David Horspool | The Spectator columnists & writers

The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers

In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He recognised that the bustling scene – black-robed clerics, bargaining merchants, black porters and children teasing a monkey, played out on a wide boulevard in front of a colonnaded row of slightly rickety houses – was Iberian, but could be no more precise. Only in 2009 did scholars identify the street as Lisbon’s Rua Nova dos Mercadores, painted in the late 16th century, and lost like so much of the city in the great earthquake of 1755. One of the many virtues of Edward Wilson-Lee’s fascinating, elegantly written book is to plunge us into that scene, and to follow a trail outward from this global city across Europe, to Africa, India and beyond.

How Charles II sought to obliterate a decade of British history

When the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, in the person of that ‘lovely black boy’ Charles II, was announced in May 1660 it was with a flourish of public amnesia. Charles had, it was declared, already been king for 11 years, from the moment in January 1649 when his father had been unlawfully executed. Such acts of contrived forgetting were not unprecedented in English history. William the Conqueror effaced Harold’s short reign from the records and Henry VII did much the same for Richard III. But 11 years was ambitious. And this forgetting would be expected not of people on whose daily lives the great affairs of state barely impinged, as might have been the case for many in the Middle Ages when a royal bloodletting substituted one crowned head for another.

Was Josiah Wedgwood really a radical?

No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles of Self-Help fame, they admired this industrious, inventive, uxorious and religious man as a harbinger of their own age. It surely helped that his story, if not exactly one of rags to riches, was certainly a tale of triumph over adversity. His biggest obstacle was one he did his best to conceal from a carefully constructed public image. Though Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and George Stubbs did a family study showing Josiah, his wife Sarah and their seven children in the grounds of his country house, Etruria Hall, neither likeness hinted that Wedgwood had a wooden leg. His lower right leg was removed without anaesthetic on what he cheerfully christened ‘St Amputation Day’ in 1768, when he was 38, following complications after a carriage accident.

The great agitator

John Lilburne was only 43 when he died in 1657, an early death even for the time. But in many ways it was remarkable that he lived so long. He not only dodged Royalist bullets when fighting for Parliament in the civil war as Lieutenant Colonel Lilburne, but managed to avoid the noose or firing squad on three occasions, each time trusting his own principled legal dexterity (and a slice of luck that he would have seen as the hand of Providence) to cheat his would-be executioners. This was an age, of course, when men of far more elevated status than this member of the minor gentry from the north east did not manage the same feat. Most famously, Charles I himself was tried, convicted and executed for his crimes, and he had been preceded by some of his most powerful subjects, including his favourite the Earl of Strafford and the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

Power to the people | 5 January 2017

Jeremy Corbyn will probably enjoy this book — which doesn’t mean you won’t. Asked to name the historical figure he most admired when first standing for the Labour leadership, Corbyn answered that in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne.Very interesting character, because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different. Lilburne, who should certainly be better known, was a leader of a group that came to be called the Levellers, which flourished at the height of England’s civil strife in the 1640s, and whose radical, democratising politics has sporadically appeared on the agenda of the left, invoked as the ‘Good Old Cause’, ever since.

A lively, rebellious boy

It is one of the great set-pieces of high drama in English history. The king, shamed by his part in the murder of his one-time friend turned implacable enemy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, agrees to come as a penitent to the holy site of the archbishop’s death to seek forgiveness and, in a conspicuously unkingly gesture, to prostrate himself at the martyr’s tomb. By the time he does so, the innocent blood spilled in the cathedral has begun to attract pilgrims from all over Europe, drawn by the miracles performed at the place where royal anger unleashed such unprecedented violence. In the words of Matthew Strickland, the king showed himself to be ‘overcome with feelings of guilt and remorse’. The Archbishop, of course, is Thomas Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights acting on what they interpreted as the wishes of Henry II.

A five-ring fiasco

The ambitions of the founding father of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin — that they should be ‘the free trade of the future’ and provide ‘the cause of peace’ with a ‘new and mighty stay’ — were at once wildly optimistic and strangely prescient. Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism, the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst. To anyone who believes that the excesses of the Games over the past 50 years or so have betrayed a purer original legacy, these two books by Jules Boykoff and David Goldblatt provide bracing correctives. The Games may have grown with each successive Olympiad, but almost all their present-day horrors are rehearsals of performances given during their earliest reincarnations, from Coubertin’s first revival in Athens in 1896 up to and beyond Hitler’s racist jamboree in Berlin in 1936.

Those fearless men, but few

While reading this book in a London café, I was politely buttonholed by an Irishman: ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I saw what you were reading and wondered how far back it went.’ I answered that, as it was a group biography of the men who led the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, it began with the eldest of them, Tom Clarke, in the mid-19th century. ‘But,’ I added, ‘it goes back further, to Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone — even Cromwell is mentioned.’ ‘Sure the feud’s much older than that,’ was the gleeful reply. If Ruth Dudley Edwards had been at the table, I imagine she would have said that that was part of the problem — the romantic, rebel, republican view of Irish history as an unbroken tradition of justified resistance.

Who was then the gentleman?

Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 hasn’t proved particularly attractive to writers of historical fiction. Pierce Egan, better known for his essays on boxing, wrote an interminable novel called Wat Tyler in 1841, and Robert Southey produced a dramatic poem of the same title which he later disavowed. William Morris took another hero of the revolt, the itinerant preacher John Ball, as his inspiration for a time-travelling socialist fantasy; and that’s about it. Historians and political thinkers in the centuries after the revolt have often tried to redress the balance of the unrelentingly hostile monastic chronicles that first told the story of 1381.

Best shot

I have learnt to be wary of proselytising about football. The last time I tried was the final of the World Cup in South Africa, Spain versus the Netherlands, two teams with a reputation for skilful, attacking play and thoughtful rather than hopeful passing. These two sides, I explained to people whom football fans like to call ‘neutrals’ (it means they’re not interested), would show how the game is meant to be played at its most refined — especially if your most recent encounter with football was watching England’s concrete-booted performances in that tournament, culminating in ignominious exit against an unusually exuberant Germany. I was half right. Spain played their neat, probing, clever game, while Holland went for full-frontal assault, approaching the match more in the spirit of Bruce Lee than Johan Cruyff.

Ready to rebel? You are part of a glorious tradition

Angry disenchantment with the political and financial establishment has rarely been deeper. David Horspool says that the English rebel — culturally affronted rather than ideologically left-wing — is an honourable archetype of our nation’s historyG.K. Chesterton’s famous line in The Secret People, ‘We are the people of England, that never have spoken yet’, still seems to appeal across the political spectrum. It is quoted by BNP bloggers, by socialist thinkers agonising over a nation without an identity, and it was famously invoked by Martin Bell, the white-suited independent. In truth, Chesterton’s picture of a quiescent English population doesn’t reflect today’s brash, opinionated culture, where queuing is obsolete and ignorance seems the best qualification for airing your views or demanding ‘respect’.

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