Author: Mark Hannam

On Monday 26 April 1937, Gernika, a small historic Basque town close to the French border, held its weekly open-air market. 

Culturally conservative and loyally Catholic, the Basque region nonetheless mostly supported the Republican cause during the civil war, in return for the promise of regional autonomy within a democratic Spain.  In the Spring of 1937, the rebel forces seeking to overthrow the Republic were making slow but steady advances towards the heart of the Basque region, but General Franco and his German military advisers wanted to accelerate progress in this region.  So they planned to start attacks on civilian settlements that lay well behind the military front line.

At around 4.30 in the afternoon, a single plane from the Condor Squadron – led by Colonel Wolfgang von Richthofen, and comprised mostly of German fighters and bombers, supplemented with some Italian planes – appeared over Gernika, and dropped a few bombs.  Once it had departed, the townspeople rushed out of their shelters to survey the damage and provide help to the few wounded.  Around fifteen minutes later, a full squadron of planes arrived, and more bombs were dropped onto the town centre.  At the same time, a group of fighter planes strafed those attempting to flee into the fields beyond the town.  The local hospital, staffed by nuns, was also attacked.   

At 5.15, another wave of planes appeared overhead and for the next two-and-a-half hours, they carpet-bombed the town: this was a new aerial strategy that the Condor Squadron had recently developed for attacking enemy trenches, but which they now experimented with in an attack on a civilian settlement that lacked any form of defence.  As well as bombs, numerous incendiary devices containing thermite and phosphorus were also dropped, burning alive the people and animals below, and setting fire to buildings.  By evening, the town centre was flattened, a chaotic mass of charred ruins.  Of the 7,000 population, more than one third were casualties: 1,600  dead and close to 900 wounded.

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Henry VIII is England’s most famous king.  Some kings are famous for great wartime deeds, for example Richard I, known as “the Lionheart”, or Henry V, victor at Agincourt; some are famous for well-remembered episodes during their kingship, such as Alfred, who burnt some cakes, or Richard III, who lost his horse; others are famous for disabilities, such as George III’s madness or George VI’s stutter.  Henry VIII is famous neither for heroic deeds nor disabilities, but because he had six wives.   Plenty of kings had multiple mistresses, but multiple marriages are far less common; six wives is an unusually high number for kings; even for movie stars, although Tony Curtis managed it.

To understand Henry VIII’s lifelong commitment to serial monogamy we need to consider the political problem that confronted him and his belief about how best to solve it.  His father, Henry Tudor, had emerged as the victor of the War of the Roses, a civil war in England that followed on from the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337-1453).  For more than thirty years, two English noble families contested the right to the throne until the dispute was finally settled by Henry Tudor’s victory over Richard of York (who lost his horse) in 1485, and his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter and heir of the rival family. 

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When the Sexual Offences Act (1967) was passed by the UK parliament, homosexual acts between men were partially decriminalised. Initially, the law only applied in England and Wales (decriminalisation was extended to Scotland in 1980, and to Northern Ireland in 1982), and only applied to men over the age of 21 (the age of consent for homosexuals acts was lowered to 18 in 1984, and then in 2000 was harmonised with the age of consent for heterosexual acts, at 16), and did not apply to men serving in the armed forces (although it was extended to include them in 2000). Homosexual acts between women were never legally prohibited in the UK and therefore did not need to be decriminalised. This Act formed part of a slew of progressive legislation in the late 1960s, which also included the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of capital punishment, and the relaxation of the divorce laws, all championed by the Labour Party’s then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins.

Not everyone in British politics welcomed the advent of the permissive society. In the mid-1980s public anxiety about the spread of AIDS provided the chance for opponents of liberalisation to campaign for new laws that proscribed ‘the promotion’ of homosexuality. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), passed by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, required that local authorities in England, Wales, and Scotland shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, nor should they promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. While many local government employees and many teachers worried about the meaning of the term “promotion” – did buying copies of books by Oscar Wilde for libraries count as promotion? What about playing music by Benjamin Britten? Was visiting Hadrian’s Wall problematic? – many UK newspapers conducted aggressive and intrusive reporting of the lives and behaviour of well-known gay men. It appeared, for a short time, that twenty years of progress had been reversed.

Continue reading “Joining in and opting out”

Five hundred years ago, on the low-lying plains that run eastwards from the River Danube, near the town of Mohács, an army of 20,000 Hungarian soldiers led by Louis, the 20-year old king, faced an Ottoman army, estimated at 100,000 men, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey.  King Louis II of Hungary was married to Marie, who was the younger sister of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and his brother Ferdinand, Emperor of Austria.  Louis and Ferdinand had pleaded with Charles to send more troops to halt the Turkish advance, and had even suggested a temporary cessation of hostilities with the German Protestants, to allow them to recruit a mercenary army to defend European Christendom from the infidels.  Charles declined to support his brother-in-law, preferring to concentrate his military resources on his war with France, by which he hoped to secure Burgundy and much of Northern Italy for the Habsburgs.  Although Francis I, the French king, was betrothed to Charles’s elder sister, Eleanor, Charles viewed Francis as untrustworthy and referred to him as “the tiresome Turk”. 

Despite being heavily outnumbered, Louis II engaged the Ottoman army in battle: he was killed, along with many leading Hungarian nobles, and most of his army.  Two weeks later, Suleiman entered the city of Buda and appointed  John I, as the vassal King of Hungary, determining that an annual subsidy would be paid to Istanbul.  Ferdinand claimed the crown of Hungary for himself, and set about rallying the Christian kings of Europe to form an alliance and raise an army to drive the Turks out of central Europe.  His pleas were ignored, not least because most of Europe was more concerned about the territorial ambitions of Charles than of Suleiman.  The French, English, Venetians, Milanese, and the Pope all joined together to form the League of Cognac, established to resist the Habsburgs threat, and Buda remained firmly under the control of the Turks.   When John I died, in 1540, Ferdinand disputed the succession of the Hungarian crown to his young son, John II, and raised his own army of Austrian and German troops, which was dispatched to Buda to liberate it from Ottoman control.  This army, once again around 20,000 in number, was crushed by Suleiman’s troops along the banks of the Danube, and Turkish control of Hungary was once again confirmed.  The Ottomans remained in charge for almost 150 years until, in 1686, a Habsburg army finally wrested back control, first of Buda and then the lands to the south and east.   

Continue reading “Blue Danube”

I recently read a biography of Napoleon, written by the French historian Georges Lefebvre, first published in 1935.  I wanted to learn about him through the work of one of his own countrymen, for whom his historical importance would not be in doubt, but who nevertheless understood the many shortcomings of his rule, first as Consul and then as Emperor.  I had become aware that, despite studying European history at school until I was eighteen, I had never learned much about Napoleon, and that his portrayal in England was often rather cartoonish – a short, pompous man, who over-estimated his abilities and deserved to be ridiculed – with an emphasis on his dictatorial character.  By contrast, contemporary accounts by philosophers, novelists, and poets, celebrate Napoleon as the man who abolished Feudalism across Europe, introduced religious toleration, granted civil rights to the Jews, drafted constitutions, and who cut down the power of the church and the landed aristocrats.  Rather than a figure of fun, for many people of his day he was a symbol of progress, the champion of the rights of the people against the old elites.  Lefebvre’s book was exactly what I needed, and I think I now have a more balanced view of one of the Europe’s great but flawed leaders.

Early in the book, Lefebvre describes preparations for the Battle of Marengo (1800), which took place near a small town in Piedmont, roughly at the centre of the triangle formed by Turin, Milan, and Genoa.  In May, Napoleon led the French forces over the Alps and into northern Italy, ready to face the Austrian army.  As I read this, I remembered that this event is also described at the start of the novel Vertigo, by W G Sebald, a German author who lived much of his life in England and whose works have acquired something of a cult status.  I picked up my copy of Vertigo and re-read the first sentence:  In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great Saint Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible.  How odd!  For, according to Lefebvre, Napoleon had decided to lead the army to the Great Saint Bernard Pass which, having been crossed in 1798 and 1799, was a passage familiar to French armies.  Had the French army crossed the Alps using that pass twice before, or did they do so in 1800 for the first time?    Whose version of events should I trust?

Continue reading “Making stuff up”