metaphysics and Melodrama: Bulwer’s Rienzi’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 36:3 (December 1981), 261–76. Quotation is on 270. 38 See Margaret F. King and Elliott Engel, ‘The Emerging Carlylean Hero in Bulwer’s Novels of the 1830s’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36:3 (December 1981), 277–95, discusses how Bulwer’s novels in this decade explore the issue of ‘how the Romantic alien [is] to function within a culture in transition’ (278). 32 33

How Radical was Rienzi?

63

uneasy about the Italian radical nationalist, Mazzini, and his Giovane Italia movement, as well as the potential for mob violence in Britain. Like Edmund Burke, he became a reformer who was increasingly concerned about the potential for reform to become revolution. The Afterlife of Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi: ‘Liberty . . . The Growth of Ages’ Bulwer-Lytton’s approach was clearly shared by many of the readers and reviewers of Rienzi. The Examiner’s literary reviewer, describing the romance as ‘Mr Bulwer’s greatest novel’, remarked that it was clearly ‘addressed to nations’, as its author pointed out that, for a people to be free, they must trust to their own endeavours and make gradual progress towards liberty.39 Paintings inspired by textual representations of the revolutionary Roman also attracted similar comments, especially Alfred Elmore’s Rienzi in the Forum (1844). A review in The Illustrated London News, which featured a large wood-engraving of the painting, cited the predictable quotation from Byron (used by the artist himself), and commented on the fine composition of the image, which showed a panoramic view of Roman ruins, festooned with picturesque groups of differing classes, ages and genders. The reviewer reminded his readers that Rienzi was ‘exhorting them to recover their liberties, and assert their rights as Romans’, but that history recorded that few ‘were fired with the zeal with which he was distinguished’.40 This reading of the image clearly reflects Bulwer-Lytton’s emphasis on the failure of the people to live up to the heroic virtues of their leader. Nevertheless, Bulwer-Lytton remained sufficiently radical at heart to seize the opportunity provided by the publication of a new edition of Rienzi in the revolutionary year of 1848 to draw parallels between the contemporary situation in Italy and the era of Rienzi. After noting the popularity of the work with his readers, Bulwer-Lytton went on to comment that it ‘attracted peculiar notice in Italy’, and to describe its role in fostering ‘political regeneration’ and influencing the ‘rising generation of Italian youth’.41. While he did not believe that the king of Piedmont, who eventually presided over the unification of Italy, was ‘much of a constitutional reformer’, he hoped that the ‘people, sooner or later, will do the work of the King’, inspired by the example of Rienzi.42 It is an unexpectedly hopeful assessment of the potential role of the Italian people in reforming their government for the novelist who had found the medieval Roman people undeserving of Rienzi – but perhaps Bulwer-Lytton felt that the constitutional reform was at last a possibility in the Italian peninsula. Reviewers also made links between the reissued novel and the Continental historical context of 1848. The conservative Morning Chronicle offered a surprisingly positive review of the new single-volume edition, highlighting how Bulwer-Lytton had challenged Gibbon’s interpretation of Rienzi, and revealed his real virtues. ‘The Literary Examiner – Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes’, The Examiner, 13 December 1835, issue no. 1454. 40 ‘Fine Arts – The Royal Academy Exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 8 June 1844, 373, issue 110. 41 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, preface to the 1848 edition, xi–xii. 42 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, preface to the 1848 edition, xv–xvi. 39

Rosemary Mitchell

64

Fig. 3.1. Rienzi in the Forum (1844). Engraving from Alfred Elmore’s painting, London Illustrated News, 8 June 1844.

However, this sympathy proved to be part of a more conservative agenda. The reviewer concluded: Throughout the work, he [the reader] will meet with many passages . . . that are only too truly applicable to the present disturbed condition of the Governments of Europe – which will serve to convince him how enviable is his social position, living in a land where property is safe and life secure, and where liberty is under no restraints but such as are for the general benefit of mankind.43

Clearly, for this reviewer, Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel served as a reminder of the current revolutionary state of Europe, and the superiority of the British constitution, which secured liberties, but also order. This suggests Rienzi could be appropriated by conservatives – as well as liberals, radicals and socialists – as a warning rather than an exemplar from history. Radical Rienzi? Engels Rehabilitates Revolution For young Friedrich Engels, Rienzi was attractive for the opposite reason: as a revolutionary exemplar. His 1840–41 drama, Cola di Rienzi, an operatic libretto, drew heavily on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, although its emphasis on the role of the female 43

24499.

‘Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes’, The Morning Chronicle, 29 April 1848, issue

How Radical was Rienzi?

65

Fig. 3.2. William Holman Hunt, Rienzi vowing to obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions (1849). © The National Gallery, London. On loan from The Ramsbury Manor Foundation.

characters may also suggest the influence of Mitford’s play (his earlier ‘A Pirate Tale’ shows a familiarity with British Romantic literature).44 Engels, like Bulwer-Lytton, provided Rienzi with a loyal wife, while inventing a daughter for Colonna – Camilla – in love with Walter de Montreal, a mercenary warlord who was also a major character in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, and was (both in reality and fiction) executed by Rienzi. The final scene in Engels’ play presented the two women competing for the attention of a Roman mob, who – ultimately preferring Camilla’s call for vengeance – kill the tribune.45 This antiphonal structure is a feature of the drama from its first scene in Act 1: here the patricians, headed by Colonna, are anxious to ‘flee the wrath of the howling mob’, but find themselves confronted by the people of Rome, who – however – split into two separate choruses, one in support of Rienzi as ‘the people’s liberator’, the other believing him to be ‘a despot’, a ‘tyrant’ as bad as the

Terrell Carver, ‘Art and Ambiguity: The Politics of Friedrich Engels’, International Political Science Review 12:1 (January 1991), 7–10. 45 It is unclear whether Engels was aware of Wagner’s operatic version of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which premiered in Dresden in 1842. This could not have influenced his own libretto, which may have been affected by the 1837 German dramatic version of Rienzi produced by Julius Mosen (Carver, ‘Art and Ambiguity’, 10). For Wagner’s Rienzi, see (among other scholarship) Rachel Nussbaum, ‘Wagner’s ‘Rienzi’ and the Creation of a Paper’, The Musical Quarterly 84:3 (Autumn, 2000), 417–25, which argues that the opera ‘portrays the ambiguity of a bourgeois liberalism that cannot productively connect the public and the private’, a narrative of ‘conflict without offering a way out’ (417). 44

Rosemary Mitchell

66

barons. Act 1, scene iii reiterates the division of the people – with the two groups now described as a ‘chorus of the people’ and a ‘chorus of malcontents’, which suggests where Engels’s sympathies ultimately lay. Despite Rienzi’s attempt to win them by a promise to ‘consecrate my whole life to your freedom’, the malcontents remain unpersuaded. Indeed, Engels himself gives the tribune lines which exhibit dictatorial tendencies: Rienzi promises to restore Rome to her ‘ancient splendour’ and renew ‘the bygone age of world conquest’, suggesting that Engels was drawing parallels with imperial dictators such as Napoleon.47 So, while the picture of the aristocratic class is unremittingly negative, the portrait of Rienzi too has some critical notes. His heroism in the last two scenes – in which he refuses to flee the mob – contrasts with the vacillation of the crowd, swayed by the competing voices of the two women, Nina and Camilla.48 As Terrell Carver points out, ‘This was revolutionary romanticism at fever pitch, and Engels’s account is notably more democratic than other contemporary versions of the story.’49 Both Rienzi and the people are represented largely positively – but the implication is less that the people have failed to live up to Rienzi (as Bulwer-Lytton suggested) than the other way around. Engels uses the voice of the people to debate the historical character and consequences of revolution, apparently arriving at the conclusion that revolutionary violence was necessary, justified and purgative in its effects. His doodles on the manuscript represent the back of a woman with a sword – Camilla – who is followed by a crowd, and confronting a man at a window (presumably Rienzi?), while another shows a front view of a woman, also carrying a sword, emblematic of vengeance or justice. These images suggest that Engels was excited by, and supportive of, the concept of revolution – and was not convinced that a programme of gradual reform and democratisation was a viable alternative.50 Carver suggests that the representation of Camilla as ‘a sword-wielding reincarnation of “Liberty”’ directly references the imagery of the July revolution of 1830, such as Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830).51 Engels’ interpretation of Rienzi is, therefore, a distinctively radical and revolutionary one, which assesses the medieval republican from below, through the eyes of the people. Engels’ libretto, however, was neither published nor performed, remaining undiscovered until 1974,52 so it was not a vehicle for the dissemination of a more radical version of Rienzi’s life and career. I will now, therefore, turn to the Chartist press of the 1840s, where the issues which preoccupied Engels were publicly debated through appropriations of Rienzi. 46

Friedrich Engels, Cola di Rienzi (1842), trans. A. Miller, in M. Scheglova et al., eds, Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels: Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), Vol. 3: Act 1, sc. I, pp. 357–543. Quotations on 537, 541–42. 47 Engels, Rienzi, Act 1, sc. III, pp. 546–47. Quotations on 547. 48 Engels, Rienzi, Act 3, sc. I and Act 3, sc. II, pp. 561–68. Quotation on 565. 49 Carver, ‘Art and Ambiguity’, 10. 50 Engels, Rienzi, between pp. 544–45. The drawings also include what appears to be a portrait of Bulwer-Lytton. 51 Carver, ‘Art and Ambiguity’, 10. 52 Carver, ‘Art and Ambiguity’, 10. 46

How Radical was Rienzi?

67

Radical Rienzi? Rienzi in the Chartist Press Rienzi certainly made frequent appearances in nineteenth-century British newspapers, largely because of the number of racehorses and ships named after him, not to mention a breed of dahlia popular at horticultural shows. However, the medieval revolutionary also featured in articles and other items in a more serious capacity, and particularly in the Chartist press, where his reputation became a site for discussing different political strategies. It is clear that some British working-class radicals did not share the Romantic enthusiasm for revolution of the young Engels. The anonymous author of a series of pieces on ‘The Progress of Liberty in England’, published in The Northern Liberator in 1840, co-opted Rienzi to his non-violent agenda. This writer detailed the events of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, describing how ‘the oppressed . . . retaliated upon the oppressors’ – but he deplored the violence of the peasants as unworthy of a Christian people. The death of Wat Tyler is presented as ‘probably provoked by his insolence, as was the fate of his contemporary Rienzi’, and deplored for leaving the revolt without a leader.53 This reflection was clearly inspired by the 1839 Newport Rising and its aftermath, when an estimated 10,000 working-class Chartists marched on the Westgate hotel in Newport to release alleged prisoners, and were forcibly quelled; the leaders were tried for treason, and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to transportation. As Mike Sanders demonstrates, the rising had a substantial ‘ideological afterlife’, stimulating substantial debate among Chartists about the necessity and desirability of revolutionary action.54 By contrast, John Watkins – who was not averse to the possibility of militant action – represented Rienzi far more positively.55 Writing in The Northern Star, he was defending his drama, John Frost, which was intended to illustrate Chartist principles through the events of the Newport Rising. Identifying ‘Ignorance, prejudice and apathy’ as even greater enemies to Chartism than the government itself, he called for all Chartists and working-men – in a curious echo of Gibbon’s reflections on the Roman people’s lack of republican virtue – to exhibit a more manly ‘spirit’ and to throw off the shackles of their slavery. He commented scornfully on a petition for the liberation of Frost and other imprisoned Chartists: Shame on the people of England, that suffered such a man as Frost to be banished for loving them, but more shame would it be for us to kneel to these mocking creatures [ie the political elite] and beg them to let him come back . . . when Rienzi ‘the last of the tribunes’, was banished by the aristocracy, the people made them call him back – nay,

‘The Progress of Liberty, No. IV’, The Northern Liberator, 25 April 1840, issue 132. Scholarly accounts of the Rising have been produced by Ivor Wilks, South Wales and the Rising of 1839 (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984); David J. V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); see also Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 87–128. 55 For a life of John Watkins, see Malcolm Chase, ‘John Watkins (1808–1858), Poet/ Chartist’, at http://georgemarkhamtweddell.blogspot.com/2012/12/john-watkins-18081858-poet-chartist-by.html. 53

54

Rosemary Mitchell

68

placed him over their heads. But Englishmen are surely sunk somewhat lower than Italian eunuchs.56

Notably, Watkins’ reference both reflected and challenged Bulwer-Lytton’s representation of Rienzi as an isolated republican hero, abandoned by the people: it suggested that the people played as important a role as Rienzi himself in his (second) rise to power. Watkins alluded to Rienzi again in the following year, in his ‘Legacy to the Chartists: Lecture 1’, where he emphasised the importance of being ‘zealously affected in a good cause’, and – echoing Bryon – cited ‘Rienzi, ‘last of the Romans’, redeemer of the dark centuries of shame’, as one among other examples of passionate supporters of liberty.57 His appropriation of Rienzi endorsed a vehement, and indeed violent, response in Britain to the oppressions of the state. As Watkins was also the writer of a play offering a no doubt radical reading of the 1381 Revolt, this suggests that – for him – Rienzi could be seen in a highly positive light as one of a line of revolutionary leaders who challenged the power of the political elite. But the speech attributed to ‘Mr Hood’ at a London meeting of Chartists in April 1841 – while still appropriating Rienzi – avoided such a direct endorsement of violent action. Once again, the context was provided by the 1839 Newport Rising. Hood, discussing the adoption of a petition for the liberation of Frost and other imprisoned Newport Chartists, also opined that the current Parliament and administration were highly unlikely to respond positively, and that Chartist leaders could spend their time more fruitfully spreading the principles of Chartism among the working classes. He continued: Why had they [Frost and his fellow prisoners] been kidnapped away? Simply because they stood in the front ranks of liberty, they had been selected as victims, by a detestable, an atrocious and abominable Ministry – (loud cheers) – a Ministry, who, if another Rienzi or Cromwell were to arise, would consign them to death and transportation.58

Aligning Rienzi (and Frost and his companions) with Cromwell provided a transnational as well as an historical dimension to the debate, suggesting that true promoters of liberty should expect to encounter state oppression everywhere and in every age. However, many Chartists were not averse to endorsing the more overtly revolutionary activity by which Rienzi’s career was characterised – when it was applied to the Continental context. In 1845, at a commemoration of the birthday of Henry Hunt, Thomas Cooper – a lecturer for Mazzini’s People’s International League – was called upon to make a toast to ‘our Italian brethren’. Directly encouraging them to ‘accomplish the overthrow and extirpation of the abominable tyrannies affecting their country’, he recalled a long list of Roman republican heroes and medieval

John Watkins, ‘John Frost, A Play’, The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 10 April 1841, issue 178. 57 John Watkins, ‘Watkins’s Legacy to the Chartists: Lecture 1’, The Northern Star, 23 April 1842, issue 232. 58 ‘Metropolitan Meeting at White Conduit House, to elect delegates for the New Convention’, The Northern Star, 17 April 1841, issue 179. 56

How Radical was Rienzi?

69

poets, among whom feature ‘courageous souls, like Rienzi, [who] had lifted up the nervous arm to dash down tyrants’.59 In fact, as Mazzini’s nationalist movement became more of a preoccupation for the Chartists, Rienzi had tended to featured more frequently in Chartist publications. In March 1842, a Chartist short story, entitled The Goldsmith; or, The Rienzi of Palermo appeared in the Chartist Circular:60 it was, as Rob Breton points out, ‘a nationalistic story of foreign invaders and working-class martyrs’, in which Guiseppe d’Alesi organises the poor to resist a Spanish occupation of Sicily, a revolution which ends in his death.61 In 1847, The Northern Star included in its poetry section ‘The Italian Summons’ by Alfred Fennell, which called upon Italian cities to ‘rally, t’is Liberty calls’: ‘Up! Rome! For Rienzi draws forth sword and spear.’62 In the wake of the collapse of the 1848 revolutions, Rienzi still continued to feature in the Chartist press, but now with the emphasis even more heavily on the failure of his cause: on 29 June 1850, under the pen name of ‘Bandiera’, the Chartist Gerald Massey published an article in The Red Republican, lamenting the ‘evil days’ which habitually fell on ‘the viceregents of freedom’. In the place of honour, immediately after Christ, appeared Rienzi: that splendid spirit Rienzi burst on the astonished World to redeem Rome and Italy, from ages of shame and degradation. He expunged from her dark and bloody archives, much of her crime and guilt, humbled the haughty and rapacious nobles, tamed the brigand barons, re-adjusted the bandage which had slipped the eyes of . . . Justice, and bade fair to reinstate her in all her ancient glory as the peerless mistress of the world, and he too, fell a victim to popular ignorance, sacrificed at the shrine of Tyranny.63

Massey’s reading was not far removed from that of Bulwer-Lytton: while he did not blame the Roman people for their lack of republican virtue so much as their ‘ignorance’ – their failure to understand the context of aristocratic tyranny by which their city was oppressed – he still saw Rienzi as their ‘victim’. Is there, perhaps, an undercurrent of criticism here for the failure of the British working classes to support Chartism sufficiently to achieve revolutionary change in 1848?64 George Markham Tweddell’s poem, ‘Rienzi, the Patriot of Rome’, which appeared in the London Journal in 1849, Cooper’s Journal in 1850 and in three local northern papers, 59 ‘Commemoration of the Birthday of Henry Hunt. London Democratic Supper’, The Northern Star, 15 November 1845, issue 418. For a brief life of Cooper, see Stephen Roberts, ‘Thomas Cooper (1805–92)’, in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 60 [Anon], The Goldsmith; or, The Rienzi of Palermo, A Sicilian Tale in the Chartist Circular, 2, no. 130, 19 March 1842, 539 and 2, no. 131, 26 March 1842, 542. 61 Rob Breton, The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading Against the Middle-Class Novel (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 105. 62 ‘Poetry’, The Northern Star, 25 September 1847, issue 518. 63 Bandiera [Gerald Massey], ‘Persecution and Martyrdom’, The Red Republican 1/2, 29 June 1850, at http://gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/cpr_red_republican_index.htm. For a short life of Massey, see Sidney Lee, rev. by S. Basu, ‘(Thomas) Gerald Massey (1828–1907), in ODNB. 64 Mike Sanders detects a similar theme in several of Massey’s poems of the period (The Poetry of Chartism, p. 214).

70

Rosemary Mitchell

was even less restrained in its critique of those who had betrayed the ‘scholar and patriot’: ‘Priests, barons, people, base were all the three/ To plot the fall of Liberty and thee.’ For Twedell, Rome was ‘ungrateful’ and ‘unworthy’ of Rienzi.65 Here, perhaps, Bulwer-Lytton’s interpretation of Rienzi can be seen to resurface, in the bitter disappointment of the aftermath of 1848. Holman Hunt’s Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice: Picturing Rienzi in the Year of Revolutions That Rienzi was a site for the exploration of anxieties about militant revolutionary action is apparent in my final case study of a British representation of Rienzi. In 1848, the young William Holman Hunt and his fellow lodger, John Everett Millais, decided to ‘accompany the noted Chartist procession’ which marched from Russell Square to Kennington Common. ‘Standing up on the cross-rails outside the enclosure’, rather than on the grass with the other demonstrators, they were able to see the ‘gesticulations’ of the orators, but not to hear what they said.66 They saw Feargus O’Connor escorted by a constable to a brief interview with the police superintendent: I felt respect for both the men and for the crowd as the speaker quietly descended, and a lane was made by the thousands present, while the two walked over the common as staidly as though they alone were on the ground. The Chartist champion was detained only a few minutes . . .67

Hunt recalled that, conscious of ‘concealed measures’ taken to quell disturbances, and that rooftops were ‘manned with riflemen’, O’Connor encouraged the ‘law-abiding people’ to disperse, which they did. The artists tried to follow their example, but at Bankside saw a group of ‘stalwart roughs’ assembled, determined to fight, and heard the sounds of ‘bloody strife’. According to Hunt, Millais was anxious to see the outcome, but ‘I knew how in the moment all might be involved in a fatal penalty’. ‘I had promised to keep him out of wanton danger’, Hunt continues, ‘but it was not without urgent persuasion that I could get him away.’ Guiding his friend away from the fight, he eventually got him home, just as rain was pouring down its ‘silent artillery’ and scattering Chartists and other bystanders alike.68 65 G. M. Tweddell, ‘Rienzi, the Patriot of Rome’, at http://tweddellpoetryhub.blogspot. com/2013/05/rienzi-patriot-of-rome.html. Possibly because of the initially reforming character of Pope Pius IX’s papacy in the late 1840s, the Chartist press was surprisingly disinclined to blame the Catholic church for Rienzi’s downfall until the early 1850s. For the life of G. M. Tweddell, see www.tweddellhistory.co.uk/. 66 W. Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London and New York: Macmillan and Co, 1905), 1:101. 67 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:102. 68 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:102. The date of the Kennington Common demonstration was 10 April 1848 – but Hunt includes the episode in a chapter dated ‘1847’. It is a reminder to bear in mind Carol Jacobi’s comments about the retrospective and highly constructed nature of Hunt’s recollections in Pre-Raphaelitism; C. Jacobi, William Holman Hunt: Painter, Painting, Paint (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 17–40.

How Radical was Rienzi?

71

Hunt’s next painting – Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions (1848–49) – necessarily needs to be seen in the context of this and other popular and revolutionary demonstrations in the late 1840s.69 Holman Hunt identified ‘Bulwer’s romance’ as his immediate source, but added: Like most young men, I was stirred by the spirit of freedom of the passing revolutionary time. The appeal to Heaven against the tyranny exercised over the poor and helpless seemed well fitted for pictorial treatment. “How long, O Lord!”, many bleeding souls were crying at that time.70

Here Hunt linked his political enthusiasm for the cause of liberty and reform to both his religious faith, and to the socio-economic context of the ‘Hungry Forties’. He also linked the subject matter to the aesthetic revolution which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood saw themselves as pioneering: as Judith Bronkhurst argues, it was ‘planned as a revolutionary work in terms of a rejection of artistic conventions’.71 Hunt described a visit by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his studio: I showed him my new picture of “Rienzi,” in the painting of which . . . I was putting in practice the principle of rejection of conventional dogma, and pursuing that of direct application to Nature for each feature . . .72

Hunt’s commitment to ‘direct application’ to Nature was expressed by his concern to paint the ‘foreground and hillside’ plein air, and also the ‘research’ required for the depiction of the costumes, armour and architectural background: ‘For the shields and the spears I went with my canvas to the Tower.’73 He had already used another art student as the model for Rienzi in his preliminary sketches, but now he replaced his original model with D. G. Rossetti, arguing that, as his friend was of Italian descent, ‘the racial character would be more satisfying’.74 However, it seems likely that the revolutionary connections of Rossetti’s father might also have influenced Hunt’s decision: he knew about Giuseppe Rossetti’s revolutionary past in Naples, when he was involved in ‘one of the many revolts under the Bourbon kings’ and was obliged to escape to England.75

The fullest account of this image is to be found in Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art, 2006), 1:131–32. 70 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:114. 71 Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 1:132. 72 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:107. 73 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:115. Jacobi, William Holman Hunt, 159, note 23, points out that the spears as they are arranged in the foreground ‘mimic the broken lances’ in Ucello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1450, National Gallery, London), suggesting that the image owes something to artistic tradition as well as the study of nature. For more on Holman Hunt’s preparatory studies for Rienzi, see Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 1:132 and Jacobi, William Holman Hunt, p. 181. 74 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:142. 75 Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:146–47. See also Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 1:132. 69

Rosemary Mitchell

72

As commentators have pointed out, Hunt’s Rienzi demonstrates close attention to Bulwer-Lytton’s novel:76 the inclusion of details such as the curly locks of the young brother and the garland round his wrist, Rienzi’s raised fist, the nearby river, the two soldiers and the figure of the young knight (Adrian di Castello in the novel), even the buckler on which the corpse is laid, all accord with Bulwer-Lytton’s account of this defining event in Rienzi’s life. But – given the other images of Rienzi discussed in this chapter – it is clear that Hunt’s choice of this particular episode is an unusual one: most images represented Rienzi addressing the Roman people, urging them to seek to restore the ancient liberties and glory of Rome. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Hunt’s painting owes much to his experience of attending the Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common. Here Hunt was unable to hear the orator, and was more impressed by the peaceful order of the crowd: it was their lack of revolutionary violence which attracted him. When he and Millais encountered a ‘bloody strife’ on the way home, Hunt succeeded in protecting his friend and guiding him safely home – just what Rienzi failed to do for his young brother. Bronkhurst suggests that we should place the painting within the tradition of representation of revolutionary oath subjects, such as J.-L. David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784);77 however, Hunt’s decision to paint Rienzi as the bereaved brother rather than the republican orator and politician puts the emphasis on the personal as much, or even more, than on the political. The real extent of Hunt’s radicalism in his portrayal of Rienzi therefore remains uncertain, given his decision to depict a scene from Rienzi’s life before he becomes a populist orator or a republican leader, and the emphasis in the image on the iniquity of violent confrontation of the kind which results in the death of innocents. As Hunt’s response to the Chartist demonstration suggests, his genuine sympathy for the working classes did not extend to the endorsement of revolutionary action (and here he is no different from many other middle-class sympathisers and reformers at the time). Conclusion: A Radical Rienzi? It is clear that the historical reputation of Rienzi in the British cultural imagination saw a considerable improvement in the Romantic and early Victorian period, leading to a much less critical evaluation of the medieval revolutionary than that of Gibbon. However, even more positive interpretations of Rienzi often retained a critical perspective on the man himself – whether it was Mitford’s portrait of the flawed Romantic hero (which suggested ultimately a conservative preference for the status quo), or Engels’s meditation on the potential for the emergence of dictatorship (although he saw revolutionary regime change as necessary). While Bulwer-Lytton’s 1835 novel was by far the most influential vehicle for the rise in Rienzi’s reputation in Britain, it was a work which only challenged Gibbon’s interpretation of Rienzi himself – but not Gibbon’s disdain for the Roman people’s lack of civic virtue: for Bulwer-Lytton, the Rienzi was a man ahead of his age, a Carlylean hero for whom the medieval Italian people were unready, of whom they were unworthy. Chartist 76 77

Jacobi, William Holman Hunt, p. 186, where she also cites Lindsay Errington. Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 1:132.

How Radical was Rienzi?

73

representations of Rienzi certainly do offer more positive readings of Rienzi, but – as his career was a site for debate over the use of physical or moral force (like that of Wat Tyler) – not all Chartists writers or speakers were positive in their assessment of his political militancy, at least when considering their own activism; perhaps they were influenced by Sismondi’s interpretation here. As a model for contemporary Italian nationalist revolutionaries, however, they were happy to recommend him more unreservedly, following here in the footsteps of Byron, perhaps. In the aftermath of 1848, Rienzi’s own failure offered a bitter consolation for the failure of revolutionary and working-class movements at home and across Europe. As the case study of Hunt’s painting suggests, ultimately the spectre of revolutionary violence was too daunting for many British radicals – from Bulwer-Lytton to unknown Chartist writers – unless it was happening abroad. There was a distinctly radical Rienzi in the early Victorian British cultural imagination, but even many of his admirers tended to prefer him to remain safely at home in Italy. Such a phenomenon may offer only a partial challenge to the contentions of scholars such as Clare A. Simmons, who argues in the epilogue to her stimulating work Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (2011) that, as medievalism became ‘expensive’ in the early Victorian era, ‘the idea of medieval Britain [my italics] functioned less as an evocation of ancient rights than as the confirmation of present-day privilege’.78 But it shows that the Victorian radical appropriation of figures from beyond British shores, to fuel the development of subaltern medievalisms, has been underplayed in previous scholarship.

Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 191–94. Quotation on 194. 78

Part II

Chartism and Medievalism

4 Chartism and Medievalism: Retrospective Radicalism in the English Nineteenth Century Stephen Knight

I

n his recent book Medievalism: A Critical History, David Matthews comments that the decade of the 1840s, notable for medievalism, was also the time of Chartism, and that ‘the Middle Ages were genuinely put forward as offering practical solutions to contemporary problems’.1 Some instances he cites are ‘one-nation’ arguments from people like Carlyle and Disraeli, concerned to reconnect the interests of lords and peasants, very much in favour of the former. But there were alternative medievalist positions available, including some in the context of the Robin Hood tradition as it developed after Joseph Ritson’s 1795 anthology, Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Song, and Ballads, now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw. Ritson’s reorientation of the Robin Hood tradition in his anthology allowed the development of a radical image of the Middle Ages. At the same time, a more politically conservative version of Robin Hood remained on offer. This chapter will pay particular attention to political medievalism as it featured in nineteenth-century novels and poems in the wake of Ritson’s reinvention of Robin Hood, and will look in particular at the intersections between political medievalism and Chartism. Medievalism and Radicalism Ritson was certainly a radical – he favoured the French Revolution and liked calling his English literary colleagues ‘Citizen’: even the conservative Scott thought quite highly of Ritson, but because of his scholarship not his politics. Like Thomas Percy, Ritson saw real value in gathering the voices of the medieval past, which 1

p. 55.

David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), see

Stephen Knight

78

he regarded as an alternative to the modernity of novel-heroes and heroines, and self-aggrandising authors, whether Gothic or merely Romantic. Ritson makes a major political statement about Robin Hood, saying he ‘displayed a spirit of freedom and independence which has endeared him to the common people, whose cause he maintained’ and was especially opposed to ‘the crimes and follies of titled ruffians and sainted idiots’.2 Ritson’s Robin Hood anthology and its introduction would remain the dominant source for the outlaw myth until J. M. Gutch’s augmented edition, which appeared in 1847 with the title A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, with other ancient & modern ballads and songs relating to this celebrated yeoman, with more historicism and some introductory criticism of Ritson. There is an important and usually unnoticed feature of Ritson’s work that substantially influenced the Robin Hood myth. He represented in the ballads almost all the popular activities, physical and political, of the yeoman Robin Hood, missing just one early ballad, ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ (which was still lurking in a Cambridge college library). But he also accepted the late sixteenth-century political appropriation of the outlaw myth which made Robin not an ordinary yeoman speaking up for his popular kind, but a displaced earl, maltreated by bad King John, and so standing up basically for true lordship and kingship. The ambivalence of Ritson’s positioning of Robin Hood, at once both Tory and radical, has remained central to the hero in more recent times, from Errol Flynn’s Sir Robin of Locksley to the present, and helps explain why, though Robin Hood is a figure on whom the 1840s radicals did to some extent focus as a genuinely popular voice, he was also easily elided into something more appealing to mainstream and very limited liberalism. Yet the medieval, resistant Robin Hood remained a possible identification for early nineteenth-century liberals who verged on radicalism. For Keats he was a memory of a non-urban, non-bourgeois, pre-capitalist, pre-imperial, naturally socialised and so honoured past, where ‘men knew not rent nor leases’.3 In imagined modernity, Keats’s Robin would mourn to see his oaks made into an imperial navy and Marian would weep that landowners made tenants pay for the honey provided by bees on their land.4 Leigh Hunt developed that idea in some new ballads, setting honest peasants, supported by the outlaw, against corrupt clergy and dubious lords. These new radicalisations of the outlaw started in 1818, in the time of widespread dissent against government and modernity, but before the resistant popular voice to be known as Chartism was heard. Thomas Love Peacock developed Ritson’s Robin as a liberal-radical gentleman in Maid Marian in 1822 – Marian is evidently based on Peacock’s admired friend Mary Shelley and the gentry liberal Robin appears to be a version of Sir Percy himself. Peacock, very importantly for the future of the myth, condenses this liberal lordly Robin with the excitement of the traditional resistant yeoman adventures. The novella has been largely ignored by Peacock admirers who prefer the anti-Coleridge Joseph Ritson, ed., Introduction to Robin Hood, A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant, Relative to the Celebrated English Outlaw, 2 vols (London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795), 1:i–xl, see pp. xii–xiii and xiii. 3 John Keats, ‘Robin Hood: To a Friend’, in Collected Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 169–70, line 10. 4 Keats, ‘Robin Hood: To a Friend’, lines 47–57. 2

Chartism and Medievalism

79

joking of the conversational novellas, but it was a very widely read text in its time and an even more widely watched musical – with Peacock’s own songs – in the stage version by J. R. Planché which played on through the century. George Saintsbury, in his 1895 introduction to the Macmillan edition of Maid Marian, recalls having seen and much enjoyed the ‘very popular’ musical as a young man.5 Robin Hood as part of early nineteenth-century ideas of resistance could be more than merely literary or liberal. In 1817, William Hone, defending himself on a charge of sedition, referred to Robin Hood as an archetype of English traditional democratic myths. Though Peacock was very influential, this period saw other, if limited, politicisations of Robin Hood. He was a popular figure in the Sherwood Forest area from the turn of the nineteenth century, and local writers privileged him as a voice of local, and lower-class, aspirations for social freedom, if of a generalised kind. William and Mary Howitt, Quakers from the Nottingham area, recognised their local hero Byron as a fighter for Greece,6 and also prized the regional resistance tradition of Robin Hood: their poem collection The Forest Minstrel (1823) values the forest itself as rich, natural, democratically available and equates the resistant spirit of the ‘bold king of outlaws’ with his ‘generous spirit’.7 This position was developed by Robert Millhouse, a stocking-weaver and soldier from the same area, who published Sherwood Forest and Other Poems in 1827: the main poem sees the forest as a ‘structure grand / Of Freedom,’ turning the mind ‘from the den / Of Rapine and Misrule’.8 It tells in medievalist mode the long history of Sherwood as a site of resistance to imposed authority, where British Celts confronted Rome and King Alfred defended Wessex. It finally praises ‘the brave Fitz-Ooth’ (i.e. Robin Hood: Ritson stated that this was his Norman family name), who with Marian confronted ‘the iron hand of tyranny’ and supported both ‘chastity’ and ‘the poor’. These writers were followed in Spencer T. Hall’s mixture of poetry and prose The Forester’s Offering (1841). Hall, a newspaper compositor, also a Quaker who knew Millhouse well, wrote as ‘The Sherwood Forester’ and sees Robin as a yeoman figure, but not really a political resistant – he is set in nature, a benevolent emblem of communal populism rather than the dissenting working-class figure which by then was well-known. None of these versions of Robin Hood looked towards the new forms of lower-­ class resistance that flowered after 1832. The Reform Act of that year was widely felt to have been a betrayal of ordinary working men – women were not yet considered – by a power-sharing coalition of the upper and middle classes. From the mid1830s onward, various forms of resistance were gathering, most in the democratic and persuasive tradition which would lead to the gathering of signatures for a mass 5 George Saintsbury, Introduction to Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. vii–xx, see p. xvii. 6 On the Howitts, see Lois J. Potter, ‘Sherwood Forest and the Byronic Robin Hood’, in Thomas Hahn, ed., Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 215–24. 7 William and Mary Howitt, The Forest Minstrel (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Day, 1823), p. 33. 8 Robert Millhouse, Sherwood Forest and Other Poems (London: self-published, 1827), canto 1, stanza 3.

Stephen Knight

80

petition demanding voting power for ordinary people. The label ‘People’s Charter’ is essentially a medievalist reference: it had for a century and more been argued that Magna Carta, often called the Great Charter, was a crucial point in English history when royal power was made weaker and the present system of parliamentary rule was essentially instantiated. It was also felt that the Norman Royal Forest Laws, brutally excluding peasants from the fertile forests, were somewhat reduced in the 1297 version of Magna Carta (as Justin Clemens and I have argued elsewhere).9 However improbable these ideas were in historical terms, they were widely believed, and there were parallel views: the thirteenth-century Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, redeemed somewhat by being less bestial than his father, was widely spoken of as the initiator of parliamentary freedoms. These ideas of the populist implications of the Great Charter were a crucial context for lower-class resistance, and directly fuelled much of the idea of Chartism. It is perhaps curious that it was not known as ‘Charterism’ – was this perhaps effectively an act of censorship by conservative forces and media to conceal the link with the Great Charter? Two contextual factors remain of crucial importance in this period. One was Ritson’s idea – and Peacock’s practice – that somehow the virtues of the yeoman anti-authoritarian could be condensed with those of a liberal lord whose family name was originally Fitz-Ooth. But if the anti-authoritarian aristocrat was one point of ambiguous ideological focus, the curious contrary to it was the new and persuasive idea that Robin Hood was a Saxon. This started with Scott, who rejected the idea of the lordly Robin – and yet also appropriated it fully for his truly noble and conservatively self-interested Saxon lord, Ivanhoe. In the initiatory age of racism and popular nationalism, this Saxon Robin idea really caught on: he fought the French lords just as the English had confronted their countrymen in the Napoleonic wars, and this Robin especially resisted the Norman Forest Laws, which had been recognised at least since Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713) as a definite past encroachment on the freedoms of ordinary Englishmen.10 Thomas Cooper, Chartist Medievalist The situation seemed ripe for a condensation of liberal medievalism with the new class-conscious Chartist resistance – and the hour brought the man, in Thomas Miller. Born in Lincolnshire in 1807, he grew up poor and became a basket-maker, but wrote poetry and prose from an early age and was soon patronised by Lady Blessington, literary liberal and former friend of Byron. In London, Miller turned to fiction, and his Royston Gower is a much under-noticed major radical historical novel of 1838, in classic three-volume mode, published by the mainstream firm of Henry Colburn. It is essentially a radical response to Ivanhoe – the subtitle is The Days of King John. Like Scott, Miller shows the Anglo-French nobles as bullying and squabbling among themselves, and the Saxons as the true ancestors of English Justin Clemens and Stephen Knight, ‘Magna Carta as English Political Myth’, in Australia’s Magna Carta, 2nd ed. (Canberra: Department of the Senate, 2015), pp. 63–68. 10 See Stephen Knight, ‘Robin Hood and the Forest Laws’, Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies 1 (2017), 1–12. 9

Chartism and Medievalism

81

freedoms. But his Robin Hood is not just Scott’s tough non-commissioned officer, willing to throw his military power behind the Saxon lords, praise King Richard, and then disappear, with his disturbing power, from the narrative. He is, rather, a leader of a self-consciously disempowered peasant and yeoman class, willing to sympathise with liberal Normans, and to support the continued or restored power of Saxon lords. This is not the same as the republican pre-communist, para-revolutionary Wales/Yorkshire mode of Chartism – but this Robin and his supporters are also complex and multifaceted figures capable of infiltrating the councils of the powerful to direct affairs in their own interests. In Miller’s account, Robin himself poses as a messenger, enters the castle of Geoffrey de Marchmont, the brutal local Norman lord, and in a single complex sequence saves from de Marchmont’s axe the Saxon warrior Walter the One-Handed, and then also saves de Marchmont himself when Walter is about to throw him off the battlements to his death. This is not a proper response, Robin judiciously judges: brutal violence is not the settlement that this outlaw leader, or this author, envisages as correct. A very intricate plot slowly works its way to a conclusion, in which romance plays a substantial part. The Saxon Edith of Lincoln, who still holds extensive land, loves Henry the son of the Earl of Gloomglendell, a Norman with a very Saxon-seeming title. In the same inter-ethnic spirit Margaret, daughter of the brutal Norman de Marchmont, loves Edwin son of the Saxon warrior lord Gurthric of Clifton – the author says of her that ‘readers must remember that we are sketching the character of a child of nature’.11 The future of those couples will suggest some form of socio-racial union, but there remains conflict in the male world. Hereward the Ready, Edith’s father, clearly a mythic Saxon figure, is hounded throughout by King John and defended recurrently by the outlaws. The mostly evil de Marchmont desires the beautiful Saxon inheritress Edith, and she is intermittently abducted and tormented, but without the sexist sadism that was soon to be common in popular Victorian fiction. King John is in general in quest of money, power and some respect from the church – Archbishop Langton is a particular pain to him. There are forceful figures on the Saxon and popular side, like Elwerwulf the old wise woman of the forest, her son Druth, a dwarf rich in both wisdom and cunning; even more improbably there appears a noble peasant named Beowulph, as well as Robin’s seven-foot henchman, Little John. But most interesting, and deliberately so, is the figure for whom the novel is named, Royston Gower. Avoiding Robin Hood in the title is no doubt itself a populist radical move, but this has made the work little-known as either a Robin Hood or a radical novel.12 Royston Gower is, in spite of his first name, apparently of Saxon origin – but naming can be vague in this context. Robin itself is as unlikely to be etymologically Saxon, and that the surname Gower is of Welsh origin is as unlikely 11 Thomas Miller, Royston Gower, or the Days of King John: An Historical Romance, 3 vols (London: Colburn, 1838), 1.254 12 When Routledge undertook a multi-volume reprint of Victorian Robin Hood novels in 2005, they did not want Royston Gower; it was seen as too long and not overtly ‘Robin Hood’ enough in its title.

Stephen Knight

82

to have been known to Miller as it is to modern medievalists who write blandly on Chaucer’s quasi-English colleague John Gower. Royston works now for Geoffrey de Marchmont, and has killed in his service. Before that he was a crusader – the idea of Saxon crusaders, including Robin Hood, is curiously common in these popular medieval novels; presumably crusading was seen as a manly, even proto-imperial, practice. Royston fought on crusade with his then master the Saxon Gurthric of Clifton, but now, faced with modern conflict at home, Royston steadily comes to rebel against an unjust, expropriative lord. When de Marchmont’s men want to burn Elwerwulf and her cottage, Royston warns that she has special powers, and is soon dubious when de Marchmont wants him to jail Edwin, Gurthric’s son. Elwerwulf says to him – in a moment important for the novel and the period – ‘he who conceals a sin, although it be not his own, in measure encourages the crime’.13 So Royston helps Edwin escape, and commits himself to the Saxon rebel cause. As a result, Royston is captured and imprisoned: he refuses to kill Edwin to achieve his own freedom – and so de Marchmont condemns him to death. But his guards, in a decidedly Chartist moment, debate the matter, and decide not to kill him, and then agree to change sides, joining Edwin, and even the outlaws. As a result, Royston is central to the text as a man of conscience, moving his power of action from the malign authorities, and he will soon speak of ‘the new duty which his conscience has marked out’.14 The story hurries to its end (relatively speaking for a three-volume novel) with a major trial by battle between Henry of Gloomglendell and Geoffrey de Marchmont. Geoffrey is fatally wounded, his daughter Margaret is upset, but soon will be married to Edwin, while Saxon Edith will also marry her noble Norman Henry, in spite of the church’s continuing interference. Royston’s future epitaph – in an acknowledgement of medievalism – is given in the text in both English and Old English. The final, politically crucial comment occurs when the barons who are organising against King John, along with the outlaws, are waiting to see what happens and hoping, in the words of the Pindar of Wakefield, ‘The times may yet alter’.15 Magna Carta is an assumed presence in the story of Royston Gower, but Miller focuses consciously on the ‘Ancient Forest Laws’, seeing them as negative, ‘not merely as a code of almost forgotten laws, but as to the effect such tyrannical mandates were likely to produce upon a brave, yet oppressed people’.16 These forest laws were, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, often seen as medieval parallels to the many contemporary repressions which interfered with the orderly and natural life of working people. The inevitable projection of Miller’s story is towards the modern 1830s forms of resistance to modern authoritarian hierarchies. But it is not a matter of direct violence. Miller’s outlaws are brave and skilled enough to fight, but their leaders prefer to use cunning and infiltration to disempower the brutal authorities. The novel is also rich with the sense of a possible 13 14 15 16

Miller, Royston Gower, 2:233. Miller, Royston Gower, 2:256 Miller, Royston Gower, 3:256. Miller, Royston Gower, 1:vii.

Chartism and Medievalism

83

Saxon–Norman sympathy, whether in romance or between mutually respectful males. That seems to suggest a way forward that is not as confrontational as the South Wales Chartists’ attack, with several thousand men, on Newport in 1839, which ended with some twenty dead and two hundred arrested, or the similar plans the Yorkshire Chartists were developing in the same period. But the idea of open resistance remained a possibility, both past and present, and was greatly feared by the authorities – hence the great Chartist gathering on Kennington Common in April 1848, in the spirit of modern European rebellion, which was met by upwards of 100,000 special constables. Miller’s own radical medievalism fell away: he wrote two more long historical novels, Fair Rosamond (1839) and Lady Jane Grey (1840), but both were, in the spirit of Scott, realistic/romantic retellings; there were some suffering peasants but they were hardly given thematic status. It may well be that the fashionable social world of Lady Blessington, where Miller met the publisher Colburn, and which probably gave him the medieval idea in the first place, also reduced him to gentry-pleasing forms as he went on. But he was never to be successful, either in terms of income or status. Post-Chartist Radical Medievalism At least one popular author sought to accommodate Miller’s spirit in his historical and political fiction. Pierce Egan the Younger’s first novel was Robin Hood and Little John, or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, serialised from 1838 and appearing as a novel in 1840. This is basically a lengthy elaboration of Peacock’s position (with some 400,000 words), combining Robin as a displaced lord with a good deal of forest activity and hostility to sheriffs and corrupt minor lords. While it could be seen as broadly hostile to the upper classes, though very much in racialised Saxon– Norman terms, it is further away from the emotive radicalism of the Howitts and their followers – which they would themselves continue when in 1846 the new People’s Journal they were then running with John Saunders, author of the 1834 Songs for the People, reprinted in five sequences the ballad-epic of c. 1500 known as the Gest of Robin Hood as an instructional piece of medieval poetry which Saunders says in his head-note is either by Chaucer ‘or his equal’.17 Stephen Basdeo has suggested that Egan’s Robin Hood is inherently radical, as Robin has ‘quite a “democratic” set-up in Sherwood Forest’ through election as leader ‘upon his merits by downtrodden Anglo-Saxon peasants’, the sort of process ‘the Chartists demanded’.18 But this is a modernist reading: in fact the men acclaim (rather than vote for) Little John, but he defers to Robin as a great archer and really an earl. After losses against King John’s men the outlaws stay in the forest and ‘So far as lay in his power, Robin Hood relieved the heavy burden of the poorest classes around him.’19 After Richard returns, Robin is reinstated as an earl but does not People’s Journal 1 (1846), p. 71. Stephen Basdeo, ‘Radical Ideas in the Penny Serials of Pierce Egan the Younger (1814– 80)’, http://gesteofrobinhood.com/2016/01/19. 19 Pierce Egan the Younger, Robin Hood and Little John, or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (London: Forster and Hextall, 1840), p. 438. 17

18

Stephen Knight

84

regain his estates; when Richard dies King John’s men attack again, Marian is killed and eventually Robin dies as in the late medieval quasi-epic The Gest of Robin Hood. It is hardly an inspiring quasi-Chartist story. Egan’s relatively unpolitical take on Robin Hood was probably more a matter of the way the myth was itself located and interpreted than his own views, because he went on to write a medieval novel a good deal more closely linked to Chartist activities and the work of Miller in Wat Tyler. Appearing in serial form through 1840 and published as a book in 1841, the novel tells in some detail the story of the man whom Thomas Paine, drawing on the unsympathetic account by David Hume in his History of England (1754–62), had identified as a central figure in the 1381 ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ (the traditional title for a series of resistant events which were rather more complex than are suggested by that name).20 Like his Robin Hood, a novel of over 400,000 words with many illustrations, Egan’s Wat Tyler provides a detailed back-story about Tyler’s objection to the poll tax, especially as it was being levied on his fifteen-year-old daughter, an idea going back through Paine to Hume. This action had been the topic of Robert Southey’s verse play Wat Tyler of 1794, written at the height of the author’s radicalism. By 1817 Southey had totally changed his political position and was Poet Laureate, but a number of radical publishers produced pirate copies of his play in that year of growing dissent, and William Hone, charged in the same year with sedition, published it with a strong introduction. Southey tried to stop these publications, but as the play was legally judged ‘seditious’ the author had no rights over it, nor indeed any access to royalties from the substantial new sales.21 Egan acknowledged the link with a quotation from Southey on his title page, describing Wat Tyler as ‘Prompt to act when justice needed’. The novel works up to a dramatic end in charting the events of 1381, with Tyler and other leaders (their traditional names here include a contemporarily very convincing Tom Miller, apparently referencing the Chartist novelist) trying to contain the basically criminal excesses of some rioters – much like the hard-to-control Chartist activities of the late 1830s – and Tyler finally makes a major speech in which he lists the five demands of the people. The last is ‘a complete repeal of the game and forest laws’, that long-standing issue for medieval radicalism. This list is plainly a reference to the ‘Six Points’ of the Charter that was presented to Parliament in 1838 – and immediately rudely rejected. King Richard at once says he will give the rebels a charter, but when Tyler examines the draft he finds it was ‘ingeniously worded so as to evade the fulfilment of every demand they professed to grant’.22 The final attack on London follows, climaxing, in line with the historical record, with the fatal wounding of Tyler by the mayor of London and a royal servant, and the defeat and dispersal of the rebels. Southey had himself used the term ‘charter’ for the agreement made after Tyler’s death, and in his play the king’s agreement is In The Rights of Man, Part 2, in Tom Paine and Revolutionary America: Autobiography and Selected Writing, ed. Eric Foner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 327. 21 See Introduction to Robert Southey, Wat Tyler, in Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821, ed. Paul Baines and Edwards Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. xiv–xviii, see pp. xv–xvi. 22 Pierce Egan the Younger, Wat Tyler (London: Johnson, 1851), p. 500. 20

Chartism and Medievalism

85

acclaimed by the commons when it is read out by a herald. But when the people insist on waiting until parliament confirms the charter, the authorities move in and kill and arrest the remaining leaders. Southey referred to this charter as a radical version of Magna Carta, but by Egan’s time that term had developed a quite new and specific meaning linked to Chartism itself. Nevertheless, the novel does not end with any strong radical mood – the author’s last, rather feeble, word is to hope that ‘a few out of the many who have perused these pages have been amused, and have a kind thought to bestow on the author’ (510). That suggests the somewhat blander tone of his Robin Hood novel, and that is where Egan headed in one further medievalist story with some sense of radical resistance, Adam Bell, which appeared in 1842 as a serial and a novel. In legend Adam Bell was one of three outlaw figures operating jointly in Inglewood (here spelt Englewood), a Scottish border area. His story emerged as popular in print in the sixteenth century, but it is first referred to in the south in 1432 in the margin of a Wiltshire Parliament roll, where his name leads a list of outlaws including Robin Hood and Little John (who seem to be mentioned in jest). The northern outlaw myth of Adam Bell seems to have been a parallel to that of Robin, which makes it appropriate that he was also treated by Egan, and in a quite serious form. The novel follows broadly the incidents of the lengthy ballad, but adds a romance for Adam with Lucy Fitzalwyn, the modest daughter of a Norman merchant, and also for his colleague William of Cloudeslie with the grand beauty Guillemine, niece to the Baron of Carlisle, who wants her to marry the Norman lord Sir Denys Crèvecoeur. The Baron is a major opponent in the story, and finally the outlaws and their Saxon allies besiege and seize Carlisle. The Baron dies, William is captured and to be executed but, as the third outlaw, Clym of the Clough, says, ‘the king is growing weary of the rapacity of the Normans and is bestowing rewards and honours upon the Saxons’.23 William is pardoned, marries his beloved and in her right becomes himself Baron of Carlisle. The post-Ivanhoe Saxonism of the novel, tempered with the romantic ethnic mixing of Royston Gower, is in an early statement given a political extension somewhat like that of Thomas Miller: landholders were everywhere driven forth from their homes to seek subsistence and a dwelling-place where best they might, and in self-defence they took to the woods and became, in the eyes of the Norman thieves, ‘lawless robbers’, because whenever they came across one of the fraternity they never failed to return the compliment paid them by divesting the foreign spoliators of all they possessed. (3)

The obvious parallel between Englewood and Sherwood and the general link to Robin Hood are finally strengthened as the novel’s last scene shows the former outlaws being honoured by the queen and generally pardoned for outlawry because of their prowess in shooting on her behalf. (This action is taken from the yeoman ballad ‘Robin Hood and Queen Katherine’.) But neither that link to the popular hero nor the brisk vigour of the story itself made this novel very successful, and that was Pierce Egan the Younger, Adam Bell, Clym o’ the Clough and William of Cloudeslie (London: Hextall, 1842), see p. 189. 23

Stephen Knight

86

also the case with its predecessor Wat Tyler. The audience’s interests seemed more in the popular and romantic/sensationalist end of the medievalist register and Egan’s own publisher apparently encouraged a Robin Hood follow-up in 1849 by Joachim Stocqueler entitled Maid Marian, a title used presumably to differentiate it, as it was evidently not out of feminism. The novel features a fairly random set of adventures, including some focused on an Arab father and his belly dancer daughter, brought back from Crusade by Robin. The father is accused of poisoning but escapes, while the daughter becomes one of Prince John’s mistresses. Thomas Cooper and G. W. M. Reynolds It could be argued that there are structural reasons why the Robin Hood story did not really mesh with Chartism. While the status of Robin-as-lord, deriving from the dominant Ritson–Peacock version, does seem a problem, it runs deeper than that. In fact, the outlaw myth is never really socialist, as James Meek has recently noted in discussing a modern reversal of the myth against the allegedly lazy handout-stealing poor.24 Robin wants to take money from the rich sheriff and monks to give to the poor – but originally, only when he is a lord. Yeoman Robin just keeps it – but he also never wants to seize the levers of real social and political power. It is revealing that E. P. Thompson’s searching account of the rise of the working classes in England shows that those people were never attracted to the outlaw myth. But though the two positions might seem inherently far apart, in fact the medievalist Chartist story as found in fiction, at its most political in the hands of Thomas Miller, is also basically a myth of social reorganisation and ethnic merging rather than social takeover. It could in theory mesh with the outlaw myth. The firmly Tory version of that outlaw myth offered by G. P. R. James in 1843 in Forest Days, where Robin is a loyal and highly effective supporter of lords true to the future King Edward I, might well seem to be a concerned reply to any elements of radical support that people might have been finding in Egan. But that was not the end of radical medievalism. Thomas Cooper, a close friend of Thomas Miller, served two years in jail for Chartist crimes in 1842–44, and in 1839 he wrote Captain Cobler (rejected and not published until 1848). This forgotten novel is about one of the leading figures in, and executed for, the Lincolnshire Uprising of late 1536, which was parallel to the northern Pilgrimage of Grace, preceding it by a week. Cooper, like several modern historians, argued that such movements were not only pro-Catholic and anti-Henry VIII, but that in them the concerns of common people were positively identified with those of the church and the monks, who were themselves heavily against the extending powers of the crown. The novel, he said contained much ‘antiquated information, which cost me a great deal of minute search’;25 it has a very complicated plot and is hostile to Henry VIII,

James Meek, ‘Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity’, London Review of Books 38 (18 February 2016), pp. 3–8. 25 In a letter of 1864, quoted in Stephen Roberts, The Chartist Prisoners: The Radical Lives of Thomas Cooper (1805–1892) and Arthur O’Neil (1819–1896) (Oxford: Lang, 2008), p. 51. 24

Chartism and Medievalism

87

who at one stage tries to seduce the heroine Magdalen with ‘the insatiable, brutal desire of the baboon’.26 Cooper no doubt wrote this in imitation of his friend Thomas Miller, but there was no other real medieval radicalism in the Chartist cause. Quite different is the other 1839 back-dated text, Thomas Doubleday’s The Political Pilgrim’s Progress,27 a fully developed allegory on the model of Bunyan’s very widely read The Pilgrim’s Progress of 1768 – E. P. Thompson ranks it with Paine’s Rights of Man as a ‘foundation text’ of modern radicalism.28 The central figure is Radical, who, though harassed by figures like Worldly Wiseman, Cant Humanity, Temporising and Expediency, does finally find his way from the City of Plunder to the City of Reform. Pierce Egan Jr went on to write very general fiction, often at a low level, and his apparent encounter with a general audience’s preference for colourful rather than radical medievalist fiction appears to have affected the work of someone who might otherwise have been a radical medievalist, G. W. M. Reynolds. He was an amazingly prolific and seriously radical novelist working in the 1840s and 1850s. In both politics and publishing practices Dickens was hostile to him – Reynolds had established himself in the late 1830s with Pickwick Abroad. In 1848 Dickens called Reynolds ‘the fringe on the red cap’; Reynolds replied by calling Dickens ‘an aristocratic lackey’.29 Reynolds was, by the late 1840s, a major Chartist, a leading speaker at meetings around the country. His works, set in modernity, are themselves strongly radical – his four-volume Mysteries of London reworks Eugène Sue’s 1842–3 Mystères de Paris in a more realistic and politically searching account of social and criminal forces of the modern city, and his massive eight-volume follow-up Mysteries of the Court of London, going back in time a generation, is a savage exposé of the Prince Regent and corrupt aristocrats. Other Reynolds novels of the 1850s explored the difficult lives of ordinary people, especially young women, not without an element of politically dubious romance – the girls often married up, to a good aristocrat who has somehow survived the inherent evils of his class. But though Reynolds would certainly have known about outlaws and the revolutionary potential of 1381, the topic never attracted him. He wrote some Scott-like northern historical stories, mostly hostile to royals and lords. He was one of the very few authors not at all seduced by the romantic charms of Mary Queen of Scots, and he usually figures a hard-working bourgeois figure, both honest and eventually successful. But he also produced three quite freewheeling medievalist, or (marginally) early modernist, stories. They lack an English, and especially a Saxon focus; Reynolds was firmly anti-racist, his fiction is recurrently pro-gypsy and even more strikingly, he was in his own time known as a ‘philo-semite’. His three historical stories Thomas Cooper, Captain Cobler (London: Watson, 1850), p. 362. Thomas Doubleday, The Political Pilgrim’s Progress (Newcastle: Northern Liberator Press, 1839), reprinted in Ian Haywood, ed., Chartist Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–63. 28 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1977), see pp. 34–38. 29 For a discussion of Reynolds and his exchange with Dickens, see Stephen Knight, The Fiction of G. W. M. Reynolds: The Man Who Outsold Dickens (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 7–8, 15–18. 26 27

88

Stephen Knight

range widely across Europe and are determinedly supernatural. Faust: A Romance (1846) is set in southern Europe in the early sixteenth century, and explores many excitable topics and tones far from politics. The story grows through many complications to a climax combining Lucrezia Borgia and a man caught in a steadily closing iron chamber – as found in the highly Gothic Blackwood’s Magazine story, ‘The Iron Shroud’ (1830; reworked by Poe in 1843 in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’). Events take place in the context of a recent plague and with mounting excitement as the Devil is about to come to regain Faust. This obviously attracted a good response in the London Journal, because Reynolds continued in the same mode when he started his radical and educational magazine Reynolds’ Miscellany in 1846–47 with Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, a highly excitable and elaborate narrative, also set in the early sixteenth century, about ninety-yearold Wagner, who gains constantly renewed youth from the devil along with lupine tendencies. He meets the Amazonian beauty Nisida, who is deaf and dumb, and he has many elaborate adventures, mostly to do with aristocratic vice and foolishness, but with occasional ventures out in his wolf form, when he kills animals and even children, returning ragged and bloodstained to his tasteful apartments. There is very little politics beyond some scenes of Catholic excess, involving, for example, penitents scourging themselves (Reynolds was not shy of the sadomasochism of the popular novel). The general nastiness of most aristocrats is a recurrent motif and, reflecting the author’s own life, there is much travel, with adventures on islands in the Mediterranean, in Naples and Florence. Eventually the exposure of a final secret gives Wagner back his aged body, he dies, and is buried with the penitent Nisida – who was always only pretending to be deaf and dumb. The third novel was the medievalist fantasy The Necromancer (1852). Here the devil-inspired person is Lord Danvers, living across the ages from the early sixteenth century to the nineteenth. To save himself he has had to find sequentially six girls willing to sell their souls to be his mate. This sensational, even prurient emphasis appears in all Reynolds novels, alongside and intertwined with his serious radical dedication – is it any wonder the cultural capital club of Eng Lit has totally ignored him? Reynolds must have had a sense that radical medievalism would not work for his audience, because the years when he produced Faust and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf were when he was also working hardest at educating his many readers in journalism and fiction to hold radical positions, and was also operating as a noted Chartist. That sense of the limited appeal of medieval radicalism may also be why Egan did not return to the mix of medievalism and Chartism, and indeed why figures like Miller and Cooper turned to serious Christian faith in their middle and later years, though the weakening and demise of Chartism by the mid-1850s were no doubt causes as well. Conclusion The essence of radical medievalism was left in the painterly hands of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose radicalism was aesthetic and personal rather than social and political. But they did maintain the medievalist critique with some vigour and

Chartism and Medievalism

89

in widely-seen and compelling modes, and when William Morris became increasingly radicalised – seeing himself, like Shaw, as a socialist from the 1880s – he would turn to medieval materials as part of his contribution to the impact of the late nineteenth-century follow-up to Chartism. Henry Mayers Hyndman, whose Democratic Federation Morris joined in 1882, transmitted Marx’s thoughts towards Fabianism. Hyndman was a conscious follower of the major Chartist Bronterre O’Brien.30 Morris recurrently medievalises his radical politics, in part in his view of the early art and craft of human creativity without the capitalist fragmentation and alienation of the labour-hire process, but also in his writing. The Earthly Paradise famously has a vision of Chaucer’s London ‘small, and white, and clean’, while A Dream of John Ball (in book form, 1888) is a fictionalised account of the 1381 revolt in which a dreamer travels in time to experience the medieval ‘Fellowship of Men’ focused on the preacher Ball,31 and shares with Ball his confidence that though in the future ‘men shall be determined to be free’ (285) and though ‘great and grievous shall be the strife’, still ‘the Day will come’ (286). In a less direct mood, the more ambitious News from Nowhere imagines in the mid-twentieth century what Matthews calls ‘a kind of late medieval utopia’.32 In both Morris’s writing and the Arts and Crafts movement, radical medievalism would gain a substantial place as it had struggled largely unsuccessfully to do in the earlier high period of both Chartism and medievalism. In much the same way the international movement named ‘The Knights of Labor’, founded in Philadelphia in 1869, exerted considerable pressure on employers’ practices, and was notable and largely successful in the worldwide campaign for reduction in working hours. Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg record another instance in their essay focusing on practice in Australia. A major strike for the eighthour working day began on the building site at the authors’ own University of Melbourne in April 1856, and its success was celebrated in May that year in the first of regular city parades that ‘regularly featured a dramatic display of civic medievalism in celebration of the international labour movement’.33 A striking element emerged in 1889 when union members of the United Tinsmiths of Victoria made four suits of shining tin armour, complete with accoutrements for horses, and they would regularly appear leading the annual celebratory parade towards what the local newspaper described as ‘the parliament house of the Knights of Labour’, namely the Trades Hall.34 While medievalism was often, even predominantly, a nostalgic and inherently conservative rejection of both urban and industrial modernity, and the politically See Ruth Kinna, William Morris: The Art of Socialism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 96–97. 31 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, in The Complete Works (London: Longman Greene, 1896), 16:284. 32 Matthews, Medievalism, p. 62. 33 Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg, ‘Medievalism on the Streets: Tinsmiths, Knights, and the International Labour Movement’, in Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch, eds, International Medievalism and Popular Culture (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014), pp. 83–105, see p. 85. 34 Hickey and Trigg, ‘Medievalism on the Streets’, p. 85. 30

Stephen Knight

90

resistant attitudes that were generated by those contexts, the voices of workers’ resistance and of political innovation were not entirely silent in the development and dissemination of medievalism. From Ritson to Morris, with special impact from Keats and Peacock and with a usually overlooked presence among some Chartist novelists, the medieval world could also be realised as a source of ideals celebrating fraternal values and natural coexistence that could inspire resistance to modern conservative attitudes and practices. When J. H. Reynolds, in a sonnet he wrote in response to Keats’s ‘On Robin Hood’, spoke of those past ‘Days of undying pastoral liberty’,35 he summed up a radical reading of the medieval context, even of the Great Charter itself, that was recurrent through the nineteenth century.

For a discussion of the Keats-Reynolds exchange, and also the involvement of Leigh Hunt, see Stephen Knight, ‘Romantic Robin Hood’, Chapter 5 of Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 103–42; esp. pp. 113–26. 35

5 Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms Mike Sanders

T

his chapter examines the contributions made by medievalism to Chartism’s strategies of legitimisation.1 It argues that ‘Chartist medievalism’ is a heterogeneous ideological formation which plays a significant role within the Chartist imaginary. The chapter is organised around a series of medieval moments drawn from a variety of Chartist sources and spanning the history of the movement. It begins in 1839 with the ‘Chartist’ sermons of the Rev. Joseph Rayner Stephens, continues through the columns of McDouall’s Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate (1841), the English Chartist Circular (1841–43), Thomas Cooper’s Chartist epic The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), to the late Chartist poetry of Gerald Massey (published 1848–51), and a lecture series given by the movement’s final leader, Ernest Jones in 1851; the chapter concludes with an analysis of a sequence of poems meditating on England’s medieval history taken from W. J. Linton’s The Plaint of Freedom (1852). The chapter situates these diverse sources in relation to three strategies of legitimisation used by Chartism – Constitutionalism, Natural Rights and Christianity. It argues, therefore, for the presence of different, but not necessarily competing, versions of medievalism within English Chartism.2

Chartist Medievalism and Constitutionalism Generally speaking, Chartism understood itself as a restorative movement, charged with the task of reclaiming constitutional rights which had been lost as a result of I am particularly grateful to David Matthews, James Paz, and Matthew Roberts for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 The role of medievalism in Scottish, Welsh and Irish Chartism is beyond the scope of this chapter. 1

92

Mike Sanders

the ‘Norman Yoke’ imposed following the Norman Conquest of 1066.3 In particular, many Chartists believed in the existence of an essentially democratic Anglo-Saxon constitution. For the Chartists, as for earlier reformers, Anglo-Saxon England had practised a form of direct democracy in the shape of the ‘Folkemot’ or ‘Folkmoot’, an annual gathering of free men called to give their assent to any new laws proposed by the king and his advisors. The popular preacher Rev. J. R. Stephens offers his own version of this practice in a sermon given on 3 March 1839. After inviting his hearers to consider why their ancestors built such large cathedrals, he supplies an answer: These cathedral churches were intended as meeting-houses for the people; the manhood of the entire county . . . was to be gathered together from time to time – say twice in the year . . . The Bishop was to be there, the representative of the heavenly power; the Sheriff was to be there, the representative of the earthly power; and the Bishop was to read out to the people the laws of God from his book (the Bible), and the Sheriff was to read to the people the laws of the land from the King’s book . . . [and] the people were to determine whether the laws of the land were in spirit, and in substance, and in operation, the same as the laws of God. And if they found them to be the same – if they found them to be good, and right, and wholesome . . . then all the people said ‘Amen’.4

Thus Stephens offers his audience a vision of the Anglo-Saxon constitution as a combination of direct democracy and popular sovereignty exercised within a theocratic framework. Furthermore, he argues that his auditors will be neither free nor happy until similar practices are reinstated in England.5 McDouall’s Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate (hereafter McDouall’s) shares Stephens’ opinion that the restoration of ancient ways is necessary to secure the happiness of the present day. However, it differs from Stephens in tracing the origins of England’s democratic institutions to pre-Saxon Britain. McDouall’s argues that it was in fact the ‘early Britons’ who followed the practice of electing their leaders and constituting a law-making Parliament on the basis of universal (male) suffrage, claiming ‘at the very beginning of our history, the great principle of the Charter was admitted, and republicanism, in reality, practised’.6 For McDouall’s, the Saxons continued and possibly even improved these native British practices until they were destroyed following the Norman Conquest.7 Even then the Anglo-Saxon 3 The classic account remains Christopher Hill’s ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 46–111. 4 Joseph Rayner Stephens, ‘The Political Pulpit. – Nos. 4 and 5’, in The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850, vol. 1, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), pp. 234–52 (235). 5 Stephens, ‘Political Pulpit’, p. 236. 6 ‘Remaining Rights of the People’, McDouall’s Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate, 6 (8 May 1841), pp. 41–42. 7 According to McDouall’s, Saxon institutions were also ‘founded . . . upon the principles of the Charter’ and were improved under ‘the still more democratic system [of] Alfred’ (41). However, McDouall’s subsequently criticises the Saxons for introducing hereditary rights to the soil and, thereby, laying the foundations for hereditary rule; ‘The Saxons’, McDouall’s, 7 and 8 (15 May and 22 May 1841), pp. 49 and 58/59. Despite introducing the potential for hereditary rule, McDouall’s makes it clear that the Anglo-Saxons remained resolutely

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

93

constitution displayed great tenacity: McDouall’s claims that Annual Parliaments survived until the reign of Edward III, and universal (male) suffrage persisted until Henry VI.8 McDouall’s argues that the unbroken desire of the people to reclaim their democratic institutions also serves as an index of their utility.9 Despite sounding a more sceptical note about the realities of Anglo-Saxon politics, the English Chartist Circular (hereafter Circular) nonetheless championed the constitution inaugurated by Alfred as an important precedent for Chartist demands. In its first number, the Circular begins a series called ‘Lessons to the Rulers, and the Ruled’ which aims to explain various constitutional arrangements with a view to deciding which is best suited to establishing the ‘general will’. As part of this process it traces the development of forms of government in England, beginning with the primal confusion of the Heptarchy (‘as many governments as there were powerful heads of armies’) which granted some political privileges to ‘the common soldiers . . . on the condition of holding in the most wretched slavery the peasants of the country’. This confusion is subdued by the ‘vigorous mind of Alfred’ who forms ‘the first correct idea of a political constitution on record’. The Circular promises a future article which will analyse ‘the excellences and defects of the wonderful fabric which [Alfred] sought to erect’.10 The Circular fulfils this promise in its very next number with the second lesson in its ‘Lessons to Rulers, and the Ruled’. This lesson begins by noting Alfred’s superiority to the ‘shallow-minded statesmen of modern times’. It continues by informing its readers that while it does not consider Alfred’s constitution perfect, nonetheless: it was as far superior to that which has superseded it, as heaven is to hell; and that a departure from, instead of the carrying out, as improving upon, the institutions of Alfred, has been fraught with misery, poverty, and slavery, to those who constitute the very sinews, and marrow of the state.11

The Circular understands the organisation of Alfred’s constitution as follows: at the base, ‘Peasants in Slavery’ (who possessed no political rights), next ‘Freemen in Tythings’; above these came the ‘Judges, Magistrates, and Commanders of Hundreds, elected by the tything-men annually’; above these were the ‘Sheriffs’ and ‘Magistrates of Counties’ (also elected annually), then the ‘Folkmote’ which met annually to discuss the acts of the legislature (as described by the Rev. J. R. Stephens), next the ‘Wittenagemot, or Legislative Assembly’ and, finally, the ‘executive and Ecclesiastical

democratic in two articles focussing on Alfred’s reforms: ‘Alfred the Great’s System’ and ‘The Anglo Saxon System’, McDouall’s, 9 and 10 respectively (29 May and 5 June 1841), pp. 66/7 and 74. 8 ‘Remaining Rights of the People’, p. 41. 9 ‘The best proof of [the Anglo-Saxon Constitution’s] utility was its long continuation in the affections of the people’, ‘The Anglo Saxon System’, p. 74. 10 ‘Lessons to the Rulers, and the Ruled’, English Chartist Circular, 1:3, p. 5. Individual numbers of the English Chartist Circular are undated. However, it began publication in early 1841 and ceased publication in 1843. 11 ‘Lessons to the Rulers, and the Ruled. Lesson II’, 1.3, p. 9.

Mike Sanders

94

Powers’. For the Circular, this arrangement comes close to realising the organic integrity presupposed by the metaphor of the constitution: 12

The head and extremities were united; not by occasional elections, or by pretended delegations of national power; the whole surface of the body, by minute subdivision, were formed to receive and transmit instantaneous impressions, external and internal; all the parts were held to their offices by the general force, without commotion and without violence[.]13

That the Chartists had a high regard for the ‘Ancient Constitution’ as guaranteeing democratic rights is beyond doubt. The precise sources for these beliefs are rather more obscure. The only direct reference to a study of medieval history in the English Chartist Circular is a brief mention of ‘Hallam’s Middle Ages’ in an article entitled ‘Origin of Aristocracy’.14 Josh Gibson suggests that the Chartists were influenced by the ‘democratic version of the Saxon constitution’ championed by late eighteenth-century reformers such as Obadiah Hulme, James Burgh and Major John Cartwright.15 In addition, the evidence provided by the Declaration of Rights (which was adopted at the First Chartist Convention in September 1839) suggests that Chartism drew heavily on histories of English law.16 The Declaration lists thirty-nine rights (possibly echoing the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church), nine of which are identified as Saxon in origin, with a further eleven sourced to Magna Carta and, therefore, potentially qualifying as rights reclaimed from the Norman Yoke. Thus, Chartism identifies a medieval provenance for just over half of all the fundamental rights to which the British people are entitled. However, for all its virtues the Circular argues that Alfred’s constitution carries two crucial ‘diseases’ or weaknesses: ‘the SUPERSTITIOUS DOMINION of ECCLESIASTICS, and the SLAVERY of the PEASANTS’. The Circular contends that ‘the union of ecclesiastic with temporal power’ is ‘absolutely inconsistent with public liberty’, whilst slavery is both an affront to humanity and an institution which necessarily degrades the enslaved. In order to preserve Alfred’s reputation, the Circular represents these defects as things ‘which his power could not eradicate but which the political constitution would have gradually expelled’.17 A later number of the Circular attributes the growth of the Church’s economic power to the decision in 854 CE by the ‘weak superstitious’ King Ethelwolph to allow the Church to extract tithes. The Circular quotes Hume approvingly as to the consequences of this ‘Lessons to the Rulers, and the Ruled. Lesson II’, 1:3, p. 9. Interestingly, McDouall’s offers a slightly different account of Alfred’s system as composed of ‘tithings . . . hundreds . . . the Mickle Gemot . . . [and] Witena Gemot’, ‘’The Anglo Saxon System’, 10, p. 74. 13 ‘Lessons to the Rulers, and the Ruled. Lesson II’, 1.3, p. 9. 14 A Tyne Chartist, ‘Origin of Aristocracy’, English Chartist Circular, 1:36, p. 144. Hallam’s Middle Ages is, presumably, a contraction of Henry Hallam’s The State of Europe during the Middle Ages which was first published in 1818. 15 Josh Gibson, ‘The Chartists and the Constitution: Revisiting British Popular Constitutionalism’, Journal of British Studies 56:1 (January 2017), 70–90 (71). 16 ‘Declaration of Rights’, English Chartist Circular, 1.18, pp. 69–70. 17 ‘Lessons to the Rulers, and the Ruled. Lesson II’, 1.3, p. 9. The article’s closing remarks suggest further lessons were planned, but no further articles in this series were published. 12

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

95

decision: ‘The ecclesiastics . . . made very rapid advances in the acquisition of power and grandeur.’18 The implication is that the Church was too strong to be confronted directly by Alfred but that had his constitution been allowed to develop naturally, its democratic elements would have ultimately led to the abolition of slavery and the eradication of improper ecclesiastic power (‘priestcraft’). This view is consistent with the theory of the ‘Norman Yoke’ which sees England’s burgeoning democratic institutions destroyed at the Conquest. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon constitution played an important role in the thinking of the early Chartist movement. It provided a positive vision of an English social order organised by forms of direct democracy. Therefore, the Anglo-Saxon constitution legitimised Chartist demands by furnishing a native, historical precedent. Alfred’s constitution demonstrated that the essential genius of the English was democratic. The Norman Conquest had destroyed direct democracy and compounded the twin diseases of slavery and priestcraft. However, in the centuries since the Conquest, the English had slowly reclaimed some of their lost rights. The victory of Chartism would complete this process, and return England to the true path of her historical development. Chartist Medievalism and Priestcraft If the Anglo-Saxon constitution provides the positive pole for the Chartist imaginary, then the Norman Yoke clearly provides its negative counterpart. Where the Anglo-Saxon constitution offers direct democracy and liberty, the Norman Yoke offers tyranny and oppression. Accordingly, in the Chartist imaginary this gives rise to a medievalism imbued with negative associations and nowhere is this made clearer than in Chartism’s identification of the Middle Ages as the zenith of priestcraft in England. Indeed, Chartism’s critique of priestcraft clearly differentiates this form of subaltern medievalism from its elite counterparts in two important and related respects – its critique of gothic architecture and its insistence that far from being the ‘natural’ outgrowth of an ‘organic’ social order, medieval hierarchy was sustained by a combination of force and fraud, with fraud in the form of priestcraft playing the dominant role. This view of medievalism is forcefully expressed in one of the Chartist movement’s most significant cultural landmarks, Thomas Cooper’s Chartist epic, The Purgatory of Suicides. On Cooper’s first dream voyage to the Purgatory of Suicides, he is shown the hall of the Suicide Kings which he describes in terms of gothic architecture. Significantly, for Cooper, such architecture is associated with ideological mystification and intellectual slavery. It is described as the ‘fashion of that gloomy age / When Phantasy, in convent bondage bred, / Drew graces from distraction’.19 Gothic’s love of the grotesque and variety (which would later be commended by Ruskin) is, for Cooper, a deliberate attempt to mystify and thus enslave the minds of the laity:

‘Origins of Tithes in England’, 2.111, p. 233. Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides (London: Jeremiah How, 1845), I:30, lines 1–3, p. 11. Further references to this work are given in the text. 18

19

96

Mike Sanders Grotesque of apes with ire of angels dread, – Aiming all contraries to blend and wed, Until with hybrids she had filled the mind, And with wild wonderment its powers misled, So that, its grasp grown loose and undefined, The shaven and shorn enchanters might its freedom bind[.] (I:30, lines 4–9, p. 11)

The very next stanza shows how the architectural style combines with Catholic ritual to confuse and intimidate the common people: And peasant thrall, by bell and book dismayed, Glanced tremblingly on corbel, niche, and pane, Where imp, saint, angel, knight with battle-blade, Griffin, bat, owlet, more befooled the swain, Till, when the incense fumed, round swum his wilder’d brain[.] (I:31, lines 5–9, p. 11)

The identification of Roman Catholicism with priestcraft as an intellectually repressive force which seeks to mystify, terrorise and thus secure the passive obedience of the lower orders recurs frequently throughout The Purgatory of Suicides. In Book Eight, Cooper identifies the Reformation as an important moment in the historical movement towards human freedom. In particular, he salutes Luther as a champion of freedom, as a hero who: . . . didst so fearlessly unbind Old Europe from the triple tyrant’s chain, – Enthroning Reason the soul’s suzerain[.] (VIII:5, lines 3–5, p. 257)

Intriguingly, Cooper acknowledges that Luther was, in part, an unconscious agent of history, unaware of the full meaning of his struggle – ‘thou didst not comprehend / Its ultimate’ (lines 2–3, p. 258). For Cooper, the struggle between Reason and its enemies necessarily proceeds ‘From step to step’ (VIII:6, line 8, p. 258), and is truly the work of centuries, so it is unsurprising that earlier heroes misrecognise the nature of their enterprise: What though those words, like oracles of old, Were sealed, in their full meaning, to the seer Who uttered them? (VIII:6, linesVIII:9, lines 1–3, p. 259)

This is also important because it imagines the realisation in the future of an improved society rather than the restoration of a lost, better society which characterises elite medievalism. It also enables Cooper to situate Luther in a tradition which reaches back to Wyclif. Indeed, he hails Luther as Wyclif ’s spiritual heir, and thus claims the former for England:

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

97

Thou art our own, great Saxon! we descry Our brave old Wickliffe’s soul restored in thee; And claim thee for our honoured land of Lollardy! (VIII:7, lines 7–9, p. 259)20

Furthermore, Cooper comes close to racialising history here, insofar as its central dialectic becomes the opposition between Saxon freedom and Roman bondage. Ultimately, this racial/national emphasis is recuperated within an eirenic (albeit Eurocentric) vision as Cooper populates his imagined future temple of humanity with a diverse range of figures: Spinoza and Rousseau, Bayle and Voltaire, With Fenelon, Erasmus, Pascal, shrined, – May beam in brotherhood eternal there! (VIII:14, lines 1–3, p. 260)

Although Cooper emphasises ‘natural’ over ‘lost’ rights, there is a degree of family resemblance with the myth of the Norman Yoke. In both cases, an apparently inherent Saxon desire for liberty is forced to struggle for realisation against foreign oppression. Certainly, Cooper’s nationalist account also sees the Middle Ages as a period when popular rights were degraded (although he stresses ideological mystification rather than the lack of political rights as the source of this degradation). For Cooper, as for Chartism more generally, it is a medievalism of resistance, rather than compliance, which is worthy of emulation. Cooper’s hostility to priestcraft, his suspicion of Roman Catholicism and his championing of the Protestant Reformation as a proto-democratic struggle combine to generate a resistant medievalism which is sceptical of the claims made by its elite counterparts. That it was a widely shared and persistent current within Chartism is evidenced by Ernest Jones’ lecture series, ‘Canterbury versus Rome’, which was given in the aftermath of the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England (the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850). The ‘Notices to Correspondent’ column of The Friend of the People for 8 February 1851 notes the success of Jones’ lectures and promises to reprint extracts from them in future numbers. In the event, the journal reprints four extracts across its next five numbers as part of an ongoing ‘The Crimes and Frauds of Priests’ series.21 Three of these extracts, ‘The Papal Church in the Middle Ages’, ‘Decline and Fall of the Papal Church in England’ and ‘The Papacy as it Was, and as it Is’, offer a very critical assessment of the medieval church. The second extract, ‘The Papal Church in the Middle Ages’ offers a view of the medieval Church as an oppressive parasite on the body politic: ‘[Monks] rested 20 It is interesting that Cooper does not think it necessary to provide an endnote explaining Lollardy to his readers. 21 ‘The Crimes and Frauds of Priests. Christianity and Popery’, The Friend of The People (15 February 1851), 75–76; ‘The Crimes and Frauds of Priests. The Papal Church in the Middle Ages’, The Friend of the People (22 February 1851), p. 83; ‘The Crimes and Frauds of Priests. Decline and Fall of the Papal Church in England’, The Friend of the People (8 March 1851), pp. 99–100; ‘The Crimes and Frauds of Priests. The Papacy as it Was, and as it Is’, The Friend of the People (15 March 1851), p. 107. Further references to these articles are given in the text.

98

Mike Sanders

like bloated spiders on the fruits of the soil . . . Their cathedrals were their fortresses, their monasteries their barracks, the rack their weapon’ (p. 83). Here Jones presents the Church as an occupying army ruling through fear inculcated by ‘the gloom of superstition’ and sustained by the dreaded Inquisition. Unsurprisingly, this Church retarded rather than promoted human progress: ‘Down at the feet of this accursed superstition sank everything that was good and great and free and brave. Brute force strangled every liberal thought – torture silenced every generous heart’ (p. 83). In a later extract, Jones takes issue with Macaulay’s claim that the Church preserved learning, arguing instead that it was ‘the republics of Italy and the Saracens of Spain that preserved learning – and it was the church that trod out the light of those Italian republics’ (p. 107). According to Jones, the Catholic Church in England exhibited similar characteristics. Indeed, he describes the period from Magna Carta to the dissolution of the monasteries as ‘one torrent of iniquity’ relieved only by Wyclif who represents ‘the first dawn of the Reformation’ (p. 99). Jones argues that Wyclif also represents ‘the dawn of freedom. For Christianity and Democracy are inseparables’, and describes him as ‘the source from which the Lollards, the Puritans, the Nonconformists and the Dissenters have successively flowed’ (p. 99). He describes Wyclif ’s followers as the ‘democratic Lollards’ who fought against ‘tyranny, both spiritual and temporal’, and notes both the ferocity and the longevity of their persecution, describing the latter as ‘the fiery scourge, [which] continued through three entire dynasties’ (p. 99). The tenacity of Lollardy is attributed by Jones to the fact that Lollards preached the ‘eternal gospel of equality, liberty, fraternity’ (p. 99) – thereby implicitly identifying Chartism as part of this tradition (the masthead of The Friend of the People carried the slogan ‘Equality, Liberty, Fraternity’). However, Jones warns against identifying the Anglican Church with the Reformation, claiming that the ‘state church prevented the Reformation, though it supplanted the Papacy’ (p. 99). When Jones later revisited this topic as part of his Evenings with the People series, he argued that the Established Church ‘is not the exponent of the Reformation, but its destroyer’, and describes it as having been built ‘on the blood of the Lollards and the treasure of the Romanists’.22 Jones summarises the pre-Reformation history of Roman Catholicism in England as a ‘millennium of infamy’ (p. 100) and is no more complimentary about the Anglican Church, declaring: ‘Canterbury is a bastard Rome. Christianity has long been crucified between two thieves – the English Church and the Romish Church’ (p. 107). Chartist Medievalism and ‘Social Catholicism’ When Chartism contemplates the political dimensions of Roman Catholicism, its assessment is negative and framed by the notion of priestcraft. However, when its attention shifts to the economic practices of medieval Catholicism, a more nuanced picture emerges. Admittedly, some commentators condemn the avaricious nature 22 Ernest Jones, ‘Evenings with the People. No. 3. The State Church’, in The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850, vol. 6, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), pp. 163–83 (p. 164).

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

99

of the Church. For example, in The Friend of the People series, Ernest Jones depicts the medieval Church as having its ‘eye on every house . . . [and] their hand in every pocket . . . they caught the last sigh of the dying, and with it the patrimony of his heirs’ (p. 83). He also accuses the Church of introducing usury to England and emphasises the wealth of its institutions at the Dissolution, claiming ‘[the] treasures in gold, velvets, and precious stones that were collected surpassed belief ’ (p. 100). However, this critique is overshadowed by an emphasis on the welfare services provided by the medieval Church which draws heavily on William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation in England. As Matthew Roberts shows in Chapter 1 in this volume, Cobbett’s History transformed popular understanding of the Reformation.23 He certainly provided the Chartist movement with an alternative view of the Dissolution as an economic and social disaster for the common people of England. In an account which draws heavily on the work of Catholic historians such as Lingard, Cobbett offered a positive assessment of what might be termed ‘social Catholicism’. Cobbett’s work was made available in cheap editions by Chartist publishers and was extensively reprinted in the Chartist press. The Circular, for example, serialised excerpts from Cobbett under the title ‘Sketch of the History of England’.24 The first article in this series offers a very favourable assessment of medieval social Catholicism. Cobbett notes that the Church held property ‘in trust . . . for the relief of the poor’ and argues ‘this state of things gave the common people great advantages . . . especially as it prevented them from being borne down by the aristocracy’. For Cobbett, the medieval Church not only prevented the common people from being reduced to the condition of slavery, it also ensured ‘a distribution of property favourable to the commons’ by distributing tithe income, by acting as ‘easy landlords’, and by spending its revenue locally (pp. 113–14). For Cobbett, this near-idyllic economy was destroyed by the Reformation which he depicts as a massive land grab by the aristocracy. Property held in trust by the Church for the benefit of the people was appropriated by an aristocracy which proceeded to destroy the independent yeomanry by depriving them of lifelong leases. The absence of welfare provision increased ‘the misery of the people’ until fear of ‘open rebellion’ prompted the Elizabethan Poor Law. For Cobbett, this is not a matter of antiquarian interest; rather he insists that the changes unleashed at the reformation are responsible for the current condition of society, ‘a state of rack-renters, of paupers, and of an aristocracy making the laws and burdening the commons, or people, at their pleasure’ (p. 114). Generally speaking, the social Catholic aspects of medievalism which play a central role in elite medievalism occupy a much more subordinate position within Chartist medievalism. In addition, even when it does appear in Chartist discourse, the welfarism of social Catholicism is figured very differently. This difference can be illustrated by a brief comparison with Disraeli’s Sybil, or, The Two Nations (1845). In this novel, Disraeli has his Chartist leader, Walter Gerard, rehearse many of See Matthew Roberts’ chapter in this volume for further details. This series ran for four consecutive numbers of the English Chartist Circular: 2.81 to 2:84, pp. 113–28 (pp. 113–14, 119, 121–22, 128). Further references to these articles are given in the text. 23

24

100

Mike Sanders

Cobbett’s arguments concerning the economic despoliation of the labouring classes as a result of the Dissolution. Elsewhere in the novel, he pens an approving portrait of a benevolent, paternalist aristocrat who behaves in an appropriately ‘feudal’ manner by taking good care of his tenants. Superficially, it appears as if both characters share a similar view of medieval values and are looking for ways of reactivating them in the present. Medievalism would appear, therefore, to provide the basis for class peace in Victorian society. However, Sybil is only able to make this wager by repressing two crucial aspects of Cobbett’s analysis: his critique of aristocracy and his preference for ‘independence’ rather than benevolent paternalism. As noted earlier, for Cobbett it is not the largesse of the medieval Church (welcome as it is) which is most valuable, but the way in which it guarantees the independence of the yeomanry by effectively granting the latter joint ownership of the land.25 It is this desire for independence, combined with a keen awareness of the practical limits of the benevolence of the propertied classes, which makes Chartism understandably wary of chivalric paternalism. Towards the end of the movement’s existence, Gerald Massey writes in praise of ‘Labour’s social Chivalry’ but this is a rare sighting of the rhetoric of chivalry in Chartist writing.26 Chartist Medievalism and Popular Resistance In place of the visions of chivalric paternalism characteristic of elite medievalism, Chartism privileges a view of medievalism as an archive of heroic examples of popular resistance to both the Norman Yoke and priestcraft (usually regarded as the different faces of the coin of tyranny). Crucially, for Chartist writers such as Massey and W. J. Linton, these historical examples are not treated as matters of antiquarian interest, but rather are seen as a repository of popular energies which need to be either transmitted to, or unlocked in, the present historical moment. In some cases, this sets up an important temporal dynamic which imagines the relationship of the past to the present in terms of irruption rather than restoration. In this view, the ‘unfinished business’ of the past erupts in the present in order to redirect the historical process to a better future.27 Thus, for example, in Massey’s ‘Our Land’, memory of the heroic past is intended to inspire present action: Tis the land that our stalwart fore-sires trode, [sic] Where the brave and the heroic-souled – Implanted our freedom with their best blood, In the martyr-days of old.

‘[T]he monastics . . . were easy landlords, let their lands at low rents, and on leases for lives, so that the renters were, in fact, pretty nearly the proprietors . . . hence arose the term YEOMAN, which is retained in our law-writs, but which has now no application.’ Cobbett quoted in the English Chartist Circular, 2.81, p. 113. 26 Gerald Massey, ‘Labour’s Social Chivalry’, in Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (London: J. Watson, 1851), p. 37. 27 For a fuller account of this temporal dynamic, see Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 209–13. 25

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

101

The huts of the lowly gave Liberty birth, Their hearts were her cradle glorious, And wherever her footprints lettered the earth, Great spirits up-sprang victorious, – In our rare old land, our dear old land! With its memories bright and brave, And sing O! for the hour its sons shall bend, To free it of Tyrant and Slave.28

Here Massey calls on the people to emulate the heroes of the past, and the first hero to be named (at the beginning of the next stanza) is Alfred, who is claimed for Chartism (‘Alfred was of us’). However, in other poems Massey presents the past as directly inspiring (in the sense of generating) present action; in ‘A Call to the People’, for example, he writes: The mighty dead lie slumbering around – Whose names, smite as if God’s soul shook the air, Life leaps from where their dust makes holy ground, Their deeds spring forth in glory – live all-where[.]29

Similarly, in the ‘The People’s Advent’, heroic example is transmitted immediately, literally charging the world: ‘the live lightning of their thought / And daring deeds doth pulse earth’s bosom.’30 It is noticeable that Massey usually offers generalised assertions, as opposed to specific examples, of the heroic past (‘Our Land’ with its references to ‘Alfred’, ‘Shakspere’ [sic] and ‘Milton’ is a rare exception to this rule). For a much more systematic and detailed engagement with the historical past it is necessary to turn to W. J. Linton’s The Plaint of Freedom which was published in 1852 and thus towards the end of the Chartist movement. The Plaint of Freedom stands alone amongst Chartist medievalist texts for its breadth of reference. In addition to the established touchstones of Alfred, Magna Carta, Robin Hood and Wat Tyler, Linton includes: Edmund Ironside, Hereward, Wyclif and Ket the Tanner, in his pantheon of radical medieval heroes. The Plaint of Freedom can be seen both as a distillation or synthesis of previous Chartist medievalism, as well as a distinctive repurposing of those currents in an attempt to address the challenges presented by the changed political situation of the early 1850s. Linton’s collection is written in response to both the failure of the revolutionary wave which appeared to be on the brink of transforming much of Western Europe in 1848, and the apparent lethargy of the English in the face of the threat posed to their liberties by the triumph of reaction in Europe generally and the rise of Louis Napoleon in France specifically. This combination of historical

‘Our Land’, in Massey, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love, 22. Significantly, the next stanza begins ‘Alfred was of us . . .’ 29 ‘A Call to the People’, in Massey, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love, 35. 30 ‘The People’s Advent’, in Massey, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love, 24. 28

102

Mike Sanders

situation and artistic-political intention is reflected in the poem’s formal qualities as well as its content. Formally, the volume consists of a short opening invocation addressed to Milton, followed by a longer prologue voiced by the Spirit of Freedom who laments England’s indifference to the struggles for freedom underway in Europe, but also views with alarm the dwindling of freedom in England itself where ‘lower, lower sinks the flame [of Freedom]’.31 This culminates in a nightmare vision in which a degraded England succumbs to French rule and witnesses the return of Roman Catholicism. Freedom asks if the people will wait: Till London croucheth to its doom: When strangers, stepping through our walls, Chaunt French Te-Deums in Saint-Paul’s, And pile their arms on Nelson’s tomb? [. . .] Can Wickliffe’s heirs permit the Pope? May Cromwell’s lieges court the Tsar? Or Alfred’s lineage shrink from war, With shameful peace our only hope? (pp. 8–9)

In an attempt to avert this disgrace, Freedom calls on the poets to: Invoke the ghosts of buried days, To show thee what thy life should be, – [. . .] Revived, – so gain thou living force From out the tomb of old renown! (p. 12)

There then follows a sequence of twenty-six poems tracing the history of popular resistance and the struggle for freedom from Caractacus to Paine (each poem consists of four quatrains with an abba rhyme scheme, written in iambic tetrameter). This sequence is followed in turn by a short poem which registers the apparent defeat of Liberty (‘So Freedom’s voice fail’d. All was still’, (p. 41)), before a longer poem calls to the reader: Look up! Be thou, this Present Time, That glorious Image of the Past; And yon cloud-shadow, o’er thee cast, The coming of a doom sublime! (p. 45)32

The final poem then affirms the final victory of Freedom, albeit at an unspecified future date. The Plaint of Freedom is clearly intended as a type of national epic. Throughout the volume, England is represented as favoured both by Freedom and God. Towards 31 W. J. Linton, The Plaint of Freedom (Newcastle upon Tyne: G. Bouchier Richardson, 1852), p. 6. Further references to this work are given in the text. 32 The italicised words appear in red ink in the original volume.

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

103

the very start of the poem-sequence she is ‘The isle that Freedom loved so well’ (p. 5), and in its closing stanzas she becomes the ‘Brave Ark, that hath / God’s Freight’ (p. 50). In places, The Plaint of Freedom elides national and racial identity; Freedom addresses ‘Saxon England!’ (p. 6). And, with the exception of the poems commemorating Caractacus and Arthur, Linton’s focus is firmly on Saxon and English heroes. The Plaint of Freedom bolsters its national-epic credentials by appropriating two of England’s foremost poets, Milton and Tennyson. From its dedication, ‘To the memory of Milton’, onwards, The Plaint of Freedom explicitly invokes Milton’s status and authority as the laureate of the English Republic. However, it also stakes an implicit claim to the current Poet Laureate, Tennyson, by adopting the In Memoriam stanza. The central sequence of The Plaint of Freedom brings together a history of popular resistance and rebellion beginning with Caractacus and ending with Paine. It is, in some respects, a rewriting of Constitutionalist historiography (the recovery of rights lost to the Norman Yoke). Except that unlike its Whig counterpart, Linton identifies the Commonwealth as the apogee of English freedom. Furthermore, he depicts present-day England in a manner which suggests that the Norman Yoke has been reimposed: Yon fence, that girds a thousand fields, Shuts out the serf, – their harvest yields No harvest unto landless serfs. The weaver starveth at his loom; The reaper faints for lack of bread . . . (p. 10)

Additionally, Linton’s vision of history draws largely on Carlyle’s narrative of English history as a series of rebellions, each one of which extends freedom.33 Clearly, Linton’s belief in the need for a further democratic rebellion marks a major point of departure from Carlyle’s schema. Finally, as noted earlier, Linton also subscribes to a quasi-secularised redemptive history in which England is the chosen nation charged with ‘teach[ing] the nations how to live’ (p. 45). In this complex historiography of England as the once and future Republic, medievalism occupies a privileged position insofar as the Commonwealth is understood as both the culmination of centuries of Saxon resistance to the Norman Yoke, and the restoration of Saxon liberty. Alfred is the first of Linton’s medieval subjects proper and, as is usual in Chartist literature, he is seen as providing a model of ethical governance. Indeed, the poem’s closing line insists on Alfred’s contemporary relevance – ‘Instruct our statesmen how to rule’ (p. 17). Justice and the encouragement of learning are seen as the key virtues of that reign, and these join the ‘Alfred jewel’ as emblems of his reign. However, Linton differs from other Chartist commentators in emphasising Alfred’s military valour and the means by which he preserved England’s national security:

33 ‘Call it not succession of rebellions; call it rather succession of expansions, of enlightenments, gift of articulate utterance descending ever lower.’ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), p. 5.

104

Mike Sanders Despair flees with the routed Dane; An English navy guards the seas. (p. 17)

In the poem Alfred’s military achievements precede his civilian accomplishments, suggesting that national security is a prerequisite for justice and learning, thereby emphasising the poem’s earlier warnings regarding the dangers of foreign invasion in the present moment. This dual focus also informs the next poem, ‘Edmund Ironside’. The poem opens with the repeated incursions of ‘the Northmen’ and celebrates Edmund’s resistance. Despite his ultimate defeat, Ironside’s heroic defiance, ‘like stag at bay’, proves him ‘Last worthy of our Alfred line’ (p. 18). The poem also suggests a contemporary parallel insofar as Edmund’s defeat is represented as the result: Of peace grown fat with shame secure, And foes who make their footing sure, And then proud deeds of no avail. (p. 18)

A similar vision of luxury promoting the triumph of expediency over principle (and thus bringing about national decline) informs the collection’s closing sequence where commercial concerns debase the very virtues they claim to promote. Thus, the present moment becomes one in which the ‘foul, slow, sullen wave of Trade’ threatens to destroy hope: O hope! – What hope? Of more per cent, Of costlier garb, or daintier food, For me or you? (p. 44)

This suspicion of commercial values provides one of the rare moments of agreement between Chartist medievalism and its elite counterparts. The next poem, ‘Hereward the Saxon’, describes the imposition of the Norman Yoke. It opens in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Hastings, offering Harold’s grave as a metonym for the whole of Saxon England:  . . . a foreign heel, Tramples that noble grave; and steel, Which slew the free, shall scourge the thrall. (p. 19)

The Norman Yoke itself is represented as both the collapse of Alfredian virtues and the irruption of violence into the domestic lives of the people:  . . . tyrant greed, And anarchy with sateless maw, And rapine scorning right and law: [. . .] And shrieks of outraged maids and wives, And servile deaths, and outlaw’d lives In deep morass or savage glen. (p. 19)

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

105

Amidst this chaos only ‘the stubborn Hereward’ offers resistance, but is unable to ‘break the Norman’s planted staff ’ (p. 19). The next poem, ‘Robin-Hood’, deals with the most famous of those ‘outlaw’d lives’. However, the poem does not offer a straightforward celebration of England’s most famous outlaw. Rather, Linton offers a more muted assessment of both the value and significance of Robin Hood. Outlawry is represented as ‘better far’ than a life ‘palaced with the tyrant’s men’, and ‘better even . . . / Than service under foreign lord’ (p. 20). The outlaw life offers a limited degree of autonomy and an opportunity for ‘vengeance’ and the chance to ‘bend / A freeman’s bow’. However, the final stanza suggests the limitations of this response: A thankless life in the merry green wood: Natheless in the shadow of Freedom there Some worthier hearts may learn to dare An aim beyond bold Robin Hood. (p. 20)

The poem ends on an ambivalent note, for all his boldness, Robin Hood enjoys only ‘the shadow of Freedom’; literally, free only within the forest and consequently living a life which is only minimally free but which anticipates (or foreshadows) greater and more substantial freedoms at some unspecified future date. Significantly, the notes which accompany the poem insist on Robin Hood’s status as a yeoman and as a representative figure: ‘Robin Hood is taken here as the impersonation of Saxon outlawry, of the long-during opposition of the people to the Norman rule’ (p. 62).34 The more substantial freedoms foreshadowed in ‘Robin-Hood’ begin to take a more concrete form in the next poem, ‘Magna-Charta’. The Chartist movement attached great importance to this document: as Josh Gibson observes, ‘the name People’s Charter itself was an explicit reference to the Magna Carta’.35 Indeed, the English Chartist Circular reprinted the entire text of the Magna Carta (suitably modernised) across the first two pages of its fiftieth number (pp. 197/198). In Linton’s account the barons assembled at Runnymede are described, tellingly, as ‘English bred and born’, which is to say they no longer appear to be Norman. Similarly, with this redrawing of the racial contours of the struggle for freedom, the enemies of freedom are now identified as ‘king’ and ‘pope’. The Magna Carta is seen as a cause for celebration because the freedoms it enshrines will extend beyond their original recipients: The Charter yet shall widen out Till Free and Bond have set their hand. (p. 21)36

Linton’s insistence on Hood as a yeoman is a response to attempts to identify Robin Hood as a displaced aristocrat; see Stephen Knight’s chapter for further details of this phenomenon. 35 Gibson, ‘The Chartists and the Constitution’, p. 75. 36 The contraction to ‘Charter’ also suggests the Chartist movement as an inheritor of this promise. 34

106

Mike Sanders

The final stanza sketches the process by which this promise is, partially, realised: Shout merrily, England! Freedom’s seed, – Whose growth our Hampden’s blood bedew’d, Whose promised harvest Milton view’d – Took root that day on Runnymead. (p. 21)

The notes which accompany the poem lay greater emphasis on the limitations of Magna Carta: ‘[t]his beginning of English liberties, well worthy our reverence as such, had however no provision for the relief of the great mass of the people, the serfs or villains’ (p. 62). The next two poems in the sequence, ‘First Commons Parliament’ and ‘Wickliffe and Sawtre’, respectively deal with the opponents of freedom – kingcraft and priestcraft – identified in ‘Magna-Charta’. ‘First Commons Parliament’ opens with a tableau of Simon de Montfort’s army kneeling at prayer. This image highlights the complex interplay of forces – people, God, and aristocratic hero – embarked on the struggle for freedom at this stage of the historical process. The image provides an emblem of good government, a resuscitated form of the Folkemot, which literally constrains the power of the king: ‘Halt, Monarchy! thy wand is bent’ (p. 22). However, the second half of the poem (which deals with Battle of Evesham where de Montfort was defeated and killed) offers an image of violent class conflict, in which the people inspired by de Montfort’s example, seek to enforce their rights in arms: Set firm thy foot, thou base-born churl! Against the foot of mailed knight: And, as thou wrestles for thy right, Remember Leicester’s Righteous Earl! (p. 22)

Where ‘First Commons Parliament’ addresses the struggle for political freedom, ‘Wickliffe and Sawtre’ focuses on the fight for liberty of conscience. The poem hails Wyclif as ‘The Reformation’s Morning Star’ and follows Thomas Cooper rather than William Cobbett in seeing the Reformation as affirming the right to liberty of conscience, ‘Free-Thought to winnow truth from chaff; / And Conscience, God’s ordaining priest’ (p. 23). The poem continues by mentioning Sawtre’s martyrdom (the accompanying notes describe him simply as ‘the first religious martyr in England’ rather than the first person to be burned for Lollardy (p. 62)), and uses the dispersal of Wyclif ’s ashes as emblematic of the spread of his influence throughout the world – ‘His dust may bid the world be free’ (p. 23). The next poem in the sequence deals with Chartism’s favourite medieval rebel, Wat Tyler.37 It opens with a reminder of the radical potential of Christianity and, in two stanzas which read as an extended gloss on John Ball’s famous question (‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’), deduces the need for 37 See Stephen Basdeo’s chapter for a fuller discussion of the treatment of the figure of Wat Tyler in the Chartist press, and David Matthews’s chapter for the presence of Tyler in the early nineteenth-century press more generally.

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

107

political equality from the fact of shared divine creation: ‘Let human lives, as soul with soul, / Be equal, and their passage free’ (p. 24). Less familiar is Linton’s likening of Tyler’s hammer to that of Thor: Pray then for Thor’s unerring throw! Woe wort they treason, Royal Knave! Wat-Tyler’s hammer digs thy grave, Though falling far, and seeming slow. (p. 24)

Despite the mixed metaphor of Tyler’s hammer digging Monarchy’s grave, this stanza exemplifies Linton’s belief in a long, dialectical historical process in which apparent defeats (such as the death of Tyler and the failure of the Peasants’ Revolt) will ultimately be redeemed as victories. It is also noticeable that the poem assumes a readership familiar with Tyler’s story. The poem focuses on the historical significance of Tyler’s example, rather than his actions and, in its final stanza, the distance between past and present is minimised by lines which could equally well be a summary of Tyler’s career or an exhortation to the workers of the present day to follow his example: Stout Saxon Workman! fling thy wrath On him who scorns thy homely stead, Who counts thee but as groats-per-head. Strike once, and clear thy forward path! (p. 24)

In the accompanying notes, Linton also insists on the parallel between Tyler and the present day: Nearly five hundred years ago (1381) Wat Tyler, the Maligned of History, demanded the political equality of all subjects of the realm, and now our intelligent villeins – mechanics ‘and else’ – are considering the propriety of some whig ‘instalment’ of the franchise for all but ‘about a million’. (p. 63)

The immediate failure of the Peasants’ Revolt condemns England to the ongoing nightmare of monarchical history which, for Linton, finds its clearest expression in the bloody rivalries of the Houses of Lancaster and York. In the ‘Wars of the Roses’, Linton represents the conflict as the culmination of all the retrograde developments in English history since the Conquest. For Linton, the cultural glory of Chaucer and the martial glory of ‘Azincourt’ ultimately count for very little: If Wrong contending aye with Wrong, And Robber Robber mastering, Be all the sad shamed years may bring Their dark blood-slippery path along? (p. 25)

The repetition of ‘Robber’ reminds the reader of the Conquest which is represented as the source of the endemic violence which follows: ‘From bitter fount what stream can flow? / What fruit shall follow canker’d flower?’ (p. 25). Indeed, the Conquest

108

Mike Sanders

almost becomes the political equivalent of original sin or an ongoing trauma which informs all subsequent action; the Norman Yoke is incapable of producing anything other than ‘Injustice’ and ‘Ruin’ according to the poem’s final stanza, which reads: The door the fool Injustice built Lets in his fellow. Nought can stay Crime’s Shadow. Fierce-sing’d Ruins lay Their dragon-eggs in nest of Guilt. (p. 25)

Linton’s final medievalist poem is ‘Ket the Tanner’ which opens with a focus on the ongoing economic expropriation of the commons (both people and land) in the form of enclosure.38 The drive to accumulation unleashed by the ruling classes is shown to be destructive of both the common good and the English landscape and incurs both a moral rebuke (in its allusion to Isaiah 5:8) and incites political unrest: Squeeze public weal for private gain; Remove the landmarks of the poor; Add field to field; heap store on store: And marvel that your serfs complain. (p. 26)

The second stanza offers a tableau of Ket’s supporters gathered round the ‘Tree of reformation’ on Household Hill. Like its counterpart in ‘First Commons Parliament’, this tableau records a moment of hope, of tragic promise, which arises just before the moment of defeat. In this case the promise is that of the potential power of the people: the tragedy, that they are unable to realise their power: O patient poor-folk! cease to moan; Can not those sinews make you free? (p. 26)

This lack of awareness means that the rebels constitute a ‘Hope all untrain’d, that only dares’, and in such a situation the poem reminds its readers, ‘hope’ only rhymes with ‘rope’. The final stanza confronts, and seeks to recuperate, the fact of failure: So Tyler fail’d, so Ket must fail: The plough hath pass’d over Mousehold Oak The unheeded word the ‘felon’ spoke Time echoeth, until it prevail. (p. 26)

Ket and Tyler are celebrated here as examples of heroic resistance whose actions and words ‘echoeth’ through history until Freedom (the ‘unheeded word’ is ultimately realised). One final aspect of The Plaint of Freedom which requires attention is Linton’s use of endnotes because these indicate the degree of familiarity which he assumes his 38 Ket’s rebellion occurred in 1549 and, therefore, has limited claims to be considered ‘medieval’. I have included it in this discussion for two reasons. Firstly, Linton presents the rebellion as yet another outgrowth of the Norman Yoke, in the form of the ongoing expropriation of the ‘serfs’. Secondly, Linton draws parallels between Ket and Tyler suggesting that, in his mind at least, both figures belong to the same stage of English history.

Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms

109

readers already possess with the history recorded in his poems. Of the ten poems from ‘Alfred’ to ‘Ket the Tanner’, Linton considers it necessary to provide a summary of the key events for only three poems: ‘Hereward the Saxon’, ‘First Commons Parliament’ and ‘Ket the Tanner’; he also provides a detailed note describing the treatment of Wyclif ’s remains. The remainder (and bulk) of the notes either explain a particular detail in the poem (the note to ‘Alfred’, for example, details the dispatch of Bishop Sigelm to India with a gift for the shrine of Saint Thomas), or draw a contemporary parallel (as in the case of ‘Magna Charta’ and ‘Wat Tyler’ discussed earlier in this chapter). In other words, Linton assumes that his readers are sufficiently familiar with Alfred, Edmund Ironside, Robin Hood, Magna Carta, Wat Tyler and the Wars of the Roses, for those persons and events to require little or no explanation. In conclusion, a number of different, but not necessarily competing, versions of medievalism coexisted within the Chartist imaginary. Medievalism could be used to posit a lost Anglo-Saxon Constitution thereby legitimating Chartist demands by the fact of historical precedent. Similarly, the history of prolonged resistance to the Norman Yoke provided a series of heroic opponents of political oppression (Hood, Tyler, Ket) who served as an inspiration and example to Chartists engaged in the same struggle. However, medieval social Catholicism could also be used to provide a model of a more just economic order, while Cobbett’s critique of the Reformation provided a means of questioning the legitimacy of the Anglican Church and the workings of the Poor Law in the present day. In contrast, medieval Roman Catholicism was often seen as epitomising the worst excesses of priestcraft and the Reformation (understood as affirming the right of individual conscience) seen as an important development in the realisation of human freedom. This view of the Reformation, articulated by Cooper and Linton, often underpinned a particular narrative of English history and English/Saxon identity as the struggle to realise a form of liberty which is simultaneously English and universal. Above all, in its unapologetic celebration of rebellion, Chartist medievalism rejected the inherently conservative values of elite medievalism with its dream of order.

6 Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’: Chartist Newspaper Portrayals of the Rebel Leader Stephen Basdeo

T

he Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was an event which saw 50,000 rebels, led by Wat Tyler, John Ball and Jack Straw, march on London to demand an end to the hated poll tax, the abolition of serfdom and the freedom for all men to buy and sell in the marketplace.1 Despite the revolt’s failure following the killing of Tyler by William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, Tyler went on to enjoy a post-medieval literary afterlife in English popular culture. Until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyler was always depicted as the clear villain of the tale – a drunken lout who challenged his king – while Walworth’s murder of him was held up as a noble act of patriotism. Scholars usually give credit to Thomas Paine and Robert Southey for rehabilitating Tyler’s reputation, transforming him from a rebellious wretch into a heroic freedom fighter.2 Paine, in a footnote in The Rights of Man (1791), expressed his admiration for the rebel leader. Southey, the author of Wat Tyler, which was written in 1794 when he was a young radical and then printed to embarrass him in 1817 when he was an older conservative, portrayed Tyler as a medieval sans-culotte.3 However, as this chapter argues, scholars should be giving

1 I am well aware that that the term ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ is reflective of rather dated historiography. It is, however, convenient and is used herein spite of the fact that the rebels in 1381 came from a number of different classes. The numbers of those who participated in the revolt can range in some sources to around 100,000, although most critics and contemporary sources seem to say 50,000 as a safer bet. 2 See Stephen Basdeo, The Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader: Wat Tyler (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2018) and Juliet Barker, England Arise: The People, the King, and the Great Revolt of 1381, 2nd ed. (London: Abacus, 2015). 3 See Basdeo, The Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader: Wat Tyler, pp. 74–106 as well as Jean Raimond, ‘Southey’s Early Writings and the Revolution’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 19: The French Revolution in English Literature and Art Special Number (1989), 181–96.

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

111

more credit to the Chartists for popularising Tyler and disseminating knowledge about the rebellion among the working classes. It was for the purposes of rehabilitating Tyler’s reputation, as the leader of the first large-scale popular movement, that Chartist writers began appropriating his story and publishing it in their newspapers such as The Northern Star, as well as those papers which were allied to the cause, such as The Odd Fellow. They did this by reprinting Southey’s poem as well as publishing original poetical works and historical commentaries of the revolt. Pierce Egan the Younger (1814–80) represented Wat Tyler as someone who was essentially a medieval Chartist in a highly popular novel, although it is not the intention here to focus on this work, which has received attention from several scholars (see further Stephen Knight’s essay in this volume). Instead, the main focus of this work is the many little-known poems which appeared in the columns of Chartist newspapers.4 This discussion is significant because it provides an alternative reading to R. B. Dobson’s claims about Chartist appropriations of Wat Tyler. Dobson stated that ‘the legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt to the nineteenth-century working class was rarely relevant and often ambiguous’.5 He was commenting here specifically upon the very few portrayals of Tyler he could find in Chartist literature at the height of the Chartist era, and accordingly surmised that Tyler’s memory was of little consequence to the Chartists.6 Yet as we will see, history was important to the Chartism as the movement’s writers aimed to provide an alternative history from below which rehabilitated Tyler, by contrast with the books written by ‘party historians’, who vilified him. Chartist writers focused on Tyler – their ‘favourite medieval rebel’ as Mike Sanders calls him in this volume – because his struggle was viewed as the first struggle of the British working classes against their tyrannical overlords (which suggests, incidentally, that Chartism conceived popular history in longue durée terms). Consequently, Tyler was essentially the focal point of an alternative form of nationalism – a nationalism from below – founded upon the remembrance of ‘great’ working men and a collective memory of shared workers’ struggles which were disseminated through 4 See the following works for a commentary on Pierce Egan the Younger’s Wat Tyler (1841): Stephen Basdeo, ‘Radical Medievalism: Pierce Egan the Younger’s Robin Hood, Wat Tyler, and Adam Bell’, in Stephen Basdeo and Lauren Padgett, eds, Imagining the Victorians, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies 15 (Leeds: LCVS, 2016), pp. 49–65; Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), ch. 2. 5 R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 356. 6 The fact that Chartist activists sometimes named themselves ‘Wat Tyler the Chartist Blacksmith’, or the famously named and oft-cited Wat Tyler Chartist Brigade and the Wat Tyler League, suggests a historical awareness of the revolt on the part of the Chartists. References to the above can be found in the following places: ‘Riot and Rescue of a Chartist’, The Morning Post, 19 July 1848, 7. For the reference to the Wat Tyler Brigade and Wat Tyler League, see David Goodway, London Chartism 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 13. The fact I am critiquing R. B. Dobson on this minor point should not be read negatively: Dobson, a medieval scholar with only a secondary interest in Victorian medievalism, was carrying out his research in the 1970s when searching for instances of ‘Wat Tyler’ in newspapers was a much more arduous process than it is now in the age of mass digitisation of primary sources.

112

Stephen Basdeo

print. National identity depends in all cases upon people having at least a passing knowledge of well-known events in their nation’s history which contributes towards their idea of their own imagined communities. Until the nineteenth century, history was primarily conceived of in terms of ‘great men’ and great events. Yet most of those told in history books simply retold the deeds of kings and statesmen; for the Chartists, there were few events or people in mainstream history with which they could feel any affinity. So Chartists turned to the Peasants’ Revolt and conceived of it a workers’ struggle – led by great men such as Wat Tyler – against a widely disliked elite who paid no heed to commoners’ grievances. Chartism was likewise a workers’ struggle against an elite which was unresponsive to the needs of workers. Tyler was important to the Chartists because he legitimated the idea of rebellion against the establishment. Moreover, Tyler remained an important figure for Chartists even after the rejection of the 1848 petition by the government; Chartist poets could still draw inspiration from Tyler’s story in preparation for a potential future rebellion even into the 1850s. Creating an Alternative Workers’ National History Contemporary history writing, as we have seen, often focused on the retelling of stories of ‘great’ establishment men whose actions fitted with the (small ‘c’) conservative view of history, while the likes of radicals such as Wat Tyler who opposed them were vilified as drunken and violent louts. Early in the eighteenth century, the anonymous writer of The History of all the Mobs (1716) argued that Wat Tyler’s rebellion and its aims were ‘obnoxious to all good men’.7 Popular editions of books such as The History of England (1808) referred to the rebels in 1381 as a ‘tumultuous rabble’.8 Likewise, Jonathan Boucher in A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (1797), for example, called Wat Tyler a madman, while arguing that the American revolutionaries had been animated with his spirit.9 The mainstream press was no fairer to Tyler’s reputation either, as the following article from The Weekly Entertainer in 1817 argued that ‘Wat Tyler, Hob Carter, and Tom Miller . . . could neither read nor write, and were poor ignorant wretches, [who] took a great hatred to all gentlemen’.10 Poems such as one attacking Henry Hunt (1773–1835) and previous reformers such as Thomas Paine and Wat Tyler, which appeared in The Morning Post in 1820, warned would-be radicals that violent popular leaders never succeeded in their arms but often met grisly ends.11 It is true that Thomas Paine made an attempt to rehabilitate Tyler in The Rights of Man (1791), in which he stated that Tyler deserved a monument to him erected at 7 Anon., The History of all the Mobs (London: J. Moore, 1716), pp. 12–13, cited in Basdeo, The Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader, p. 60. 8 Oliver Goldsmith, An Abridgement of the History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Death of George the Second (London: Andrew Wilson, 1808), p. 74. 9 Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797), pp. 50–51. 10 ‘Wat Tyler’, The Weekly Entertainer: or, Agreeable and Instructive Repository, 19 May 1817, 390–92 (pp. 390–91). 11 Anon., ‘A New Song to an Old Tune’, The Morning Post, 7 January 1820, 3.

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

113

Smithfield. However, Edmund Burke had famously hit back at Paine’s comments about Tyler on a point-by-point basis in one of his footnotes, calling him an ‘insolent demagogue’, although he did pettily insist that ‘little as I respect the memory of Wat Tyler, yet justice may, perhaps, require that I should apologise for degrading him by an indirect kind of comparison with one so infinitely beneath him in every respect as Tom Pain’.13 Paine’s positive assessment of Tyler – in but a footnote no less – was simply one voice among many more negative claims made about Tyler’s life and his role in the revolt; even the fallout from the publication of Southey’s Wat Tyler in the press had little to say of the rebel’s portrayal there and was focused more upon criticising the Poet Laureate. In the face of such lies surrounding Tyler’s character in the ‘courtly stories’ – the designation which one Chartist writer gave to David Hume’s account of the Peasants’ Revolt – the movement’s adherents had to forge their own national identity ‘from below’ that was focused upon the historical struggles for working-class rights and freedoms and the focal figure of this nationalism from below was Wat Tyler.14 The creation of an imagined community ‘from below’ required a degree of historical knowledge to create a collective memory of oppression. This is why Chartist newspapers, and periodicals which were sympathetic to the movement, included sections such as ‘Historical Gleanings’ which often offered a rudimentary social history, as the English Chartist Circular did when they retold the history of the Peasants’ Revolt with Tyler as the hero of the narrative with the ultimate aim being to ‘dispel the factious predilections of British historians’ who wrongly held William Walworth to be a hero.15 The dissemination of this alternative reading of history was especially important at a time when, as we have seen, Tyler was vilified in history writing, and translations of medieval chronicles such as those written by Jean Froissart were usually only available in expensively bound, multivolume works. The expense of these restricted access to such texts for much of the reading public.16 Even a supposedly popular edition, Tales of the Olden Time Selected from Froissart (1841), retailed at a price of 4s 6.17 This was expensive at a time when, as we know from Henry Mayhew, who was researching his London Labour and the London Poor in the 1840s, that very poor families often had to club together to buy a single penny 12

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. G. Vale (New York: G. Vale, 1848), pp. 157–58. Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 3rd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), p. 7. 14 W. J. Linton, ‘The Man Who Slew Wat Tyler’, The Star of Freedom, 5 June 1852, 1 contains the ‘courtly story’ reference. 15 ‘Historical Gleanings’, The English Chartist Circular, n. d. [c. 1840], p. 28. 16 Walter Scott, Tales of My Landlord: With the Author’s Last Notes and Additions and a Glossary: Black Dwarf and Old Mortality (Paris: Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1831), p. 500: This fact was recognised even by Walter Scott in Old Mortality (1816) when Claverhouse asks Morton ‘Did you ever read Froissart?’ to which the latter responds with an emphatic ‘No’. Lord Berners’s translation, first published between 1523 and 1525, was still in the nineteenth century considered to be the standard translation of Froissart. 17 Anon., ‘Advertisement’, The Athenaeum, 17 December 1841, 1076. See bibliography listings for other nineteenth-century editions of Froissart’s Chronicles. 12 13

Stephen Basdeo

114

broadside. Even if a working-class person was somehow able to lay hands on Tales from Froissart, the interpretation of the rebels’ motives in that was no more positive than in many previous accounts of the events of 1381. 18

A Respectable Rebel? Chartist revisionist histories attributed dialogue to the historical actors at Smithfield in 1381, much of it invented. The sentiments expressed by the king and those on the side of the establishment showed readers that in 1381, as in 1841, the ruling class held the working men of England in nothing but contempt, regarding them as immoral brutes unworthy of enfranchisement. Yet as Chartist writers argued, there was no reason for the ruling classes to sneer at the working-class members of the Chartist movement. Just as the Chartists aimed to present themselves as respectable and so prove themselves worthy of the vote, so writers aimed to depict Wat Tyler as a man whose moral compass was aligned with Victorian ideas of respectability. Chartist writers were often at pains to depict William Walworth as the morally depraved actor in the whole affair. How could ‘party historians’, asked a writer for the English Chartist Circular, ever approve and count as patriotic and virtuous the actions of Walworth when it was well-known that he owned brothels? When the insurgent army marched into Southwark, Tyler ordered a number of brothels, known by the name of the Bordello, or Stews, and situated on the Bankside, to be burnt. This may not appear to have been a very serious affair at first sight; but so it proved, for the proprietor of these dens of sensuality was no other than the ‘ever famous Lord Mayor,’ Sir William Walworth!19

In this respect they were on the mark: the historical William Walworth was, in fact, the owner of a brothel in Southwark and landlord for several others.20 The implication, for this Chartist writer, is that Walworth’s assassination of Tyler was not a patriotic act in defence of his king but simply an act of vengeance for harm done to his immoral business interests. It was only after representations of Tyler flourished in Chartist literature that kinder interpretations of Tyler’s life and deeds can be found in non-Chartist quarters. Charles Dickens in Household Words, for instance, declared that ‘Wat was a hard-working man who had suffered much, and had been foully outraged; it is probable that he was a man of much higher nature and a much braver spirit than any of the parasites who exulted then or have exulted since, over his defeat.’21 That said, Dickens is only giving Tyler slight praise and the rebel is not made heroic here as he was by the Chartists. Dickens’ statement has echoes of Burke’s comments. From the 1850s onwards, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw even became the heroes of various Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 93. 19 ‘Historical Gleanings’, 28. 20 Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 59. 21 Charles Dickens, ‘A Child’s History of England’, Household Words, 12 June 1852, 305. 18

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

115

penny dreadful stories such as Wat Tyler; or The King and the Apprentice (1867), The Sword of Freedom; or, The Boyhood Days of Jack Straw (c. 1870) and Gentle Deeds; or, Serfdom to Knighthood (1886). Many of these penny dreadfuls are Robin Hood tales in all but name; Tyler is usually a returning war veteran who becomes an outlaw and subsequently becomes involved in the Peasants’ Revolt. Tyler’s appearances in popular literature emerged at the same time as portrayals of him in mainstream ‘three-decker’ novels such as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Merry England; or, Nobles and Serfs (1874) – a novel in which Tyler is once again represented as a Robin Hood figure – before he became a significant figure in the English socialist movement.22 The fact that Walworth was not a member of the nobility but someone who, if he were alive in the nineteenth century, would have been a member of the middle classes, allowed Chartist writers to vent some of their anger towards the bourgeoisie. James Bronterre O’Brien, in an essay first published in Bronterre’s National Reformer in 1837, which was then reprinted in The Chartist Circular in 1841, argued that while the aristocracy, or ‘the court sycophants’ as he called them, were indeed a contemptible class of people, the worse among mankind were the middle classes. From their ranks, such men as Walworth were drawn; they always betray those with whom they should really have common cause. This was as true in 1381 as it was after the middle classes’ betrayal of the working classes in 1832, made all the more odious when the newly enfranchised middle classes helped the government pass the New Poor Law in 1834.23 Tyler, described as one of ‘nature’s nobles’ was, therefore, killed ‘by the murderous hand of a scheming profit monger’, or by the hand of the middle classes.24 As Bronterre concluded, it was ever thus ‘with the base and bloody minded middle man, Walworth’.25 A Man of the People O’Brien called Tyler one of ‘nature’s nobles’. It was not in prose, however, but principally poetry that Tyler was held up as an example of a brave and heroic Englishman – a ‘great’ man of working-class readers’ own class – who faced oppression and hardship and of whom, although his revolt failed, they could still be proud.26 Editors often included extracts from Southey’s poem; Cleave’s Penny Gazette reprinted Southey’s Wat Tyler in 1838 and provided several illustrations alongside it.27 The Odd Fellow excerpted Southey’s poem on the front page of its issue for 18 July 1842: 22 See Basdeo, The Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader, pp. 139–46 for a discussion of Tyler’s appearances in penny dreadfuls. 23 James Bronterre O’Brien, ‘Who are our real foes and oppressors?’, Bronterre’s National Reformer in Government, Law, Property, Religion, and Morals 1:5 (1837), 37–38 (p. 37) and James Bronterre O’Brien, ‘The Middle Classes’, The Chartist Circular, 16 January 1841, 1. 24 O’Brien, ‘Who are our real foes and oppressors?’, 37. 25 O’Brien, ‘Who are our real foes and oppressors?’, 37. 26 Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 2. 27 ‘Scenes from Southey’s Wat Tyler’, Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 10 March 1838, 1–2.

116

Stephen Basdeo Oh, ’tis of vast importance; who should pay for The luxuries and riots of court? Who should support the flaunting courtier’s pride? Pay for their midnight revels, their rich garments. Did not the state enforce? – think ye, my friend, That I, a humble blacksmith, here at Debtford [sic] Would part with these six groats – earned by hard toil, All that I have! To massacre the Frenchman, Murder as enemies, men I never saw! Did not the state compel me?28

Although written primarily as a critique of aristocratic or ‘Old Corruption’, in which an unfeeling and unresponsive aristocratic oligarchy levied taxes on poor plebeians, these lines from Southey would have still had resonance for many readers in the 1840s. While the example from O’Brien cited earlier condemned the middle classes, in Chartist writings, criticism of ‘Old Corruption’ often sat easily alongside condemnations of the bourgeois capitalist class.29 Interestingly, credit is not given to ‘apostate’ Southey for these lines which are simply retitled as ‘A Worker’s Thoughts on Courtly Folly’ and the extract is signed as if written by Wat Tyler himself.30 Southey was not the only writer ‘borrowed’ by the Chartists; poems from Charles Cole also appeared in the columns of the movement’s newspapers along with original poetry from anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Most of the poetry in which Tyler features dates from the 1830s and 1840s, suggesting that the Chartists were aiming to provide the rebel leader with the poetical tradition of his own which he had lacked in popular culture this point (see David Matthews’ essay in this volume for early uses of Tyler). The exception here, of course, as Dobson points out, is that while most of the information we have of the actual rebels comes from such writers as Walsingham and Froissart, who were opposed to their cause, there does exist a ‘handful’ of vernacular letters which make much use of rhyme.31 There is one ballad which celebrated the alleged nobility and heroism of Richard II and William Walworth in facing down Tyler’s revolt, which first appeared in The Garland of Delight (1612), and was then reprinted in Thomas Evans’s Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative (1777). However, Tyler certainly did not enjoy any kind of post-medieval

Wat Tyler, ‘A Worker’s Thoughts on Courtly Folly’, Odd Fellow, 18 July 1842, 1. Gareth Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 90–178. 30 In 1842 Southey was certainly not a ‘worker’ by any stretch of the imagination, given his 1813 appointment to the lucrative position of Poet Laureate. The omission of any credit to Southey may be because the editors had received an anonymous submission and did not check its authorship; more likely, they might have withheld credit to the poet, in light of his conversion to Toryism in the 1800s and his subsequent well-known anti-reform opinion in the earlier part of the century. In any case, Southey never registered his poem with the Stationers when he wrote it back in 1794 so it was technically out of copyright; there was no obligation to credit him. 31 Dobson, p. 71: ‘Iohan the Mullere hath ygrounde small, small, small, / The Kynges sone of heuene schal paye for al. / Be war or ye be wo; / Knoweth your freend fro your foo.’ 28

29

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

117

ballad afterlife on the same scale as Robin Hood, who had been completely gentrified by the time the Chartists came along.32 Very few of the Chartist Wat Tyler poems under examination here were written specifically for the working-class newspapers and periodicals in which they appeared. Editors usually reprinted earlier poems by radical poets, much as they did with Southey’s poem. John Cleave (c. 1795–1850), the editor of Cleave’s Penny Gazette, inserted Charles Cole’s ‘Sonnets after Reading Part of a History of Wat Tyler’, which originally appeared in Cole’s anthology entitled A Political Address to His Grace the Duke of Wellington (1835), a sardonic mock-heroic poem showing Wellington to be a bloodstained tyrant. In his Wat Tyler sonnets, Cole’s purpose was to hold up Tyler as a historical figure of whom the working classes and ‘true patriots’ could be proud, in contrast to the elites, having declared that ‘each patriot’s pen, / And tongue, both touch’d alike with living fire, / Shall place thee proudly with the noblest men.’33 Further poems continue this tradition of glorifying anti-establishment rebels. A poem entitled ‘The Voice of Wat Tyler’ appeared in Odd Fellow, and was written by ‘Spartacus’ (as Mike Sanders points out, this pseudonym was often used by W. J. Linton). Given the ‘physical force’ nature of the poem, there seems to be no reason to doubt Linton’s authorship here. Linton lists in succession a number of British, and not just merely English, historical revolutionaries such as ‘Crowned Cromwell’, ‘Giant Wallace’. Chief among all of these, however, is ‘the English Thor’, Wat Tyler, who is the poem’s narrator. The tool with which Tyler killed the tax collector who assaulted his daughter has acquired almost mythic status so that, as ‘Lord of the anvil’, he is set apart as the principal rebel. The emphasis placed upon the hammer and the anvil served the same function in these poems as the hammer and sickle would for communists in the twentieth century. They were workers’ tools but also symbols of resistance to oppression and unjust taxes. As we have seen, to forge an alternative workers’ nationalism it was important to build up readers’ knowledge of the life and deeds of the great working men of the past, and where poems referred to Tyler alongside more obscure figures, more information had to be given. If readers did not know about the lives of the historical figures to whom these poems referred, they could turn to the footnotes some of the papers provided. It was not unusual for poets in the nineteenth century to include numerous notes alongside their poems, especially when they were dealing with historical subjects, in a tradition looking back to the heavily annotated poems of Walter Scott: The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Rokeby (1813) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). Even Hone’s edition of Southey’s Wat Tyler makes significant use of notes giving the history of the revolt. As Mike Sanders notes in Chapter 5 in this volume, Linton followed this trend by including endnotes to his medievalist poems. Similarly, ‘The Voice of Wat Tyler’ lists various historical reformers and has several endnotes printed immediately after the poem adding information on them.34 32 See Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), ch. 2. 33 Charles Cole, ‘Poets Corner: Sonnets after Reading a Part of History Relating to Wat Tyler’, Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 3 July 1841, p. 195. 34 ‘The Voice of Wat Tyler’, The Odd Fellow, 16 April 1840, 64.

118

Stephen Basdeo

Radical poetry could, therefore, be just as instructional and informative as the historical essays. Some Chartists viewed middle-class philanthropists’ attempts to provide a form of basic instruction to the poor as yet another attempt at controlling their lives. Yet there was a widespread acknowledgement from many Chartists that educational reform would be required after they had managed to get their demands written into law.35 For many Chartists, especially the ‘Knowledge Chartists’, wholesale educational reform had to start before they won their rights, and the footnotes provided alongside such poems as ‘The Voice of Wat Tyler’ offered both entertainment and historical instruction. Not only did Chartist writers celebrate Wat Tyler as a great man of labour history, and the Peasants’ Revolt as the first English workers’ movement, they also sometimes placed the Peasants’ Revolt in a transnational context. This reflected a school of thought among Chartist writers that workers’ struggles in the present were part of a long line of class struggles not only in England but the world over, stretching even into antiquity, when the peasantry of Ancient Greece, Sparta, and even Rome rebelled against their overlords. This sentiment was echoed in The Penny Satirist in 1840 when, having concluded a fairly conventional history of Tyler’s revolt, the anonymous writer stated ‘thus failed the first struggle of the British helots’.36 Chartist activists referred to themselves as modern-day helots on a number of occasions.37 A similar transnational emphasis is found in Edwin F. Roberts’ account of the events of 1381, in which he argued that the era was: An age of proletarian revolt. The iron rule of the middle ages, the same everywhere from that universal tendency of men to rule, to tyrannise, and to plunder had produced its fruit. In Flanders the people had made themselves remarkable under the leadership of Philip Vann Artevelde; in France, the Jacquerie had given the aspect of things all the grimness of that blood with terror can invest circumstances with. In Froissart’s chronicles, there is this testimony to oppression at home: – ‘It is customary in England, as well as in other countries, for the nobility to have great privileges over the commonalty whom they keep in bondage’.38

The focus on Flanders is interesting as Pierce Egan the Younger, whose novel Wat Tyler was essentially a Chartist reimagining of the Peasants’ Revolt, also wrote Quintin Matsys: The Blacksmith of Antwerp (1838) in which the eponymous painter is actually a rebel who leads a revolt against the nobility of Antwerp. Scholars such as Henry Weisser long ago pointed out that the main facets of Chartism were international in their scope, illustrated by remarks published in The Northern Star in Michael Cullen, ‘The Chartists and Education’, New Zealand Journal of History 10:2 (1976), 162–77 (p. 165). 36 ‘The Meeting of Richard the Second and Wat Tyler’, The Penny Satirist, 3 October 1840, p. 1. 37 A few selected examples include: Anon., ‘Chartist Meeting in Manchester’, The Northern Star, 24 April 1841, 6; Anon., ‘Happy Land’, The Northern Star, 16 July 1842, 3; Anon., ‘West Indian Capital and Free Labour’, The Northern Star, 3 September 1842, 3; Anon., ‘To the Editor’, The Northern Star, 29 April 1843, 5. Further examples can be found at Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, https://ncse.ac.uk (accessed 17 December 2018). 38 Edwin F. Roberts, ‘The Days of Wat Tyler’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 4 August 1849, 3–4 (p. 4). 35

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

119

1846 which stated that all worthy activists must aim not only for the emancipation of the British working class but also for ‘the veritable emancipation of the human race’.39 The Chartists’ internationalist outlook is one of the reasons why, as Sanders points out, The Northern Star had an often uneasy relationship with Irish nationalist writers: while the paper’s writers and editors sympathised with the struggles of the Irish workers who were subjugated by an unresponsive and callous Parliament it still condemned the ‘nationality humbug’ and further stated that ‘if we thought that nationality was to be the only end . . . we would never again write or utter another word in favour of either’.40 Solidarity could be expressed with nationalist movements overseas, but there had to be a greater, and nobler, purpose behind nationalist struggles against aristocratic and capitalist oligarchies. Chartism’s focus on the betterment of the condition of working men the world over explains why, even as the Chartist movement was dying out in the early 1850s, poets find scope for using Wat Tyler as a means of criticising American slavery, thereby uttering another expression of solidarity with oppressed peoples from around the world. ‘The Man Who Slew Wat Tyler’, written by Linton, was occasioned by the visit of an American politician to London. For reasons which remain unclear – the politician in question was not named in the paper – the American was treated to a dinner held by The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. The visiting statesman commended the corporation in his speech for having among its ancient ranks ‘the man who slew Wat Tyler’ (the historical Walworth was indeed apprenticed in his youth to John Lokevyn, a fishmonger and wool merchant). Linton was livid that praise could ever be given to Walworth the Murderer: Let’s hope that your fishmongrel Co. Have other grounds for glory; For Walworth’s was a coward’s blow, – [. . .] You Yankee Nigger-driver, you Just harken to a riler; And conscience flog you not a few: Your fellow slew Wat Tyler.41

There are two internationalisms at play: there is the internationalism of big capital which holds in high esteem such men as Walworth, the murderer of Tyler as far as Chartists were concerned. They wine and dine with each other; they congratulate themselves on their spiritual ancestors. They have an imagined community all of their own, founded upon a common enemy: the workers whom they exploit. Then there is the workers’ internationalism: the disenfranchised factory worker has common cause with the black slave. Earlier in 1842, a writer in The Chartist Circular condemned slavery, which had been abolished throughout the British Empire at this point, in stark terms, saying that: ‘slavery abolishes virtue. Slavery robs a man of himself, making him a mere machine for tyrants’ work. Slavery murders man. The Northern Star, 14 February 1846, cited in Henry Weisser, ‘Chartist Internationalism, 1845–1848’, The Historical Journal 14:1 (1971), 49–66 (p. 50). 40 The Northern Star, 1 January 1848, cited in Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, p. 173. 41 W. J. Linton, ‘The Man Who Slew Wat Tyler’, The Star of Freedom, 5 June 1852, 1. 39

120

Stephen Basdeo

Slavery damns the future of the whole race.’42 While many Chartists in England looked to America as a shining beacon of democracy and liberty when compared with England, when many activists emigrated over there in the latter part of their careers, the ‘land of the free’, with its use of slavery, seemed distasteful to many. Writing after his move to the United States in 1848, John Campbell, a Chartist émigré, argued that unless slavery was abolished his adopted country ‘can no longer be styled a democracy’.43 While leading Chartist activists envisioned their movement as internationalist, less has been said by modern historians about how they conceived of their own labour history. Thus, the class conflict between slaves and masters, peasants and lords, workers and capitalists stretched from ancient times with the helots, then to medieval Europe, and finally to the modern peasantry: the nineteenth-century working class and, of course, black slaves in America. After the government’s rejection of the third Chartist petition in 1848 there was a sense of defeat in some quarters but many were still willing to fight on. Again, Tyler’s name was invoked in order to rouse the working men of England from their apathy. To this end, The Northern Star reprinted in its issue of 16 September 1848 a little-known poem by Charles Cole entitled ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’. The poem, or rather song, originally appeared in Hugh Williams’s edited volume of National Songs and Poetical Pieces (1839).44 This little book was full of poems written by radicals for radicals; the use of ‘national’ in the title is further evidence of the fact that, at this point in time, the Chartist movement, with whom both Williams and the publisher Henry Hetherington were heavily involved, was aiming to create an alternative form of nationalism which focused upon the deeds of great working men and notable events in English labour history (each poem in this book likewise makes significant use of endnotes to further educate readers on the events depicted).45 Chartist internationalism is further indicated in the fact that the collection contains songs praising French and Polish workers in their own struggles against a tyrannical elite.46 Williams’ original collection, however, enjoyed only a limited print run and had little impact upon its first publication. There was no other Wat Tyler poem which was more appropriate for The Northern Star to print in late 1848 because the content of the poem shows Tyler roused from his grave to urge the working classes to fight on. What the working people of Great Britain need in 1848 is a new sense of Anon., ‘Slavery’, The Chartist Circular, 4 June 1842, 2. John Campbell, A Theory of Equality; or, The Way to Make Every Man Act Honestly (Philadelphia, PA: John B. Perry, 1848), p. 16. 44 Charles Cole, ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’, in National Songs and Poetical Pieces, ed. Hugh Williams (London: H. Hetherington, 1839), pp. 17–19. It is often difficult to trace the first appearance of a Wat Tyler poem in the archives due to the fact that they were often reprinted in a subsequent paper. 45 Anon., ‘Is there yet spirit in England?’, in National Songs and Poetical Pieces, ed. Hugh Williams (London: H. Hetherington, 1839), p. 22: for example, statements such as the working class being ‘sabred by troops’ can be taken as veiled references to Peterloo. 46 J. S. Buckingham, ‘Death or Liberty’, in National Songs and Poetical Pieces, ed. Hugh Williams (London: H. Hethertington, 1839), pp. 39–40 praises ‘Heroic France’ and hopes that England will learn from her example, while Thomas Jenkins, ‘To Poland’, in National Songs and Poetical Pieces, ed. Hugh Williams (London: H. Hetherington, 1839), pp. 42–44 hopes that Poland will throw off the weight of her Russian and German tyrants. 42 43

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

121

purpose and, perhaps, ‘a TYLER’, after which Wat speaks to the new peasantry and inspires them by reminding them of his own struggle in which, like Samson, he rose up with the people of his country and unshackled himself from chains: Now to the purpose – I am He, Who not for fame competed, But would have seen my country free, And have her foes defeated: Mine was a deed the good desired, The shackled chain was round us; We rose at once like men inspired, And burst the links that bound us!

Yet there is both admonishment and a warning contained in his lines: But what avail’d it? Soon the youth Whose kingly craft entrapp’d them. To trust his honour and his truth, Again his chains enwrapp’d them. And still ye cowards ye are bound, As ’twere a serpent coiling, Its dreadful weary length around, Your limbs, all faint and toiling!47

Initially, Tyler’s and the poet’s tone is one of disappointment with the Victorian working classes; he goes on to admonish them not only for having forgotten the struggle of the serfs from 1381 but also such events as the Peterloo Massacre in 1819.48 What the mention of such events signifies is the fact that the poet, through the voice of Tyler, is building a revolutionary nationalism based upon the collective memory of such events. Essentially, the Victorian working classes need to be reminded of previous struggles and Tyler exhorts them to rise again and break the chains that bind them into submission. Yet it will not be an easy struggle, as Tyler tells the modern working classes that there will be plenty of cultural distractions to beguile them away from focusing upon the cause of reform, Tyler proclaims: ‘God save the Queen’, your dogs I see, Have superseded donkeys; Age of progressive industry! Of course you work your monkeys! ‘God save the Queen!’ Still Britons slaves, In this land of bravery; Ye sing ‘Britannia rules the waves,’ Yet bow to basest slavery.49

47 48 49

Charles Cole, ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’, The Northern Star, 16 September 1848, p. 2. Cole, ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’, p. 2. Cole, ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’, p. 2.

122

Stephen Basdeo

The historical Wat Tyler’s actions were not, of course, republican; on the march to London in the summer of 1381, the rebels stopped random passers-by and made them swear loyalty to the king. Even when Tyler met the king at Mile End, Tyler stressed that the rebels were loyal to him, objecting only the evil counsellors who surrounded him. This is one of the reasons why Tyler asked permission to behead those of his ministers who had committed treason against him. But in Cole’s poem, patriotism and loyalty to the monarch were meaningless: the ghost of Wat Tyler who speaks through the poem has learned his lesson and urges the Chartists not to make the same mistakes as the 1381 rebels by being loyal to the king. The blatant animosity towards the queen found in Cole’s poem was actually unusual in Chartist poetry and in its activists’ writings more generally. Williams’ volume in which the poem was first printed was, in fact, dedicated ‘to the Queen and her Countrymen’ while the dedicatory note reiterates contemporary radicals’ love for the person of her majesty.50 Some activists held republican sentiments but overall the movement had ‘very little to say’ about the monarchy.51 Pickering goes further and suggests that most Chartists’ visions of a reformed political constitution envisioned a role for the monarchy – what he calls ‘popular monarchism’ – and that Victoria was seen by many a Chartist activist as the person who might be able to sway politicians into granting the Charter.52 This was a view also echoed in many nineteenth-century ‘King and Commoner’ ballads published during the 1840s, in which a commoner unwittingly meets Queen Victoria and tells her the working classes’ grievances, after which the monarch is moved to call her corrupt ministers to account. These works follow the tradition of a number of popular medieval and early modern ballads depicting a king travelling among the peasants in disguise – a corpus of works which has recently been studied in depth by Mark Truesdale – and allowed a patriotic yet reformist agenda to be represented in popular song. In their nineteenth-century iterations, it is never Victoria who is at fault but her ministers, much as in earlier medieval ‘King and Commoner’ tales it was local officials such as sheriffs and abbots who were responsible for the commoners’ ills while the king was free from blame.53 Yet Cole, through Tyler, reprimands the working classes and implies that any movement which bows to ‘basest slavery’ in the form of popular monarchism is doomed to fail; the working classes’ idea of nationhood had to be revolutionary and republican. Cole’s poem was not conceived at a moment of defeat; it was originally written in 1839 when the Chartist movement was full of possibilities. In spite of its reprinting in 1848 after the rejection of the petition in that year, the poet makes it clear that the nineteenth-century working classes have unfinished business, as he exclaims: 50 Hugh Williams, ‘Dedication’, in National Songs and Poetical Pieces, ed. Hugh Williams (London: H. Hetherington, 1839), pp. iii–iv. 51 Paul Pickering, ‘“The Hearts of the Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History 88:290 (2003), 227–47. 52 Pickering, ‘“The Hearts of the Millions”’, 227–47. 53 Stephen Basdeo and Mark Truesdale, ‘Medieval Continuities: Nineteenth-Century King and Commoner Ballads’, in Stephen Basdeo and Lauren Padgett, eds, Imagining the Victorians, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies 15 (Leeds: LCVS, 2016), pp. 11–28. On the medieval tradition, see Mark Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’

123

May kindred spirits still survive, To rouse for coming glory, Till not a Briton but will strive, To profit by His story.54

Tyler impresses the duty to continue to fight for reform on every working Briton – the nation – but the people will have to prove themselves as worthy heirs of Tyler himself. As Mike Sanders notes, throughout most of 1848, even after the grand meeting at Kennington Common and the rejection of the petition, ‘there nevertheless remained a widespread feeling that a decisive class conflict had been postponed rather than resolved’.55 And Sanders points to the tone of further poems published in The Northern Star which likewise gave the impression that the working classes had unfinished business to complete.56 As most people are now aware, the Chartist movement ‘failed’ by the early 1850s, just as the rebels in 1381 did not achieve their aims. Yet this did not matter as Tyler’s story could serve as inspiration for potential future causes. In W. J. Linton’s ‘A Song for the Next Rebellion’, which was published in The English Republic in 1853,57 the Chartist cause was just as righteous as Tyler’s was of old; the idea was that eventually the workers’ cause would succeed. A Symbol for the Next Rebellion The Chartists did much more for Wat Tyler’s literary afterlife than Thomas Paine’s brief footnotes ever did. Southey’s poem deserves a prominent place in studies of post-medieval portrayals of the Peasants’ Revolt, but it was the Chartists who kept his memory alive at a time when mainstream history writing was less than kind about his actions.58 They did this through not only reprinting Southey’s poem but also by publishing historical ‘essays’ and original poetry. These were genuine attempts at building an alternative form of nationalism from below to counter the elite form of nationalism that focused upon the ‘great men’, kings, and queens of English history. Tyler’s importance to Chartist writers was, therefore, far from being ‘rarely relevant and often ambiguous’. Their appropriations of Wat Tyler went on to serve as a model for later socialists who likewise took the legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt and used it to show that socialism was not a foreign ideology but something which working men and woman had striven for in the past. It is because of the Chartists’ appropriations of the rebel and his actions that Wat Tyler now holds a special place even among radical and left-wing activists today.

54 Cole, ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’, p. 2. The Northern Star misprinted ‘may kindred spirits’ as ‘my kindred spirits’, although this does not significantly alter the meaning. 55 Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, p. 167. 56 Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, p. 167. 57 W. J. Linton, ‘A Song for the Next Rebellion’, The English Republic (1853), 271. 58 Based upon a keyword search of Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, https://ncse. ac.uk/index.html, interestingly, adverts for cheap 2d reprints of Southey’s text appear regularly in Chartist newspapers until c. 1842, which perhaps suggests that the Chartists’ own poetry had acquired greater importance by this point, although this will require further research.

Part III

Socialism, Feminism and Medievalism

7 The Cause of Liberty: Ford Madox Brown, Augustus Welby Pugin and Victorian Medievalism Colin Trodd

E

arly and mid-Victorian medievalism is larger than the workings of any one form of thought in the visual arts. It appears in different shapes and guises and is given different critical attributes and characteristics at specific points on the politico-cultural spectrum. At one end of this spectrum, in the High Tory revivalism of Daniel Maclise’s Sir Francis Sykes and His Family (1837), medievalism signals the longing for an imagined history filtered by myths of ancient manners and chivalric customs, a version of culture and society as festivity which Sykes tried to propagate at the Eglinton Tournament, the vast (and hugely expensive) pageant, joust and revel organised in 1839. Somewhere near the middle of this spectrum, medievalism relates to the critical idiom of Whig historicism as deployed by the Fine Art Commission, established in 1841, to oversee the ambitious scheme to decorate the new Houses of Parliament (1843–45). The commissioners, whose proclamations were coloured by Henry Hallam’s influential The State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) and The Constitutional History of England (1827), subscribed to the view that public art should indicate an awareness of the connection between medieval institutions and the emergence of constitutional government.1 At the oth-

Hallam and Thomas Babington Macaulay, the dominant figures in British constitutional history, were both members of the Fine Art Commission. The nature of their involvement with the programme of the commissioners warrants more attention than I can provide here. M. H. Bond, ed., Works of Art in the House of Lords (London: Merrell, 1980), includes a short sketch of the programme, but makes little use of concurrent debates about the difference between ancient, medieval and modern liberty. See also Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding, eds, The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (London: HMSO, 2000). Neither publications engage with the wider historiographical tradition in which ideas of constitutional freedom and civil society were developed by David Hume, Adam Smith, John Millar and Dugald Stewart. 1

128

Colin Trodd

er end of this spectrum, medievalism refers to a range of practices, for the most part by younger artists and designers, where it is identified as part of a process of critical resistance to modernity, and the governmental and commercial systems with which it was associated. This third type of medievalism was polemical as it offered the opportunity of concentrating on the articulation of the social order from below, as is the case in Ruskin’s well-known ruminations on the expressive value of work conducted by medieval stonemasons, which reached its crescendo in the multi-volume The Stones of Venice (1851–53). This chapter is organised around the polemical strand of thought noted above. This is done in the conviction that the polemical attitude has far-reaching implications for our current understanding of the relations of Victorian visual culture with wider cultural and political practices in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. To ensure thematic consistency, the chapter focuses on two ebullient and restless figures: the architect, designer and social critic Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–52), and the painter, designer and diarist Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), both of whom gave critical heft to the argument that medievalism meant more than its modelling in Tory and Whig discourses. Pugin’s Contrasts (first edition 1836; second edition 1841) is best known for the juxtaposition of the two plates added in 1841: Catholic Town in 1440 and The Same Town in 1840. The former represents a world where buildings affirm the workings of a face-to-face culture; the latter represents a world where everything has become institutionalised, mechanised and anonymous. Other plates in Contrasts conform to this pattern of division: the replacement of the dynamic cohesion of medieval society by a social formation dominated by the idea of efficiency in the use of material and human resources. These images have been widely reproduced and extensively discussed in scholarly and popular readings of Victorian culture and society.2 Far less attention has been given to Pugin’s text, which takes the form of a set of vivid reflections on the importance of architecture as a medium for the transmission of public culture and national memory. One unnoticed aspect of Pugin’s thinking is captured in this extract: Having occasion lately to examine the interior of [Westminster Abbey], I was disgusted beyond measure at perceiving that the chapel of St. Paul had been half filled up with a huge figure of James Watts, sitting in an arm-chair on an enormous square pedestal, with some tasteless ornaments, which, being totally unlike Greek or Roman foliage, I suppose to have been intended by the sculptor to be Gothic . . . Is this noble edifice for ever to be blocked up and mutilated by the continual erection of these most inappropriate and tasteless monuments?3

James Watt, a master of the amplification and utilisation of energy through his pioneering work on the steam engine, is robbed of his true surname in Pugin’s noisy 2 See, for example, Rosemary Hill ‘Reformation to Millennium: Pugin’s Contrasts in the History of English Thought’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:1 (1999), 26–41; and Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2007). 3 A. W. Pugin, Contrasts (second ed., 1841) (London: Charles Dolman, 1841), p. 40.

The Cause of Liberty

129

and heated attack, which takes the form of objecting to the nature of a culture that cannot fix the proper scope and limits of the authority of technology, engineering, and the practical life it celebrates. As described here, ‘Watts’ invades the citadel of British constitutional medievalism to exercise his civic right to sit down, as efficiently as possible. If ‘Watts’ has become his own monument, then the best we can do, Pugin hints, is define the ‘edifice’ as prescriptive guide for practice: this excrescence announces that Westminster Abbey, the locus of state-sanctioned medievalism and religious authority, is just another delivery system for the practical reasoning of industrial society. There is nothing superior in the cosmos to this crassly literalised ‘edifice’, this modern apotheosis of The Man who Sits in his Seat. Pugin, in other words, supplies a way of thinking about a form of exchange where ‘cathedral churches are to become show-places for the people [and] sources of revenue’.4 That there is a richer density of detail in Contrasts is demonstrated in the fol­ lowing passage, which indicates the nature of Pugin’s response to the medieval Gothic church: what a burst of glory meets the eye, on entering a long majestic line of pillars rising into the lofty fretted vaulting! The eye is lost in the intricacies of the aisles and lateral chapels; each window beams with sacred instructions, and sparkles with glowing and sacred tints . . . Every capital and base are fashioned to represent some holy mystery . . . the modulated light, the gleaming images of the just, – all conspire to fill the mind with veneration, and to impress it with the sublimity of Christian worship.5

Pugin’s fantasy of unity, where the subject is absorbed into the environment by powers at once physical and numinous, is worth considering for two reasons. First, it operates in sensory terms: embodied experience is the untranscendable horizon of the spiritual. Second, this means that the hallmark of Pugin’s aesthetic is its openness to the material substance of medieval culture. His emphasis on seeing and sensation, not iconography and symbolism, is designed to support a bigger argument in favour of the communal nature of medievalism. From Pugin’s perspective, to understand the romance of the medieval church is to recognise that it operates as a free perceptual field: It was this feeling that operated alike on the master-mind that planned the edifice, and on the patient sculptor whose chisel wrought each varied and beautiful detail. It was this feeling that enabled the ancient masses, in spite of labour, danger and difficulties, to persevere till they had raised their gigantic spires to the very regions of the clouds.6

Pugin’s reading, which asserts that medieval architecture incarnated a shared sense of purpose and a common sense of belonging, runs in parallel with a more fluid and, on first inspection, unusual form of critical evaluation, where he contrasts the ‘charitable, devout and faithful habit[s]’ of the Middle Ages with the ‘luxurious, corrupt

4 5 6

Pugin, Contrasts, p. 41. Pugin, Contrasts, p. 37. Pugin, Contrasts, p. 5.

130

Colin Trodd

[and] infidel system of the present age.’7 This moral exhortation – which mobilises the rhetoric of completeness and integrity encountered in Pugin’s sensory reading of the Gothic church – is an unexpected inversion of the high-toned pronouncements of civic humanism, where the activities of modern, rational European citizens are contrasted to the lethargy and immorality of Orientals, Pagans or Barbarians.8 From Pugin’s perspective, then, to engage in public debate is to complicate the structuring terms of conventional public debate: in Contrasts modernity signals rudeness, corruption and the power of commercial cabals; the Middle Ages offer refinement, civilisation and communal culture. In 1843 the Fine Arts Commission offered £2,000 in prizes for cartoons on a subject from British history or literature. The entries, from established and emerging artists, were displayed in the medieval Westminster Hall in a series of exhibitions between 1843 and 1845. As implied above, most of the exhibitors subscribed to the jurisprudential paradigm of parliamentary sovereignty outlined by the commissioners.9 Ford Madox Brown’s submission, Spirit of Justice (1844–45), which proved to be unsuccessful, did not adhere to the conventions followed by other competitors in the scheme.10 Nevertheless, it was acclaimed by Benjamin Robert Haydon, who noted: ‘The only bit of fresco fit to look at is by Ford Madox Brown. It is a figure of “Justice”, and exquisite as far as that figure goes.’11 Haydon, a history painter, using the idiom of connoisseurship, was impressed by the boldness of the design, its unusual expressiveness, rather than the subject matter, which represents the abuse of

Pugin, Contrasts, p. 19. On the dynamics of sophistication and barbarism within civic humanist discourse, the indispensable reference point remains J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 9 The parliament decorations and competitions are analysed in two important works by Paul Barlow: ‘The Imagined Hero as Incarnate Sign: Thomas Carlyle and the Mythology of the National Portrait in Victorian Britain’, Art History 17:4 (1994), 517–45 ; and ‘“Fire, Flatulence and Fog”: The Decoration of Westminster Palace and the Aesthetics of Prudence’, in Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, eds, Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 69–82. 10 The version reproduced here is Brown’s watercolour study; the original cartoon design was cut into fragments sometime in the 1960s and then distributed to various private owners. 11 Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 3 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1853), 2:309. Haydon, a friend of Keats and Wordsworth, terminated his wildly unsuccessful bid to place himself at the head of a new school of British historical painting by taking his own life in 1846. His poverty, unreliability, critical failure and suicide haunted Brown. See Virginia Surtees, ed., The Diary of Ford Madox Brown (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981): 20 August 1854, p. 83; 2 October 1854, p. 96; 6 May 1855, p. 136; and 11 January 1855, p. 115, where Brown announces: ‘I am getting a regular Haydon at pawning – so long as I do not become one at cheating my creditors’. Brown would have known about the calamitous failure of Haydon’s solo exhibition at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, which was eclipsed by Tom Thumb’s performance at the same venue. D. G. Rossetti may have alluded to this example of the triumph of capitalised popular culture over true art when he enquired over arrangement for Brown’s solo exhibition in 1865: ‘Are you to succeed [P. G.] Hamerton, or the Talking Fish [meaning a performing seal]?’ See W. M. Rossetti, Rossetti Papers (London: Sands & Co., 1903), p. 70. 7

8

Fig. 7.1. Ford Madox Brown, The Spirit of Justice (1844–45). Manchester Art Gallery/ Bridgeman Images.

132

Colin Trodd

privilege by a medieval nobleman.12 It is, however, in the marriage of formal power and social message that we discern the inventiveness of Brown’s vision of medievalism as social activism. The crucial turning point in Brown’s perception of the social value of painting took place before the advent of Pre-Raphaelitism in the late 1840s. Spirit of Justice confirms Brown’s interest in socialising history by highlighting and heightening certain critical procedures around the idea of liberty.13 In this inventive design he examines the charisma of historical symbols, which are viewed from the standpoint of the common people. He does this in several ways. First, he offers a vivid model of what authority looks like from the position of the ‘plebeian’ subject, the petitioning widow in the foreground.14 Second, he sets out to picture an image of the verification of equality under the law. He actualises justice by placing its personification in a specific situation, one where this enraged and underprivileged widow asks for justice ‘against the oppression of a perverse and powerful Baron, who is assisted by a hired adviser, and supported by the wealth of his father’.15 Brown’s words explain a world where ordinariness addresses privilege, outraged feeling confronts institutional power and vigorous action comes up against stasis. Third, this sense of division and conflict is expressed in bodily terms: the dynamic immediacy and exhilarated presence of the petitioning widow is encapsulated in the dramatic force of her thrusting hand, which, pointing at the baron, is a stimulus for action.16 His posture, at once languid and defiant, mixes disdain, indifference and insouciance. The widow’s head D. G. Rossetti informed Brown that ‘The outline from your Abstract Representation of Justice which appeared in one of the Illustrated Papers constitutes, together with an engraving after that great painter Von Holst, the sole pictorial adornment of my room.’ See William Michael Rossetti, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His Family-Letters with a Memoir (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), p. 116. 13 Alastair Ian Wright, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Body of Harold: Representing England at Mid-Century’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 8:1 (2009), www.19thcartworldwide.org/spring09/42-autumn07/autumn07article/127-ford-madox-browns-thebody-of-harold-representing-england-at-mid-century, provides an introductory account of how Brown’s works relate to the tradition of an ideal ancient constitution embedded in a vision of Saxon culture. 14 Brown’s Diary contains many entries relevant to this design. At one point, he criticises the ‘family interests’ of aristocratic culture before noting ‘[w]hoever feels a tenderness for a fellow being worships God in the act, nay a kind of feeling for a dog or a cat shall not pass unnoticed, but woe to the selfseeker & him who despises the poor.’ See Surtees, ed., Diary, 5 October 1854, pp. 98–99. 15 Brown, in F. Knight Hunt, ed., The Book of Art, Cartoons, Frescoes, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts as Applied to the New Houses of Parliament (London: J. How, 1846), p. 181. This key aspect of the image was underplayed by the Art Union critic, who claimed it was a ‘constitutional, and not a moral, representation of Justice . . . The spirit of the work differs from every other in the series: it presents a version of Justice in reference to the sources of the executive power of our constitution.’ ‘Westminster Hall, the Cartoon Exhibition, and New Houses of Parliament’, The Art Union no. 83 (August 1845), p. 258. 16 Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 48, is right to characterise Brown’s habit of creating polyrhythmic images in the 1840s and 1850s as arising from ‘conflicts of form. Lines do not flow into one and another, but meet at angles or in opposing directions. Large shapes and small stand next to one another, without elements of transition . . . unity [is] provided by repetition.’ 12

The Cause of Liberty

133

turns away from the viewer to engage with the situation by appealing to Justice, the figure at the apex of the image; but the baron stares at the widow in an act of pure contempt. The widow lives in this situation and attempts to galvanise the agent of the law. The baron, detached from the scene, embodies aristocratic hauteur. She resides in history; he is abstracted from history. She is a burst of energy, a manifestation of common nobility; he is no more than a common example of crushing and brutalising power.17 Said summarily, what all this means is that Brown’s medievalism spotlights different social norms, values and mentalities. He pits schematic format against situated event, ‘structured formalism’ against ‘human life’.18 We look on as two forms of social being – two forms of identity – confront each other. The heraldic world of jurisprudence and constitutional law is brought into contact with the world of human feeling and social subjection: abstractions of legal theory and political power are confronted by a full-blooded representation of the People. Unjust distortions of the social order, it is implied, will be corrected when the common widow and the figure of Justice overcome the bisected space in which their mediated encounter takes place. In all this, Brown mobilises the stylistic procedures of modern (neo-medievalist) German art, with its interest in decorative surface pattern, to question the social bases of that art: the idea that members of the feudal aristocracy were more caring than the impersonal agencies of modern society. There is another point, too, of real importance to consider here. Brown’s design gives credence to the struggle against social elites by the actualisation of a dispute about misrule. Public opinion, in the form of the petition, is articulated in juridical terms.19 Justice comes alive – becomes an active creative presence – as she presides over a problem central to the workings of the social body: the relationship between those experiences that bring struggle into being and those forces that generate submission. This is to say, Brown chose to represent the production of justice in terms of division and conflict: on one side, the moral law, the lowly widow’s invocation to public duty and social responsibility; on the other side, the world of feudal authority, the self-absorbed and abstracted look of the baron. The widow, set to one side, leads the viewer into the image. Yet, at the same time, her rushing presence breaks the symmetry of the composition. With her billowing dress, part of which is broken by the border, she disturbs the patterning of the image, calling attention to its schematic properties. This hard energy is contrasted to the relative rigidity of the juridical figures in the next tier. She is made from the compound of two pictorial features: the top section of the body, an inverted L-shape, suggests compressed power; the bottom section of the body, a whirl of lines, suggests propulsive movement. This 17 For which see Colin Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011), pp. 33–37; and Julian Treuherz, Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011), p. 108. 18 See the helpful account of the work in Mary Bennett, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 1:35. 19 In this sense it parallels Bentham’s formulation of the Public Opinion Tribunal, conceived as a constitutional body with the power to exercise popular sanctions in cases of misrule. See Jeremy Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code [1822], ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 56–73.

134

Colin Trodd

mixture of mechanical and athletic power, where the body is the result of reinforcing crosscurrents or polyrhythms, would become one of the dominant design elements in Brown’s Manchester murals, briefly discussed at the end of this chapter. Here, however, the viewer is encouraged to identify the widow as an authentic sensorial subject who beckons Justice by looking above and beyond ecclesiastical and political sources of power. Justice, like the figures in her retinue, is kinetic and reactive. To her right we see the figure of Mercy dressed as a peasant, further indication of the importance of common life in the performance of forces that hold together the social body. It is noticeable that none of these figures is enthroned; instead, justice is enacted on a stage or platform, an innocuous space denuded of decoration, symbolism and ceremonial grandeur. Part emblem, part tableau and part situation, Spirit of Justice is an unconventional image where attention moves between the figure of intensification (the widow) and the figure of inwardness (Justice). In keeping with the protocols of academic art theory, the conclusion to the petition is not represented. All the same, the outcome, the vindication of truth, is suggested by the widow. As expressed here, she bypasses the repetitions of clerical-statist justice in the middle planes of the image to appeal to ‘higher’ beings. Her movement suggests that she is in the process of transferring her gaze from Justice to Mercy, which is to say, from the personification of power to the personification of the People. Put differently, Brown’s image disturbs the idea of the unity of history or polity: the widow draws attention to the immobilised forms of legalistic constitutionalism standing between herself and Justice; and her gestures call into question the authority of those figures and symbols associated with the belief in the providential ordering of British society. The radical physicality of Brown’s interpretation of justice comes to the fore when compared to a more conventional realisation of the subject in another design submitted to the Westminster scheme: A female in chains is represented appealing to the tribunal for justice; she is pointing to the broken law. Above is seen a council of wise men. In the centre is seated the figure of Justice, in one hand holding the scales, with the other resting on the globe. She is trampling on the Dragon, the emblem of tyranny and sin, and is attended by the Angel of Judgement with the sword of justice on one side, and on the other side by an Angel of Peace, holding in her hand the table of the law.20

Here tension exists within, and is contained by, the self-perpetuating terms of academic allegory, a system designed to block engagement with the material forms of the social world. In contradistinction, Brown creates a form of rowdy and disordering medievalism where public life is neither ornamental nor performative. We have seen enough, I hope, to begin to understand how Spirit of Justice affirms a vision of popular sovereignty, and so departs from the critical preoccupations of academic painting. Nowhere is this clearer than in Brown’s attitude to pictorial organisation, which compresses planes to assert the perceptual and bodily power of the widow. Just as she sets out to make the effortless inhabited world of 20

E. Butler Morris’ Justice, as described in Knight Hunt, ed., The Book of Art, p. 181.

The Cause of Liberty

135

the dignitaries uncomfortable, so Brown replaces a generalised version of medieval history with a living vision of medieval liberty. What we see in Brown’s design is the socialisation of a mental universe in which a representative of the People insists on making her own viewpoint the subject of the representation of historical experience. More broadly, Brown sets out to transform national history into a form of political demonstration, thus mobilising ‘public opinion’ through a medievalist rhetoric of popular feeling. Much of the idiosyncrasy of Brown’s work results from this need to draw attention to the complexity and richness of social feeling, an approach to the social order that chimes with forms of radicalism advanced in the 1840s. Where some of the Chartist writers set out to develop a popular aesthetic, one that could dispense with traditional ideas of social balance, Brown questioned the logic of subordination and control arising from academic models of representation.21 His interest in strategies for change arising from the new situations of modern life extended to his treatment of feeling, gesture and expression. As noted by Nick Tromans, many commentators recoiled from what they considered to be Brown’s misguided interest in facial or bodily distortion.22 Tromans’ forcefully argued study is good at combating the critical perception that these preoccupations disabled Brown from developing a serious or convincing picture of human life. In what follows, I want to contribute to this line of thinking by arguing that some of Brown’s commentators have failed to detect the critical circumstances of his medievalism, and so misattributed interest in melodramatic forms and disorderly situations as evidence of a taste for the bizarre and the vulgar. The chief reason for this error, I believe, has been a general failure to appreciate how Brown’s idiosyncratic version of the real was a response to the agenda established by the Fine Art Commissioners and their academic allies.23 Brown’s use of melodrama should be seen in terms of wider attempts to make painting more attentive to popular feeling. In the first place, there was the general movement to create art forms that could be reproduced in mass-publication periodicals, such as The Art Union. In the second place, and arising from this, there was the neo-Hogarthian strand of British art associated with the formation of new cultural communities around the idea of the expressiveness of life freed from the conventions of civility, gentility and respectability.24 Finally, there was the contin21 For which see Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 22 Nicholas Tromans, ‘Drawing Teeth: Reflections on Brown’s Mouths’, Visual Culture in Britain 15:3 (2014), 299–312. 23 William Holman Hunt qualified his praise for the main figures in Spirit of Justice by suggesting ‘attention was distracted by the Gothic quaintness of the central design . . . arranged at equal distances symmetrically in a row across the picture, their faces covered by large tilting helms inclined alternately to the right and left’. William Holman Hunt, PreRaphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1905), 1:121. 24 Allan Cunningham’s account of Hogarth, where the artist is manufacturer of forms which embody the life of his subject, describes some of the main features of Brown’s art. According to this reading, Hogarth’s ‘powerful mind was directed to studies of actual life in all its varieties . . . To find excellence in art without perfection of form – to make use of human beings such as they moved and breathed before him . . . was [his] wish . . . The schools in

136

Colin Trodd

uing authority of the social dimension of Romanticism, the desire to force a distinct shift in aesthetic perception by spotlighting subjects from everyday life.25 In all three cases we note a recurrent theme: the blending of thought, feeling and language to generate new ways of imagining the body of the People. Put another way, melodrama was one critical idiom in which Brown’s model of medievalism could be deepened through alignment with the composite forms of common life; it was an important mechanism for revealing the unreliability of the academic mode of seeing and representing the world. Melodrama, I want to argue, is the vehicle by which Spirit of Justice seeks to connect social activism with History Painting. It establishes the look of a world where the significant figures signal difference, division and conflict. It explains the insurgent and labile nature of the widow as the subject of suffering and wronged humanity.26 It confirms the nature of a compositional structure where foreground and background are in the processes of being moulded into a single critical unit. Melodrama was what made the widow a strong and vivid presence in this otherwise abstract world of jurisprudence. It was Brown’s method for picturing the clashing forces at work in history. Instead of seeing Spirit of Justice as a stuttering distortion of realism, then, it is more helpful to reconnect it with the socio-conceptual world in which it was born. It is an activist image: the transformation of the mass open air meeting or public platform into a rowdy artwork, the reimagining of the spaces in which national history is made. It is an image that takes seriously the discourses of radicalism, which set out to produce visions of social inclusiveness. As a result, it points out what Brown took to be the limitations of traditional History Painting, replacing displays of gravitas and politeness with an operatic system of protest, confusion, division, hyperbolic gestures and expressions. As these points suggest, melodrama, as critical idiom, allowed Brown to pursue an agenda where the academic model, based on a constrained rhetoric of action, could be replaced by a demotic aesthetic, one where depiction was equated with the display of human vitality. In any event, the idea of melodramatic pictorial culture is helpful as it provides an historical context for understanding what we might call the extreme presentness of many figures in Brown’s paintings and drawings. Another way of putting this is to say that he sets out to reshape History Painting as an ‘appeal’

which he delighted to study were the haunts of social freedom – schools where the chained-up nature of men are let loose by passion . . . and contradiction . . . He acquired learning by his study of human nature, in his intercourse with the world.’ See Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Artist, Sculptures and Architects, 6 vols (2nd ed., London: John Murray, 1831), 1:66, 83, 166–67. 25 David Wilkie is a key figure here: see Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); and David H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 26 As Bendiner reminds us, it is important to note that the widow confirms Brown’s interest in forms of histrionic figural expression pioneered by Fuseli. See Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, p. 90.

The Cause of Liberty

137

to the People. In this respect, Brown wants images to force themselves on spectators, to invite confrontation and conflict of one form or another. His images need to be ‘democratic’ in the larger sense that they want to picture a world where life is lived, not falsified by the external pressures of academic art discourse. In this respect, they relate to those semi-forgotten projects and appeals, at once artistic and agitational, formulated by George and James Foggo, and other opponents to the Royal Academy of Arts, most of whom set out to create a popular radical art form arising from the idea that the modern artist must create art works fusing audience and subject matter in images of common life.28 Stated more prosaically, Spirit of Justice imagines an art world where visual culture is rooted in the world of feeling. As it is presented here, the social world is adversarial, the ongoing conflict between communities and groups. An extension of this would be to see Spirit of Justice as a pictorial dramatisation or amplification of Brown’s confrontation with institutions of authority. If this is correct, then Spirit of Justice may have been designed to instantiate a sense of what he imagined the newly politicised classes felt themselves to be. In any case, this design pictorialises the rhetoric of melodrama within a critical setting where power is expressed in terms of the force and fraud imagery of popular radicalism, with its division between signs of liberty and tyranny. In framing my argument in these terms, I am suggesting that Brown took an active interest in those sites of debate (public art programmes, the art gallery, the press, the stage, cultural meetings and gatherings) where models of social and political identity were proposed and disputed. Adopting this line of reasoning has certain advantages, one of which is that it produces a fluid reading of Brown’s radicalism. For instance, it provides a context for discussing his famed defiance, truculence and intransigence. These characteristics, which form the belligerent body language of the widow in Spirit of Justice, indicate how egalitarianist melodrama was developed in the 1840s to counter the 27

Brown’s early vision of the People – an imagined political formation defined as the alliance of progressive intellectuals, artists, civil professionals, journalists, small manu­fac­ turers, artisans and skilled or self-educated workers, all those groups and types committed to free discussion, public knowledge and the creation of a transparent social order – relates to the political models proposed by Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. By the 1870s, when his social circle included exiled communards, he ‘hated all Academicians, all Cabinet Ministers, all Officials, all Tories, all Whigs and the Times newspaper’ (as recalled by his grandson, Ford Madox Hueffer, in ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar [November 1903], 572). When working on the Manchester murals in the 1880s, he observed that ‘the question of labour & the unemployed’ was the central problem of modern life. (See letter from Ford Madox Brown to Marion Spielmann, 9 May 1886, John Rylands Library, Manchester, English MS 1290, where he concludes, ‘On its solution depends the future of the world.’) The same year he spoke at a mass meeting in Manchester for the unemployed and informed a friend of his thoughts of the operating procedures of the industrial magnates in Greater Manchester: ‘the manufacturers look upon a good broad margin of starving workmen as the necessary accompaniment of cheap labour’. See Ford Madox Brown to Frederic Shields, 16 April 1886, in Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, A Record of his Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), p. 376. 28 On which matter, see Colin Trodd, Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester Murals (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 27

138

Colin Trodd

rhetoric of academic culture. The manic forcefulness of the image was Brown’s way of signalling the nature of exaggeration as expression of political vision. At this point it might be helpful to stand back and make a wider point about how we can understand the authority Brown attributed to the painted image. I think it is essential to distinguish between multidimensional and monodimensional forms of critical interpretation. My preference, as should be apparent by this stage, is for a multidimensional reading, on the grounds that it restores issues of agency to habits, processes and practices of art-making, and that it avoids the identification of the scholar as an edge-walker – someone whose primary job is to supply the master theory the hapless artist struggles to understand or represent.29 With this in mind, we need to complete our discussion of Spirit of Justice by considering some of its tectonic characteristics. There is no doubt that Spirit of Justice defines melodrama as critical agency: it is how the private life of the widow is given expression as she bursts into this public world of justice. Brown’s depiction of social intensity is construed through a series of interlocking shallow planes. The compressed verticality of the design, with figures segmented into four layers, creates a sense of intimacy. The shallow space and symmetrical organisation of subjects intensifies the interplay between the real and allegorical dimensions of the image. At the top and the bottom, we discover subjects that are in the world; in the middle rows we see figures that are supposed to know the world. This distinction between action and abstraction is important. The structure of the composition supports the thesis that the image is designed to represent the incarnation of justice, a process involving two forms of visualisation. In the first instance, we see abstract representations of justice – the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the middle of the design, as well as the phalanx of knights below them. They enter the image as disembodied types of status or character. The knights are their armour; the Lords are little more than their garb. In the second instance, Justice cups her ear to hear the appeal of the petitioning widow. These two figures look like each other, their bodies display the same bulky physicality, and they indicate immediacy of action within this moment of expression.

My argument takes issue with the received view of Brown’s attitude to the process of realising art works, particularly his relation to verism. Leading advocates of this viewpoint are inclined to treat Victorian art as a dominated and corrupted medium, something unable to address the ideological dimension of social matter. See for example Albert Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, Arts Magazine 56 (September 1981), 116–25; Paul Wood, ‘The AvantGarde From the July Monarchy to The Second Empire’, in Paul Wood, ed., The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 35–55; and John A. Walker, Work: Ford Madox Brown’s Painting and Victorian Life (London: Francis Boutle, 2006). As defined in these sources, bourgeois ideology is a parody of the steam-whistle party of ultra-entrepreneurial Victorian industrialists, as popularised by Dickens’ Bounderby in Hard Times (1854). There were, no doubt, real flesh-and-blood examples of this tiresome cultural cliché, but it is to treat Brown with outright scorn and disdain to imagine he was one of them. For a brilliant and persuasive account of the serious problems inherent in the ‘normalised’ account of Brown, as offered by the commentators noted above, see Paul Barlow, ‘The Ordering and Disordering of Work’, Visual Culture in Britain 15:3 (2014), 258–76. 29

The Cause of Liberty

139

Brown’s lighting of figures is equally bold. The light source that illuminates Justice explains the lighting key of the bottom portion of the widow’s dress. The diagonal shaft of light, which connects Justice and the widow, frontalises the design and gives graphic immediacy to their encounter. Nor should we overlook the fact that the widow, as mixture of physicality and luminosity, is given far greater material resolution than the centrally placed Lords, all of whom are denuded of volume. As conceived here, the logic of image-lighting is used to express the vitality of historical life as actuated in the dramatic interplay between two realisations of the People. The question arises, of course, whether Brown’s stylised reimagining of the Middle Ages does indeed function as a coherent or systematic aesthetic vision, one in which composition is rearticulated as confrontation. To address this matter, I will complete the reading of Spirit of Justice with a few reflections on his interest in the articulation of edges, a matter particularly noticeable in the foreground, as they relate to the construction of the pictorial subject. The object edges – the shoulders and arms of the baron, the gesticulating arm of the widow, the clinging arm of the infant – are emphatic. So, too, is the massive hand of the widow which scoops the second child. The shoulder, elbow and arm of her father connect the family by overlapping with his wife, whose clasped hands form another edge. This interest in bodily presence extends to the figure of Justice, as her foreshortened left arm is as out of scale as the widow’s left hand; the right-hand of Truth, by contrast, is clenched. Both suggest human engagement rather than the abstract qualities associated with the conventional imagery of jurisprudence with which Brown would have been familiar through study and training. Seen together, this association of edging with pictorial logic confirms that Brown used zigzag patterns and angular lines to suggest the tactile strength and gusto of common historical subjects. If this were an isolated case it would clearly be wrong to draw any general conclusions about Brown’s visualisation of medieval culture and society. In fact, two of the panels in his cycle of paintings in Manchester Town Hall develop the critical idiom of Spirit of Justice. Accordingly, this chapter concludes with a brief explanation of some of the features of the activist medievalism displayed in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D.1363 (1881–82).30 The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers aligns the practical and sensuous nature of work with representations of comfort and care. The children in the foreground are one example of a process whereby creativity is socialised: here is a picture of what human wholeness looks like when individuals become part of a living community. These children, standing apart from the royal procession in the midground and the space of productivity on the right, create a latticed form through the

The other being The Trial of Wyclif, A. D. 1377 (1885–86), which is analysed in detail in Trodd, Ford Madox Brown, ch. 4. 30

Plate 1. Ford Madox Brown, The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in 1363 (1882). Manchester City Council/Bridgeman Images.

The Cause of Liberty

141

play and rhythm of concatenated hands. Social life, concentrated in this space of togetherness, confirms that the children are more than mere choral figures. As we have seen, Brown wants to find pockets of hope in those historical moments and social situations where human energy is set against abstract systems of one kind or another. These hands, which demonstrate how a human society works through the materialisation of trust, as well as the blending of friendship and work, must be related to the ideas of leading critics of industrialism, many of whom noted that apologists of the industrial system used the term ‘hands’ to refer to industrial workers.32 For critics of the industrial process, the term ‘hands’ indicated a condition of thraldom in which the worker was at once alienated from work and his or her body. To be a hand was to be caught up in a process where mechanisation and productivity were the sole means of calibrating value. To be a hand was to be subjugated by the organisation of production, a system where the performance of labour meant workers became estranged from each other. To be a hand was to be a cog in a social mechanism, a productive unit; and to be a hand was to subject to a process in which value was extracted from the subject.33 We know this much at least: in the radical activist medievalism of Spirit of Justice, the powerful hand of the widow acts as a sign of human spirit, a marker of an ability to generate new patterns of civil association from the codifications of the feudal order.34 Likewise, the common subjects in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers allow Brown to shift his focus from neo-feudal or aristocratic visions of 31

31 A similar motif, used in Brown’s stained-glass window The Marriage of St. Edith (1878), St Editha Church, Tamworth, brought forth this angry response from D. G. Rossetti: ‘Really I must say they are inconceivable. Every figure (it is a long series) is passing one hand through the stone mullion of the window into the next panel of glass! – each panel containing one figure.’ Undated letter from D. G. Rossetti to Jane Morris, in John Bryson and J. C. Troxell, eds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris Correspondence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), no. 97. 32 See, for instance, J. R. McCulloch, A Statistical Account of the British Empire, 2 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans , 1837), 2:115, who waxes lyrical about the mechanisation of the cotton industry: ‘the preparation and repair of which employs a great number of hands and a large amount of capital’. All the same, even advocates of the industrial civilisation thesis were concerned about deskilling in new factories where ‘the designing and direction of the work passed away from the hands of the workman into those of the master and his office assistants. This led also to a division of labour; men of general knowledge were only exceptionally required as foremen or outdoor superintendents: and the artificers became, in the process of time, little more than attendants on the machine.’ See William Pole, ed., The Life of Sir William Fairbairn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877), p. 47. 33 Matters relating to imagining the productivity of the body, a topic of great importance to Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Marx and Morris, are examined in Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 1–24. 34 Brown, a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle, would have been familiar with the use of the hand motif in The French Revolution, where it stands for a sign of ‘ludicro-terrific’ powers of alien intimacy unleashed by revolutionary consciousness. See H. D. Traill, ed., The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1901), 2:253. For more on this this matter, see Colin Trodd, ‘Culture and Energy: Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and the Cromwellian Grotesque’, in Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni, eds, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 68–80.

142

Colin Trodd

medievalism. To put this another way, meaningful human energy is equated with the quotidian existence of the workers in the foreground, all of whom are given greater physical presence than the royal group in the middle of the design. These workers are powerfully concentrated expressions of Brown’s belief that the human imagination produces images of community and welfare through the expressiveness of labour. With both Spirit of Justice and The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, then, medievalism is the prism thorough which Brown sees the plebeian classes as active, sensory agents working within disordering historical processes to set their own rhythms and generate their own identities.

8 Serfs, Saints and Comrades: Working-Class Medievalism and the Narratives of Victorian Socialism Ingrid Hanson

O

n the death of William Morris in 1896, the socialist journal Justice published a memorial poem by John Leslie, Scottish-Irish activist, entitled ‘William Morris: A Proletarian’s Tribute’. In its final stanza Leslie hails Morris, on behalf of ‘we the poor’ as ‘our stainless Bayard, brave comrade’.1 While it might seem unremarkable to use such an appellation for Morris, well-known for the medievalism of his art and writings, it is significant that he is not only the famously ‘Spotless and Fearless Knight [. . .], a model of manly virtues’ here, but also a ‘comrade’, an equal; no less significant is the easy familiarity with which Leslie uses the medieval reference point.2 As this chapter will show, the recurring and deftly handled presence of medieval figures, themes and stories in the writings of working-class socialists suggests a far more pervasive, politically deliberate use of the Middle Ages than the critical focus on Morris as the key figure of Victorian socialist medievalism has allowed.3 Various forms, both serious and comic, of the medievalism so closely associated with Morris appear again and again in the newspapers cen-

J. Leslie, ‘A Proletarian’s Tribute’, Justice, 10 October 1896, p. 5. Edith Wolford, The Story of the Chevalier Bayard: From the French of the Loyal Servant, Monsieur Guyard de Berville, 5th ed. (London: Sampson Low Marston Searle and Low, 1875), pp. ix–x; for a discussion of the Chevalier Bayard in nineteenth-century art, literature and culture, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 146, 150, 220, 229. 3 Exceptions to this critical silence include Anna Vaninskaya: ‘Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31 (2009), 45–57; Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010); and Stefan Arvidsson, The Style and Mythology of Socialism (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 87–277. 1

2

144

Ingrid Hanson

tral to the development and articulation of socialism in the late nineteenth century. While some of these instances occur directly in reference to Morris, as in the case of Leslie’s poem, or in dialogue with Morris and his work, a commitment to the use of the medieval to establish transhistorical kinships and cultural affiliations, to turn a defamiliarising critical eye on contemporary social structures and to develop a coherent, culturally confident community goes well beyond borrowings or tributes in content, form or thought. The newspapers that proliferated in the 1890s and the social activities that grew up around them contributed significantly to the creation of a socialist culture. Their task, outlined with slight variations in each paper, was, as the Scottish socialist John L. Mahon said of the movement’s propaganda more broadly, ‘to take hold of the working-class movement as it exists at the moment and gently and gradually mould it into a socialist shape’.4 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s argument that radical press poetry in this period encapsulates in form and content the idea ‘that one can engage and transform dominant culture from within the forms of that culture’ echoes Mahon’s articulation of intent and might well be applied to the fin-de-siècle socialist press as a whole and to its uses of medievalism in particular.5 Alongside the London-based Justice, established in 1883 by H. M. Hyndman and handed over to the editorship of Harry Quelch in 1886 as a paper ‘owned by working-men, edited by a working-man, written largely by working men’, this chapter considers the work of three working-class newspapers and their editors: the Leeds-based Labour Champion, edited by Tom Maguire, which survived for only five weekly issues between October and November 1893 before it collapsed for lack of funds; the Clarion, founded in Manchester in 1891 by journalist and son of travelling actors, Robert Blatchford; and the Labour Leader, edited by Keir Hardie from 1893, first in Glasgow and then in London. The Clarion also moved to London in 1895, building on its northern, working-class readership, its activities, clubs and social groups to become one of the most successful socialist papers of the period, with a regular readership of 40,000–50,000, rising to 90,000 at its height, compared with Justice’s 2,500 a week in the 1890s. The Labour Leader, which ran well into the twentieth century, had a circulation in 1890s of some 50,000.6 Each of these papers and their editors contributed significantly to the shaping of the socialist movement and to expressing its values, and in each there are sustained strands of medievalism which carry over into contemporary socialist culture more widely. The medievalism of these newspapers, I suggest, has little of the ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ Alastair Bonnett identifies in the writings of Morris and Blatchford. It offers instead a bricolage of recurring images, ideas, stories and moments which are malleable and mixable in the service of narratives of cultural belonging in a history J. L. Mahon, quoted in E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (London: Merlin Press, 1977), p. 473. 5 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 28. 6 H. M. Hyndman, Justice, 5 June 1886, p. 2; Deborah Mutch, Introduction to English Socialist Periodicals 1880–1900: A Reference Source (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. xxii; Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 2009), p. 339. 4

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

145

of political struggle. Morris himself, writing of the communal wall paintings in the medievalist post-revolutionary future of News from Nowhere (1890), notes that they draw on ‘queer old-world myths and imaginations’ little known in the nineteenth century but familiar in the Utopian socialism of Nowhere.8 While the evidence of writings by Victorian working-class socialists is that ‘old-world myths and imaginations’ are, in fact, a central part of the culture and identity of the movement, socialist medievalism may nonetheless be considered to have some affinity with the ‘queer’ in its contemporary theoretical sense: it opens up a space in which socialist identities can be created and expressed by ‘rendering [. . .] culturally central, apparently monolithic constructions newly accessible to analysis and interrogation’, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes is common to queer approaches. This designation usefully suggests a collective act of socialist identity-formation through ‘experimental self-perception and filiation’, represented by an appropriation of and identification with comic, disruptive and empowering readings of the medieval past that run counter to their mainstream uses.9 7

Mixing It Up: Filiation, Self-Perception and the Malleability of Names The Labour Champion uses as its front cover tagline a Latin quotation associated with Anne Boleyn and Queen Elizabeth I: ‘semper eadem’: always the same. Set alongside the other elements of the cover – a dragon, a lightly clad St George attacking the dragon, a jester and a woman cradling a baby – this phrase, untranslated, becomes the bearer of many meanings: it recognises the continuities of power while suggesting, by its association with contemporary poverty and the myth of St George, that things need not remain the same. It appropriates Latin, the language of high culture, for its own satirical purposes, claiming the right to this language and revaluing its significations. The tagline might be read as ironic, comic, bitter or invitational, and the articles the newspaper carries reflect each of those moods in different proportion, although the prevailing tone is one of comic indignation, signalled by the presence of the jester on its cover and achieved, in large part, through varieties of incongruity. Louise D’Arcens identifies three different uses of comedy in relation to the medieval, laughing at, in and with the Middle Ages, and there is much in the iconography of the Labour Champion’s cover of laughing in the Middle Ages: a use of the past that involves ‘a playful collapsing of temporal distinctions’, fostering in readers a ‘comic recognition of [. . .] universal humanity’ and a ‘transhistorical sympathy’ with medieval people. This usage, D’Arcens argues, draws attention to ‘humanity’s perpetual negotiation with the dynamics of power’, a central concern for socialist newspapers.10 At the same time, Maguire, who wrote to the Commonweal, Bonnett, Left in the Past, pp. 60, 69. For the uses of bricolage in relation to the medieval, see Umberto Eco, ‘Living in the New Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1987), pp. 73–85 (p. 84). 8 William Morris, News from Nowhere in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910–15), 23:100. 9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 8–9. 10 Louise D’Arcens, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 11–12. 7

146

Ingrid Hanson

the Socialist League newspaper edited by Morris, as early as 1885 to note that ‘an effort should be made to simplify and popularize somewhat the language and style of many of the articles’, which might otherwise ‘pall upon the plain stomach of the worker’, appropriates and plays with medievalist words, names and forms, as well as stories. He mobilises associations with popular culture in order to highlight failures in contemporary social structures.11 His experiments with tone and style show the influence not only of the Clarion’s convivial comedic style but also of his own early reading, which, as Edward Carpenter points out in a memorial written after Maguire’s untimely death at just twenty-nine, drew on ‘Goldsmith and Sterne and the eighteenth-century writers generally’ as well as demonstrating a love for ‘a comic or satirical ballad with a chorus’.12 As Elizabeth Carolyn Miller points out, most of the images on the Labour Champion’s cover were standard in socialist iconography of the era. They can be made, as Roland Barthes suggests is characteristic of myths, to carry a range of meanings while retaining connection to their origins and history: ‘the meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation’.13 In the Clarion, for instance, the front cover cartoon on 9 March 1895 shows a huge dragon labelled Monopoly, breaking down walls called ‘labour’ and ‘elections’ with its wings; ‘The Dragon’s loose!’ is the caption, and beneath this is a question: ‘hey John, why didn’t you chain him when you had the chance?’14 The verse that goes with it is prefaced by a note lamenting the poor turnout of working men at the London County Council election. It concludes: The sword of Socialism bright You have disdained to draw, Wherefore this monster of the night Shall have you in his claw.15

The dragon, then, is clearly identified with challenges to working-class freedom, which by association is English freedom. On 4 May that same year, the Clarion front cover cartoon, entitled ‘The Two Champions’, shows a large dragon with two heads, Toryism and unions, versus a small knight, Socialism. This reflects the ongoing debate within the socialist movement about whether trade unions were palliatives that would prevent wholesale social change or effective bearers of working-class desires for freedom, expressed well by John Burns in Justice in 1884: ‘will they assume the responsibilities of [their] glorious position, or will they die out as the old Guilds did, and leave the issues to be fought by those who have more courage and more knowledge?’16 The short-hand image of the dragon can be used here because Quoted in Miller, Slow Print, p. 209. Edward Carpenter, ‘Memoir’ in Tom Maguire: A Remembrance, Being a Selection from the Prose and Verse Writings of a Socialist Pioneer (Manchester: Labour Press Society 1895), pp. ix–xiii (pp. xi–xii). 13 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), pp. 109–64 (pp. 117–18). 14 ‘The Dragon’s Loose’ cartoon [unsigned], Clarion, 9 March 1895, p. 73. 15 M. B. [Mont Blong], ‘Clarion Verse: The Dragon’s Loose’, Clarion, 9 March 1895, p. 73. 16 John Burns, Justice, 19 July 1884, p. 4. 11

12

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

147

it carries associations accrued through layers of storytelling. On the Labour Champion’s cover, the point of contact between the spear wielded by St George and the dragon’s mouth touches the edge of the banner reading ‘Champion’, thus allowing a conflation of the newspaper, as the champion of labour, and the figure slaying the dragon, a labouring champion. Both, by implication, are associated with the defence and liberation of the English nation itself. The jester on the Labour Champion’s banner also carries cultural meanings, though he is a figure less often used in socialist imagery. He is important here not only as a signal of Maguire’s use of humour, but of his particular relationship to medievalism and to the injustices indicated by other elements of the front cover; it is suggestive of his sense of himself as continuous with a figure of misrule, subversion and irony, who is nonetheless subjugated, brought into the present but carrying something of the oppressive past and, simultaneously, its critique, with it. The names of his columnists – many of them pseudonyms for himself – work in a similar way. While Justice uses names or initials for columnists and writers, the Labour Champion, like the Clarion, tends to use comic nicknames. These noms de plume function like loanwords from a foreign language, signalling both appropriation and difference; they work, as Lawrence Venuti, drawing on Jacques Lecercle, argues loan words always do, as a kind of Derridean ‘remainder’, generating new meanings while remaining connected to the original.17 Maguire calls himself Gurth when writing prose and Bardolph when writing verse. Both set him not only in a line of well-known working-class characters, but also in a tradition of awkward but comic resistors. Shakespeare’s Bardolph and Walter Scott’s Gurth had a lively cultural life of their own in the late nineteenth century: Ivanhoe spawned stage plays, toy theatre productions, burlesque shows and illustrated editions, while Henry V was staged and restaged across the 1890s, taking on a particular flavour of nationalism at the end of the century in response to the Second Boer War. In describing his favourite books, Clarion editor Robert Blatchford refers to Bardolph as one of ‘a galaxy of humourous glories’.18 Lazy, bawdy Bardolph, comic though he is, refuses to be co-opted in any meaningful way into Henry V’s war, while Gurth, his creator tells us, has ‘a sense of oppression, and a disposition to resistance’, unlike Ivanhoe’s other serf – and jester – the subservient and complacent Wamba. He longs to be free, whereas Wamba is content with his serfdom.19 Given the significance of Thomas Carlyle to the fin-de-siècle socialist movement, as a figure whose critique of social and economic relations features frequently in accounts of conversion to the cause, it seems likely that his use of Gurth is also evoked here. For Carlyle, in Past and Lawrence Venuti, ‘The Difference that Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious’, in Alessandra Riccardi, ed., Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), pp. 214–41 (p. 219). 18 On Ivanhoe’s stage life, see Deborah Philips, Fairground Attraction: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 63 and D’Arcens, Comic Medievalism, pp. 101–2; on Henry V, see Robert Blatchford, My Favourite Books (London: Clarion Office, 1901), p. 37, and Andrew Gurr, Introduction to Shakespeare, Henry V, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–63 (pp. 46–48). 19 Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, in The Waverley Novels, Bouverie ed., 25 vols (London: Daily News, 1901), 9:31. 17

148

Ingrid Hanson

Present (1843), ‘Gurth with the brass collar round his neck’ is not ‘an exemplar of human felicity’ but ‘Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and [. . .] at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home – Gurth to me seems happy.’ This happiness is offered ‘in comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall of anybody!’20 Maguire’s use of the name, then, suggests the inadequacy of the conditions of the present as well as of the desires of the working class in comparison with this medieval serf. Other contributors to the Labour Champion include Puff, the Howler, the Bumpkin and Merlin, the latter another character familiar through the Victorian popular revival of Arthurian plays, spectacles, art and literature.21 These columnists develop their own personalities and comment comically on each other’s writings. In a regular column entitled ‘Merlin’s Mixture’ the writer notes that at a meeting talking over ‘the beauties of the paper’ one of the members brought ‘his missus’, who ‘suddenly chimed in with “Oh I do like that tale of Gurth’s. I read it on Sunday afternoon and it sent me to sleep”’. Merlin comments, ‘for once I have the bulge on Gurth’.22 This combination of colloquial lowbrow punning with the allusively literary names is characteristic of the Labour Champion’s bricolage approach to culture and its determination to assert the right of its readers to national culture and national literature as well as to a voice that insists on its own burlesque demotic. Seamus Heaney notes of his translation of Beowulf that part of his aim was to make the text sound as though it were ‘speakable by one of [his] relatives’, and so to claim it; for Maguire, performing a similar act of appropriation, ‘if this is a philological move, it is also a political one’, as Seth Lerer notes of Heaney.23 The medievalism of contemporary culture is as useable in the service of socialism, Maguire’s use of names suggests, as in the service of entertainment: the two are intrinsically connected. In a posthumously published story, ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’, Maguire makes a different kind of connection, urging the necessity of socialism through an Orientalist tale, the medievalist valency of which is made explicit in a Labour Champion article on political economy, ‘In the Lists’. ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’ takes as its starting point the well-known story of Sindbad the Sailor from the thirteenth-century Arabic collection The Thousand and One Nights, a centrepiece of popular Orientalist entertainment. Translated into French by Antoine Galland For contemporary accounts of Carlyle’s importance to socialists, see Blatchford, The New Religion (London: Clarion Press, 1897), p. 3 and John Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans Green, 1921), p. 67; Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 2nd ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), p. 284. 21 For a detailed account of the Arthurian myth in Victorian culture, see Debra Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes (New York: Harry Abrams, 1995). 22 Labour Champion, 21 October, 1895, p. 5. A similar comic rivalry exists between regular writers in The Clarion: the Bounder, Dangle, Mont Blong, Nunquam (short for Nunquam Dormio: I never sleep). 23 Seamus Heaney, Introduction to Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), p. xxvii; Seth Lerer, ‘On Fagne Flor: The Postcolonial Beowulf’, in Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, eds, Postcolonial Approaches to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 77–102 (p. 94). 20

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

149

between 1704 and 1717, referred to frequently by Walter Scott, and translated into English in a popular, abridged edition by Edward Lane in 1840 and in full, for subscribers, by John Payne in 1882 and Richard Burton in 1885, by the 1890s it was widely available in a variety of forms, from illustrated stories, extracts and pastiches to stage shows. ‘Sindbad’ in particular was well established as a pantomime favourite.24 Maguire makes use of the tale’s cultural ubiquity, drawing on its folk-tale form and using an oral, communal tone. He begins: ‘Everybody has heard of Sindbad the Sailor and the Old Man of the Sea; how the wicked old man caught Sindbad napping, and locked his legs round the sailor’s shoulders, with the evident intention of enjoying a free ride for the remainder of his unnatural life.’25 Using a creative misreading, the tale takes an apparent meaning evident in the original name – ‘bad’ – and turns it to ‘good’ to show the character of his working-class anti-hero, Sindgood the Simple, who finds himself in the course of his travels on a ‘dreary, dismal, misty island’. Sindgood meets a hideous creature named the Old Man of the Mountain, who claims ownership of the land and demands that the young man carry him up the island’s mountain to find fruit. Sindgood is denied food and urged to practise self-control while the old man gorges himself on the mountain’s rich yields, year after year, until ‘the Old Man has grown heavy and corpulent and our hero breaks under the oppressive burden’. Sindgood believes the Old Man who tells him this is how it must be. The story notes that ‘there are however prophets who declare that he will one day insist on sharing the surplus fruits of the mountain’.26 As any reader familiar with the story would know, Sindbad does, in the end, throw off the Old Man of the Sea and kill him: the ending is latent in the story for readers to imagine for themselves. Maguire’s resolutely conversational reworking of the tale acknowledges, manipulates and dismisses the conflated Orientalism and medievalism of its exoticised, archaicised forms in English culture. He reverses the common equation of the contemporary ‘East’ with the backwardness of the English Middle Ages, as John M. Ganim notes is common practice among Victorians, including, on occasion, Morris, and instead insists on equating the downtrodden sailor of the ancient tale with the contemporary English working class.27 His serialised Labour Champion article, ‘In the Lists’, which runs across all five issues, makes this equivalence explicit. It begins by noting that ‘when [. . .] we set ourselves to enquire into the causes of modern famines we are struck at first sight by what, to serfs in the Middle Ages, would have been a monstrous paradox, but which, to our end of the century free-voters, is merciless

24 See Peter Caracciolo, ed., The Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of the Thousand and One Nights into British Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 11–15, 240; Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36–37. For the sake of consistency, I use throughout the Victorian spelling, Sindbad, rather than the more common current spelling, Sinbad. 25 Maguire, ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’, in A Remembrance, pp. 74–85 (p. 77). 26 Maguire, ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’, pp. 77, 85. 27 John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 42.

150

Ingrid Hanson

matter of fact – to wit, the prime cause of starvation is an overplus of goods’.28 A section entitled ‘Dry as Dust Explanations’ borrows from Carlyle’s medievalist Past and Present, which in turn takes the figure of the imagined antiquarian Drysasdust from Walter Scott.29 At the very end of this piece, discussing the false reasoning of mainstream economics, Maguire notes that ‘The Old Man of the Sea fastened round the neck of Sindbad never quite succeeded in convincing the unlucky sailor that his object was quite a disinterested and laudable one.’30 The oppressed sailor of the fabular past, like the imagined medieval peasant, is more alert to injustice than the dulled nineteenth-century worker, the article suggests. Across his small but significant body of work, Maguire makes confident, complex use, then, of contemporary medievalism, to draw attention to injustice, to challenge the apparent normality and superiority – both temporal and racial – of Victorian England and to highlight a ‘moment of danger’, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s term, which is also a moment of potential change.31 He draws directly or tangentially on myths and forms of the past to generate comic juxtapositions that draw attention to serious social problems and gesture towards socialist solutions. In doing so, he wrests English medievalism from its widespread cultural uses as a tool of conservative nostalgia or carnivalesque escapism. The Gaze of the Discriminated: Seeing, Dreaming, Performing Robert Blatchford, writing in the Clarion in 1892, defended his heroes, including Morris and Ruskin, as ‘the despised and rejected of the intelligent electors of England, [. . .] the Socialists, the poets, the philosophers, the seers’.32 Frequently though these figures feature in the paper, even more important as seers are the workers of the medieval past, so central to the writings of Ruskin and Morris, brought into the present or projected into an imagined future. Homi Bhabha suggests that while ‘hybridity [. . .] unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power’, it ‘reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated eye back upon the eye of power’.33 It is in the service of a similar strategy of subversion that the Clarion, like the Labour Champion, turns the gaze of the medievalist eye on Victorian power structures. Like Maguire’s Gurth, the workers of the past imagined again and again in the paper’s pages serve as spectators to Maguire, ‘In the Lists: An Enquiry into the Causes of Trade Depressions, their Growth Development and Remedy’. Serialised in the Labour Champion, October–November 1893. Reprinted in A Remembrance, pp. 105–28 (p. 106). 29 Dryasdust is invoked repeatedly in Past and Present. See also Scott, Ivanhoe, ‘Dedicatory Epistle to the Rev. Doctor Drysasdust, F.A.S.’, pp. 12–23. 30 ‘In the Lists’, p. 122. 31 This is not to suggest Maguire is wholly free of Victorian racial prejudice: the second issue of the Labour Champion includes a derogatory article about the appearance of the Canoe Indians, 21 October 1893, p. 5; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. and intr. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 244–55 (p. 248). 32 Nunqaum, ‘Hero-Worship’, Clarion, 21 May 1892, p. 2. 33 Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 145–74 (p. 160). 28

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

151

the present, defamiliarising it with their disbelief at the limitations of the workers despite their freedom from feudal servitude. At the same time, while the working classes of the present are unable to effect a subversive turning back of the gaze, the oppressed of the past show them, often in that most medieval of forms, the dream vision, how to do it. From evocations of fellowship and joyful work in ‘Merrie England’ to stirring folk-poetry and dystopian visions of Victorian daily realities in comparison with the past, the polyvalent presence of the medieval introduces an ‘unsettling’ view of contemporary social structures as well as of history and progress. A Clarion tale of 1895, ‘A Free Country’, turns the eye of the medieval on the present, using satire and defamiliarisation to expose what is hidden. The title itself, a well-worn phrase used elsewhere in the newspaper as a casual colloquialism to indicate freedom of opinion, appears increasingly unstable in meaning as the story goes on.34 The editor’s brother, Montague Blatchford, under the nom de plume Mont Blong, sets out to imagine the return to the nineteenth century of a medieval peasant, Wat Warton, whose name carries echoes of Wat Tyler, leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt (discussed in his various guises by Stephen Basdeo, Stephen Knight and David Matthews in this volume) and familiar to many nineteenth-century socialists through William Morris’s rousing 1886–7 tale of the uprising, A Dream of John Ball.35 ‘A Free Country’ begins with an address to the reader, inviting an act of identification with a medieval peasant: ‘I daresay you have often wondered – as I have – what an English serf of the Middle Ages would think of that freedom which we are supposed to enjoy in this nineteenth century, that freedom for which they longed and struggled, and often died in the fourteenth century.’ The narrator continues with reference to Morris’s John Ball as well as to his medievalist utopia News from Nowhere, noting that he will attempt to imagine the viewpoint of the English serf, although ‘as I have not the literary art of William Morris, my rude clumsy attempt may be far from answering’.36 This story, he suggests, begins with the ordinary person’s questions and is told by someone very much like the reader. Not only does the story that follows use the bleak, unromanticised medieval to offer a critique of the even bleaker and less honest present, it also creates distance between Morris – admired though he is – and the community of Clarion readers, much as Leslie’s appellation of Bayard sets Morris apart from those who come after him. He is a model, but also, even before his death, part of the past, this suggests. The serf, Wat Warton, wakes up in the nineteenth century, finds himself nobody’s bondservant and sets out to enjoy his freedom. He experiences a progressive disillusionment as he wanders through the world, trying to find food, lodging and clothing: ‘he was hauled from pillar to post. Told to “come out of that” by some owner of private property, or to “get out of this” by some protector of the public peace; eyed reproachfully by respectable people, dubiously by industrious people, and with 34 One of the Clarion’s regular columns of laconic responses to readers’ letters includes this: ‘Edith: We do not think with you. But it is a free country’. ‘Answers to Correspondents’, Clarion, 11 June 1892, p. 4. 35 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, was first published serially in Commonweal between November 1886 and January 1887, and quickly brought out in book form in 1888 by Reeves and Turner. 36 ‘A Free Country’, Clarion, 27 April 1895, p. 136.

152

Ingrid Hanson

absolute loathing and abhorrence by suspicious people; his life of liberty was not a happy one’.37 Eyed by people absorbed in the system of industrial capitalism, Wat gazes back. Gradually he comes to realise that ‘everything doesn’t belong to everybody, everything belongs to somebody, that is to say those who’ve been fortunate enough to get possession of everything by some means or other’.38 From his first discovery that a jug of ale on a table outside an inn is not for the taking to his final death in penury and illness, this medieval peasant serves as a reminder of the lack of freedom of the nineteenth-century worker even in comparison with the life of an openly enslaved medieval peasant. There is nothing in Mont Blong’s critical use of past and present here of the ‘kind of injured yearning’ Bonnett identifies in the left’s uses of the past.39 Rather, the constructed medieval past is active, malleable, usable for the practical project of ‘making socialists’.40 It looks back at the present and questions narratives of natural or inevitable progress, leaving room for an alternative narrative of change. It is a narrative that relies on exposing and identifying the injustices and suffering of the present through contrast with the richly imagined past. In February 1895, the Clarion carried a serialised story by R. Peel entitled ‘A Curious Dream’, in which the narrator, a ‘middle-aged clerk in a Lancashire cotton factory’ explains that a strike on the part of the cotton workers ‘must mean actual destitution’ for himself, his wife and seven children. He goes on to say that ‘a great strike means much that is bitter to the cotton operatives. But what would it mean to me? They have their union, their strike pay, to depend on. I have nothing.’ The story that unfolds is, he tells us, ‘a dream, and I say so frankly’. In the dream, the cotton workers come out on strike, the narrator’s children begin to starve and he kills a shop-owner and two constables in order to get food for his family; the first part of the tale ends when, the more militant colliers having joined the strike, a violent clash occurs between enraged colliers and constables, during which he sees his wife appear, ‘her black hair streaming behind her, a knife between her teeth, and in her hand, still dripping with human blood, a head’. Seeing that ‘that demonized, red-handed figure of revenge was my wife’ he draws out his knife and thrusts it into his left breast ‘deep and hard’.41 The tale finishes at this point, and picks up the following week with a contrasting vision. While in this first part of the tale its status as a dream is emphasised, in the second part events that might much more readily be identified as dreamlike are presented instead as the result of an awakening. The narrator wakes up, as the second part of the tale begins, in a scene of medievalised delight, ‘amongst velvety grass and primroses [. . .]. Overhead was a moist and sweet blue sky, where in the sunshine palpitated a small atom of light and song, which I knew to be a lark.’ Not only this, he hears laughter and music and sees that people are dancing. The music ‘was not a waltz air – too spirited, too blithe’; the people are dressed in ‘robes’ and ‘tunics’ in natural colours, and they

37 38 39 40 41

‘A Free Country’, 11 May 1895, p. 149. ‘A Free Country’, 18 May 1895, p. 157. Bonnett, Left in the Past, p. 63. Blatchford, Merrie England (London: Clarion Office), p. 243. ‘A Curious Dream’, Clarion, 9 February 1895, p. 45.

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

153

dance ‘in couples, maid and man’. The generalised medievalism of the setting is unmistakeable and, in this case, unmistakeably Morrisian. ‘Health, health; health and happiness – these were before me for the first time in the faces and forms of my fellow creatures’, the narrator notes. The hillside is ‘covered with pretty cottages nestling around tapering spires and white domes, and noble towers of clean white stone’. The narrator is addressed as ‘friend’, like Morris’s time traveller in News from Nowhere, and one of the beautiful, happy girls in his dream tells him: ‘we are Wigan people – weavers, spinners, colliers, carvers, painters, musicians, foresters, farmers, florists, jewelers – all kinds of craftsmen and artists; but it is after noontide and we are playing’.43 Craft work and manual labour are given parity in this list, as are work and play, each allocated to a portion of the day. The long working hours of the nineteenth century have been abolished and work produces not anxiety and illness but health: ‘those bronzed faces and strong limbs had been tanned in the fields and moulded by work’, the narrator notes. Fellowship, health and beauty are figured here as interlinked aspects of an imagined past projected into the future; community is represented by the shared physical pleasure of dancing. The specific note that this was not a waltz, with its connotations of middle-class formality and its non-native origins, suggests that the leisure as well as the work of the people is authentically English and natural. Although this second part of the story might suggest nostalgia for the past, linked with the first part and set alongside other uses of the medieval in the newspaper, it becomes not nostalgic but prophetic in anti-realist hopefulness: it reimagines the past, brings it into the present and produces in doing so an excess, a remainder, which is neither past nor present. A more complicated engagement with nostalgia is evident in the journalistic and cultural uses of the idea of Merrie England. An 1891 article by Ernest Edwin Williams in The Workers’ Cry, a London working-class newspaper for which Maguire also wrote, evokes feudalism as not merely a forerunner to socialism but its analogue: ‘The last of socialism’s robes which Society wore was called Feudalism. It was a picturesque garment and was not altogether unsuited to the rough and tumble life of those days.’ He notes that: ‘[my] object is to impress on my readers that any form of Socialism is superior to individualism even when that Socialism is of so very mixed and imperfect a kind as was feudal society’. He goes on to say that: ‘Feudalism was socialism – with inequality of condition. It was not, therefore, the best kind of socialism; though it was probably the best procurable.’ Both socialism and feudalism are reduced to caricatures here, in the service of the comparison. In the same kind of colloquial language used by Maguire, he goes on to offer a version of Merrie England as an image of the feudal past: ‘They were such funny times. But it was a lump better than anything we have had since.’ He substantiates this by urging his reader to use their power of critical, imaginative vision: ‘if you doubt me, just take a glance at a medieval village of England – Merry England, they used to call it then – and see if I am not correct’.44 Merrie England had become a familiar cultural idea by 42

‘A Curious Dream’, 16 February 1895, p. 53. ‘A Curious Dream’, 16 February 1895, p. 53. 44 E. E. Williams, ‘Looking Backward’, Workers’ Cry, 12 September 1891, p. 12. Spellings vary across and within newspapers, with ‘merry’ and ‘merrie’ used interchangeably. 42 43

154

Ingrid Hanson

this period. Robert Blatchford’s 1893 series of Clarion columns, ‘Merrie England: A Series of Letters on the Labour Problem’, offering contemporary economic analysis with very little of the medieval about it, became an instant success, as Laurence Thompson has noted.45 It addressed ‘John Smith, of Oldham, a hard-headed workman, fond of facts’, in a tone, as Bonnett observes, that worked towards ‘the political transformation of the clubbable individual’. This tone, which Bonnett argues was the target of Keir Hardie’s critique of ‘irresponsible levity’ in the socialist movement, suggests deliberate disdain of the highbrow or esoteric, while at the same time celebrating and appropriating a comically hybrid past for serious ends.46 The Clarion’s medievalism as a whole, indeed, can be seen to offer the ‘ambiguous relationship to the emotional registers of both humour and seriousness’ characteristic of the camp medievalist productions of Victorian popular theatre discussed by D’Arcens.47 ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman but a “woman”’, Susan Sontag suggests.48 This mode of seeing in quotation marks, of laughing at the thing that is important, runs through the Clarion’s treatment of the medieval and yet serves not to undermine its significance, but to enhance it. Despite its bluff tone, the paper offers an anti-homogenising reading of culture that blends the familiar and the formal, the economic and the theatrical. If, as Susan Sontag argues, ‘to camp is a mode of seduction’, then the Clarion uses its campness to invite participation in its particular version of confident, performative, communal socialism.49 Merrie England itself, I suggest, is most often used in knowing quotation marks by Clarion journalists even while they affirm the range of values implicit in the phrase. The prevalence of the myth of Merrie England can be seen in the many advertisements for or accounts of events centred on this theme. In November 1895 the Clarion announces the ‘Clarion Lime-light Lecture: Merrie England’ tour, promising ‘200 of the most exquisite, striking and absolutely original slides ever shown’, guaranteed, in that tone of comic seriousness, to ‘wreck the Government and inaugurate the Social Revolution’; in November 1895 it advertises Birmingham Labour Church’s Merrie England Fayre and the Gorton Independent Labour Party Merrie England May Fayre; and in May that same year Liverpool socialists raised funds through a Merrie England Fayre opened by Robert Blatchford and Keir Hardie and featuring, among other entertainments, a maypole song and dance and, in a conflation of medievalism and Orientalism, ‘Ye Oriental Stalle’.50 Indeed, Laurence Thompson, Robert Blatchford: Portrait of an Englishman (London: Gollancz, 1951) pp. 99, 117. 46 Blatchford, ‘Merrie England’, Clarion, 4 March 1893, p. 8; Bonnett, Left in the Past, p. 75. 47 D’Arcens, Comic Medievalism, p. 93. 48 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1966), pp. 275–92 (p. 10). 49 Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, p. 281. 50 ‘Clarion Lime-light Lecture’, Clarion, 16 November 1895, p. 364; ‘Birmingham Labour Church Merrie England Fayre’, Clarion, 2 November 1895, p. 348; ‘Gorton Merrie England May Fayre’, Clarion, 16 November 1895, p. 364; Merrie England Fayre and Arts and Crafts Exhibition (Liverpool, 1895), Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup. com.manchester.idm.oclc.org/tinyurl/8ccD85 (accessed 17 June 2018), pp. 7, 13, 29. 45

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

155

Edward Carpenter, in his memorial for Tom Maguire, notes that young Maguire, converted to socialism at the age of nineteen, had shared in the work of propaganda in the difficult early days of spreading the socialist message, when ‘crowded ILP demonstrations and Merrie England bazaars had not yet been invented’.51 Merrie England bazaars, then, stand as a sign of a well-developed socialist culture. It is a culture from within which the Clarion can offer its ‘Lime-light lecture’ in terms of camp exaggeration as ‘immeasurably the most artistic, sparkling, side-splitting, tear-compelling, educative, electrifying, paralyzing entertainment ever conceived’ which will ‘act quicker than all the pamphlets and speeches in the propaganda put together’, in the safe assumption that its readers will attend in complicit expectation of serious content in comic form. These knowing uses of the medieval are set alongside occasions in the Clarion when Merrie England is used more straightforwardly, as in ‘A Curious Dream’, and in the ‘Clarion Ballad’, a recurring though not regular feature of the paper, for 16 March 1895, entitled ‘A Song of Merrie England’. Written by one of the newspaper’s regulars, E. F. Fay, the poem begins by drawing attention to its own form, to the role of storytelling in forming identity and understanding: Come, give to me my island harp Renowned in song and story And I will weave a rhythmic warp, A tale of English glory.

It reminds readers of a time when ‘the old saw says, [. . .] every rood of English ground / maintained an English MAN’, linking a pre-industrial landscape of village greens, ‘verdant vales and fertile dales’, ‘skies clean and rivers pure’ with an ideal of manliness as anti-capitalist. The maintenance of this English man is made possible by the absence of ‘cunning men’ who ‘buy and sell’. The poem ends with a return to the present and a reminder of the value of working people: I sing a song of native worth, With a hey down derry derry! Of the good old earth and sun-browned mirth, While England yet was ‘merrie’.52

This wholehearted claim to national identity and apparently unquestioning representation in specialised language of an idealised past and an idealised landscape of belonging, however, appears alongside more equivocal representations of the reimagined medieval past. In ‘A Peep at Merrie England’ the writer, C. Allen Clarke, seems to have taken Williams’ advice from the Workers’ Cry, to ‘take a glance at a village of medieval England’.53 He describes a ‘Club Day, Field Sports and Crowning of the Rose Queen’ in the Lancashire village of Lytham, noting that: 51 52 53

Carpenter, ‘Memoir’, p. x. E. F. Fay, ‘A Song of Merrie England’, Clarion, 16 March 1895, p. 85. Williams, ‘Looking Backward’, p. 12.

156

Ingrid Hanson Looking at this sweet scene, alive with colour and cheerful with music, it did not take much imagination to forget Lancashire factories and Manchester slums and fancy myself back in those merry Middle Ages that William Morris loves, and those pleasant days Nunquam would like to see back again.

The constructed nature of these ‘merry Middle Ages’ is suggested by the reference to Blatchford (Nunquam) and Morris, even as the limited realisation of their vision is lamented: ‘alas! These Rose processions, these May Queen festivals, these Morris-dancers [. . .] are not part of the nineteenth-century programme, nor common to the dull towns.’ This momentary enactment of an imagined Middle Ages, complete with ‘Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and Maid Marion’ can only exist, Clarke suggests, ‘here and there, in some village luckily not yet chained in the convict march of steam-made progress’. The article highlights this by beginning with an epigraph from Goldsmith – ‘I love everything that’s old; old friends, old tunes, old manners, old books’ – and finishing with a quotation from Wordsworth: ‘“Merry England” still / May be thy rightful name in prose and rhyme.’ 54 It celebrates not a vital, effective, transformative Middle Ages, nor a Middle Ages that might be put to active use in struggle, but a rural past evoked through story; it draws attention to the incompatibility of the communal values of this imagined past with the mechanised, capitalist present but stops rather short of making the direct connections between those values and the everyday world of work that ‘A Curious Dream’ achieves so deftly. Nonetheless the dominance of the present is undermined by the eclectic range of readings of the past in the writings of socialist journalists, allowing a hybrid creation of the imagined Middle Ages to critique the present and open new spaces of possibility for the future. They ask questions about meaning, identity and change that are echoed in Sedgwick’s foundational questions about queer reading of texts and cultures: ‘what if [. . .] there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?’55 Socialist readers in the late nineteenth century are invited to imagine different versions of the past, look at the present from the vantage points of those various imagined pasts and in doing so, become active participants in the formation of their own identity. Story, Song and the Coming of the Common Man The uses of the past in Maguire’s writing and in the Clarion in the mid-1890s, I have argued, are rooted in a commitment to multiplicity and communality, to the development of both critique and identity through the refusal of an authoritative use of the past and an insistence on playfulness, theatricality and the recognition of an unassimilable remainder or excess as productive of a desire for change. Both newspapers, like the Labour Leader and Justice, whose uses of the medieval have little of the playful camaraderie and insistently comic use of language of Blatchford’s and 54 55

C. Allen Clarke, ‘A Peep at Merrie England’, Clarion, 6 July 1895, p. 214. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 6.

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

157

Maguire’s, represent a movement from the authoritative individual to the interactive communal. In Justice’s opening year, it invokes medievalism in an ironic reference to weaponry: The knight is dust And his good sword rust, His soul is with the saints, I trust. These lines were written by the chief handler of arquebuses to a guild of cobblers in the Middle Ages some years after he had shot a noble through the body while that aristocrat was fumbling for his lance. It was a good battle; but the cowardly use of gunpowder settled it unexpectedly in favour of the people.56

Later the same year, the same matter of weaponry is raised, with the reference to cowardice glossed a little further: ‘Worthy profit-mongers, remember that time was when the arquebus was thought a very cowardly weapon: but somehow the lance disappeared and the knight with it; the men with arquebuses still march on.’57 Both the continuities of history and its inevitable ruptures are evoked here in the service of a narrative of the inevitability of working-class liberation. Like Leslie’s tribute to Morris, it offers a narrative in which values previously reposed in the figure of the knight are wrested from that individual hero by and for the working class. The transition from individual to communal is figured in other newspapers through the subversive uses of popular narratives of ancient heroism. On 5 February 1895 the Clarion Ballad is ‘A Saga Song’, by J. Cartmel-Robinson. It begins: I sing you a song from the Sagas, I sing of the Vikings of Old. I sing of the two foster brothers, Sigvaldi and Thorfast the bold.

In contemporary language and idiom, the poem tells the story of Sigvaldi’s death and Thorfast’s avenging of his half-brother through the burning down of King Atli’s hall and the murder of his men. There is no stinting of Icelandic saga terms: the poem includes berserkers, scalds and ‘the Norn’, Valhalla and ‘the Valkyr of Odin’ who waits for Thorfast on his death at the end of the poem: ‘She gave him the peacekiss and took him / Where valour and faithfulness dwell’.58 While, as Andrew Wawn notes, stories, characters and themes from the Icelandic and Nordic ‘Old North’ had found their way, by the end of the nineteenth century, into a wide array of texts, plays, lectures and songs, it is their representation of ‘valour and faithfulness’, that particular combination of individual courage in action and commitment to the wider clan, that is emphasised in socialist journals.59

[Untitled], Justice, 9 February 1884, p. 5. ‘The Anarchist Trial’ [unsigned], Justice, 27 December 1884, p. 4. 58 J. Cartmel-Robinson, ‘A Saga Song’, Clarion, 2 February 1895, p. 40. 59 Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 3–9. 56 57

158

Ingrid Hanson

In a rather more pointedly contemporary use of Icelandic medievalism, ‘The King, the Lord and the Man’, written by ‘Berserk’ and headed with an illustration of a Viking warrior with winged helmet and a horn at his belt, begins with an invitation to listen, but this time making use of a distinctively socialist idiom: Come, listen, O my comrades, while I sing to you the song Of the King in elder days, when the Commonwealth was young, The King by right of service in the nation’s common yoke.

It goes on to sing the praise of the king, ‘Who was strong with a man’s strength, and not the strength of gold, / Who was hearthmate and sharer with the people that had lack’. This king, then, is in the mould of the king John Ruskin describes in Fors Clavigera, who shares in physical labour, does ‘harder work than everybody else’, and indeed is ‘even ready to govern for nothing’, allowing his followers to ‘divide any quantity of spoil or profit’.60 At the same time this king is a Christ-like figure, ‘who shed for them his blood, in the battle and the wrack, / A lord and not a lozel, with a mattock and a shield’. The song concludes by asking, ‘But now, my comrades, think you, if the king and lord be dead, / Who will lead us and protect us? By whom shall we be fed?’ The answer comes back, ‘A voice of grandest music as it swings from shore to shore / We are Kings and we are Lords; God hath given us the Sign’. The ballad finishes with a direct appeal: ‘Ho, steady, then, my comrades, hold together, we are one’. The invitation to individual heroism common to the proliferating texts of the Victorian ‘Old North’ is transvalued by the repeated use of ‘comrade’, with its pervasive and politically freighted contemporary usage.61 The stories of Icelandic heroism do not function here as authoritative texts with a single message about national history, but instead are used piecemeal to create a new, hybrid narrative that speaks in the language of the medieval past, with archaisms such as ‘lozel’ and ‘wrack’, alongside the language of the politically urgent and active present. In using this blended language, the poem asserts the belonging of the people to this history and their power to reshape its direction. The Labour Leader frames that belonging and its imperatives to change in the form of prophecy. On 9 March 1895, an article on William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, for a regular column entitled ‘Our Reading Circle’, begins: The fourteenth century was the springtime of English literature. The dumbness which had fallen upon Englishmen ever since the Norman Conquest had been already broken by a few faint murmurings, but it was not until the fourteenth century that Britain was at last ‘fulfilled all over’ with real poems written in the common language of the common people, and not in that of their aristocratic conquerors.

The article goes on to describe the ‘Free Labourers’ of the period, the words of John Ball, ‘Wat Tyler’s rebellion and its treacherous overthrow’ and to discuss Langland’s text, briefly, as one that describes ‘an awakening such as might, any day, take place in 60 John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Vol. 1, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1907), 27:168. 61 Berserk, ‘The King, the Lord and the Man’, Clarion, 23 February 1895, p. 61.

Serfs, Saints and Comrades

159

our England’, in which ‘masses of men all touched with a common feeling and longing to amend their selfish, greedy lives, cry out for truth’. It finishes with a quotation from the poem that compares the ‘common man’ with Christ, and asks readers, ‘is not Langland’s prophecy to-day fulfilled in your ears? Is not the Common Man at length coming to his kingdom?’62 Drawing on biblical language that Jesus uses about himself, the writer emphasises the role of the people in their own salvation and at the same time suggests that the stories of the past might come to fruition in the present.63 In the brief flourishing of socialist newspapers in the 1890s, leading up to the death of Maguire in 1895 and then of Morris in 1896, the writings of the handful of working-class socialist journalists I have discussed offer a snapshot of the uses of the medieval past to articulate a commitment to the common, ‘used to affirm something shared or to describe something ordinary’, as well as to a self-consciously ‘common’ – meaning ‘vulgar, unrefined, and eventually low-class’ – style and language to challenge political injustice and social inequality and stake a claim to cultural belonging.64 Just as Morris is admired, imitated and at the same time consigned to history, so the Middle Ages are used in these newspapers in a range of complex ways, assuming shared though not identical processes of sophisticated thought in readers for whom the medieval can be admired and mocked, respected and critiqued, inhabited and othered. In its very presence, malleability and multivalence, this constructed past serves to assert the right of working-class socialists to the appropriation, interpretation and use of medieval myths, stories and forms and therefore their capacity to make history anew.

62

3.

M. R. Heath, ‘Our Reading Circle: Piers Ploughman’, Labour Leader, 9 March 1895, p.

See Luke 4.21. Raymond Williams, ‘Common’, in Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 71. 63

64

9 Morbid Solidarity: Remains, Afterlives and the Commune of Saints Stuart McWilliams

‘How shall we live then?’1  William Morris

E

‘I would like to learn to live finally.’2  Jacques Derrida

very political platform is also a crypt. Such sepulchral foundations can be disquieting: radical movements in particular tend to resist necrophile (or, as Robert Pogue Harrison has it, ‘necrocratic’3) appearances. In his ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx famously framed the new revolutionary project as requiring the abandonment of funereal pieties: The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin till it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content.4

1 Paul Meier, ‘An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris: “How Shall We Live Then?”’, International Review of Social History 16:2 (1971), 217–40 (230–32). 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xvi. 3 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. ix. 4 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, trans. Terrell Carver, in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin (London: Pluto Books, 2002), p. 22.

Morbid Solidarity

161

Yet the left, broadly conceived, has never truly banished its spectres or renounced its own morbid preoccupations. Lenin’s corpse is perhaps the most carefully preserved in the world, and the language of haunting has been drawn back to the tradition’s surface in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Meanwhile, Marx’s own tomb (into which he was transferred in the 1950s) continues to be a site of both political assembly and vandalism. In one of his Fors Clavigera letters to English workers, John Ruskin (writing in 1880) makes concrete the link between a (medievalised) Christian socialism and burial rights: Trade Unions of England – Trade Armies of Christendom, what’s the roll-call of you, and what part or lot have you, hitherto, in this Holy Christian Land of your Fathers? Is not that inheritance to be claimed, and the Birth Right of it, no less than the Death Right? Will you not determine where you may be Christianly bred, before you set your blockhead Parliaments to debate where you may be also all Christianly buried, (your priests also all a-squabble about that matter, as I hear, – as if any ground could be consecrated that had the bones of rascals in it, or profane where a good man slept!) But how the Earth that you tread may be consecrated to you, and the roofs that shade your breathing sleep, and the deeds that you do with the breath of life yet strengthening hand and heart, – this it is your business to learn, if you know not; and this mine to tell you, if you will learn.5

Ruskin’s enjoinder reminds us that interment itself is a matter of political economy: working-class burial in the nineteenth century was a land ownership battleground at the intersection of private, Church and state property interests, and the ‘trade funeral’ was necessarily a site of political assembly and union activity.6 The place of the dead in the traditions of the left is a recurrent issue, and one which will also haunt the present essay. Moreover, medievalist discourse is itself concerned with the status of the dead, and indeed with a category of the premodern dead which has been created and ‘interred’ by forces of modernisation.7 What kind of class solidarity can survive the historical relation here? The present volume’s introduction notes the many silent continuities between medieval working life and John Ruskin, ‘Letter LXXXIX’, in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, vol. 4 (London: George Allen, 1906), pp. 364–65. 6 Mary Elizabeth Hotz, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. 24. A decade before Ruskin’s letter, Joshua Toulmin Smith had noted the importance of funeral practices in many medieval English guild ordinances. ‘Every year’, for example, ‘a requiem was sung for all departed Gild-brothers, when they were all mentioned by name; and on the death of any member, special services were held for his soul [. . .].’ Joshua Toulmin Smith, ed., English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More than One Hundred Early English Gilds Together with The Olde Usages of the Cite of Wynchestre, The Ordinances of Worcester, the Office of the Mayor of Bristol, and The Costomary of the Manor of Tettenhall-Regis, from Manuscripts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London: Early English Text Society, 1870), p. cxxxiv. 7 It is Kathleen Davis’s contention that modernity’s invention of medieval ‘tradition’ coincides with the imputation of quasi-feudal histories to Europe’s overseas colonies, so that, for example, ‘India becomes fixed as always just escaping a Middle Ages nobody ever had. . . . [In] this colonial moment, the simultaneously produced and destroyed image of a feudal past 5

162

Stuart McWilliams

the experience of labourers in the (incompletely industrialised) nineteenth century, while recognising that ‘subaltern medievalism’ itself tends to prioritise rupture and discord in history; to refer to the past in a gesture of resistance rather than restoration or continuity. The resulting knot of solidarity and alterity can hardly be untied, but its torsions may be felt more keenly if both elements can be understood as relating fundamentally and minimally to the life/death boundary. For Martyn Hudson, ‘the notion of the dead is central both to Marxism and to working-class experience, as well as to the peasantry’, but the last of these has, through urbanisation, been subject to ‘the severing of the geographical tie [and] the severing of the vertical ties binding one to one’s own ancestry’. Hudson offers, however, a supplement to the peasant/worker distinctions found in the works of Marx – and, in different forms, in those of John Berger (acting as ‘a clerk of the peasant’s records’) – by insisting that the modern working class has had its own ‘sedimentation of historical experience’, its own (localised, not purely universal) relations to dead generations, and finally its own entanglements in the production and interpretation of material culture: This material culture can itself be destroyed in the terrifying accelerations of production and consumption, but it is so ubiquitous that the material vestiges of the rule of capital will undoubtedly persist into the next epoch. Again, what should be central to our understanding is a historical examination of this material culture of factories, wharves, machinery, as the remnants of our working-class dead. Nor the least part of our concern should be that faction of the dead who were eliminated in the very production of this material culture.

If medievalism entails the cultivation of historical desires and affinities, then socialist medievalism (or any medievalism of the disenfranchised) must involve multiplied, indeed ‘compound’, affinities. The resulting asymmetric discourses may well be found to be riddled with false equivalences, mistranslations and impositions. Nevertheless, a subaltern medievalism which imagines society (past and present) from below may have its own strategic advantages: in Hudson’s account, ‘[o]ften those who have constructed an affinity with the observed, pulled from the ranks of other classes and histories, can render visible elements of experience which lay unreflected upon by the observed. The special task of this kind of intellectual lies in the universalisation of, and abstraction from, the details of subaltern experience by de-localising and extra-territorialising it.’8 The Specular and the Secular This chapter’s invocation of ‘remains’ and ‘afterlives’ is not, then, intended to be exclusively (or even primarily) metaphorical. Remains are not in this context merely is made visible by the hard valence of the colonial practice that performs the vanishing act.’ Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 74. 8 Martyn Hudson, ‘On the Dead of World History’, Race and Class 43:4 (2002), 26–33; quotations respectively 27, 28, 28, 30, 30, 31.

Morbid Solidarity

163

traces or survivals, but primarily the very human remains upon which radical medievalism builds its historical imagination. Similarly, for our purposes, the ‘afterlives’ of socialist medievalism and its associated discourses do not only refer to matters of legacy or revival (important as these surely are). In her study of the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross deploys the French term ‘survie’ to cover ‘a kind of afterlife that does not exactly come after but in my view is part and parcel of the event itself [. . .] a life beyond life. Not the memory of the event or its legacy, although some form of these are surely already in the making, but its prolongation, every bit as vital to the event’s logic as the initial acts of insurrection in the streets of the city.’ This ‘expanded temporality’9 is undoubtedly a useful hermeneutic technique – for the present discussion, however, it also requires a more literal supplement: a consideration of afterlives that attends to eschatological (and perhaps ‘thanatological’) matters, and to the interplay of mortality and eternity. We are thus engaged in a morbid project in every sense. Yet this may be precisely the right mode in which to approach, for example, William Morris: If the ghost offers a suggestive metaphor, it also embodies the very stuff of Morris’s creative fiction: writings replete with dream visions, unsettling visitations, and unexpected phantoms. The spectre is also at the heart of Morris’s philosophy of romance (the capacity for the past to peer through the present), and of his lifelong dialogue with the forgotten wraiths of medieval times.10

Spectres are also there to be seen; they are spectacular.11 William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, published in full in 1888 and serialised in Commonweal over the preceding two years, is an exercise in what might be called speculative medievalism. The connotations here are multiple: the book is not only ‘speculative’ (fanciful, visionary) in its imagined encounters, it also (and even more fundamentally) engages in a tradition of reflective optics that is itself closely associated with medieval textual culture. The medieval encyclopaedic speculum (mirror) was a kind of limitless surface, capable of representing and holding within it the plurality of the world. Such works, and their magical counterparts in romance, were also the product of a ‘spectacular’ age whose thinkers were much preoccupied with optics and optical theory (inspired in large part by earlier Arabic scholarship).12

9 Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015), p. 6. 10 Michelle Weinroth, ‘Introduction’, in Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne, eds, To Build A Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), p. 5. 11 ‘The spectacular and unexpected features of the spectre are linked to the Latin spectare and specere (to look at) and to the Latin apparere (to come forth); each of these etymological resonances pertains to the spectre’s startling and fleeting appearance, to its spectacular and arresting character. As a haunting element, the spectre prompts us to doubt our first assumptions and to think again.’ Weinroth, ‘Introduction’, p. 291 n.10. 12 See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976) and Mark A. Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

164

Stuart McWilliams

To modern readers, of course, it is tempting to see specula themselves as mirrors of the Middle Ages; diagrams of their epistemological system and limits. Morris himself acquired an incunable version of a text in this tradition – the Mirror of Human Salvation – in the 1890s (by which time he had withdrawn somewhat from direct political agitation and devoted himself to collecting and publishing, as well as to the writing of prose romances). He had already, however, spent many decades looking into the mirror of the medieval, with A Dream of John Ball constituting perhaps the fullest dramatisation of a ‘returned’ gaze.13 Its elision of the half-millennium historical distance is made possible by its framing as a literary dream vision (visio), precisely of the sort without which the medieval tradition would be unthinkable, reliant as it was on the framing and authenticating power of dreams as well as mirrors.14 To this we can add the nineteenth-century historical optic or ‘time telescope’15 itself, which Morris described as ‘the new sense of modern times, the great compensation for the losses of the centuries . . . making us feel that the past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make’.16 A Dream of John Ball is a dream of the past which considers the nineteenth-century present as a future; the inverse, therefore, both of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (published in the same year) and of Morris’s own later News from Nowhere (a direct response to Bellamy’s novel). Fundamentally, however, all of these texts share a reflective optic which is intended to defamiliarise the present, as Carlyle had done, to different ends, in Past and Present earlier in the century.17 They are uchronias as much as utopias; ‘uchronie’ being a term coined by Charles Renouvier in the same century as a name for his own discourse of alternate history or, as he calls 13 ‘It was as if Morris instead of using the familiar device of the past as a mirror for the present, used two mirrors, and allowed both past and present to exchange views in double vision . . .’ Margaret R. Grennan, William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York: Russell & Russell, 1945), p. 83. 14 See Yuri Cowan, ‘“Paradise Erthly”: John Ball and the Medieval Dream Vision’, in David Latham, ed., Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 135–51. 15 Grennan, William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary, p. 2. 16 William Morris, ‘Preface’, in Robert Steele, Mediaeval Lore from Bartholemew Anglicus (London: De La More Press, 1905), pp. xi–xii. 17 Matthew Beaumont’s Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 and The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle both draw attention to the optical techniques of the genre (including Morris’s News from Nowhere). Beaumont offers another comparison – anamorphosis – which carries its own morbid art-historical associations:

Utopia . . . is an internal distantiation of the present – “distance, right within.” . . . This utopian perspective – that of a point of retrospection pleated into the outer limit of the present – can be explained in terms of the figure of anamorphosis. Anamorphosis “is any kind of construction that is made in such a way that by means of an optical transposition a certain form that wasn’t visible at first sight transforms itself into a readable image.” The most famous example of anamorphosis is no doubt the distorted death’s head superimposed by Holbein on his painting of The Ambassadors: the skull’s form only emerges when the spectator stands askance to the picture. (Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 35.)

Morbid Solidarity

165

it, ‘history as it might have been’. A Dream of John Ball, however, offers no wildly counterfactual account of the Peasants’ Revolt and its trajectory – while it is highly fanciful, the doomed nature of the event is essential to the narrative. Similarly, while Morris permits his ‘dreamer’ persona to meet the heroic Ball, the ‘vision’ as a whole is animated by more than wish fulfilment, and its imagined encounters are attended by a tragic insufficiency; perhaps even a kind of romantic irony. One area in which wish fulfilment is evident is in the text’s creation of what might be called ‘discursive fellowship’ between medievals and the nineteenth-century narrator. John Plotz has suggested that this sense of shared linguistic resources is an important element in Morris’s overall humanistic project: 18

Although often called a poet of the People, and hailed for his socialist chants that vaunt the struggling masses over evil oppressors, [Morris’s] work makes a sustained effort to justify such solidarity by invoking impersonal forms of judgment that make all humanity cohere. The result is that language itself can come to be represented as a common property, common enough that distinctions between persons dissolve without characters needing to notice such dissolution. . . . At one point in the Dream of John Ball, the dreaming narrator is asked what his own place is in John Ball’s army. The question is asked by way of what might be called a shibboleth, that is, a triggering cue verse to which he is expected to know the password response. Someone recites to him: ‘John the Miller, that ground small, small, small.’ His response is automatic: ‘From between my lips without my mind forming any meaning came the words, “The king’s son of heaven shall pay for all.”’ Speech is the medium in which meaning is suspended, but that meaning need not pass through the individual consciousness to be transmitted. Rather, it is best understood as a memorized verse or an object so well known it passes below the threshold of attention.19

Similarly, the dreamer is thrilled by the appearance of a banner displaying Ball’s infamous rhetorical question (as reported by Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana) ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?’20 Even so, the narrator’s anomalous nature is also foregrounded: in the first chapter, upon declaring that he is his own master, Morris is told by a sceptical Will Green that such is ‘not the custom of England, as one time belike it will be. Methinks thou comest from heaven down, and hast had a high place there too.’ From the beginning, then, we find the thematisation of the dreamer’s exteriority to the normal order of time (framed here, appropriately enough, in eschatological terms).

18 Charles Renouvier, Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation Européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Paris: Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1876). 19 John Plotz, ‘Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris’s Romances’, ELH 74:4 (2007), 931–56 (948). 20 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, in The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 16, ed. May Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 228; further references parenthetically in text.

166

Stuart McWilliams

Ball’s own appearance is immediately linked to themes of death and afterlife, and to the question of solidarity across time. At the end of his first (and probably most famous) speech, he draws these together: ‘Ah my brothers, what an evil doom is this, to be an outcast from the Church, to have none to love you and to speak with you, to be without fellowship! Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do on the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane. ‘Therefore, I bid you not dwell in hell but in heaven, or while ye must, upon earth, which is a part of heaven, and forsooth no foul part.’ (230)

The dreamer is thus already preoccupied with mortality when, following the ‘battle at the township’s end’, he enters a Kentish church to converse with Ball directly. There is no respite from the dead: church is filled with bodies from both sides of the conflict, who are to be given funereal pieties. This courtesy, however, precedes (according to Jack Straw) what will be a more revolutionary attitude: ‘the priest saith, bear ye the dead men, both friends and foes, into the chancel of the church, and there this night he will wake them: but after to-morrow let the dead abide to bury their dead!’ (256). The dreamer’s challenge is to try to communicate to Ball what has happened to the world (and its socio-economic structures) in the historical interval that divides them. He must convey the principles of labour specialisation, multiplication and automation (themes which occupy so many of Morris’s real-life lectures in the 1880s), using the existing medieval image of the weaver’s loom to let Ball imagine for himself how, in time, this basic form of labour acceleration might become elaborated into something world-altering.21 This mechanisation is also a question of mortality and temporality: in his contemporaneous lecture ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’, Morris writes that ‘since [capitalists] already hold in their hands the labour of dead men in the form of capital and machinery, it is their interest, or we will say their necessity, to pay as little as they can help for the labour of living men’.22 This variation on Marx’s ‘dead labour’ affirms that, under capitalism, one’s work no longer ends when it finishes; it can be captured, suspended, repeated and accumulated. Commodity production apprehends labour and conducts an uncanny rerouting of its temporality. Indeed, it is on precisely this untimely quality which Jacques Derrida dwells in Specters of Marx. For Derrida, the commodity itself is haunted; material in form and yet anchored in immateriality and temporal otherness – hauntological rather than ontological.23 The redivision and reordering of work, time and space revealed by the dreamer is so difficult for Ball to absorb that he is invited to think of it as a kind of romance 21 ‘Then shall those things, which to thee seem follies, and to the men between thee and me mere wisdom and the bond of stability, seem follies once again . . .’ Morris, A Dream of John Ball, p. 286. 22 William Morris, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’, in The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 12. 23 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 202.

Morbid Solidarity

167

or science fiction (that is, as a speculation): ‘Imagine all this in thy mind if thou canst, at least as ye may imagine a tale of enchantment told by a minstrel [. . .] not only shall men be multiplied a hundred and a thousand fold, but the distance of one place to another shall be as nothing’ (280). Yet there is a more fundamental barrier to understanding at work here: the dreamer and Ball’s apparently incommensurable notions of death and the hereafter. Their climactic meeting has barely begun before Ball declares his conviction ‘that ere many days are gone by my soul shall be in bliss among the fellowship of the saints, and merry shall it be, even before my body rises from the dead’ (263), and this anticipated death becomes Ball’s own mechanism for achieving a new optical alignment. It is only in the next life that he ‘shall see all the deeds that I have done in the body, and what they really were, and what shall come of them; and ever shall I be a member of the Church, and that is the Fellowship; then, even as now’ (265).24 Here, Ball becomes aware of a schism or ‘wall’ dividing the two; a division for which the dreamer (and the atheistic Morris) must account, while retaining or translating the crucial notion of fellowship which animates Ball’s preaching. The dreamer’s humanist response is simple: ‘though I die and end, yet mankind yet liveth, therefore I end not, since I am a man’ (265). He thus finds a different kind of ‘impersonality’ to which to appeal; a commonality without communion. And indeed, secular notions of something like solidarity across the life–death boundary were to be found in the radical discourses of Morris’s time. In 1880, Élisée Reclus posed the question in this way: If the great factory, that is to say, the earth, and all the secondary factories which are found there, are shared in common, if work is done by all and the quantity and quality of what is produced result precisely from the solidarity of effort, to whom must it legitimately belong if not to the whole indivisible workforce? What rule could guide the accountants who work out the shares and enable them to recognize what should be assigned to each individual from the manna produced by the labor of the whole of humanity, including previous generations?25

As Ross elaborates, ‘solidarity, in this sense, extends not only to one’s living associates but to the dead as well – it exists “between those who travel through the conscious arena and those who are no longer here”’.26 Negotiating the terms of fellowship between the living and the dead was a key issue for socialists, anarchists and communards in the period, but was still more dramatic for those who, like Morris, added medievalism to the equation. The literary imagination, of course, permits such solidarity to be expressed in other ways; through visionary encounters, time travel, and, as we have seen, the shared resources of language itself.27 24 Morris himself, by contrast, offered the historical (rather than eschatological) assertion that ‘no age can see itself ’. ‘Dawn of a New Epoch’, The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 21. 25 Élisée Reclus, quoted in Ross, Communal Luxury, p. 126–27 (emphasis mine). 26 Reclus, quoted in Ross, Communal Luxury, p. 127. 27 ‘Morris’s participatory narrator . . . subtly enacts the central conviction of his life, that history can be rendered meaningful by a counterfactual “friendship” and communion of persons across time.’ Florence S. Boos, ‘Alternative Victorian Futures: “Historicism,” Past and Present and A Dream of John Ball’, in Florence S. Boos, ed., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 3–37 (35).

168

Stuart McWilliams

Establishing a secular model for affinities and solidarities across time is challenging, since the saeculum ostensibly and formally belongs precisely to the living generations; to those who (as Ball’s interlocutor semi-semi-facetiously has it) ‘live to live because the world liveth’ (264). The rhetorical usefulness of eschatology, afterlives and eternity thus persists, allowing Morris’s narrator to establish ‘solidarity, in effect, with a communion of secular saints’.28 Reflecting on the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov (1899–1951), McKenzie Wark writes: There is only one hope, and it is in eternal life, but this endless life has nothing to do with spirit or even the idea. It isn’t universal. It exists only in the sensation of shared existence. Living things are each other’s comrades, even in their struggles against each other. [. . .] Comradely life, devoted to its secondary ideas, is a homeless, rootless nation, in which each labors for another who labors for another. It is a life done with the death-image of the absolute outside and beyond itself.29

Ball, of course, is not to be dissuaded from considering his death as an entry into extra-temporal enlightenment, sped by the intercession of ‘friends that are long ago gone from the world, as St. Martin, and St. Francis, and St. Thomas of Canterbury’ (263). Before he departs, fully expecting his demise, he expresses uncertainty about whether to wish his guest ‘some dream of the days beyond thine to tell what shall be, as thou hast told me, for I know not if that shall help or hinder thee’ (286).30 He has realised, of course, that the dreamer has his own historical blind spot. Still, this division is also a kind of unification, since the far future – the future that postdates Morris’s own death – is a time of which they are both ignorant; it belongs to neither or both: it is, indeed, held in common, just like the distant prelapsarian past invoked by Ball’s famous Edenic question. The symmetries and asymmetries of Morris’s A Dream of John Ball are those of a mutual haunting. It shares this structure with News from Nowhere, whose protagonist Guest, as Antonis Balasopoulos has remarked, ‘is also a ghost because, like Bellamy’s Julian, he cannot return to his own present without haunting it in turn’.31 Each of these utopian ‘guests’ has a spectral role ‘because his bearing witness to Utopian alterity is made possible by his exclusion from it . . . he can never be fully present in the society he describes’.32 The ambiguous effect is characteristic of the ‘secular utopias’ discussed by Matthew Beaumont in Utopia, Ltd, embodying ‘an attempt to 28 Boos, ‘Alternative Victorian Futures’, p. 35. See also p. 32: ‘the priest finally understands that his visitor maintains a secular counterpart of his own vision – “secular” also in the literal sense of extending across centuries and cultural divides . . .’ 29 McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 106–7. 30 Matthew Beaumont views this as acting as ‘a surreptitious straw poll of the readers of Commonweal: it asks, would you be prepared to read a communist utopia in these pages?’ Beaumont, Utopia, Ltd., p. 84. 31 Antonis Balasopoulos, ‘Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia’, Theory and Event 12:3 (2009), https://muse.jhu.edu. 32 Balasopoulos, ‘Ghosts of the Future’. Balasopoulos suggests that such texts ‘fashion the dialogue between the present and the future not on the ground of any shared social content but on that of their shared exposure to “spectral rupture”’.

Morbid Solidarity

169

reconcile the real contradictions of historical life’ through a ‘fragile negotiation of competing impulses [which] inspires hope and displaces it.’33 Morris’s dreamer is keenly aware of the reciprocal mysteries of his encounter (‘I thought of [Ball] as he of me, that he had seen things which I could not have seen’ [267]), but even this is subjected to further reflection (or refraction), since Ball himself observes that ‘thou hast been a dream to me as I to thee, and sorry and glad have we made each other, as tales of old time and the longing of times to come shall ever make men to be’ (286). Behind the Times, between Two Worlds The notion of historical solidarity explored above is expressed as a problematic encounter in which the very possibility of such solidarity is en procès; it is founded on a humanism that is at once utopian, tragic and even ironic.34 This stands in stark contrast to the medievalist affinities cultivated by Arthur J. Penty in the early twentieth century as part of the guild socialist movement (closely linked to A. R. Orage’s The New Age, and to the work of G. D. H. Cole and John Hobson). For Penty, who was also indebted to Ruskin, as he acknowledges on the first page of his The Restoration of the Gild System, it was precisely the signature of religion which guaranteed the integrity of the Middle Ages and their political gravity. While Morris’s radical medievalism could be expressed within a playful (and insoluble) dialogue of religion and the secular, Penty’s depended on a full-blooded traditionalism and ‘reverence for the past’;35 a conviction, as he put it, ‘not merely that mediaeval society was a very sane and reasonable form of society, but that it is the form of society to which sooner or later we have no option but to return, if we are not to degenerate into barbarism’.36 In Towards a Christian Sociology, the desirable corrective supposedly offered by medieval society is elaborated: [O]ur only hope of social salvation is to take our stand on something that has within itself the elements of permanence and stability. Over against the world of movement and flux, of progress and relativity, we must set up a standard of unchanging reality, of absolute and immutable values which are unaffected by the fluid elements on the changing surface of things. Such values are to be found in the traditions of Christianity, and to them we must return. For only principles that rest upon supernatural sanction are invested with sufficient authority to secure for them popular acceptance.37

The phrase ‘social salvation’ is significant, and was used more than once by Penty, beginning in The Restoration of the Gild System. Moreover, appeals to salvation and Beaumont, Utopia, Ltd., p. 82. Stephen F. Eisenman attributes to Morris the idea that ‘actions and lifeways of longdead people and distant times are both irretrievably lost and ever present . . .’ ‘Communism in Furs: A Dream of Prehistory in William Morris’s John Ball’, The Art Bulletin 87:1 (2005), 92–110 (106). 35 Arthur Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1906), p. 94. 36 Arthur Penty, ‘Mediaevalism and Modernism’, The New Age XIV: 25 (April 23, 1914), 776–7 (776). 37 Arthur Penty, Towards a Christian Sociology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923), p. 27. 33

34

170

Stuart McWilliams

soteriological rhetoric in general form part of Penty’s marshalling of the Middle Ages. His departure from materialist principles was indeed so complete that he came to see them as yielding only a surface explanation, and that, ‘rightly considered, the evils which the Collectivist seeks to eradicate are ultimately nothing but the more obtrusive symptoms of an internal spiritual disease’.38 It is this spiritual disease for which ‘Mediaevalism’ is the cure, since ‘the Middle Ages were in varying degrees expressions of the spirit of Christianity [and] offer us a pattern that may be studied in the interests of a revival of Christendom’.39 The attractiveness of the medieval guilds themselves does not, for Penty, derive merely from their capacity for solidarity, but more fundamentally from their being ‘social, religious, and political as well as industrial institutions [which] postulated in their organisation the essential unity of life’.40 This sense of the Middle Ages as embodying a totality (especially a theologically charged one) is, of course, one of the most familiar notions in the history of medievalist thought. Tellingly, however, William Morris occasionally preferred to describe the period as a process, ‘developing, sometimes with stupendous speed, into something as different from itself as the age which succeeds this will be different from that wherein we live’.41 The coherence sought by Penty caused him to condemn internationalism in art (which he viewed as a cultural dilution as well as an economic corruption), and to promote, as David Kadlec has put it, ‘an amalgam of reactionary and anarchistic economic and political stances’,42 synthesising Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkin (who had written of ‘Mutual Aid in the Mediaeval City’43) with an almost apocalyptic anticipation of spiritual rebirth. Penty’s teleology operated principally within history,44 but the coming transformation was imagined and framed in self-consciously anti-materialist terms: The modern world, like the Pagan, is being disenchanted of materialism, it has been shaken by its perception of the inadequacy of a purely intellectual interpretation of the universe, and there has occurred a corresponding influx of Eastern ideas which has awakened an interest in the mystical, the psychic, and the occult, of which the East is the perennial source; for it is well to remember that all the modern cults and sects interested in these things, the Theosophists, the Spiritualists, and the Christian Scientists had their parallels in the Gnostics, the Neo-Platonists, and Manichaeans of ancient Rome. And what is still more interesting is that the fusion of Eastern and Western thought in Rome was followed by the triumph of Christianity. Does it not look as Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System, p. 44 (my emphasis). Penty, Towards a Christian Sociology, p. 69. 40 Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System, p. 64. 41 William Morris, ‘Preface’, in Steele, Mediaeval Lore, p. xi. 42 Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System, p. 26. David Kadlec, ‘Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism’, ELH 60:4 (1993), 1015–31 (1024). 43 See chapters 5 and 6, Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902). 44 ‘The phrase [the Kingdom of God] or its equivalent, the Kingdom of Heaven, occurs more than a hundred times in the first three Gospels. Its purpose was the establishment of the Kingdom upon this earth, and not its postponement to a life hereafter . . .’ Penty, Towards a Christian Sociology, pp. 29–30. 38 39

Morbid Solidarity

171

if the same thing is again about to happen, and that the spiritual movement on the one hand and the social movement on the other are preparing the way for the acceptance of Christianity, which, being both spiritual and material, can alone give coherence and definiteness to the vague spiritual and social impulses of our time?45

Despite Penty’s totalising, the forms of solidarity linked to this awakening tended to be exclusive rather than inclusive. Unlike Ruskin, Penty did not see trade unions as the natural heirs to the guilds, or even as capable of taking on some of their functions, since this would require an undesirable conflation of artisans and industrial workers (‘masters and men’46). Therefore, the specific historical affinity cultivated in The Restoration of the Gild System and later writings was nakedly hostile to movements of mass solidarity. ‘There is ultimately’, writes Penty, ‘no sure foothold anywhere between pure Collectivism and pure Mediaevalism, and sooner or later everybody will have to come down on one side or the other.’47 Penty also retained affection for the patronage system in the arts, since it protected artists from the ‘vulgarity’ of ‘a public body whose taste recognizes no ultimate standard . . .’48 In sum, Penty’s commitments led to a fragile arrangement in which ‘[t]he hermetic Guild Movement was joined to syndicalism, as the aristocratic artist was joined to the underclass, only in a negative identification, in an opposition to the state’.49 Penty’s anti-statism, however, was also undoubtedly linked to his sense of political theology: In the Middle Ages these things were understood because the brotherhood of man then reposed upon the Fatherhood of God. It was this association of the ideal of brotherhood with that of religion that kept its essentially human basis in the forefront of people’s minds. But with the break-up of the Middle Ages, accompanied as it was with the decline in the power and influence of the Church, the defeat of the Guilds and the formation of great States, and the subsequent rise of rationalism, the essentially human and religious basis of brotherhood was lost sight of; and men came to think of society and social arrangements in the terms of politics rather than religion, in the belief that reform of the State rather than of the Church was the key to the situation.50

In our own time, the (strongly medievalist) Radical Orthodoxy movement has attacked what Catherine Pickstock has called the ‘soteriology of the state’,51 advoPenty, Towards a Christian Sociology, p. 202. Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System, p. 74. 47 Penty, ‘Mediaevalism and Modernism’, p. 777. 48 Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System, p. 9. 49 Kadlec, ‘Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism’, p. 1027. 50 Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System, p. 60. An early reviewer of Penty’s A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History was unconvinced by its similar argument: ‘To link up, as the author does . . . Christianity and the gild organisation of industry in the Middle Ages seems . . . to show but a partial understanding of the origin and object of the medieval gild. It might be argued with equal justice that the gilds owed their existence to the effort to secure and maintain monopoly, or that they were born of the attempt to assimilate the growing industry to feudal ideas.’ Austin P. Evans, ‘Review: A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History by Arthur J. Penty’, Political Science Quarterly 36:3 (1921), 523–25 (524). 51 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), p. 152. 45

46

172

Stuart McWilliams

cating a shared and sensuous liturgical experience as a purportedly more authentic social bedrock.52 Yet this reaction, like Penty’s, may be part of a general anxiety over the double ‘transference’ noted by Kathleen Biddick which first (following Ernst Kantorowicz) sees a movement from ‘the corporate sacramental body of the Catholic Church (corpus mysticum) into the corporate notion of juridical royal embodiment’53 and then (following Eric Santner) the modern subject’s zombie-like discomfort with its ‘fantastic excess of alien flesh – the undead residue of the failed transference at the time of the French Revolution of the medieval sovereign’s second body (the immortal one) into the modern body politic of the People’.54 Biddick argues, however, that the typological (and medievalising) imaginary of Christian political theology has also always depended on the expatriation and elimination of what she terms the West’s ‘dead neighbours’ (most prominently, Jews and Muslims) from history, and on their subjection to a conception of fulfilment which grants ‘a perpetual form of Christian sovereignty’.55 Later, Penty’s combination of traditionalism and syndicalism won admiration from Catholic distributists including G. K. Chesterton, who provided a preface to Post-Industrialism (1922). There, he defended Penty against the accusation of archaism by presenting untimeliness as a virtue: ‘In one sense he is behind the times; as we speak of a man being behind the scenes. The man behind the scenes is at the back of things and the beginning of things. He knows where the actors come from, and how the whole performance began.’56 Yet this is to misunderstand Penty’s relation to the untimely: in truth, he denied the very possibility of ambiguous historical experience. In ‘Mediaevalism and Modernism’, he describes ‘the position in which the Socialist movement finds itself today’ (i.e. the incomplete embrace of his own medievalist principles) as ‘Wandering between two worlds / One dead, the other unable to be born.’57 The well-known poem from which these lines are taken, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, dramatises precisely the kind of morbid, spectral encounter that also underpins Morris’s A Dream of John Ball; a visit to a Carthusian ‘living tomb’ by a secular interloper whose melancholy itself becomes a form of solidarity: ‘Their faith, my tears, the world deride – / I come to shed them at their side.’58 That Arnold could countenance rejecting the faith of the departed as well as the notion of it being simply ‘a dead time’s exploded

For a critique of Radical Orthodoxy’s relation to both medievalism and deconstruction, see Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 118–28. 53 Kathleen Biddick, Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties (New York: Punctum Books, 2016), p. 110. 54 Biddick, Make and Let Die, p. 110. 55 Biddick, Make and Let Die, p. 99. 56 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Preface’, in Arthur Penty, Post-industrialism, with a Preface by G. K. Chesterton (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 8. 57 Penty, ‘Mediaevalism and Modernism’, p. 777. 58 Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 305–6. Note that, at the time of Penty’s article, the monastery had been closed for more than a decade following the Third Republic’s Association loi of 1901. 52

Morbid Solidarity

173

dream’ was as repugnant to Penty as a collectivism merely content with ‘flirting with Mediaevalism’.59 Penty’s refusal to acknowledge the dubious poiesis implicit in historical consciousness is ironic, since it was in the very pages of Orage’s The New Age, to which he was a frequent contributor, that Ezra Pound’s series of ‘medieval poetic translations and scholarly reflections’60 would appear in 1911 and 1912, including ‘The Seafarer’ (Pound’s first contribution in the series). For Lee Garver, the publication of this Anglo-Saxon elegy in a journal known for ‘Anglo-medieval radicalism’ in 1911 (the year of various general strikes, including a seaman’s strike) ‘affirmed [Pound’s] solidarity with striking English laborers’.61 Pound’s writings for The New Age were given the title ‘I gather the limbs of Osiris’; his task associated with necromantic reassembly and the Egyptian god of the afterlife.62 Undoubtedly, this poetic medievalism, like the morbid humanism of Arnold and Morris, was willing to ‘disturb remains’.63 Epilogue: Remainders Upon whose tombs do we continue to conduct radical political demonstration? Whose vestments and costumes are bequeathed, and what historical role-plays do they make available?64 An artisanal Byzantium or the rancour of the Peasants’ Revolt? Feudalism, the guild system, Christendom – or the disruption of all of these? Moreover, what kind of political alterity do the Middle Ages supply – if any? As Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp note, the period might now be read against the grain ‘not as an archaic ruin of abandoned precapitalist collectivities, but as a forcefully residual foundation of later, dominant economic relations’.65 In this view, it is precisely to the Middle Ages that we might look to find capitalism itself in potentia: another way, perhaps, of ‘decentralizing the flow of history . . . allowing other paths through historical time, including the time to come, to become visible’.66 The tradition of medievalist socialism is riddled with divisions, only a few of which have been encountered here. A remainder, of course, is that which is left over after a division. In the technical and legal sense, however, a remainder pertains to one who is placed to inherit property at one remove – even one who is unborn or Penty, ‘Mediaevalism and Modernism’, p. 777. Lee Garver, ‘Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism’, Journal of Modern Literature 29:4 (2006), 1–21 (2). 61 Garver, ‘Seafarer Socialism’, p. 3. 62 Commenting on his translations of Arnaut towards the end of the series, Pound notes that ‘I have spent six months of my life translating fifteen experiments of a man living in what one of my more genial critics calls “a very dead past.”’ Ezra Pound, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris XI’, The New Age 10:6 (15 February 1912), 369–70 (370). 63 Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 64 ‘The garment of medievalism has merit only when it corresponds to the living body beneath.’ Grennan, William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary, p. 16. 65 Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, ‘The Marxist Premodern’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34:3 (2004), 463–71 (469). 66 Ross, Communal Luxury, p. 74. Ross associates this gesture with Morris, Reclus and Kropotkin’s interests in ‘the North’, including Iceland and Finland, and its reputed medieval survivals. 59

60

174

Stuart McWilliams

whose future existence is merely presumed. Disrupting the linear generationality of property, a remainder is a bond between the dead and the future in which they have faith. Must the dead bury the dead? We are reminded, as perhaps Ruskin was in composing his letter of 1880, that one of the earliest functions of guilds in Europe may have been that of mutually guaranteed inhumation.

10 Finding the Present in the Past: Suffrage Medievalism in the Pages of Votes for Women1 Carolyn P. Collette

A

mong the multiple suffrage groups devoted to securing votes for women formed in the early years of the twentieth century the most militant and most vocal was arguably the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded in Manchester in 1903 under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, who was later joined by her daughter Christabel, and colleagues Emmeline Pethick Lawrence and Frederick Pethick Lawrence. The clarion voice of the WSPU was broadcast weekly in its newspaper Votes for Women, published on Fridays from 1907 to 1914.2 In its early incarnation the WSPU’s militancy appeared in the form of attending and disrupting political meetings in which women had no part or voice, then in stone-throwing at plate glass windows of large department stores and at the automobiles of rich men of business and politicians. As a matter of policy WSPU militancy was always aimed at property, never at people. Militant suffragists were willing, however, to put their own bodies in harm’s way as a matter of principle. Inevitably, militant suffrage protests resulted in arrest and imprisonment to which women responded by various strategies of resistance, including hunger-striking, starting in 1909. This refusal to eat in turn provoked the cruel response of forcible

I would like to thank Kathleen Nutter of the Smith College Special Collections for access to the print run of Votes for Women, and I would like to thank Thelma Fenster for her help with awareness of Christine de Pizan in early twentieth-century Britain. 2 The weekly paper contained essays on women’s history, reviews of books and plays, information about WSPU activities past and future. Not coincidentally the paper explained and described WSPU tactics, designed to be more urgent than the patient parliamentary strategy of the unsuccessful ‘constitutional’ approach of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). 1

176

Carolyn P. Collette

feeding, essentially a kind of torture cloaked in concern for women’s health.3 Forcible feeding involved the involuntary ingestion of ‘food’ poured down a woman’s throat into her stomach by a tube, while she was restrained by three or four wardresses, with a metal gag to prevent voluntary vomiting. The process was administered and overseen by doctors authorised by the government. Neither the government nor the militant suffrage movement achieved ‘victory’ in this struggle in which the banner of God’s will was carried by suffragettes and that of the proper defence of law and order by the government.4 Over the course of the six or seven years of suffrage militancy, Votes for Women, edited jointly by Emmeline Pethick Lawrence and her husband Frederick, recorded and valorised the WSPU struggle in editorials, feature articles and cartoons focused on the moral, political and spiritual rightness of the suffrage cause. One can trace the increasing militancy of the cause as weekly issues documented a shift from stone-throwing to hunger-striking, to interruption of male sporting events, during a period when the government seemed perpetually on the verge of admitting a suffrage bill in the Commons, but unable or unwilling actually to do so. During the years 1909–11, when the struggle seemed most vigorous and hope was highest, the pages of Votes for Women were full of stories about the struggle – and about woman scholars, warriors and saints of the Middle Ages, offered as exemplary models of women’s public achievements and suppressed history.

Votes for Women publicised the suffering forcible feeding imposed on militants. Suffragettes contended that the practice was a form of torture. An article in the 10 May 1912 issue of the paper, ‘Torture in English Prisons’ protested, ‘We have always maintained that forcible feeding, as employed in the case of Suffragist prisoners was a vindictive and punitive measure absolutely contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.’ The counter position was presented in an article in the issue for 7 February 1913, reporting the parliamentary testimony of Dr McKenna, closely involved in forcible feeding of suffragettes. He said that it had been settled in 1909 by the High Court that ‘it was the duty of the prison officials to take such measures as were necessary for preserving the health and lives of the prisoners in their custody’. 4 A vast and excellent scholarly literature on the history of the British woman suffrage movement is available in most university libraries and online. Many active suffragettes wrote their own autobiographical histories; these essential witnesses to the militant suffrage movement include Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (London: Gollancz, 1938); Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914); Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: the Story of How We Won the Vote, ed. Lord Frederick Pethick Lawrence (London: Hutchinson, 1959); Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1931); In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Lady Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: Experiences of a Suffragette (London: William Heinemann, 1914); Mary Richardson, Laugh a Defiance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953). Elizabeth Crawford’s The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London: Routledge, 1999) is an invaluable source of information about individuals and groups. See also Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Roger Fulford, Votes for Women: The Story of a Struggle (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), though now superseded, makes a complicated sequence of events clear. 3

Finding the Present in the Past

177

Looking Backward Going Forward It is a precept of this book as a whole that the broad Victorian cultural phenomenon of medievalism appeared in virtually all aspects of British life: in church architecture and domestic design, in poetry, in art, as well as in social and economic criticism where the ‘condition of England question’ dominated discussion. How Britain should respond to the labour shifts of industrialisation and the loss of past custom occupied social critics for most of the century. In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle used Jocelin of Brakelond and the medieval monks of Bury St Edmunds to focus attention on how communities and individuals function and prosper when led by people of conviction attentive to the spiritual dimensions of life. John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–53) posed questions about the relationship among moral values, individual creation and art. William Morris published The Nature of Gothic from the second volume of Stones of Venice, with his own preface (1892), adapting Ruskin’s principles in the phrase, ‘art is man’s expression of his joy in labor’ as one of his own mottos and arguing for a more socialist, less capitalist orientation to production. Morris’ commitment to medieval guilds and proto-socialist labour patterns appears throughout his work, perhaps most famously in A Dream of John Ball (1888), about the rising of 1381 (discussed in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 in this volume). Victorian medievalism entered debates in Parliament through the ideas of the radical Tory Young England Movement of the 1840s that produced Disraeli’s Sybil: or the Two Nations (1845), a novel about changing patterns of production and labour and the deteriorating state of the English working classes from medieval to modern times. Lord John Manners’ slender volume of poetry England’s Trust and Other Poems (1841) celebrated medieval community and customs, especially praising the frequent medieval holidays/holydays of rest from labour, and a version of noblesse oblige that united landowner and labourer. All these writers borrowed from the ‘past’ and adopted the core argument of A. W. N. Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) that asserted that medieval England was a better place than nineteenth-century England, socially, spiritually and economically. In this paradigm of contrast the medieval past was deemed quite separate from the present to which it offered an instructive and distinct alternative. To follow a medieval pattern meant following a better path to human happiness, one opposed to capitalism and utilitarianism, one full of spiritual substance and human connection, albeit often envisioned within a hierarchical and patriarchal social structure. While sharing the same goal of a more just, more equal society and a concern with conditions of labour, particularly for women,5 the militant suffrage adaptation Emmeline Pankhurst maintained that the primary need to secure the vote overrode economic protest per se, but the WSPU supported actions for economic equity, notably in Votes for Women’s reporting on the Bermondsey jam workers strike of August 1911, when thousands of women walked out. On 16 September and again on 19 September 1911, Emily Davison’s published letters in support of the Bermondsey strikers and in opposition to the reporting of the Morning Post, pointing out that the vote was their surest way to economic protection. She wrote to the Manchester Guardian on 7 October 1911 in support of the right of women who work at the ‘pit brow’ of coal mines to determine their own terms of employment. Her letters represent wide suffrage support of labouring women. Sylvia Pankhurst and the Labour MP Keir Hardie allied in support of labour issues. 5

178

Carolyn P. Collette

of medievalism emphasises continuity rather than the trope of contrast. While Victorian expressions of medievalism preserve and emphasise the sense of distance associated with past time, suffrage medievalism was a way of collapsing time, of reorienting its assumed sequential linearity, of saying that the current moment is connected directly to the past no matter how distant or progressive either seems. Instead of focusing on monuments and institutions to discuss how the present differs from the past, suffrage medievalism focused on spirit and will, asserting that medieval women and modern women were not different, but essentially similar. The linearity of change and temporal distance in Victorian medievalism becomes a linearity of tradition and capability in suffrage medievalism. This sense of similarity over time builds on recognition of recurrent patterns perceived in echoes and foreshadowings that unite past and present. Suffrage medievalism sought out and celebrated patterns of similarity still visible through laminations of time and practice. Through their interest in linking the past to the present they moved the Middle Ages out of its ‘middle’ position in the periodisation of Western history. In doing so they did something more important, revealing the continuity of many patterns of individual and collective behaviour that constitute women’s history, adapting medieval precedents to validate absolute devotion to the suffrage cause, through suffering, even unto death.6 History was central to the political philosophy of the militant suffrage movement. For many suffragettes the achievement of woman suffrage was part of a series of liberalising reforms that began with Magna Carta, was spurred on by the Reform Bills of the nineteenth century, and awaited the enfranchisement of women to reach its apogee. Emily Davison expressed this expectation when she wrote of the future success of the suffrage struggle in her posthumously published essay, ‘The Price of Liberty’: ‘Men as a sex have not yet grasped the inevitability of the forging of this last link in the chain of human progress’ (The Suffragette, 5 June 1914). In many ways, the historical recoveries of nineteenth-century scholarship made available in the publications of such series as the Camden Society, the Selden Society, the Early English Text Society, the Rolls Series and the Victoria County History prepared the ground for such a claim and for suffrage medievalism. The WSPU advocated the specific recovery of women’s history in the Middle Ages and earlier. Women proclaimed that historical documentation proved they had been more free, more powerful, more political in past ages than they were allowed to be during their own age. This devolution of political status in itself did not mean that medieval women were essentially different from modern women, they maintained. Rather the pages of Votes for Women argued that the historical record documents what women have achieved across the ages: women’s capabilities do not change, what changes is the construction of male power that allows or limits women to appear as the fully functional members of society they have been and ought still to be. Recovered and fully recorded, a history of men and women could prove the existence of a continuum to For Emily Davison’s support of the ideal of martyrdom for the cause, see Carolyn Collette, ‘Emily Davison: Dying for the Vote’, in Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn, eds, Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland: From Peterloo to the Present (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 139–64. 6

Finding the Present in the Past

179

show that suffragettes were the spiritual daughters of earlier generations of strong women. In the absence of this full historical record, one that includes women as well as men, militant suffragettes set out to reconstitute women’s missing past through essays, reviews and news stories in Votes for Women. They focused on recovering the lives and deeds of learned women, of politically and spiritually powerful women, and of militant women. These categories became tactical and strategic weapons in their fight. Words and Deeds By the summer of 1910 it was clear that the promises previously made by the Liberal party to consider a franchise bill for women were, as Emily Davison once said, ‘pie crust promises’ that were crumbling to nothing. Votes for Women published at least three assessments of where a suffrage bill stood during the period of June through November 1910, each one castigating the leaders of the government for sabotaging their own commitment. When a bill reached the stage of the Conciliation Committee, the paper accused the government of attacking their own bill: ‘The Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, and other members of the Government have attacked the Bill as undemocratic, but this is a mere devise for cloaking their opposition to any and every form of Woman Suffrage, and nobody is for one moment deceived by it’ (Votes for Women, 29 July 1910). In an editorial several months later, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence historicised the suffrage struggle as ‘part of the long struggle of the human race for human liberty . . . It is a trial of strength between the Government fighting under the banner of male dominance, and the women of the country fighting under the banner of human liberty’; the struggle was an overt manifestation of something deeper, ‘a swift current which carries us and all things upon its breast and sweeps us forward’. Government and suffragettes were both ‘working out . . . the decree of time and fate . . . the Movement is not of us . . . it began countless ages before we were born and will go on for countless ages after we are dust, until all the purposes of creation are fulfilled’. The struggle, she asserted, is for recognition of equal humanity in men and women (Votes for Women, 7 October 1910). The principles Pethick Lawrence articulated in her editorial helped shape Cecily Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women, produced on stage in London (1909), printed in 1910, and sold in WSPU shops. The Pageant bears an uncanny likeness to Christine de Pizan’s 1405 catalogue of women and their achievements, The City of Ladies.7 7 Christine de Pizan’s extensive writings on women and culture during the early fifteenth century were addressed to members of the court, including the queen and the royal dukes of France. The most famous of her works today is The City of Ladies (La Cité des dames, 1405) an adaptation and rebuttal of Boccaccio’s Famous Women (De Mulieribus claris, 1361–62). The work was translated into English and published in 1521, but the translator’s name, Ainsley, came to supplant the author’s. See Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki, eds, Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 20. See also Rose Rigaud, Les Idées feministes de Christine de Pisan (Neuchatel: Attinger, 1911, republished 1973). The printing of this work was authorised by the faculty of letters to which it was submitted as a doctoral thesis, ‘sans se prononcer sur les opinions qu’elle expose’ which included this summary of Christine’s convictions: ‘La femme est donc l’égale de l’homme

180

Carolyn P. Collette

Although this text was translated into English in the sixteenth century, and is thought to have been known then and perhaps in seventeenth-century England, there is no evidence that it directly influenced Hamilton’s work, in which Justice adjudicates between ‘Woman’ and ‘Prejudice’ to decide whether women have been falsely accused of being irrational beings focused on petty, narrow domestic concerns. Hamilton defends women against cultural norms that limit them to the domestic sphere by bringing forward women who in their times excelled in areas later termed ‘male’, allowing them to tell their own, individual stories in brief speeches. ‘The Learned Women’ are followed by ‘The Artists’, ‘The Saintly Women’, ‘The Heroic Women’, ‘The Rulers’, and, finally, ‘The Warriors’. Each category includes medieval women – St Theresa among the learned; Vittoria Colonna, friend of Michelangelo, among the artists; St Hilda and Elizabeth of Hungary among the saintly; Flora Macdonald and Kate Barlass among the heroic; Zenobia among the rulers; and Joan of Arc, Boadicea, Agnes of Dunbar among the warriors (Votes for Women, 16 June 1911). The categories prove the existence of active, capable women throughout Western history and culture, and they argue for the value of looking back by seeing history not as a single narrow path dominated by sequence and certain ‘important’ historical events, but as a vast field in which actions of all sorts produce manifold results that affect subsequent generations in unforeseeable ways.8 What the strong, learned, brave women of the past once did now supports the goals and claims of like women in early twentieth-century Britain. It is notable that unlike the working-class radicalism of the earlier nineteenth century or Chartism (as detailed in the chapters in this volume by David Matthews and Mike Sanders), suffragism looked chiefly to the high and late Middle Ages rather than the Anglo-Saxon period. Nevertheless, as in radicalism and Chartism, in suffragist thinking the past speaks to the present of continuity, of models worthy not only of reverence, but of reclamation and imitation. Customs that once allowed women power and authority in the state had faded, but could be recovered. The edition of Votes for Women for 11 August 1911 included a series of book reviews lead by Elinor Postlethwaite’s review article, ‘Some Learned Women Little Known’, praising Lina Eckenstein’s 1896 publication Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent Life Between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Eckenstein’s purpose was to inquire closely into the ways that religious life opened doors for women to enter into chambers of power and to live among books and learning in early medieval England and Europe. The review presents the book par sa nature, son origine et sa destination’ (p. 110). More recently, Bernard Ribémont, ed., Sur le chemin de longue étude . . .: Actes du colloque d’Orléans Juillet 1995 (Paris: Champion, 1998), contains an essay on the lost English tapestries of the City of Ladies by Susan Groag Bell, ‘A New Approach to the Influence of Christine de Pizan: The Lost Tapestries of The City of Ladies’ (pp. 7–12), and an essay by Margarete Zimmermann on early twentieth-century feminism, ‘Christine de Pizan et les féminismes autour de 1900’ (pp. 183–204). So far there is no evidence that Christine or her ideas were known to the militant suffragettes. 8 In a letter published in the 6 August 1911 edition of The Sunday Times, Emily Davison responds to a correspondent’s failure to ‘belong to the modern comparative school of history’ based, she writes, on comparative study, ‘recognizing that it [history] is not ‘a mere string of episodes, but a continuous development requiring study of origin, development, and result over time’. For the full letter, see In the Thick of the Fight, p. 178.

Finding the Present in the Past

181

as an engrossing panorama, almost another Pageant of Great Women, but with a different cast – Hilda of Whitby, Ethelraeda of Ely, Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Hungary, Clara (Claire) of Assisi, part of ‘a crowd of wonderful women’ included in the book. Postlethwaite moves immediately in the first paragraph to her point in the review: One thinks with pride of womanhood, and feels the same great motives stirred the actions of these abbesses, prioresses, and nuns, and caused them to pursue knowledge and wisdom, and to maintain as strong and steadfast courage of their convictions as is maintained to-day in the ‘Woman’s Movement’ – actions for political purposes where political reforms were needed, for moral and humane advancement and justice. We thank Lina Eckenstein for introduction to such women as Eadburg, Lioba, Hrotsvitha, Herrad, Charitas Pirckheimer.

At the end of the review Postlethwaite quotes Eckenstein’s own conclusions: The career open to the inmates of convents in England and on the continent was greater than any other ever thrown open to women in the course of modern European history; abilities might raise a nun to the rank of abbess, a position of substantial authority . . . In Saxony it fell to an abbess to act as representative of the Emperor during his absence. As independent landowners, who held their property of and from king and emperor, the abbess took rank with the lords temporal and spiritual in the right of jurisdiction which they exercised, and in the right of being represented in Parliament or at the Imperial Diet . . . While fulfilling the duties which devolved on them in virtue of their station, abbesses did not neglect their opportunities of keeping in touch with culture and of widening their mental horizon. In Anglo-Saxon England men who attained to distinction received their training in settlements governed by women. Histories and a Chronicle of unique value were inspired by and drafted under the auspices of Saxon abbesses. (478–79)

The final point Eckenstein makes seals the matter of women’s former intellectual and political freedom: ‘It is in those countries where the change in social conditions has been most complete, where women for a time entirely forfeited all the advantages which a higher education brings and which were secured in so great a measure to women by convents in the past, that the modern movement for women’s education has arisen’ (484). In a letter to the editors of Votes for Women on 18 March 1910, entitled ‘Women and the Catholic Church’ and signed A.B., the writer (obviously not a member of the movement as s/he addresses the editor as ‘Dear Sir’), argues a detailed and supportive point about the relative autonomy and power of medieval women in both the Church and secular life. A.B. argues that ‘To go back to the days when the Catholic Church tended the springs of our national life, is to go back to the rule of the Suffragette. For it was Knox . . . an avowed heretic, who blew his blasts against the monstrous regiment of women. Up till his time women were held in reverence by the Church.’ The writer then cites the emerging record of female heads of religious foundations and ‘queens consort of olden time’ who ‘had their own courts of law, received homage . . . and signed decrees in the national assemblies’, pointing

182

Carolyn P. Collette

out that Hilda of Whitby presided over a synod of the Church,9 and that abbesses signed conciliar decrees after ‘the bishops and abbots, but before the priests’. ‘Nor is this order to be wondered at, since these dames often ruled over monasteries of men as well as of women . . .’. The letter goes on to discuss Celtic women’s rights to possess land and vote in assemblies, and the recognition of abbesses’ direct obligations to the crown in response to Edward I’s Quo Warranto inquiries. Abbesses who held their foundations directly from the crown were summoned by writ to attend Parliament in the ‘Upper House’. The letter concludes resoundingly asserting the importance of women and their work in medieval culture, of women’s ‘duties in learning, in politics, and war . . . that made them of force in the world’. Saints of God The militant suffrage movement was entirely independent of sectarian religious orthodoxy, but also profoundly Christian in spirit and in its rhetoric of martyrdom and suffering.10 It was often said in partial jest that the WSPU had no religion – it was a religion. Editorials in Votes for Women were full references to the Christian liturgical seasons and articles often featured women saints as well as more contemporary reformers like Florence Nightingale (Votes for Women, 20 May 1910), Elizabeth Fry (Votes for Women, 5 August 1910), Hannah More (Votes for Women, 9 September 1910) and the American abolitionist Grimke sisters (Votes for Women, 14 October 1910).11 Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, the primary editorial voice of the WSPU until 1912, was a Methodist who was also, for a period in her youth, a member of a lay order, ‘The Sisters of the People’, situated in London at Katherine House, part of a broad religious movement that enlisted women of many Protestant faiths to live in community, to wear habits, and to work among the poor. Beyond the external, there was an essential goal to ‘lay aside ideas of pride and social distinction . . . [to] realize that all men and women were their brothers and sisters, that we belong to one common human family . . . and that wherever we find misery, loneliness, oppression or sin, there we must go with love’.12 Such orders were popular in London at the end of the nineteenth century and outwardly similar in many ways to medieval beguines.13 They flourished in the aftermath of the Oxford Movement of the mid-nineteenth century that had reawakened interest in elements of liturgy and faith before the Reformation, including women religious, and saints. The Anglican Church had venerated saints for their steadfast witness. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain witnessed a revival of interest in both The Abbey of Whitby has been associated with King Oswiu of Northumberland; it was founded by St Hilda, who presided over the synod there in 663/64. 10 See the weekly paper of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies, Common Cause, 13 June 1913, for a critique of this rhetoric. 11 All of these feature articles were written by Emily Wilding Davison. 12 See Mrs Price Hughes, ‘An English Wesleyan Sisterhood’, Review of Reviews: American Monthly Review of Reviews 6 (August 1892–January 1893), 455–56, at 455. 13 On this period of her life, see Pethick Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World, and on the phenomenon of lay service see Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London: Third Series, Religious Influences, vol. 7 (London: Macmillan, 1903). 9

Finding the Present in the Past

183

saints and the Virgin Mary, the latter so strong that the period was termed ‘the age of Mary’.14 The publication of volumes of collected stories of the lives of saints and martyrs familiarised a rhetoric of suffering and martyrdom adopted in Votes for Women where suffragettes were celebrated as ‘saints’ in the sense of faithful believers and followers, even unto death, of God’s purpose in the movement. Militant suffragettes looked to British women once more to become ‘of force in the world’. Unfortunately, this aspiration often led suffragettes to jail. It is not surprising, then, that a correlative theme developed along with women’s power in the medieval Church and medieval England – the adaptation of the category of women saints and martyrs to the modern struggle. The women who endured prison and forcible feeding were celebrated as ‘saints’ of the movement and their suffering recorded for posterity in a column titled ‘A Calendar of Saints’, published periodically to memorialise the suffering and faith of militant suffragettes. Not an entirely familiar phrase in the nineteenth century, ‘calendar of saints’ derives conceptually from Roman liturgical practice as well as medieval hagiography in general, and linguistically from the Old French calendier, a list or register, which entered English via the Anglo-Norman word calendar. Chaucer uses the term in both the Legend of Good Women (F-prologue, line 542) to mean a guide, and the Treatise on the Astrolabe where he refers to the ‘names of the holidayes in the Kalender’ (Part II 32.2, 32.5).15 While not common in nineteenth-century English, the phrase ‘calendar of saints’ does have deep roots in the language’s past, roots carefully nurtured by the adaptive genius of the WSPU who introduced the 5 November 1909 ‘calendar’ this way: The Church militant has its calendar of saints. It treasures for ever the memory of those who purchased with pain and blood its very life. All down the ages of the Christian era, generation after generation has yielded love and reverence to those valiant champions of the new faith who met without flinching the shock of persecution, who sustained through direst distress their denial of the powers of darkness to quench the Light of the world shining in their souls. And history repeats itself. To-day in our midst, the champions of a new and transforming faith are challenged by all the powers of an unenlightened world . . . But just as in the days of persecution for the Christian faith there was no flinching, so to-day the spirit of the soldiers of light is unassailable. By endurance to the uttermost they win the victory of their faith; by their agony and bitter pain they purchase a new deliverance for the spirit of the human race.

14 Alban Butler’s The Lives of the Saints was reprinted in 1866; Sabine Baring-Gould’s sixteen-volume The Lives of the Saints appeared in 1872–77, followed by his Virgin Saints and Martyrs in 1900. Agnes Dunbar’s A Dictionary of Saintly Women appeared in 1904. See also Gareth Atkins, ed., Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). John Keble’s 1827 book of poetry, The Christian Year, celebrated the Virgin as Queen of Heaven; see also John R. Griffin, ‘Newman and the Mother of God’, Faith and Reason 15 (1989), 91–109. On the Virgin and Victorian feminism, see Kimberly Van Esveld Adams, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller and George Eliot (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001). 15 Both citations to Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

184

Carolyn P. Collette

The not so subtle invocations of Christ’s passion and resurrection in this introduction are echoed in the descriptions of two of the three women especially honoured in the edition of 5 November 1909: Mary Leigh, Charlotte Marsh and Emily Wilding Davison (whose hunger strike provoked the use of a fire hose on her body in her cell for three agonising days, and who triumphed when she was ‘set free’ in a victory won by the ‘undaunted spirit of one woman’). Mary Leigh’s imprisonment as a handcuffed, confined victim of ‘torture inconceivable’ was likewise triumphant: ‘she burst open the prison gates and escaped . . . a great victory for the human spirit . . .’16 The headline of ‘Calendar of Saints’ appeared regularly in the pages of Votes for Women celebrating extreme suffering endured in a ‘cause worth dying for’, as the WSPU termed the movement, and in whose support the rallying cry of its members became ‘No Surrender!’ Women, suffering and religion formed a powerful triad in the pages of Votes for Women. Israel Zangwill, the English man of letters, gave the paper an essay which would become a chapter in his later work Italian Fantasies (1910), a discussion of a fresco of St Giulia of Carthage who was martyred in Corsica but whose remains were transported to Brescia and venerated there. A late medieval fresco near her tomb depicts her being given advice to be careful of a charge of heresy from a ‘good-natured citizen’ and from the ruler of Corsica. But she persists in sharing her faith. The fresco depicts her subsequent bodily martyrdom for that faith in gruesome detail. But while mindful of her suffering, Zangwill’s focus is on her veneration, the way her relics have been claimed and celebrated, all of which indicates, he maintains, an elevated status for women in the Catholic Church during what he refers to as the Dark Ages. Women were not superior to men, but neither did they constitute a second sex. Moreover, Zangwill connects St Giulia’s strength, dedication and martyrdom directly to the suffrage movement: To-day our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order founded on prostitution and sex-inequality, demand politic rights as leverage for a noble society, and, despite the advice of kindly Rulers, they are as ready as in the seventh century to be martyred for their faith, though they have replaced the passivity of St. Giulia by measures of aggression. Guariento foresaw the modern militant type when he drew those charming female angels with red and gold shields and long lances, and wings of green and gold, who stand on clouds – ’suffragette’ seraphs they seem to me . . . in the Museo Civico of Padua. (Votes for Women, 15 April 1910)

Zangwill’s Italian Fantasies was subsequently reviewed by Emmeline Pethick Lawrence in Votes for Women (2 December 1910). Citing the passage above she praised the book’s evocation of Italy, ‘the true gates of heaven’, a ‘world of light and colour’ unlike the grey climes of Britain. In her review she focused on a chapter devoted to the Virgin Mary, ‘The Carpenter’s Wife’, the result of a ‘vision of the imagination’ that ‘fell upon Zangwill’ as he travelled from Vicenza to ‘The Church of Our Lady of the Mountain’. In his vision he imagined the appearance of a peasant woman in tears, because her first born, Yeshua, has been termed a heretic ‘who sets at naught 16

Charlotte Marsh remained in prison several weeks longer.

Finding the Present in the Past

185

the traditions of his family and people’, bringing disgrace and shame upon his family. Hearing that Yeshua has thrown the money-changers out of the Temple, she hastens to Jerusalem to protect the son she loves; ‘It is my first-born’, she says. The vision ends with the irony that she will become queen of heaven while her husband’s prayer is, ‘Blessed are thou, O Lord, who has not made me a woman!’ Recovering Militancy The struggle for the vote was never just about the vote, but was rather about the power unlocked by the franchise. The vote conferred full citizenship on the half of the population denied that status. It meant that women, subject to the law, might have a say in the making of the law, particularly the burgeoning legislation aimed at households, working women, and at children at the turn of the twentieth century. This reasonable aspiration was met by popular male rebuttal centred in gender stereotypes. Among the arguments advanced against woman suffrage was the one that women were not qualified to be fully enfranchised citizens because they could not fight for Britain; another was that there was no point in giving women the vote, for they would vote just as their husbands or fathers directed them to. In response to these tissue-paper objections the WSPU, which staffed a research desk for Votes for Women, began to publish, during the period 1909–11, a series of feature essays, book reviews and columns on the militant women of British and European history. They sought to prove that women of earlier times followed their own interests, were more martial in defence of their goals, held in higher regard, and were more politically active than modern women were allowed to be. This search resulted in booklets like Wynne Nevinson’s The Ancient Suffragettes, featuring stories of Biblical and classical women. A trio of weekly essays titled ‘Warrior Women’ printed on 3, 10 and 17 March 1911 in Votes for Women recounted the history of Amazons all over the world;17 of ancient British and Germanic heroines, notably Boadicea, the queen of the Iceni who fought Rome in defence of her rights and her ravished daughters; and of crusading women who, ‘Animated by the double enthusiasm of religion and valour . . . often performed the most romantic exploits’ and died with their weapons in their hands (3 March 1911). In following weeks, the essay series celebrated such historical figures as the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I, who fought Stephen of Blois for her right to the English crown; Eleanor of Aquitaine; and Margaret of Anjou, queen to Henry VI. These women of English history possessed, as Christine de Pizan had termed it in the fifteenth century, ‘the hearts of men’ in a culture that allowed them to move from women’s sphere into men’s when circumstances required them to act forcefully.18 In the 20 May 1910 issue of Votes for Women, F. E. M. Macaulay ‘s ‘British Royal Women’ forcefully argued ‘how entirely foreign to the 17 Amazons recur frequently in the pages of Votes for Women. ‘Courage in Women’ (23 December 1910), a review of Guy Cadogan Rothery’s The Amazons in Antiquity and Modern Times (London: F. Griffiths, 1910), terms them ‘those suffragettes of the horizons of history’ and critiques the cultural norm that says women ‘have no right to be brave’. 18 In Le Livre des trois vertus, predominantly in the first book, Christine extensively discusses women’s ability to assume power in the absence of men, and details the strategies and performance that enable women to step into male roles.

186

Carolyn P. Collette

spirit of the British Constitution is any kind of sex disqualification, and how absurd is the contention that women are incapable of taking their share in political life’. He based his argument on a history of Queens Regnant and Consort from the time of Boadicea to Elizabeth I. The history of women, seemingly so rich in its medieval phase, was offered as a template and a continuum constructed to include a wide range of countries and periods, showing that women did not differ across time or culture. The wealthy, powerful and militant Matilda of Tuscany, a twelfth-century heroine whose life was a continual battle with popes and kings to keep control of her lands, was described as having given everything in her fight for what she believed to be right. Votes for Women praised her martial determination and praised similar determination in contemporary militant suffragettes: ‘This is the spirit which we find reawakened in the women of the WSPU today’ (‘Book of the Week’, Votes for Women, 31 December 1909).19 The same spirit in the seventeenth century inspired Anne Marie Louise d’Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier to defy the king and regain the city of Orleans against his forces. Her steadfast courage, with only a handful of soldiers, from an enemy who held the city and greeted her challenge with a box of bonbons, was proof for the writer that ‘in the Middle Ages as to-day indomitable courage in a right cause will always win its way’ (22 June 1910). The narrative of her success appeared in a story under the title ‘A Medieval Suffragette’, suggesting that the term ‘medieval’ when applied to a woman connotes not a period, but strength and the will to use force. Joan and Emily The chief avatar of the militant women’s suffrage movement was Joan of Arc, the medieval woman who claimed direct connection to God through the saintly voices that spoke to her, and who offered a model of strength of character, militancy and utter devotion to her cause. Joan of Arc inspired many of the first page cartoons in Votes for Women depicting women knights charging castles, slaying dragons. Joan of Arc was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1909 after a period during which the church had declined to add her to its calendar of saints. In every way but one Joan of Arc epitomised the ideal suffragette. She was devoted, strong, fully capable of grasping and wielding authority. But it could be said that she lacked book-learning, to which the response was that she answered to a higher calling and was instructed by that calling, which elevated her and, through identification with her, sanctified suffrage resistance. Elsie Howey, in shining armour, mounted on a white horse, represented Joan of Arc at numerous suffrage processions and celebrations. The idea of Joan of Arc 19 One of the interesting things about this recovery is that the idea of the Middle Ages became quite fluid: a woman was ‘medieval’ no matter if her dates were ‘wrong’, and a protosuffragette if she was strong. In the feature article ‘Roman Suffragettes’ (Votes for Women, 24 December 1909), the women of Rome in 43 BC resisted contributing to a war chest to fight an internecine conflict, ‘when we have no part . . . in the statecraft for which you contend against one another with such harmful results’. The quotation is a rather modern and militant version of their stand.

Finding the Present in the Past

187

transcended her liberation of France; her story and her deeds emblematised the spirit in women that once freed, could achieve marvels; her success challenged both gender and class boundaries, and her martyrdom brought her enduring fame and veneration. Above all, Joan of Arc modelled the combination of warrior-like determination and Christian virtue that Votes for Women celebrated in history and in its militant mission. Emmeline Pethick Lawrence wrote in Votes for Women: It is not the military achievement only or chiefly that absorbs the thought of the writer. It is the character of this deliverer of her race that awakens his and our supreme tribute of wonder, awe and admiration: the matchless simplicity; the consuming love, giving almost superhuman prowess to her body, as well as to her mind; the spirit of obedience to the Divine Will that inspired her amazing courage and made her the worker of miracles. (22 June 1910)

Joan of Arc’s mental qualities – her courage and her obedient dedication to her cause, sustained her militancy. She was: sane and strong and self-controlled, knowing her own mind absolutely, with an inflexible will, a sure aim, and single and direct nature . . . [a] spirit of obedience to the Divine Will . . . inspired her amazing courage and made her the worker of miracles . . . That she was a woman crowns her sex with the glory of womanhood. That she was an instrument of salvation in the hands of the most High opens to us, if we will give our life, our body and soul to obedience to the Divine Voice, a vista of possible achievement.

A review of a play about Joan of Arc titled ‘The Voices’, uses her recent beatification to structure a narrative of ultimate triumph over institutionalised male intransigence. It compares the medieval Joan ‘despised, feared and murdered as a witch’ by the same Church that now exalts her, to the suffragettes’ relationship to ‘men in high places who are as blind to the truth of the Vision, as deaf to the Voices . . . small-minded men who cannot understand the mighty course of events unfolding’. The reviewer concludes, ‘the day of visions and celestial voices is not yet past, and there are women in England at this moment who are ready, as Joan was, to pay the extreme penalty for the faith that is in them. Joan of Arc would have saved France. Women today would save not one country but humanity’ (Votes for Women, 22 June 1910). Joan of Arc’s visionary spirituality and her death fighting for the cause she believed in reflected elemental principles central to the militant suffrage movement: that women could and would fight for justice, that God’s plan for humanity engaged them in a cause eminently worth suffering and dying for. Commitment to these principles called Joan of Arc from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century, blending her story with current events. A near perfect illustration of this occurred when Emily Davison, a militant suffragette who believed the suffrage cause was God’s own cause, who was steadfast in her support of women’s franchise, who endured imprisonment and forcible feeding forty-nine times, was mortally injured at the 1913 Derby when for unknown reasons she went onto the course in front of the advancing racehorses. She died four days later, without regaining consciousness or speaking a word. After her death it was widely reported and accepted that her

188

Carolyn P. Collette

dying words were ‘Fight on and God will give the victory’ – not her words, rather an adaptation of the words of Joan of Arc at Poitiers, ‘The soldiers will fight and God will give the victory’. The past shaped the present and sanctified Emily Davison’s courage and death, both duly reported in the pages of Votes for Women. Just over a year later the women’s suffrage movement ceased active operations because of the outbreak of what would become known as World War I. During the war years women worked alongside men to help secure the allied victory. The end of the war, the armistice of 11 November 1918 ushered in a new world in which one of the first changes was the enfranchisement of women. Woman suffrage was achieved, in part, on 21 November that year. Ultimately, women would gain the right to vote on the same terms as men in 1928 through the Representation of the People Act. This success effectively ended the militant suffrage movement. A renewed medieval imaginary continued to be part of British culture for decades to come, especially in literary culture, as Michael Alexander demonstrates in Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), but it existed as a series of references to literature, to phrases, or, perhaps most memorably as an influence on the imaginations of such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The vital sense of connection that the suffrage movement perceived uniting women’s history, medieval and modern, disappeared in part because the struggles for gender equality in the twentieth century largely focused on a series of specific issues of equity and on strategies to achieve specific legislation to achieve a fuller equality between men and women. In both its contrast and continuum paradigms, Victorian medievalism had been a useful general tool of social criticism and political protest based on a selective invocation of history constructed according to political ideology and social goals. During the years of suffrage militancy, 1909 to the summer of 1914, suffrage medievalism was a unifying invocation, a way of summoning imagined generations of women to transform the struggle from the merely political to a just cause at once moral, ethical and spiritual, a cause sanctioned by the living records of medieval history. Imaging the Struggle These four images were printed during the years 1910–11 when hope was high that a suffrage bill would be debated and passed. A bill came before the House in July 1910, with the expectation it would pass. The WSPU had suspended its militancy, and a parliamentary committee composed of men of divergent views drafted a bill that seemed to satisfy the various parties to the debate. The bill achieved a majority of 110 on a second reading, but it ultimately came to naught when both Prime Minister Asquith and Home Secretary Winston Churchill expressed doubts of a nature to inflame the WSPU: it was feared that a provision to extend the franchise to property-owning women would open the way for a father or a husband to give a gift of property to a woman in return for her voting as he asked. Asquith merely did not want to reward militancy. The images below are related to the tergiversations of the Liberal Party in 1910–11. Ultimately, the party proposed a universal manhood suffrage bill in 1911, to be debated in the next Parliament. It was said that such a bill could pave the way for a woman suffrage bill. The WSPU was outraged.

Finding the Present in the Past

189

These were the political circumstances that brought forth the images. As is apparent, each appeared on the first page on their respective dates, surely reaching more gazes than just those of militant suffragettes. Three are signed ‘A Patriot’, leaving gender and individual identification uncertain. A fourth is by Poyntz Wright who also devised suffrage postcards sold in the suffrage shop.

Fig. 10.1. Dated November 18, 1910, the image refers to the statue of Boadicea as charioteer, erected in 1902 at the Parliament end of Westminster Bridge. The statue depicts Boadicea and her two daughters in a triumphant posture, the queen controlling two powerful horses in a chariot with scythes attached to its wheels. The WSPU rendering replaces the daughters with a young woman simply dressed, peering a bit anxiously forward into the distance. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Fig. 10.2. Strong horses dominate these cartoons. In the image that appeared on May 5, 1911, a woman knight rides full tilt toward a castle constructed of the Parliamentary stages through which a bill must pass before it is voted on. The banner of liberty announces the knight’s purpose to overcome the castle, but the horse’s legs make it seem as if it is pulling back or changing stride, perhaps a reference to the less optimistic prospects for a woman suffrage bill in 1911. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Fig. 10.3. The image on the front page of Votes for Women on June 30, 1911, sees the castle of May 5 transformed into Castle Prejudice. The woman knight is a herald who holds a trumpet and is clad in a cloak of fleur de lis pattern evoking Joan of Arc, and her presence dominates the scene. At a moment when expectation of the normal procedures for legislation had dimmed, the castle is a simpler construction than that of May 5. Across from the mounted woman a puny male figure stands underneath the open portcullis, suggesting that the trampled banner labeled ‘opposition’ is the first victory of the young woman as she rides undeterred toward Castle Prejudice and through its open portcullis. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Fig. 10.4. The image from September 1, 1911, depicts a St George-and-Dragon scene with a female knight in place of the saint, rescuing the Conciliation Bill, represented by another woman. The dragon is a figure for David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who created an insurance program for working men in 1911, the first of its kind in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, he could not see his way to woman suffrage. His subordinate position and imminent injury depict both the anger and the strength of WSPU determination. Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Bibliography Primary Sources Periodicals The Art Union The Athenaeum Belgravia: A London Magazine Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine British Workman Bronterre’s National Reformer in Government, Law, Property, Religion, and Morals Captain Rock in London Chambers’s Journal Chartist Circular Clarion Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register Common Cause English Chartist Circular The English Republic The Examiner The Friend of The People Household Words The Hull Packet and Humber Mercury The Illustrated London News Irishman Justice Kentish Weekly Post Labour Champion Labour Leader The Leader, A Political and Literary Review Leeds Mercury Liverpool Mercury McDouall’s Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate The Manchester Guardian The Morning Chronicle The Morning Post The New Age

194

Bibliography

The Northern Liberator Northern Star, and Leeds General Advertiser Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal Observer Odd Fellow Orthodox Journal and Catholic Monthly Intelligencer The Pall Mall Gazette The Penny Satirist People’s Journal The Poor Man’s Guardian The Red Republican Review of Reviews: American Monthly Review of Reviews Reynolds’s Miscellany Star of Freedom Truthteller Votes for Women The Weekly Entertainer: or, Agreeable and Instructive Repository Workers’ Cry Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor

Books and Pamphlets Anon., A Brief History of the Protestant Reformation (Glasgow, 1831) Benson, Larry D., gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) Bentham, Jeremy, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code [1822], ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Blatchford, Robert, Merrie England (London: Clarion Office, 1893) ———, The New Religion (London: Clarion Press, 1897) ———, My Favourite Books (London: Clarion Office, 1901) Boucher, Jonathan, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797) Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1876 [1835]) Burke, Edmund, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whig, 3rd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1791) Campbell, John, A Theory of Equality; or, The Way to Make Every Man Act Honestly (Philadelphia, PA: John B. Perry, 1848) Carlyle, Thomas, The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle (30 Volumes), ed. H. D. Traill (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1901) Cobbett, William, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 2 vols (London, 1824–27) ———, Cobbett’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church (London and Dublin, 1825) ———, A Letter to his Holiness the Pope (London, 1828) ———, Legacy to Parsons (London, 1835) Cooper, Thomas, The Purgatory of Suicides (London: Jeremiah How, 1845) ———, Captain Cobler (London: Watson, 1850) Cunningham, Allan, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Artist, Sculptures and Architects, 6 vols, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1831) Egan the Younger, Pierce, Robin Hood and Little John, or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (London: Forster and Hextall, 1840)

Bibliography

195

———, Adam Bell, Clym o’ the Clough and William of Cloudeslie (London: Hextall, 1842) ———, Wat Tyler (London: Johnson, 1851) Engels, Friedrich, Cola di Rienzi (1842), trans. A. Miller, in M. Scheglova et al., eds, Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels: Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.) Gibbon, Edmund, The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: T. Cadell et al., 1820) Goldsmith, Oliver, An Abridgement of the History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Death of George the Second (London: Andrew Wilson, 1808) Haydon, Benjamin Robert, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 3 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1853) Hueffer, Ford Madox, Ford Madox Brown, A Record of his Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896) Hunt, W. Holman, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1905) Hunt, F. Knight, ed., The Book of Art, Cartoons, Frescoes, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts as Applied to the New Houses of Parliament (London: J. How, 1846) Howitt, William and Mary, The Forest Minstrel (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Day, 1823) Lawless, John, Compendium of the History of Ireland (Edinburgh, 1823) Linton, W. J., The Plaint of Freedom (Newcastle upon Tyne: G. Bouchier Richardson, 1852) Manners, John, A Plea for National Holy-Days (London: Painter, 1843) Maguire, Tom, Tom Maguire: A Remembrance, Being a Selection from the Prose and Verse Writings of a Socialist Pioneer (Manchester: Labour Press Society, 1895) Massey, Gerald, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (London: J. Watson, 1851) McCulloch, J. R., A Statistical Account of the British Empire (2 Volumes) (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1837) Miller, Thomas, Royston Gower, or the Days of King John: An Historical Romance, 3 vols (London: Colburn, 1838) Millhouse, Robert, Sherwood Forest and Other Poems (London: self-published, 1827) Minot, Laurence, Poems on Interesting Events in the Reign of King Edward III. Written, in the Year MCCCLII (London, 1795) Mitford, M. R., Rienzi: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (London: John Cumberland, 1828) Moore, Thomas (‘Rock’), The Memoirs of Captain Rock (London, 1824) Morris, William, A Dream of John Ball, in The Complete Works (London: Longman Greene, 1896) Oxlad, Robert, The Protestant Vindicator (London, 1826) Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, ed. G. Vale (New York: G. Vale, 1848) Peacock, Thomas Love, Maid Marian (London: Macmillan, 1895) Penty, Arthur, The Restoration of the Gild System (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1906) ———, Post-industrialism, with a Preface by G. K. Chesterton (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922) ———, Towards a Christian Sociology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923) Pole, William, ed., The Life of Sir William Fairbairn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877) Pugin, A. W., Contrasts, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Dolman, 1841) Renouvier, Charles, Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation Européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Paris: Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1876) Ritson, Joseph, A Select Collection of English Song, 3 vols (London, 1783) ———, Ancient Songs, From the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution (London, 1790) ———, Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry: From Authentic Manuscripts and Old Printed Copies (London, 1791)

196

Bibliography

———, Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which Are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life, 2 vols (London, 1795) Rossetti, W. M., ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His Family-Letters with a Memoir (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895) ———, Rossetti Papers (London: Sands and Co., 1903) Ruskin, John, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1906) Scott, Clement and Howard, Cecil, The Life and Reminiscences of E.L. Blanchard: With Notes from the Diary of W.M. Blanchard, 2 vols (London: Hutchinson, 1891) Scott, Walter, Tales of My Landlord: With the Author’s Last Notes and Additions and a Glossary: Black Dwarf and Old Mortality (Paris: Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1831) de Sismondi, C. L., A History of the Italian Republics, being a View of the Origin, Progress, and Fall of Italian Freedom (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1832) Smith, Joshua Toulmin, ed., English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More than One Hundred Early English Gilds Together with The Olde Usages of the Cite of Wynchestre, The Ordinances of Worcester, the Office of the Mayor of Bristol, and The Costomary of the Manor of Tettenhall-Regis, from Manuscripts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London: Early English Text Society, 1870) Williams, Hugh, ed., National Songs and Poetical Pieces (London: H. Hetherington, 1839) Wolford, Edith, The Story of the Chevalier Bayard: From the French of the Loyal Servant, Monsieur Guyard de Berville, 5th edn (London: Sampson Low Marston Searle and Low, 1875)

Secondary Sources Alexander, Michael, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) Allott, Kenneth and Allott, Miriam, eds, The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Longman, 1979) Anstruther, Ian, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of The Eglinton Tournament 1839 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963) Arvidsson, Stefan, The Style and Mythology of Socialism (London: Routledge, 2017) Atkins, Gareth, ed., Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) Baines, Paul and Burns, Edwards, eds, Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Balasopoulos, Antonis, ‘Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia’, Theory and Event 12:3 (2009) Barker, Juliet, England Arise: The People, the King, and the Great Revolt of 1381, 2nd edn (London: Abacus, 2015) Barlow, Paul. ‘The Imagined Hero as Incarnate Sign: Thomas Carlyle and the Mythology of the National Portrait in Victorian Britain’, Art History 17:4 (1994) ———, ‘The Ordering and Disordering of Work’, Visual Culture in Britain 15(3) (2014) ——— and Trodd, Colin, eds, Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) Barthes, Roland, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) Basdeo, Stephen, ‘Radical Ideas in the Penny Serials of Pierce Egan the Younger (1814–80)’, http://gesteofrobinhood.com/2016/01/19 ———, The Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader: Wat Tyler (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2018)

Bibliography

197

——— and Padgett, Lauren, eds, Imagining the Victorians, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 15 (Leeds: LCVS, 2016) Battafarono, Italo M., Cola di Rienzo: Mito e Rivoluzione nei Drammi di Engels, Gaillard, Mosen, e Wagner (Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento, 2006) Beaumont, Matthew, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2005) ———, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) Belchem, John, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth Century England’, Social History 6 (1981), 1–32 ———, ‘Orator Hunt’: Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism (London: Breviary Stuff, 2012) Benatti, Francesca et al., eds, Thomas Moore: Text, Contexts, Hypertexts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013) Bendiner, K., The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) Beneš, Carie E., ‘Mapping a Roman Legend: The House of Cola di Rienzo from Piranesi to Baedeker’, Italian Culture 26 (2008), 57–83 Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) Bennett, Mary, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné (2 Volumes) (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010) Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) Biddick, Kathleen, Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties (New York: Punctum Books, 2016) Boime, Albert, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, Arts Magazine 56 (September 1981), 116–25 Bond, M. H., ed., Works of Art in the House of Lords (London: Merrell, 1980) Bonnett, Alastair, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010) Boos, Florence S., ed. History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992) Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London: Third Series, Religious Influences, vol. 7 (London: Macmillan, 1903) Booth, Michael R., Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001) Brake, Laurel and Demoor, Marysa, eds, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (London: British Library, 2009) Breton, Rob, The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading Against the Middle-Class Novel (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016) Britnell, R. H., ‘Forstall, Forestalling and the Statute of Forestallers’, English Historical Review 102 (1987), 89–102 Bronkhurst, Judith, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art, 2006) Bronson, Bertrand H., Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1938) Broome Saunders, Clare, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Brown, Andrew, ‘Metaphysics and Melodrama: Bulwer’s Rienzi’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 36/3 (December 1981), 261–76

198

Bibliography

Bryson, John and Troxell, J. C., eds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris Correspondence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) Caracciolo, Peter, ed., The Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of the Thousand and One Nights into British Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) Carver, Terrell, ‘Art and Ambiguity: The Politics of Friedrich Engels’, International Political Science Review 12:1 (January 1991), 7–10 Castellano, Katey, ‘Cobbett’s Commons: Monastic Economies in A History of the Protestant “Reformation”’, European Romantic Review 26 (2015), 575–90 Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (1970; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) Chesterton, G. K., William Cobbett (Norfolk, VA: HIS Press, 2011) Claeys, Gregory, ed., The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001) Clark, J. C. D., ‘Protestantism, Nationalism, and National Identity, 1660–1832’, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 249–76 Clemens, Justin and Knight, Stephen, ‘Magna Carta as English Political Myth’, in Australia’s Magna Carta, 2nd ed. (Canberra: Department of the Senate, 2015), pp. 63–68 Collette, Carolyn P., ed., In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013) Colley, Linda, Britons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) Collins, A., Greater than Emperor: Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313–54) and the World of FourteenthCentury Rome (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002) Cowling, Mark and Martin, James, eds, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern Interpretations (London: Pluto Books, 2002) Crawford, Elizabeth, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London: Routledge, 1999) Crisafulli, L. M. and Elam, K., eds, Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010) Cruise, Colin, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011) Cullen, Michael, ‘The Chartists and Education’, New Zealand Journal of History 10:2 (1976), 162–77 Culler, A. Dwight, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) D’Arcens, Louise, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014) ——— and Lynch, Andrew, eds, International Medievalism and Popular Culture (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014) Davis, Kathleen, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) Derry, John, ed., Cobbett’s England (London: Folio Society, 1968) Dobson, R. B., ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970) Dorries, Christopher, Coroners’ Courts: A Guide to Law and Practice, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). ———, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Dyck, Ian, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Bibliography

199

Eco, Umberto, Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1987) Eisenman, Stephen F., ‘Communism in Furs: A Dream of Prehistory in William Morris’s John Ball’, The Art Bulletin 87:1 (2005), 92–110 Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Evans, Austin P., ‘Review: A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History by Arthur J. Penty’, Political Science Quarterly 36:3 (1921), 523–25 Foner, Eric, ed., Tom Paine and Revolutionary America: Autobiography and Selected Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977) Fulford, Roger, Votes for Women: The Story of a Struggle (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) Fulton, Helen, ed., A Companion to Arthurian Literature (Maldon, MA and Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009) Ganim, John M., Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Garver, Lee, ‘Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism’, Journal of Modern Literature 29:4 (2006), 1–21 Gibson, Josh, ‘The Chartists and the Constitution: Revisiting British Popular Constitution­ alism’, Journal of British Studies 56.1 (January 2017), 70–90 Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981) Glasier, John Bruce, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans Green, 1921) Gonzalez, R., ed., The Representation of Ireland/s: Images from Outside and from Within (Barcelona: PPU, 2003) Goodway, David, London Chartism 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Grande, James, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) ——— and Stevenson, John, eds, William Cobbett, Romanticism and Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2015) Grennan, Margaret R., William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York: Russell & Russell, 1945) Gribling, Barbara, The Image of Edward the Black Prince in Georgian and Victorian England: Negotiating the Late Medieval Past (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017) Griffin, John R., ‘Newman and the Mother of God’, Faith and Reason 15 (1989), 91–109 Griffith, Kate, ‘The Black Lad of Ashton-under-Lyne’, Folklore 8.4 (1898), 379–82 Hahn, Thomas, ed., Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000) Hanley, Ryan, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England, 1814–1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016), 103–23 Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Harriss, G. L., Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) Haywood, Ian, ed., Chartist Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) ———, The Revolution in Print: Print, Politics, and the People, 1790-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Heaney, Seamus, Beowulf (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000) Hill, Christopher, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958) ———, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)

200

Bibliography

Hill, Rosemary, ‘Reformation to Millennium: Pugin’s Contrasts in the History of English Thought’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:1 (1999), 26–41 ———, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2007) Hilton, Rodney, Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Methuen, 1973) Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968) Hoare, Quintin and Nowell Smith, Geoffrey, ed. and trans., Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) Holsinger, Bruce, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) ——— and Knapp, Ethan, ‘The Marxist Premodern’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34:3 (2004), 463–71 Holton, Sandra Stanley, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Hotz, Mary Elizabeth, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009) Hudson, Martyn, ‘On the Dead of World History’, Race and Class 43:4 (2002), 26–33 Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981) Jann, Rosemary, ‘Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism’, Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980), 129–49 Jones, David J. V., The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) Jahanara Kabir, Ananya and Williams, Deanne, eds, Postcolonial Approaches to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Kadlec, David, ‘Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism’, ELH 60:4 (1993), 1015–31 Karras, Ruth Mazo, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) King, Margaret F. and Engel, Elliott, ‘The Emerging Carlylean Hero in Bulwer’s Novels of the 1830s’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36:3 (December 1981), 277–95 Kleinberg, Ethan, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017) Kinna, Ruth, William Morris: The Art of Socialism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) Knight, Stephen, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) ———, Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) ———, ‘Robin Hood and the Forest Laws’, Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies 1 (2017), 1–12 ———, The Fiction of G. W. M. Reynolds: The Man Who Outsold Dickens (New York and London: Routledge, 2019) Kovalev, Yuri, An Anthology of Chartist Literature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956) Kropotkin, Peter, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902) Latham, David, ed., Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) Lawrence, Emmeline Pethick, My Part in a Changing World (London: Gollancz, 1938) Lindberg, David C., Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976)

Bibliography

201

Lyttelton, Adrian, ‘Sismondi, the Republic and Liberty: between Italy and England, the City and the Nation’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17:2 (2012), 168–82 Lytton, Lady Constance, Prisons and Prisoners: Experiences of a Suffragette (London: William Heinemann, 1914) Machin, G. I. T., ‘The No Popery Movement in Britain, 1828–9’, Historical Journal 6 (1963), 193–211 Malcolmson, Cristina and Suzuki, Mihoko, eds, Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) Mancoff, Debra, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes (New York: Harry Abrams, 1995) Matthews, David, ed., In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) ———, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015) Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Meier, Paul, ‘An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris: “How Shall We Live Then?”’, International Review of Social History 16:2 (1971), 217–40 Melville, Lewis, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America (2 volumes) (London: J. Lane, 1913) Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013) Morris, William, The Collected Works of William Morris (24 volumes) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Mutch, Deborah, Introduction to English Socialist Periodicals 1880–1900: A Reference Source (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Nardizzi, Vin and Werth, Tiffany Jo, eds, Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019) Nattrass, Leonora, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Neuheiser, Jörg, Crown, Church and Constitution: Popular Conservatism in England, 1815– 1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Nussbaum, Rachel, ‘Wagner’s ‘Rienzi’ and the Creation of a Paper’, The Musical Quarterly 84:3 (Autumn 2000), 417–25 O’Day, Rosemary, The Debate on the English Reformation, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) O’Ferrall, Fergus, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985) Osborne, John W., William Cobbett: His Thought and His Times (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1966) Outram, Quentin and Laybourn, Keith, eds, Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland: From Peterloo to the Present (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Owers, George Bernard, ‘Common Law Jurisprudence and Ancient Constitutionalism in the Radical Thought of John Cartwright, Granville Sharp and Capel Lofft’, Historical Journal 58 (2015), 51–73 Pankhurst, Christabel, Unshackled: the Story of How We Won the Vote, ed. Lord Frederick Pethick Lawrence (London: Hutchinson, 1959) Pankhurst, Emmeline, My Own Story (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914) Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1931)

202

Bibliography

Parker, Joanne, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred The Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) ——— and Wagner, Corinna, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) Pearl, M. L., William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account of his Life and Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1953) Philips, Deborah, Fairground Attraction: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) Phillips, Peter, ed., Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard’s Death (London: Catholic Record Society, 2004) Pickering, Paul, ‘“The Hearts of the Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History 88:290 (2003), 227–47 Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997) Plotz, John, ‘Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris’s Romances’, ELH 74:4 (2007), 931–56 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) Pomarè, Carla, Byron and the Discourses of History (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) Poole, Robert, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Poovey, Mary, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 1995) Prothero, Iorwerth, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1979) Raimond, Jean, ‘Southey’s Early Writings and the Revolution’, The Yearbook of English Studies 19: The French Revolution in English Literature and Art Special Number (1989), 181–96 Raisanen, Elizabeth, “‘Speech/is your fit weapon”: Mary Russell Mitford’s Rienzi and the Gendering of Speech Acts’, European Romantic Review 22:2 (2011), 209–33 Reynolds, J. A., The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823–9 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954) Ribémont, Bernard, ed., Sur le chemin de longue étude . . .: Actes du colloque d’Orléans Juillet 1995 (Paris: Champion, 1998) Riccardi, Alessandra, ed., Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Richardson, Mary, Laugh a Defiance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953) Riding, Christine and Riding, Jacqueline, eds, The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (London: HMSO, 2000) Rigaud, Rose, Les Idées feministes de Christine de Pisan (Neuchatel: Attinger, 1911, republished 1973) Roberts, Stephen, The Chartist Prisoners: The Radical Lives of Thomas Cooper (1805–1892) and Arthur O’Neil (1819–1896) (Oxford: Lang, 2008) Ross, Kristin, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015) Sanders, Mike, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Sansom, C. J., Tombland (London: Mantle, 2018) Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1984) Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, in The Waverley Novels, 25 vols (London: Bouverie, 1901) Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994) Shakespeare, William, Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Bibliography

203

Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990) ———, ed., Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages (London: Frank Cass, 2001) ———, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Smith, Mark A., From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015) Snape, M. F., The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003) Solkin, David H., Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008) Sontag, Susan, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1966) Spater, George, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Stedman-Jones, Gareth, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832– 1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Steele, Robert, Mediaeval Lore from Bartholemew Anglicus (London: The De La More Press, 1905) Stevenson, Katie and Gribling, Barbara, eds, Chivalry and the Medieval Past (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016) Stillinger, Jack, ed., John Keats: Collected Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) Surtees, Virginia, ed., The Diary of Ford Madox Brown (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981) Sutcliffe, Marcella Pellegrino, Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats (London and Woodbridge: The Royal Historical Society and the Boydell Press, 2014) Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) ———, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (London: Merlin Press, 1977) ———, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) Tomko, Michael, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Thompson, Laurence, Robert Blatchford: Portrait of an Englishman (London: Gollancz, 1951) Tozer, H. F., ed., Byron: Childe Harold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886; this impression, 1937) Treuherz, Julian, Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011) Colin Trodd, Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester Murals (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming) ———, Barlow, Paul and Amigoni, David, eds, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) Tromans, Nicholas, David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) ———, ‘Drawing Teeth: Reflections on Brown’s Mouths’, Visual Culture in Britain 15:3 (2014), 299–312 Truesdale, Mark, The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) Vaninskaya, Anna, ‘Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31 (2009), 45–57 Vanden Bossche, Chris R., Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)

204

Bibliography

Van Esveld Adams, Kimberly, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller and George Eliot (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001) Vargo, Greg, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Vernon, James, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Vicinus, Martha, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes, 1974) Waithe, Marcus, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006) Walker, John A., Work: Ford Madox Brown’s Painting and Victorian Life (London: Francis Boutle, 2006) Wark, McKenzie, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015) Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002) Weinroth, Michelle and Browne, Paul Leduc, eds, To Build A Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2015) Weisser, Henry, ‘Chartist Internationalism, 1845–1848’, The Historical Journal 14:1 (1971), 49–66 Whelan, Irene, The Bible War in Ireland: The Second Reformation and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) Whiting, Robert, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Wilks, Ivor, South Wales and the Rising of 1839 (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984) Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura, eds, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958) ———, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) ———, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1988) Wood, Paul, ‘The Avant-Garde from the July Monarchy to The Second Empire’, in Paul Wood, ed., The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 35–55 Wright, Alastair Ian, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Body of Harold: Representing England at Mid-Century’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 8:1 (2009), www.19thc-artworldwide. org/spring09/42-autumn07/autumn07article/127-ford-madox-browns-the-body-ofharold-representing-england-at-mid-century.

Index Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations Ainsworth, William Harrison, Merry England; or, Nobles and Serfs 114 see also Merrie England Albert, Prince  39 Alexander, Michael  188 Alfred, King and the Anglo-Saxon constitution  95 as a Catholic  28 as defender of Wessex  79 as exemplary ruler  11 Irish equivalents of  36 in W. J. Linton’s The Plaint of Freedom  101, 102, 103, 104 in Gerald Massey’s poetry  101 praise of in the British Workman 47, 48 in the English Chartist Circular 93, 94–5 in McDouall’s  94 n. 12 in the Poor Man’s Guardian 45 in the Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor  46 reign of  10, 45 and the Saxons  44–8 and the witenagemot  48 see also Folkmote Andrews, William Eusebius  27, 28, 31, 34, 35 Arnold, Matthew, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ 172 Art Union, The  132 n.15, 135 Asquith, Herbert  188 Balasopoulos, Antonis  168 Ball, John  53 n. 49, 89, 106, 110, 158 see also William Morris, Peasants’ Revolt

Beaumont, Matthew  168–9, 164 n.17 Bellamy, Edward  164 Benjamin, Walter  10, 150 Beowulf 148 Berger, John  162 Bhabha, Homi  150 Biddick, Kathleen  172 Blatchford, Robert  144, 147, 150, 154 see also Clarion, Merrie England Bloody Mary see Mary I, Queen Boadicea  180, 185, 186, 189 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon  101 Bonaparte, Napoleon  59, 66 Bonnett, Alastair  144, 154 Boym, Svetlana  13, 40, 41 see also nostalgia Bragg, Melvyn  1 British Workman, The  47, 48 see also Alfred, King Bronkhurst, Judith  71, 72 Bronterre’s National Reformer see under O’Brien, James Bronterre Brown, Andrew  62 Brown, Ford Madox  14 The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester  15, 139–42 The Marriage of St Edith  141, n.31 Spirit of Justice  14–15, 130–9, 141, 142 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward on Mary Russell Mitford  61 Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes  12, 61–4, 65, 66, 70 reviews of  63–4 as a source for Holman Hunt’s Rienzi  71, 72 Burke, Edmund  63, 113

206

Index

Burns, John  146 Byron, George Gordon  56, 58, 68, 79 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 59 Campbell, John  120 capitalism  47, 152, 166, 173, 177 Caractacus, King  102, 104 Carlyle, Thomas, Past and Present  5, 148, 150, 164, 177 Caroline, Queen  9 Carpenter, Edward  146, 155 Carver, Terrell  66 Castellano, Katey  20 Catholicism 19–38 Roman  12, 14, 109 and architecture  128 associated with France  102 associated with religious excess  88 Cobbett’s conversion to  27 and the sacramental body  172 seen as repressive  96, 97–8, 109 and women’s rights  181, 184 ‘social’  20, 98–100, 109 see also emancipation, Catholic Cerceau, de, Jean Antoine  56 Chandler, Alice  10, 13, 39–40 Charter, The Great see Magna Carta Chartism  5, 77–123 and Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism  47 compared with suffragism  180 and feudalism  49 and Rienzi  67, 69 strategies of  14, 91 uses of Wat Tyler in  51, 53 see also John Ball, Newport Rising, Wat Tyler Chaucer, Geoffrey Legend of Good Women 183 Treatise on the Astrolabe 183 Chesterton, G. K.  172 chivalry  5, 10, 41, 42, 48, 100 Churchill, Winston  188 City of Ladies, The see under Pizan, Christine de Clarion, The  15, 144, 146, 147, 150–6, 157 Clarke, C. Allen  155 Cleave’s Penny Gazette  115, 117 Cobbett, William  19–38, 106

A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland 12, 19–38, 99 Political Register 19 and ‘social Catholicism’  99–100 Cole, Charles A Political Address to His Grace the Duke of Wellington 117 ‘Sonnets after Reading Part of a History of Wat Tyler’  117 ‘The Spirit of Wat Tyler’  120–3 Colley, Linda  21 Collins, Amanda  56 constitution Anglo-Saxon  92–5, 109 British  28–30, 64 English 54 Cooper, Thomas  68, 88, 106 Captain Cobler 86–7 Cooper’s Journal 69 Purgatory of Suicides  14, 95–7 see also Chartism Courbald, Henry  58 Cremorne Gardens see under Eglinton Tournament Cromwell, Oliver  68 D’Arcens, Louise  145, 154 David J-L, The Oath of the Horatii 72 Davison, Emily  178, 179, 184, 187–8 Declaration of Rights, Chartist  94 Delacroix, Eugène, Liberty Leading the People 66 Delheim, Charles  13 Derrida, Jacques  147 Specters of Marx  160, 161, 166, 169 Dickens, Charles  87, 114 Digby, Kenelm  The Broad Stone of Honour 5, 41 Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil  5, 42, 77, 99–100, 177 D’Orleans, Anne Marie Louise  186 Doubleday, Thomas, The Political Pilgrim’s Progress 87 Eckenstein, Lina, Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent Life 180–1 Edward III, King  39, 51, 93 Egan, Pierce, the Younger,  87, 88, 111 Adam Bell 85–6

Index Quintin Matsys: The Blacksmith of Antwerp 118 Robin Hood and Little John, or The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest  13, 83–5 Wat Tyler  13, 51, 84, 118 see also Wat Tyler Eglinton Tournament as chivalric festivity  127 as conservative political statement  39 elitist medievalism of  3, 5, 11 High Tory revivalism of  14 re-enactment of at Cremorne Gardens  11, 44 ridicule of  44 working-class spectators at  8 see also chivalry Elizabeth, Queen  23, 145 Elmore, Alfred, Rienzi in the Forum  63, 64 emancipation, Catholic  19, 20, 21, 25–8, 38 in Ireland  33, 35 of the human race  119 of the working class  119 of women see Women’s Social and Political Union Engels, Friedrich, Cola di Rienzi  12, 64–6, 72 English Chartist Circular  93–5, 113, 114, 115, 119–20 Cobbett in  100 n.25 Magna Carta in  105 Rienzi in  69 on Walter Scott  8 Evans, Thomas, Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative 116 Foggo, George and James  137 Foxe, John  19–20, 27 Folkmoot see Folkmote Folkmot see Folkmote Folkmote  47, 92, 93, 106 Forest Laws, Norman  80, 82, 84 Friend of the People, The  97, 98, 99 Froissart, Jean  52, 113–14, 116, 118 Furnivall, Frederick  53 Ganim, John M.  149 Garland of Delight, The 117

207

Garner, Joel, 8, 31 George, Saint  145, 147, 192 Gibbon, Edward see also Rienzi Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  12, 56–7, 67, 72 Bulwer-Lytton’s riposte to  61, 62, 63, 72 as source for Mary Russell Mitford 60 Girouard, Mark  9 Giulia, Saint, of Carthage, 184 Gramsci, Antonio  3–4 Gutch, J. M. A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, with Other Ancient & Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to this Celebrated Yeoman  13, 78 Hall, Spencer T., The Forester’s Offering 79 Hallam, Henry The Constitutional History of England 127 The State of Europe during the Middle Ages  94, 127 Hamilton, Cecily, A Pageant of Great Women 179–80 Hardie, Keir  144, 154 Hereward  81, 101, 104, 105, 109 Hickey, Helen  89 Hilda of Whitby  182 see also suffragettes History of the All the Mobs, The 112 Holsinger, Bruce  173 Hone, William see under Southey, Robert Hood, Robin  77–90, 101, 105 as displaced noble  13, 52, 78 Keats on  90 as namesake  44, 68 reputation of  2, 11, 51 J. H. Reynolds on  90 as yeoman  78, 79, 86, 105 see also Pierce Egan, Thomas Miller, Thomas Love Peacock, Joseph Ritson Howitt, Mary  79, 83 Howitt, William,  79, 83 Hume, David, History of England  22, 35, 84, 94–5, 113 Hunt, Henry  52–3, 68, 112 Hunt, Leigh  78

208

Index

Hunt, William Holman on Brown’s Spirit of Justice  135 n.23 Rienzi vowing to obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions  12, 64, 65, 70–2 Hyndman, H. M.  15, 89, 144 Ironside, Edmund  101, 104 James, G. P. R., Forest Days 86 Jameson, Fredric  7 Jann, Rosemary  5, 13, 40, 47, 54 Joan of Arc  16, 186–7, 188 Elsie Howey as  186 John, King  50, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 see also Robin Hood, Magna Carta, Thomas Miller Jones, Ernest  14, 97–8, 99 see also Chartism Justice   15, 143, 144, 146, 156, 157 Kadlec, David  170 Keats, John  78, 90 Ket the Tanner  101, 108, 109 Knapp, Ethan  173 Knights of Labor  89 Knights of Labour see Knights of Labor Knox, John  181 Kropotkin, Peter  170 Labour Champion  15, 144–8, 149 Labour Leader  15, 144, 156, 158–9 Langland, John, Piers Plowman 158–9 Lawless, John  35–6 Leigh, Mary  184 Leslie, John  143 Lingard, John  26, 27 Linton, W. J.  91, 100, 117 ‘The Man Who Slew Wat Tyler’  119 The Plaint of Freedom  14, 91, 101–9 ‘Edmund Ironside’  104 ‘First Commons Parliament’  106, 109 ‘Hereward the Saxon’  104–5,109 ‘Ket the Tanner’  101, 108, 109 ‘Magna-Charta’, 105–6 ‘Robin-Hood’ 105 ‘A Song for the Next Rebellion’  123 ‘Wars of the Roses’  107 ‘Wat Tyler’  107

‘Wickliffe and Sawtre’  106 see also Chartism Lollards, 24, 98 London Journal, The 69 Luther, Martin  96 Lyttelton, Adrian  58 Macaulay, F. E. M., ‘British Royal Women’ 185–6 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington  98 Machiavelli, Niccolò  56 Maclise, Daniel, Sir Francis Sykes and His Family 127 Magna Carta and Catholicism  28, 98 and constitutional liberty  11, 28 familiarity of working-class with  109 interpretations of  50 and liberal reforms  178 as a model for Chartism  49, 85, 105–6 and royal power  80 as a source for the Chartist Declaration of Rights 94 as touchstone of freedom  101 Maguire, Tom  144, 145, 146, 155, 157 death of  159 ‘In the Lists’  148, 149–50 noms de plume 147 ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’  148–9 Mahon, John  144 Malthus, Thomas  22 Manners, Lord John  42–3 England’s Trust and Other Poems 177 Marsh, Charlotte  184 Marx, Karl  15, 89, 160, 161, 162, 166 Mary, Queen of Scots  87 Mary, Virgin  36, 183, 184–5 Mary I, Queen  23, 25 Massey, Gerald  69, 91, 100 ‘A Call to the People’  101 ‘Labour’s Social Chivalry’  100 ‘Our Land’  100–1 ‘The People’s Advent’  101 see also Chartism Matilda of Tuscany  186 Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor 113 Mazzini, Giuseppe  63, 68, 69 McDouall’s Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate  92–3, 94 n.12

Index Medievalism anti-utilitarian  12, 22–33 barbaric 23 blank 23 canonical  5, 10, 40, 41 Chartist varieties of  91–109 conservative  5, 13, 40, 41 counter-Reformation 22–33 disordering 15 elite  3, 8, 14, 16, 73, 96 Irish 33–8 liberal 77–83 polemical  14, 127–42 populist 22 radical  15, 67–70, 77–90 resistive  11, 13–14, 43–54 restorative  11, 41 revolutionary 67–73 romantic 23 as social activism  132 socialist  13, 15, 40, 143–73 speculative  15, 163–8 subaltern, definitions of 3–4, 9–12 suffrage 175–92 transatlantic  21, 33–7 Whig  13, 40 working-class  91–109, 110–23, 143–59 Meek, James,  86 Merrie England  3, 21, 31, 115, 151, 153–5 Merry England see Merrie England Middle Ages, the associated with ‘the East’  149 Catholicism and  22, 97–8 Christianity and  170 and colonialism  161 comic uses of 145–6 as critique of the present  35–36, 37, 77, 129–30, 139, 156 economies of,  6–7 Enlightenment hostility to  12 gothic  23, 32 grotesque 23 guilds of the  16, 157, 170–1 historical duration of  9–10 idealisation of  20, late  3, 180 merry 156 political uses of  15, 77, 94, 97,143, 159 popular rights in  14 popular uses of  11–12, 41–43

209

post-Conquest, 48–9 in the present  32 and priestcraft  95 romantic views of  22, 23, 31 saints of  176 survivals of in everyday life  6–7 as totality  171 see also medievalism Millais, John Everett  70, 72 Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn  144, 146 Miller, Thomas, Royston Gower  13, 80–3, 84, 85 Millhouse, Robert, Sherwood Forest and Other Poems 79 Milton, John  101, 102, 103, 106 Mitford, Mary Russell, Rienzi: A Tragedy, In Five Acts  59–61, 65, 72 monasteries Chartist depictions of  98, 99 depiction of by Cobbett  12, 23, 33 dissolution of  9–10, 33, 98 as a sign of barbarism  12, 32–3, 37 as a sign of freedom  98, 99 and women’s roles  182 see also Catholicism Moore, Thomas, Memoirs of Captain Rock 35–6 Morris, William  5, 37, 146, 161, 170 A Dream of John Ball  89, 151, 177 15, 163, 164–9 See also John Ball, Peasants’ Revolt, Wat Tyler The Earthly Paradise 89 ‘How Shall We Live Then’  160, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ 166 News from Nowhere  15, 51, 89, 145, 164 narrator of  153, 168 and nostalgia  144 and Orientalism  149 perceptions of  40, 150, 151 Preface to The Nature of Gothic 177 and radical medievalism  89, 90, 167, 169 reputation of  15, 143–4, 159 Napoleon see Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleon, Louis see Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon Nattrass, Leonora  20

210

Index

Nevinson, Wynne, The Ancient Suffragettes 185 Newport Rising  67, 68, 83 Norman Conquest, the  9–10, 14, 52, 92, 158 as beginning of feudalism  43, 44 as destroyer of democracy  95, 107 Whig historians’ view of  47 Norman Yoke, the  11, 13, 21 history of the idea of  47 resistance to  103, 109 as a sign of ancient loss of freedom  14, 43, 44, 91–2, 95, 104 uses in Chartist writings  94, 97, 100, 103, 108 See also Norman Conquest Northern Liberator, The 66 Northern Star, The  53, 67, 69, 120, 123 catechism of freedom in  50 and Irish nationalists  119 naming of  49 Rienzi in  56, 69 Wat Tyler in  111, 120 Nostalgia  21, 153 conservative 150 medievalist 41 reflective  13, 41, 43, 47, 54 restorative  13, 40, 41, 42, 47, 54 revolutionary 144 O’Brien, James Bronterre  45, 89, 115, 116 O’Connor, Feargus  70 Odd Fellow, The  115–16, 117 Orage, A. R. The New Age  169, 173 Oxford Movement, 182 Paine, Thomas  14, 25, 84, 102, 103 Rights of Man, the  87, 110, 112–13 Paine, Tim, 46 Pall Mall Gazette 43 Pankhurst, Cristabel  175 Pankhurst, Emmeline  175 Peacock, Thomas Love, Maid Marian 78–80 Peasants’ Revolt, the Chartist uses of  14, 113–23 critique of violence of  67 cultural afterlife of 110–12, 151, 165 failure of  107, 110 naming of  1, 84, 110 n.1 Wat Tyler’s role in  52, 53, 84

Penny Satirist, The 118 Penty, Arthur  15, 169–73 People’s Charter, the  80, 105, 122 Disraeli’s support of  5 Six Points of  84 see also Chartism Peterloo Massacre  26, 53, 121 Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline  176, 187 as editor of Votes for Women  16, 176, 179 on Joan of Arc  187 as leader of Women’s Social and Political Union 175 as member of a lay order  182 as reviewer of Zangwill’s Italian Fantasies 184 Pethick Lawrence, Frederick  16, 175, 176 Pickstock, Catherine  171 Pizan, Christine de  179, 185 Plotz, John  165 Poole, Robert  6 Poor Man’s Guardian, The  45, 46, 49 Pope, Alexander, Windsor Forest 80 see also Forest Laws Postlethwaite, Elinor, ‘Some Learned Women Little Known’  180–1 Pound, Ezra  173 Pre-Raphaelites  40, 71, 88 Pugin, Augustus Welby  23, 39, 42 Contrasts  128–30, 177 as figure of canonical medievalism  5, 13, 40 at the Great Exhibition  49 as polemical medievalist  14, 128 Quelch, Harry  144 Reclus, Elisé  167 Reform Act of 1832  58, 79 Reformation the Protestant  12, 14, 98 and the Anglican Church  98 church practices prior to  182 as proto-democratic struggle for freedom  96, 97, 98, 106, 109 William Cobbett’s critique of  19–38, 99, 109 of Rome  57 tree of  108 see also Cobbett

Index Renouvier, Charles  164 Republican, The Red, 69 see also Chartism revolution aesthetic 71 the American  32, 112 the French  32, 39, 51–2, 77, 141 n.34, 172 the Glorious  32, 37 historical character and consequences of 66 the industrial  45 the July, 66 social  154, 160 Reynolds, G. W. M.  86, 87–8 Reynolds, J. H.  90 Richard II, King  1, 52, 81, 84, 116 Rienzi  12, 14, 55–73 Rienzo, Nicola di see Rienzi Ritson, Joseph  51, 77 Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Song, and Ballads, now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw 13, 52, 78, 79, 80 see also Robin Hood Ross, Kristin  163, 167 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  71, 130 n.11, 132 n.12, 141 n.31 Ruskin, John  5, 150, 169, 170, 171 canonical medievalism of  13, 40 Fors Clavigera  158, 161 on the Gothic  95 and neo-gothic  41 The Stones of Venice  128, 177 Sade, Abbé de  59 Saintsbury, George  79 Scott, Walter  3, 41, 77, 80, 83, 149 and annotation  117 conservative medievalism of  13 Ivanhoe  5, 39, 41, 80, 150 literary riposte to  13, 80 spinoffs from  147 theatrical versions of  11, 41 warnings against  8 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  145, 156 serfdom  103, 108, 115, 121, 147 abolition of  110

211

compared with condition of the Victorian working class  148, 149, 151 economic 45 Magna Carta and  106 Shelley, Mary  58, 78 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  58, 78 Simmons, Clare A.  3, 73 ‘Sindbad the Sailor’  148–9 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard Sismonde de  57–9, 61, 73 Sisters of the People  182 Slavery  121, 122 abolition of  119 American  119, 120 abolition of  120 Chartist condemnation of  119 of Anglo-Saxon peasants  93, 94 abolition of   95 and the Catholic church  99 intellectual 95 of the Victorian working-class  67 see also serfdom socialism  143–59, 163, 165, 167, 172 Christian  161, 173 guild  15–16, 169 proto- 177 Wat Tyler as forerunner of  53, 123 Society of Friends of Civil and Religious Liberties 27 Sontag, Susan  154 Southey, Robert, Wat Tyler  2, 14, 51, 52, 53 appropriation of by Chartists  111, 115–16, 123 critique of Southey for  113 Southey’s later disavowal of  2, 40, 84, 110, 116 n.30 use of the term charter in  84–5 William Hone’s edition of  84, 117 see also Wat Tyler Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  4 n.8 see also subaltern Star of Freedom see Northern Star Stephens, Joseph Rayner  13, 91, 92, 93 Stocqueler, Joachim, Maid Marian 86 Straw, Jack  110, 114–15, 166 subaltern definitions of  3–5 see also medievalism

212

Index

suffrage male, 28, 92, 93 women’s see suffragettes Suffragette, The 178 suffragettes  compared to Joan of Arc  187 forcible feeding of  176 militant  16, 175–92 Roman  186 n.19

Votes for Women  16, 175–92

United Tinsmiths of Victoria  89

Waddington, Samuel  9 Walsingham, Thomas  116 Historia Anglicana  165 Walworth, William, 113, 114, 115, 116 murder of Wat Tyler by  52, 110, 114, 119 Wark, McKenzie  168 Waters, Chris  5, 13, 50 Watkins, John see also Northern Star John Frost 67–8 ‘Legacy to the Chartists: Lecture 1’  68 Watt, James  128–9 Wickliffe, John. See Wyclif Williams, Hugh, National Songs and Poetical Pieces 122 Williams, Raymond  20 Witenagemot see folkmote Women’s Social and Political Union  16, 175–92 Wordsworth, William  40, 156 Workers’ Cry, The  153, 155 Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor  46, 48 50, 51 Wright, Poyntz  189 WSPU see Women’s Social and Political Union Wyclif, John  14, 96–7, 98, 101, 109 heirs of  102 as ‘Reformation’s Morning Star’ 106

Victoria, Queen  39, 41, 122

Zangwill, Israel, Italian Fantasies 184

Tennyson, Alfred  5, 13, 40, 103 Thompson, E. P.  6, 86, 87 Thousand and One Nights, The  149 Trigg, Stephanie  89 Tromans, Nicholas  135 Tweddell, George Markham, ‘Rienzi, the Patriot of Rome’  69 Tyler, Wat  1, 51, 54, 108, 114, 158 familiarity of Victorian readers with 109 historical significance of, for Chartists 106–7 as namesake  2, 53, 151 negative Victorian depictions of  112–13 in Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man 112 as proletarian hero  52, 53, 101 reputation of in the nineteenth century  2, 11, 14 treatment of in Chartist newspapers  53, 110–23

Medievalism I Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins II Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau Alicia C. Montoya III Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest Siobhan Brownlie IV Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages Louise D’Arcens V Medievalism: Key Critical Terms edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz VI Medievalism: A Critical History David Matthews VII Chivalry and the Medieval Past edited by Katie Stevenson and Barbara Gribling VIII Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 Peter N. Lindfield IX Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation Jennifer Rushworth X Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century Andrew B. R. Elliott XI Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation edited by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons XII Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones Shiloh Carroll

XIII William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas Ian Felce XIV Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern Robert Mills XV François Villon in English Poetry: Translation and Influence Claire Pascolini-Campbell XVI Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones KellyAnn Fitzpatrick XVII Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood edited by M. J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus XVIII Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain Dustin M. Frazier Wood