It is often forgotten that the decision by Nazi Germany to invade Poland in September 1939, and thus to start the Second World War, was only made possible by a secret agreement with the government of the USSR. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of the previous month contained clauses that partitioned Poland into German and Soviet zones of influence and allowed Russia to drive into Poland from the east while the Wehrmacht struck from the west.
On this date in 1939, German and Soviet forces met, and in token of their victory over Poland, held a celebratory military parade in Brest-Litovsk (ironically the site of a humiliating capitulation by Lenin’s Bolshevik government to imperial Germany in World War I). Standing on the platform in the photo above are two geniuses of tank warfare, Germany’s Heinz Guderian and the Soviet Semyon Krivoshein.
The Soviets occupied eastern Poland until 1941 when Hitler’s surprise attack, Operation Barbarossa, broke the peace treaty with the USSR and opened up a new front in the war. In the interim the Soviets had taken hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners and massacred the officer class in the Katyn forest in 1940. The Red Army would return in 1944 and drive out the Germans. Their stay would last until the fall of eastern European communism in 1989.
In 1689 James II, King of England and Scotland, was deprived of his throne in what came to be known as the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution. His desire to bring about religious toleration for Catholics (he was one) and his abuse of constitutional norms to do so united much of the political class who summoned James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William to assume rule. William and Mary died childless and were succeed by James’s other daughter Anne. When she died in 1714, the English looked about for a Protestant heir and found one in George I who became the first of the Hanoverian line.
The descendants of James II were not willing to let the Stuart claim to the throne lapse. In 1715 James the Old Pretender launched an invasion of England with French help but was repelled. In 1745, his son (the grandson of James II) Charles Edward, known as the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland and found a small army of supporters to rally around him. His men (called Jacobites after the Latin translation of James) quickly took Edinburgh, forcing the British army to try and bring him to open battle.
This they did at Prestonpans, east of the capital. The redcoats outnumbered the Scots and were better armed but the Jacobites were made of sterner stuff than the ill-trained and inexperienced Englishmen. A sudden and savage Highland charge broke their opponents in less than fifteen minutes, killing hundreds and taking even more prisoners.
Charles Stuart’s success here led him and his generals to believe that such a charge could win them more battles but the Highlanders were massacred at Culloden when they faced disciplined troops and artillery fire.
On this date, churches of the Anglican communion celebrate the life of John Patteson (1827-71), the first Bishop of Melanesia. Patterson was the great-nephew of the poet Samuel Coleridge, educated at Oxford, and ordained a priest. He was a devoted student of languages and a country curate when he was recruited in 1854 to become a missionary in the Southern Pacific.
Based in New Zealand, Patteson sailed through the island chains of Melanesia trying to spread Christianity. To enable himself for this task he learned 23 native languages, wrote grammars for these tongues and translated parts of the Gospel. His job was made immeasurably harder by the presence in those areas of “blackbirders”, essentially kidnappers from British ships who would recruit islanders as indentured labourers and treat them as slaves on plantations. Patteson’s desire to offer a boarding-school education for native youth seemed to many of the locals as just another way of taking away their young men who would never return. Despite his opposition to this slave trade Patteson was attacked on more than one occasion. On this date in 1871 Patteson was killed on an island in the Solomons; his body was found floating at sea in a canoe with a palm leaf in his hand.
His death spurred a crack-down on black-birding and steps were taken to better protect islanders. Patteson is buried in Exeter Cathedral’s Martyrs’ Pulpit.
Should you happen to be in Naples on this date, or on December 16, or on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, make it your business to drop in on the cathedral where you may be fortunate enough to see a miracle. At these times, the dried blood of St Januarius (or San Gennaro to the locals) will liquefy.
Januarius was the bishop of Naples during the time of the persecution of Christianity by the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century. In 304, he was thrown to the bears and then beheaded. His relics were preserved and it was noted in 1389 that when the ampoule containing his blood was brought near the reliquary containing his head, liquefaction occurred. This miracle came to occur regularly on his saint’s day (today), the anniversary of the translation of his relics, and on the festival of his patronage of Naples.
On March 21, 2015, the blood in the vial appeared to liquify during a visit by Pope Francis. This was taken as a sign of the saint’s favour of the pope. The blood did not liquify when Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI visited nor when Naples elected a Communist mayor. Make of that what you will.
Januarius is the patron of Naples and blood banks and may be invoked against volcanic eruptions.
The Romans, after dispensing with their Republic, tried a series of imperial dynasties. The problem was that, while the founder was often a man of restraint and competence, his children or grandchildren were likely as not to be monsters. The very able Augustus gave way to the paranoid Tiberius, the ghoulish Caligula, the dotard Claudius, and the fiendish Nero. After a year of four rival claimants Nero was replaced by the moderate Vespasian. Unfortunately Vespasian’s decent son Titus died early and was replaced in 81 AD by the younger Domitian, whose tale Chambers takes up here:
The obituary for this day includes the name of one of those monsters, who disgrace so frequently the annals of the ancient Roman empire. On 18th September, 96 A. D., the Emperor Domitian was assassinated by a band of conspirators, after having rendered himself for many years the terror and detestation of his subjects. The son of Vespasian, and the brother and successor of Titus, he exhibited in the commencement of his reign a great show of righteous severity, and came forward as a reformer of public morals. Several persons who had transgressed the laws of conjugal fidelity, as well as some vestal virgins who had violated their vows, were punished with death. It was not long, however, before his real character showed itself; and he became a disgrace to humanity by his acts of cruelty and avarice. Cowardice and falsehood entered largely into his disposition, which, if we are to credit all the accounts that have descended to us, seems to have scarcely had a redeeming point. Multitudes of persons were put to death, either because the emperor desired their wealth, or from his having become apprehensive of their popularity or influence. Secret informers were encouraged, but philosophers and literary men were slaughtered or banished, though Martial and Silius Italicus could so far degrade poetry, as make it the vehicle for flattery of the imperial monster.
A favourite amusement of his, it is said, was killing flies, in which he would spend whole hours, and nothing seemed to give him greater pleasure than to witness the effects of terror on his fellow-creatures. On one occasion, he invited formally the members of the senate to a grand feast, and caused them on their arrival to be ushered into a large hall, hung with black and lighted with funeral torches, such as only served to exhibit to the awe-struck guests an array of coffins, on which each read his own name. Whilst they contemplated this ghastly spectacle, a troop of horrid forms, habited like furies, burst into the apartment, each with a lighted torch in one hand, and a poniard in the other. After having terrified for some time the members of Rome’s legislative body, these demon-masqueraders opened the door of the hall, through which the senators were only too happy to make a speedy exit. Who can doubt that the character of Domitian had as much of the madman as the wretch in its composition?
At length human patience was exhausted, and a conspiracy was formed for his destruction, in which his wife and some of his nearest friends were concerned. For a long time, the emperor had entertained a presentiment of his approaching end, and even of the hour and manner of his death. Becoming every day more and more fearful, he caused the galleries in which he walked to be lined with polished stones, so that he might see, as in a mirror, all that passed behind him. He never conversed with prisoners but alone and in secret, and it was his practice whilst he talked with them, to hold their chains in his hands. To inculcate on his servants a dread of compassing the death of their master, even with his own consent, he caused Epaphroditus to be put to death, because he had assisted Nero to commit suicide.
The evening before his death, some truffles were brought, which he directed to be laid aside till the next day, adding, ‘If I am there;’ and then turning to his courtiers said, that the next day the moon would be made bloody in the sign of Aquarius, and an event would take place of which all the world should speak. In the middle of the night, he awoke in an agony of fear, and started from his bed. The following morning, he had a consultation with a soothsayer from Germany, regarding a flash of lightning; the seer predicted a revolution in the empire, and was forthwith ordered off to execution. In scratching a pimple on his forehead, Domitian drew a little blood, and exclaimed: ‘Too happy should I be were this to compensate for all the blood that I cause to be shed!’ He asked what o’clock it was, and as he had a dread of the fifth hour, his attendants informed him that the sixth had arrived. On hearing this he appeared reassured, as if all danger were past, and he was preparing to go to the bath, when he was stopped by Parthenius, the principal chamberlain, who informed him that a person demanded to speak with him on momentous business of state. He caused every one to retire, and entered his private closet. Here he found the person in question waiting for him, and whilst he listened with terror to the pretended revelation of some secret plot against himself, he was stabbed by this individual, and fell wounded to the ground. A band of conspirators, including the distinguished veteran Clodianus, Maximus a freedman, and Saturius the decurion of the palace, rushed in and despatched him with seven blows of a dagger. He was in the forty-fifth year of his age, and fifteenth of his reign. On receiving intelligence of his death, the senate elected Nerva as his successor.
ST LAMBERT, BISHOP OF MAESTRICHT, MARTYR (c. A.D. 705)
An account from Butler’s Book of Saints of the life of a churchman during the turbulent rule of the Merovingian Franks.
St Landebert, called in later ages Lambert, was a native of Maestricht, and born of a noble and wealthy family between the years 633 and 638. His father sent him to St Theodard to perfect his education. This holy bishop had such an esteem for his pupil that he spared no trouble in instructing and training him in learning and Christian virtue, and he was a credit to his master: his biographer, who was born soon after Lambert’s death, describes him as, “a prudent young man of pleasing looks, courteous and well behaved in his speech and manners; well built, strong, a good fighter, clear-headed, affectionate, pure and humble, and fond of reading”. When St Theodard, who was bishop of Tongres-Maestricht, was murdered, Lambert was chosen to succeed him; but the tyrannical Ebroin was reinstated as mayor of the palace when the Austrasian king, Childeric II, was slain in 674, and he at once began to revenge himself on those who had supported Childeric. This revolution affected St Lambert, who was expelled from his see. He retired to the monastery of Stavelot, and during the seven years that he continued there he obeyed the rule as strictly as the youngest novice could have done. One instance will suffice to show how he devoted his heart to serve God according to the perfection of his temporary state. One night in winter he let fall his shoe, so that it made a noise. This the abbot heard, and he ordered him who was responsible for that noise to go and pray before the great cross, which stood outside the church door. Lambert, without making any answer, went out as he was, barefoot and covered only with his shirt; and in this condition he prayed, kneeling before the cross, three or four hours. Whilst the monks were warming themselves after Matins, the abbot inquired if all were there. Answer was made that he had sent someone to the cross who had not yet come in. The abbot ordered that he should be called, and was surprised to find that the person was the Bishop of Maestricht, who made his appearance almost frozen.
In 681 Ebroin was assassinated, and Pepin of Herstal, being made mayor of the palace, expelled the usurping bishops and, among other exiled prelates, restored St Lambert to Maestricht. The holy pastor returned to his flock animated with redoubled fervour, preaching and discharging his other duties with wonderful zeal and fruit. Finding there still remained many pagans in Kempenland and Brabant he applied himself to convert them to the faith, softened their barbarous temper by his patience, regenerated them in the water of baptism, and destroyed many superstitious observances. In the neighbourhood of his own see he founded with St Landrada the monastery of Munsterbilzen for nuns.
Pepin of Herstal, after living many years in wedlock with St Plectrudis, entered into adulterous relations with her sister Alpais (of whom was born Charles Martel), and St Lambert expostulated with the guilty couple. Alpais complained to her brother Dodo, who with a party of his followers set upon St Lambert and murdered him as he knelt before the altar in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian at Liege. That is the later story of the circumstances of St Lambert’s death, but his earliest biographers, writing in the eighth and tenth centuries, tell a quite different tale. According to them, two relatives of Lambert, Peter and Andolet, killed two men who were making themselves obnoxious to the bishop. When Dodo, a kinsman of the men thus slain, came with his followers to take revenge, Lambert told Peter and Andolet that they must expiate their crime. They were killed on the spot; and when the bishop’s room was found to be barred, one of Dodo’s men climbed to the window and cast a spear which killed Lambert too, as he knelt in prayer. This took place at a house where is now the city of Liege.
Lambert’s death, suffered with patience and meekness, joined with the eminent sanctity of his life, caused him to be venerated as a martyr. His body was conveyed to Maestricht. Several miracles which ensued excited the people to build a church where the house stood in which he was slain, and his successor, St Hubert, translated thither his relics. At the same time he removed to the same place the episcopal see of Tongres-Maestricht, and around the cathedral which enshrined the relics of 8t Lambert the city of Liege grew up. He is to this day the principal patron of that place.
Tomás de Torquemada (1420-98) was the legendarily ruthless Grand Inquisitor of Spain during a time when the persecution of Jews, Muslims, and conversos in that country accelerated.
The population of medieval Spain consisted of a majority of Catholics with significant minorities of Jews, Muslims and those who had converted to Christianity from those faiths. The latter were called “New Christians”, marranos (if Jewish), moriscos (if Muslim), or conversos. Non-Christians were subject to intermittent persecution and converts were always under suspicion for secretly clinging to their original religion. “Purity of blood” — a line of family descent free of Jewish or Muslim ancestors — was a social advantage; in medieval and early-modern Spain Christianity and racism went hand-in-hand.
Torquemada himself had Jewish blood but his influential relations in the Spanish church smoothed his career path. He rose inside the Dominican Order and eventually became confessor and advisor to Queen Isabella of Castile. When the papacy created a separate Spanish Inquisition at the request of Isabella and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, Torquemada soon became its head and directed its efforts against those who openly professed a religion other than Christianity and those converts who were suspected of being crypto-Jews or -Muslims.
The Reconquista, the 700-year drive to expel Islamic states from the Iberian peninsula, was completed in 1492 with the surrender of the last Moorish stronghold in Granada. The surrender terms guaranteed freedom of religion for non-Christians but within months the Alhambra Decree, engineered by Torquemada, demanded the instant conversion or expulsion of all Spanish Jews under very cruel terms. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 says that the Jewish community had offered a large sum of money to Ferdinand not to enforce the decree but “when Ferdinand was about to yield to the enticing offer, Torquemada appeared before him, bearing a crucifix aloft, and exclaiming: “Judas Iscariot sold Christ for 30 pieces of silver; Your Highness is about to sell him for 30,000 ducats. Here He is; take Him and sell Him.” Leaving the crucifix on the table he left the room. Chiefly through his instrumentality the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.” Though Torquemada died in 1498 the Spanish Inquisition’s persecutions of Jews, Muslims and converts continued for centuries. In 2012 the Spanish government granted automatic citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the banished Jewish population.
In the early 1960s demands for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans were met by violence, particularly in the southern states. There, support for separation of the races was a deeply entrenched social belief and the Ku Klux Klan attracted many men (and women) who would fight for segregation. Increased media attention, the popularity of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and political considerations by the Kennedy regime in Washington turned up the pressure. Vigilante attacks on civil rights workers and those attempting to march or vote escalated to murder.
On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963 a bomb was placed outside Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The church had been active in organizing protests against segregation and this made it a target in the eyes of some. At 10:22, fifteen sticks of dynamite under the porch exploded killing four children and wounding 22 others. The dead were four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.
This atrocity did much to energize the civil rights movement and discredit southern segregationists but justice for the victims was not easily forthcoming. The federal government dispatched FBI agents to help in the investigation and the state of Alabama issued a paltry $5,000 reward for information. Martin Luther King condemned Governor George Wallace, a vociferous segregationist, telling him “the blood of four little children … is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder.”
The FBI eventually identified 4 members of a Klan splinter group as the perpetrators — Thomas Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry — but no federal action was taken against them while J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI. In the 1970s a new Alabama Attorney General secured a murder conviction against Chambliss who had purchased the dynamite. In 2000 the federal government reopened the case and convicted the two surviving bombers, Cherry and Blanton, of murder, 37 years after the deed. All four of the accused maintained their innocence throughout.
Pope Adrian VI, born Adriaan Florensz in Utrecht, in the Netherlands in 1459, was the last non-Italian pope for over 450 years. He was born into a humble family but received an excellent education at a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life, who were pioneering humanist teaching for lay people. He went on to the University of Leuven on a scholarship provided by the Duchess of Burgundy. He became a teacher of theology and eventually taught that subject at the university where one of his students was Erasmus.
When the Habsburg princess Margaret of Austria became Governor of the Netherlands in 1506, she chose Adrian as an adviser. He soon became tutor to her nephew Charles, the son of Emperor Maximilian, a boy who would himself become Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was employed frequently by the Habsburgs, who ruled almost half of Europe, as a diplomat. He served for a time as Regent of Spain and as head of the Spanish Inquisition.
In January, 1522 he was elected pope in the midst of the burgeoning Protestant Reformation. He condemned Luther as a heretic but his own attempts at reform were viewed with suspicion and resistance from his conservative cardinals. He died in September 1523.
A celebration of that great and amiable man from Chambers’ Book of Days:
Montaigne was born in 1533, and died in 1592, his life of sixty years coinciding with one of the gloomiest eras in French history–a time of wide-spread and implacable dissensions, of civil war, massacre and murder.
The father of Montaigne was a baron of Perigord. Having found Latin a dreary and difficult study in his youth, he determined to make it an easy one for his son. He procured a tutor from Germany, ignorant of French, and gave orders that he should converse with the boy in nothing but Latin, and directed, moreover, that none of the household should address him otherwise than in that tongue. “They all became Latinised,”‘ says Montaigne; “and even the villagers in the neighbourhood learned words in that language, some of which took root in the country, and became of common use among the people.” Greek he was taught by similar artifice, feeling it a pastime rather than a task.
At the age of six, he was sent to the College of Guienne, then reputed the best in France, and, strange as it seems, his biographers relate, that at thirteen he had run through the prescribed course of studies, and completed his education. He next turned his attention to law, and at twenty-one was made conseiller, or judge, in the parliament of Bordeaux. He visited Paris, and was received at court, enjoyed the favour of Henri II, saw Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and entered fully into the delights and dissipations of gay society. At thirty-three he was married though had he been left free to his choice, he “would not have wedded with Wisdom herself had she been willing. But ’tis not much to the purpose,” he writes, “to resist custom, for the common usance of life will be so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice.” Of women, indeed, he seldom speaks save in terms of easy contempt, and for the hardships of married life he has frequent jeers.
In 1571, in his thirty-eighth year, the death of his father enabled Montaigne to retire from the practice of law, and to settle on the patrimonial estate. It was predicted he would soon exhaust his fortune, but, on the contrary, he proved a good economist, and turned his farms to excellent account. His good sense, his probity, and liberal soul, won for him the esteem of his province; and though the civil wars of the League converted every house into a fort, he kept his gates open, and the neighbouring gentry brought him their jewels and papers to hold in safe-keeping. He placed his library in a tower overlooking the entrance to his court-yard, and there spent his leisure in reading, meditation, and writing. On the central rafter he inscribed: I do not understand; I pause; I examine. He took to writing for want of something to do, and having nothing else to write about, he began to write about himself, jotting down what came into his head when not too lazy. He found paper a patient listener, and excused his egotism by the consideration, that if his grandchildren were of the same mind as himself, they would he glad to know what sort of man he was. “What should I give to listen to some one who could tell me the ways, the look, the bearing, the commonest words of my ancestors!” If the world should complain that he talked too much about himself, he would answer the world that it talked and thought of everything but itself.
A volume of these egotistic gossips he published at Bordeaux in 1580, and the book quickly passed into circulation. About this time he was attacked with [kidney] stone, a disease he had held in dread from childhood, and the pleasure of the remainder of his life was broken with paroxysms of severe pain. “When they suppose me to be most cast down,” he writes, “and spare me, I often try my strength, and start subjects of conversation quite foreign to my state. I can do everything by a sudden effort, but, oh! take away duration. I am tried severely, for I have suddenly passed from a very sweet and happy condition of life, to the most painful that can be imagined.”
Abhorring doctors and drugs, he sought diversion and relief in a journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. At Rome he was kindly received by the pope and cardinals, and invested with the freedom of the city, an honour of which he was very proud. He kept a journal of this tour, which, after lying concealed in an old chest in his chateau for nearly two hundred years, was brought to light and published in 1774; and, as may be supposed, it contains a stock of curious and original information. While he was travelling, he was elected mayor of Bordeaux, an office for which he had no inclination, but Henry III insisted that he should accept it, and at the end of two years he was re-elected for the same period.
During a visit to Paris, he became acquainted with Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young lady who had conceived an ardent friendship for him through reading his Essays. She visited him, accompanied by her mother, and he reciprocated her attachment by treating her as his daughter. Meanwhile, his health grew worse, and feeling his end was drawing near, and sick of the intolerance and bloodshed which devastated France, he kept at home, correcting and retouching his writings. A quinsy [throat infection] terminated his life. He gathered his friends round his bedside, and bade them farewell. A priest said mass, and at the elevation of the host he raised himself in bed, and with hands clasped in prayer, expired. Mademoiselle de Gournay and her mother crossed half France, risking the perils of the roads, that they might condole with his widow and daughter.
It is superfluous to praise Montaigne’s Essays; they have long passed the ordeal of time into assured immortality. He was one of the earliest discoverers of the power and genius of the French language, and may he said to have been the inventor of that charming form of literature—the essay. At a time when authorship was stiff, solemn, and exhaustive, confined to Latin and the learned, he broke into the vernacular, and wrote for everybody with the ease and nonchalance of conversation. The Essays furnish a rambling auto-biography of their author, and not even Rousseau turned himself inside out with more completeness. He gives, with inimitable candour, an account of his likes and dislikes, his habits, foibles, and virtues. He pretends to most of the vices; and if there be any goodness in him, he says he got it by stealth. In his opinion, there is no man who has not deserved hanging five or six times, and he claims no exception in his own behalf. “Five or six as ridiculous stories,” he says, “may he told of me as of any man living.” This very frankness has caused some to question his sincerity, but his dissection of his own inconsistent self is too consistent with flesh and blood to be anything but natural.
Bit by bit the reader of the Essays grows familiar with Montaigne; and he must have a dull imagination indeed who fails to conceive a distinct picture of the thick-set, square-built, clumsy little man, so undersized that he did not like walking, because the mud of the streets bespattered him to the middle, and the rude crowd jostled and elbowed him. He disliked Protestantism, but his mind was wholly averse to bigotry and persecution. Gibbon, indeed, reckons Montaigne and Henri IV as the only two men of liberality in the France of the sixteenth century. Nothing more distinguishes Montaigne than his deep sense of the uncertainty and provisional character of human knowledge; and Mr. Emerson has well chosen him for a type of the sceptic. Montaigne’s device—a pair of scales evenly balanced, with the motto, Quo scais je? (What do I know?)—perfectly symbolises the man.
The only book we have which we certainly know was handled by Shakespeare, is a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. It contains the poet’s autograph, and was purchased. by the British Museum for one hundred and twenty guineas. A second copy of the same translation in the Museum has Ben Jonson’s name on the fly-leaf.
