Skip to main content
Read page text
page 10
history fighting that turned that far-western city’s streets into battle zones in 1966. Many chapters are enlivened by memorable profiles of individuals who spent at least part of their lives in villages. One chapter, for example, is peppered with quotes from her interviews with an obstinate and opinionated elderly composer who spent his youth and young adulthood being sent to different places as he alternately adhered to and rejected calls to have music serve political ends, paying a steep price for each act of defiance. The work Red Memory reminded me of most was The People’s Republic of Amnesia, just with the tragedies of a decade rather than a year as its focus. The book is an exploration of how the Cultural Revolution is remembered by China’s populace. Branigan shows that people in China are not all on the same page when it comes to the complex events of the Chairman’s era. Chapters look in detail at such things as competing accounts of a famous act of violence early in the Cultural Revolution, which ended in the death of a teacher at the hands of her students, and museums that either support or challenge official narratives of China’s post-1949 trajectory. Red Memory is not just an engagingly written book but also, for two reasons, a much-needed one. It is valuable, first, because it helps clear up lingering popular misunderstandings of a major event in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution and its legacy have generated a rich scholarly literature, which Branigan mines. But many non-specialists still have a vision of it formed by one or two moving memoirs they have read. The problem is that some of the most influential of these make it easy for readers to assume that China’s population is made up of two groups: former Cultural Revolution perpetrators and their descendants and former Cultural Revolution victims and their descendants. In fact, the twists and turns of the event were such that many people were perpetrators at one point and victims at another. Many families had members who moved between these two categories. The second reason we need a book like this is that coming to terms with the Cultural Revolution has taken on an added timeliness since Xi, the first paramount Sometimes bad things happen to good writers. If you are a professionally published writer . Established by writers for writers, the Royal Literary Fund could Visit www.rlf.org.uk . leader to grow up in the Mao era (he was born in 1953), took power. Some Cultural Revolution events probably played formative roles in shaping Xi’s personality. Being humiliated and having members of his family pitted against each other in its earliest phase, despite (or because of ) the elite status they had thanks to his father’s role as a veteran revolutionary leader, surely scarred him. In addition, mythic narratives of Xi’s experiences during that decade figure centrally in the personality cult that he and those around him have created to justify his rule. Branigan handles particularly well the way Xi’s actions after he was sent to the countryside at fifteen have been turned into a legitimising story of personal transformation – of a city boy becoming a loved and admired leader of salt-of-the-earth men and women while in the political wilderness. Branigan writes, ‘When he took the top job, his book The Governance of China – more than 13 million copies distributed in thirty-three languages, and counting – hymned his grace in austerity, his selfless dedication to the peasants and the humility with which he learned from them (like Mao, was the unstated implication).’ Tales of his life are meant to show that he suffered during the Cultural Revolution, as so many did, but that this strengthened him in the end. Xi’s ‘story’ was ‘potent in an age where the gulfs between town and country, rulers and ruled, had expanded so fast ’. Taking note of how events from the period 1966–76 are used to burnish Xi’s authority underscores just how different the treatments of that era and the year 1989 are in China today. It is routine in soundbite-driven reports on China to find ‘Tiananmen Square’ and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ called a pair of ‘taboo topics’. In reality, while references to the protests and state violence of 1989 are off limits, the events of Mao’s final decade are allowed to be discussed, albeit only in ways that conform with sometimes shifting official visions of the past. This difference is among the many complex issues Branigan handles astutely in Red Memory, which is a book not about efforts to impose ‘amnesia’, but about the various ways that memories of a problematic period are continually being ‘disinterred, re vived and nur tured ’ by different groups and individuals, as well as at times ‘policed, exploited and suppressed’. Literary Review | february 2023 8
page 11
history edward vallance All For the Good Old Cause The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England By Jonathan Healey (Bloomsbury 512pp £30) It seems that great popular histories of the Stuart age are like buses: you wait ages for one and then three (or four) come all at once. Following on from excellent studies of the Interregnum by Paul Lay and Anna Keay, and Clare Jackson’s prize-winning Devil-Land, Jonathan Healey ’s The Blazing Wo r l d offers a zesty and gripping account of England’s ‘century of revolution’. While it shares a similar chronological span to Jackson’s book, covering the period from the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne to the deposition of his grandson, James VII and II in 1688, Healey’s book is distinctive. Where Jackson chose to de-centre England, focusing on how the nation’s tumultuous affairs were understood by foreign observers, Healey provides us with a political history that broadens the focus beyond Westminster and the royal court to take in the political activities of ordinary men and women. Healey’s narrative opens with an event demonstrating the intertwining of popular culture and political and religious commentary – a ‘skimmington ride’ orchestrated by local Catholics that disrupted and mocked a special sermon at Cartmel church marking the anniversary of James I’s coronation. While this particular incident was directed by the local gentry, as Healey makes clear, the actions of those outside the social elite exerted a critical influence on the course of events: it was crowd activity, for instance, that forced Charles I to flee his capital in 1642. As Healey also notes, though, the Restoration of monarchy in 1660 was popular: ‘Had it not been, it might never have happened’. However, while Healey makes clear that England’s civil wars were preceded by decades of social and economic hardship, he stops short of seeing these pressures as a direct cause of the conflicts of the mid-17th century. Instead, for Healey, social transformation, the rise of the ‘middling sort ’ as a political and economic entity, was a consequence of the political revolution. Healey’s discussion of this weighty subject matter is leavened by his keen sense of humour and eye for the ribald anecdote. He highlights the libertinism of Charles II’s reign through the story of the courtier Sir Charles Sedley delivering a drunken mock sermon naked from the balcony of a tavern in which he claimed ‘he had to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’ (the inclusion of such salty 17th-century language is another feature of the book). In covering such a lot of ground relatively concisely, Healey inevitably gives more space to some periods than others. Overall the book is weighted more heavily towards the first half of the century than the second: whereas the 1640s and 1650s are covered in depth, the reign of James II and the revolution of 1688 are compressed into one chapter. Healey perhaps underplays the influence of the mid-century revolution on the political struggles of the later 17th century, presenting radical political energies as largely having dissipated by the time of the Restoration. Take, for example, his discussion of the Rye House Plot of 1683, a radical Whig conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and James, Duke of York, on their way back from Newmarket races. Healey neglects to mention that Rye House, the fortified manor house in Hertfordshire from which the attack on the royal brothers was to be launched, belonged to one Richard Rumbold, a former New Model Army soldier and, for a time, a follower of the radical democratic Leveller movement. Rumbold had also been part of the guard on the scaffold when Charles I was executed and had clearly not lost his taste for regicide in the intervening decades. As Gary De Krey has shown, other Rye House plotters also had connections to the mid-century revolution, among them John Gladman (another former Parliamentarian soldier and Rumbold’s kinsman) and Samuel Mayne, son of the regicide Simon Mayne. So when Tories accused the Whigs of being no more than the king-killing Puritans of old, they were not completely wide of the mark. In his conclusion, Healey is at pains to make clear that the individuals he discusses were men and women of their own time – they did not foreshadow modern political movements. This is a refreshing stance, especially in a work of popular history, a genre in which readers are usually told how such and such a historical personage, event or period got us to where we are today. The incident described at the start of The Blazing World was part of a customary tradition of ‘rushbearing’ in northwest England that would persist into the modern era, but its 19th-century descendent, Healey stresses in a powerful conclusion, was a world apart from the early modern version. (We might pause for a moment here, though, to note that the custom’s ‘more genteel’ 19th-century incarnation could still be a vehicle for political comment: when in the summer of 1819 Lancashire weaving communities marched to St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to demonstrate for liberty and democracy, they did so bearing the laurels and branches of a traditional rushbearing procession.) The Blazing World offers an important corrective to anachronistic approaches to the past, especially as regards English history in the 17th century – an age that has been mined perhaps like no other for antecedents of modern political movements, whether the ‘first socialists’ (the Levellers) or the ‘first eco-warriors’ (the Diggers). As Healey demonstrates through his engrossing narrative, the 17th century has more than enough in and of itself to fascinate and inspire us. A case in point is the aforementioned Richard Rumbold. Unlike other Rye House plotters, Rumbold escaped to the Dutch Republic. He would finally be captured after participating in another conspiracy against the Stuart monarchy: Argyll’s Rebellion of 1685. Tried for treason in Edinburgh and sentenced to death, Rumbold went to the scaffold with his commitment to the ‘Good Old Cause’ of civil and religious liberty undimmed. For all his post-Restoration associating with aristocratic conspirators, his last words spoke more of his political apprenticeship with the Levellers: ‘there was no man born marked by God above another, for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.’ february 2023 | Literary Review 9

Page Text

View plaintext

history edward vallance

All For the Good Old Cause The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

By Jonathan Healey (Bloomsbury 512pp £30)

It seems that great popular histories of the Stuart age are like buses: you wait ages for one and then three (or four) come all at once. Following on from excellent studies of the Interregnum by Paul Lay and Anna Keay, and Clare Jackson’s prize-winning Devil-Land, Jonathan Healey ’s The Blazing Wo r l d offers a zesty and gripping account of England’s ‘century of revolution’.

While it shares a similar chronological span to Jackson’s book, covering the period from the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne to the deposition of his grandson, James VII and II in 1688, Healey’s book is distinctive. Where Jackson chose to de-centre England, focusing on how the nation’s tumultuous affairs were understood by foreign observers, Healey provides us with a political history that broadens the focus beyond Westminster and the royal court to take in the political activities of ordinary men and women.

Healey’s narrative opens with an event demonstrating the intertwining of popular culture and political and religious commentary – a ‘skimmington ride’ orchestrated by local Catholics that disrupted and mocked a special sermon at Cartmel church marking the anniversary of James I’s coronation. While this particular incident was directed by the local gentry, as Healey makes clear, the actions of those outside the social elite exerted a critical influence on the course of events: it was crowd activity, for instance, that forced Charles I to flee his capital in 1642. As Healey also notes, though, the Restoration of monarchy in 1660 was popular: ‘Had it not been, it might never have happened’.

However, while Healey makes clear that England’s civil wars were preceded by decades of social and economic hardship, he stops short of seeing these pressures as a direct cause of the conflicts of the mid-17th century. Instead, for Healey, social transformation, the rise of the ‘middling sort ’ as a political and economic entity, was a consequence of the political revolution.

Healey’s discussion of this weighty subject matter is leavened by his keen sense of humour and eye for the ribald anecdote. He highlights the libertinism of Charles II’s reign through the story of the courtier Sir Charles Sedley delivering a drunken mock sermon naked from the balcony of a tavern in which he claimed ‘he had to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’ (the inclusion of such salty 17th-century language is another feature of the book).

In covering such a lot of ground relatively concisely, Healey inevitably gives more space to some periods than others. Overall the book is weighted more heavily towards the first half of the century than the second: whereas the 1640s and 1650s are covered in depth, the reign of James II and the revolution of 1688 are compressed into one chapter. Healey perhaps underplays the influence of the mid-century revolution on the political struggles of the later 17th century, presenting radical political energies as largely having dissipated by the time of the Restoration.

Take, for example, his discussion of the Rye House Plot of 1683, a radical Whig conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and James, Duke of York, on their way back from Newmarket races. Healey neglects to mention that Rye House, the fortified manor house in Hertfordshire from which the attack on the royal brothers was to be launched, belonged to one Richard Rumbold, a former New Model Army soldier and, for a time, a follower of the radical democratic Leveller movement. Rumbold had also been part of the guard on the scaffold when Charles I was executed and had clearly not lost his taste for regicide in the intervening decades. As Gary De Krey has shown, other Rye House plotters also had connections to the mid-century revolution, among them John Gladman (another former Parliamentarian soldier and Rumbold’s kinsman) and Samuel Mayne, son of the regicide Simon Mayne. So when Tories accused the Whigs of being no more than the king-killing Puritans of old, they were not completely wide of the mark.

In his conclusion, Healey is at pains to make clear that the individuals he discusses were men and women of their own time – they did not foreshadow modern political movements. This is a refreshing stance, especially in a work of popular history, a genre in which readers are usually told how such and such a historical personage, event or period got us to where we are today. The incident described at the start of The Blazing World was part of a customary tradition of ‘rushbearing’ in northwest England that would persist into the modern era, but its 19th-century descendent, Healey stresses in a powerful conclusion, was a world apart from the early modern version. (We might pause for a moment here, though, to note that the custom’s ‘more genteel’ 19th-century incarnation could still be a vehicle for political comment: when in the summer of 1819 Lancashire weaving communities marched to St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to demonstrate for liberty and democracy, they did so bearing the laurels and branches of a traditional rushbearing procession.)

The Blazing World offers an important corrective to anachronistic approaches to the past, especially as regards English history in the 17th century – an age that has been mined perhaps like no other for antecedents of modern political movements, whether the ‘first socialists’ (the Levellers) or the ‘first eco-warriors’ (the Diggers). As Healey demonstrates through his engrossing narrative, the 17th century has more than enough in and of itself to fascinate and inspire us. A case in point is the aforementioned Richard Rumbold. Unlike other Rye House plotters, Rumbold escaped to the Dutch Republic. He would finally be captured after participating in another conspiracy against the Stuart monarchy: Argyll’s Rebellion of 1685. Tried for treason in Edinburgh and sentenced to death, Rumbold went to the scaffold with his commitment to the ‘Good Old Cause’ of civil and religious liberty undimmed. For all his post-Restoration associating with aristocratic conspirators, his last words spoke more of his political apprenticeship with the Levellers: ‘there was no man born marked by God above another, for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.’

february 2023 | Literary Review 9

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content