The greatest mind shift?

This crossed Malcolm’s mind as he jousted on politics.ie over the fall of Rome.

He began to wonder whether the most profound historical re-appraisal of his life-time was not the vexed question of the “Dark Ages”.

See! We don’t really use the term anymore. It’s not PC in academic circles.

A broken mirror to the past

As Malcolm recalls, in his time at school, the lights went out in the early fifth century and (a few generalisations about “barbarian” invasions later, and a brief interval for Charlemagne) the lights switched on again, about the start of the first millennium.

Groping through the fastness of the night, students were allowed the merest candle glimmers. Typically this might be no more than:

¶ the fiction of Gregory the Great’s Non Angli, see angeli!

¶ the further fiction of Alfred’s Great Saxon Bake-off

¶ the more authentic forensic drama of the Synod of Whitby (that one, less because it settled Easter, but because it was a poke in the eye for the dreaded Irish, and a walk-on part for the occasional woman, as left) …

All of which is thoroughly Anglocentric, as indeed is the name given the “Dark Ages” themselves. Apparently the German scholars have always preferred die Völkerwanderungen — the time of the wandering peoples. Since many of those peripatetics were germanic in origin, that arguably is equally Germanocentric.

Catch ‘em young. treat ‘em rough

A first day at secondary school inevitably starts with getting a timetable.

Somewhere in those disorienting hours, and new subjects’ names  (which, for Malcolm, also involved Fakenham Grammar’s holly-bush) one heard: Geography is about maps; history is about chaps. The “chaps” who defined early modern history were late classical or Christian authors. The “barbarians” (another loaded term) didn’t leave their written record; and so were always seen through the writings of the good guys.

Some of the gaps between geographical maps and historical chaps amount to archaeology. That is where much of the reconsideration of the “Dark Ages” has stemmed from.

But were there other factors?

As part of that politics.ie exchange, Malcolm found himself musing on whether one element in the fall of Rome was technological — and social changes that implied. On the whole, history teachers aren’t too good on things technological.

One example came to mind.

Thanks to quadruple-dealing, the Venetians conveyed the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, committed widespread mayhem, rape and pillage, and brought this bit of porphyry home as a souvenir. They were so proud, they cemented it to the Treasury of St Mark’s. A missing bit is still in Istanbul. It’s not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. It represents the four Tetrarchs.

Diocletian in AD286 appointed three others to share, under his sway, the management and defence of the Empire:

• Diocletian himself was based at Nicomedia, modern Izmir, on the Asian frontier;
• Maximian operated from Mediolanum [Milan] with authority forItalia et Africa;
• Up on the Danube, at Sirmium, near modern Belgrade, Galerius had oversight of the Danube frontier;
• While Constantius Chlorus was officer commanding the Rhine frontier at Augustus Treverorum [Trier].

Plum, sputum and glades (not)

Here the tetrarchs are depicted in a spirit of brotherhood (which didn’t last long — so we can accurately date this bit of statuary)  and in full military fig. These guys are wearing state-of-the-art heavy metal, and the swords are spathae.

One of the things Malcolm dimly recalls recall from classical archaeology lectures (Professor Pyle at TCD, alas not doing this with actions) was why Caesar did so well against the Gauls. Vercingetorix and co. came at the Romans with their long slashing swords. Their metallurgy wasn’t up to their ambition. Hence a Gaulish warrior might periodically retreat, leap up and down on his sword to straighten it, and then return to the fray. Meanwhile the Roman legionnaires, with plum, scutum and gladii (which the spelling-corrector would wish as “plum, sputum and glades”) just kept doggedly poking their way forward.

If the spatha became the weapon of choice and fashion in the late fourth century, and was the the nearest substitute for a Glock 19 the quartermasters could offer, metal-bashing must have significantly improved. Lest we forget: if the iron sword was improved, so too were other applications for iron — the plough, for an obvious example. Sure enough, the heavy mouldboard plough makes its appearance just around the same time as Tetrarchs are happily presenting their side-arms. That’s technology in social action.

With the spathae there would be improved infantry handbooks, new soldiering — the day of the heavy infantryman has arrived. In due course, equine-management would deliver beasts capable of putting this heavy mob on horseback, and — lo! — we have arrived at the age of the armed knight.

That’s not the complete story of the fall of the Empire by a long shot: as Rory Carr, another sparring partner of Malcolm’s, reminded us:

In 1984, German professor Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories on why Rome fell, and new theories have emerged since then.

TV lightens the darkness

None of that in any way explains why we have gone through a major academic reconsideration of five centuries. Nor that this has, to some extent, penetrated the public consciousness.

Obviously knowledge has improved. We now enjoy data and analysis from technical equipment that previous generations of archaeologists lacked. And there are many, many more archaeologists in productive employment.

Similarly, on the monkeys/typewriter/Shakespeare analogy, an excess of PhD students will eventually have to consider previously-neglected topics, and may even produce results.

Added to which there are infinite hours of numerous TV channels needing material. A fluffy, scruffy, muddy and bloody archaeologist, preferably with a strong regional accent and eccentricities, in a trench is cheap filming and audience-friendly. Throw in a bit of eye-candy (there’s another relationship which failed the test of time) and you’re making a mark in the ratings.

All the better for it

If the early modern period can be “sexed-up”, so much the better.

It might even have an impact on schools. David Starkey may not be everyone’s (and certainly not Malcolm’s) cup-of-tea but he hits the button:

History, fundamentally, is a branch of storytelling. It is, of course, a very sophisticated branch of storytelling: issues of evidence, issues of critical analysis, issues of debate are very important, but they seem to me to be the scaffolding and the foundations.

There is nothing dry, desiccated, dreary about history. In schools it has to become something more than castles, eight wives, the slave trade, Hitler, Stalin — which, in many cases it has been in recent years. The other problem is that each of those topics, important as each is, comes with value-added. There’s a clear ideological overtone. And all together they do not give any “sweep” to history. Starkey again:

We need big courses, we need ancient history, we need medieval history, we need the history of the dark ages, we need that sense of change and development across time.

Malcolm will take a little milk, no sugar, with that.

And finally, Starkey gets to how, why and what Malcolm reads (that ever-tottering guilt-pile). It is the first of his two powerful justifications for the teaching of history and its place in the National Curriculum (the second is the “celebratory” element — who and what we are and have achieved):

… how can we justify the idea of history at the centre of a national curriculum? There are two ways of doing it. The first is psychological. Memory is central to being human. The most terrible sign of Alzheimer’s is the loss of memory, something uniquely destructive to the personality. We are memory, we are our awareness of ourselves. I would suggest that societies are really very similar. They are collective memory, and a society that loses its collective memory has nothing. Without an awareness of the need for collective memory any notion of community, value or stability vanishes and we become merely individualised flotsam and jetsam. So there is a really powerful argument of this sort to be made for the centrality of history.

Devious diggers and curious curators

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement is a wall-to-wall Dickensian extravaganza. Then there’s the main article  — page three of the TLS is a major event, any week.

It is a Richard Clogg’s review of Susan Heuck Allen’s Classical Spies. For the record, Clogg is a historian with a Grecian bent and Allen an archaeologist. So, can the twain ever meet?

Whereas the book’s subtitle suggests an exclusively American perspective, Clogg spends a lot of useful time considering what the Brits, dispossessed to Cairo and elsewhere, were up to for the duration. We come to a different view to the norm of the WW2 activities of the archaeologists and Hellenists:

 the classicists and archaeologists appointed to the American and British schools were indeed engaged in intelligence work, while their counterparts in the German, Italian and Vichy-controlled French schools carried on digging on behalf of the German occupying forces.

Digging, that is, in the broadest sense of the word.

Clogg drops names who were SOE types:

C.M.Woodhouse, N.G.L.Hammond, Anthony Andrewes, Stanley Casson, J.M.Cook, T.J.Dunbabin, Peter Fraser, Eric Gray, T. Bruce Mitford, David Talbot Rice, J.D.S.Pendlebury and David Wallace.

In the ’60s you didn’t get very far reading (or, in Malcolm’s case, barely scanning) Classics or early History without hitting hard against many of those names.

• Bruce-Mitford, for example, was a fixture at the British Museum for four decades — and wrote the definitive study of the Sutton Hoo burial.
• If anyone needs a right-wing hero figure, Monty Woodhouse (there he is, right, in full Greek mountain fig) might qualify. Straight out of New College, Oxford (with a double first, to boot), he was into the Royal Artillery. By 1941 he was in Crete, liaising with the resistance, then onto the mainland with the Harling Force, and by 1943 (still in his mid-20s) a full Colonel in charge of the British Military Mission in Greece. After the War he was still spooking: first in Athens (machinating as Second Secretary against the Muscovites), then in Tehran overthrowing the Mosaddegh government and establishing the Western-friendly Pahlevi régime (a certain Kermit Roosevelt was doing his bit for the CIA). Oh, and in between Woodhouse was a Tory MP for two terms and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. And was among the first to finger Kurt Waldheim, sometime secretary general of the United Nations and President of Austria, as a Nazi executioner, ignorant of Jasenovac concentration camp and deaf and blind to summary executions of Titoists outside his office.

Nearer home

Let’s change the location to Dublin, well out of the climactic events of the wartime period (By the way, when will “historians” recognise that, unlike Switzerland, Ireland seems never to have formally declared “neutrality?)

Surely, there’s no parallel?

Mahr, not less

Well, there was Adolf Mahr, an Austrian whose dedication Nazism predated the Anchluss. In his spare time from being Director of the National Museum he quite openly ran the Nazi Auslandorganisation in Ireland, complete with its own Hitler Youth. That involved him with the strange ménage around Maud Gonne, which included her daughter Iseult and son-in-law Francis Stuart. Mahr’s reports back to Berlin had identified certain Germans as “Juden”, thus guaranteeing their ends. A cynic might also go looking for a rationale of the remarkable Goethe-Plakette in 1934 to WB Yeats, soon after Mahr’s appointment as Director of the Museum.

At the outbreak of War in 1939, Mahr was — conveniently for the Irish government, which then didn’t need to expel him — “on holiday” back in Germany (and, in 1945, when he came looking for his job back, made him extremely unwelcome). `Marooned in wartime Germany,  Mahr went to work for Goebbels’ propaganda radio and Irland Redaktion. By 1944 Mahr was running Ru IX and Ru II, which broadcast to Britain, Ireland and the British Empire, usually immediately after “Lord Haw-Haw”.

Nice guy: the dirt on him and Ireland’s other Nazis was well dished by David O’Donoghue for History: Ireland. A small detail: even with Mahr in Berlin, Nazis were running the Turf Board and the ESB, with a niche in the Department of Finance.

The extraordinary Richard Hayes

Passing Mahr regularly, and probably on nodding terms at least, would have been Richard Hayes, the director of the National Library. Take care here: there are two Richard Hayes around at this period: the other one was censoring films, and not every writer (and even fewer indexers) has sorted the one from the other.

Librarian Hayes was another of those polymaths made extinct by ever-greater specialisation in higher education: he had three honors (correct spelling, Malcolm assures you) degrees from Trinity — in Celtic Studies, in Modern Languages, and in Philosophy. By the time of the Emergency, Hayes too had a sideline. Having polished off the administration at the National Library, daily he bestrode his sit-up-and-beg bicycle up to Collins Barracks in Arbour Hill. There he devoted himself to the systematic decoding of all and anything that came his way. He was Ireland’s one-man equivalent of Bletchley Park.

The National Library hold a remarkable collection of Hayes papers, relating to his crypto-analysis. We can see he worked on double-folio broadsheets, ruled into harlequin squares. Clearly, as early as 1939 Hayes was breaking the German and American diplomatic cyphers. The “approved” version is that Hayes was into the British cypher by late-1941. That may well be true, except it is a very useful date for “previous offences” not to be taken into account. Equally, it may be that Colonel Dan Bryan, who became head of G2 in 1942, was felt by some to be too close to the British MI5; and not all the material Hayes accessed crossed Bryan’s desk. We must also be aware that the Hayes papers we have have probably been “weeded”. In any event, the British were extremely impressed by Hayes’s results: he had a hand in the arrest of all of the dozen German spies during the Emergency. If there is one particular success, it must be the cracking of the code used by Hermann Goertz, who managed to stay “on the run” in Dublin for nineteen months (another suspiciously convenient arrangement: in that time Goertz was repeatedly face-to-face with the greatest in the land and in the Irish military).

À la recherche du temps perdu: cakes and carrots

No madeleine (surely the most-overworked cake in literary history), but a taste for that Augustinian —  and the need to feed the Lady in his Life and the Pert Young Piece — drove Malcolm back to the Stag.

The Augustinian was off. Instead, the offerings were not only St Austell Proper Job, which Malcolm knew well and had relished in joints such as the Harbourside Inn in Charlestown (that’s the Cornish one), but … hello! … something different!

Old Daily Gold Top

Here is an indicator of how one trend in the great British beer revival is going.

The presentation and the advertising are helpful clues:

This fine recipe gives a beer that will appeal to ale drinkers and lager drinkers alike.

“…so light, you could mistake it for fine lager!”

Well, only if you’d ruined any remaining taste-buds on mass-market froth.

The Old Dairy is located where the depths of Kent are about to tip over into East Sussex. It’s kind of the centre-point of a roughly equilateral triangle made up of Sandhurst (no, not the one for the military types), Sissinghurst (for the gardeners) and Tenterden (the birthplace of printer Caxton and TV-man David Frost). In short, this locality is about as couth and twee as anywhere in England. Just what the day-trippers from the Pas de Calais are expecting.

The brewery is a ten-barrels-a-week micro-brewery — that’s significantly less than 3,000 pints, so you’re not going to find it swilling around too readily. Moreover, the Old Daily boasts some ten brews, several only seasonal, in its recipe-book. The one you’re most likely to meet is Red Top, a simple, honest Best Bitter at 3.8%. And you’ll most easily find it in bottles.

So Gold Top on draught, well off its home patch in East Finchley, counts as a distinct, and worthwhile “find”.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

There’s that note of agreement on the ever-present topic of Greene King Abbot from gingerfightback.

Which leads into another of those coincidences that plague Malcolm’s life (as much as they provide the unlikeliest of plot-devices for Dickens’ novels).

For our gingerfightback uses a cute gravatar (as right).

The coincidence is that Malcolm had just cleared out his ever-burdensome spam file, where one “sell” had been:

Not the best post unfortunately. Sorry to be so blunt. You should try some Norwegian carrot cake (gulrotkake) to cheer you up instead.

Ah, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless critic!

Malcolm can cope with a bit of elementary etymology: so kake (which is straightforward Middle English) and rot (right out of any of the old Scandinavian tongues) are easy. Anyway, gulrot has its own Norwegian wikipedia page. Which leaves only the “gul-” element. Yet gules is heraldic red, and here the OED goes in for a bit of speculation:

The ulterior etymology is disputed: the word coincides in form with the plural of the French and medieval Latin word for ‘throat’. If the heraldic sense be the original, the allusion may be to the colour of the open mouth of a heraldic beast. It seems more likely, however, that the heraldic use is transferred from the sense ‘red ermine’, in which case the word may represent some oriental name; but the suggestion of derivation < Persian gul , rose (Hatzfeld & Darmesteter), is very improbable.

In any event gulrotkake, taken out of context, sounds as unpleasant as one might wish. After which the criticism seems mere spiteful jealousy at Malcolm’s art, perhaps sort of perverted  vegetable love …  Vaster than empires, and more slow. [Irony alert!]

Particularly so, since Alan in Belfast provided Slugger O’Toole with a particularly tortuous and sinister New Year political insight into carrots.

So, it’s as well Malcolm has the recollection of Proper Job and Gold Top (a quart of each) as a comforter.

Bad dose of the MRDAs

That’s as in “Mandy Rice-Davies Applies“.

Fox has gone. We all knew he would.

After the parade comes the man with a broom-and-shovel.

None other than Tim Montgomerie.

His post has three points:

1. Cameron has handled the saga well.
2. The importance of ideological balance in the Cabinet.
3. Fox’s record and future.

Let’s consider those MRDAs further.

The weakest PM since …

… well, the last one.

Since this is a value judgement, Malcolm would suggest “since the dying days of the Callaghan administration”. Yet, even then, Jim Callaghan — a class act — knew that, as Cassius had it:

So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.

In the end, Callaghan condoned his own end, by refusing to drag in a dying MP to level the vote.

Cameron, though, has contrived to tie himself to the dying corpse of LibDemmery for a five-year term, and blocked his knock-off by perverting the rules on an early dissolution.

Furthermore, by the intricacies of the coalition agreement, he not only has umpteen policy restraints but he also has the composition of his Cabinet dictated to him. Who, except in extremis, would see Danny “Ginger Rodent” Alexander worthy of promoting from third-tier PR work to the Cabinet?

In the case of the Fox business, Montgomerie has it:

Some say that the Prime Minister has protected Dr Fox because he doesn’t want to look like he treats an embattled politician of the Right any differently from an embattled Liberal Democrat. That probably has been part of Cameron’s calculation but I also understand there’s been real warmth from the PM to his Defence Secretary behind-the-scenes. Nobody on the Right can legitimately say that Dr Fox hasn’t been treated fairly.

Others say, with a shrewder eye to the realities, that Cameron can be none too upset over the demise of a past, and possibly future rival. His shuffling back from full-blown support has been much more:

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

What Fox was up to amounted to gross insubordination. It now seems he was the centre of a parallel foreign policy cabal, financed by overseas Rightists, dedicated to a neo-Con agenda, with a particular focus on pro-Israeli policies. Werrity was his cut-out, his channel to some very, very suspect characters. The Guardian has a briefing graph to accompany Michael White’s article:

Once upon a time over-ambitious politicos went to the block for less.

Cameron must have known his Defence Secretary was undermining his Foreign Office. Allowing that to persist for the last eighteen months is no sign of strength.

Balancing the Cabinet

Yeah, yeah. All government are, to some extent, coalitions of factions.

The Tory Right is well represented in the present one: at least half-a-dozen names spring to mind. Ben Duckworth did a boilerplate, but workman-like attempt to define the Tory Right for Total Politics. It is of some interest that Duckworeth, writing six months or more ago, had this as his peroration:

Iain Duncan Smith is seeing through vast welfare reforms and Owen Paterson is finding his energies wholly taken up by his Northern Ireland brief. At the lower ministerial level, even the unreconstructed Thatcherites must spend their energies implementing set policies from the coalition agreement. This leaves Liam Fox. The defence secretary “remains a serious player”, says one admirer. Others have their doubts about the lack of a long-term strategy as a leader of the right.

The Tory right may not be a cohesive force. It is split along generational lines, specific issues and personality clashes. It is not really the ‘hang-em and flog-em’ social stereotype either. It is a movable strength in the Conservative Party but one thing David Cameron cannot afford to do, as prime minister of a coalition, is combine it against him. The right will continue to have their say.

No, what Montgomerie is crying out for is not the Tory Right — they are there in force — but more neo-Cons. And they, despite Montgomerie’s hopes and the views of the window-lickers in his comments columns, are rare birds in real UK politics.

That leaves us with Fox’s future

That, in itself, is a test of the other two Montgomerie theses.

If Cameron has played this correctly, and he certainly has played the long game, Fox will have neutralised himself — as David Davis did before.

Fox on the back bec=nches could be a rallying point for the few dissidents (which means disappointed-by-lack-of-promotion) who hang out in those parts.

On the other hand, had he resigned on some matter of principle some while back, he would have been in a far stronger position.

The massed middle-ranks of Tory MPs, now looking towards the second half of this Parliament, have two far bigger thoughts:

• the failure of the current economic strategies;
• the prospects of individual and party re-election.

Their edginess will have been made worse by the discipline shown by the Labour side. It is worth noting that nobody on the Labour Front Bench went ballistic, and demanded Fox’s resignation. When Fox was making his statement, earlier this week, Jim Murphy went nit-picking over the ministerial code. Some thought that inadequate. It actually left Fox twisting in the wind, and Cameron chewing finger-nails. Similarly Ed Miliband left it to back-benchers to taunt at PMQs, thus ensuring that the unemployment figures were not squeezed out of the news-cycle, but also leaving Fox a sitting target, knowing that the Press gang, with the complicity of the faceless military, would get their prey.

And Fox would dominate the news-cycles for at least a week.

Meantime,  here’s to the original Mandy, who is forever just eighteen in all English political history. 

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Everybody implies. Nobody spells it out.

Well, the cruder types do in their comments on the seedier sites (Guido, the Mail …).

For the generality, though, in this enlightened day and age, nobody gives a hoot what consenting adults do behind closed doors.

With certain exceptions.

• You don’t make a song-and-dance out of your knickers (witness Nadine Dorries).
• You don’t claim your porn on parliamentary expenses (witness Jaqui Smith).
• You don’t take money and then double-claim it on your cheat sheet (witness David Laws).
• You don’t aggressively strut your stuff unless you are prepared for the snidery (witness Peter Mandelson).
• And you don’t get into a leg-over position, as well as having a knees-under-desk one in the military-intelligence nexus, unless you are prepared for MI5 to take an interest in your comings and goings (that’s the legacy of Profumo-Keeler-Ivanov).

The last of those is particularly relevant here.

We can reasonably be sure that Liam Fox was checked over long before he was enstooled as Grand Panjandrum at the MoD. Probably early in 2005, when he succeeded, as the shadow minister, Michael Ancram, the 13th Marquess of Lothian and therefore, most definitively, one of us — though, hardly coincidentally, another Bullingdon clubber.

Any doubts or difficulties, then or subsequently, would have passed across the desk of Jonathan Evans, DG of the Security Service, and from him to GOD himself (the almighty Gus O’Donnell).

In the current disposition, such wrinkles might then be vouchsafed to GOD’s representative on earth, David Cameron.

If Mr Werrity didn’t crop up in all that, it would be incompetent rather than remarkable.

Malcolm therefore posits that little of the froth of recent days will come as “news” in Downing Street.

Malcolm further suggests that the next Act has already been scripted.

Second front, now!

There’s something in the wind. The natives are restless. Those yips and harrowing screeches bode ill for the Cameroonie Fifth Cavalry.

Fox hunting

In particular one particular hunting party has it in for Dr Liam Fox. Scalp-taking is the order of the day.

The Guardian has Werritty was running Atlantic Bridge out of Fox’s parliamentary office.

The Torygraph , revisiting its old hit-parade, has Werrity living rent-free in Fox’s flat, which was funded on parliamentary expenses (David Laws casting a shadow there). That, in itself, is well worth watching: Fox was done for £25,000 expenses on his second home. He went screaming to the appeal, and lost humiliatingly.  He was one of the “magic circle” of Cameron close associates (Gove was another) who were not defenestrated: this caused pain and grief amongst those with less-offensive duck-houses and moats.

Now we conceivably also have the ghost of “Sir “Mark Thatcher knocking at the door:

It has emerged Mr Werritty set up a meeting for Dr Fox with businessmen in Dubai, despite having no official role.

Fort Tory has sent out a message: “pull the wagons into a circle!”

Moreover, read the puffs on the near horizon:

• ConHome is as opaque as an Apache smoke-signal, giving priority to boilerplate stuff from Osborne and making Fox fifth item, even below the Shadow Education spokesman visiting a “free school”.
• Paul Staines’s scandal sheet, now under the daily direction of Harry “Tory Bear” Cole, is little more than an outhouse for spewing Tory bile. Still, give the bear half a sniff of fresh blood  and he’s off  prowling the prairie:

Next week could be a big week for Fox hunting.

And Neo-Guido is certainly posing some good questions:

Fox has said it is unacceptable for Werritty to say he is an advisor, but he needs to clear up whether his office had anything to do with the cards. Like paying for them out the stationery budget…

Which would be a real knee-trembler were that to be on either Fox’s or Atlantic Bridge’s account.

The M18A1 Claymore mine with the plastic trigger and detonator wire (from wikipedia)

Death after a thousand cuts

This would be a very good weekend for the aggrieved brasshats of the Ministry of Defence to be briefing discreetly their acolytes in the Sunday heavies.

Malcolm is sure that the brown jobs, the fly-boy crabs and the navy types all have enough animus to do the business.

All it needs is the whispered hint, a juicy bit of political dirt.

One thing is well known: the apolitical British military are as sophisticated political operators as any. They know where the bodies are buried. Not all wet-jobs require the usual heavy hardware (as illustrated right).

So tomorrow’s papers may be fun.

Logical? Reasonable? Sensible?

Malcolm is neither a lawyer, nor an American, though he has daughters who are the one, and grandchildren the other. He admires much of American society immensely. And yet …

A nearly unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects even hurtful speech about public issues and upheld the right of a fringe church to protest near military funerals.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing “is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible.” But he said government “cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”

“As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate,” Roberts said.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was the lone dissenter.

… there are limits.

Three points:

• Is a funeral, which is invariably a moment of personal suffering and private emotion, a place for the self-promoting and profoundly unReverend Fred W Phelps and his family to perform their amateur dramatics?
• Is there not some social obligation on officialdom to protect the bereaved (and the context here is the close family of soldiers killed in the service of their country) from “hurtful … public discourse” and unnecessary “pain”?
• Why, writ small but as a comparison, in a land which treasures the Right to Bear Arms and shoot each other, is it acceptable for parents to have circulated official school “permission slips”, so that, before little Joe can play with little Willie, Mom has to assert there is no hard liquor in the house?

The wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes

There is a previous First Amendment case which deserves to be remembered.

In the First World War, the Socialist Charles Schrenck campaigned against the draft. The Supreme Court held his conviction under the Espionage Act correct and constitutional. Justice Holmes delivered the magisterial opinion:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. … The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is question of proximity and degree.

Surely, not just a “right” but a “duty”.

A family tradition

Let’s get this right:

• Prime Minister David Cameron is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV.
• William IV was third son of George III, whose elder brothers were the future George IV and … Frederick, Duke of York and Albany.

Taraaah!

Said Prince Fred is generally accounted to have been the Grand Old Duke of York, who:

… had ten thousand men.

He marched them up to the top of the hill

And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up.

And when they were down, they were down.

And when they were only halfway up,

They were neither up nor down.

He earned that reputation because of the futile Flanders campaign of 1799.

Hasten on to the last recent few days.

On Monday David Cameron was belligerent:

We must not tolerate this [Libyan] regime using military force against its own people. In that context I have asked the Ministry of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Staff to work with our allies on plans for a military no-fly zone.

Quite what the brasshats thought of this will doubtless appear in somebody’s memoirs. The nearest British base is Akrotiri in Cyprus, a mere thousand miles away. Even if Britain had the aircraft (which it doesn’t), at that distance grounding Gaddafi’s Sukhois looks a bit of a stretch.

A day later it was time to march back down the hill:

Britain has backtracked from its belligerent military stance over Libyaafter the Obama administration publicly distanced itself from David Cameron‘s suggestion that Nato should establish a no-fly zone over the country and that rebel forces should be armed.

As senior British military sources expressed concern that Downing Street appeared to be overlooking the dangers of being sucked into a long and potentially dangerous operation, the prime minister said Britain would go no further than contacting the rebel forces at this stage.

So today, in PMQs, it was neither up nor down:

1207 Ed Miliband moves onto the issue of the no-fly zone, asking for “clarification” of the UK’s position after he said other countries had “distanced” themselves from the idea.

1208 Mr Cameron says the international community should prepare for “all eventualities” for dealing with the Gaddafi regime and says that this includes a no-fly zone, quoting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in his answer.

In point of fact, Hillary Clinton seemed less than whole-hearted, and more anxious to protect the defence budget when she appeared before gung-ho Senator John Kerry’s committee:

Mrs Clinton has said the US is still considering the implementation of a no-fly zone in Libya, although she acknowledged there would be drawbacks in such a move.

Defence officials have said the US would have to destroy Libyan air defences in order to establish and enforce a no-fly zone in the country.

“If we were to set it up… we’d have to work our way through doing it in a safe manner and not put ourselves in jeopardy,” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm Mike Mullen told reporters, referring to the threat posed by Libyan air defence measures.

Others take a more jaundiced view of possible US intervention:

… the push for aggressive action against Qaddafi’s regime is running into surprising opposition from the Pentagon, where senior military officials are urging policymakers to proceed cautiously and warning that any form of armed intervention into Libya could carry unforeseeable dangers and costs.

The upshot is that anyone expecting the U.S. military to take action against Qaddafi in the days ahead is virtually certain to be disappointed. The Obama administration has been steadily escalating its financial and diplomatic pressure on the Libyan dictator, freezing tens of billions of dollars of his assets and joining its European allies in vocally demanding that he step down. Publicly, White House officials insist that “all options are on the table” when it comes to Libya, including military force. In practice, however, there are no signs that the administration is actually preparing for military action inside Libya.

The administration’s go-slow approach has been evident in the limited amount of military assets that have been moved closer to Libya. Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered a pair of American warships to the Mediterranean Sea on Tuesday, and announced that the U.S. would augment one of the vessels—the USS Kearsarge—with a new contingent of 400 Marines. The ships should arrive in the vicinity of Libya by Thursday.

Sticking it to ‘em

Cameron has been talking loudly, but has not even a fig-leaf to cover his military nudity. On the other hand, engrained in the US mind is Teddy Roosevelt’s pensée from 1900:

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

The “big stick” in this case is the USS Enterprise, currently shuffling around between the Red Sea and the coast of Somalia. Only when the “Big E” is heading through the Suez Canal, is the stick being waved.

Oh, and those ten thousand men! Lest we forget them:

Defence Secretary Liam Fox has been forced to defend the decision to make 11,000 redundancies in the armed forces, insisting that personnel who have recently returned from Afghanistan will not be sacked.

 

Monkey and organ-grinder

Today the Ministry of Defence is having to apologise for sacking front-line troops … by email.

Perhaps we should not be unduly surprised: through two World Wars the dictum was that the British soldier could stand up to anything, except the British War Office. That was as entrenched [sic] a belief as the one that an impending military disaster was signalled by the despatch of Irish, Welsh and Scottish troops (a descending order of priority gauged to show the extent of the fiasco and bloodshed to come).

Now here’s an interesting aside on how the MoD has its priorities:

1. Who is responsible for Operations, Personnel … Parliamentary business and correspondence?

Ah! That would be the Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox MP; and, yes, he is entitled to the “Dr”, being a former GP.

2. So who was put up to do the apologetics?

Need you ask. In this Conservative-led government, that’s the job of the flak-catchers, in this case Nick Harvey MP.

His job description tells us quite how constipated Whitehall remains:

Leads on: Operations and operational policy, including operational legal issues.

Force generation, including readiness, recuperation, key enablers, deployed operational logistic delivery, operational training exercises.

When Malcolm wants to open his front door, and use a “key enabler”, he gives it two fingers.

Harvey, it should go without saying, is a Lib Dem; and therefore part of this government’s bomb-shelter.

Priorities

Presumably if it were the officer class getting the shake-down rather than mere warrant-officers, it could be a matter for the Big Beast, Dr Fox, himself.

Hugh Muir’s Diary column in today’s Guardian relates a scrap of tittle-tattle:

Trouble for Dr Liam Fox, with siren voices intent on undermining the hard man of the Tory right and acolytes in his constituency. The tears we shed, we shed for him. Even so, David Cameron seems relaxed about it all, not least because he knows that the Ministry of Defence is in good hands: for whenever there is a problem, we are told, he calls his man in the ministry, Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat, to find out what the unlovable secretary of state is up to. Harvey is usually able to reassure him. A funny arrangement but it works out well.

That’s worth reading with care, or dashing over lightly twice. Whichever way one reads it, it is poison. It also corroborates the impression that the Sir Humphrey Massive (the most terrifying street-gang in Britain) regard the LibDem ministers with something between scorn and contempt, but save their purest bile (and assiduous leaking) for the Tories.

Fox is in the tumbrel for the mismanagement of the defence cuts. Not only did the armed services have all those shiny Big Boys’ toys snatched away, it now transpires it was at inordinate cost: £12 billion and counting (and damn all to show for it). Who dropped that into Sam Coates’s shell-like, Dr Fox?

The cock-up competitors

If Fox is in the frame for the cabinet minister most loathed in Whitehall, let us remember he has stiff competition:

• Pickles runs the FUBAR that involves slicing local authorities off at the knees. However, since that guarantees local electoral disaster come May, after which it becomes the headache for the Other Lot, he could escape with only shrapnel injuries, before reshufflement to his true métier: the Ministry for counting paperclips.

Sooner or later his department will have some messy housekeeping on hand. Presently it’s the libraries under the spotlight. What will it be when the next Victoria Climbié or Baby Peter sadly comes along? As he or she sadly but surely will. What happens, too, if the horror happens in one of those “easyJet” councils, so beloved of the Tories for outsourcing the whole she-bang?

• Gove at Education, whose messianic sense of self-righteousness, when he is self-evidently wrong, if only for the amazing screw-the-middle-class university fees hike, deserves credit for this Grand Imperial Non-self-adjusting Fuck up alone. Then, his insouciance after taking a thrashing in the Courts over the Schools Order is breath-taking. However, he is a high-wire artist with no safety net; so gravity will get him in one end or the other. Someone should be whispering in Gove’s ear, like the slave to the triumphant Roman general: “Remember thou are mortal”.

Maggie Thatcher gets credit for closing more grammar schools than anyone else. There was method in her seeming madness. The Great English Middle-class were recognising that little Nigel Nice-but-Dim wasn’t going to make the 20% who got into the selective grammar school; and, since they were strapped for cash, couldn’t afford the private school (which was none too keen anyway to be the last resort for too many Nice-but-Dims, unless they played outstanding cricket). Then the competition for selective places became even more constrained when it was no longer possible to argue, believe it or not on “equality” grounds”, that little girls matured faster than little Nigels, and so the grammar-intake could be “balanced” on numbers rather than “ability”. Hence the passing enthusiasm among the Great English Middle-class for comprehensives: the “get out of gaol/ do not fail into the secondary modern” free card.

All of which, by various means, Gove wishes to repair. He will be sadly mistaken; especially so if the “Free Schools” amount to a few would-be selective grammars (still with no room for Nigel, but expecting substantial “voluntary contributions”) and a rush of religious foundations with those strange goings-on.

• It doesn’t look as if Osborne at the Treasury is greatly liked, either. Gids is enduring considerable behind-manicured-hands snorting-and-giggling. There was that unseemly shuffle about the £800 million raid on the banks, purely, it appeared, to sidetrack Ed Balls in their first encounter (but equally piddling on the right of his party who don’t like taxes of any sort). Then he was sloping off to an unavoidable EU commitment to avoid the second confrontation. Two falls or submissions …

In addition there are rumblings such as, again today, Larry Elliott in the Guardian:

The official inflation figures due out today are misleading the public, according to international experts who say the data released every month in the UK understates the true increase in the cost of living.

Although the government’s preferred measure of inflation is expected to show an increase on December’s 3.7% to 4%, an article in the respected journal of the International Association for Official Statistics says there is a risk of a loss of public faith in the official data.

The authors of the report, who include a former World Bank economist, concluded: “The official price indices currently available for the UK are misleading the general public and of doubtful relevance for policy purposes.”

That’s not a one-off: the Guardian had an editorial (8th January) about misuse of statistics elsewhere in the Whtehall machine. The limpet-mine below the waterline is that Osborne in particular made play of the previous government’s use of figures. So he had the spiffing wheeze of creating such straw-men as Sir Alan Budd at the Office for Budget Responsibility, which was promptly shot down as a pretence of anything “independent”. If Gids starts marking the statistical cards (as all Chancellors eventually do) he’s in for more trouble. Besides which, he’s made more than a few enemies among senior Lib Dems.

De fence is de thing at the bottom of de garden

Yet of all the threats to government stability, anything happening in the Ministry of Defence is among the worst. For the irony is that, in a free democracy, the military leaders have to be more “political” than anywhere else. With a Junta in charge, the Generals and Admirals need only to buff their braid, strut and issue a pronunciamiento when they feel up to it. In Britain the Top Brass need to be subtle, conniving … and efficient leakers and backstairs briefers.

Gordon Brown knows how they refined those fine arts against the previous dispensation.

So, Fox, beware!

The man from Brabant

As Malcolm was noting in that earlier post, he has a distant ancestor from Brabant. Or perhaps not.

When Malcolm received a genealogy from a distant connection, it included a reference to “Sir James Granado, a knight-equerry at the court of King Henry VIII”.

Any cogent and comprehensive explication of this is a long way off. What Malcolm thinks he knows so far amounts to the following:

The husband

The familysearch.org website throws up a match, taken from a preserved church register: on 8th October 1539 “Jamys Granado” married “Mawdlen Kyldermans” at Saint Dionis Backchurch, London:

Near the south west corner of Lime-street, behind the houses in Fenchurch street, stands St. Dionis Back-church, dedicated to St. Dennis, or Dionysius, an Athenian Areopagite, or judge, and now the patron of France. It receives the epithet of Back-church from its situation behind a row of houses, to distinguish it from St. Gabriel’s church, which formerly stood in the middle of Fenchurchstreet … The old edifice was burnt down in 1666.

If “Kyldermans” is a phonetic for “Keldermans”, our “Mawdlen” could come from a very remarkable Brabant family of architects. What that doesn’t explain is what she and her new husband were doing in London. The move to London and the use of the vernacular “Jamys” — rather than the Latinised “Jacobus” expected of a “high” clerk — might have religious connotations at this historical moment.

The soldier

Lord Grey writes a dispatch from Boulogne, 27th April 1546, recounting a skirmish with the French, which had led to a number being taken prisoner: among the names is Jacques Granado.

Next year, Granado is at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, 10th September 1547, at the tail-end of the “Rough Wooing”, in the heat of the action and, in the spotlight, taking at least one prisoner:

The Scots continued their bravery on the hill ; the which we not being so well able to bear, made out a band of Light Horsemen and a troop of Demi-lances to back them. Our men gat up on the hill, and thereby, of even ground with the enemy, rode straight towards them, with good speed and order ; whom, at the first, the Scots did boldly countenance and abide ; but, after, when they perceived that our men would needs come on, they began to prick [ride away], and would fain have begone ere they had told their errand. But our men hasted so speedily after, that, even straight, they were at their elbows, and did so stoutly then bestir them, that, what in the onset at the first, and after in the chase, which lasted a three mile, well-nigh to as far as the furthest of their camp on the south side, they had killed of the Scots, within a three hours, above the number of thirteen hundred, and taken the Master of Home, Lord Home’s son and heir, two priests and six gentlemen (whereof one, I remember, by Sir Jacques Granado) : and all, upon the highest, and well nighest towards them, of the hill ; within the full sight of their whole camp.

After the Battle, the Duke of Somerset, in his camp at Roxburgh on the 28th of September, knighted Sir James Granado, Brabander.

In Royal service

Thomas Rymer produced a collection of documents from the Royal Patent Rolls which includes a key reference. This is also foot-noted for the on-line version of Machyn, edited by J.G.Nichols:

An annuity of 50l. was granted March 10, 1549-50, to sir Jaques Granado and Magdalen his wife, and to the longer liver: see the patent printed in Rymer, xv. 210.

The National Archives contain two references to Granado, both post-1547: one that he is liable for taxation in London, another that he is liable for taxation as a member of the Royal household.

The diplomat

In the autumn of 1551 (the letter of introduction is dated 26 October), sir Jaques Granado knight, one of the esquyres of the stable, was sent by Edward VI to

to his good brother the French king and the dolphin of Fraunce and the constable of Fraunce with certen geldinges, as tokens and presentes from his Majesty to every of them.

Sir William Pickering, writing a dispatch from Paris on 18th November, reported the safe delivery of the horses:

mr. Granado withoute faile hathe done his part righte welle to them bothe upon the waye and in their delyverye lykeivise.

The King then sent an autographed reply to Edward VI through:

le s’ de Grenadde, escuyer de vostre escuyrie, present porteur…

Escript a Fontainebleau le iiij jour de Decembre 1551.

Granado then took a return (and seemingly more generous) present back to England. As was customary, Granado received a personal royal gift, as Pickering details, writing a further dispatch from Melun on 8th December:

Mr. Granado hath taken his leave, and hathe in reward three cheyns, one of the king, the queue, and dolphin, in valewe by estimacion viij. [gold] crownes. The Kinges majesty shalle have sent him from hence vj. cortalles, iij. Spanishe horses, one torke [Turk], a barbery, one cowerser, and ij. lyttel mewles.

The courtier

On 3 January 1552 Granado features in a tourney organised as part of the Christmas celebrations. A mock contest was enacted:

… there came in two apparelled like Almains (the Earl of Ormonde and Jacques Granado) and two came in like friars (Mr Drury and Thomas Cobham); but the Almains would not suffer the friars to pass until they had fought. After this followed two masques, one of men, the other of women. Then there was a banquet of 120 dishes.

That, incidentally, would be “Black Tom” Butler, the tenth Earl of Ormonde, and — more to the point — one of Edward VI’s closest buddies.

The secret agent?

There is a side-light on all this in a document from the Imperial Archives in Vienna, edited in a collection of State Papers for the Institute of Historical Research by Royall Tylor (1916), and here hosted by the magnificent British History on-line.  And here we enter a murky world of Big Politics.

The Emperor Charles V’s man in London, Simon Renard de Bermont (portrait, right), was negotiating the proposed marriage of Queen Mary of England to Charles’s son, Philip II of Spain. The notion was that, were a son-and-heir to be born of such a marriage, he would inherit:

in England and the Low Countries, and if no heir is born, the Infante Don Carlos, son of the Prince, is to marry the Queen’s sister [i.e. the Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth I] under the same conditions.

On 13th November 1553, Renard sends a complex report back to Vienna, relating an interview with Mary. The point at issue was messages from Cardinal Pole, then fidgetting in Dillingen. With Parliament about to rise, Mary was urgently seeking advice on the English matter … the cause of the Church’s authority (i.e. the restoration of the Catholic Church in England).

However, the Emperor Charles’s brother, and soon to be successor, was Ferdinand, the King of the Romans. Ferdinand had put his second son, the Archduke Ferdinand (aged 24) into play as a potential match for Queen Mary (aged 37). So Alonso de Games, Ferdinand’s man, was also in London on a parallel mission.

In that letter of 13th November 1553, Renard reports:

I gather that the King of the Romans has some suspicion of your Majesty, because he says that Licenciate Games, the King’s ambassador with you, failed to obtain audience or a reply to the letters the King sent you, for which reason he sent Alonso over here to carry out the King’s orders. I take it from what I have heard him say and from his communications with the Grenades that the King has decided to press his (son’s) suit, and believes that he stands a better chance of being accepted than does your Majesty.

Royall Tylor foot-notes that reference to Grenades as:

This may be Sir Jacques Granado, who was Esquire of the Stable to Edward VI and took a present of geldings to Henry II of France, from whom he received presents … This circumstance would have been enough to make him suspect in Renard’s eyes.

The death

Henry Machyn’s diary, in an entry for 4th May 1557, gives a gory description of Granado’s death:

The fourth day of May did ride before the King and Queen in Her Grace’s privy garden Sir James Granado. And so the bridle bit did break and so the horse ran against the wall and so he broke his neck, for his horse threw him against the wall, and his brains ran out.

Machyn also notes Granado’s funeral:

The sixth day of May was buried in St. Dunstan in the East Sir James Granado, knight, with two white branches and twelve staff torches and four great tapers and a two dozen of escutcheons.

John Strype’s Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (from the early 1700s) lists the monuments of the City worthies in the church of St. Dunstan’s in the East, including that of Sir James Granado, Knt.

Widow and daughter

This does not complete the immediately-available story of Jacques Granado. We hear more of his widow in the introduction by Alexander Grosart to Robert Chester’s Love’s martyr, or, Rosalins complaint:

Sir Robert Chester married as his second wife, Magdalen, widow of Sir James Granado, Knt., on the same day and at the same place, that his son Edward Chester, married Sir James Granado’s only daughter and heiress. i.e.,  father and son married respectively mother and daughter. This took place at Royston on 27th November 1564. The wife of Edward Chester survived her husband and was again married, viz., to Alexander Dyer, Esq.

Apart from a bit of additional family history, Grosart provides a roundabout link between the Chester family and Shakespeare. Love’s martyr has been interpreted (in the main by Grosart) as an allegory on the love between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex. As for the Chester connection, this shows that Granado and his widow moved in quite elevated circles. Robert Chester had bought the monastic benefits of Royston Priory from Henry VIII for the sum of £1751 and five shillings, was knighted in 1552, and went to be Sheriff of Hertford and Essex under Elizabeth:

Edward Chester his Son and Heir; who about 16 Octob. 6 Eliz. married Katharine the Daughter and Heir of Sir James Granado, Kt. by whom he had Issue Robert Chester, which Robert Anno 41 Eliz. was constituted Sheriff for this County, and married Ann the Daughter of Henry Capell, Esq. by the Lady Katharine Manners his Wife, Daughter of Thomas [Manners, who had Plantagenet ancestry through his mother, Anne St Leger] first Earl of Rutland: He was in Commission of the Peace for this County, and entertain’d King James I. at his House in his Royal Progress from Scotland to London: Who on the 23d of July 1603 knighted him at Whitehall.

The persistence of the name

Granado’s daughter, Katharine, carried the Granado name into the Chester line. Two sons went into the church: Dr Robert Chester, Rector of Stevenage, and Dr Granado Chester, Rector of Broadwater, Sussex, between 1624-1645. In early 18th-century London there is a Granado Chester (or perhaps a father and son: two separate wills in the name of “Granado Chester of Hertfordshire” are proved in 1726 and again in 1757),  a grocer, occupying a warehouse at Crosby Place, Bishopgate Street. There’s quite a bit of hatching, matching and dispatching on the familysearch genealogy site involving various “Granado Chesters”; however, St Helen Bishopgate has a curious baptismal record:

5 August 1708 Anne the natural daughter of Granado Chester by Anne wife of …. she cohabiting with the said Chester incontinent as being sold by her said husband to Chester to common fame.

The reference to Crosby Place leads to another speculation: Granado Chester’s warehouse occupied the ground floor, while another tenant was the East India Company. We then find a later Granado Chester is an officer with the EastIndia Company, and a veterinary surgeon with the 1st Light Cavalry at Fort St George on the India list in 1827. There is a John Granado Chester, practising as a solicitor in London, SE11, until the mid-20th century. “Granado Chester” persists to the present-day in a business family of businessmen in East Anglia.

Similarly, Frances Chester, the grand-daughter of Edward Chester and Katharine Granado, married John Pigott at Barkway, Hertfordshire, on 3rd February 1630. One of their surviving sons, Sir Granado Pigott was a south Cambridgeshire squire (the village of Abington Pigotts takes the family name). staunch Tory MP in Queen Anne’s time, and passed the name down the Pigott line.

Reflection

Jacques Granado was not a “notable” personality, but he does leave marks on the records of history.

What this does not show is his origins. He is “of Brabant”, with a surname that could be Spanish. His wife, “Mawdlen”, seems to have a Dutch surname. They are wed in the “aliens” church in London.

After the marriage of Maria of Burgundy and Maximilian of Austria in 1477 Brabant was ruled by Hapsburgs, and remained so until the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War (the Dutch War of Independence) after the Beeldenstorm in 1566. Quite how Granado gets from there to soldiering for the English at the Second Siege of Boulogne in 1546 is unclear: however, these are the times of the wars of religion; and already the persecuted Anabaptists are making their way to London. Equally, the continental wars are affecting English trade: Antwerp was losing importance to London, and exports developed from raw wool to finished cloth — the power of the London Merchant Adventurers Company was burgeoning. It may be significant that Katharine Granado and her mother marry into the Hertfordshire merchant-gentry. Granado himself is buried in some state, with a monument in his parish church, and accompanied to his grave by armorial-bearers.

We can see from the records that Granado is in London in 1539 and a decade later he is on the royal pay-roll. We also can see that he got around quite a bit: Boulogne, the Scottish war, the French court. His marriage is in Fenchurch Street, but he later moves his home parish to St Dunstans in the East, only a few hundred yards distant, but convenient to the Tower of London. We might observe that later, when Francis Walsingham was running Elizabeth’s secret service, he too lived convenient for the “office”, at Seething Lane. Simon Renard not only feels that any comment passed by Granado is of valuable, and Renard’s suspicions about Granado should, then, be very well placed.

What we can be assured is that Granado was one of those 16th-century novi homines (“new men”) who rose through the social ranks on his merits. In Granado’s case the merit is partly military, and partly because of some expertise, which may be or may include his horsemanship and expert equine-management. Did he also arrive in England as a mercenary, an adept in one of the new military applications? Whatever his origins, he evidences courtly mannerisms, and is to be trusted in diplomatic exchanges.

And not a bad root to find, fully fifteen generations down to the base of the family tree.