Dear Diary: Don't 'Member Nuff About History
It was the sort of day that makes me worry that I’m overly fond of the sound of my own voice. Well, not the sound, exactly — people say nice things about it, but it does nothing for me — but the content, which was old history gossip. After lunch, to which I was treated by a dear English friend who, like Nancy Mitford, came from much too nice a family to receive the education to which her intelligence entitled her, I was asked about the origins of the American Civil War. We had been talking about the Tenthers, and about the failure of leadership in American politics over the past half-century. (Now that I’m an old man, I admire Dwight Eisenhower for keeping the nation steady during the chthonic McCarthyite hysterias of the Fifties, and I fear that he was the last true leader to occupy the White House.) I hope that my answers exploded a number of myths.
Then at dinner, after watching Equivocation, Bill Cain’s rather overcharged play about Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot at MTC, Kathleen asked me to explain the English Civil War, which she claimed to know nothing about. (She was quite surprised to learn that Oliver Cromwell came from a county family.) I had the damnedest time saying “Charles II” when I meant “Charles I,” and vice versa, but at least I never confused James II with his grandfather, James I. Trying to trace the origins of the adversity between Crown and Parliament, all I could think of was John Hampden and Ship Money. I used to know about all those crises. (I still have JR Tanner’s undoubtedly outdated review of the constitutional disputes of Seventeenth-Century England.) Good old Archbishop Laud. Strafford and “thorough.”
I am still very much in the middle of Peter Wilson’s Thirty Years War — a bit past the middle, but only a bit. I’m dying to get to Steve Pincus’s 1688. It would be grand to re-read Cecily Wedgwood’s King’s Peace; I never did have The King’s War, but I’d like to read that, too. What could be more romantic than situating the capital of royalist England at Oxford? And, speaking of cavaliers and roundheads, there is no longer any doubt that The Young Victoria has made I Puritani my favorite opera in the world. I have begun efforts to follow Victoria’s advance to favoring Norma, an opera than the strange voice of Joan Sutherland made me quite dislike, but I am in no hurry. Vien diletto…
But how am I to get any reading done if I spend hours at a time rattling off the remnants of my decayed command of dates and fates? (I had to confess to Kathleen that I couldn’t for the life of me recall what became of Richard Cromwell.) And do I really care, if charming women are inclined to pump me for the low-down on select charters and documents illustrative of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I — and Queen Victoria, whose Prince Albert was, in Strachey’s opinion, the most able statesman in England at the time of his premature demise. Did you know that Albert’s last official act, composed on his deathbed, was to soften a British ultimatum that, in its original language, would have almost certainly provoked war between the Union and the United Kingdom? Now I must bone up on the Trent Affair, so that, next time I’m asked, I’ll be able to do more than gush that Prince Albert saved the day.