Christmas Every Day

1757

The death of an admiral to encourage the others

A passage in Voltaire’s Candide reads thus:

Talking thus, we approached Portsmouth. A multitude of people covered the shore, looking attentively at a stout gentleman who was on his knees with his eyes bandaged, on the quarter-deck of one of the vessels of the fleet. Four soldiers, placed in front of him, put each three balls in his head, in the most peaceable manner, and all the assembly then dispersed quite satisfied.  What is all this?” quoth Candide, “and what devil reigns here?” He asked who was the stout gentleman who came to die in this ceremonious manner. “It is an Admiral,” they answered. “And why kill the Admiral?” “It is because he has not killed enough of other people. He had to give battle to a French Admiral, and they find that he did not go near enough to him.” “But,” said Candide, “the French Admiral was as far from him as he was from the French Admiral.” “That is very true,” replied they; “but in this country it is useful to kill an Admiral now and then, just to encourage the rest [pour encourager les autres].”‘

John Byng (1704-57) was a successful British admiral, Member of Parliament, and former governor of Newfoundland who had the misfortune of failing in a single battle. For this misdeed he was judged by the British Admiralty to have failed in his duties and was executed on the deck of his flagship.

The island of Minorca, off the Spanish coast, had been captured by the British in 1708 but in the Seven Years War was threatened with invasion by a French fleet. Byng was ordered to take a hastily-assembled and under-manned flotilla to reinforce the island but when he arrived in Minorcan waters in May of 1756 he found the French were already there in strength. After an inconclusive naval engagement, Byng concluded that the island was lost (indeed, it was to capitulate) and that he would return to Gibraltar for repairs. There he found orders commanding him to return to England for trial for a breach of the Articles of War.

The 1757 court martial acquitted him of cowardice but convicted him of not doing his utmost, a crime punishable by death. There were influential voices calling on King George II to extend mercy but the monarch declined and Byng was executed, himself giving the signal to fire by dropping his handkerchief. Most agree that this was an unjust result but some historians argue that the death of Byng served to inculcate a spirit of aggression in British naval commanders which would serve them well in future wars.

His epitaph reads:

To the perpetual Disgrace
of PUBLICK JUSTICE
The Honble. JOHN BYNG Esqr
Admiral of the Blue
Fell a MARTYR to
POLITICAL PERSECUTION
March 14th in the year 1757 when
BRAVERY and LOYALTY
were Insufficient Securities
For the
Life and Honour
of a
NAVAL OFFICER

1890

Birth of an American Fascist

William Dudley Pelley (1890-1965) was a fascinating mixture of spiritualist loon, aspiring dictator, talented writer, and fantasist. His short-lived Silver Legion was one of a number of fascist organizations that sprang up across the world in the 1930s in imitation of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

Pelley rose to fame in the 1920s with his short stories, two of which won the coveted O. Henry Prize, and his journalistic skills. He spent time working with the Red Cross in Siberia during the Russian Civil War, where he developed a hatred of Communism and of Jews, who, he said, lay behind global Bolshevism. His way with words took him to Hollywood and a screenwriting career but he left in disillusion and anger with Jewish studio bosses.

In the 1930s he developed a new religion based on visions in which he claimed to have seen God the Father and Jesus and been given the power to levitate and see through walls. Many of his religious followers also became devotees of his new political movement, the Silver Legion, who wore silver shirts with a blue tie, in imitation of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and Hitler’s Brownshirts. His group, he declared, would take part in the “the ultimate contest for existence between Aryan mankind and Jewry.” The party opposed Communism, Jews, involvement in foreign wars, and the Roosevelt administration. He claimed his Legion numbered 25,000 but when he ran for president in 1936 he received only 1,600 votes.

The government began to harass Pelley; he was placed under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his property seized. When World War II broke out Pelley disbanded the Silver Shirts but continued to rail against Roosevelt. He was arrested and convicted of sedition, obstructing military recruiting and fomenting insurrection within the military. He was released from prison in 1950 whereupon his interests turned to UFOs and a new religion called Soulcraft. His writings live on in neo-Nazi websites.

1619 The Witches of Belvoir

On the 11^th of March 1619, two women named Margaret and Philippa Flower, were burnt at Lincoln for the alleged crime of witchcraft. With their mother, Joan Flower, they had been confidential servants of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, at Belvoir Castle. Dissatisfaction with their employers seems to have gradually seduced these three women into the practice of hidden arts in order to obtain revenge. According to their own confession, they had entered into communion with familiar spirits, by which they were assisted in their wicked designs. 

Joan Flower, the mother, had hers in the bodily form of a cat, which she called Rutterkin. They used to get the hair of a member of the family and burn it: they would steal one of his gloves and plunge it in boiling water, or rub it on the back of Rutterkin, in order to effect bodily harm to its owner. They would also use frightful imprecations of wrath and malice towards the objects of their hatred. In these ways they were believed to have accomplished the death of Lord Ross, the Earl of Rutland’s son, besides inflicting frightful sicknesses upon other members of the family.

It was long before the earl and countess, who were an amiable couple, suspected any harm in these servants, although we are told that for some years there was a manifest change in the countenance of the mother, a diabolic expression being assumed. At length, at Christmas, 1618, the noble pair became convinced that they were the victims of a hellish plot, and the three women were apprehended, taken to Lincoln jail, and examined. The mother loudly protested innocence, and, calling for bread and butter, wished it might choke her if she were guilty of the offences laid to her charge. Immediately, taking a piece into her mouth, she fell down dead, probably, as we may allowably conjecture, overpowered by consciousness of the contrariety between these protestations and the guilty design which she had entertained in her mind.

Margaret Flower, on being examined, acknowledged that she had stolen the glove of the young heir of the family, and given it to her mother, who stroked Rutterkin with it, dipped it in hot water, and pricked it: whereupon Lord Ross fell ill and suffered extremely. In order to prevent Lord and Lady Rutland from having any more children, they had taken some feathers from their bed, and a pair of gloves, which they boiled in water, mingled with a little blood. In all these particulars, Philippa corroborated her sister. Both women admitted that they had familiar spirits, which came and sucked them at various parts of their bodies: and they also described visions of devils in various forms which they had had from time to time.

The examinations of these wretched women were taken by magistrates of rank and credit, and when the judges came to Lincoln the two surviving Flowers were duly tried, and on their own confessions condemned to death by the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir Henry Hobbert.

The above account from Chambers’ Book of Days omits several interesting points: the death of another of the earl’s children, the possible escape from the gallows of one of the accused, and the recent suggestion that the boys were poisoned to leave the earl without a male heir, allowing the poisoner to inherit the estate by marrying one of the earl’s daughters.

1925

Pink’s War

“First, plan your retreat.  All expeditions into tribal lands end in retreat.”  The obdurate and indomitable nature of the tribes of the Northwest Frontier of India is legendary. Warlike, fiercely independent, and clannish, they have bedevilled every attempt to curb their raids and blood feuds. For over a century they repelled the British Army, just as today they are a challenge to the Pakistani government.

In 1925, the Mahsud tribe of southern Waziristan was holding out against the British Raj and continuing to attack army outposts. The Royal Air Force, determined to succeed where the Army had failed, conducted its first independent action in strikes on Mahsud villages. Under Wing Commander Richard Pink, flying Bristol fighters and deHavilland DH9A light bombers, the RAF first leafleted the mountain strongholds to warn of impending attacks so that there would be no civilian casualties and then proceeded, day and night, to strafe, bomb (over 250 tons of ordinance) and harass the territory for weeks until the tribesmen finally agreed to a treaty.

An interesting day in history.

1836 Fall of the Alamo

After a 13-day siege Mexican troops under General Santa Ana pour into the Alamo fort and massacre the defenders. The painting above shows the death of Davy Crockett.

1857 The Dred Scott decision

Dred Scott, a black slave, had been taken by his master to a non-slave state and sued for his freedom. The Supreme Court ruled against him, saying that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves”, whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. Moreover, the court said the federal government could not regulate slavery in territories acquired after the creation of the U.S.  This ruling inflamed anti-slavery passions and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

1912 First use of airships in war

Italian forces in two dirigibles drop bombs on Turkish troops in what is now Libya.

1970 A Weather Underground bomb explodes

Left-wing terrorist groups emerged out of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. One of these was the Weathermen, (later the Weather Underground) whose name derived from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” containing the line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The group incited riots, declared war on the USA, and bombed the Pentagon, Capitol Building and State Department. On this date three terrorists, all white graduate students, died when one of their own bombs exploded in their Greenwich Village safe house.

1984 British miners’ strike begins

Until this strike the British miners had been among the best-paid and most militant of the UK’s labour unions. For years, the the National Union of Miners had successfully resisted government plans to make the coal industry more efficient and reduce subsidies; their strike in 1974 had brought down Edward Heath’s Conservative government. In 1984, without calling a national ballot, NUM president Arthur Scargill led the miners out again, but this time Margaret Thatcher’s government was prepared. Coal stockpiles at power plants were enormous, and police strategies were devised to counter the union tactic of flying pickets. After a year of bitter conflict, the union conceded defeat.

Joining the line waiting to enter the gates of Hell on March 5, 1953 was Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvilli, aka Cato, aka Koba, aka Stalin, Georgian revolutionary and Soviet dictator.

Born in 1879 to a peasant family who hoped that he would become an Orthodox priest, Stalin rebelled and became fascinated with Marxism. He rose from being a low-ranking thug and bank robber for the socialist cause to becoming editor of Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and discipline of V.I. Lenin, head of the Bolshevik faction. Exiled to Siberia in 1913-17, he was released to join in the political turmoil that followed the overthrow of the Czar and the establishment of the first provisional Russian democracy. During the revolutionary wars provoked by the Bolshevik overthrow of parliament, Stalin served as a bureaucrat, a role at which he excelled. By 1922 and the establishment of the Soviet Union he was Party Secretary, an unglamorous but powerful post that enabled him to sit on all committees and influence the rise or fall of party members.

On Lenin’s death in 1924 a struggle for the top jobs broke out. Stalin’s rivals were all much better-known and few thought him a candidate for supreme leadership, particularly as Lenin in his last days had grown disenchanted with him. He succeeded, however, in out-maneuvering Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army by allying with Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, Politburo member Lev Kamenev and intellectual Nikolai Bukharin. Stalin then turned on his erstwhile friends and by 1927 was in command of the USSR.

His policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture were brutally set in place.The former had some success but the latter was disastrous and resulted in millions dying of starvation. Millions more were sent to the Gulag slave labour camps and tens of thousands of generals, scientists, technical experts, and party officials were murdered in the political purges of the 1930s.

Stalin’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler led to the Second World War. The reward for the USSR was the green light to occupy the Baltic republics and eastern Poland but Stalin was caught by surprise in 1941 when German forces launched Operation Barbarossa. Russian heroism mixed with a disregard for human life would eventually win the war on the Eastern Front but at an enormous cost. 158,000 Russian troops shot by their own side not to mention those killed in service in the punishment brigades from which only a survivable wound could free one. After victory in 1945, 3,000,000 liberated Russian prisoners were sent to the GULAG for the crime of having surrendered. Half of the returning officers were shot out of hand; only 20% ever returned home. Among the victimized were many of the most prominent Russian military heroes whose crime was outshining Stalin. 

Stalin was never in good health but it was considered dangerous to suggest this to him. In 1952 a number of Jewish doctors were accused of planning to poison him and other leaders. Robert Tucker’s biography Stalin in Power: The Russian Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 has this to say about Stalin and Jews:

On March 1, 1953 he suffered a stroke and lingered until expiring on March 5. (The dark comedy The Death of Stalin (2017) gives us a glimpse into his last days and the sordid crew jockeying to succeed him.) His embalmed body was put on display beside Lenin’s outside the Kremlin.

The historian Robert Conquest sums up the 70 years of Bolshevism this way: “There was an old bastard named Lenin/ Who did two or three million men in./ That’s a lot to have done in,/ But where he did one in/ That old bastard Stalin did ten in.”

 

1861

Adoption of the official flag of the Confederate States of America

If one were to identify this flag as that of the Confederacy, you would be wrong.

What you see above is a version of the Confederate battle flag, based on that of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederacy itself used this below as its official flag, chosen on this date in 1861:

The flag was known as the “Stars and Bars” and was widely disliked because of its resemblance to the flag of the Union, the “Stars and Stripes”. So, in 1863 the CSA chose the “Stainless Banner” incorporating the battle flag in the canton:

Many liked this design because it was mostly white and the rebels were, after all, fighting for white supremacy, but in battle that was a drawback as it resembled a flag of truce or surrender. Thus, on this date in 1865, the third and last flag of the Confederate States, the “Bloodstained Banner” was chosen:

It’s happy birthday today to French-Canadian heroine Madeleine de Verchères (1678-1747). For decades the Iroquois confederacy waged a brutal war against the settlements along the St Lawrence River in the colony of New France. Among the farms they had attacked was the seigneury of Verchères, near what is now Montreal, where they murdered a number of its defenders.

In October 1692 14-year-old Madeleine was temporarily left in charge of the stockade while her parents journeyed to pick up supplies. A band of raiders descended upon the men working in the field, taking them prisoner, while another ran after Madeleine nearly catching her as she ran back to the little fort. Once inside she fired off a musket and encouraged her little brothers and sisters, two soldiers, and an old man to make as much noise as possible to simulate a large force. She shepherded into the stockade a family who had arrived unaware of the attack and guarded the walls wearing a military helmet. 

After an eight-day siege reinforcements arrived. “Monsieur, you are indeed welcome,” she told the captain, “I surrender my arms to you.”

Thirty years later she would save her husband’s life when he was attacked by natives. Quebec has long recognized her as a symbol of its nationhood and the bravery of its women.

On the day of his 38th birthday, Michel de Montaigne had the following inscription placed on the crown of the bookshelves of his working chamber:

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

In 1580 Montaigne published the fruit of that seclusion in the first edition of his Essais. Here are some of his observations:

“No wind favors him who has no destined port.”

“He who lives not to others, lives little to himself.”

“Philosophy is doubt.”

“Ambition is not a vice of little people.”

“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. ” 

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.” 

1534 Death of Count Wallenstein

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) is a phenomenon not nearly as well-known as it ought to be. It was the last of the great European religious wars and the Treaty of Westphalia which brought it to a close marked the beginning of the age of nation-states.

One of the most significant figures of this conflict was the champion of the Catholic cause, Count Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein who rose from being a mercenary captain to be an Imperial generalissimo, a prince, and one of the richest men in Europe.  He was successful in all but one of his battles but was suspected (quite rightly) of overweening ambition and treachery, suspicions which led to his assassination.

I had long been aware of Wallenstein’s military genius but not until reading this passage in Chambers’ Book of Days did I learn of the man’s astonishing grandiosity.

Born of high rank in 1583, Wallenstein found himself at forty chief of the imperial armies, and the possessor of immense wealth. Concentrating a powerful mind on one object, the gratification of his ambition, he attained it to a remarkable degree, and was for some time beyond doubt the greatest subject in Europe. In managing troops by a merciless discipline, in making rapid marches, in the fiery energy of his attacks upon the enemy, he was unrivalled. In but one battle, that of Lützen, where he met the Protestant army under Gustavus of Sweden, was he unsuccessful.

Wallenstein’s immense riches, his profound reserve, and theatrical manners, were the principal means he employed to exalt the imagination of the masses. He always appeared in public surrounded by extraordinary pomp, and allowed all those attached to his house to share in his luxury. His officers lived sumptuously at his table, where never less than one hundred dishes were served. As he rewarded with excessive liberality, not only the multitude but the greatest personages were dazzled by this Asiatic splendour. Six gates gave entrance to his palace at Prague, to make room for which he had pulled down one hundred houses. Similar chateaux were erected by his orders on all his numerous estates. Twenty-four chamberlains, sprung from the most noble families, disputed the honour of serving him, and some sent back the golden key, emblem of their grade, to the Emperor, in order that they might wait on Wallenstein.

He educated sixty pages, dressed in blue velvet and gold, to whom he gave the first masters; fifty truants guarded his ante-chamber night and day; six barons and the same number of chevaliers were constantly within call to bear his orders. His maître-d’hôtel was a person of distinction. A thousand persons usually formed his household, and about one thousand horses filled his stables, where they fed from marble mangers. When he set out on his travels, a hundred carriages, drawn by four or six horses, convoyed his servants and baggage; sixty carriages and fifty led horses carried the people of his suite; ten trumpeters with silver bugles preceded the procession. The richness of his liveries, the pomp of his equipages, and the decoration of his apartments, were in harmony with all the rest. In a hall of his palace at Prague he had himself painted in a triumphal car, with a wreath of laurels round his head, and a star above him. [See above for a mural from his palace.]

Wallenstein’s appearance was enough in itself to inspire fear and respect. His tall thin figure, his haughty attitude, the stern expression of his pale face, his wide forehead, that seemed formed to command, his black hair, close-shorn and harsh, his little dark eyes, in which the flame of authority shone, his haughty and suspicious look, his thick moustaches and tufted beard, produced, at the first glance, a startling sensation. His usual dress consisted of a justaucorps of elk skin, covered by a white doublet and cloak; round his neck he wore a Spanish ruff; in his hat fluttered a large red plume, while scarlet pantaloons and boots of Cordova leather, carefully padded on account of the gout, completed his ordinary attire. While his army devoted itself to pleasure, the deepest silence reigned around the general. He could not endure the rumbling of carts, loud conversations, or even simple sounds.

One of his chamberlains was hanged for waking him without orders, and an officer secretly put to death because his spurs had clanked when he came to the general. His servants glided about the rooms like phantoms, and a dozen patrols incessantly moved round his tent or palace to maintain perpetual tranquillity. Chains were also stretched across the streets, in order to guard him against any sound. Wallenstein was ever absorbed in himself, ever engaged with his plans and designs. He was never seen to smile, and his pride rendered him inaccessible to sensual pleasures. His only fanaticism was ambition. This strange chief meditated and acted incessantly, only taking counsel of himself, and disdaining strange advice and inspirations. When he gave any orders or explanations, he could not bear to be looked at curiously; when he crossed the camp, the soldiers were obliged to pretend that they did not see him. Yet they experienced an involuntary shudder when they saw him pass like a super-natural being. There was something about him mysterious, solemn, and awe-inspiring. He walked alone, surrounded by this magic influence, like a saddening halo.

The end of Wallenstein was such as might have been anticipated. Becoming too formidable for a subject, he was denounced to the Emperor by Piccolomini, who obtained a commission to take the great general dead or alive. On the 25th of February 1634, he was assailed in the Castle of Eger by a band, in which were included one Gordon, a Scotsman, and one Butler, an Irishman, and fell under a single stroke of a partizan, dying in proud silence, as he had lived.