Sunday 20 December 2020

THE SONG OF SIMON de MONTFORT: England’s First Revolutionary SOPHIE THÉRÈSE AMBLER

 THE SONG OF SIMON de MONTFORT: England’s First Revolutionary

SOPHIE THÉRÈSE AMBLER, Picador, 2020, 428 pages

 Review by Phil Shannon

What to do with a pesky British knight of the realm who thinks that all Britons, including those of no wealth, should have a voice in making the laws that govern and tax them, and who has an armed following well up for it?  Why, you drive a lance through his neck in battle, slaughter his followers and, pour encourager les autres big time, you return to the dead knight’s body to sever his hands, feet and head, and as a coup de grace, his testicles, stuffing them into his mouth, the whole grisly package of body parts despatched as a present to your wife.

 This is exactly what the powerful land baron, Roger Mortimer, in alliance with King Henry 111 and his heir to the throne,  Prince Edward, did to Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester and revolutionary democrat, at the battle of Evesham in Worcestershire in 1265.  Sophie Ambler, a British historian at Lancaster University, recounts the tragic fate of this early sortie into representative government in the democracy-deficient Mediaeval Ages.

 In the beginning, Simon was a comfortable member of the elite club of land barons, bishops and Royals.  By managing royal administration in the shires (including the collection of taxes and administration of justice) as well as providing the special services cavalry corps for the king’s army, knights were essential cogs in this circle of social connection, political power and material reward.  Simon, by marrying King Henry’s sister and naming their baby Henry, was a skilled player of the suck-up game.

 There were family disputes over the economic spoils of power, however, and Simon was initially propelled onto his politically rebellious path by a large debt owed to Simon by King Henry which remained unpaid because Henry preferred to waste money on vanity military projects.

 Simon also actually took seriously the knightly oath of serving the wellbeing of the king’s subjects, something which Henry had conspicuously failed to do.  Simon’s anti-royalist radicalisation deepened in 1258 when a year-long winter (the result of a massive, climate-altering Indonesian volcano) hit the poor of England with failed crops, soaring corn prices, terrible famine and deadly disease epidemics on top of ruinous royal taxes, fees and fines.

 When, to manage this crisis, the King summoned the religious and secular elite of England to a ‘parliament’ in that year to approve his request for yet another tax, Simon lead a Bolshie delegation of rebel barons and bishops who had come to see a greedy and recklessly autocratic Henry as a threat to the ruling class unity and stable class relations that worked to the benefit of their own interests as the second-tier elite. 

 There was a flamboyant, martial demeanour to Simon’s delegation as well.  Attired in full knightly kit, swords and all, the King’s usually trusty but now aggrieved lieutenants were negotiating from strength and they did not stop with exercising their Magna Carta right of veto over tax proposals (a right won in struggle against the egregiously bad Bad King John in 1215).  More than this specific restraint on the power of the Crown, the rebels wanted an end to costly, pointless royal wars, and, further upping the ante, they demanded a revolution in England’s system of government.

 Government, they insisted, should be by a more widely representative council of ‘leading citizens’ instead of solely by the Crown and its chosen stooges.  In the age of absolute monarchy, this diminution of royal power was revolutionary.  Henry was frightened into political surrender.

 He retained the throne and some residual powers, however, and the resultant system of dual power see-sawed for six years between royalists and democrats as the population’s traditional feudal loyalties to king and lord vied with an emerging, new democratic, political consciousness.  Long before Leon Trotsky was to make ‘permanent revolution’ a trending meme, the more maximalist of the rebels, such as Simon, discovered its necessity in the struggle with the old, still extant, political order.

 Simon consolidated popular support for a showdown with royalty as he extended to the common people of England ground-breaking new rights and avenues of justice against the sheriffs, bailiffs and other agents of the state.  The 50% of the population who were tenant farmers (obliged to serve their lords - they were basically unfree serfs) also exercised new-found rights further down the food chain against their lordly owners.

 This last development alarmed the more moderate of the elite rebels but, for the moment these uncertain class allies held fast against a common enemy, the hard-line royalist reactionaries who eventually wheeled out the usual remedy of putting the upstart yokels to the sword.  The first counter-revolution, by domestic and foreign royalist forces, came a cropper, however, in the  battle of Lewes in 1265, thanks to Simon’s military acumen and political leadership.  Simon took King Henry and Prince Edward prisoner.

 With the wind in their sails, the Montfortians pressed their advantage, expropriating the castles and other assets of the enemies of democratic reform.  They took control of the capital from the royalists, winning over London’s middle class (bakers, and food and wine merchants, who were victims of royal rapacity) and the labouring class of skilled artisans and unskilled workers.  It was not just an elite of barons, knights and bishops who backed Simon but, as a London chronicler wrote, ‘almost all the middling people of the kingdom’ willingly flocked to Simon’s banner, including giving eager service as foot-soldiers in Simon’s citizens’ army.

 

The first parliament of the new regime experimented with a deeper, albeit limited, democracy.  Representatives to England’s ‘first House of Commons’ in 1265 were in part selected, in part elected, including not just knights, bishops and barons but lesser religious and secular notables, and townspeople (well … townsmen, but this was eight centuries ago), too.  In parallel, out in the shires, local people tasted a stronger flavour of democracy by electing their shire sheriffs.  None of this would meet the bar of the bourgeois democracy of our day, of full suffrage and direct election of parliamentary representatives, but, for the times, it was a revolutionary leap forward in democratic rights.

 As parliament deliberated, the symbolism of the humiliated king being led everywhere as a captive under the eye of Simon’s personal military detail of 160 knights, whilst Edward languished in jail, made manifest the fundamental transformation of the political order that had just occurred.

 The old elite knew it and began plotting to get their power back.  Although Simon had won over many knights, much of the Commoner population and a significant number of bishops (the Church tithed ten per cent of its wealth to fund the Montfortian army), none (bar one – who later defected) of the immensely powerful land-owning earls were Simon’s comrades in the struggle against their own class interests.

 These earls had immense wealth for funding a sizeable army, and they had the power to conscript a large body of men, also playing on the tenant-serfs’ cultural conditioning of reverence for royalty and the Pope in order to weaken popular support for Simon.  Well-off moderates in the revolution, fearing for their manors and castles and serfs, betrayed Simon by helping Prince Edward, a ferocious warrior, to escape to lead the military backlash.  The grim logic of war did the rest.

 The anti-democrats doused with blood the Montfortian “flicker in the political dark” but the example of Simon’s revolution survived in popular memory.  Sophie Ambler’s addictively readable historical narrative is grounded in diligent, insightful research and enlivened by warm sympathy for the defeated rebels.  Their revolution had its imperfections – its anti-Semitism, common for the time, is confronting, whilst Simon’s political principle of ‘good lordship’ fell short of a full extension of political power to the lord’s subjects – but the reader is rooting for it all the same.  Simon’s revolution – partial, flawed, defeated but inspirational - remains ours to finish off.

Tuesday 4 February 2020

And What Do You Do? NORMAN BAKER



… AND WHAT DO YOU DO?  What the Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know
NORMAN BAKER
Biteback Publishing, 2019, 390 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

When conversing with commoners, members of the British Royal Family are instructed to always ask the question ‘And what do you do?’.  For, after all, this gives the working class something to talk about – their job.  Norman Baker (a former Liberal Democrat Minister in the British parliament) says, however, that it is high time the question was returned in kind by asking of the royals ‘And what do you do?’.

So how do the royals fill their day?  Let us count the ways.

Plaque-unveilings


It seems to be mandatory to have a regal presence to unveil a plaque at the opening of a local council’s latest pride-and-joy.  The royals’ ribbon-cutting function is not just ceremonial, however.  Strictly-observed royal etiquette on such occasions (the lowly people must never speak without being spoken to, arrive after the royal personage, sit in the presence of royalty or be allowed to look down upon a royal from a height) delivers an important lesson about the subordinate place of the great unwashed in Britain’s social hierarchy.


The King was in his counting-house …….

Counting their spondulicks is something the royals are seriously good at.  They used to be given a straight-up bung (under the ‘Civil List’ budget item) from the government but this made just who was paying for the lavish lifestyle of the royals a bit too obvious to the taxpayer.  Public funding of the royals was best dealt with more circumspectly, and more remuneratively, through the ‘Sovereign Grant’, which siphons off 25% (around £100 million a year) of the profits from leasing access to the royals’ land holdings (or ‘Duchies’, a fancy-pants regal term for property asset portfolios).



The Queen has title to the Duchy of Lancaster (45,000 acres of prime agricultural land, most of the Lancashire coast, all the sea-beds around Britain, a golf course in Wales and other valuable properties across England) and Prince Charles has the Duchy of Cornwall (160 miles of British coastline, some rivers, many residential, commercial and farming properties, ‘The Oval’ cricket ground, and gold, silver, tungsten and iridium mines in Cornwall and other counties.  These are all public lands, valued at around £14 billion in total, gifted by the state to the royals.

No one knows exactly how rich the royals are but an apt adjective would be ‘stonking’.   Two decades ago, the Queen was valued at £1.2 billion, whilst the deceased Queen Mother’s estate weighed in at £70 million.  Every one of the fifteen ‘senior royals’ (including Charles’ two sons via Diana - William and Harry) hit the scales at over £20 million each, courtesy of their pocket money from the family’s Duchy profits.
 
Tax accountancy for fun and profit!


The royals are a dab hand at wealth maximisation through tax minimisation.  They are exempt from inheritance tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty on share transactions.  They were exempt from income tax until a series of palace scandals in the early 1990s prompted a PR change of course whereby the royals pledged to pay income tax - on a ‘voluntary’ basis, however, and only then after massive ‘deductibles’ for ‘business expenses’ such as the upkeep for Charles’ polo ponies.  As well as this legal tax avoidance, Monarchy Inc. is adept at underhanded tax evasion - a majority of the Queen’s in-theory taxable income is sheltered from Britain’s tax authorities in offshore tax havens.


How to live well


The Royals are famously profligate with other people’s money, primarily taxpayers’ dosh, but also in-kind freebies from their elite peers in Hollywood and the like who offer up their private jets, cruise yachts, posh ski resort chalets, Kenyan hunting lodges and luxury holiday villas in the Caribbean for free royal use.


They are, however, infamously miserly with what they consider their private money.  The Queen Mother’s frequent, extravagant dining occasions had a liveried footman posted behind each guest’s chair pouring champers from £300 bottles of the stuff but when it came to tipping Royal Marine bandsmen on the royal yacht, Britannia, she protested bitterly to the Exchequer that the token gratuities had to come out of her own pocket (the tips were just 12½ pence per head!).

Job Creation



It would be soup kitchens all over again if it were not for the Royal job creation scheme.  The Queen Mother, for example, had a personal staff of sixty, Charles has 28 whilst the Queen finds room on the payroll for, amongst dozens of others, a Gold Stick-In-Waiting, Master of the Queen’s Music, Gentlemen Ushers, nine surgeons, five apothecaries, an astronomer, a Hereditary Carver, one Sculptor in Ordinary, Warden of the Queen’s Swans and a Royal Bargemaster.  The royals staffing roster is not a “mediaeval mountain of absurdity”, however, as the abolition of the ‘Keeper of the Lions in the Tower’ demonstrates a modernising trend as “the royal family moves seamlessly into the eighteenth century”.

Champions of meritocracy

There is a lot of ribbon-pinning and title-bestowing by the royals to recognise worthy persons who have enriched society, including the royals themselves, including the Royal Family Order, bestowed on all female members of the Royal Family for the achievement of, well, being a female member of the royal family, a prestigious laurel that only a select few deserve.

As connoisseurs of personal worth, it is only right, therefore, that such meritorious beings as the royals be the first to be looked after in the event of, say, nuclear war.  The entire extended royal family, cousins and all, get first dibs on spots in the nuclear bunker when the Big One is about to fall, as specified in the official ‘Order of Precedence’.  For, if we have to start civilisation all over again, this time without any mistakes, the royals naturally come first to mind.

Charity work


The royals are tireless charity workers – nothing as common as doing a shift in the local op-shop but, rather, tapping rich celebrities for donations, a task which might be more impressive if the royal charities didn’t divert large executive salaries and expense accounts from the charities’ funds to the court favourites who head them, or if the royals didn’t charge appearance fees to guest at other charity fund-raising events (the asking price by Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister, is $30,000 a pop in the US, for example) which comes out of any event proceeds.

Playing catch-me-if-you-can.



The monarch, under the mediaeval ‘principle of perfection’, can do no legal wrong and so can not be prosecuted under common law.  Thus, although Prince Philip’s traffic accident in 2019, which injured two other road users, was the Duke of Edinburgh’s fault, the Crown Prosecution Service offered a deal for the 98-year-old to surrender his driver’s licence in return for no charges being laid.  Just two days after this accident, the failure of both the Queen and the Duke to wear a seatbelt was similarly given a pass (both royals, by the way, are official patrons of road safety charities).

Eco-Warriors

The preferred mode of travel for royalty is expensive, CO2-intensive helicopter and private jet rather than commercial flight or train.  Prince Harry, for example, chartered a helicopter from London to Birmingham where he lectured an audience to ‘wake up and act’ on climate change.  For added green hypocrisy, Prince Philip, a serial master blaster of wildlife, was a founder member of the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), whilst Charles became head of the WWF’s UK arm at the same time as he was adding wild boar in Liechtenstein to his big game trophies.

Defending democracy



The royals are all for democracy – when it delivers the right result.  When the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, sacked a twice-democratically-elected Labor Government in Australia in 1975, he was acting on instructions from the palace. 
Agents of political disease

It would be insufficient to conclude that the British royals are just a monumentally expensive waste of space. Far worse is their politically toxic culture of elite entitlement, privileges and prerogatives which subtly propagandises that power and wealth differentials based on birth and wealth are inevitable, a conclusion which is daily garnished by the establishment media’s royalty fetishism with, as Baker says, its “constant diet of sickeningly sycophantic coverage which reports their activities with breathless and uncritical awe”.



Although Baker is too much the political centrist to bring it up, there is an antidote to the political poison of royalty – pink-slip the lot of ‘em.  Starting with the laying-off of the tiara’d and titled toffs, we could then progress onto the business barons and corporate kings.  A small rise in the number of unemployed plaque-unveillers would be a small price to pay for a much greater rise in political democracy and economic equality.