“It cam wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass!” Such was the prophecy supposedly made by King James V of Scotland at the birth of his only child, Mary, in 1542. The Stuart dynasty had originated in the marriage of a Bruce daughter to a Stuart male and the king seemed to fear that his line would end with his daughter. It was not an accurate prophecy but his daughter did live a tumultuous and, in the end, tragic life.
Mary was half-French; her mother was Marie de Guise, a member of an ultra-Catholic royal clique. To keep Mary safe from the clutches of Henry VIII who wished to force a marriage with his son Edward, the child was whisked away to France where she was raised as a Renaissance princess. She was married to Prince Francis, heir to the throne, and in 1559 when he became French king she became Queen of both France and Scotland. Perhaps, just as important was her claim to be the true Queen of England — she was the grand-daughter of Henry VIII’s sister and after 1558 the ruler, Elizabeth, was a Protestant.
Her reign in France was short-lived because Francis, always sickly, died in late 1560 of a brain infection. The French packed her off the next year to Scotland where she could be useful to them as an anti-English ally. Mary was, however, politically maladroit and totally unprepared for the backwardness and political violence she discovered in her home country. Much of the ruling class had become Protestant and would not submit to a woman who was more French than Scottish and a Catholic to boot. Intrigue, murder, religious strife and sexual hijinks would mark her years in power.
The 1984 movie Amadeus is a wonderful piece of cinema if you don’t care a fig for historical truth. It is sumptuously staged and brilliantly acted and, best of all, it is full of the wonderful music of Wolfgang Mozart, one of God’s kindest gifts to humanity. Unfortunately, its plot slanders the reputation of a very able and innovative composer and conductor, (and, apparently, a rather decent guy) Antonio Salieri (1750-1825).
Salieri was an Italian who spent most of his professional life serving the Austrian Habsburgs, especially the enlightened despot Joseph II, a noted musical aficionado. His operas were performed all over Europe; his influence on the genre was considerable. He was the imperial Kappelmeister and was the teacher of Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert, yet the fictional musings of Alexander Pushkin and Peter Shaffer had made his life a metaphor for jealousy and mediocrity. In fact, Salieri and Mozart had no poisonous relationship and, if anything, Salieri was a supporter of his younger colleague. For a revisionist look that seeks to restore his personal and musical reputation, read Alexander Ross’s “Antonio Salieri’s Revenge”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/antonio-salieris-revenge.
The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 marked the beginning of the American Civil War. In 1863 Union forces returned to Charleston harbour but failed in numerous attempts to destroy or capture the fort which remained in Southern hands until 1865.
1943The Schweinfurt Raid
In an attempt to disable the German aircraft industry, the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force launched massive attacks on Schweinfurt and Magdeburg. The simultaneous raid was designed to disperse Luftwaffe fighter attacks but bad timing and lack of fighter protection made the raid a disaster. 60 bombers and their crews were lost plus several of their escorts. The folly of long-range penetration without fighter coverage persisted until another raid on Schweinfurt later in the year proved even more catastrophic.
1958Failure of Pioneer 0
The Space Race between the USA and the USSR was just getting started and rocket technology was still unreliable when an ambitious unmanned lunar expedition was launched. The Pioneer craft was to go into orbit around the moon with a camera and various instruments but less than four minutes into the flight the Thor rocket carrying the payload exploded.
2005Terror bombing in Bangladesh
Inspired by the success of the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan, the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (the Awakened Muslim Masses of Bangladesh) and the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (the Assembly of Holy Warriors) combined forces in 2005 to set off 500 bombs all across Bangladesh. The groups wish to replace the secular state with a sharia-ruled government and force stricter observance of Islam. Though leaders of the groups were tried and executed, fundamentalist violence continues to plague the country.
A remarkably active saint of the thirteenth century, known as the “Apostle of the North”. Butler’s Book of Saints tell us
Hyacinth, the glorious apostle of Poland and Russia, was born of noble parents in Poland, about the year 1185. In 1218, being already Canon of Cracow, he accompanied his uncle, the bishop of that place, to Rome. There he met St. Dominic, and received the habit of the Friar Preachers from the patriarch himself, of whom he became a living copy. So wonderful was his progress in virtue that within a year Dominic sent him to preach and plant the Order in Poland, where he founded two houses. His apostolic journeys extended over numerous regions. Austria, Bohemia, Livonia, the shores of the Black Sea, Tartary, and Northern China on the east, and Sweden and Norway to the west, were evangelized by him, and he is said to have visited Scotland. Everywhere multitudes were converted, churches and convents were built; one hundred and twenty thousand pagans and infidels were baptized by his hands. He worked numerous miracles, and at Cracow raised a dead youth to life. He had inherited from St. Dominic a most filial confidence in the Mother of God; to her he ascribed his success, and to her aid he looked for his salvation. When St. Hyacinth was at Kiev the Tartars sacked the town, but it was only as he finished Mass that the Saint heard of the danger. Without waiting to unvest, he took the ciborium in his hands, and was leaving the church. As he passed by an image of Mary a voice said: “Hyacinth, my son, why dust thou leave me behind? Take me with thee, and leave me not to mine enemies.” The statue was of heavy alabaster, but when Hyacinth took it in his arms it was light as a reed. With the Blessed Sacrament and the image he came to the river Dnieper, and walked dry-shod over the surface of the waters. On the eve of the Assumption he was warned of his coming death. In spite of a wasting fever, he celebrated Mass on the feast, and communicated as a dying man. He was anointed at the foot of the altar, and died the same day, 1257.
In Spanish, Hyacinth is known as San Jacinto, and in Poland an expression of surprise is “Święty Jacek z pierogami!” —“ St. Hyacinth and his perogi!” He is the patron saint of Lithuania and of those in danger of drowning.
In the early hours of August 15, 1975 detachments of the Bangladesh Army roared through Dhaka as part of a military coup. Some were stationed to prevent possible opposition, others were bent on assassinating government figures. One unit backed by tanks attacked the presidential palace and murdered the country’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and members of his family. A junta of army officers was installed to rule the country.
Mujib, as he was called, had been the leading figure in obtaining his country’s independence. In 1947 the territories of British India were partitioned into a Hindu-majority India and two Muslim-dominated areas dubbed East and West Pakistan. The latter were separated by a thousand miles, and different cultures and languages. The West dominated the government and declared Urdu to be the official language despite the fact that the easterners largely spoke Bengali. Resentment against this enforced inferiority resulted in a 1971 rebellion in the east. Mujib, who had called for civil disobedience and resistance, was taken prisoner and the West Pakistani army tried to suppress the rising with enormous brutality including a campaign of rape; millions were displaced, 300,000 were said to have been killed and 200,000 women raped. The actions against women were allegedly supported by Muslim religious leaders, who declared that Bengali women were gonimoter maal (public property). This prompted Indian intervention and the result was a nasty war, ending in the independence of the east in a new state known as Pakistan. Mujib was released and returned home in 1972 to become the country’s first president.
Though Bangladesh was now independent, unrest continued. The country was devastated by the civil war, left-wing rebels wanted to impose communism, and Muslim fundamentalists objected to Mujib’s secular approach. Corruption was endemic, and was blamed for the famine conditions in many parts of the country. Mujib attempted to centralize power in himself with a new constitution that banned all political parties but his own; his paramilitary forces committed numerous atrocities. The situation was ripe for a coup.
After Mujib’s murder, the military junta ruled for a time before it too was overthrown. Bangladesh has suffered from political instability ever since, though at the present time the government is democratic and headed by Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina.
Oh, how true that is. I cannot watch historical dramas without getting upset at the anachronisms. I have no trouble with cheesy Hercules Unchained rubbish but something that purports to convey truth and does not, causes the veins in my temple to throb. Herewith the three worst “historical” films. Number Three on your program is Oliver Stone’s JFK. Stone took the paranoid fantasies of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and turned it into an attack on the military-industrial complex. The fact that Garrison’s theories were laughed out of court mattered naught to Stone. Number Two is The Burning Times by Canada’s National Film Board under the direction of Starhawk, a witch. It claims that there was a Female Holocaust of 9,000,000 dead in the early-modern witchcraft craze. This was happily used by university Women’s Studies departments for years.
Number One, the worst historical film ever made, is King Arthur directed by Antoine Fuqua.
The lies start with the voiceover introduction: “By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land. More peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field. And when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship, spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day.”
Rubbish in the first degree. By 300 the Roman empire was not expanding; it was barely holding on, rescued from collapse by soldier-emperor Diocletian who persecuted Christians intensely and who did not put Christian symbols on his soldiers’ shields as the opening scenes suggested.
“The powerful Sarmatians” were not all that powerful and were just about on their last legs as an independent people in the 300s AD; they certainly weren’t conquered by the Romans (they were absorbed by Slavs and other barbarian confederacies) or enlisted by the Romans as “knights”, an anachronistic term.
The film is set in Britain in the year 476 with Arthur (Clive Owen) leading a troop of Sarmatian cavalry in the Roman army. In fact, the last Roman military unit left the island in 410. And they ride with stirrups which were unknown at the time.
Arthur is a follower of Pelagius (a real historical character, a British heretic who proposed a theory of human free will at odds with the Christian doctrine of the need for divine grace). In the movie Pelagius’s notion of free will is meant to be some sort of democracy and he is murdered by the Church because of it. In fact Pelagius died c 420 unmolested by the Church, except in debate.
Pelagius’s murderer is the film’s villain, Bishop Germanius (clearly supposed to be Germanus of Auxerre, the opponent of Pelagius who died in 429 and who, of course, never laid a finger on the heretic much less killed him.) He reneges on the deal that would have allowed Arthur’s men to go home, forcing them to go on one last mission, to rescue a Roman official who lives north of Hadrian’s Wall and whose son might be the pope one day.
The Christian official whom the heroes are sent to save is, of course, a very bad man who tortures his slaves for asking for food. He tells them he speaks with the voice of God and that it is a sin to disobey him. The willingness of the film to tar the Church with any sort of evil reaches its low point when we see a monk wall himself up with pagans, eager to torture them into salvation and starve to death in the process. “It is God’s wish that these sinners be sacrificed. Only then can their souls be saved.”
All of this anti-Christian blather goes on before the battles with the invading Saxons who are shown to be racists as well as real mean guys (and invading north of the Wall instead of hundreds of miles south of it as in real life. There was nothing to steal up north.) Arthur teams up with British natives known as “Woads”, in real life the “Picts”. Woad is the plant that gives the blue dye the Picts adorned themselves with. Such an alliance is necessary because we learn that the Saxons have metal crossbows (not invented until 800 years later) but the Woads have trebuchets (likewise centuries out of place.) The most attractive of the Woads is Guinevere (Keira Knightley) who hurls her fragile frame clad in a well-tailored deer-skin bikini against the Saxons in a series of dazzling kung-fu moves unknown to history until the birth of Jet Li.
Sorry for the rant. It’s been 16 years since King Arthur and I’m still mad.
At the end of World War II, the the map of the defeated Germany was considerably altered. Parts of the nation were lopped off and given to neighbouring countries while the remaining territory was divided into four, each ruled by one of the occupying powers. There were sectors for the French, British, Americans, and USSR; the old capital Berlin, now deep in the Soviet sector, was similarly divided. In 1948 Stalin tried to drive the Western powers out of Berlin by blockading the city but the Berlin Airlift thwarted that.
Western Germany, or the German Federal Republic, emerged out of the French, British, and American sectors, democratic with a market economy; in the East, the German Democratic Republic, was a Soviet puppet state with a communist command economy. The prosperity gap that increasingly separated the two to the benefit of the westerners and political freedoms led to a desire on the part of GDR residents to migrate west. Before 1961, 3.5 million Germans had done so, perhaps as much of 20% of the population. Particularly irksome to the eastern government was the loss of young, educated Germans to a brain drain, with the relaxed border in Berlin as the faucet. Consequently at the urging of their Soviet masters, the populace of the city awoke on the morning of August 13, 1961 to the construction of the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, a barrier separating East and West Berlin, supposedly designed to keep the nasty capitalists out of the East German paradise. Hundreds of refugees fled over the makeshift border while it was being erected but it soon enclosed West Berlin in a ring of concrete, barbed wire, mines, dog patrols, and a no-man’s land death strip.
The Wall, which was eventually pierced in 1989, may have been of economic benefit to the GDR (ending the black market and enabling tighter control) but it was an enormous spiritual black eye to the communist project. If you had to make a prison of your own country, how could you proclaim the benefits of a Marxist society? Both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan scored propaganda coups by coming to the Wall and demanding its removal.
The hunt for witches was seldom much of a concern in England, unlike Scotland or parts of Germany where a craze for persecuting those who had made a pact with the devil often broke out in the 16th and 17th centuries. The exception to this rule was the reign of terror provoked by self-styled “Witch-Finder General” Matthew Hopkins and his companion John Stearne.
In 1642 a civil war erupted in England between the supporters of King Charles I and those backing the claims of Parliament. The chaos produced by this conflict allowed all sorts of strange behaviours to bubble to the surface: people preached the approach of the End of Time; men proclaimed themselves the Messiah; some claimed that to sin grossly was a sign of divine election; and, is as usual in times of crisis, vegetarianism and unbridled sex were proclaimed to be virtues. In areas of Parliamentarian control, where strict Calvinist preachers held sway, the detection of witches became a preoccupation. Interestingly, witches were sought out not for any maleficium or harm they had done, but for having entered into a compact with the Evil One.
Enter Hopkins, a young ne’er-do-well and the older Stearnes, a land-owner, who claimed to have devised ways of detecting witchery and who went from town to town offering their services — for a fee — to root out these evil women. Their efforts secured the arrest and trial of hundreds of alleged witches. The accused were subject to the “swimming test” in which they were bound to a chair and thrown into the water — if they floated they were guilty. They might be “pricked” for the devil’s mark — a sport of insensitive skin where their animal familiars or “imps” (see illustration above) suckled. Sleep-deprivation and other torture, illegal in England, were said to be used to force confessions. Estimates vary, but at least 300 women were hanged as a result of the 15-month campaign by Hopkins and Stearne — 60% of all witch executions in English history.
The witch hunt was opposed by a number of ministers and politicians who doubted their techniques and who suspected their motives. By 1647 the two decided it was prudent to retire from the game. Hopkins died of tuberculosis on this date in 1647 but Stearne lived to write A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft. Though end of the Civil War saw a drastic decline in witch prosecutions, the work of Hopkins and Stearne seems to have influenced the Puritan colonies in New England where tragic outbreaks, such as in Salem Massachusetts, continued.
A post-war migration of southern African Americans to the Los Angeles area created urban tensions as restrictive housing laws created largely black sections of the eastern and southern parts of the city. These shady real estate practices and perceived racial bias by the Los Angeles Police Department created resentment in areas such as Watts and Compton. On August 11, 1965 a routine evening traffic stop resulted in six days of rioting that caused deaths, enormous damage, and the summoning of the armed forces to subdue the unrest.
Marquette Frye was arrested for drunkenly driving his mother’s 1955 Buick, but a scuffle broke out when bystanders and Frye’s family protested his treatment. In addition to taking Marquette into custody, his mother and brother were also arrested. Guns were drawn, back-up was summoned, crowds gathered, and bottles were thrown. Despite attempts by community leaders to calm the situation, rumours spread about police brutality, and rioters took to the streets, vandalizing buildings and menacing white passersby. After two days of disturbances, the California National Guard put 2,300 reservists on to the streets to join 1,600 police, all to little avail. Arson was widespread, mobs enforced-no-go areas, and police were attacked; it was estimated that 30,000 inhabitants participated in the riots. The LAPD responded with mass arrests and ordered a curfew; bit by bit they took back the neigbourhoods and by August 16 peace had been restored.
The toll was high: 34 deaths, 1,038 injured, 3,438 arrested; hundreds of buildings and businesses over a 50-square-mile area were burnt or looted. A commission determined that a number of racial inequities in employment, housing and education were to blame. This was not to be the last major race riot in the 1960s.
Beginning in the mid-16th century, Spanish troops and settlers penetrated into the territory of the Pueblo in what is now New Mexico. Though royal Spanish law was remarkably tolerant for the time, its enforcement in distant parts of the empire was weak, leading to the enslavement and forced conversion of natives. Franciscan missionaries evangelized the Pueblo and won many to at least a superficial attachment to Christianity but most natives continued various aspects of their traditional spirituality including psychoactive drugs and kachina dances. Drought conditions and raids by the Apache added to the resentment against the Spanish occupiers and prompted a number of local unsuccessful revolts.
In 1680 a Pueblo leader named Popé (or Po’pay) engineered a conspiracy against the Spanish settlers and their missionaries. The notoriously fragmented natives had no tradition of political unity, but such was their hatred of their suppression that they listened to Popé’s blandishments, which promised an end to the drought and a return to prosperity if the foreigners were expelled and the Pueblo returned to the worship of their old gods. On August 10 they rose up en masse and began murdering hundreds of priests and colonists. Columns of frightened Spanish retreated from the territory into the safety of Texas, leaving the Pueblo once again in charge of their destiny. Popé travelled through the land, urging the destruction of all Spanish churches, and buildings, and discouraging the agriculture that the newcomers had brought: the cultivation of fruit trees, wheat and barley, and raising livestock such as cattle and sheep.
For twelve years the Pueblo maintained their independence but the droughts did not end with the return of the old gods, nor did Apache raids cease. When a new Spanish governor invaded again, he promised clemency for the rebels and distributed food; a peace was agreed upon. There would be further outbreaks of violence but, in general conditions, were better and Spanish oppression diminished after the revolt.
