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biography CLF_London_Review_241x57_Spring_2017.qxp_La Cambridge Literary Festival Spring 2017 18–23 April In partnership with Highlights include Sebastian Barry Madeleine Bunting Harriet Harman Richard Holmes Tom Kerridge Paul Kingsnorth Thomasina Miers Pankaj Mishra Charlotte Rampling John Simpson Elif Shafak Alexandra Shulman Martin Sixsmith Rose Tremain Book at cambridgelivetrust.co.uk 01223 357851 more congenial topic. Bolton has a firm grasp of contemporary sources, including the praise poems created by Scandinavian skalds for their patrons: Cnut was, he notes, ‘without question … the most important non-Norwegian’ among skaldic patrons. More important to him, however, are English law codes, land charters and, above all, the many witness lists for these documents, the study of which was mightily advanced by Simon Keynes’s An Atlas of Attestations in Anglo-Saxon Charters and The Diplomas of Æthelred ‘the Unready’. What these show is the elaborate networking of magnate families and Cnut’s careful balancing of ethnic and familial interests. He granted lands in strongly English areas, including the West Midlands and Dorset, to men with Scandinavian names such as Hákon, Eilaf, Hrani, Agemund, Bovi and Urk. When he outlawed the English notable Æthelweard, a southwestern ealdorman, he made amends by promoting his relative Æthelnoth to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. Cnut seized an opportunity to execute Eadric (nicknamed ‘the Grasper’), one of Æthelred’s most covetous councillors, while raising up another unscrupulous English politician called Godwine, father of Harold Godwinson, who died at Hastings. All this careful balancing meant that Cnut could count on English support, in the form of ships and men, when he faced the ‘defining moment’ of his career in 1026, the Battle of Holy River in Sweden, at which he took on the combined forces of Olaf II of Norway and King Anund of Sweden. Not even Cnut’s skalds could quite call this a victory for him, but he did enough to make the Swedes withdraw and prevent Olaf from returning to Norway by sea. The land trip home, Bolton suggests (basing his argument on a much later but well-recorded retreat), could have cost Olaf most of his men, who would have died of cold and hunger. By 1030, Bolton concludes, Cnut was ‘the most powerful ruler that Scandinavia had ever known’. He could take time off to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1027. He was the first Scandinavian or English king to have the desire or ability to influence the election of the Holy Roman Emperor, helping to secure the title for Conrad II that year. But he died suddenly, like many of his relatives, on 12 November 1035. Bolton suggests that there may have been a genetic tendency to stroke or cerebral aneurysm. What might have happened if he had lived longer? Bolton’s book is a model of careful, patient and exact scholarship. Anyone interested in the period can only be grateful for the way he untangles witness lists and complex dynastic marriages. And yet one may feel a wind of fashion filling the sails. The final verdict offered on Cnut is that he was ‘surprisingly modern’, his court was ‘culturally diverse’ and he was the promoter of ‘an entirely new Anglo-Scandinavian identity’. He was given to ‘spin-doctoring’ and his character was marked by a certain ‘fluidity of identity’. The Tony Blair of the medieval world? I would hate to think so. Finally, there is one revealing slip. In the confusion following Cnut’s death, the English tried to bring back their old royal family in the form of Æthelred’s surviving sons, Alfred and Edward. Eventually Edward, known to posterity as ‘the Confessor’, became king, but Alfred was captured and blinded on his return to England, later dying of his injuries. Suspicion fell strongly on the arch-twister Godwine and Bolton regards his guilt as a fact. At least I think so, for when Bolton writes, ‘There Godwine was arrested … and subsequently blinded and incarcerated’, he surely means Alfred. It was the likes of Godwine, a politician to his boot heels, who were responsible for the final collapse of Anglo-Saxon England. The loyalty of the English to their old kings, shaken by Æthelred and unrewarded by Edward the Confessor, was not entirely transferred to Godwine’s son Harold. Who can blame the long-suffering taxpayers of England for not turning up in force when they were most needed at Hastings? But maybe seeing things habitually from a politician’s perspective explains Bolton’s aversion of the eyes from Godwine’s treachery and its consequences. To misquote Bill Clinton, politics isn’t all about power-broking, stupid. Social cohesion is more important. And you can’t impose that from the top down, no matter how strong and effective your administrative machine. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 20. Literary Review | march 2017 8
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biography donald rayfield The Boy Scout & the Butcher The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution By Robert Service (Macmillan 282pp £25) Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait By Victor Sebestyen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 569pp £25) These two books, published to coincide with the centenary of the Russian Revolution, are linked by the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. This event forms the climax of Robert Service’s magnificent account of the Tsar’s last years and is just one of the atrocities to appear in Victor Sebestyen’s ‘Intimate Portrait’ of Lenin. But the only things that victim and murderer had in common were an inability to distinguish the trivial from the important and a conviction that they incarnated some non-human power: the Tsar believed that he had been anointed by God; Lenin regarded the Russian Revolution as the consequence of a Hegelian historical process. Service’s account of the Tsar’s last eighteen months is more detailed and better researched and narrated than any previous account. (The murder of the Tsar is remarkably well documented, because a week after it was committed White Army soldiers captured Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs had been detained, and a thorough judicial investigation was undertaken.) Sebestyen adds to Service’s account only a few details about the Bolshevik soldiers who participated in the slaughter of the imperial family. However horrible it may have been, on reflection, the Tsar’s end seems almost like an act of euthanasia compared with the torments inflicted on hundreds of thousands of other victims of the Red Terror between arrest and execution. After the shock of early 1917, when Nicholas, away from St Petersburg at military headquarters in Mogilev, was forced by rioting and mutiny in the capital to abdicate, the Tsar had felt almost relief. Dispatched by Kerensky, the leader of the Provisional Government, in a luxurious train to the Siberian town of Tobolsk, where much of the population was sympathetic, even reverential, and where he was known simply as ‘Colonel’ or ‘Mr Romanov’, Nicholas seemed to flourish in his new environment. Always Lenin in disguise as a Finnish worker, August 1917 a boy scout by temperament, he gardened and chopped wood. For the first time he began reading literature, including Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he admired so much he read passages to his wife and children (though he still valued his copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); he chatted amicably to those guards who consented to shake or kiss his hand; his family was allowed to walk to church and have services conducted in their palatial house. If anyone suffered, it was the Tsarina Alexandra, the real author of his miseries through her stupidity, inflexibility and superstitions, who was profoundly distressed by her sudden loss of authority. Nicholas’s confinement was tightened almost imperceptibly as power in the Urals and Siberian towns passed to the Bolsheviks: concessions to the imprisoned monarchy began to infuriate the armed gangs and political agitators, who could easily have tried to kill the Romanovs even before Lenin assented to the removal of ‘the baggage’, as the imperial family was known. The danger became more acute in the summer of 1918, when the Romanovs were moved to Bolshevik-controlled Yekaterinburg and locked in the double-walled Ipatiev mansion in response to the threat by the White Army and Czechoslovak Legion to take over Siberia. Until then, the Romanovs had assumed that Nicholas II would face a show trial in Moscow and that his immediate family might be allowed, as some other Romanovs were, to escape abroad. But once in Yekaterinburg, they must have feared the worst. Mercifully, only a few seconds lapsed between the sentence being pronounced in the basement of the mansion and the onslaught of bullets and bayonets. Nicholas’s tragedy was that he remained a petulant teenager. His father, Alexander III, treated him as a child: university professors were summoned to lecture Nicholas and his siblings but they were never allowed to question their pupils. Aleksei Suvorin, Chekhov’s publisher, related in his diary that Nicholas, while heir to the throne, visited his mistress, the ballet dancer Matilda Kshesinskaya, at her parents’ home and cursed his father for not giving him enough money to rent an apartment; he spent their afternoons together smoking cigars and whining. Throughout his life, Nicholas invariably did the wrong thing. After thousands were crushed to death in a stampede at his coronation in Moscow, he nevertheless danced at a ball at the French embassy; when an unarmed crowd appeared at the Winter Palace in early 1905, he let his Cossacks fire on them. Utterly besotted with his wife, conniving at her obsessions with holy men such as Rasputin, he was convinced that it was the people’s duty to gain his confidence, not vice versa. The march 2017 | Literary Review 9

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biography

CLF_London_Review_241x57_Spring_2017.qxp_La

Cambridge Literary Festival Spring 2017 18–23 April

In partnership with

Highlights include Sebastian Barry Madeleine Bunting Harriet Harman Richard Holmes Tom Kerridge Paul Kingsnorth Thomasina Miers Pankaj Mishra Charlotte Rampling John Simpson Elif Shafak Alexandra Shulman Martin Sixsmith Rose Tremain

Book at cambridgelivetrust.co.uk 01223 357851

more congenial topic. Bolton has a firm grasp of contemporary sources, including the praise poems created by Scandinavian skalds for their patrons: Cnut was, he notes, ‘without question … the most important non-Norwegian’ among skaldic patrons. More important to him, however, are English law codes, land charters and, above all, the many witness lists for these documents, the study of which was mightily advanced by Simon Keynes’s An Atlas of Attestations in Anglo-Saxon Charters and The Diplomas of Æthelred ‘the Unready’.

What these show is the elaborate networking of magnate families and Cnut’s careful balancing of ethnic and familial interests. He granted lands in strongly English areas, including the West Midlands and Dorset, to men with Scandinavian names such as Hákon, Eilaf, Hrani, Agemund, Bovi and Urk. When he outlawed the English notable Æthelweard, a southwestern ealdorman, he made amends by promoting his relative Æthelnoth to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. Cnut seized an opportunity to execute Eadric (nicknamed ‘the Grasper’), one of Æthelred’s most covetous councillors, while raising up another unscrupulous English politician called Godwine, father of Harold Godwinson, who died at Hastings.

All this careful balancing meant that Cnut could count on English support, in the form of ships and men, when he faced the ‘defining moment’ of his career in 1026, the Battle of Holy River in Sweden, at which he took on the combined forces of Olaf II of Norway and King Anund of Sweden. Not even Cnut’s skalds could quite call this a victory for him, but he did enough to make the Swedes withdraw and prevent Olaf from returning to Norway by sea. The land trip home, Bolton suggests (basing his argument on a much later but well-recorded retreat), could have cost Olaf most of his men, who would have died of cold and hunger.

By 1030, Bolton concludes, Cnut was ‘the most powerful ruler that Scandinavia had ever known’. He could take time off to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1027. He was the first Scandinavian or English king to have the desire or ability to influence the election of the Holy Roman Emperor, helping to secure the title for Conrad II that year. But he died suddenly, like many of his relatives, on 12 November 1035. Bolton suggests that there may have been a genetic tendency to stroke or cerebral aneurysm. What might have happened if he had lived longer?

Bolton’s book is a model of careful, patient and exact scholarship. Anyone interested in the period can only be grateful for the way he untangles witness lists and complex dynastic marriages. And yet one may feel a wind of fashion filling the sails. The final verdict offered on Cnut is that he was ‘surprisingly modern’, his court was ‘culturally diverse’ and he was the promoter of ‘an entirely new Anglo-Scandinavian identity’. He was given to ‘spin-doctoring’ and his character was marked by a certain ‘fluidity of identity’. The Tony Blair of the medieval world? I would hate to think so.

Finally, there is one revealing slip. In the confusion following Cnut’s death, the English tried to bring back their old royal family in the form of Æthelred’s surviving sons, Alfred and Edward. Eventually Edward, known to posterity as ‘the Confessor’, became king, but Alfred was captured and blinded on his return to England, later dying of his injuries. Suspicion fell strongly on the arch-twister Godwine and Bolton regards his guilt as a fact. At least I think so, for when Bolton writes, ‘There Godwine was arrested … and subsequently blinded and incarcerated’, he surely means Alfred.

It was the likes of Godwine, a politician to his boot heels, who were responsible for the final collapse of Anglo-Saxon England. The loyalty of the English to their old kings, shaken by Æthelred and unrewarded by Edward the Confessor, was not entirely transferred to Godwine’s son Harold. Who can blame the long-suffering taxpayers of England for not turning up in force when they were most needed at Hastings? But maybe seeing things habitually from a politician’s perspective explains Bolton’s aversion of the eyes from Godwine’s treachery and its consequences.

To misquote Bill Clinton, politics isn’t all about power-broking, stupid. Social cohesion is more important. And you can’t impose that from the top down, no matter how strong and effective your administrative machine. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 20.

Literary Review | march 2017 8

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