From: Seb Perry [sebperry@hotmail.com] Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2001 11:23 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Blair (no, the other one) I thought this might be of interest to the list.... http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/article/0,,9014-2001393662,00.html ________________________________________________________________ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 18 2001 Are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier? Roundhead Reputations by Blair Worden JOHN CAREY The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity by Blair Worden Allen Lane Ł20 pp400 W S Gilbert noticed that every boy and girl was born either a little Liberal or a little Conservative. By the same token, a quick poll among your friends will reveal that they are all Cavaliers or Roundheads. One of the ironies Blair Worden brings out in this study of posterity’s take on the civil war is that both names were originally insults. Roundhead was a name given to groups of London apprentices demonstrating on the parliamentarian side, and referred to the regulation that obliged them to keep their hair cropped. Caballeros, anglicised to Cavaliers, alluded to the Spanish troops infamous for their cruelties in the Protestant Netherlands. To God-fearing Puritans it seemed a fit label for the “heap of scum and dross and garbage of the land” they were up against. Worden’s book would have been even more engrossing if he had taken on the whole subject of the conflict between royalist and parliamentarian perspectives down the centuries. But given his close focus that would have stretched to many volumes. As it is, he limits himself to the after-history of three men, Oliver Cromwell, Algernon Sidney and Edmund Ludlow. Cromwell, whom he saves up to last, is inevitably the most interesting. Even before his death he was hated by both sides; by royalists as the slayer of their king, by parliamentarians as the tyrant and enslaver of his country who, in 1653, had marched into the House of Commons with a troop of soldiers, ejected the members, and named himself Lord Protector. At the Restoration his body was disinterred from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and, along with those of two other regicides, hung on a gibbet then beheaded. >From that time until the start of Victoria’s reign he was almost universally execrated as a blot on English history. But gradually the tide began to turn. Worden thinks the Napoleonic wars gave people a new respect for military force, and Cromwell’s policy of religious toleration attracted favourable notice from Nonconformists. Agitation for electoral reform and growing impatience with parliament as a“talking-shop” spread the feeling that to expel its members at the point of a musket might not be a bad idea. With Thomas Carlyle’s edition of the Letters and Speeches in 1845 the pro-Cromwell trickle became a flood. His religious fanaticism, which had seemed barbaric to the 18th century, thrilled Carlyle. The thought of the armed soldiers of Christ scattering their enemies gladdened his heart. He saw them as warring, like him, against Mammon and scepticism, and he shared Cromwell’s preference of dictatorship to democracy. To the modern reader the wonder is that Carlyle’s splenetic, proto-fascist bombast can have fooled anyone. But it fired the blood of the Victorian middle class, and Cromwell’s star rose. His aggressive foreign policy came to be seen as a prelude to Britain’s imperial mission. The moment during the 1653 coup in the House of Commons when he pointed to the mace and ordered his soldiers to “Take away that bauble” was celebrated in a painting by Benjamin West. Fervent celebrations greeted the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1899, and a statue of him with unsheathed sword, and a British lion at his feet, was erected outside the Houses of Parliament. The monument was paid for by Lord Rosebery, playboy and racehorse owner, whom Cromwell would certainly have consigned to the fiery pit. Among Marxists and Socialists his reputation dipped in the late 20th century as more came to light about his brutal suppression of the Levellers, a radical movement with advanced ideas about electoral reform, women’s rights and other good causes. But for most people he remained indelibly a hero. Worden’s other two subjects, Sidney and Ludlow, are almost unknown nowadays, and that is largely due to Cromwell’s apotheosis. Though they, too, were parliamentarians, they detested Cromwell as a dictator, and their reputation waned as his waxed. Sidney inherited some of the glamour of his great-uncle Sir Philip, the Elizabethan soldier-poet. He fought at Marston Moor, and escaped abroad at the Restoration, but was allowed back in 1677 on condition he did not plot against the government. He broke this condition, was found guilty of treason at a trial presided over by the notorious Judge Jeffreys, and executed. Worden’s point is that the Whig historians who published his writings at the end of the 17th century carefully misrepresented him, converting a hot-headed insurrectionist into a plaster saint. They played down his republicanism and cast him as a perfect English gentleman and martyr. His incorruptibility was contrasted with the sleaze of William III’s court. A century later Wordsworth, Shelley and the other Romantic poets were still proclaiming his spotless integrity. In fact documents from the French archives released in 1773 had revealed that Sidney, shortly after his return to England, received 1000 guineas from the French ambassador. His admirers were furious, dismissing the undoubtedly genuine documents as a shameful foreign slur on Sidney’s glorious name. In Ludlow’s case, the rewriting of history was quite literal. A parliamentarian commander, he had been one of the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant. Like Sidney he fled abroad at the Restoration, and he died in Switzerland in 1692. His Memoirs, published six years later by the same group of radical Whigs who had doctored Sidney’s reputation, became a key Civil War text, pored over by successive generations of historians. Only in the later 20th century was it exposed as a forgery. The discovery of part of the original manuscript showed that it had been severely abbreviated before publication and its whole tenor altered. Whereas with Sidney it was his inflammatory republicanism that had been written out of the record, with Ludlow it was his Puritan fundamentalism, which, in the new age of reason, would have seemed maniacal or ridiculous. Who was responsible for the forgery is a question Worden pursues at length. The answer he comes up with is an Irishman John Toland, a shadowy figure, probably the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest. Whether this attribution is correct does not seem to matter much. The political purpose of the rewriting, which Worden expertly clarifies, seems the important thing, not who did it, and Worden’s claim that Toland’s tampering with the Memoirs proves him a “genius” is stretching a point. All the same this is a tenacious piece of detective work. If, as Worden shows, history is constantly being rewritten, then are postmodernists right to dismiss all history as fiction? On this point Worden wobbles. He admits that history cannot be scientific or objective, but he believes up-to-date methods bring it near to the truth. Maybe. But to enter fully into the thoughts and feelings of the past we should have to cease to be ourselves. To that extent history’s aim is always unachievable, and the tangled map of misreading Worden uncovers reinforces that impression. No doubt he will return to this hotly debated issue. Meanwhile, he has made a weighty contribution to the history of history. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp From: Justin Pepperney [pepperney.3@osu.edu] Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2001 10:37 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: cfp: renaissance power play RENAISSANCE POWER PLAY The Uses and Abuses of Power in Early Modern Europe Annual Conference of the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society Marlborough School, Los Angeles, California 4-6 April, 2002 It will come as no surprise that the current state of Renaissance studies has emerged from a fruitful engagement with “discourses of power,” both in terms of the discipline’s relation to its traditional historical subject matter, as well as its place within a larger postmodern academic climate. Recognizing that discussions of power relations have, by now, reached their dénouement, this conference endeavours to assess where this dominant critical paradigm has left us, and where we might proceed from here. This year’s theme should be interpreted broadly, and papers are invited to consider any aspect of power negotiations in political, social, or artistic spheres throughout the Renaissance. We’re especially interested in studies that adopt a comparative approach, perhaps discussing “power” in more than one national, social, or institutional context. We hope that the dynamic created among the papers will articulate new directions for understanding how our positioning within current academic culture informsor betraysour analyses of early-modern power configurations. Plenary Speakers: Richard Helgerson Department of English, University of California-Santa Barbara Kenneth Bartlett Department of History, University of Toronto Proposals of no more than 500 words should be sent to either of the following conveners before 31 December, 2001. Electronic submissions are encouraged. Please visit the conference website at http://www.english.ohio-state.edu/people/bayer.23/pnrs.htm Dr. Brent Whitted Marlborough School 250 South Rossmore Avenue Los Angeles, California 90004 Phone: 323-935-7978 FAX: 323-933-0542 whittedb@marlborough.la.ca.us Mark Bayer Department of English, Ohio State Univ. 164 West 17th Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43210 Phone: 614-292-6065 FAX: 614-292-7816 bayer.23@osu.edu From: Prof. T Corns [els009@bangor.ac.uk] Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 12:18 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: British Milton Seminar 25: spring meeting 2002 -- call for papers THE BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR BMS 25 SPRING MEETING, 2002 Saturday 23 March 2002 PRELIMINARY NOTICE Venue: In Birmingham Central Library on Saturday 23 March 2002. There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm. No particular theme has been identified for this meeting, so proposals for any aspect of Milton studies would be welcome. I should like to receive offers of papers no later than 21 December 2001. Thomas N. Corns Joint Convener 13 November 2001 From: Neil Forsyth [neil.forsyth@angl.unil.ch] Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 11:14 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton and Rushdie The connection is via Defoe's Political History of the Devil, which=20 Rushdie describes as 'being very rude to Milton'. Martine Hennard=20 Dutheil has written about this in her Origin and Originality in=20 Rushdie's Fiction. Hope that is useful. >Hello. Does anybody know if there is anything written on the connection(s) >between Salman Rushdie and John Milton? Specifically in the relationship >between "Paradise Lost" and _The Satanic Verses_? >I appreciate any inforamation or insight. >Thanks, >Russ Leo >leo3623@fredonia.edu ************************************ Neil Forsyth Section d'anglais =46acult=E9 des Lettres Universit=E9 de Lausanne CH-1015 Lausanne-Dorigny Switzerland ************************************ From: Jeffrey Shoulson [jshoulson@miami.edu] Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 11:31 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton and Rushdie Dear Russ, I've often felt that Paradise Lost and The Satanic Verses have much in common. I've taught them together in a course called "Blasphemers, Artists, and Other Demons" and I've been toying for a long time with writing something about it. As of yet, though, I haven't come across anything in print, so I am as eager as you to hear from the rest of the list if there is anything out there. Best, Jeffrey -- Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Ph. D. Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Department of English University of Miami P.O. Box 248145 Coral Gables, FL 33124-4632 off: (305) 284-2182 fax: (305) 284-5635 http://www.as.miami.edu/english/jshoulson/