Grand Duchess Elizabeth And Other Stories

The Money-Changers and the Money-Lenders

2012-01-29T00:07:00.001Z

Nowadays everyone seems to blame ‘the bankers’ for everything, but ‘the bankers’ is such a loose term that really sounds like nothing but another scapegoat. Money-lenders have a pretty poor press throughout history but, whether you want a mortgage or become overdrawn, the majority of people make use of their services at one time or another in their lives. I think that is a good thing. It is helpful to be able to borrow what is needed, and if a fair interest rate is charged and agreed upon, it is mutually beneficial.

To be frank, I don’t really care if some banker is awarded a huge bonus when the country is riddled with debt and people are losing their jobs. It doesn’t feel right but If his bonus were shared among all the people who have lost their jobs, it wouldn’t amount to much. In reality, though, the ‘front men’ are easy targets, and the public outrage is pandering to a smoke screen covering what really goes on.

If I wish to borrow £100 from a neighbour, who agrees to lend me the money for a venture, I would take that as my neighbour’s belief in my ability to succeed and be willing to pay back the money plus interest when my venture came to fruition. That is all to the good. Supposing, though, that my neighbour was more desperate to lend me the money but I had no need of it, so my neighbour set about creating something that would put me in a position where I was in need. Perhaps, if the neighbour were really wicked, he could create friction between me and other neighbours so we started wrecking each other’s livelihoods and destroying each other’s property until we had so many bills that we could not pay and we would need to borrow money urgently just to protect ourselves and get by. Then, when through the machinations of my money-lending neighbour, I am brought to my knees, he can charge whatever he likes in interest and, what is more, he can slide in and take over the running of my household since I have made such a mess of it.

That is the First World War in a nutshell...though we are led to believe otherwise. I wonder, too, though I am no economist, if that is what is now happening in Greece, where there is financial chaos and 'someone else' would like to move in to take over the economy. Is this a test-drive for everywhere else?

When Jesus drove the money-changers out of the Temple, it wasn’t because they were offering loans or carrying out a fair business. He was incensed because the innocent people who wished to pray and live their lives peacefully were being cheated and manipulated. Someone announced that all money was evil and so only the money that came directly from the Temple was good enough to be used to pay the stipulated price for any particular ceremony. The money-changers charged whatever they chose and people had no alternative but to pay it if they wished to carry out their religious practices.

Isn’t it interesting how this was one of only two occasions in the Gospels when Jesus was incensed? Isn’t it interesting how the money-changers (not the money lenders) evoke the wrath of heaven? Euro anyone? Americo anyone?

The second novel in my 'Shattered Crowns' trilogy (Shattered Crowns: The Sacrifice) will soon be available. It almost breaks my heart to write it when I see that 40 million people, who believed they were acting for good, died, in fact, for the benefit of so few and for so unjust a cause....

Kaiser Wilhelm - A House of Many Windows

2012-01-27T23:11:00.000Z

The better I ‘get to know’ Kaiser Wilhelm – whose birthday was 27th January – the more I feel for this man, who has been so reviled by historians. The First World War propaganda really settled into the psyche and to this day he is seen as the mad warmonger, which he never really was, I am sure.

The details of his traumatic birth and the effects of the disability of his arm have been repeated so often that it is hardly worth repeating them but it really must have had such an impact on a small child who, on the one hand was so flattered and manipulated – and basically used as a pawn against his parents - by Bismarck and others, and at the same time was intelligent enough to know that his disability might prove a major obstacle to the image he wished to create. After all, he had heard the whispers that ‘a one-armed man can never be Kaiser...’ and in a typical example of how cruelty breeds cruelty, he himself was later to make a similar statement about his own father when throat cancer rendered him speechless.

There is no doubt hat he could be cruel. His treatment of his mother, after his father’s death, is a prime example of this – but what goes on in families (his love-hate relationship with his mother), and still more what goes on in human minds can never really be understood by outsiders. His pride, his belligerence and his alleged madness, though, seem to be greatly exaggerated and misunderstood. When he was a small child, his mother wrote that he ‘ is very shy by nature and that often makes him look proud.’ That seems to have been the pattern of his life. His outward appearance, however, contrasted sharply with his obviously low opinion of himself.

He wasn’t always – in fact he was never! – the caricature on the propaganda posters. Again, when he was a child, his mother wrote that he, ‘is a dear, interesting, charming boy – clever, amusing, engaging – it is impossible not to spoil him a little. He is growing so handsome and his large eyes have now and then a dreamy expression and then again they sparkle with fun and delight. He too has his failings; he is inclined to be selfish, domineering and proud, but I must say they, too, are not his own fault as they have been hitherto more encouraged than checked.’

One aspect of his character really stands out for me – his desire to be loved. His disability and the way in which the Prussian court kept him from his mother, seems to have left him with such a sense of insecurity and a longing to be accepted. Like many people, torn between conflicting emotions, he sometimes lashed out – trying to appear the strong man when the little boy inside him was crying to be loved. I think often, when reading more about him, of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lines: “The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.”

I do not believe for a moment that he wanted war and – as the title the first novel my trilogy shows! – I believe he, along with Tsar Nicholas, was easy prey for those who wished to find a scapegoat on which to blame the subsequent slaughter. Kaiser Wilhelm was a complex man of many shades of character, but he was also capable of great love. His desire to visit his grandmother, Queen Victoria, as she was dying, his interview with the Daily Telegraph in 1908 (which led to such a bizarre furore and contributed to his nervous breakdown), his willingness to rescue to the Russian Imperial family in the midst of the revolution when Germany and Russia were at war, and even his angry tantrums when war broke out, seem to me to bear witness to his capacity to love and his longing for love.

Ultimately, had he not been so manipulated by those around him, he might have shown his true character and would have come down through history very differently...

Truth - and weeds! - will out...

2012-01-18T23:35:00.004Z

At the height of the July Crisis of 1914 a certain German newspaper reported erroneously that the Kaiser had ordered a complete mobilisation of his army and war with Russia was imminent. Without a doubt that report was read in St. Petersburg and though, at that very time, the Kaiser and the Tsar were desperately corresponding via telegram and both were trying to avoid war, such a feeling of mistrust was aroused and such a sense of danger reported that public opinion all but dragged both Emperors into the terrible conflict.

The freedom of the press is of vital importance. The problem was....and is....that the press was owned by a small group of people who could manipulate and print whatsoever suited their agenda.

Fast forward several decades....In the 1980s I, along with many other people, frequently scoured the pages of the ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’ for the addresses of publishers to whom I might submit my work. At that time, the local library was filled with a huge non-fiction section with books on every fascinating subject imaginable and an equally large fiction section with such a huge selection of different styles of writing that it was a veritable gold mine of literature and learning. As time passed, something odd started to happen. The list of publishers in the ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’ became shorter...famous names and small presses were gradually being taken over by a few large companies until basically there were only two or three companies who owned everything. At the same time, the selection of non-fiction books in the library took up less space and the fiction section dwindled, too, in favour of videos and fewer classics. If you checked the publishers of these books, they all belonged to the same 4 or 5 companies.

At that time, I received some interesting replies to my letters and submissions to publishers. One told me that my biography of Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia ‘lacked sufficient scandal to be of interest to readers’. Another said, ‘historical fiction has had its day...’ (funny that there are more historical fiction sites than those devoted to any other genre now) and several ‘lost’ my manuscripts and there were many other odd goings on about that and how my ideas appeared elsewhere but that is of no importance now. One went even so far as to say, “we like your style. Write about sex and shopping and we’ll give you a chance’...er, no thank you! Sorry, but I couldn’t help but think of some jumped-up school leaver/junior reader looking for a break for him/herself with no experience of life....

Then, along came the internet! Whole new worlds opened up for writers – print on demand publishers...so different from so-called Vanity publishing (a derogatory term devised by those who wished to control what the masses read! And interestingly enough there is a fascinating list of classical authors who are now hailed as the best writers who had to publish their own books most of which had more to say than the dross thrown out by the publishers of their age). Amazon is incredible! How they deal with their writers and with their readers and purchasers is beyond a dream!! Respectful, fair, a customer-centred service in every possible way...access to books that I had only dreamed of finding before...and then came Kindle and other e-book publishers...books at our finger-tips...books on line....Google and WordPress blogs and above all, access to knowledge and truth and the freedom to choose from a wide variety of sources and make up our own minds about what is real and what is propaganda.

This is why I have Tweeted the Wikipedia blackout today. I do not believe that this dispute has anything to do with copyright, but has everything to do with a few people wanting to gain control of the internet, just as they gained control of the newspapers and then the publishing companies and TV stations. The copyright business is merely a smoke screen because the owners of newspapers and the mainstream media (including publishing) have had control of what they feed people for a very long time and internet freedom threatens this. They have not used this gift well but have often sought to manipulate rather than educate, or to dumb down rather than to raise up; to create fear rather than appeal to the true nature of humanity, which is love. Basically, some people have sought power of others’ minds and right now that power is threatened by the freedom of the internet. Of course, I don’t agree with stealing other people’s work (and that has been the prerogative of certain publishing houses which I could name but will refrain from so doing!) but there is something more important going on here.

Have you ever tried to get rid of weeds in your garden – especially those which grow between cracks in paving stones? Do what you like, they keep on sprouting...you clear one space and they sprout elsewhere and so it is with the human spirit and our innate attraction to freedom. In every aspect of my life, I see more and more clearly every day the wonderful freedom of the Divinity – the God/Source of All – who simply cannot be crushed and whose freedom can never be curtailed but which lives in every heart and in every being...It is Life itself, and no amount of policing can ever control it. What a wonderful world this can be if we strip away the blinkers, see through the smoke screens and have access to our birthright as free-thinkers and free-spirits!

We Actually Get On Rather Well....

2012-01-13T23:12:00.002Z

Many years ago as a student I spent the summers working as a guide in a well-known pilgrimage centre in southern France. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, not least because the place in which I worked needed only one person from each country to act as a guide for the people who spoke that language. Consequently, I was the only English person at the Youth Camp in the Pyrenees where we were housed. In the evenings, we all ate together and, even though we spoke in different languages (and I confess that English people are probably the worst in the world for mastering other languages – I stand in awe of those multi-lingual European, Asian and African friends!!), somehow we managed to communicate very clearly with one another and have some of the profound conversations that come with the fervour of youth!

Amid the laughter and the fun, we often joked about stereo-types (yes, the English were seen as undemonstrative, the Italians as ebullient, the Americans as friendly and so on and so on until we realised that we were playing our roles and laughed about it, hugged one another – or playing at being English, shook hands!) but one conversation recurred over and over again: how could we ever have been at war with each other? How could there ever be any wars, when people from all over the world enjoyed our differences, enjoyed laughing at ourselves, enjoyed learning about different ways of life and how things are in other countries...It reminded me very much of a garden filled with flowers of so many contrasting scents and colours but all blending together beautifully.

Ever since then, and from long before that, I have repeatedly asked myself the same question...how can there be wars when people are so interesting and so good? Why must we clash when we could live in harmony? I think of the soldiers of opposing sides who played football with each other at Christmas in 1914 and imagine they, too, had the same thought, “Why are we killing each other? They are just like us!”

For some time I have been working on the trilogy about the royalties in the First World War ‘Shattered Crowns’ and the more I learn, the more disgusted I am to discover the depths to which a very few people sank in order to gain control over many others for no other reason than to make up for their own sense of inadequacy and addiction to power. The same methods that they used to set the war in motion are still applied today. Firstly, create fear so people will listen to you. Secondly, give people an object for their fear (a nation or a terrorist group). Thirdly, do something dramatic and horrific to cause outrage in people so that they will agree to fight in the name of ‘right’. Once you have achieved that, you have your war. You can make a fortune from it in arms deals and financial takeovers and explain away the national debt, and at the same time take control of the natural resources of one country after another. It’s interesting, for example, that the Treaty of Versailles deprived Germany and Austria of the lands which were richest in resources....

In the 1980s, as I recall, the whole of South America seemed to be in a state of endless revolutions and discord. One after another so-called tyrants were being toppled but at the same time I was hearing from groups like Christian Aid and CAFOD that the fruit-growers (the ordinary, good people who made a living from the land) were being driven out of their homes and livelihood were having their crops – worth millions of pounds and dollars- taken over by ‘foreign’ companies. Interesting, too, that this came at the time when we were first told we need to eat/drink ‘five a day’ fruit wise. Last Spring/Summer the Middle East was filled with revolutions and there are all kinds of oil deals going on...The myth of global warming (oops, sorry, that was blown out of the water, now we call it climate change) was losing its impact so we needed something else to scare us...and to make us cheer about the ‘downfall of tyrants’ – Hurrah! They killed Bin Laden! Hurrah, they killed Gaddafi! Hurrah they killed Saddam! And before that, hurrah they killed Nicholas II! Hurrah, they killed Charles I! Hurrah they killed...they killed....they killed...and still it goes on....

And one day we wake up and find ourselves in a Youth Camp in Lourdes where there are Germans, English, American, Rwandan, Lebanese, South African, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Australian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iranian, Indian, Afghan, Iraqi, Mexican, Brazilian people (to name but a few!) sitting together, sharing ideas, appreciating differences...and it becomes clear that the people who think they rule the world are people of no nation beyond their own flimsy egos. We are not afraid of one another. We have no need to fear our neighbour. Most people are good and those who set out to destroy only do so to make up for their own sense of inadequacy.

Wouldn’t t it be wonderful if this could be the year to end war? When, rather than being built on murder and sacrifice and fear, the vision for the future is built on wisdom, toleration, beauty, appreciation of differences, confidence in our own innate loveliness and above all mutual respect? I believe it is possible if we believe in the innate goodness and Godliness of people, instead of believing in the darkness of others....

2012

2012-01-06T23:37:00.002Z

As a small child you learn that if you touch fire it hurts a lot, and you’d be a fool to keep doing it....so you don’t do it again. Maybe you try once more...it hurts even more...the pain is greater and if you don’t learn after the third time, you’d learn it sooner or later and stop doing it. Why don’t we learn the same thing about wars and invasions and inflicting our views on other people?

The 20th century produced the two most horrific examples of mass slaughter ever known. While the average soldier believed at the time that he was fighting for truth or freedom or to protect the weak or some other great notion, the First World War was fought quite simply to keep bankers and industrialists happy, to give them more power and to overthrow those autocracies which would not allow their system of banking to operate. It sickens me immensely to think of the hundreds of thousands of families around the world who lost loved ones in that war. It sickens me that my grandmother believed to the end of her life that her beloved brother and brother-in-law who died in some dark shell-hole on the Somme died for some cause that seemed worthwhile at the time. I state this quite plainly: they died to allow certain banking families to gain control of the Russian and German banks; to prevent Germany from gaining access to oil in the Middle East; to destroy the Catholic Church’s hold over Austria-Hungary and the Orthodox Church’s control over Russia. This wasn’t a matter of one religion fighting another – it was rather a matter of realising that the strength of a belief is the most powerful force in the world and it was necessary to destroy those beliefs in order to gain complete control of a country...and its wealth and its resources and its banking.

Outside various English cities there are protests against capitalism. I think this is misguided. The people who protest know that something is very wrong. They know, as all the world knows, that we are all sick of war and we have no reason to kill one another. They know, too, that we are frequently presented with ‘paper tigers’ – supposed enemies who are created like bogeymen to scare children so that we will go on supporting wars. It’s not, to my mind, a matter of capitalism – after all, capitalism is freedom: it quite simply means that if you have an idea to create a business and people want what you are selling they can buy it and you can provide jobs and use your talents to the full.

Does the average American want to have anything to do with what is going on in Iran? Does the average British person have any idea about the history of Afghanistan...or Iraq for that matter? Had the average German person in 1914 any idea who Archduke Franz Ferdinand was? Had anyone in France even heard of Sarajevo?

When I was growing up, we were constantly warned of the imminent threat of a nuclear attack from Russia. At the same time, we were warned to beware of – and saw – the attacks of the IRA. These threats eventually faded but were very quickly replaced by threats from further afield....now we had to beware of attacks from other religious extremists....Why? Quite simply because if the people are afraid, they accept whatever they are told. If we are frightened, we will fight wars, believing we are being brave....we will accept that recessions are the fault of our overspending....we will go on putting our hands in the fire and so it continues....

Enough is enough. Haven't we learned yet?

What if we just stopped bothering? What if we all said: God bless the Hindus, the Moslems, the Christians, the Jews, the people of all denominations and beliefs, the atheists, the black people, the white people, the people of every shade of colour, the gay people, the straight people, the hot-heads and the apathetic...and then got on with our lives. There would be no need for war....there would be no need to listen to the liars who lead people into war...and the paper tigers would be seen in their true light and we could all get on with our lives.

2012 could be the most wonderful year. It could be the end of the world as we know it - the world that has been so marred by deceit and by war! Bring it on! It could be the year when we take away the blinkers and learn to respect and love our neighbour and stop listening to those who create only fear in order to achieve their own ends; and instead minded our own business and loved those around us and that would truly be the beginning of the world as we know it can be.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T01:08:00.000Z

Happy New Year!

So much has been written of 2012 and all kinds of stories are afoot. It seems to me that after the tumult of recent years (and by ‘recent’ I mean over 2 centuries or perhaps 2 millennia!) this year seems a perfect time to:

“....preach deliverance to the captives, and sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the year of favour, and the day of reward.”

The shake-up in the belief in submission to the authority of governments, ministers, historical lies, wars...in fact the whole caboodle of those who provoke fear, seems to be drawing to a close. People of the past have seemed to love a leader as though we are incapable of thinking for ourselves and believing in our natural goodness, preferring to go along with a notion of original sin.

What if tomorrow – New Year’s Day – we awake with the awareness of the dignity and brilliance of every other being on this planet and beyond? What if we no longer needed to rely on someone to tell us that we need to fear this terrorist or that economic decline? What if we return to our roots and reality and know that all is well, that we are love and we are loved and we can make this year very beautiful and very different from the slavery of dependence on others’ ideas....What a beautiful world this can be!

Whoever you are, if you read this, I wish you every blessing for 2012 and thank you for visiting my blog!

With much love for you at the start of this brilliant New Year!

Christina

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T22:42:00.000Z

Wishing you a very joyful, beautiful and lovely Christmas!

Thank you for reading my blog throughout this year. Although we might not know each other, I am bidding you all the blessings of the season and all good thoughts, wishes and prayers.

Merry Christmas!

Queen Victoria's Excessive Mourning

2011-12-14T12:26:00.000Z

The death of Prince Albert on 14th December 1861 had a profound effect on his family. It often seems to me that in the midst of Queen Victoria’s excessive mourning, the effects on Prince Albert’s children have been overlooked. The video at the end of this post points out some of the implications.

Another thought often occurs to me, which might be a little more controversial. The story of Victoria and Albert is seen as one of the great royal love stories of all time and I do not doubt for a moment that the Queen adored her ‘beloved angel’ but there is something about the excesses of her mourning (including her refusal to be cajoled from it – she actually wrote to her daughter, Vicky, that she enjoyed thinking of her sorrow!) that gives me the impression of ‘she doth protest too much’. Queen Victoria, it seems to me, was what is now called co-dependent. Her love – though genuine – was perhaps not in the least what might be called real/mature love in which the object of one’s affection is seen as a person in his/her own right with his/her own needs. When Queen Victoria loved someone, she ‘needed’ them and, in some ways, seemed to sap the life from them. It is interesting, though very sad, that Prince Albert, John Brown and Disraeli were all such men, and, though the Queen would do anything to defend and support them, such support seems to spring more from a need in herself, rather than a mature, respectful acceptance and love of another individual. It might even be said that her treatment of Melbourne was the precursor for this. She so needed him that she was prepared to cast the constitution aside and override parliament, even putting the monarchy at risk in order to keep him by her. It was not only with those to whom she formed a romantic attachment, however, that she behaved in this way. Her reluctance to allow her daughter, Beatrice, to marry, and then her insistence that Beatrice and her husband remain living with her, is a similar example. “I must have a daughter with me...” she wrote to Vicky.

Another interest fact is that in March 1861, the death of Victoria’s mother threw her into a state of utter despair to the extent that even beloved Albert felt compelled to tell her to basically ‘pull herself together’. There was a great deal of guilt involved in her sorrow, due to her disregard of her mother in the immediate years following her accession. Did she also feel a sense of guilt around Albert’s death? Is that why she went to overboard on preserving his memory?

Queen Victoria is someone whom I admire immensely, and none of this is meant as a criticism – merely as an observation. The starkness of her childhood, the cruelty of John Conroy and the early death of her father seem to have left her as a very needy person. At no time in her adult life was she without a ‘prop’ – whether it was Melbourne or the Munshi – and such was her dependence on these people that when they died (not the Munshi! He outlived her!) she truly felt as though a part of her own soul/being had been wrenched from her.

(As an aside, I do not believe Albert died of typhoid: Prince Albert and Typhoid - A Myth? )

Thanks heavens for these lovely people!

2011-12-01T19:26:00.000Z

Thank heavens for the lovely people who carry out these projects!

Who would ever buy products that were tested on animals?

Happy Birthday, Empress Frederick!

2011-11-21T21:05:00.000Z

Happy Birthday to Queen Victoria’s brilliant daughter, Princess ‘Vicky’ – German Empress Frederick, and mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II!

Some years ago, I visited Osborne House – a place which, more than any other I think, captures the essence of the happy childhood that Vicky and siblings enjoyed. In the gardens around the Swiss Cottage there was such a sense of the children busily planting their flowers and vegetables; and in the little children’s museum, Vicky’s collection of fossils etc. was so moving as it looked like it might have been placed there earlier that day. There was a quite overwhelming sense of Vicky in that place...not surprising really since she forever seemed to long to return to the safe world of her happy childhood.

Continuing the story of the fascinating life of Queen Victoria:

Queen Victoria - A series in several parts

2011-11-18T18:57:00.000Z

It's quite staggering to me that, even after all these years and the vast amount of available information, many people still view Queen Victoria as a humourless and very stern widow. Often, I have asked schoolchildren what they know of her and they invariably say, "She always wore black...she was not amused....she was very strict...."
For this reason we (Hilliard & Croft) are making a series of videos, intending to show her lighter and more human side. We intend to alternate the narration of the videos and this is the first, while I have narrated - and which I hope you will enjoy. The second video in the series will be available shortly. (The still image is not what we would have chosen, and that will be rectified very soon with a more attractive image!)

A New Video

2011-11-15T19:04:00.000Z

I have a new video of the background to 'Most Beautiful Princess':

Please make allowance for my cold!! (The weather has been very damp of late!!)

Happy Birthday, Ella

2011-11-01T10:01:00.000Z

Remembering Grand Duchess Elizabeth, born 1st November 1864

False Flags and Fantasies

2011-10-26T23:40:00.000+01:00

Few things in the recorded history of ‘world events’ are ever as simple as they first appear and, when it comes to wars and the lust for power, things become very murky indeed. The relatively recent term ‘false flag’ refers to events wherein an atrocity or other emotive event is committed by one group of people (often against their own people) disguised as enemies in order – quite often - to provoke their own people to rise up in indignation or even go to war. The term comes from the naval practice of flying an enemy’s flag rather than one’s own while engaging in ‘dastardly deeds’.

As Bonfire Night draws nigh, the shops are already beginning to sell fireworks to celebrate the 5th November, the date on which in 1605 the Catholic plot to blow up the king and the Houses of Parliament was foiled. 400 years later, there are several unanswered questions relating to this alleged plot (who wrote to Monteagle to inform him of the conspiracy? What was the fiercely anti-Catholic Cecil’s role in this? Why did the first search of the cellars overlook the barrels of gunpowder etc. etc.?) Some historians suggest that the whole thing was a deliberate ploy by Cecil, who, with Monteagle as his spy, engineered the whole event in order to provoke anti-Catholic feeling which would then facilitate a purge of the Catholics. Insufficient information is available to know whether or not this is so, but it would make a lot of sense in the light of the murky dealings which continue in politics to this day. Monteagle, however, did, I believe, do rather well out of the whole affair and if it were a false flag event, it was very successful since we even celebrate it today!

I believe that the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was another false flag event. He was, of course, murdered by Gavrilo Princip, but who set that young lad up? Who provided him and his equally bungling co-conspirators (no different from Guy Fawkes’ co-conspirators) with weapons and the perfect place to stand to fire his gun? Who gained from his murder? Well...the answer to that is quite obvious – the ministers who feared his accession and the bankers who loaned huge sums of money to governments to stage a war and then charged exorbitant interest on their loans. And for this so many millions of people died!

What goes on behind the scenes is so appalling that the majority of us cannot believe it to be true. It is written off as ‘conspiracy theory’ or wacky delusional people seeking some explanation for the atrocities that are so often committed in our name but even a cursory glance into the pages of history shows that very few wars have been fought for a genuine reason; very few – if any! - persecutions have had any genuine benefits for anyone other than the few who love to control and to satisfy their own lust for power. Nowadays, when everything is so much more politically correct, we don’t persecute others or wage wars to promote our own interests....no, we do it now to protect innocent people in foreign lands (as long as those lands have oil and gold).

The Downfall of Tyrants

2011-10-21T23:19:00.002+01:00

The downfall and death of tyrants is a very murky subject and one which leaves me wondering why anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history, psychology or spirituality could ever want power. There are, however, two factors which seem worth mentioning. Firstly, the effect on the tyrant, and secondly the bizarre behaviour (not to mention hypocrisy) of those who seem to gloat in the death of any other human being.
Shakespeare captured it all so perfectly in ‘Macbeth’ wherein the eponymous hero descends into a mental abyss which eventually drives him into delusional insanity, despair and ultimately a very unhappy death.

William the Conqueror – not a likeable man by any means but one who was filled with an overriding personal ambition and who is best remembered for his success at the Battle of Hastings – was eventually killed from an abdominal wound and his naked corpse was deserted by his former ‘friends’ and left lying alone for a whole day and worse was to come:

An interesting post

Ivan the Terrible, saw his country spiral into chaos and lived in terror before he suffered a stroke and died. According to Trotsky, (who was killed after being hit on the head with an ice-pick!) death for Lenin was “a deliverance from physical and moral suffering.” I have been told by various people that Lenin’s brain rather resembled a walnut, so destroyed was it by syphilis (which, at that time, was known to cause insanity). Stalin, having lived in fear of so many of his enemies, suffered a stroke and was left to die untended in his own excrement. Hitler, in despair, killed himself. It is impossible not to think that if someone is so filled with darkness, they are bound to meet a terrible end, not only physically but - far more horrifically - morally/psychologically/spiritually – basically an end in complete despair and terror, which is surely even worse than any physical suffering. It is, perhaps, significant that Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King Louis XVI of France, both of whom were later quite irrationally branded as tyrants, met their end with great dignity and, in spite of the tragedy, appeared to be at peace within themselves.

In recent time we have been presented with horrific images of the downfall of tyrants and, while on the one hand, it is to be expected that tyrants meet such unhappy ends, on the other it seems more than a little odd to me that nowadays they are always found hiding in holes and are then butchered in self-righteous mania. Gadaafi had indeed committed appalling crimes, as had Saddam Hussein but to see graphic images of any man – whatever his crimes – being killed in such circumstances is, to my mind, beneath the dignity of humanity. Nor can these relatively recent images be overlooked:

In his satirical novel, Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding described the difference between vanity and hypocrisy. Vanity, he said, is a person doing good in order to be seen and praised. Hypocrisy is a person doing evil disguised as good. One minute the world rulers are befriending this man. The next we hear that his crimes have been going on for 40 years. Then why were people shaking him by the hand so recently? If I recall correctly, the West was funding the Taliban when the Russians were involved in Afghanistan...but then the Taliban were our enemy. Saddam Hussein was also funded by the West during the Iran-Iraq War....And of course, to go back a little further, Churchill, who spoke so dramatically of the ‘Iron Curtain’ was a one-time ‘friend’ of Stalin...

When I see one man crawling out from a hole, looking like a terrified rat, and then being killed by those he has harmed, I find it shocking. When I see another man allegedly being found in some remote compound and then being dropped from a ship before anyone can see him, I find it a little stage-managed. When I see a third person appearing in a blood-soaked shirt, begging for mercy and being killed, I find it repulsive. It is even more repulsive when, in the same news report, there is a mention that happily Libya’s oil-production is now returning to normal.

Well....whatever really goes on behind the scenes, I cannot think of a worse end than that of a tyrant, whether he be one who is blatantly a criminal, or one who manipulates from behind the scenes = the 'dark forces' that Queen Elizabeth once spoke of...

Bismarck and Karma

2011-10-16T12:00:00.000+01:00

While researching – for a new novel based on the life of Moretta of Prussia – I have been quite fascinated by the relationship between Bismarck and the German Emperor’s family and cannot help thinking of the irony of his ultimate downfall. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ is credited with having

successfully brought about German Unification (though the part played by Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia – later Frederick III – was deliberately written out of the history of this) and he had undoubtedly a great deal of political nous and foresight (he predicted with uncanny accuracy that the First World War would occur twenty years after his fall from power and also said it would spring from some minor event in the Balkans). His methods, however, were utterly ruthless and while, on the one hand, he is seen as a great statesman who did a great deal of good for the people, on the other he sometimes seems to be a megalomaniac who would use any underhand means to dispose of his enemies. He deliberately incited various ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary to cause trouble for their Emperor; he deceitfully provoked the Franco-Prussian War, he suppressed any group which he perceived to be a threat to his plans (Catholics and socialists were his main target), and he often used invented scandals to destroy his political opponents.

“I wonder why he does not say straight out,” wrote the then Crown Princess Victoria, “ ‘as long as I live both Constitution and Crown are suspended’ because that is the exact state of the matter. No doubt his is patriotic and sincere and thinks it for the good of Germany. He thinks that a great central power is necessary and that one will must decide and that state be everything and do everything like one vast set of machinery – say the ‘Inflexible’ for instance where the captain works everything alone and directs the ship by electricity etc. So Prince Bismarck wishes, with the press of a little finger, to direct the whole....”

It is unsurprising that the Crown Princess (later Empress Frederick) was so opposed to the Chancellor. Not only were his policies totally contrary to her own more liberal views, and not only had he purposely side-lined her husband, but he had deliberately denigrated the Crown Princess herself, inventing scurrilous stories to destroy her reputation and, perhaps most cruelly of all, had played a major part in turning her eldest son – Wilhelm – against her.

To Bismarck it seems that Wilhelm was something of a puppet. Having flattered him as he was growing up and filled his head with a sense of his own importance, he (Bismarck) almost seemed to believe that he would always be able to manipulate his protégé. The fatal illness and untimely death of Wilhelm’s father must have appeared as a miracle for the elderly statesman who, even as Frederick was dying, was encouraging Wilhelm to step into his shoes as Emperor. In 1888, Wilhelm became Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Chancellor surely expected to be able to manipulate him as he had manipulated his grandfather. He was in for a rude awakening as the arrogance which he himself had fostered in the prince, was to turn against him as though like Dr. Frankenstein he had created a monster which he could not control.

I do not for a moment, however, think Wilhelm was a monster. In the days after his father’s death, he behaved appallingly – surrounding and ransacking the palace where his mother was grieving, in search of private papers; he then basically threw her out of the palace until, for a while, she and her younger daughters had no idea where they would live; he changed the name of the palace to obliterate his father’s memory and in his first speech made strong references to his grandfather but none whatsoever to his father. But Wilhelm’s relationship with his mother was extremely complicated. Bismarck had truly turned him against her and yet, on some level, as a chid and beyond he had adored her (even writing her disturbing letters which sound almost like love letters, and which she felt it prudent to ignore) and I cannot help wonder whether what happened next had something to do with his getting revenge on the man who had treated her so badly.

Far from being a puppet, Wilhelm had strong views of his own and – surprisingly, perhaps, to those who see him a a ‘warlord’ – one of his main concerns at the beginning of his reign, was the welfare of workers. Bismarck, in his determination to crush all opposition,planned to employ a strategy that he had employed before to good effect – he wished to provoke the socialists into an armed uprising so that the police/armed forces could be called in to crush them completely. Wilhelm, who was far more sympathetic to the workers’ demands, was appalled when he discovered this plan and absolutely refused to turn his troops on his own people. Eventually he left the Chancellor no option but to resign. His unceremonious departure must, on some level, have given Wilhelm the sense of having repaid him for his treatment of his parents. The most ironic part of all – true Karma! – came when Bismarck approached Wilhelm’s mother, whom he had treated so badly for so long, and, in desperation, asked her to speak on his behalf to her son. Empress Frederick – without any bitterness (she actually wrote that she felt sorry for Bismarck) – replied in all honesty that she had no influence whatsoever over Wilhelm since Bismarck himself had deliberately destroyed the bond between them.

Karma indeed.....

Not Born to Rule?

2011-10-06T18:57:00.001+01:00

Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that the majority of the monarchs who reigned during the First World War had come to the throne either by ‘chance’ or rather sooner than expected? Most of them were not born as heirs, and those who had been prepared from childhood to rule, succeeded following the premature deaths of their fathers.

In Britain, George V had not expected to be king but the untimely death of

his elder brother, Albert Victor, led to his eventual accession. In Austria-Hungary, the aged Franz Josef only became Emperor when his uncle was forced to abdicate during the many upheavals of 1848. When Franz Josef died in the middle of the wa

r, the crown passed to Karl, who would not have become emperor were it not for the suicide (murder?) of Franz Josef’s son, Rudolf, and the murder of Karl’s uncle, Franz Ferdinand. In Belgium, the deaths of his cousin, Leopold, and his elder brother, Baudouin led to King Albert’s accession; while in Italy, King Victor Emmanuel succeeded his assassinated father. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II might have known from their earliest years that one day they would become emperors, but neither expected their fathers to die so soon. Wilhelm’s father reigned only for three months, while Nicholas’s father died rather suddenly at the age of only 49. The kings of Roumania and Bulgaria and were foreign ‘imports’ who were somewhat unexpectedly offered the thrones; while in Greece, King George I was a Danish prince whose murder led to the accession of son, Constantine; and shortly before the outbreak of war the war, the Serbian King Peter handed over authority to his son, Alexander, who acted as his regent.

Perhaps all of this has no real meaning but it does strike me as rather strange....

(For more about the royalties in the First World War, please visit the site: Shattered Crowns

19th Century Royalties

2011-09-14T15:44:00.000+01:00

I am gradually compiling a guide to the 19th centuries royalties, with particular emphasis on Queen Victoria's family. The intention is to provide information, links (to relevant sites and blog posts from all over the net) and book recommendations. This is very much in the early stages - merely an introduction and outline of Queen Victoria's children and grandchildren - over 3 pages so far (please check the links at the top of the 'About' page)but if I would welcome any recommendations of blog posts, the links to which might be added. If you have written a post about any of Queen Victoria's children or grandchildren, please feel free to contact me.

Queen Victoria & Other 19th Century Royalties

Queen Victoria's Favourite Authors

2011-09-10T14:43:00.000+01:00

Alongside being a prolific letter-writer and lover of poetry, Queen Victoria greatly enjoyed contemporary novels, particularly those about the lives of ordinary people. Among her favourite authors were Dinah Craik, whose novel John Halifax, Gentleman was probably her most successful work (and, incidentally, made into a BBC television series in the 1970s).

Of Mrs. Craik, Queen Victoria wrote to her eldest daughter, Vicky,:
“Have you ever read two pretty, simple but very pleasantly written novels called ‘A Noble Life’ by the authoress of ‘J. Halifax’ and ‘Janet’s Home’? They have both been read to me of an evening and I like them so much. Not sensation novels but pretty, simple stories, full of truth and good feeling.”

Mrs. Oliphant was another of the Queen favourite authors and, with her love

of all things Scottish, she greatly enjoyed ‘Merkland’ which she described as ‘An old – but excellent Scotch’ novel.’ In 1868 the Queen met Mrs Oliphant whom she considered, “very pleasant and clever looking.’

Naturally, her friendship with the Prime Minister, Disraeli, led her to

greatly appreciate his novels, too, and when her own ‘Leaves from a Highland Journal’ was published, she was greatly flattered when he spoke to her as a fellow-writer, “We authors, ma’am…”

Marie Correlli - a writer of popular novels – also appealed to the Queen, as did Wilkie Collins, Dickens and George Eliot, regardless of the scandal of the latter’s private life. Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s biography of Byron, however, Queen Victoria considered shocking since it included information about the poet’s incestuous relationship with his sister.

“That Byron scandal is too shameful; I have not read it as I have a particular horror of scandal and gossip, and it is quite untrue. Mrs. Stowe has behaved shamefully.”

Queen Victoria and Alfred, Lord Tennyson

2011-09-09T23:28:00.000+01:00

Continuing the theme of royalties and the arts, Queen Victoria’s friendship with Alfred, Lord Tennyson is very fascinating. Being a neighbour on the Isle of Wight, Tennyson was sometimes invited from his home, Farringford (now The Farringford Hotel ), to Osborne House where Queen Victoria, who enjoyed his work, liked to spend time in his company, though, as she wrote to her daughter, Vicky, she found him rather dark and gloomy at times and described him as looking ‘very old’.

The role of Poet Laureate cannot have been more difficult for any other poet than it was for Tennyson. With so large a family and numerous weddings and funerals, the Queen frequently asked him for a new poem to mark the occasion. Consequently, some of Tennyson’s dullest and most trite poems are dedicated to various members of the royal family and nowadays sound a little like doggerel, like his dreadful and clumsy poem for Princess Alice, which begins:

Dead Princess, living Power, if that, which lived
True life, live on—and if the fatal kiss,
Born of true life and love — divorce thee not
From earthly love and life —....

and on and on and on it goes!

The Queen undoubtedly asked him to write these things and had such faith in him because she was so impressed and comforted by his ‘In Memoriam’ for beloved Albert. “Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort...” wrote Queen Victoria, a year after Albert’s death.can imagine him, sometimes, thinking, “Oh no, what am I to write this time? How can I make this different from the last memorial or wedding verse?” At the same time, the Queen wrote to Vicky that she found some of his work difficult to understand and Vicky – that brilliant mind! – replied that she couldn’t make sense of it either! Queen Victoria, however, not only asked him to supply suitable poems, she also asked him if he could find a way to remove Gladstone from office – a request to which Tennyson politely and tactfully replied that it was beyond his capabilities!

A simpler relationship between writers and royalty was that between Charles Ludwig Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Leopold...

A Princess Alice in Wonderland

Royal Patronage of the Arts

2011-09-03T14:51:00.000+01:00

In the guidebook to Frogmore House and the Royal Mausoleum, there is a photograph of a fan designed and painted by Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, Vicky, and presented to her mother in 1856. Alas, I cannot scan or post the photograph, and a description will not do it justice. The detail of flowers, an angel and a classical figure are so exquisite that it is difficult to believe that this was not created by a professional artist with many years of experience but by a sixteen year old girl (and it certainly puts many modern works of so-called art to shame!).
Although Vicky continued to paint throughout her life, it is not easy to find copies of her work and this is surely a great loss to the art world.

Many members of Queen Victoria’s family were gifted artists. Members of the Royal Academy said that Prince Albert, some of whose painting hang on the walls of Osborne House, could have been a professional artist had he not been a prince (and, incidentally, the composer Mendelsohn said he could have been a successful composer);

Vicky’s sister, Princess Louise, was an equally accomplished sculptor who created this statue of Queen Victoria, which stands in Kensington Gardens; and Queen Victoria herself was skilled in watercolours and oils as her painting of Prince Albert shows.

Artistic and musical themselves, Queen Victoria’s family – like many other royal families of Europe – were also great patrons of the arts and they were aware that their patronage was not simply a matter of personal gratification but that they were preserving some of the greatest works of art for the nation. The much-maligned Grand Duke Serge of Russia, husband of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, was renowned for his art collections and he made it clear that he wished to ensure that these treasures were being kept for Russia, not for his own pleasure (though he undoubtedly took pleasure in them, too). Queen Victoria, despite her initial reluctance to be seen on photographs,was also an early patron of photography as this article shows.

Queen Victoria and Photography

Kaiser Wilhelm – an enthusiastic archaeologist – was also eager to continue in the tradition of Frederick the Great in cultivating the art, poetry and literature of his country.

Another interesting article shows the importance of royal patronage for French artists and how their careers suffered during and after the revolution.

French Royal Patronage

It often seems to me that it is possible to judge the state of civilisation in a nation not only by the way it treats its animals but also by its contribution to art, literature and music and, alongside their many other contributions to society, I think the role of royalties in patronising the arts cannot be underestimated.

Queen Marie of Roumania's Appreciation of Beauty

2011-08-28T12:44:00.000+01:00

Queen Marie of Roumania - herself one of the most beautiful princesses of her age - was cousin to Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia: "The most beautiful princess in Europe". She wrote of her:

"...This faculty of enjoying beauty as a whole and in detail has followed me all through life. Line, colour, form, and the sounds and scents belonging to each picture, have made life extraordinarily rich, and with every one of those unforgettable impressions comes always that feeling of gratitude for each new beauty revealed to my soul.

Today I still feel grateful to beloved Queen Alexandra for the vision of beauty she was to me...This other beautiful woman had a tragic and terrible fate. She was the Grand Duchess Elisabeth of Russia, my cousin, sister of the late Czarina. She had married one of my mother's younger brothers, the Grand Duke Serge. He was blown up by Nihilists, long, long before the revolution, whilst governor of Moscow. She then entered holy orders, building a convent in which she lived; but her holy life brought her no mercy from the Bolsheviks. She was abominably slaughtered in Siberia, but, curiously enough, her body was found and later on transported to Jerusalem, where it now lies in the Holy Land.
She was quite newly married when her beauty burst upon me as a marvellous revelation. Her loveliness was of what used to be called the "angelic" kind. Her eyes, her lips, her smile, her hands, the way she looked at you, the way she talked, the way she moved, all was exquisite beyond words; it almost brought tears to your eyes."

Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats

2011-08-15T23:13:00.002+01:00

I am very happy to say that "Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats" is now available in paperback.

Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats

'In England Now'

2011-08-12T23:44:00.000+01:00

Some years ago someone whose opinion, spirituality and intelligence I trust said that there is a small group of people (eight families, I believe) who wish to control the world and this group of people have been working through various means to achieve that end for the past 150 years or more. It seemed so bizarre and contrary to all I had learned, lived by, my spirituality and my world-view that I couldn’t make sense of it and so, without disputing it, I simply decided to watch from an impartial standpoint and see what I saw. Since then, I have discovered and seen many things. I have read the biographies of people who, with amazing courage and great honesty, wrote of how they were hired by various government agencies to incite revolutions (notably in South America in the 1980s) in order to pressurise the presidents or governments there into handing over their most arable land to fruit producing companies. I have read sermons from priests about their work among the poor of Africa and how the people have been deprived of their usual crops and compelled to buy seed from big companies who have genetically manipulated those seeds so that they do not naturally reproduce the following year. I have observed the way in which animals are appalling treated and how pharmaceutical companies introduce dangerous toxins into the food chain, then provide cures for the results and keep people on medication for their entire lives (at great profit to themselves). I have seen, too, how the American Constitution – that flagship of freedom!! - appears to be being deliberately dismantled and how the countries of Europe are being compelled to hand over their independence to a central body in Brussels and how just about everything I was taught about the history of the world since about 1789 was inaccurate or, to be honest, a lie.

To be frank, I am not a conspiracy theorist – not because I doubt that there are conspiracies but because I not really very interested in what politicians do or don’t do and who is right and who is wrong. Most of the time it seems a bit silly to me – little boys (and now girls) playing little power games. I would much rather walk in the woods, look at trees, ducks, flowers, goats, dogs, the sky and read poetry, listen to music and commune with nature; and I believe – or rather know with all my heart and soul – that there is a far greater and more beautiful power beyond all the childishness of power-seekers - but sometimes it just feels right to speak out.

In the light of recent events, England must appear as a very sorry place to

be: a place of mindless violence, unrest, riots and discord. Firstly, these events took place in relatively small areas of the country. Secondly, is it really possible that this violence erupted spontaneously and on such a scale from people who – let’s be honest – appear to be so easily led by a mass mentality and not to be able to think for themselves. Something or someone co-ordinated it. Thirdly, what is the significance and relation to this of the recent Bilderberg meetings? Is there a connection or not? Why is Bilderberg so secret? Why are we suddenly intervening in Libya? Why are we in Afghanistan? Why is someone creating a constant climate of fear? Why are people like Peter Mandelson (one time member of the Young Communist League) living in luxury and appearing at Bilderberg meetings, created as Peers of the Realm? Why is Tony Blair, who lied to Parliament about Iraq’s supposed W.M.D.s making a fortune from oil-producing countries now? Why was President Obama awarded the Nobel Peace Prize simply for being elected president? We have let things go on unchecked for too long and now, this past week's chaos appears like the oubreak of a fever that signifies the bringing to a head of an illness that is being cured.

Happily, something really wonderful is coming out of all of this mayhem. If you want to destroy a nation – as Russia was destroyed in 1917 and Germany a year later, and as many S. American countries were destroyed in the 1980s – first you must create chaos. The South American countries, re-invented themselves. Now, they seem like the safest places on earth. The recent chaos in England has brought out the true English and wonderfully multi-cultural character! Far from creating a climate of fear, these events have created an amazing awareness of who we really are! I have yet to see a more dignified response to something so horrific, as the response of

Mr. Tariq Jahan to the murder of his son. This Moslem gentleman, to whom all our hearts and love go out, spoke so powerfully as he called for peace and of his faith. Then there were the Sikhs who silently stood outside their Temple to prevent any attack. They did not want violence. They simple stood there to protect what was sacred to them. The brilliantly outspoken Christian Archbishop of York, John Sentamu,

who cut up his clerical collar and refuses to wear it again until there is freedom in Zimbabwe, and who has done so much for the local community, appeared on the BBC saying that if attackers approached his door, he would defend his family and his home with a cricket bat if necessary. And hundreds of ordinary English people appeared on the streets not to act as vigilantes but to protect their own communities and clear up the mess left by the riots. This is England. Immediately we all step into the ‘spirit of the blitz’ and this normally reserved nation suddenly remembers that we are proud of our communities and our tolerance and way of life. It might take a riot or two to remind us who we are but, after years of socialist propaganda and the attempts to create fear, we are still a nation of eccentrics and communities; a tolerant nation and a nation of individuals.

It seems to me that these recent events have achieved the very opposite effect than was planned. Now, perhaps, they will attempt to police the internet in the name of protecting us, but really it won’t work. There is a power far greater than any material, financial or political machine, and it simply cannot be eradicated. That is the power that lives within all of us -the beauty and divinity and sacredness of humanity and the soul that cannot be crushed.

The Art of Distraction

2011-08-09T23:36:00.001+01:00

A conjuror appears on the stage and, with dance-like movements, draws our attention to his right hand while his left hand – unseen – cleverly conceals the trickery that leaves us amazed by his magic. Sometimes I try to look away from what the right hand is doing or from what we are being guided to see, but most accomplished conjurors are so skilled in the art of distraction that their performances are successfully deceptive and we see only what they want us to see.

Since the advent of newspapers and, more effectively, since the advent of televised news and 24 hour news, the art of the political conjuror has been honed in to perfection. It used to seem odd to me that one day there would be some ‘major’ government crisis in the news or, more poignantly, some jiggery-pokey with financial markets and within a day or two we were threatened by a terrible health scare or some outside threat that drove all coverage of the government/banking mess from the headlines. At one time there was SARS (and we would within a few weeks all be walking around wearing masks). Then there was bird flu – which would wipe out half the country if we weren’t careful. More recently (during our last Labour government’s mess) there was swine flu – the threat of which was so great that the government saw fit to put a glossy leaflet through the letter box of every house in the country, telling us to ‘dispose of tissues carefully’ and wash our hands after blowing our noses. Dear me, we must have been in a very sorry state to have to be taught basic hygiene! I also recall various bombings of embassies and even a war or two, when a British Prime Minister or an American President was coming under attack. On a wider scale, this goes beyond presidents and Prime Ministers, to what led to the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars – who had anything to gain? What was happening with the financial markets?

For the past few nights England, it seems, is being distracted by the riots in the cities – or at least in some parts of some cities. I do not underestimate the extent of the damage, or the horrendousness of what is happening, the devastation to some people’s businesses and their loss of livelihood and the fear evoked in particularly in some parts of London. If you look at the British newspapers’ headlines, you see images of burning buildings, looted shops and lines that shout ANARCHY! What is making everyone aghast is that there seems to be no reason behind this outbreak of madness. Those involved are mostly children or teenagers, running amok through their own communities and creating misery and terror. Here are some thoughts, though:

This is not about starving people looting shops because they are hungry; nor is it about government cuts or anything of the sort. This is a well-orchestrated series of events, led by people who are, according to eye-witnesses, guiding the rioters away from the police and who are in constant communication with each other. Who are these people and who is behind them? Children are very easy to lead; disaffected youths are even easier to provoke into violence, as Hitler knew so well. And while we are distracted by this mayhem – this orchestrated work of destruction – what is happening in the financial world? (Interesting that only a few months before the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of WW1, the Federal Reserve was set up in America?).

A great light in the middle of this: today in Chapeltown, Leeds – an area of the city that was involved in the 1981 riots – a peace rally was held by local business people and residents of all ages, stating their commitment to their community and demonstrating a spirit that goes beyond the manipulation of trouble-makers. In London, many young people went out into the streets to clear up the mess left by the nights of rioting. No matter how this is reported in the media and no matter how widespread it appears, this is not the true face of England, which remains filled with people who do care for one another and do not live by this manipulated mentality. England today still look like this:

and this:

And, turning from the distraction, what is going on with the financiers and the small group of people who would like to destroy the individuality of nations and the freedom of individuals?

Annus Mirabilis!

2011-07-30T23:54:00.000+01:00

It often seems that those who sit out storms come through them far stronger and far lighter and far wiser that ever before. Maybe some people remember the sadness in the Queen’s voice when, with what sounded like a sore throat and bad cold and a great deal of sorrow, she spoke of the ‘annus horribilis’ of 1992 – a year she would surely be happy to forget. The 1990s was a particularly unhappy decade for the Queen and, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, she came under increasingly unpleasant scrutiny from newspapers (which, incidentally, are now being shown in their true light...or rather darkness!). Happily, though, she did not buckle under but, as she has done for almost 60 years, continued in her role and remained true to herself.

Today, I am sure she must have really enjoyed the lovely wedding of her granddaughter Zara – a quite different and, for the Queen, probably less demanding occasion from the wedding of Prince William only three months ago. Already preparations are underway for her Diamond Jubilee and it is a lovely to think that perhaps, having come through the other side of the annus horribilis, it is now an annus mirabilis and thank heavens for the next generation!

Congratulations to Zara and Mike Tyndall (a good Yorkshire fellow!!) and I wish them a very happy life together!

Freedom of the Press & The Internet

2011-07-29T23:28:00.002+01:00

I love the internet! It seems to me to be the greatest innovation since the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel! The way in which people can communicate with friends across the world at any hour of the day or night, is brilliant. The way in which people who wouldn’t otherwise have ever met can come together is amazing. The way in which information is available at the press of a key is so rewarding. The way in which it is possible to learn and discover things that you might never have thought of is amazing; and, above all, the possibilities for sharing ideas and learning to see through the eyes of people who might live thousands of miles away is awe-inspiring. Once, while working on a book, I needed to know whether a particular car of a particular era would start by a key in the ignition or by winding a crank in the engine. Knowing nothing about engines I searched for an antique car forum, posed my question and within half an hour had 5 detailed replies from experts! How brilliant is that?

There are people who speak of the dangers of the internet because some social websites give rise to people – especially children – placing themselves at the mercy of predators. This is undoubtedly true but there have always been wicked people who use whatever methods are available to abuse others, and I think that, in time, children will become as aware of the dangers as children in the past were aware of the dangers of getting into strangers’ cars or taking sweets from strange men. Another – slightly amusing to me – ‘danger’ is what happens when you purchase a website and let it lapse. There is a website in my name which is now filled with ‘steamy sex secrets’ which have nothing to do with me, though it is still registered in my name and, since I once had cards printed with that website address and handed them out to many people in places where I give talks about the Victorians, it might be a bit weird if anyone goes to that site! That causes me a lot of amusement and, no matter what, I hope with all my heart that there will never be any form of internet censorship because that would be far worse than the so called dangers of the present freedom of expression.

The recent newspaper scandals of News International demonstrate the dangers of monopolies and what happens when free-speech or the ‘freedom of the press’ falls into the hands of a few magnates. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1914, a German newspaper published a totally false story of Germany’s war preparations and military mobilisation. Only two years previously, the British Prime Minister, Asquith, had warned the Kaiser of the danger of German newspapers being dominated by a small group of people with their own agenda. That article, I am sure, was a deliberate attempt to raise fear across Europe and provoke war.

The exchange of ideas available on the internet overrides the news that is fed to people by the standard papers and TV broadcasts – which are often indirectly under government control - and allows people to look beneath the surface of what we are being told. From such a position, people are able to form our own opinions without relying on some magnate’s slant on what is happening in the world.

And, speaking of the internet, please visit our new blog, which has just been set up:
Lost in the myths of history
and also, if you feel inclined, a new website (which won’t be sold on!)
Hilliard & Croft

Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats

2011-07-25T21:18:00.002+01:00

I am delighted that the paperback version of Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats is now complete and will be available for purchase within the next fourteen days (or less!).

3rd Excerpt from "Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats"

2011-07-16T23:24:00.002+01:00

This excerpt takes place immediately after the funeral of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, when Archduke Karl meets with the Czech princes who attended the requiem..

“....Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla…”
“Day of wrath, that dreadful day, the whole world shall lie in ashes…” he whispered, when suddenly the sound of raised voices echoed from the Medieval Gate where three men stood talking loudly.
Striding in their direction, Karl immediately recognised them as the Czech Princes Kinsky, Schwarzenberg and Lobkowitz, who had knelt reverently in the chapel and seemed genuinely saddened by the deaths. Seeing him approach they turned in unison and, though their greeting was polite, there was an obvious hostility etched into their faces.
“Gentlemen, it is a sad day…” Karl began in a conciliatory tone but rather than placating them his words provoked anger.
Prince Kinsky was the first to speak, “A sad day and a thoroughly shameful one!”
“Shameful?” Karl said, uncertain of his meaning.
“Had I not seen this for myself, I would never have believed it.”
“Montenuovo,” Prince Lobkowitz said, “should be publicly humiliated and dismissed at once for such an affront. How dare so vile and insignificant a creature dishonour the Archduke and his wife in this way!”
Though his own feelings were slightly less vehement, Karl immediately warmed to these men who shared his disgust at the treatment of Sophie and Franz Ferdinand.
“It is a great insult to my uncle’s memory…” he began but Prince Kinsky interrupted,
“If I were in the Emperor’s position I would have Montenuovo flogged for this.”
Lobkowitz agreed, “As if it were not enough that they treated Her Highness so atrociously in her lifetime, they now go out of their way to abuse her in death.”
“And as for that excuse for a requiem…” Kinsky said so angrily that he could barely blurt out his words and looked to Schwarzenberg to speak for him.
“Who told the Cardinal to rush through the service and why were there so few mourners? We know that many foreign royalties wished to attend but they were not allowed to do so. King Carol of Roumania was actually turned back at the border!”
Appalled by this information, Karl shook his head, “I had no idea.”
Kinsky, regaining his composure, said, “Even our own people were turned away. Crowds had gathered to file past the coffins. Many had patiently waited in line since dawn, and others had made the effort to travel from different parts of the empire but almost four hours before the service began Montenuovo had the doors locked and refused them entry.”
“It would be understandable,” Schwarzenberg said, “if the public were to be given another opportunity of paying their respects but we have just been told that there will be no formal procession to the station. The bodies are to be shipped away in the night like a pair of executed criminals.”
“At least,” Kinsky said bitterly, “when they reach Artstetten they will be given the honour they deserve. I thank God that the Archduke had the foresight to make provision for himself and Her Highness in Bohemia where they have always been shown the respect and affection that was so sorely denied them in Vienna.”
Karl stared down at the ground and said quietly, “I know it is small consolation but I agree with everything you have said. I was very fond of my uncle and I know that all of this has been conducted in a shameful manner. The Emperor, however, is not to blame. He…”
“The Emperor allowed this to happen,” Kinsky said. “It is common knowledge that he intensely disliked Archduke Franz Ferdinand and I dare say that he is more than relieved by this turn of events.”
“No!” Karl protested loyally. “It’s true that they disagreed about many things but the Emperor is truly horrified and saddened by what has happened.”
Kinsky shook his head scornfully and opened his mouth to say more but Schwarzenberg urgently intervened as though fearful of what his companion had been about to say.
“You must understand, Your Imperial Highness, that the Archduke was the only member of your family who truly understood and respected the Bohemian people. As in so many other parts of this empire, there is a feeling among the Czechs that we are issued with orders from Vienna by people who have no understanding of our culture and our way of life. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was different and, of course, his wife was one of our own people. The Choteks might be sneered at here, but in Bohemia they are a highly respected family.”
Lobkowitz nodded, “Unlike the ministers or even the Emperor – to whom, I assure you, we remain devoted – the Archduke listened to us. We even hoped that when he eventually succeeded to the throne he might restore the Kingdom of Bohemia as an autonomous region within the empire in much the same way as the Kingdom of Bavaria is both autonomous and part of the German Empire.”
Karl nodded thoughtfully and wondered whether it would be imprudent to suggest that, like Uncle Franz, he recognised the need for greater freedom and self-government in the various provinces.
Schwarzenberg, seeming to read his thoughts, said, “Of course, this is not an appropriate time to discuss your future plans but, as you are now heir, perhaps you will consider what we have said and honour the Archduke’s memory by implementing some of his ideas.”
“Uncle Franz had many plans for reform. He was well-travelled and well-read and, though as yet I lack his wisdom and experience, I hope that one day I will be able to combine our great traditions with some of his more progressive ideas.”
“Then I suggest,” said Kinsky, “that you keep your views to yourself until you are in a position to execute them.”
Karl, disturbed by his ominous tone, ran his foot over the cobbles, inadvertently kicking a stone that flew across the courtyard and ricocheted on the opposite wall.
Schwarzenberg moved closer, “The details of exactly what happened in Sarajevo remain unclear. Perhaps you could elucidate?”
Karl opened his hands helplessly, “The killer, Gavrilo Princip, was a nineteen-year-old Bosnian who believed that by assassinating Uncle Franz he would further the cause of a South Slav Kingdom. Princip wasn’t working alone. There were several would-be assassins in the street that day…”
“We have read all of this in the newspapers but it makes so little sense,” Kinsky said impatiently. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a group that is allegedly comprised of Serbian officers, ministers and lawyers should choose a set of incompetent kids to carry out such an attack?”
“I suppose,” Karl said, “young men like Princip are malleable. It is easy to train them into believing their actions are justified, and their leaders view them as dispensable.”
Kinsky’s eyes narrowed, “Imagine if we were planning the assassination of someone as important as the heir to an empire. Whom would we choose to carry it out – a tubercular boy who, from all accounts, hadn’t even held a gun until a few months ago, or a skilled marksman with experience of weapons?”
Karl shook his head, “What are you suggesting?”
“Is there any proof that this boy was acting on behalf of the Black Hand?”
“The Emperor has ordered a thorough investigation so we must wait for its findings.”
Kinsky threw back his head, “The investigators will find whatever they are told to find, which undoubtedly means they will implicate the Serbian government in the murders.”
Karl glanced warily across the courtyard.
“You are aware, I suppose,” Shwarzenberg said, lowering his voice to a whisper, “that the Serbian Prime Minister, Pasic, warned our ambassador in Belgrade that a plot was afoot and the Archduke’s life would be in danger if he travelled to Sarajevo?”
Karl, increasingly unnerved, shook his head.
“Pasic had received word that these assassins were planning to disrupt the visit and he gave orders that they were to be arrested at the border.”
“And,” Lobkowitz said, “three days before the Archduke left Vienna, the Serbian envoy gave Bilinski, the Civil Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the same warning but in every case these warning were ignored.”
“Why?” Karl frowned.
“Why indeed?” Kinsky looked up at the sky. “One thing is certain, there are several men within our own empire and even more international intriguers who had far more to gain from His Imperial Highness’ death than the Serbs had. When did the Archduke receive his invitation to Sarajevo?”
Karl shrugged, “I don’t know. A few months ago, I would imagine.”
“Around the time of the Emperor’s illness, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“The thought that the Emperor might die must have triggered a great deal of fear in certain circles. Everyone knew that the Archduke had already prepared lists of the ministers whom he would remove from office; and everyone knew, too, that he had no intention of supporting an invasion of Serbia.”
“There is no proof,” Schwarzenberg said, “that these boys were linked to the Black Hand. Even if they were duped into believing that they were acting on behalf of that group, who is to say that that was actually the case?”
Karl’s stomach churned, “You are saying that his murder was planned by …”
“No,” Schwarzenberg interrupted, “we are accusing no one. We are merely making observations.”
Lobkowitz nodded, “Who knows what goes on in the shady world of spies and agent provocateurs?”
“You must admit,” Kinsky said, looking directly at Karl, “that the timing and manner of His Imperial Highness’s death couldn’t have worked out better for many of those ministers in Vienna if they had planned the whole thing themselves. Now, they can remain secure in their positions of power; and this very public killing has provided them with the perfect excuse they were seeking to invade Serbia.”
Again Karl remembered Franz Ferdinand’s words on the evening of the ball: “…What frightens me, Karl, is the thought that these people would willingly manipulate us into a situation where war becomes inevitable. To all intents and purposes, it will be seen as an imperial war fought by kings but in fact the whole tragedy will have been engineered by ministers and generals who will then use the ensuing chaos to set themselves up in our place.”
“And,” Kinsky said, “they must be rejoicing that they are not only rid of the Archduke, but also his wife whom they all treated so appallingly.”
“Isn’t it strange,” Schwarzenberg nodded, “that Princip was as close to Her Highness as I am to you, yet he claims that he killed her by accident?”
Karl stared at the ground, weighed down by so many conflicting thoughts and emotions that for several minutes he could not speak and when he eventually did so, his voice trembled, “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” Kinsky said. “There is nothing to be done. The investigation will produce its report, and history will record these events accordingly but, with all due respect, Your Imperial Highness, be aware that very few world events are ever quite as simple as they are presented for posterity.”
“Indeed,” said Lobkowitz. “Documents disappear, investigations run into insurmountable obstacles, and the truth is lost in the fairy tales that are told to keep the public happy. It is so often the case that beneath these stories, there are layers upon layers of artifice, and even when we have a glimpse of the truth and the immediate culprits are unmasked, there are many more who lurk in the shadows and whose guilt is never uncovered.”
Karl nodded sadly. Just as the news of the murder had shattered the beauty of a summer afternoon, so, too, had Uncle Franz death wrecked the idyll of the age of innocence.
“Whether or not we will ever know the truth of what happened in Sarajevo, there is something we can do now to honour Uncle Franz and Sophie.”
The three princes looked at him with interest.
“There are still crowds outside who would like to pay their respects as the bodies are taken to the station.”
“Police cordons have been set up to keep the people away.”
“The police will give way to the new heir apparent. Gentlemen, perhaps you will join me in leading the crowds in procession so that we can at least mark the Archduke’s departure from Vienna in a manner that’s honourable and fitting.”

2nd Excerpt from "Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats"

2011-07-15T11:46:00.004+01:00

This is a second excerpt from "Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats".
Here, Kaiser Wilhelm, at his daughter's wedding, is viewing himself in a mirror and trying to make sense of his conflicting emotions regarding his late mother and his sense of his own inadequacy.

He pressed his hand to his ear, trying to silence the demons that had taunted him for so long. If only Mama had been more like Queen Victoria, things could have been very different. Grandmama did not see him as weak – she recognised his potential as a noble German Emperor. While she lived, the two nations could stand side-by-side, their combined heritage bringing peace and culture to the world. With Grandmama’s passing, and the accession of Uncle Bertie as Britain’s King Edward VII, that seemingly unbreakable bond had been severed. For almost a decade an aggressive rivalry had replaced the former cooperation between the two countries, and the mutual respect they had once shared had been twisted into antipathy.
Wilhelm peered more closely at the mirror and, as he stared intently at his own face, that of his late uncle, lying in state, floated through his mind. Along with the rest of the family, he had paid his respects to the corpse of the British king but, while others struggled to contain their grief, it had taken Wilhelm even greater self-control to conceal his relief and elation. Looking down at that lifeless body, lying like a great oak felled by a storm, it had dawned on him that the death of King Edward VII marked the dawn of a new age for Germany and for her Emperor.
Huge, bronchitic and bloated by his own excesses, Uncle Bertie, no less than Wilhelm himself, had come to personify his empire. Like her king, quaffing and gluttonising at his table, Britain’s appetites had become insatiable, ravenously gobbling up so much of the world. Like her king, too, flirting and sprawling with his Parisian whores, Britain had abandoned her rightful partner, Germany, choosing instead an adulterous alliance with France. This was all Uncle Bertie’s doing, Wilhelm thought. With his patronising attitude and his lack of respect for his Kaiser-nephew, the nine years of his reign had brought nothing but tension between two great nations whose union had been sealed seventy years earlier in the marriage of Wilhelm’s grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Three years had passed since Uncle Bertie’s death but still that union remained unrestored. Britain continued her liaison with France and had even extended her alliances to create a comfortable ménage-a-trois with Russia, leaving Germany – the young and virile nation – to seek dubious comfort in the arms of the aged and decrepit old crone, Austria-Hungary.
“Now, though,” Wilhelm murmured, adopting the pose of a hero, “it is time for the restoration of the true order. When Britain realises that her era of domination is over and it is Germany’s hour to take the lead, she will abandon her flirtation with France and return to me, begging for an alliance like an unfaithful wife pleading for her husband’s forgiveness.”
He smiled at his own magnanimity, “I will take her back. I will overlook these past thirteen years and, in her gratitude, she will treat me with respect and devotion. Germany is in the ascendancy. Our military prowess, our growing navy, our social welfare programmes and advances in industry, outclass those of any other nation, and I, as her Kaiser, the All-Highest, am the most influential ruler of the age!”

The Earl of Harewood

2011-07-13T13:13:00.002+01:00

I was sad to hear of the death of the Earl of Harewood at the weekend as he seemed such a lovely man. I live not far from Harewood House and, while visiting the bird garden there as a small child, was asking my parents something about a particular bird when a gentleman (who looked very old to me but anyone over thirty looks old to a child!) very kindly supplied me with the answer. My mother whispered, “That is the earl!” and I hurriedly flicked through the guide book for his photograph and found that was true. Not being acquainted with royal protocol, I looked up at this tall man and asked for his autograph on the photo, and he smiled kindly and signed it for me.

Many years later, I wrote to him about a book and received a very lovely handwritten reply. He had accidentally dropped a half-finished Times crossword into the envelope somehow, and I was going to complete it and return it to him, but I never did.
Sincere condolences to his family...I am sure he will be remembered with love.

A short video of 'Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats'

2011-07-11T14:32:00.003+01:00

Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats is now available from:

Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle.UK

and Amazon.de

Please visit this brief introduction to 'Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats' at YouTube:

Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats

"Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats" Excerpt

2011-07-10T19:24:00.002+01:00

I am delighted that within a day or two, my novel: “Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats” will be available via Kindle, and will available in paperback in about a month. The cover posted here, is a temporary cover for the Kindle edition.
As I wrote in a previous post, “The Scapegoats” is the first in the ‘Shattered Crowns’ trilogy which follows the royalties of Europe through the years 1914-1918. The Scapegoats covers the periods from April 1913 to the outbreak of the First World War. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Emperor Franz Josef, Archduke Karl, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II feature most prominently in this novel, an excerpt from which, I include below (and will include further excerpts over the next couple of days.

This excerpt is part of a conversation between Archduke Karl and his uncle, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It takes place during a winter ball where the two men have escaped from the chatter of the ballroom and, as they discuss the fate of Crown Prince Rudolf, Franz Ferdinand gradually reveals his suspicions that he will soon be murdered:

....Eventually, [Franz Ferdinand] turned and said, “In the past, I believed that kings and emperors made all the decisions for their people. Now, though, I see it very differently. For the most part, monarchs are merely the actors who take centre-stage. Their lines are scripted for them and their movements are stage-managed by faceless people whom the audience never sees. Even in an autocracy like Austria-Hungary, so much goes on behind the scenes where ministers and politicians plot and intrigue among themselves. They see their monarchs as little more than puppets. They make plans that suit their personal ambitions and increase their own sense of power, and they manipulate their emperors into accepting and implementing those plans at whatever cost to their countries. Then comes the cruellest part of all: when the drama turns into tragedy, these people withdraw into the shadows leaving the emperor to shoulder all the blame.”
Karl frowned, “I cannot believe that an emperor anointed by God could be so easily influenced.”
“Most emperors who take their coronation oath seriously have the good of their people at heart but even the most astute of them cannot see with his own eyes all that is happening across his empire. These shady people know that; and so, with carefully woven words, they persuade him that unless he follows this course or that course, the country will suffer. They conceal things that they don’t want him to know and they scare him into accepting their ideas.”
“Scare him!” Karl laughed in disbelief.
“Yes,” Franz Ferdinand nodded emphatically. “The ability to inspire fear is the politician’s most powerful weapon. Men react totally irrationally when they are afraid. Even in Biblical times, wasn’t it fear of losing their authority that prompted the Sanhedrin to hand Christ over for crucifixion? And wasn’t it the fear of repercussions from Rome that prevented Pontius Pilate from setting him free? Imagine being able to harness that fear and twist it to your own ends. That is a tactic that politicians have mastered. Create an enemy, create something or someone to fear, and then persuade the people that you alone can protect them from the impending disaster. If the people believe you – and skilled politicians ensure that they do – they will do whatever you ask of them: they will fight your wars, pay your taxes, and allow their own freedom to be curtailed, all the time believing that you are acting for their highest good.”
Karl ran his hand across his brow.
“These politicians employ the same tactics when dealing with their emperors. They say, ‘unless you implement harsh laws, more people will suffer’ or, ‘unless we take up arms against this country or that country, we will be invaded,’ and all the time, unbeknown to their king, they are striking deals among themselves or with their foreign counterparts.”
“But why?” Karl blinked, “Why would they do such a thing?”
“Money, power…”
“And for that, they would not only betray the trust of an emperor but also endanger the welfare and lives of their fellow countrymen?”
Franz Ferdinand smiled at him gently and spoke in the tone of a patient schoolmaster to an innocent pupil, “The more noble the emperor, the easier it is for the unscrupulous to take advantage of him. Good men, who act from the highest motives, believe that those around them are equally noble. I hate to disillusion you, Karl, but the truth is that there are many ambitious and self-seeking men in positions of authority. Who would have believed that someone like Redl, on whom so much of our country’s security depended, would sell us out to protect his pathetic reputation and to fund his lavish lifestyle?”
“That was a particularly unpleasant case.”
“Believe me, Redl is not the only one who would be willing to sacrifice all that we hold dear to further a greedy ambition. Every day secret agreements are reached between politicians, arms manufacturers, bankers, spies and newspaper proprietors. There are always people who place their personal gain before the good of the country.”
Karl returned to the table and, sitting down, rested his head in his hands. The evening had begun so brightly in the glamour of the ballroom, yet now, alone with his uncle, he felt suddenly drained and exhausted.
Franz Ferdinand came to stand behind him and rested an avuncular hand on his shoulder, “I am so sorry, Karl,” he said softly. “I didn’t intend to distress you but men in our position must see what is going on or there is no hope for our country or our people.”
A line from the Gospel ran through Karl’s mind, ‘I am sending you out like lambs among wolves; be as wily as serpents and as gentle as doves....’

Happy Independence Day!

2011-07-04T13:59:00.002+01:00

A very Happy Independence Day to all American visitors!

May the spirit of your brilliant Founding Fathers always live in America! May your constitution thrive and your country become once more ‘the land of the free’!

“A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” (Thomas Jefferson)

Freedom, Fear and Empowerment

2011-07-02T23:30:00.005+01:00

Something dawned on me today when a kind lady asked me to donate to a cancer research charity, to collect for which she had given up her Saturday morning. Often we see that certain drugs are not available to some people because they are ‘too expensive’. Several years ago I saw a documentary about a village in India where people who had suffered from polio as children had become deformed and were treated as outcasts by their families and yet for something like £1 a village they could be inoculated but the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t donate that vaccine. They do, however, freely provide vaccines against bizarre epidemics like swine flu and other man-made illnesses (made in labs?) and also – as I know from several friends who have worked for such companies – give huge bonuses to their staff and the owners of these companies are mega-millionaires. So, as I donated to the charity simply because the lady who asked me to was obviously doing so in good faith, I couldn’t help thinking, “Where does all this research money go? To drug companies who then create something that they charge the earth for, and also who – perhaps! – actually create illnesses in labs....”

I know it sounds like some kind of weird sci-film to think such a thing and it is totally contrary to my nature to be so suspicious! Sometimes, though, things become too blatant to ignore any longer and you have to speak out. Remember SARS and bird flu and swine flu and how they all appeared at times when governments were going through a difficult time and needed the people to be distracted by something fearful. I dare say they will come up with something new before too long and – at the same time as the EU is banning certain herbal remedies that have been used since the world began (like St. John’s Wart) – the grip of pharmaceutical companies becomes more obvious.

Having been engrossed in the horrendously murky dealings behind the First World War – and the way in which this was anything but an ‘imperial’ war but was absolutely manufactured by megalomaniacs who set out to overthrow Russia, Germany and any other country that did not adhere to state control (and then replaced the governance of Russia and Germany with absolute state control – these people not only funded Lenin and Trotsky, but also Hitler!), it became so obvious that there is a very dark and very misguided group of people who still continue their bizarre dream of ‘world domination’ to this day. When you want to overthrow a country, the best thing to do is create the idea that their present leader is a tyrant, then create uprisings and then step in as though you are a peace-keeper. It’s gone on for centuries now. It’s become rather ‘old hat’ and we still fall for it. Also, create an atmosphere of fear so that people will believe you are protecting them while you are subjecting them to abuse in airports (zap them with massive radiation and, if they refuse that, subject them to physical molestation) or while you manipulate the boom and bust, the supposed ‘global downturn’ and little by little you control the world...well, not really...

The trouble for these people, though, is that they do not take into account the incredible nature of humanity or the spiritual dimension of Life which is far more powerful than any big corporation, conglomerate, government or empire. Just as green shoots and flowers sprout through the most dilapidated of places, there isn’t enough oppression in the world to stifle the true nature of the individual spirit. There isn’t enough hatred in the world to overcome one single person who loves; there aren’t enough methods of control to enslave one single free spirit; there aren’t enough lies to smother the truth that every person is of vital importance and not one person or group of people has real power over another.

I often wonder why these people don't concentrate on their own lives rather than trying to elbow their way into everyone else's. I guess they must be lacking a sense of self-worth if they need to 'take charge' of others to distract themselves from their own sense of inadequacy. Little boys playing their intimidating games...I don't want to play anymore in their culture of fear.

The Kingdom of Heaven

2011-06-28T22:55:00.002+01:00

I think often that heaven is far closer and more accessible than we know. It cannot possibly be simply a ‘place’ we go to when we die. Heaven, I was taught as a child, is where God is; and at the same time was told that God is omnipresent – therefore to those who believe in heaven, it must be with us now. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you’ or ‘among you’ (depending on the translation). It seems to me that physical life is but one aspect of who we are. In physical life there appears to be time but there are moments when we ‘glimpse eternity’ and realise that time, like so much else, is only a tool to help us order our lives. Beyond time, beyond all the boundaries that we put in place to create order, it often feels that in the timelessness of everything, we have access to all that has ever been and all that ever will be, since it all is really in the great ‘eternal now’.

Believing that to be so, it has always seemed perfectly logical to me that we can talk as freely and as naturally with those who are no longer in physical life, as we can with those around us. I do not mean table-tapping or Ouija boards or any of the other weird and dark things people use – on the contrary, I mean that through the purity of our own being and the Light of the Divinity within us, we can be in tune with anyone from any place or any time. Churches have always believed this – prayer, conversations with saints etc. are not dark and do not require darkened rooms or spooky goings-on; they are light and pure and natural. It was always perfectly natural to me to converse with saints, since that is what my Catholic upbringing showed me. It only began to dawn on me later that many saints were not really very nice people, and many had been canonised for political reasons...in fact some were downright racist, sexist, bigoted and quite nasty pieces of work. If, however, it was perfectly natural to converse with those people, was it not equally natural to converse with anyone?

It seems that there are wavelengths on which we operate and some of these coincide with the wavelengths of others, and just as we are attracted to or have a rapport with those around us though sometimes we do not know why we are just drawn to some people, we can be equally drawn to or have a rapport with those who are no longer on earth and from that place we are perfectly in-tune with them. It is a very remarkable and beautiful experience, I think. Some people might consider this a load of balderdash but I believe it.

On the anniversary of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, I cannot help but think of the sheer joy that both of them experienced at the moment of their ‘death’. Such a horrific event, so pre-meditated and with such dire consequences for humanity (and for their beloved children), and yet whenever I think of them on this day, I have such a powerful sense of the joy that they both felt – a great release and a huge amount of laughter and exhilaration.

Did you ever attend a funeral expecting to be moved and tearful only to find it was an amazingly joyous and uplifting occasion? If so, maybe you’ll agree with these thoughts about Franz Ferdinand and Sophie.

Ninety-Seven Years Ago Tonight

2011-06-27T23:10:00.004+01:00

Ninety-seven years ago this evening, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, hosted a banquet for officers and local dignitaries at their hotel in Bosnia. The orchestra of the Sarajevo garrison played for them and I imagine that on a summer evening, the guests were entertained to such beautiful and popular music as Strauss’ Roses from the South and the Emperor Waltz. (Strauss' music being the epitome of Vienna at that time, I put his picture here).
That evening was so perfect for Franz Ferdinand. Someone once said that the three ingredients to happiness are something to enjoy, something to look forward to, and someone to love. In his role as Inspector of the Imperial Army, Franz Ferdinand had just witnessed a successful series of military manoeuvres and, considering that he had often despaired of the state of the Austrian army, that must have come as a great relief to him. He had, only weeks earlier, cultivated a friendship with Kaiser Wilhelm and together they had planned closer co-operation with Russia and the other major powers. More importantly to Franz Ferdinand, he had enjoyed a summer of seeing his wife accepted by the people at the races and at the opera; and he had spent time with his beloved children. He certainly had something to enjoy.
Tomorrow would be his fourteenth wedding anniversary and, perhaps for the first time, he and Sophie would travel together in the same motorcade – no longer would she be relegated to the role of an inferior. What’s more, he would have the chance to explain his views on giving greater autonomy to the different regions of the Empire. His uncle, Emperor Franz Josef, weakened by his recent bout of bronchitis, could not be emperor forever and very soon, it would seem, Franz Ferdinand would be able to implement his own ideas. He had a lot to look forward to.
And Sophie beside him. This woman, for whom he had endured the alienation of his family and the court, and who was probably the only person in his life (apart from their children) who truly understood him, meant more to him than anything. He truly loved her.
Yes, indeed, I imagine Franz Ferdinand was very happy on this night, ninety-seven years ago.

His murder the next day was such a major world event that there hasn’t ever been a history book about the First World War that doesn’t mention him. Even in my ‘O’ level classes and the rather dull text books that described this amazing time, there was a faint photograph of him on that fateful day, and, in the index of the book there was only one reference to him to say he was murdered and consequently war broke out.

His murder and the subsequent slaughter was not, I am sure, merely the work of some tubercular student with notions of nationalism, but rather a well-defined plot in which Princips was only the ‘patsy’. Had this man lived, the history of the 20th Century would have been very different but, since we cannot directly change the past, we can, at least, recognise the true character of a man who – like so many others – had been so maligned or ‘written off’ by historians.

I am so glad that his last evening was spent with his beloved Sophie and that, it seems, he was truly happy that night.

"For the Children"

2011-06-26T23:07:00.003+01:00

I guess that in moments of extreme physical danger reactions are not always indicative of a person’s character. I once saw a documentary about ‘Heroes’ which included several interviews with people who had been in perilous situations, some of whom had later been hailed as heroes and others as cowards. One example was a man who, on a sinking ferry, turned himself into a human bridge, risking his own life so that others could literally walk over him to safety. He was later awarded for his courage and yet he said that he had suffered nightmares ever since and didn’t remember anything of his thoughts at the time. On the same programme was a woman who, in a panic to escape from a burning plane, had trodden on her fallen fiancé's body in her desperate attempt to escape. Her fiancé died and she had lived with a great burden of guilt ever since. Both reactions, it seemed, were spontaneous and one certainly could not condemn that poor woman who, in different circumstances might well have been a heroine.

Having said that, it seems that in times in heightened emotion people tend to become most truly themselves. Some people become very calm and quiet and ‘something else’ appears to take over (I consider that ‘something else’ to be their true self, and the God within each of us). Others tend to panic or talk a lot or burst into tears or behave in ways that appear out-of-character and that seems to me to be a desperate need to control the situation from a solely physical aspect. Either way, sooner or later, it all comes down to who we really are – that powerful Divine life that is the very breath of our being.

One thing (among many!) that seems to be often forgotten about Franz Ferdinand, is what he said when the fatal bullet struck him. This man, who is so often relegated to a footnote in history and so mistakenly described as nothing more than a bull-headed angry man, at the moment of his death said to his wife as she died in his arms, "Little Sophie [Sopherl, Sopherl] you have to live for the children....” A term of beautiful endearment to his wife, and his thoughts turned at once to their children. It says a great deal about the man, I think, that this was his priority at that moment. What a loving and devoted husband, in an age where many men of his station kept mistresses; and what a loving father, in an age where many men of his station had little to do with their children. Had the First World War not been stage-managed to come about as a result of his murder, I really believe that history would have learned to see him in a very different light. I hope with all my heart that “Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats” (which is very close to publication) will at least begin to touch on the reality of this much maligned and misrepresented man.

"If I Ruled the World"

2011-06-21T23:20:00.003+01:00

It’s not surprising that the phrase “divide and conquer” is taken from the Latin ‘divide et impera‘ since this age-old practice goes back to the Romans and probably even earlier. If you want to take control of another country, one way of achieving your aim is to rouse discord among the people, divide them and then step into the chaos and take charge. I think this tactic was probably used by the Romans in Palestine/Israel in New Testament times, when Herod the Great’s sons inherited different parts of his kingdom. A more modern example is Bismarck’s incitement of the Magyars, following the Austro-Prussian War, so that they would basically rabble-rouse against their Austrian ‘overlords’ and in so doing would weaken Franz Josef’s Empire. (Alas, all over the world, we see the same strategy being carried out today).

While writing Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats, so many things struck me as disturbing and having parallels in the long past and in the present. One aspect of the First World War that cannot be overlooked is that in 1914 there were 4 major autocratic powers in Europe (the fourth might be called under another name): Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia and the Church (in fact 2 Churches: Orthodoxy and Catholicism). If you or I were – as in a game - of a mind to take control of trade, industry, banking and above all the mind-set, beliefs and aspirations of humanity, autocracies would be the first obstacle to be overcome, particularly if those autocracies were built on deep-seated beliefs such as religion. Russia, a deeply spiritual and independent nation wherein Orthodoxy and Tsardom were so intertwined, and Austria-Hungary, the ‘Apostolic Empire’ with its close connections to the Roman Catholic Church, would be the prime targets. By 1914, Austria-Hungary was already disintegrating, but there was a danger that if the elderly Emperor Franz Josef died and his nephew, the forward-thinking Franz Ferdinand, were to succeed him, the Empire, through Franz Ferdinand’s reforms could not only be restored but could also make peace with its neighbours. (Two weeks before Franz Ferdinand’s fatal trip to Sarajevo, he entertained Kaiser Wilhelm at one of his country estates and the two men discussed, among other things, greater co-operation with Russia and the need to create peace in the Balkans.)

By 1918 the autocracies had been wiped out and with them Orthodoxy and Catholicism no longer held any territorial weight in Europe. Those past autocrats could be either wiped out of history (as happened in Soviet Russia) or portrayed quite differently to the reality (that, too, is an old trick – look how Richard III was described by the usurping Tudors! – and so it continued with ‘weak’ Nicholas and ‘mad’ Wilhelm). Society could be first secularised and then ‘dumbed down’, fed a diet of sex and shopping, pleasure-seeking and desperation, ‘action films’ and advertisements. Hey-ho! Now we can brainwash the world and people become mere puppets, repeating the old histories....

The only problem is that if you ever lay concrete flags in a garden and build walls and sanitise everything, little sprouts of green still push between the flags, weeds and flowers flourish in the most unlikely places and Nature continues to show her face no matter how much effort you put in to oppressing her. People will go on fighting wars without meaning and others will go on in their game of control but really the human spirit and the depths of Spirituality, Life and Humanity in all its forms can never be crushed by these games. Sooner or later the Truth always comes out.

(Personally, to quote a song, 'If I ruled the world....' I'd say to everyone, "Here, you rule you, and I'll rule me and we'll all get along just fine!")

"Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats"

2011-06-19T23:27:00.005+01:00

The first novel in my trilogy, Shattered Crowns, is shortly to be released. The trilogy follows the royalties of Europe from 1913 to 1918 and the first novel (1913 to the outbreak of the First World War) has the subtitle The Scapegoats. I chose this title because, after ploughing through so many opposing opinions and documents, and from thinking of the characters involved it is clear that Tsar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm and, to a lesser extent, Emperor Franz Josef have been made the scapegoats for such a terrible war whereas not one of them – not even the Kaiser! – wanted war.

It is particularly striking, seeing how they were – against their will - hoodwinked, cajoled and pressurised by ministers and others into allowing the war to happen, that these three monarchies were destroyed by the war. It is so striking that it seems almost a deliberate plot to overthrow them, particularly when you consider that both Russia and Germany refused to be drawn into the international banking legislation of the time and were fiercely independent. I firmly believe that – after years of trying to make sense of how this terrible war came about – the real cause lies very deeply hidden in something far more sinister that can easily be described here.

I am, however, far more interested in interesting people than in politics and one of the most interesting revelations to me during my research is the character of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This man, whom most people remember only because his murder is said to be the cause of WW1, was a far greater and more perceptive man than the hot-headed, unpopular person he is usually shown to be. His ideas for future government of Austria-Hungary (based on the American idea of independent states and a federal government); his determination to refuse to be crowned King of Hungary until universal suffrage was granted; his understanding of the balance of power and his opposition to the annexing of Bosnia-Herzegovina, are quite wonderful!

Interesting, isn’t it, that he was invited to Sarajevo on his wedding anniversary and Sophie, his beloved wife who had been so shunned in Vienna was also invited to appear with him in public that day? Did someone fail to mention that it was also a day of great national symbolism for the Serbs (St. Vitus Day – the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo). Strange how, in such a turbulent area, there was no military protection...even stranger how, after the first attempt on his life, he was still driven in an open car through the streets and the car took a wrong turning - because the driver hadn’t been informed of the change of route to the hospital – and so had to reverse into the path of the killer. Strange too that we accept that the Black Hand was a recognised criminal organisation who had carried out many atrocities when, in fact, apart from a couple of so-called failed or aborted assassination attempts, I cannot find any evidence of their supposed crimes. Also, if that group was – as Austrian ministers claimed – made up of military officers and high ranking Serbian officials, would they choose some drop-out nineteen year old student to carry out so important an assassination? There is a great deal more to say of this but perhaps it is inappropriate here.

To the end of her life, Empress Zita maintained that there was something far more
sinister about the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand than meets the eye. In the aftermath of war, Franz Ferdinand has largely been forgotten; Kaiser Wilhelm (who was always a bit unbalanced) has been made out to be the mad and evil plotter - though he was tryng desperately - in the midst of his many hang-ups - to avoid war and he vehemently opposed the invasion of Belgium; and Tsar Nicholas (who was way ahead of many others in his understanding of and attempts to bring a peaceful solution to the
Balkans wars, and who worked often through the night with no rest in his attempts to broker peace) is portrayed as dancing on the deck of his yacht letting the world go to hell in a handcart because he was ‘weak’. Amazing how easily often repeated stories begin to be believed.

"Shattered Crowns: The Scapegoats" isn’t an attempt to change perceived history or anything of the sort, but is rather written out of love and respect for these ‘scapegoats’ of history.

"Golden Fleece"

2011-06-13T23:19:00.004+01:00

What a treasure of a book I received as a gift last week! Bertita Harding’s “Golden Fleece” – the story of Franz Josef and Sissi of Austria. Apart from the wonderful feel and smell of the paper that only comes with ‘old’ books(this was published in 1939) the style and brilliance of the author is so appealing that it is amazing that she isn’t better known!

Written in the style of a novel but totally true to history, this book is a masterpiece of psychology, humour and sincere respect for its subjects.The style sometimes reminds me of Dickens – the little asides that are universally and timelessly amusing – but is far less heavy; and the story itself is told in such a captivating way that it is both hugely informative and easy to read. There are magical, but not verbose, descriptions and anecdotes, and each page reads like watching a film unfold. There are moments when I literally laugh out loud at some of the occasional comments (e.g. regarding Sissi’s parents: “Marriage had been difficult, a matter of mostly avoiding each other. Even so, eight children....bore witness to an occasional meeting...” or, of her father, Duke Max, “He rejoiced in the reputation of being the most unpractical man of his time.”) but – true to the formula of ‘make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry’ – there is such insight into the characters that you can feel Sissi’s grief and frustration without being allowed to succumb to it. Basically, the author grasps how both Emperor Franz Josef Empress Elizabeth felt at various times, so we understand exactly their position, but at the same time the author manages to point out (often with small humorous phrases) that their feelings were not necessarily their finest feelings.

Bertita Harding, about whom I can find very little information, must have been one of the most underrated authors of her age; and one of the most underrated authors of royal history. This book is really one to treasure!

Happy 90th Birthday to Prince Philip

2011-06-10T23:03:00.004+01:00

A very Happy 90th Birthday to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He might have made many controversial comments and he is the very opposite of ‘political correctness’ (which is sometimes rather refreshing!) but he has carried out his duties as Prince Consort so diligently for over fifty years.

Although this picture (taken with Prince Philip's uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten)
doesn’t quite capture it, I think there is a definite likeness between him and his grandmother, Victoria of Hesse/Battenberg/Milford Haven who played such a major role in his upbringing. I would venture that Victoria was probably the cleverest and most well-read of all Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, and was a remarkably strong personality. Princess Marie Louise’s descriptions of Victoria’s response to the news of the murder of her sister, Alix, Tsarina of Russia, and her entire family are incredibly moving. For three weeks after hearing that devastating news, Marie-Louise says, Victoria quietly worked in the gardens. Shortly afterwards, she also received news of her sister, Ella’s murder, and she was responsible for having Ella’s body taken to the Holy Land.

Victoria was a very strong and fascinating character....her grandson, Prince Philip, must be so proud of and grateful for her influence.

Those Whom The Gods Would Destroy...

2011-06-04T23:36:00.004+01:00

When I was a very small child, I sat each afternoon on my grandmother’s knee (literally!) while she sang songs from the First World War and told me stories of people she had known and loved who were killed on various battlefields, and her sister-in-law who gassed herself when she received news of her young husband’s death on the Somme. That’s a bit of an odd start in life, when you think of Teletubbies and Thomas the Tank Engine and The Mister Men and the bright lovely stories that are more suitable to our formative years. However, the First World War always disconcerted and fascinated me and for a very long time I have tried to understand what really happened and why so many people became involved in such madness that makes no sense whatsoever.

For the past couple of years, I have been researching various aspects of that war for my forthcoming book, which will very soon be available and is the first of a trilogy of novels based on the lives of the royalties of the era, concentrating in the first novel on the Austrian Archdukes Franz Ferdinand and Karl, and the German Kaiser Wilhelm (more of the book anon!). What has been far more disconcerting than my grandmother’s stories are some of the things that have come to light about these people, and who was really behind the First World War. I am not by nature a suspicious person but the deeper you delve into these things, the murkier it becomes. There is so much to write about this but for now there are two things that specifically come to mind.

The first is a quotation from Euripedes: “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” I very much doubt that the ‘gods’ would act so malevolently but it seems pretty certain that those whom the victors would destroy, they first describe as insane. Kaiser Wilhelm is a prime example.
He is largely portrayed as a complete megalomaniac and war-monger when, in fact, despite his difficulties (and I don’t dispute that he was, to say the least, a little caught up in his own love-hate relationship with his mother and his need for acceptance and affection), he had been the autocrat of one of the most peaceable countries in Europe for the first twenty-five years of his reign and his outbursts of aggression were largely in response to what he saw (probably accurately) as attempts to undermine his ‘new’ nation.

The second specific thought, which is far more disconcerting, brings to mind the
innkeeper, Thénardier, from Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’. A long chapter of that brilliant book describes Thénardier stealing from the corpses on the battlefield of Waterloo. He is obviously an unpleasant and unscrupulous character but, while researching the First World War book, it became apparent to me that this grave-robbing and profiteering is small-scale compared to the much grander scale of people who nowadays appear very respectable but have made a fortune from wars. Since historical events cannot be isolated, my research led back to the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution and again and again the same families appear....I would go so far as to say that there were certain people and certain families (who still operate successfully today) who deliberately set out to undermine the power of autocracies – particular the autocracies of Austria-Hungary and Russia – in order to create chaos and implement their own agenda.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not subscribe to any particular political party or have an unflinching affiliation to a particular religion. I believe wholeheartedly in the wonder and beauty of humanity and that all Life is an expression the Divine and therefore that all people and all creatures are incredibly precious. I simply wanted to know why so many people died for nothing in the First World War (and why that great-aunt was driven to gas herself in 1916), and it opened a can of worms which a few years ago I would never have believed. It seems that very few things really are as they first appear.

A Role Model for Another Generation

2011-05-20T23:19:00.006+01:00

People often speak of the need for good role models for the young but, in my experience, it’s not the youth who need role models so much as older people! In fact, it is quite often older people who are very set in their ways and love to complain (and they probably complained about something else when young) who speak of the ‘youth of today’ as being so wayward.

It was ever thus. This is a quotation from Socrates in the 3rd Century B.C. ”Young people today love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they disrespect their elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Young people now are tyrants...They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers....”

It’s not politically correct to admit this but walking into shopping centres or queuing in the Post Office, it isn’t young people who drop the door in your face or ram their shopping trolley into your ankles or moan and sigh about the length of the queue – it is more often than not elderly people.

I would (smilingly – tongue in cheek) misquote Socrates by saying that quite often, “Elderly people today love being waited upon; they have bad manners,contempt for the young; they love to discuss their ailments instead of their successes. Some elderly people now are tyrants....”

Of course, this is a huge generalisation but I do believe that some people of more mature years have a greater need of role models than the young...and in Ireland this week, the Queen displayed all that is finest in her generation and what a great role model she is! Dignified, sensitive, devoted to her life’s calling, tactful, courageous, demonstrating both humility and dignity, using her years of experience to know exactly how to respond and converse with people of all different backgrounds, striding over that field towards the castle....

People might say, “Oh well, it’s different for her – she has always been waited upon....” but I know very few people (in fact none) of her age who have such a busy schedule and always appear at their best, smiling and being genuinely interested in other people. No matter how luxurious a lifestyle might appear, it’s tiring to travel and to fit in with a tight plan of events. Only a few weeks ago, she was entertaining people at Prince William’s wedding. In a few days she will be entertaining President Obama....and between those two events she managed to fit in one of the most historically significant visits of her reign! What a beautiful thing to see her interacting with the people of Cork today!

Let’s remember, too, that the Queen hasn’t been immune from family scandals, tragedies and dramas. She is the daughter of a reluctant king who suffered from a dreadful lack of self-esteem and reputedly had a strong temper; she lived through the Blitz and worked throughout the war when Britian was on the verge of defeat...I hugely admire Queen Victoria but I think our present Queen has outshone her in so many ways...not least for her example of how to live gracefully at any time of your life.

There is a lot to learn from people who have a great deal of experience...and it doesn’t need to involve a load of moaning and groaning about aches and pains and being ‘old’.

Long May She Reign!

2011-05-13T23:02:00.005+01:00

As of yesterday, the Queen, having reigned for over fifty-nine years, is the second longest reigning (or, as it is reported on the news, the second longest serving) monarch Britain has ever known – the first, of course, being Queen Victoria, who reigned for sixty-three years.

It is very interesting that, considering that historically daughters only attain the crown if they have no surviving brothers, our greatest monarchs have been women. In my view, in the past thousand years, the monarchs who made the greatest impact on the country and world at large have been Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria and our present Queen. Equally interesting are the similarities and differences between Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II.

Both were young when they came to the throne but whereas Victoria became queen at a
time when, thanks to the waywardness of her Hanoverian uncles, the royal family was held in low esteem, Queen Elizabeth arrived at a time when there was deep respect for the monarchy, due largely to her father’s courage and determination throughout the Second World War. Although their paths were dissimilar in so many ways, both dealt with rapidly changing times and the necessity of finding the balance between maintaining (or in Queen Victoria’s case establishing) tradition, and adapting to the mood of the country. After the death of ‘beloved Albert’ Queen Victoria withdrew from public gaze for about six years, consequently attracting a great deal of personal criticism and being described as self-indulgent in her grief to the extent that Republicanism seemed a very real possibility. The first time she appeared again in public, however, the crowds were even more enthusiastic and she remained a very loved and respected figure for the rest of her reign. After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Queen Elizabeth kept her distance for a few days, consequently attracting a great deal o criticism from the press and being described as cold-hearted for failing to express grief. The newspapers had a field day in their misguided prophecies that this would mark the end of the monarchy. When Her Majesty returned a couple of days later to London, she was met with nothing but the sincere devotion and appreciation of the crowds. Queens, it seems, cannot do right for doing wrong in the journalists’ eyes, and yet now, after fifty-nine years on the throne, even the most cynical journalist would find it difficult to find anything for which the Queen could be criticised.

A wonderful sign of our times, perhaps, is the relative ‘youthfulness’ of our Queen compared to her great-great-grandmother. At the time of her Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria was only seventy-eight years old and yet she was driven in a carriage to St. Paul’s and remained in the carriage throughout the service as she was incapable
of walking unaided. The present Queen is eighty-five years old yet walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey at the recent Royal Wedding, as brightly as ever. Queen Elizabeth has moved with the times without compromising the mystique of royalty or tradition. What a wonderful example she is of remaining true to your ideals, without being rigid!

(Incidentally, speaking of the age of the Queen, dreary people often say this has become the era of youth, in which the elderly are dismissed and overlooked. Well I say that is a jolly good thing! I grew up among elderly people who were grumpy and demanding and expected to be waited upon merely because they had lived a long time. Then I met elderly people who were so young in their outlook that they were inspiring and their life experience had created a wisdom that could be lightly and beautifully shared. Youth is not a matter of how long you’ve been here, it’s a matter of outlook and the ability to adapt. In my experience, the longer people live, the more they become themselves and so in reality, the older we get the healthier and brighter and more interesting we could become....but that is another story....)

The Kaiser and Archetypal Images

2011-05-10T23:24:00.004+01:00

There was once a rare radio phone-in, which differed from many others in that it wasn’t just a whole load of people complaining about things, and it happened to be about racism. What made it wonderful was a call from a local taxi driver who said that, being short-tempered, whenever a poor driver pulled out in front of him without indicating or someone drove badly, it was his natural instinct to shout out about the first thing he saw in that person, “You stupid....” maybe it was the colour of their hair, or their facial hair or an older person or a young lad...whatever it was, he found the immediate phrase. The driver happened to be Asian and said that when he made a similar driving error, he understood why people shouted what might be taken as a racist comment at him. In fact he said he would have shouted the same comment about another person who looked like him! Of course, I am not advocating aggression or nasty personal comments in this post but this man’s honesty was not only a refreshing change from political correctness (whatever that means??) but also made a big impact on me.

Immediate images are more powerful than years of learning and in times of heightened emotion we resort to our immediate impressions and the archetypal images from childhood. Dark-haired men tweaking their curly moustaches are usually sinister; pretty little women, like fairies, are often innocent damsels in distress; hooded figures are frightening like the Grim Reaper and so on.

While researching for a forthcoming series of books about the royalties in the First World War, I have seen Kaiser Wilhelm II - for whom I have always felt affection, though thought him a little bizarre!! - in an entirely different light. One of the questions I have often asked myself is why he is still seen as either evil or an imbecile. A chance comment from a child to whom I showed a picture of the Kaiser led me to an interesting thought. The child said, without knowing anything about the Kaiser, “He looks like a Nazi.” When I asked what he meant, he replied, “He has that look about him...a wacky moustache and a strange arm.”

It suddenly dawned on me how Wilhelm’s image has been massively tarnished by Hitler, who is often viewed in the same light, though two men couldn’t be less alike! Have you noticed how Hitler, during speeches such as the one in this link, keeps his left arm pinned to his side while gesticulating with his right arm? He is imitating and distorting the mannerism of the Kaiser (who, of course, could not use his left arm due to an accident of birth). Hitler’s moustache, while completely different to that of the Kaiser, is an equally noticeable feature of his face.

Hitler

It is horrific to think that the image of the Kaiser – whom I firmly believe was a ‘good’ man who did his utmost to prevent war – has been so distorted by this shadow of the maniac Hitler. There is a great deal more to write in defence of Kaiser Wilhelm, whose image, I believe, has been so terribly distorted for the past hundred years. Again and again I return to the certainty that many of the charges levelled against him - like the charges of weakness levelled against Tsar Nicholas II - are completely without foundation.

No Man Is an Island

2011-05-04T23:53:00.005+01:00

I will and do rejoice in the end of violence against any other human being or any animal or creature. Surely, though, it's impossible for any thinking/feeling person to rejoice in the death of any other part of humanity - no matter how violently that person has lived - without compromising our own humanity.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

(John Donne)

Prince Harry as Tsar?

2011-05-03T22:09:00.004+01:00

How incredible is this amazing story? I doubt it will come to pass but stranger things have happened...and what a lovely thing that would be!

Prince Harry as Tsar

Not So Desperate Flaws

2011-05-01T00:03:00.006+01:00

I hesitated in writing this post as I do not know the full details and certainly do not wish to draw attention to a child's minor and correctible condition but, after reflection, decided to write it anyway.

One of the beautiful children at yesterday’s wedding was particularly delighted to be playing such a role because, until then, she has been kept away from photographers due to an eye condition, which creates a squint. This little girl looked absolutely beautiful yesterday and I am sure she is equally beautiful all of the time! I am a little aghast at the need to keep her away from being photographed until now, for so minor a reason?

The newspapers have often reported that the condition, which led to her being kept from the public gaze, is ‘rare’ – but I don’t believe that is true. It is a quite common occurrence (and I know this as I, too, grew up with it and have experienced this way of viewing the world). It’s no big deal. In fact, though it was a big deal in childhood (going around with nail varnish on one lens of my spectacles so that one eye would work harder; or being called various names like ‘speccie’ and ‘cross-eyed’) it became quite fascinating to me to think why things were as they were. After some painful surgery as a very small child, I used to go to church and pray for a cure...and - wonder of wonders! – at the age of 13 - I underwent surgery again and was told afterwards that I could throw away my glasses and probably wouldn’t need them again until I was about...17. Three decades have passed since then. I still don’t wear glasses and have better eyesight than many of my contemporaries! What really happened was that I decided it was no big deal and it stopped bothering me. In fact, I decided it was symbolic of having an eye in two worlds – that which is ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ and that which is, ‘aren’t things unpleasant’? - and whenever it bothered me physically, I realised it coincided with my not being focussed on ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’

On a much grander scale, though, it brings to mind the way in which some royal families have felt a need to conceal or protect their children, if there was the slightest hint of them not being ‘perfect’ in any way. Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son, was so often left out of royal visits because of his haemophilia. Prince John was sent to live apart from the rest of his family because of his epilepsy and other conditions. The haemophilia of the beautiful Tsarevich Alexei, was hidden from the public because his parents feared that people wouldn’t understand or would lose faith in the monarchy.

Perhaps the worst thing that parents can do – with the best intentions - is to try to hide their child’s condition. By hiding it, they exacerbate it and make a big deal out of something which, left to his/her own devices, the child is perfectly capable of dealing with or even healing. I do not honestly believe in the necessity of illness in any form, and, harsh as it sounds, so many lifelong invalids tend to be the victims of their parents’ well-meaning over-protectiveness. It’s okay to have a condition; it’s okay to be ill for a while – it’s all a question of balance and not being led into adopting the sick role.

The Royal Wedding!

2011-04-29T23:08:00.007+01:00

Well...what can be said beyond: What a perfect day!

“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this....” lovely wedding. It’s so much more than a day’s celebration. Like the Abbey, it’s a thousand years in the making: the perfect blending of royalty with the people.

There was a time when people blamed their kings and queens for all their ills. There was a time when kings and queens viewed their people with disdain. It has taken centuries for the two to come together and every step along the way has led to the lovely blend of dignity, pageant and respect with the fun and sense of camaraderie that we have seen today. Alongside all the implications for the nation, we shared the joy of two lovely people who are so perfectly suited and who are both fun-loving and dignified - what a perfect combination! I hope they are having a really happy party this evening in the palace!

God bless all of the many, many people behind the scenes who rehearsed in the early hours for months in advance to make this day so lovely for our country!

And every blessing upon Prince William and Princess Catherine! May they always be as beautiful and happy as they are today!

And thank heavens for the survival of the monarchy!!

"I wonder what the [future] king is doing tonight...."

2011-04-28T22:57:00.004+01:00

Here, we don’t have Independence Day or Thanksgiving. We don’t have a version of Australia Day, and our religious festivals are swept up in commercialism. In England, we don’t really even celebrate St. George’s Day, as the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; and we don’t have Burns’ Night or Hogmanay. In fact, in England especially, but throughout most of Britain, we don’t really have anything that celebrates who we are....

Except when it comes to Royal events! And wow! Has this wedding captured the nation...and we do this so well!! Please forgive a little Englishness/Britishness tonight but of all the royal occasions in my lifetime (the Queen’s Silver and Golden Jubilees and the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana), tomorrow seems to not only continue a link in a chain dating back to the processions of the Victorian era, but also to have created something quite new.

Seeing children Maypole dancing in red, white and blue; the shops bedecked with bunting, and the people who camp out all night for a glimpse of the procession, the historical link is so apparent. It could be any celebration from any era when royal visits and occasions were celebrated. My grandmother spoke of King Edward VII coming to Leeds in 1908 and what she, as a schoolchild, did was no different from what children in schools all over Britain have been doing today. The new part, however, is that I don’t think that (in my lifetime) there has been a royalty who inspired such sincere and genuine affection as Prince William. Perhaps it is because the country mourned the death of his mother, that we kind of took him and Prince Harry to our hearts in a way that is quite unique...more likely it is because he has shown himself to be all that could be wished for in a prince: the common touch with the dignity and mystique of royalty; the ability to empathise with ordinary folk and yet to remain a Prince.

And Kate....well, everyone seems to be claiming a part of her right now so I will stick in the oar for the Leeds connection! Her ancestors gave their name to an area of the city (Middleton) and were part of the philanthropic founders of this northern place.

There is so much excitement throughout the country – such a sense of celebration - and it seems like everyone is not only wishing this lovely couple well, but also being so grateful for this opportunity to celebrate who we are as a nation. You have to admit the inch perfect placement of the knives and forks and glasses on the tables, the perfect timing of the processions and the carefully measured placement of every guard along the route is really rather wonderful! Just for tonight and tomorrow, I am so very proud to be English/British...and as night falls the song from ‘Camelot ‘ comes to mind:

“I wonder what the King is doing tonight?” For ‘King’ read ‘future king’....

I know what my people are thinking tonight,
As home through the shadows they wander.
Ev'ryone smiling in secret delight,
They stare at the castle and ponder.
Whenever the wind blows this way,
You can almost hear ev'ryone say:

I wonder what the king is doing tonight?
What merriment is the king pursuing tonight?
The candles at the court, they never burned as bright.
I wonder what the king is up to tonight?
How goes the final hour
As he sees his bridal bower
Being regally and legally prepared?
Well, I'll tell you what the king is doing tonight:
He's scared! He's scared!

You mean that a king who fought a dragon,
Hacked him in two and fixed his wagon,
Goes to be wed in terror and distress?
Yes!
A warrior who's so calm in battle
Even his armor doesn't rattle
Faces a woman petrified with fright?
Right!

You mean that appalling clamoring
That sounds like a blacksmith hammering
Is merely the banging of his royal knees?
Please!

You wonder what the king is wishing tonight?
He's wishing he were in Scotland fishing tonight!
What occupies his time while waiting for the bride?
He's searching high and low for some place to hide.
And oh, the expectation,
The sublime anticipation
He must feel about the wedding night to come.
Well, I'll tell you what the king is feeling tonight:
He's numb!
He shakes!
He quails! He quakes!
And that's what the king is doing tonight.

I’ll bet he is!! But he needn’t be...we love him!

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T11:02:00.003+01:00

Wishing you a VERY HAPPY EASTER!

View From the Street...

2011-04-20T23:19:00.007+01:00

The shops are filled with memorabilia: Union Jack scarves, tee-shirts emblazoned with the royals crest, tasteful glasses and tacky crockery. There is red, white and blue bunting, dotted with pictures of William and Kate, in the shopping centres; and the pubs are advertising all kinds of deals with screens in the beer gardens for the 29th April. With St. George’s Day approaching and Easter being late this year, there’s a whole series of Bank Holidays coming together, making the working weeks much shorter, and we have amazingly beautiful weather for April – the cherry blossom is out everywhere and the bluebells are beginning to bloom!

Like the rest of the world, Britain is going through a recession engineered by bankers and the shady groups who hide in the shadows. Bread and circuses might seem like the order of the day to some of those who wish to keep us in line with the programme but there is something deeper here in this Royal wedding than simply being appeased with a few street parties and a set of souvenirs.

Is it a strange coincidence that we are having so beautiful a Spring? Britain’s climate is so unpredictable and often so wet that even way back in history the Roman invaders hated being here and the Normans didn’t think much better of it. For the past few years, winters have been extremely long and summers have been virtually non-existent - a couple of sunny days in June and that’s it. As soon as the sun appears the mood changes. We’re no longer the buttoned-up people with stiff upper lips, but the friendly, happy people who hurry out at the first possible opportunity to savour the sun!

It is pretty amazing, though, that throughout my lifetime the loveliest summers and the brightest days have always coincided with royal occasions. I was at school in 1977 when the Queen and the whole country celebrated the Silver Jubilee. We were all
given souvenir mugs and hurried to watch the Queen drive by as she toured the country. In 1981, I recall the Union Jacks in windows for the wedding of Prince Charles and the then ‘Lady’ Diana, and the warmth of those summer evenings. Again, 2002 and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee...warm summer days, the flags, the coming together, the feeling of a country united.
Now, 2011...a wonderfully warm spring; a handsome prince and a real love-match...Our Royal Family obviously doesn’t control the weather, but they certainly raise the mood of the country...and somehow that mood is repeatedly reflected in the weather.

This is so wonderful a time for England/Great Britain. An estimated two billion viewers from all over the world will watch the wedding ceremony, which has also led to so many more hotels bookings, thriving businesses, generating huge amounts of income and providing many people with more work. Pubs (which have been closing down all over the place since the EU directed smoking ban) will prosper on the day. Prince William and Kate asked that people who wish to send gifts, send money instead to their charity, which has already received huge amounts in donations.

Above all, though, this wedding is drawing people together with the great love and appreciation we feel for the traditions of our country and who we really are, which is reflected in our Royal Family who somehow – regardless of their individual foibles – personify the finest spirit and aspirations of this country....and provide us with a wonderful excuse for a jolly good party and fun!!

A Different Kind of Hero

2011-04-18T23:12:00.006+01:00

One of the most beautiful stories of WWII, and one that shows heroism in a different light, is that of Miriam Milbourne, about whom I know little except for her heroism, which wasn’t of the kind that requires an impulsive moment of great courage, but rather a far-seeing vision, and the fruits of her efforts can be enjoyed today.

During the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, food was in desperately short supply due to the British blockade, and the islanders were compelled to hand over any livestock to the occupying forces.

By the time of the occupation, Miss Millbourne (she is always described as Miss Miriam Milbourne, which I presume is meant as a mark of respect from that era) had been carefully ensuring the survival of the almost-extinct breed of beautiful Golden Guernsey goats by careful breeding programmes for about fifteen years. She was not going to willingly submit her beautiful animals to feed the Nazi invaders and so she somehow managed to conceal them in caves throughout the entire length of the occupation, knowing that if she had been caught, she would have been sentenced to death.

Happily, she and the goats survived. It was 1967 before the herd was successfully
introduced to England, and to my utter delight, there are beautiful Golden Guernsey goats in the farm of Temple Newsam. These gorgeous creatures are so noble in appearance, and so friendly and self-contained that it is impossible to imagine that they could have been wiped out were it not for the courage and love of this little-known heroine.

Animals have suffered a great deal in human conflicts. Over 8 million horses were killed in the First World War (8 million!! and what did they know of human wars?); during Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda, elephants were horrifically slaughtered; the habitats of numerous animals have been destroyed on battlefields; sniffer dogs have been killed while searching for explosives....Thank heavens for someone like ‘Miss’ Miriam Milbourne whose courage enables me and so many thousands of other people to enjoy the beauty of the lovely Golden Guernseys today.

"For Those in Peril on the Sea"

2011-04-14T23:01:00.004+01:00

On the anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, the courage of those who daily risk their lives to save others ‘in peril on the seas’ comes to mind. The work of the Royal National Lifeboat Association is truly awe-inspiring since most of the brave people who man the lifeboats are volunteers who turn out in all conditions at the drop of a hat when someone is in distress. It’s a definite reminder that, in spite of what the newspapers and TV broadcasters would have us believe, the world is filled with noble people who are willing to risk even their own lives for others.

One of the least likely English heroines, Grace Darling (whose name always appeared in my childhood history books about great heroes and heroines of the past), embodies that wonderful spirit of humanity that still thrives today. Grace was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper in Northumberland who, one stormy night in September 1838, spotted a wreck from the window of the lighthouse on the Farne Islands. Since the sea was too rough for the lifeboat to be launched, she and her father set out in a rowing boat to rescue the survivors. Her story was brought to the attention of Queen Victoria who was so impressed by her courage that she gave her £50, which must have been a large sum of money in the days when a servant earned less than £20 a year!

I believe that the spirit of Grace Darling and all the other true heroes and heroines of history is still strong today in the Mountain Rescue teams, the Lifeboat teams and all the people who, almost without thinking, automatically perform acts of great courage when they see someone else in need. It’s a natural human response to immediately go to the help of others in need and we are surrounded by heroes and heroines.

Unfortunately we are too often presented with only the dark side of our society: images of war, cruelty, animal abuse, child abuse murder and selfishness. I firmly believe that if the news concentrated more on the noble, the beautiful and the courageous, we would not only see ourselves in a different light, but we would all become better for it.

"Forever Wilt Thou Love..."

2011-04-13T22:49:00.002+01:00

In spite of its unexciting title – and, I must say, some of what seems nowadays its early 19th century over-flowery verse – Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ expresses to beautifully the sense of moments or people of history that seem to remain stamped upon eternity and our common memory, as surely as the images were moulded on his ancient urn.

Addressing the intricate images on the urn, Keats speaks to the young man who is approaching his lover: “Forever wilt thou love and she be fair..” and so it seems to me, looking at photographs of people of the past. It rather reminds me, too, of Shakespeare’s line from Antony & Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her...” or again from Binyon’s poem that is always read aloud on Armistice Day: “They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn...”

It is interesting that, in spite of the ways in which history is written and re-written, and many untruths about the causes of events are passed down through generations, certain images – true images, perhaps – remain unchanged. At the end of his life, Nicholas II of Russia was simply Comrade Nicholas Romanov. Louis XVI was Citizen Louis Bourbon...and yet, in spite of that temporary triumph of those who sought to humiliate and degrade these men, everyone remembers them as Tsar Nicholas and King Louis XVI. Their names and titles are engraved somehow into our common memory and neither the envy nor the anger of those who set out to destroy them has managed to efface that.

Like the engravings on the Grecian urn, some things are eternal...

Lennox

2011-04-10T19:42:00.003+01:00

Following on from the previous post, I would like to draw attention, too, to the plight of certain breeds of dogs, who are being needlessly killed in the name of ‘public safety’. This, taken directly from another website, is the story of an innocent animal named Lennox:

“Lennox is a loveable 5 year old family member. He's an American Bull dog Labrador cross that we have owned since he was a little pup. As responsible dog owners that also foster for numerous Northern Ireland dog shelters we had Lennox as a young pup Micro chipped, Neutered, DNA Registered, Pet Safe Registered, Insured and Licensed every year with the Council without fail.

"On Wednesday the 19th May 2010 he was taken from our family home by Belfast City Council as they believe he falls under the dangerous dogs act for Northern Ireland. The Council, without seeking any proper professional guidance declared Lennox to be a breed of "Pit Bull Type" and so they wish to kill him simply because he has the appearance of said breed. The Belfast City Council took Lennox from his loving family home using a wrongly addressed warrant and using copyright ADBA (American Dog Breeders Association) breed standards guide which the Council were never authorised to use, in doing so the Council broke international copyright laws and for doing so have recently been issued with a 'Cease & Desist' order from ADBA Inc.

Lennox has never attacked anyone or anything yet the Council have removed him from his home where he lives with my Husband, myself, our 11 year old disabled Daughter, his kennel mate Juicy a 2 year old female boxer and various foster dogs. Belfast City Council are pressuring our family to sign him over to them to be destroyed however we feel the need to fight his case, he cannot speak but we will be his voice! If this was a human we would declare this racism. We ask every kind hearted compassionate person for your support, don't let them murder him. This may be our dog today but it could be your best friend tomorrow!”

http://www.largebreeddogrescue.com/save-lennox.php
http://www.savelennox.co.uk/

The Sport of Kings?

2011-04-10T11:45:00.004+01:00

Yesterday, I had the misfortune to see the Grand National on television and was utterly sickened not only by what happened, but also by the commentator's inadvertent admission of how we view animals and the bizarre contradictions regarding animals in our society. Every year horses die in this appalling race and this year was no exception. No mention was originally made of these fatalities but as the horses rounded the course a second time, men with chequered flags were directing them away from one of the jumps. The reason for the diversion was that there was – I quote – ‘an obstacle’ at the other side of the fence. This obstacle was a green tarpaulin covering the corpse of a beautiful creature who had fallen the first time round.
“An obstacle...” – is that all it is? A sentient, beautiful being who had been killed in a barbaric race that lasts about quarter of an hour – for fifteen minutes of entertainment, two horses died. Can you imagine taking part in a marathon or another race where fellow competitors had died and you were told just run around their bodies which were merely 'obstacles'?

The picture above is not from yesterday’s race but from another racecourse. The Grand National isn’t the only race where horses die. I do not doubt that racehorse owners love their horses; the stable hands, the trainers, the jockeys – they obviously have great affection for these animals, and this is what is so bizarre. Would you willingly allow your pet to take part in something so dangerous...would you willingly force your child to do something like that? They say, “Oh the horses enjoy running and jumping...” Do they enjoy breaking their necks or their legs and being shot while the crowd goes on cheering as though nothing has happened?

For the past couple of weeks, people have been appalled by the cruel treatment of the elephant, Annie, who was rescued from a circus and is now happily rehoused and enjoying her life. That an elephant should suffer cruelty for the sake of entertainment is an outrage. Is it anymore outrageous that so many horses should be packed into that race and forced to leap such high fences?

And when the race was over and the dehydrated winner was taken away to be rehydrated, the crowds continued their cheering and I doubt anyone watched the poor dead creatures being carted off to wherever they cart dead horses off to.

They call this ‘the sport of kings’. There are few kings left now in Europe and it is a great pity that, having lost so much of the finer part of many European monarchies, we thought to keep this appalling treatment of such beautiful animals.

“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” St. Francis of Assisi

'Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages"

2011-04-01T22:39:00.004+01:00

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
...Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...

I find this opening to the Prologue of Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’ so wonderful because – in spite of its ‘olde English’ that is like a foreign language today – it speaks to something quite timeless: the desire to go on pilgrimages. Even more interesting to me is the fact that he mentions April drawing that longing from people and, though this was written over five hundred years ago yet every spring, just like those 14th century pilgrims, I, think so many people still feel that ‘pull’ in Spring to make things clean and new on every level. ‘Spring cleaning’ seems to be an innate thing – like nest building – and whatever brings us closer to our natural way of being, in tune with Nature, seems to me such a beautiful thing.

All over the world there are pilgrimage sites and holy places of many faiths and it seems that no matter what one’s Creed or beliefs, the same sense of wonder and transcendence pervades them all. Whether they be stone circles or the sites of apparitions or the homes of saintly people of the past, it often seems that places absorb the faith of, and all that is finest in those who go there. I have been in old chapels where the walls themselves seem to drip sanctity; and I have been in ancient woods or wandered in Pagan places where the trees and the earth itself seem to have absorbed that same sense that there is so much more to us than the daily ‘stuff’’ with which we fill our lives. (Incidentally, it is beautiful that the Christian monk, Thomas Merton, when visiting a Buddhist shrine was advised not to enter since – at that time – it was not in keeping with his religion. He entered and later wrote of it being one of the most wonderful experiences of his spiritual life).

Interesting, too, in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is the odd collection of pilgrims! Saintly, lusty, uncouth, avaricious, interesting and bores; those who came to find Heaven and those who just came along for the ride: these people might just as well have stepped out of the 21st Century. Yet none of those people is simply uncouth, lusty, lazy or anything else – that is but one small facet of their behaviour and they had all chosen to go on this Pilgrimage in search of something more profound...perhaps to discover the wholeness of who they were.

The realisation that, no matter how sophisticated we think the world has become, there are some things that don’t change (our connection to the earth, our human characteristics, our natural cycles and the humorous loveliness of people) and there are eternal truths which do not change, is a very beautiful thought. There is always so much more to us all than meets the eye....

Perhaps this also explains to a small extent the appeal of beautiful palaces and stately homes and the Royalties of Europe. Among the Kings and Queens of the past, the same characters existed as exist today and as were described in ‘The Canterbury Tales’. Marie Antoinette was sometimes frivolous; Edward VII was sometimes a glutton; Wilhelm II was sometimes arrogant; Alexandra of Britain (Denmark) was obsessed with her children and always late; Queen Victoria was sometimes obstinate and domineering (other times, like a little child in search of someone to look after her) etc. etc. etc. None of these people was simply that one facet of their behaviour and, as Royalties, their characteristics appear to have been exaggerated until they are written off by many people as simply that one aspect. Their homes, though, their beautiful palaces, like those sacred places, seem to have absorbed something more – the grandeur and dignity of everyone.

It is very lovely that, no matter how sophisticated or dehumanising the world seems to be nowadays, there is always an innate connection with Nature and the natural inclination towards beauty, exactly as flowers and shrubs naturally turn towards the sun.

Hallelujah!

2011-03-30T23:19:00.002+01:00

550 years ago yesterday, on a bitter Palm Sunday in a hail storm, the bloodiest battle ever to take place on English soil was fought in the Yorkshire village of Towton. Today, half a millennium later, people still place flowers and light candles in memory of what took place that day when Englishmen murdered other Englishmen and thousands were killed in a rout which led to men stepping on their comrades’ corpses in their desperation to escape.

Ostensibly, it was a battle between the Yorkists and Lancastrians in the Wars of the Roses but really, nowadays, who knows what was in the hearts of those young men when they went to war? Now, when the outcome of the battle is really of no significance, the descendants of those soldiers who died in that place feel only the silence that hovers over battlefields that seems to say, ‘why?’

A long past battle brings people together. On Armistice Day the veterans who fought on opposing sides of World Wars have stood together, acknowledging each other’s courage and each other’s loss. When the war is over and the cause is long-forgotten, the enemies stand together mourning their lost comrades and the loss of innocence and, perhaps, wondering what all the shouting was about.

The same is true of natural disasters...in the midst of the chaos people of all nations reach out to one another and come together. In grief, in tragedy, in the aftermath of wars, we drop our defences and find we have so much in common.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we did this naturally, without the tragedies or wars? If episodes like this:

Hallelujah!

or this:

Dancing

were the norm?

Leeds Union Workhouse

2011-03-28T23:52:00.004+01:00

One hundred and fifty years ago today the Leeds Union Workhouse opened. Over the past century and a half, it has developed into one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals with many wings and modern buildings, but there are still visible remnants of the old workhouse (much of which is now museum).

The workhouse – yet another vile product of the industrial revolution – was among one of the first institutions that, to my mind, marked the dehumanising of humanity. When England – and particularly the north of England – was largely dependent upon farming, most people lived in villages or parishes, where they worked the land, paid rent and a couple of days labour a year to the local landowner or squire, weaved and spun in their cottages and took their wares to sell in the nearest market town every week or so. (Even today, Yorkshire is filled with road signs pointing to ‘Historic Market Towns’). It wasn’t by any means an easy life. Most cottages were pretty squalid; when harvests were bad, people starved, animals and people were often undernourished...On the other hand, there were some advantages: people were people. Whether you were the village idiot or the eccentric midwife, local witch or passing labourer, you were a unique person, accepted in your own right. You contributed – often by tithing – to the parish poor fund, and the local parson handed out that money to the elderly or those who could no longer work. Parish Relief, as it was called, worked quite well when the harvest was good and not many people were claiming it.

The Enclosure Acts changed everything. Cottagers were evicted from their homes. Animals were cruelly fattened beyond recognition. Village idiots were placed in institutions and, as the towns developed into industrial cities, churning out more cloth in a day than an ordinary weaver could produce in a year, more and more people were thrown ‘on the mercy of the parish.’ Since the Parish Relief couldn’t meet the growing demand, the government authorised parishes to group together in a Union and, instead of handing out money, they should build workhouses – hence the Leeds Union Workhouse.

The workhouses were created to discourage people from being poor.
They did this by making these places as dehumanising as possible so you would only go there if you were absolutely desperate. Men and women were segregated and, since many people who arrived at the workhouse were elderly couples who could no longer work, this meant that people who had been married for decades were not allowed to see each other again. Forced into uniforms, sitting in rows, eating and working in silence, the workhouse inmates’ lives were as appalling as those of the people who later were forced into concentration camps.

Who was responsible for this? Not monarchs, not princes, but petty-minded officials who believed themselves to be the elite, more intelligent than the masses, and the only ones capable of controlling an unruly and unintelligent society.

Today, of course, we are far more enlightened. We no longer allow ourselves to be regimented by people who know better; there are no longer elite groups who believe that most people are ignorant and need to be put in their place...

Overthrowing Tyrants

2011-03-23T22:55:00.004Z

It is Spring...the daffodils are blooming; the sky is blue and the sun is shining, the lambs are frolicking and the world looks so beautiful...That matters far more than what comes next in this post...

In 1914 the Russian army rolled into war to defend ‘little Serbia’ which had come under attack from the Austro-Hungarians who were intent on crushing the Slav dream of a united South Slav Kingdom. To the average Austrian, the attack was a righteous response to the murder of their heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and a necessary measure to protect the peoples of their Empire. To the average Russian, the defence was a righteous response to a bully who was placing impossible demands for reparation on Serbia. They were all fighting – apparently – to protect someone else....but who they were fighting for became lost in the scale of the slaughter. In the end there was nothing but disillusionment for all who lived through the First World War.

Going back a little further...At the time of the War of Independence when the Americans were throwing off the yoke of oppression imposed by Britain, Simon Bolivar was leading an equally successful campaign against Spanish rule in South America. He enlisted to his cause many foreign troops – including some high-minded British officers and soldiers who believed that Bolivar would do for the South what George Washington had done for the North. Some of those soldiers were in it for themselves, believing they would be rewarded with land, but others believed they were fighting to ‘save’ the native South Americans from a tyrant. In fact, Bolivar, having disposed of the Spanish, simply continued to oppress the ordinary people, and those soldiers ended up disillusioned.

Going back still further...in the Middle Ages, knights from all over Europe, hearing of the oppression of Christians in Jerusalem, set out on a series of great Crusades to rid the Holy Land of Islamic tyrants. After some hundreds of years of slaughter and carnage, wins and losses and atrocities committed on both sides, the Knights were not only defeated but made outcasts by their own Church.

In each case – and there are hundreds of such cases throughout history – the dream inspired in people was the removal of a tyrant and the protection of that tyrant’s victims. It’s a tried and tested formula that works well because most people want to help their neighbour in need and want to protect the innocent. What greater feeling can be aroused in a good man than that he might be a knight in shining armour defending someone in distress? Isn’t that honourable and noble, and don’t we have a duty to help our neighbour in need?

And yet...and yet...How many more countries will we bomb? How many more tyrants will we set out to overthrow? How many more wars – now euphemistically described as ‘military intervention’ – will we fight before we realise that there is always a quite different agenda behind what the news stories tell us? History shows us that nothing is ever as it appears in the news at the time...Wars are never about what they are said to be about and the overthrowing of tyrants is rarely quite as simple as it appears. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya...

It’s a dangerous business, overthrowing tyrants. Of course, no one wants tyranny but there wouldn’t be any tyrants if there weren’t always people ready to fire the guns for them....and the people who fire those guns are inspired by the same kind of ideology that they, too, are knights in shining armour, doing what is best for others. Can one man really hold so much power over others?

It is beyond bizarre that after all these thousands of years of wars and tyranny and all the rest of it, we still go on and on engaging in these mindless conflicts. It couldn’t happen if people stopped listening to politicians and leaders. It wouldn’t happen if we minded our own business and simply paid attention to who we are, not blaming others for our misfortunes or trying to impose out ideology on others, but recognising our own individual brilliance, being quiet within, and seeing in everyone the expression of the Divine.

I prefer to listen to birds and look at daffodils and talk to trees than to listen to political leaders. People who talk to trees are seen as quite mad...but what could be more mad than failing to learn from the past and continuing this relentless nonsense of killing each other in the name of freedom?

"There's Nowt So Queer As Folk"

2011-03-20T23:28:00.006Z

There’s a saying here in the North of England, “There’s nowt so queer as folk” – roughly translated as ‘People are very bizarre.”

It’s very true, isn’t it? This is the first of a few posts about how bizarre things seem to me. I appreciate that some things might be controversial and that it might sound arrogant to express such an opinion, but what the heck! The deeper you delve into history or look at the present state of affairs, the more bizarre things appear and it is astounding really that so many things are taken for granted or old mistakes are incessantly repeated without being questioned. These are just my thoughts...

It’s bizarre that ‘The Tamworth Two’ – the two pigs who became a legend after
escaping from an abattoir and finding their way to freedom – became national heroes and everyone smiles at their brilliant escape....and then the same people who smile at that, sit down to a pork dinner or a bacon sandwich???

It’s bizarre that people who gush at the beauty of new born lambs think nothing of tucking into a chop, as though those beautiful and inspiring creatures had no feeling at all.

It’s bizarre that Christian countries could ever have been so anti-Semitic when Jesus was Jewish.

It’s bizarre that virtually every revolution or war that was fought in the name of ‘Liberty’, simply paved the way for greater tyranny, and people accepted it.

It’s bizarre that while the whole world is united in our desire to do all that we can to aid the Japanese people who are enduring the effects of the tsunami and earthquake, we silently sit by and watch the planes fly over Libya possibly killing many more people (as happened in Iraq)....

It’s bizarre that our planes now attack Gaddafi who, only a short time ago was being
embraced by Tony Blair and by the (unelected) president of the European Union.

It’s bizarre that every military intervention in recent times is described as an effort to protect the innocent people who are being attacked by dictators, yet we did nothing in Zimbabwe or other African countries.

It’s bizarre that people are swept up in the idea that we are responsible for climate change when we all know that the earth has moved through so many climatic shifts (ice ages, times of heating etc.) long before humanity had any part to play in it. (Who was responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs or dodos??)

It’s bizarre that the First World War is often called an imperial war when in fact not one single monarch or emperor wanted that war and it was all devised by politicians and ministers behind the scenes.

It’s bizarre that those who ousted the kings couldn’t wait to step into their palaces...and people still believed that these people were acting for their good!

It’s bizarre that most of us spend our lives living by the clock instead of by our natural instincts to rise when we’re ready and sleep when we’re ready and eat when we’re ready. Animals and plants seem far more attuned to Nature, and are far healthier!

It’s bizarre that the sick are so often seen as ‘brave’ or ‘heroes’ and in Christianity, sickness is seen as something that can be offered to God. Many saints of the past longed for suffering and martyrdom as a sign of their love??! – bizarre!!! If Jesus had thought that way, when he met a leper or a blind man, he would have praised their sacrifice rather than telling them they were healed!

Well, that’s a start...I hope to go into more specific details in the next few posts and trust that if this is offensive or simply arrogant, it is merely a record of my observations...

The Making of a King

2011-03-18T23:33:00.004Z

When their first son, Bertie, was born Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – both of whom were still so young – sought guidance about his upbringing from Prince Albert’s mentor Baron Stockmar. His advice couldn’t have been more detrimental to the poor Prince of Wales whose memories of childhood were so unhappy that as soon as he became King, he disposed of that great (and beautiful!) symbol of his childhood, Osborne House. As a boy Bertie could never please his parents. He just couldn’t fit their (or Stockmar’s) ideal of the perfect prince. Gauche, not studious or particularly academically intelligent, his natural talents for diplomacy and charm were so often overlooked. I adore Prince Albert and think that the one mistake of his life was his treatment – albeit well-intentioned – of the future King Edward VII. In later life, the perceived traumas of this strict regimen showed up in Bertie’s addictions to food, sex and gambling and anything else that brought him comfort. His life, however, was not a tragedy! He was well-liked, affable, had the common touch alongside great dignity and he was a great statesman and ambassador, though his reign was so brief.

Prince Albert and Queen Victoria wanted to raise the perfect prince.

Seeing the footage of Prince William in New Zealand today, I was over-awed by the thought that it took a few generations and far less strict regimen for that dream to
come into being. Prince William was amazing! One moment dressed in casual clothes, shaking hands with the crowds, crouching to have his photo taken with children, and chatting to them as freely as if they were old friends. When someone in the crowd called out, “I will see you in London on the 29th!” Prince William, with genuine delight replied, “You’re coming? You are all invited!!” The next minute, in a smart suit and a Maori ‘stole’ he was addressing the earthquake victims with a solemnity and wisdom that was so touching. He spoke of his grandmother and the advice she had given him – and who could fail to notice that he, having lost his mother at such a young age, understood grief - and his dignified references to Her Majesty also showed such respect for the Queen (as did the way he sang the National Anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’, with such gusto).

Kipling's wonderful lines immediately came to mind:

“If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings nor lose the common touch...”

If ever the British monarchy needed a lift when the scurrilous newspapers go in search of scandals, I am sure this young prince is the perfect person for the job. Not only would his mother be so proud of him, but also his great-great-great-great-grandparents, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria must surely be looking down at him and thinking, “Well, we got there in the end!”

"The Great"

2011-03-14T23:56:00.003Z

On the beautiful blog ‘Tea at Trianon’ there is a wonderful post about Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs.

Tea at Trianon

I read this shortly after watching a brilliant TV documentary last night, which
included so much fascinating information about King Frederick the Great of Prussia. From his most famous quotations and the little I had read of Frederick, he had always seemed to me to be a rather stereo-typical war lord who earned the epithet ‘the Great’ through his conquests and military strategies. It’s always so wonderful to be proved wrong! Frederick, it turns out (as I am sure most other people already know, though I have been a complete ignoramus about him and intend to rectify that!), was so enlightened! He lived a very simple life, totally dedicated to his people and his county, encouraged education and learning, built some of the most beautiful buildings in Potsdam and the rest of Prussia not for his own use but for the well-being and edification of his people, and he wrote some magnificent lines which, unfortunately, I have not yet been able to find, about the role of a king as a servant of his people and if the king’s and the people’s interests are conflicting, the king must subjugate his own wishes. For these reasons, far more than for his military conquests, he surely earned the ‘Great’.

Becoming absorbed in this new insight, I realised at once that I felt the same
excitement as I felt on discovering the truth about Catherine the Great many years ago. Until then, all I knew of her was the story that she murdered her husband and allegedly had many lovers, and the curious and totally unfounded story about the bizarre manner of her death (she actually died of a stroke). Discovering the truth about Catherine was enlightening. She was one of the most forward-thinking monarchs of the age. Seeing her footmen standing around with nothing to do, she handed them books and when she was told that they couldn’t read, she arranged classes for them. She cared intensely about her people’s welfare and, although she had been virtually dragged to Russia at an early age and forced into marrying a sadist, she dedicated her life to the Russian people.

Alexander II, Frederick and Catherine – three very different characters but each with the good of their people at heart. Sadly, Alexander II hasn’t been called ‘the Great’ but, like his grandson Nicholas II, and like the majority of the 19th and early 20th century monarchs, too, he dedicated himself to a life in the service of his people. I wonder often, has there been a royal tyrant in Europe the past two or three hundred years? I don’t think so...but there have been several socialist or revolutionary tyrants who seized power from the royalties.

(In our more sophisticated age, there are shady politicians, bankers, corporate financiers and arms dealers who carry out their tyranny behind the scenes and manipulate currencies, the news and world affairs...but history shows that those who seize power inevitably end up being destroyed by it.)

Liberty and Lilies

2011-03-12T23:42:00.008Z

(I trust this doesn't appear as a mere aside to this post but words are inconsequential in such times and it would be inappropriate to say more - sincere thoughts and sympathy to the people of Japan at this time).

As soon as he heard of the unleashing of the French Revolution, the English poet, William Wordsworth – a young man at that time – hurried to France to be part of this great movement towards liberty and individual freedom. Impassioned and animated by what was happening across the Channel, he believed that people had cast off the shackles of centuries and a new age was dawning and he wrote some of his most wonderful poems...Then he witnessed the murder of a king and the indiscriminate slaughter and bloodshed that followed and he returned disillusioned to England where eventually he bought a beautiful house in the Lake District and wrote some of his dullest poetry!

Wordsworth’s zeal at the outbreak of the French Revolution is understandable. It becomes even clearer in the light of William Blake’s poems (and Blake, in my opinion, is far better and more genuine poet). Blake saw the de-humanising of people that came about throughout the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, where people who had lived a rural life, in tune with Nature, were suddenly – due to the Enclosure Acts, and the advances in technology that led to ordinary journeymen losing their livelihood – thrust into slum dwellings in appalling conditions, deprived of dignity in places where children (especially those poor little pauper apprentices) were horrendously overworked, abused and disposed of in those ‘dark Satanic mills’ (the towers of which, incidentally, still line the ugly view from the train window between here in Leeds and neighbouring Bradford). Seeing the world move towards such a mechanical and inhumane way of being, where people were no longer individuals but simply cogs in the wheel of industry, I think I, too, would have rushed to France for that Revolution or rather that attempt to stop the way that people were being turned into automatons.

The question is, though, what where they rebelling against? And who took the blame and became the scapegoat for all the wrongs that people suffered?

They were rebelling against so-called ‘progress’ that was depriving them of their individual humanity and creating a sense of insecurity, and yet they chose as their scapegoat a king who, without having chosen such a role, actually cared about their well-being. The King, unlike the industrialists, had nothing to gain from turning his people into mechanical parts. He hadn’t looked for power. He hadn’t sought a throne. He did what he thought was his duty and would have been happier mending clocks. Yet this innocent man who had been forced into marriage, humiliated for his early failure to produce an heir and whose life had been mapped out by others from the start became the scapegoat for the angry dissatisfaction of his people.

No matter how deeply I delve into history, I don’t understand this obsession with Revolutions and killing or blaming kings. The average French person in 1789 probably had no more interest in who was on the throne than the average Yorkshireman cared about what was happening in London. What mattered to people then – and matters to people now – is the quality of their lives. If life is hard, if business fails, if there is massive inflation, the immediate response is either to look for someone to blame and be angry with them to the point of rioting or sending them to the guillotine, or to surrender in submission as a victim of circumstance. Are we so weak and dependent and lacking in the ability to take responsibility for ourselves that we need always seek a scapegoat?

There’s another way forward, I think. All these revolutions in the name of liberty merely exchange one notion of tyranny for another. If ever there were anything to learn from history it surely is that no one outside of us has power over us. No one outside of us controls our circumstances unless we allow them to do so. The alternative to ‘allowing them to do so’, isn’t to behead or shoot them, since we would then merely replace them with another perceived tyrant. The alternative is to realise that no one, absolutely no one else, is responsible for our experiences. We get to choose how we view the world and how we are with other people. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’ anymore. There are no ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and so there is no need to squabble over power.

After all, “Look at the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin (nor get up with the clock, nor feel jealousy or fear, nor kill kings nor stir up trouble in other countries so we can make some oil deal) and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these...”

A Return to The Age of Elegance

2011-03-05T23:31:00.004Z

If ever you feel down in the dumps or under the weather; or if ever you look around the modern world and feel a little disheartened at much of what passes for music, fashion, literature and art today, and you long for a return to the Age of Elegance and culture...and sheer joy... I cannot recommend Andre Rieu highly enough!

Within about thirty seconds of watching the DVD of his Australian concert, I was transported to another world! Here is a little clip of it:

Andre Rieu

His beauty, the beauty he creates and his joie de vivre are so uplifting and his work is like a brilliantly shining light in the world of Art and Entertainment. Isn’t it interesting that thousands of people flock to his concerts? People of all ages and cultures laugh and cry at his concerts because his music and, even more, his passion for recreating that Golden Age of Imperial Austria seems to touch something of the beauty within us all.

Rudolf: the Mystery and the Tragedy

2011-03-04T23:28:00.006Z

Some years before I knew anything about Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, I listened to this very moving song ‘C’est a Mayerling’ by Mireille Mathieu:

Mayerling

and imagined this to be a most tragically beautiful story, somewhat like my adolescent interpretation of the film, Elvira Madigan, where hopeless lovers shoot themselves under a holm-oak tree to the strains of a Mozart sonata; or even the heart-rending “Les Amants d’un Jour” by Edith Piaf – both of which seemed so romantic and beautiful. The reality of suicide is, of course, something entirely different and anything but romantic. This post, however, is not about suicide but about tragedy and mystery of a different kind.

Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera – their story has been made into films and
written up in various magazines while the mystery of their supposed suicide pact in the idyllic setting of Maylerling is presented as one of the great romances of the era. Alongside the romantic aspect, comes the mystery element: so many unanswered questions leading to theories that the whole thing was a set-up and Rudolf was murdered (a hypothesis which Empress Zita appeared to believe) or that Rudolf killed Mary and then killed himself...and there are so many different ideas about what happened, combined with the fact that Emperor Franz Ferdinand reputedly said that “anything but the truth” should come out and the official papers surrounding the event mysteriously disappeared. As happens with so many people who die in dramatic circumstances, Rudolf’s death overshadows the more interesting and perhaps more tragic details of his life.

I am not convinced that Rudolf killed himself, but that is irrelevant here. The great tragedy of his life, rather than the overplayed tragedy of his death, is his decline from being an astute and learned young man, into one who appeared to give way to despair. His affair with Mary doesn’t seem such a great romance, when she was but one in a string of lovers whose help he sought in overcoming his loneliness and the frustration of feeling that his opinions had no place and his aspirations no outlet in his father’s court. His similarity with King Edward VII of Britain is quite striking. Both, I think, were intelligent men who had ideas which differed so starkly from those of their monarch-parents and both were denied the opportunity to express their views of implement their dreams and plans. Both, too, felt as though they were somehow a disappointment to their parents and in their frustration, filled the empty hours with habits that became addictions: drink, food, drugs, mistresses - something to fill the inner vacuum.

Rudolf had many ideas which were so at odds with the Habsburg Court but some of which might have even saved the Empire. Had he been less passionate about these ideas, it would have been easy for him to slip into the frivolous lifestyle of many of his relations, biding his time until he came to power and he could have lived to a ripe old age. The fact that he felt such despair that his ideas weren’t well-received or recognised, shows, the depths to which he believed in his own vision of the necessity of change. Where he isn’t portrayed as the romantic hero who died for love, he is often portrayed as a rather pathetic waster who squandered his talents and wealth in a hedonistic lifestyle. Neither of these portrayals rings true. Like his mother, he was a free-spirit gasping for air in a claustrophobic court, and had he not had such visions of how to improve things, he wouldn’t have felt that lack of improvement so desperately.

The tragedy isn’t what happened at Maylering – whether had lived to 31 or 101 he would have left now anyway. The tragedy is that he is remembered in a way that never really seems to capture who he was, what he thought, what he felt and what he dreamed. To me he remains so mysterious and really quite beautiful.

Shy Kings and Dance Cards

2011-02-27T22:34:00.003Z

(This site is still waiting to be spring cleaned...please bear with me if it goes a little wonky for a while)

Last week, in the wake of the deserved success of “The King’s Speech”, Channel 4 presented a moving documentary entitled “The Real King’s Speech” which added more background to the film. It included original footage of George VI making various speeches, and alongside that way in which these were presented by the BBC (some of them doctored to make the speech more fluent), the original with all its pauses and hesitations. The close-ups of the King’s face, the movement of his lips and the muscles in his throat as he attempted what was for him ‘hell’ (his word for it) as he worked on overcoming his stammer and speech impediment were incredibly moving. Several things came to mind.

Firstly, the original assessment in the notes of his therapist mentioned the total lack of diaphragm movement and the virtual ‘idleness’ of the solar plexus. The solar plexus has long been seen as the centre of self-awareness/self-worth (isn’t it amazing how, when you are humiliated you feel it physically in your gut?) and it is small wonder that poor George VI had such self-worth issues when you consider the horrors of his childhood: being forced into leg-splints, having his hand tied behind him because he was left-handed (as a left-handed person myself, I cannot think of anything more bizarre than that kind of treatment and hurrah that his great-grandson, Prince William, is left-handed and no one thinks anything of it!) and having such a bully of a father who yelled at him constantly!

Secondly, it is interesting that King George’s courage was recognised during his lifetime and is even more highly regarded now. The immense strength of character it took for a desperately shy man with a speech impediment to accept the throne for which he was unprepared cannot be underestimated. It is said that when he realised his brother had abdicated, he sobbed for an hour at the realisation of what responsibility he must now shoulder. For a man to be so afraid and yet to take that responsibility, it requires enormous moral courage and George VI demonstrated that courage.

And yet....Nicholas II...The Tsar did not stammer but he, too, had felt overwhelmed by a powerful father and was suddenly saddled with an empire for which he, at only 26 years old, was suddenly responsible. Not only was he coming to terms with father’s death, but also realising the enormous task ahead of him, when he cried on his cousin’s shoulders, that did not feel ready for such responsibility. George VI is, quite rightly, regarded as heroic for his moral courage. Nicholas, however, facing an even greater task, is regarded as weak. I think they were both very brave men who, at great personal cost, did not shirk responsibility. I wish that Nicholas would also be generally described as courageous.

On a lighter note I have a bizarre question! At balls, when ladies often had dance
cards attached to their wrists on which they could ‘book’ who would partner them for which dance, how did the men remember on whose cards their names were written and how did they make sure they didn’t double-book themselves? Did they have secret notebooks stashed in their pockets or did they have to remember exactly what they had already arranged?

Spring Cleaning!

2011-02-19T23:32:00.002Z

This is an extremely dull post but this blog is about to undergo a bit of an overhaul in order to make sites, books and really beautiful blogs more easily accessible with ‘feeds’ etc.

It is a source of endless wonder to me how many beautiful ideas and how much knowledge, insight and understanding is now available on so many subjects. It seems almost as though as silent and non-violent revolution has taken place and, from all over the world, amazing people appear with ideas and passions which they are willing to share with others – a truly remarkable happening that we can share all this loveliness!

If in the next couple of days if the blog goes a bit wonky, please don’t stop dropping by – it’s just being renovated and hopefully will fall into place soon!

Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich

2011-02-17T18:54:00.002Z

Remembering Grand Duke Serge (- the much maligned and often misunderstood husband of Grand Duchess Elizabeth -) who was murdered on 17th February 1905.

'Star-Crossed Lovers' - The True Romantics

2011-02-14T19:03:00.007Z

Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is often seen as the ultimate love story but I think it is really about something far less romantic and far more cynical than the tragedy of two young and star-crossed lovers. From the earliest scenes, Juliet makes references to death, and while that is often taken as a sexual euphemism, I think it can be taken literally as physical death. An overriding theme of the play is that this love cannot last. It must burn out quickly and passionately or Romeo and Juliet will become as unloving as their parents are. There is no romance between the older Montagues and Capulets – they merely tolerate each other. Shakespeare returns to the same theme in ‘Antony & Cleopatra’. These lovers are older but their romance emasculates Antony and makes him look feeble because, in Shakespeare’s mind, love seems to belong to the young.

Obviously, though loth to spoil so beautiful a story, with such beautiful language (and I love Shakespeare!!), Romeo and Juliet hardly love each other at all. I do believe in love at first sight, but it’s a strange thing that Romeo and Juliet meet
only a couple of times at a distance, marry quickly, spend one night together and then are separated (why didn’t Juliet run away with Romeo when he fled Verona?) so they hardly know each other at all. Both, though, are in love with the dream of love (after all, at the opening of the play, Romeo is mouching about in love with someone else) and since it is a dream that they love, not each other, they have to wake up...or die to keep their dream alive.

Alas, Shakespeare did not live to see 2 couples who really were star-crossed lovers, and who kept that romance and beauty alive through many tribulations, and ultimately died together. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, and Tsar Nicholas II and Alix of Hesse, were true romantic heroes in my opinion. Not only did they have to overcome many hurdles in order to be together (Sophie, a lady-in-waiting, being deemed unworthy of an Archduke; Alix for so long unable to agree to convert to Orthodoxy and having to overcome opposition from her grandmother and future mother-in-law) but once married they had many more difficulties to overcome. These people loved one another, not the dream of being in love, and, as can been seen particularly in the later letters of Alix and Nicholas (during their separation during the war), they remained passionate about each other.

It almost seems fitting that they should die together; I cannot imagine either Alix or Nicholas outliving the other; nor can I imagine Franz Ferdinand without Sophie’s calming influence. So on Valentine’s day, I wish that Shakespeare had lived to write their stories and to show that love does not belong to the young; rather it deepens with age and can last until death....and beyond.

Ludwig, Light and Lunacy

2011-02-11T23:26:00.008Z

I wish I could remember the exact line from the 1972 film, ‘Lady Caroline Lamb’, that Lord Byron speaks when, being praised for some feat of bravery, he replies with something to the effect of external events being as nothing compared to the true terror of delving into the depths of the human mind.
That isn’t really surprising, coming from Lord Byron, who is – to me – a most unattractive character (much as I love some of his poetry) and I would imagine that it must have been so dark inside his head.

The labyrinths within one person’s mind are infinite. It is incredible to think how many thoughts flash through one’s head and how many images, smells and sounds bombard one’s senses within one single day – or even one single hour - of one single life. Memories, connections, patterns, habits, reactions – and nowadays, more than ever, it seems that our senses are bombarded and dull us to the silence or the confrontation with what we see and know ourselves to be when we look at ourselves as we really are. I think, perhaps, Lord Byron saw only darkness in his thoughts and that was what he found so terrifying.

It is amazing, really, that many who have dared to face their own demons and their own Light and have lived from that inner knowledge, have been labelled as mad simply because they refused to comply with the agreed standard of what is ‘normal’. Prior to the industrial revolution, ‘the village idiot’ was accepted as part of the community; in some cultures, people who would today be labelled mentally ill, were viewed as sacred; and in Christianity, many canonised saints would be sitting in psychiatrists’ chairs today. In the post-Industrial Revolution age, when everything became mechanical and people became cogs in the wheel, eccentricity was so unacceptable that it had to be hidden away. The expression ‘round the bend’ comes from the Victorian Lunatic Asylums, which were always built ‘out of sight’ and reached by winding roads to keep them invisible from the main roads, since madness was so taboo. Anything which is hidden creates fear – hence, I am sure, the plethora of Gothic horror stories (even Jane Eyre), which include ‘lunatics’.

Ludwig II of Bavaria is often described as ‘Mad King Ludwig’. His elaborate creations of beautiful castles, his costumes and his fantasy world are presented in an almost comic fashion but it seems his mind was filled with Light. His love of Wagner’s music (and his adoration of Wagner, himself); his whole being was devoted to beauty – at the expense of everything else.
Poor Ludwig! On a TV programme recently, I heard a Bavarian man describe him as ‘the Michael Jackson’ of his day – and that seems pretty accurate. What people do not understand, they seek to condemn.

It is interesting that almost 50 years after Ludwig, another obsessive Wagner fan came to power in Munich. This man, however, while sharing Ludwig’s almost mystical love of ancient Germanic legends, epitomised the dark side of madness yet his madness appeared so ‘normal’ to people that he succeeded in contaminating a whole generation with the insanity of hatred. The same music lived in and inspired 2 very different men – beautiful Ludwig and dark, dark Hitler. I wonder why Ludwig’s fantasy never caught on with his people, yet Hitler’s did! Who was really the mad man?
The one who dressed in theatrical costumes, spent a fortune creating artificial lakes and scenery, and built castles that he rarely inhabited? Or the one who dressed in military costumes, spent a fortune creating tanks and guns and led millions to their death?

The same question could be asked today. Where is the real madness? Is it in the people who are a little eccentric, who don’t look or behave as everyone else does, or is it in the dark minds of those who still fail to learn from history, and believe there is something to be gained in war or control or manipulation of others? I’d rather have Ludwig as my King than Alexander the Great, or any of the other so-called ‘greats’ of history!

The Burden of Being an Idol

2011-02-07T23:40:00.005Z

At six years old, in the classroom of a rather scary teacher, I recall learning the Ten Commandments, most of the words of which made little sense to me, and one of which was (remembered verbatim): “Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. Thou shalt not have any graven image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth...” This most illuminating and incredibly scary teacher explained that meant we mustn’t worship idols. A very brave child asked what an idol was, and the teacher explained that the Israelites made things out of wood or gold or anything else they could find and said prayers to it as though it were God. For some reason, an image of The Wizard of Oz came to mind but it seemed prudent not to mention that to the teacher, who didn’t seem too keen on children’s opinions!

If only it were all so simple as making something out of wood or gold and worshipping it! Or, perhaps, if the teacher had understood it a little more clearly, it wouldn’t have been so confusing. The whole thing was turned into a rather snooty and condescending look at primitive peoples who could be taken in by a graven image, and the message rather lost its meaning. Nowadays, I see the idols rather differently – I think they are the people or the institutions to whom we hand over our originality, our intelligence, our individuality, our beliefs and our true selves.

Imagine, though, how it must feel to be the idol! Imagine what a horrendous responsibility it must be to take upon yourself – or rather to have laid upon you - the aspirations, expectations and volatile whims of your people. Much is written of past monarchs’ obsession with the divine right of kings but, the closer you look at it, the clearer it is that it wasn’t so much the monarchs’ obsession as their people’s obsession that led to so much suffering. People wanted their kings to shoulder all their burdens, to be the scapegoats for all their sufferings...to basically take responsibility for them. Some people have courted that kind of adulation but no one can bear such a weight and it inevitably crushed them in the end. I think of William ‘the Conqueror’ (what a grandiose title!) lying naked and alone at the end of his life; or Stalin, abandoned by his closest companions when he suffered a stroke; or Hitler skulking off to his bunker and Lenin, whose autopsy revealed what was left of his brain...

Those born into royal and imperial families, particularly in autocracies, however, were saddled with the burden of being idols from the moment they entered the world. The film ‘The Last Emperor’ – portraying Henry Pu-Yi, the last Emperor of China, is a stark example of such a thing taken to extremes. Throughout his early life, he was a prisoner, confined in a palace and deprived of freedom so that he could be worshipped, while the world moved on outside. Nicholas II of Russia and Louis XVI of France, for example, and many more, might not have lived in such forbidding circumstances but they all were forced to assume the weight of responsibility for the expectations of their people. There wasn’t a time when they could say, “I’d actually like to be a farmer, a clock-maker, a writer, train driver....” as most children do. The poorest peasant in Russia or France could dream of a different life and perhaps even see it come into being, but these monarchs had no such freedom. No one could say to them, “What would you like to do when you grow up?” It was all planned and mapped out from the moment they were born. They had to be their people’s idols, and, regardless of one’s religious beliefs, there is common sense in the message of not worshipping idols, since no one else can carry your burden for you and, creating an idol, inevitably leads to the anger of realising that your idol had feet of clay. Born into such a position, these autocrats did their best – they didn’t choose to be there, but felt obliged to carry the weight of responsibility and did the best they could. When things went wrong, their people railed against them, blamed them and tore them to pieces. Who were the people really killing? These innocent men or their own shattered image of reality?

As an unashamed monarchist, devoted to the Queen, whose wisdom and commitment to her country I greatly admire, and to many royalties of the past, the intricacies of whose lives, lived on a grand stage, illuminate so much of what happens in everyone’s life, the difference between appreciation and idolatry is startlingly obvious. It is wonderful to look into the palaces of kings, to feel appreciation of the beauty of architecture and art, centuries of culture and grandeur, the wisdom that has been handed down through ages of ‘being in power’ alongside the very human foibles of many of our monarchs. It is wonderful to appreciate and respect the way in which traditions handed down through centuries have come to epitomise who we are as a nation, how we see ourselves, how we would like to see ourselves. It is quite another thing to look at royalties as some kind of drain on resources or as responsible for all the ills in society, In appreciation, we are powerful; in envy or in blame (‘the king is responsible for all we suffer’ or ‘the monarchy is a drain on society’s resources’) we hand over our individual power and turn monarchs or presidents into idols against whom we ultimately rebel and eventually destroy...

"The Mind Is Its Own Place"

2011-02-04T23:03:00.003Z

John Milton's wonderful line from ‘Paradise Lost’ : “The mind is its own place and of itself can make a heaven of Hell or a hell of Heaven” came to mind when I read a very interesting comment by ‘Anonymous’ on a previous post. Referring to Kaiser Wilhelm, s/he wrote:

“His parents were a happy marriage, so I don't know why he became such a complicated character. On the other hand, Emperor Karl grew up in a broken home, his father being an unfaithful husband and his mother a very strict and monotonous woman. That clearly shows that it's up to every person to decide what kind of human being she or he wants to become in life.”
I couldn’t agree more with the last sentence of this comment. Recently I was watching a TV drama in which someone, from the outside, had everything going for him but he was deeply unhappy due to his perception of, and emotional response to the events happening with other members of this family, which – inaccurately as it happened – left him feeling somehow unloved. Children see the world revolving around themselves. If parents are unhappy together, children often believe themselves to be the cause of their unhappiness. If, for some valid reason, which the child does not understand, parents leave the child with other people for a while, the child can feel abandoned. Children are so finely tuned that the slightest snub can seem like a disaster, and the tiniest observation can create immense awe and joy. Most of us dull that fine tuning as we grow up – and we are encouraged to do so by adults - in order to dull our extremes of painful or rapturous emotion. Whether we grow up in idyllic domestic circumstances (did anyone grow up in a thoroughly idyllic home where everything was always rosy?) or in very unhappy circumstances, it seems to me we have a choice. We can either become reactors/victims or creative and perceptive beings. How wonderful it would be to maintain a child’s fine-tuning alongside the wisdom that comes with understanding that, while we truly are the centres of our own universe (in that we have choice how to perceive every encounter and situation), everyone else around us is also the centre of his/her universe.

Kaiser Wilhelm, I think, had a reactor/victim mentality and was in such inner turmoil because he knew he needn’t be that way but couldn’t find a means of overcoming his own demons. The fact of his parents’ happy marriage probably added to his woes. His mother was little more than a child when he was born and she had very little say in his upbringing. Being so young and being a stranger in a foreign country and in a Court that was so different to the one in which she was raised, she felt powerless to influence Wilhelm when he was, almost from the moment of his birth, made the property of the Prussian Court, and had his head filled with grandiose notions from Bismarck and from his paternal grandparents. At the same time, because of the deformity of his arm, he was forced to endure countless hours of humiliation and painful treatments in a futile attempt to correct the deformity. A small child, seeing the love his parents had for each other, yet feeling excluded from that love, he always seems to view his deformity as the cause of his mother’s abandonment of him. To make matters worse, his mother was intellectually brilliant, and didn’t really ‘suffer fools gladly’ – after all, her own mother had been very quick to criticise her children so that was the normal pattern for Vicky. Wilhelm must have felt one minute stupid and weak, and the next minute, hearing Bismarck speak of his role as future Kaiser, amazingly powerful. It was a pattern he continued to act out all his life – swinging between victor and victim to such extremes.

At the outbreak of war, for example, his initial response to the Russian mobilisation was that of a victim. The Willy-Nicky telegrams and his own autobiography show him in an attitude of injured innocence – the poor victim of his family’s treachery. Within a week he was making grandiose and extreme announcements about how he would utterly decimate every British soldier who set foot on the Continent, and how every Russian prisoner should be killed without mercy. Who or what was he really railing against? His own sense of confusion and inadequacy.

The saddest part of his story is, I think, that he was intellectually gifted and he was capable of great love but his inner turmoil prevented him from ever finding balance or harmony within himself. The last video footage of his life shows him at Doorn, carving wood, playing with his dogs, behaving as he probably behaved in the happy hours he spent with his mother and family at Bornstedt (the country ‘farm’ his parents bought to create as normal a family life as possible for their children. There, he had played with local children and lived a ‘normal’ life and felt very close to his mother).

The contradictions in his character are fascinating, and are also a family trait. Few people could be as contradictory as Queen Victoria and several of her children and grandchildren...and perhaps the contradictions, magnified by the loftiness of their position, are what make these people so attractive even today. They mirror everyone’s contradictions in a way that is quite beautiful.

There is so much more to write of Wilhelm’s contradictions...

Happy Birthday, Kaiser Wilhelm

2011-01-27T23:08:00.008Z

Perhaps it is because we are such complicated beings that people try to create some sense of order in the chaos of emotions and thoughts within each person’s life. When you think of the hundreds of thousands of thoughts that enter your mind each day, the many emotions through which you move and the millions of images that enter your visual, auditory and olfactory fields it’s small wonder that people try to organise and label so many experiences, and so many other people. Scientists slot things into categories – gasses, liquids solids, elements, minerals, species etc. etc. – everything labelled and in order to prevent confusion. Perhaps for the sake of clarity, historians sometimes adopt the same method, labelling people as good or bad, black or white, innocent or guilty.

In the annals of history, Kaiser Wilhelm is categorised clearly as either mad or bad. I feel for this man, though very few people seem to have much that is good to say of him and I don’t believe this is simply because he happened to be on the losing side of WW1 – after all, few people write in a critical way of Franz Josef or Karl of Austria. Something about this man arouses either scorn and mockery or dislike, and it is my firm belief that this is because no one hated the Kaiser as much as he hated himself. All that grandiose posturing, the uniforms the huge moustache, concealing the lost little boy whom he remained to the end of his life. He was a bundle of contradictions – playful and bizarre one moment, angry the next; adoring his grandmother and holding her while she died; alternatively adoring and despising his mother, whom he treated appallingly; desperately longing to be loved, while at the same time needing to appear strong and above the rest of mankind; hating and loving and envying England; changing mood from one moment to the next; wanting to feel part of his large extended family, yet so desperately longing for the respect of his cousins that his behaviour was often beyond irrational (as when he threatened to ban his sister from entering Germany simply because she had converted to Orthodoxy, but a short time later was encouraging his cousin, Alix, to convert in order to marry the Tsarevich); and perhaps most strikingly, his genuine sense of his own self-righteous innocence at the outbreak of war.
This would-be powerful man remained a victim of his own insecurities all his life. No wonder he suffered at least two nervous breakdowns.

I have often read descriptions of him as ‘bonkers’ and I think it is rather sad that he is written off so easily. Clearly, he did have many psychological issues that remained unresolved - sometimes he played rather cruel tricks on people or behaved inappropriately (slapping Ferdinand of Bulgaria on the bottom and wondering why he was affronted??), but I don’t think he was deliberately cruel and I think he was capable of a great deal of love – as he showed at his grandmother’s deathbed. He loved animals and children. It must have taken a great deal of determination to overcome not only the physical disability of his left arm, but also the psychological effects of knowing he wasn’t the perfect specimen of a prince that his people expected. He rode brilliantly; he spoke many languages fluently; he was an intellectually intelligent man who loved art and literature and wanted to make Germany a place of learning and culture which extended to all classes. He fell in love with his cousin, Ella, and felt rebuffed that his love was unrequited....and later, when he married, he remained faithful to his wife. I think the speed with which he remarried following the death of his first wife, says something of his need to be mothered....He spent his entire life seeking the approval of the mother whom he treated so badly.

The photographs of him in Doorn after his ‘escape’ from Germany, show the face of a
very sad and broken man. Every time I think of him, I think of Longfellow’s lines:

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
So...Happy Birthday, Willy – the contradictions in your character often seem to be mere exaggerations of the contradictions within us all.

Fire at Temple Newsam

2011-01-25T22:51:00.002Z

On Sunday evening a fire broke out in one of the barns of the farm, which is home to many rare breed animals, at Temple Newsam House. I did not hear about it until yesterday, when someone told me that the beautiful cattle, who are housed there and whom I see very often, had been in danger and had probably died in the flames. I was shocked beyond reason at such a thought but happily, it turned out that the animals were all – thanks to the heroic action of the fire brigade – rescued and quite safe. The thought of those pensive, beautiful creatures being caught in something so frightening was so horrific and what was more horrific was the suggestion (though the cause of the fire has not yet been confirmed and this was pure speculation) that the fire was an arson attack.

I spoke of this to someone whose immediate response was, “When they catch the culprits, they ought to lock them in a barn and light a fire outside until they experience the terror those poor animals must have felt!” And it struck me as rather odd that the same person then sat down to a beef dinner!

Apart from my personal views about the unnecessary and cruel slaughter of animals, it raises rather an interesting question. If a person abuses an animal, by law s/he can face a prison sentence. If, however, that person has a license to slaughter animals in abattoirs (where sentient creatures still feel terror) no one objects. The same is true of humanity. If someone takes it upon him/herself to terrorise or murder someone else, people rise up in indignant horror at such a crime. Crowds bang on the police vans taking the murderer to trial and people seem to gain a sense of their own self-righteousness in condemning the crime. If, however, killing is legalised and made respectable (in the case of a war, for example, or – in some countries – an execution) the victims surely feel the same terror, the same pain, the same loss, but it’s alright because the government said it was alright to commit this killing.

If someone had set out to deliberately harm those animals in the barn, I must confess, my initial thought, too, was that I would like that person to feel the fear that those creatures must have felt, but that was simply a reaction – and reactions, as opposed to responses, are always dangerous. Propaganda thrives on creating a reaction and too often legislation numbs human conscience and makes something ‘right’ simply because it has government authority behind it. If people had been able to think for themselves, instead of relying on legislation (someone else’s idea of what is alright and what is not alright) would so many millions have died for nothing on the Marne and the Somme? If people had thought for themselves, instead of relying on legislation, would there have been so many guards and commanders willing to carry out the atrocities of the concentration camps?

Well, I walked through the woods at Temple Newsam today and, seeing the shell of the burned barn still smouldering, and the firemen still pumping water from the lake (what a feat of engineering!), and three donkeys happily grazing in the field nearby, I have to say three cheers for the wonderful fire brigade and thank goodness those animals were saved.

The Kaiser and his Grandmother

2011-01-22T23:28:00.003Z

Some years ago, on August 4th (the anniversary of Britain’s entry into the the First World War), I stood on the corridor outside Queen Victoria’s bedroom at Osborne House on the same spot where Kaiser Wilhelm must have once stood, and tried to imagine how it felt to him, wanting to see his grandmother one last time as she lay on her death bed. The Kaiser’s behaviour after the death of his father was so obnoxious and, since I do not believe him to have been for one moment a callous man at heart, I suspect he regretted that impetuous arrogance for many years afterwards. His family, Queen Victoria’s family, were so reluctant to allow him to even visit his beloved grandmother that he arrived quietly and behaved more like a subservient beggar than a pompous Emperor. As a man to whom appearance seemed to matter so much; a man who hardly ever let down his guard and always had to wear a mask, adopt a powerful persona and play the part he had assigned to himself, his presence at Queen Victoria’s deathbed is very striking. It seems like one of the few times in his life when Willy was truly himself – not arrogant, not wanting to be the centre of attention (the very opposite in fact – he skulked in the corridor, wanting only to be allowed into the room) but acting sincerely and out of genuine love.

Fritz Ponsonby, in his wonderful “Recollections of Three Reigns” describes the scene:

“At about half past six we were told the end had come. The Duke of Argyll told me that the last moments were like a great three-decker ship sinking. She kept on rallying and sinking. The behaviour of the German Emperor was beyond all praise. He kept in the background until they were all summoned. The Prince of Wales, Princess Christian, Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice stood around the bed, while the German Emperor knelt down and supported the Queen with his arm....the Emperor never moved for two and a half hours. His devotion to the Queen quite disarmed all the Royal Family.”

Turi and other royal animals/angels

2011-01-21T23:05:00.004Z

It is very touching that as, 110 years ago tomorrow, Queen Victoria was nearing her passing she asked to see her little dog. According to the report of her physician, Sir James Reid, on 21st January 1901, as she lay in bed at Osborne,

“...the Queen suddenly asked for her favourite little dog ‘Turi’ (Italian Spitz) but unfortunately he was out for exercise and not to be found. However, when he returned he was taken and put on the Queen’s bed, who patted him and seemed pleased to have him beside her.”
This was the day before Queen Victoria died and it is rather beautiful that Turi is mentioned so close to such a momentous historical occasion. Throughout her life, Queen Victoria’s animals had meant so much to her – and to other members of her family – that her letters are speckled with references to them: to Noble’s puppies, to Vicky’s cats at Potsdam, to the ostrich at Windsor, to Beatrice’s poor little dog who was killed by a carriage on the Isle of Wight. Animals were so close to the Queen’s heart that she openly supported the anti-vivisection league and clearly saw her beloved animals as members of the family. It is lovely that, alongside the mythical and family figures who, carved in stone and marble, adorn the corridors and gardens of Osborne, there are are also carvings of Prince Albert’s beloved greyhound, Eos, (who is pictured in the image here) and various other horses and dogs so beloved by the family.

Among the many accounts of the death of Queen Victoria, little mention is made of Turi’s presence and the comfort he brought her. He is rather overshadowed by the presence of Kaisers, Kings, Princes and Princesses...but it was Turi whom the Queen specifically asked for and I would love to know what happened to him afterwards. I hope he wasn’t like Caesar, Edward VII’s dog, who wandered desperately around Buckingham Palace searching for his master after his passing (but was happily given a leading role at the King’s funeral).

People remember the names of horses who carried war leaders into battle – the Duke of Wellington’s ‘Copenhagen’, and Napoleon’s ‘Marengo’ etc. etc. – it’s rather lovely to think of the other animals whose presence graced the lives of great people. Tsarevich Alexei’s spaniel ‘Joy’ and Mary, Queen of Scots’ terrier ‘Gedden’ accompanied their human companions to the death. More faithful than any servant, more comforting than any words offered by friends or family, these half-forgotten angels in animal form remained unflinching to the end and, unmoved by politics or the bickering that goes on between humans, deserve their place in history.

Little Turi deserves his place in history, too, and I am glad his name is recorded.

Kaiser Wilhelm, German Unification and the End of Empires.

2011-01-18T22:57:00.004Z

On the 18th January 1871, the King of Prussia stood in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles to hear himself proclaimed the first German Emperor. It’s impossible to overlook the irony that Versailles also gave its name to the treaty which so decimated Germany, almost half a century later.

What an effect must that moment have had on the young Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, future Kaiser Wilhelm II, and grandson of the first Prussian Emperor? As a boy, Wilhelm witnessed Prussia’s rise to power. He was seven years old in 1866 when his father returned triumphantly after defeating the Austrians in the Seven Weeks War and he saw, too, how several German states who had sided with the enemy, were brought under Prussian command. At twelve years old, he witnessed his country’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the ease with which the German Empire then came into being. To a small, insecure boy, traumatised by the disability of his arm, and confused by a desperate need to win his mother’s approval, such victories must have seemed incredibly romantic. It seems as though this was the dream around which he created his own persona....and yet it was a persona that he, with all his insecurities, could never live up to. Deeply sensitive on so many levels, and desperate to be liked, he seemed to spend his life hiding behind a mask of over-joviality and a sense of his own magnanimity, interspersed with outbursts of rage due to his feelings of being misunderstood, followed by periods of deep depression.

The interesting part of it all is that, of the 43 years of the German Empire, prior to World War I, Wilhelm was Emperor for 26 years and, during that time, Germany enjoyed peace and prosperity to a far greater extent than any other major power in Europe. While Russia suffered the disastrous war with Japan and the 1905 revolution; Britain battled with the Boers and faced strikes, suffragettes and the persistent problems posed by the Irish Home Rule question; and Austria-Hungary’s fragmentation began, in Germany, industry thrived, workers were given more rights than anywhere else in Europe and there was peace.

Now, here’s a thought...if one could view nations and empires as individual people growing through the stages of their lives, it would seem in 1871, that Germany had reached her adolescence, was beginning to find her own place in the world, and for the next 40 or so years was growing into her prime as a cultured and civilised place to be. Children – unfortunately! – often imitate their parents and the adults around them. If Germany were a person looking at her neighbours, she would see other Empires, some of which (like Austria) seemed already decrepit, desperately guzzling up land, creating colonies, and basking in the glory of power. Where could Germany go to spread her wings as other empires did? Africa, India, South America, Canada, Australia, the ocean...everywhere was already taken. Hemmed in on all sides, she needed to flex her muscles but there was no room to move, so she grew stronger, built better ships, created a more powerful army...and was seen as aggressive.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s life, and stages of life, coincided so clearly with that of his Empire from its first beginnings to its sad end. There was so much potential in Germany in 1871 and I believe Kaiser Wilhelm also had a great deal of potential for good, but it was already the beginning of the end of Empires and it seems as though Germany came too late to the party....

The End of an Era - the Tragic Departure of Emperor Karl and Empress Zita

2011-01-14T23:35:00.005Z

To anyone who wishes to really enter into the spirit of the age of Imperial (and post-World War I) Austria, I cannot recommend highly enough Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” – a book that is not only beautifully written, but one which literally transports you on a journey to another time like no other.

Towards the end of the First World War, Stefan was away in Switzerland but, following the Armistice, he returned to a broken Austria. This incredibly moving account is one of the few first-hand witness statements of the tragic departure of the Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, which coincided with Stefan’s train journey back to his native land. He arrives at the Austrian border station:

“Upon alighting [from the train] I became aware of a restlessness among the customs officers and police. They paid small attention to us and made their inspection in a most negligent manner; plainly something important was about to happen. At last came the sound of a bell that announced the approach of a train from the Austrian side. The police lined up; the officials piled out of their offices, their womenfolk, evidently in the know,crowded together on the platform. I was particularly struck by an old lady in black with her two daughters, from her carriage and clothes evidently an aristocrat. She was visibly excited and constantly pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.
Slowly, almost majestically it seemed, the train rolled near, a particular sort of train, not the shabby, weather-beaten kind, but with spacious black cars, a train de luxe. The locomotive stopped. There was a perceptible stir among the lines of those waiting but I was still in the dark. Then I recognised behind the plate glass window of the car, Emperor Karl, the last Emperor of Austria, standing with his black-clad wife, Empress Zita. I was sartled; the last Emperor of Austria, heir of the Habsburg dynasty which had ruled for seven hundred years, was forsaking his realm! He had refused to abdicate formally, yet the Republic granted every honour on the departure which it compelled rather than submitted. The tall, serious man at the window was having a last look at the hills and the homes, at the people of his land. The historic moment was doubly shocking to me, who had grown up in the tradition of the Empire, whose first song at school had been the ‘Kaiserlied’ and who had taken the military oath to obey ‘on land, at sea and in the air’ this serious and thoughtful-looking man in mufti. Innumerable times I had see the old Emperor in the long since legendary splendour of elaborate celebrations; I had seen him in the great staircase of the Schonbrunn, surrounded by his family and brilliantly uniformed generals, receiving the homage of the eighty-thousand Viennese schoolchildren, massed on the broad green plain, singing...I had seen him at the Court ball...and again at Ischl, riding to hunt in a green Tyrolean hat; I had seen him marching devoutly, with bowed head, in the Corpus Christi procession to the Cathedral of St. Stephen, and then the catafalque on that foggy, wet winter’s day in the middle of the war....

And now I saw his heir, the last emperor, banished from the country...All of those who stood about sensed history, world history, in this tragic sight. The gendarmes, the police, the soldiery were embarrassed and looked abashed because uncertain whether traditional recognition was still in order, the women hardly dared to look up, all were silent and thus the faint sobbing of the old lady, who had come from heaven knows what distance only to see ‘her’ emperor once more, was plainly audible. At last the conductor gave the signal. Everyone stared up mechanically, the irrevocable moment had come. The locomotive started with a violent jerk as if it too had to overcome a disinclination, and slowly the train withdrew. The officials followed it with a respectful gaze, after which, with that air of embarrassment which is observable at funerals, they returned to their respective stations. It was the moment in which the almost millenary monarchy really ended. I knew it was a different Austria, a different world, to which I was returning.”

Echoes of Voices

2011-01-13T23:53:00.003Z

As startling as old film footage of people whom we admire from the past and suddenly glimpse for a moment, is the sound of old voice recordings. To quote, yet again, L.P. Hartley’s famous line, “the past is a foreign country...”, it often seems, on hearing original recordings that they even spoke a different language. The sounds of words were melodic and so different from how we speak today and, as someone who loves words, I find this so fascinating and listening to their voices is like eavesdropping in on a conversation or hearing an echo.

We have all heard the clipped tones of the broadcasters of the earliest BBC and Pathe news recordings and I used to think it was something to do with the recording equipment that made the accents sound so different from anything we hear now but now, having heard many more recordings, I think people really did speak differently even 100 years ago. Listening to this recording of Virginia Woolf, for example (rather like listening to the charming voice of Princess Alice of Athlone, to which someone kindly sent a link some post ago) it’s obvious that a voice/accent like this would not be heard today. The ‘a’ pronounced as ‘e’, (to say ‘a man’, you must say ‘a men’) the elongated vowels...how to describe it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKwQ8kBMuJw

The Yorkshire accent is so different from this. We say castle not carsel, and bath, nor barth, but even audios of northerners from the past (not parst!) sound so different from how we speak today. The accent is more exaggerated – filled with expressions that no one really uses anymore and so much more pronounced than it is nowadays. It used to be – until very recently and well within my lifetime – a rather embarrassing thing to have a northern accent if you wanted to make anything of your life among southerners! Nothing but the standard southern accent was permitted on the BBC for many years....and it initially seemed strange to hear more familiar accents in newscasters’ voices. Nowadays it is all so different. Even Prince William speaks in such a different accent/tone from that of the Queen – perhaps because he has spent more time among people from different areas, or perhaps because the language is evolving so rapidly. I once read, though cannot vouch for the truth of it, that the American accent is very close to how people spoke in Elizabethan England and so the American pronunciation of Shakespeare is far closer to the original than anything produced by the R.S.C.

I actually believe that if we were all to travel back a hundred years, the accents and intonation around us would sound very different from what we hear today and would be very interested to learn of the development of the same phenomenon in other countries. I wonder what it would be like to hear Queen Victoria speak or to hear King Edward VII speak...in an ordinary room, without recording equipment. Did Hitler really sound so stark and mad? Did people really speak to one another in the clipped tones of those old recordings? How did Tsar Nicholas’ voice sound to the ear? What was the tone of Franz Ferdinand’s voice?...

Out of all the people I love from the past, the only voice I can really imagine is that of Prince Albert with his soft Coburg accent....

Facts, Fiction and Truth

2011-01-10T23:29:00.005Z

One morning a man walks into a church, packed with a sincere and devout congregation who have worshipped there all their lives, and utters a series of blasphemies. While the congregation rises in angry astonishment, the man walks away to spend an evening with prostitutes, collaborators and drunkards. In the days that follow, he openly flouts the law, insults the clergy and gathers a group of ne’er-do-wells to form a kind of cult around himself. He causes havoc in a St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (or its equivalent in his day), and when, eventually the law catches up with him, he is executed as a criminal...and good riddance to him.

Here is the beginning of another version of the same man’s life: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us....” The Son of God came to give Light to the Word, but the world would not accept him and crucified him and three days later he rose from the dead. Of course, this man is Jesus as seen through the eyes of the religious leaders of his time and seen through the eyes of evangelists and Christians. All the allegations are facts – he broke the law, he blasphemed, he disregarded authority – but they are not the whole Truth. Even the Gospel writers (and there are many more Gospels than the canonical Gospels) do not agree on all points and quite often contradict one another. The facts become distorted but I do not doubt the Truth expressed by each evangelist or by each critic.

This somewhat extreme example shows, I think, the challenges faced by anyone who writes today of real people of the past. In the East, particularly at the time the scriptures were written, there was a completely different understanding of what constituted a biography or history. Myth was a most wonderful device used to express the essence of a person, and the readers (or more often hearers) of the story, understood that. It didn’t matter so much what someone actually did, as who they were, their drive, their motive, their very essence or expression of the Divine, which, I personally believe expresses through all of us.

Nowadays, it seems that people are obsessed with facts and proof. Someone did this – we can prove it; we have a photograph or a written record of it. Someone said this – we can prove it; we have a recording of it. Someone thought this – we can prove it, we have a letter from them that is evidence of the fact. If you were to write someone’s biography without sufficient footnotes, it would be seen as risible. But with all my heart I believe facts miss the point completely.

How often within one day does your behaviour change? How often within one season do you fluctuate between joy and sorrow, between certainty and doubt? How often in your lifetime so far have you swung between kindness and unkindness; between elation and despair; between rage and love? Are there photographs of you which were taken when you were unaware and you look terrible, and others where you actually look quite nice? Have you ever written a letter to someone – perhaps out of duty in thanks for a Christmas gift or something – and said things which you weren’t really feeling at all? Have you ever been out of sorts and said something that later you think, “I don’t really think that at all, I was just in a bad mood.” One day, perhaps, depending on whose hands these things fall into, someone could write a very factual story of your life. But, while all of those facts would be there in your own image, handwriting, recording of your voice, it wouldn’t capture you at all.

This, I think, is one of the dangers of modern biography. A fictional account of a real person’s life is obviously the interpretation of the novelist. If it is worth reading at all it will contain truths not only about the subject of the book but also about the author’s view of humanity. Readers understand that and have the opportunity to interpret it at face value, as they choose. Biographies though – particularly those with the stamp of having been written by someone with a particular qualification – take on an authoritarian aspect. They are bound by facts. They are provable....and facts are so often mistaken for Truth.

Facts have their place but are far less reliable than Truth. To my mind, the closest we can come to the Truth of another person (of the past) is what you sense about them as you read the many contradictory facts of their life. Sometimes it is possible, even within the confines of one’s own mental agenda, to simply sense how they saw the world; what it was like to stand in their shoes, feel how they felt – it cannot be proved it can only be experienced and is filtered through one’s own experience...but it comes closer to the depths of a person than what is simply ‘proven’.

Facts are not all they seem, I think. Truth is everything and is so seldom recorded. We sense it by contemplating and viewing the lives of people about whom we write or in whom we are interested or to whom we feel drawn, though we can never be prove the truth of our contemplations and yet, there really is no need for proof – everything is interpretation anyway. (A quotation from Franz Werfel’s ‘Song of Bernadette’ comes to mind: for those who believe, no explanation is necessary; "for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.” It seems to apply to so many things....)

Poets and Propaganda

2011-01-08T23:16:00.004Z

“The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig presents one of the most remarkable and honest depictions of the world in 1914 that I have ever read. Zweig, an Austrian and Jewish poet and author, captures so brilliantly the ambience of that era – from his thrilling descriptions of the carefree world of innocence and his meetings with literary figures of the time, through the madness of xenophobic hatred that raged at the outbreak of war. His writing is so immediate because he lived through it, and, unlike many of his peers, he had travelled a great deal and made friends all over the continent and so stood aghast at the way in which poets and authors turned their art into propaganda for the war machine. Writing as an Austrian, he speaks a great deal (with horror!) of the German poets of the era and the way in which their anti-English works served to inspire hatred and prolong the war.

It was rather interesting to me this evening, having just read Zweig’s wonderful
descriptions, to be discussing some favourite poems when someone mentioned one which he had learned in school: “Vitai Lampada” by Sir Henry Newbolt. I used to love this poem because it seemed so inspiring when feeling out of sorts, but reading it again tonight, and looking into the background of it, it is clear that like Zweig’s friends, Newbolt was writing to prolong the myth that somehow war was glorious.

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The poem no longer seems so beautiful as it once did.

The Wedding of Karl and Zita

2011-01-06T23:06:00.006Z

Isn’t it exhilarating when people of the past, whose names have been so frequently repeated in history lessons in a rather one-dimensional fashion, start to become really real to you? There is such a wonderful moment when a person who was nothing but a name on a page, remembered for one small incident of their life or death, seems to become flesh and blood again before your eyes. It is rather like bringing a cloudy picture into focus through a camera lens – once there was only a vague outline but little by little the vibrancy of colour and form take shape and there is a moment of absolute clarity.

The Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand is remembered primarily (and, for the most part, solely) as the man whose murder was the catalyst to the First World War. If you Google Franz Ferdinand, the main sites that appear recount only his death (or, more frequently, the more recent music band ‘Franz Ferdinand’!). Where sites or books go a little further than the event of his death, he is described simply as unpopular, aloof, angry and not really a very attractive character.

Some time ago, I became fascinated by this man for whom, for some obscure reason, I feel great warmth. Like so many historical royalties, he is written off so glibly in one or two sentences but, the more I learn of him, the greater warmth I feel towards him. No one is ever quite so one-dimensional as history seems to present him/her.

As this is set to be a year of joyful royal weddings in Britain, here is a wonderful clip of original film footage of another joyful royal wedding, a hundred years ago: that of the lovely Archduke (future Emperor) Karl of Austria, and Zita of Bourbon-Parma. Franz Ferdinand appears several times in the clip and far from being the aloof character of popular description, he appears like any other happy participant in any other happy wedding at any time in history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDQfFyoGEE

Incidentally, while attending one of many funerals last year (thank goodness it is now 2011 and 2010 is over!), it was striking to me to see the same mourners, the same setting, the same movement as is seen at every other funeral throughout the ages, whether it be on old film footage or in paintings. Weddings, births, Christenings and funerals - the continuity of life, the continuity of the cycle of life – there is something quite lovely in the way that, no matter how advanced and sophisticated we think we are, we still move with the same seasonal cycles, as individual families and as humanity as a whole.

Apart from the cars and the clothing, the lovely clip of Karl’s wedding, could be from any era. If you look at the faces of the people in the background, it is just a happy family occasion. There is something so beautiful about it and about the way that old film footage gives us an insight into the characters of people which often contrasts sharply with the story that is presented by historians.

I am so grateful to the person called ‘storicus’ who has uploaded so many beautiful videos to YouTube.

A Very Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T16:45:00.003Z

For so many people whom I have met, the year 2010 has been unusually difficult in so many ways. There seems to have been so much illness and bereavement and it has often felt to me that everything was thrown up into the air in order to come down in a different and far better place. With that thought dominant in my mind, I am so looking forward to Midnight tonight and the birth of 2011.

The year 1866 had been particularly distressing for Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice. The Austro-Prussian War not only meant a long separation from her husband and the sadness of seeing the wounded Hessians, but also had led to her being on the opposing side to her closest sister, Vicky, in Prussia. By the end of the year the war was over, and as Princess Alice looked forward to 1867, she wrote to her mother:

“May the Almighty give you every blessing of peace and comfort which the world can still give you....May every blessing fall on my dear old home, with all its dear ones! May peace and the glory which peace and order bring with it, with its many blessings, protect my native land; and may, in the new year, your wise and glorious reign, so overshadowed by dear Papa’s spirit, continue to prosper and be a model and ornament to the world!
This year of pain and anxiety, yet for us so rich in blessings, draws to its close. It moves me more than ever as its last day approaches. For how much have we not to thank the Almighty – for my life, which is so unworthy compared to many others; the new life of this little one [her daughter – Irene] and above all the preservation of my own dear husband who is my all in this life.
The trials of this year must have brought some good with all the evil; good to the individual and good to the multitude. God grant we may all profit by what we have learned, and gain more and more that trust in God’s love, which is our guide and support in trouble and in joy! Oh, more than ever, I have felt this year that God’s goodness and love are indeed beyond comprehension!
...I am really glad to hear you can listen to a little music. Music is such a heavenly thing, and dear Papa loved it so much that I can’t but think that now it must be soothing, and bring you near to him....”

Bring on the fireworks and the music....Ring out the old, ring in the new! A Very Happy New Year!

The Age of Innocence

2010-12-30T23:28:00.009Z

Along with many people, I was disappointed by the remake of “Upstairs Downstairs”, which was shown over 3 nights this week. The original series played so prominent a role in my adolescence, when ‘James Bellamy’ was the caddish hero who so perfectly epitomised every schoolgirl’s dream! During a Latin lesson in school, a friend passed me a note to say Simon Williams, the actor who played James Bellamy, was coming in person to open a shop in Leeds that night - “Oh, be still my beating heart!” – I still have the photograph of that evening when Simon Williams put his arm around our shoulders and smiled for the camera!

There was a beautiful innocence about that time, and in so many ways the original series recaptured the innocence of the world before 1918. The final series – set in the 1920s – was a sort of aftermath. There was grief, loss, frittering away meaningless hours in trying to capture a lost innocence, the Wall Street Crash, the loss of the Bellamys’ home, and James’ suicide, which was symbolic of so much that had been lost.

The new series lacked so much because it seemed to try so hard. Suddenly it seemed so modern in that it was trying to be so politically correct that it involved the token northerner, the person with Down’s syndrome, the Asian person, the German Jewish person....and tried, in so short a time, to include historical details (the rise of Fascism, the Abdication Crisis etc.)...but it tried too hard and it was not possible to empathise with the characters.

But I think (at least for me) there was something more poignant about the impossibility of making this series, set in the less aesthetically beautiful 1930s, as captivating as the original. The beauty of the original series was its recapturing of an era which is rather like our individual nostalgia for a childhood which might not, to all outward appearances, have been idyllic, but in which to the individual who remembers childhood, there were moments of sheer awe, excitement, the belief in magic, in fairies, in dreams! The pre-1914 world was, I think, a world of innocence. It’s true that it was a world filled with injustice and yet we cannot view it clearly through 21st century eyes without first returning to the way in which it was viewed from the inside.
In the original ‘Upstairs Downstairs’, the servants were so proud to be working for an aristocratic family and they, far more than the family upstairs had such a hierarchy that was so stringent and well-defined. Under-housemaids peeped with delight over banisters to see the rich ladies in their beautiful gowns going out to a ball; butlers and footmen expected their masters to remain somewhat aloof and it was as though everyone had something to which to aspire, which was better than their own present circumstances.

People who have been in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II often speak of their sense of awe. Republicans become tongue-tied; and young, rebellious performers are suddenly so conventional when they meet her. That is the mystique of royalty. To those of us who are not royal, the very presence of a Queen, King, Prince or Princess, takes us right back to our childhood innocence and dreams and sense of wonder. The pre-1914 world was filled with such people and created fairy-tale-like occasions of pageants, processions, jubilees, coronations and royal funerals. The royalties might have lived in grand style but they created so beautiful an image and inspired such aspirations! If all their fortunes were added together and shared among the masses, each person might have gained a couple of pennies. The end of innocence came, I think, with the rise of envy. Rather than aspiring to be all that each person can be, unhappy people – led into wars by unhappy ad envious ministers and not by kings - looked at those whom they perceived as better off, and destroyed them. The murder of Tsars, Kings, the overthrow of dynasties gained nothing, but deprived us of so much appreciation, respect, awe and that child-like innocence, which we try to recapture in period dramas.

The world of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’, really ended in 1914-1918. I think it was a well-meaning mistake to try to revive it in another era, in which it didn’t really fit at all.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T16:28:00.001Z

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever your beliefs and whatever your circumstances, thank you for taking the time to visit this blog, and may your Christmas be filled with joy!

Heilige Nacht

2010-12-20T23:40:00.002Z

Is there a more moving carol than the original German version of ‘Heilige Nacht’ – I can imagine Prince Albert, who brought to England so many of the Christmas traditions we still enjoy today, singing it in his beautiful voice. That beautiful carol captures so perfectly the quietness which is so inspired by the muffling of snow and the inner silence that comes so natually at this time of year. It is the sound, to me, of something so profound, so beautifully inexpressible....and it is captured quite beautifully in this excerpt from ‘Oh, what a lovely war’ – where, for a moment, men remembered who they really are and caught the true Christmas spirit...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOz9SpWc_yE

Morganatic Marriages and Bloodlines

2010-12-19T23:36:00.002Z

It is near impossible nowadays to understand the concept of a morganatic marriage – a marriage between people of different social ranks wherein the person of the lower social rank (almost invariably the wife) and any subsequent children are not eligible to share the titles or ranks of the person of higher rank. Usually the ‘inferior’ wife was given some other meaningless title, which accounts for so many obscure German and Russian titles – Princess of Battenberg, Princess von Hanau, Countess Carlow, etc. etc. The closest thing we have to it today is the title of Camilla, wife of the Prince of Wales, yet titled – for various reasons – Duchess of Cornwall. In Britain there have never been morganatic marriages – as Queen Victoria, who couldn’t understand the idea at all, wrote so simply, “Either people are married or they are not.”

The purpose of this bizarre state of affairs was to preserve the noble blood of great dynasties. I cannot imagine how anyone conceived the idea that royal blood is different from other blood and it would taint a dynasty to have a commoner’s blood thrown into the mix but the irony of the outcome of such ideas is so tragically apparent. It was a disease of the blood – the noble blood - haemophilia, which caused such havoc and agony in many royal houses; the attempt to preserve the bloodline in Austria led to so many marriages between double first cousins that the children suffered enormously, both physically and mentally; and there was also, throughout the 19th and early 20th century, a vast amount of royal blood spilled from the murder of Carlos of Portugal, through to the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
and the murder of the Russian Imperial Family. Royal blood flowed, too, on the battlefields of the First World War – the nephews of the Kaiser were killed alongside the cousin of George V of Britain and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and in the midst of battle it can hardly have been any less horrific for a prince than for an average ‘Tommy’.

I cannot imagine how stifling and how utterly nonsensical it must have felt to have been a prince or princess for whom the choice of a marriage partner was based primarily on dynastic considerations, with some strange idea that this would preserve some kind of superiority. I can imagine, though, how someone like the very intelligent Franz Ferdinand felt when the woman whom he loved devotedly was constantly humiliated because of her ‘inferior’ blood. He had seen Crown Prince Rudolf slide into a life of utter decadence due to the stifling of the Court; and had seen Rudolf’s mother drift deeper and deeper into depression for the same reason. Franz Ferdinand loved Sophie. In the Court and in the world at large he was seen as brusque and unsociable, but at home he loved his children, loved his wife deeply and it is small wonder that in such circumstances he despised the coterie of snobs who stood between him and his uncle, Emperor Franz Josef. Forty or so years earlier in England, Prince Albert wrote of the need to bring new, stronger blood into the dynasty. I think, perhaps, he and Franz Ferdinand (a man whom admire more, the more I learn about him – except for his mass-slaughter of animals) would have had some brilliant conversations had they been around at the same time, and between them might have brought about a great deal of good.

The whole notion of blood seems to go back to Biblical times when the Hebrews were wandering in the desert and discovered that the blood of certain animals made them ill or even earlier when Greek and Roman doctors believed blood was something mystical. There remained a superstitious view of it for so many years that even today we speak of ‘blue blood’ – a rather apt idea considering the presence of porphyria in some dynasties - and ‘full-bloodied’.

I am glad that, for all our faults, we never entertained the notion of morganatic marriages in Britain.

The Power of Persuasion and Propaganda

2010-12-18T23:53:00.003Z

Charles Edward, Duke of Albany and Duke of Coburg, was the son of my favourite of Queen Victoria’s sons – Prince Leopold. It’s very sad that most of what is remembered of Charles Edward is depicted in these photographs of him wearing the swastika and sitting beside Hitler.

Even today, 65 years after the end of WW2 there are frequent condemnatory references on websites and in books to the affiliation between various royalties and the Nazis but it is staggering that while we, even to this day, are subjects of so much propaganda, we judge with self-righteous hindsight the people of the past.

Hitler was obviously a deranged megalomaniac and tyrant but, had I been part of a noble German dynasty who wanted the best for my people, and had seen them suffer the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, I might, in the 1930s – without access to all the information we have so easily today - have been swayed by the message of someone who said he could restore our country to its sense of dignity. I might have seen it as an opportunity to restore dignity, too, to the people I believed I was here to serve and govern, and live up to all that had been instilled in me about my duty as a member of the family of rulers to do the best for those in my duchy. I might even have heard Hitler’s voice as the one glimmer of light in the darkness of our country’s history. Perhaps I would have recalled brothers or friends who had died ignobly on the Somme or the Marne, and wondered why it was okay for Britain to raise Cenotaphs to her glorious dead, when my friends and family were seen as aggressors. After all, those real people who died had no more idea about why they went to war than my English or Russian cousins did, but the cousins were heroes and we were demons....though they all set off with the same idea of this being the right thing to do. Since then, I had seen my country brought to its knees, humiliated, emasculated and basically leaderless. Then, in the midst of weakness and despair, came a voice that gave hope....the voice of someone promising to restore all I loved...the voice of Adolf Hitler.

Remember, I had been raised as a grandchild of a prince who believed with all his heart that princes were there to serve and do the best for their people. WW1 left me with a sense of having failed in that....and a sense of my own confusion and sorrow at having witnessed so much slaughter for nothing, and having been cut off from my cousins and siblings.

In such circumstances of desperation and hope of a better future, I doubt I would have been aware that such a man, who gave me hope, was so deranged as to be planning genocide or anything of the sort. I doubt I would have even thought about anything other than the possibility of returning to the ideals of my youth when Germany was a prosperous and respected nation. Perhaps when the reality of what was happening – the madness, the mass slaughter of Jewish people, Polish people, gypsies, homosexuals, people with learning difficulties, all kinds of innocent people – dawned on me, it was too devastating to even think about.

Charles Edward, Duke of Coburg, son of beautiful Prince Leopold, sat alone, watching on television as his sister and cousins attended the coronation of our present Queen in 1953 because he was not allowed into this country, being seen as a ‘traitor’. I just wonder what any of us would have done in such circumstances.