out of date thoughts on the Whigs

It took the final election result of 2010 before I truly understood the early eighteenth century.

On the morning which marked the consummation of the New Politics, a noted, hirsute Liberal Democrat activist approached me over breakfast and shook me by the hand. This being Balliol JCR, I was the best he could do by way of symbolic Toryism; an underwhelming, motheaten tiger in a zoo more noted for its herbivore collection.

‘Welcome to government,’ I said, feeling uncomfortably far from satire.

‘The Coalition’ suffers from problems of definition more, I think, than from those of will. That bald ‘Coalition’ won’t do alone; it sounds dystopian, the government in a book by Cormac McCarthy or Magnus Mills, encompassing shades of the unsuccessful Mitchell and Webb sketch about the post-apocalyptic ‘Emergency’.

The first internet suggestion was the vapid ‘Change Coalition’, but the New Politics are after all supposed to be ‘historic’; other nerds put forward ‘The Churchill Coalition’ (because he was in both parties. Strewth). My instinct – after considering the social ramifications of ‘The Operagoing Coalition’ – was to go back rather further.

In 1710 the governing Whig Junto suffered a serious backlash for many reasons. Queen Anne had been convinced by her latest lesbian favourite, Lady Masham, that they were imperilling the Church, and the government had also unwisely tried to have the popular High Church preacher Sacheverell executed for sedition. That October a massive Tory majority was returned to the House of Commons for the first time since the 1688 revolution. It was under the control of two men.

Robert Harley, the new Lord High Treasurer, was an ex-Whig of Puritan descent. Henry St John, the Secretary of State, was a high-born, womanising Tory. They were by all accounts best friends, and they had a pretty handy set of spin doctors back at CCHQ too – Pope, Swift and so on.

They inherited a nation exhausted by the long, bloody and expensive War of the Spanish Succession, and to the fury of the patriotic Whigs but with the approval of Queen and country they put a stop it.

Their problem was that they ended up fatally divided over Europe – to wit, St John wanted the Catholic Stuarts to return and Harley didn’t. St John was about to win this argument by impeaching the Treasurer when, in 1714, the Queen died, King George came over and the whole government found itself in exile, the Tower, or at best obscurity, “men half ambitious, all unknown”.

I would accept that the resemblances between the Harley Ministry and our own present administration are superficial, though I would certainly welcome any sympathy for the Jacobite cause from Mr. Cameron, and would very much like to be employed to write poems, a la Pope & Swift, in his favour. But this pudding does nonetheless contain, after all, the proof.

When the pact was announced Signor Marco Meola’s facebook status read:

¾ Conservatives + ¼ Lib Dems = New Labour!?

I think he was nearly on the money but a few hundred years out, and I accordingly propose that we refer to our new government as the Whig Party.

Two clauses in the coalition agreement have upset a very large number of people. The core Tory membership is in ferment over Cameron’s promise to offer a referendum on AV; pragmatically, because it lowers the Conservative Party’s chance of governing alone; idealistically, because “to any true Tory the idea of the constitution being negotiable and mutable is itself a kind of sacrilege”.

We aren’t at the moment hearing so much about a more radical change that has been decided without a referendum – fixed-term, five year parliaments. This irritates people in two political directions – natural 17th century Tories who believe in a “strong crown”, a powerful executive; and Radicals who see it as diminishing the decision making power of the electorate. The 55% opposition requirement to topple a government is a similar kind of safeguard. In Melanie Phillips’s words, it “locks the parties in a fatal embrace”. It is a clause designed, in fact, to protect a junto or elite.

A weakened executive and a stronger oligarchy has been born, classic hall-marks of Whiggery. There have been complaints of “two white millionaires walking into Downing Street and announcing the New Politics”, that remind me of nothing so much as Pope’s and Swift’s complaints against their super-rich Whig rulers – “see, what huge heaps of littleness abound”.

So the Whig Junto, shadowed by a chaotic ‘radical’ opposition, is after more than two hundred years the beast that has lurched into being once more. I would not be surprised if it remained so for some time. The Whigs made Blair and Brown’s determination to retain power look amateurish. I’m fully expecting a wholly coagulated Whig juggernaut to sweep its grandiloquent consensus over even the next election.

What then of the Tories? Well, evidently those Conservatives who accuse Cameron of “abandoning Toryism” are quite right; he is a Whig Prime Minister, which does leave them in an awkward position.

After King George’s accession the Whigs were even more deeply embedded in power than they had been in Anne’s reign; Toryism was in fact a prescribed creed, practically tantamount to treason and for fifty years and more identified with the seditious Jacobite cause. The following choices faced the beleaguered Tories:

a) They could apostacise to the Whigs, as most did. This way lay mainstream power and patronage, vide Mr. Cameron. I am myself most attracted by this position. It will be so pleasant being, as I told that Lib Dem, in government; and many of my best friends, whether they know it or not, are in fact Whigs.

b) They could whisper against the government in secret and plot (in the event fairly ineffective) vengeance. Henry St John after an unhappy spell in exile returned to England and, forbidden his seat in the House of Lords, led the Tories from his secluded country villa into a sly media campaign to discredit the new Prime Minister Walpole. I’m not sure about the precise political parallels, but shall we intimate Mandelson and the Blairites here?

c) They could take the most gallant and romantic path and offer their swords to the Jacobite Pretender, James VIII and III, who resided at St-Germain in France. Here there seems to me a more precise modern equivalent. In Oxford itself, most Jacobite of cities, Ronnie Collinson, of the Union and, sometime, of Balliol is supposed to be circulating secret and treasonous propaganda against the Whig Coalition. He also at one point suggested that he was on the point of emigrating to New Zealand. He need not fly so far.

For there is still one “court-in-exile”, one legitimist claimant to the Tory cause; a man clearly uncomfortable with, defiant of, Lib Dem Whiggery; a man, whisper it, with an esoteric claim to the Throne of Britain itself. Bonnie Prince Boris resides in London. You say 1715, I say 2015…

Another Arcadia chunk

Venice, the Doge’s Palace.

(Through the state windows we see the figure of the Cardinal from earlier, gazing beadily out over the canal. Behind him are several Venetian counsellors in black robes, and a couple of men gorgeously dressed in fashionable costumes of the English court.)

FIRST COUNSELLOR: Eduardo, lord Windsor. Sir Ricardo Shelley. You are aware why you have been summoned, no?

SHELLEY: Of course there is the matter of the outstanding sum, Signor Contarini; and we promise…

CARDINAL: You promise! You promise! You English do nothing but promise. (He laughs, then returns to surveying the window.)

SECOND COUNSELLOR: My…lord…Windsor…sir…all we ask is a reasonable attitude. You know what to do when your…shall I say, your friend, arrives?

WINDSOR: All is in readiness, Signor Foscaro.

FIRST COUNSELLOR: Are you sure Master Sidney trusts you?

WINDSOR: Absolutely. We were at Oxford together.

SECOND COUNSELLOR: Well then, my lord Cardinale, we need not worry. (Turning to a third counsellor) Angelo! Tell the people at your palace to make a bed…prepared, for the young English gentleman…

(Cut to Sidney and Norton, in a gondola, progressing down the Grand Canal.)

NORTON: The greatest city in the world!

SIDNEY: I think not. The most beautiful, maybe.

NORTON: Where are we going, Master Philip? What are we doing.

SIDNEY: Waiting.

(A gun sounds.)

SIDNEY: (to the gondolier) Now take us to the Arsenale.

(Cut to Oxford and Shelley, surrounded by suspicious looking Venetian guards, waiting near the arsenal.)

SHELLEY: Is that him?

OXFORD: I think so. He’s looking pretty shabby.

SHELLEY: Let’s go.

(We see the four men, Norton hanging back, converging, now on foot, towards the centre of a bridge.)

SIDNEY: Edward! It’s been some time.

WINDSOR: Welcome to Venice, Philip.

SHELLEY: Master Sidney. I am glad to meet you. I trust here you will find the calm you seek.

(A traghetto, a flat-bottomed boat that ferries passengers horizontally across canals, is followed, letting off three masked figures, two men dressed as harlequins, and a blonde, heavily powdered woman…familiar looking…)

GREVILLE: How long must we keep this stupid game in play?

MARLOWE: Ah, Fulke, dontcha appreciate my hand with the costumes?

STELLA: Quiet, Marlowe. Remember the deal – if you cross us, you get the canal.

GREVILLE: Look! It’s them!

(We pan out. The three pursuers are less than a hundred yards behind their oblivious quarry.)

With…

STELLA: Is something troubling you, Master Greville?

GREVILLE: You could say that. Lord Windsor and Sir Richard Shelley! Philip is consorting with the most notorious Catholic exiles in the English nobility! What can he be up to?

MARLOWE: Just you stay quiet, lording, and we might yet find out.

Captain Arcadia Ep 1 Part 3

(We cut to a ship leaving the docks of Rotterdam, and the camera follows a candle-light at one window in the bridge. Within this cabin, small but comfortably appointed, Norton, dressed only in a long dirty white shirt, slumps on a stool. Sidney stands looking out to sea, his back to his servant.)

NORTON: I still can’t believe she let me be took advantage of like that.

(Sidney smiles mirthlessly but offers no comment.)

NORTON: I mean, master Philip, I’ve seen my fair share, I can handle myself, you know I can, I mean to say, how old must this little leddy have been?

(Sidney turns, holding a silver bracelet towards the lone candle.)

SIDNEY: It is a strange kind of lady robber who steals only rags but leaves valuable trinkets in her wake, Norton.

NORTON: Oh, she dropped it whilst she was changing, accident that was, sure as winking. I know these women, master Philip, in debt, need to get away, so they do anything to get into men’s clothes. She’s be livid she dropped the bauble while she were at it. A harlot’s trick.

(Sidney draws a dagger and places it at Norton’s throat, while with his other hand he dangles the bracelet before the servant’s face.)

SIDNEY: That girl was not a harlot, fool. Don’t you know this ensign?

NORTON: Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but it’s been long enough since I were in England, and even when my stay were regular like, I didn’t spent it in overmuch study o’ books o’ heraldry.

(Sidney switches the dagger around and raps Norton with the hilt.)

SIDNEY: Essex, idiot, Essex! This woman was wearing a silver bracelet enscribed with the arms of Devereux.

NORTON: So she were the Earl of Essex’s fancy-girl, then?

SIDNEY: Once again, Norton, I am reminded that you serve me because of chance rather than merit. This is obviously a piece of baptismal jewellery, a christening-ring. (He sighs.) Describe her again.

NORTON: Didn’t see much of her, she came at me from behind and when she left she was kind of covered up in the best o’ my wardrobe. (Pause) But yeah, she seemed kinda pretty good-looking, far as a man could see, lots of yellow hair, nice duckies…

(Sidney places the blade at Norton’s throat again.)

SIDNEY: Eyes?

NORTON: (squawking out in panic) Black!

(pause)

Or as close to it as a man could…

(Sidney ignores Norton’s trailing sentence, looks out over the sea and bawls a name.)

SIDNEY: STEEEELLLLLLLLLLLAAAAA!

(Back in Frau Geritzoon’s lodging house. Stella is now in a white dress of simple but costly material, drinking warm sack from a wooden tumbler at a table, and weaving a needle through a piece of yarn; Greville and Marlowe sit at its other ends, eying her suspiciously.)

GREVILLE: What cause should we have, I ask again, to believe a word of your story, mistress? Certainly your English is decent, but the same can hardly be said of your habit…or...by your own account…your conduct.

MARLOWE: An Earl’s daughter of England dressing up tranny-like after robbing a manservant? Have things got that more exciting at home since I left Cambridge?

STELLA: I care nothing for your account, sirrah. I address myself solely to Master Greville. Now, Fulke dear, is this not growing ridiculous?

GREVILLE: (spluttering) What…

STELLA: We have seen each other as bare children, in the gardens of Hampton-Court. Am I then so changed?

GREVILLE: If what you say is true…immeasurably, yes. This is scandalous behaviour, madam. Quite outrage…

MARLOWE: Lemme see the letter again. (He snatches for a bit of parchment over which all three have apparently been pouring.)

‘My well-beloved W., Tell Burghley I died outside Mainz.’

Well, forgive me for spelling out the obvious, but your friend Sidney does not want to be found. Faking and broadcasting one’s own death is, well, an extreme measure…

GREVILLE: (rising) Marlowe, if you do not fall silent and remember your station there will be nothing faked about your death. (He draws his dagger.)

MARLOWE: Time for me to start flashing things about too, right? (He leaps up and produces not a weapon but a tightly furled slip of paper, which he hands coldly.)

GREVILLE: A letter of service and warrantage from Sir Francis Walsingham…

MARLOWE: Yeah, yeah, I’m a spy, an informer, an eye of the bloody government, okay. Don’t judge me Master Greville; they offer very reasonable travel expenses and the Cambridge degree is complementary…anyway. Something tells me your bloke wants the likes of me to think he’s dead. Until Penny here turned up, that little ploy had succeeded…

(Stella leaps up and pricks Marlowe in the neck with her needle. He collapses.)

STELLA: If Philip wants to travel unobserved by the Queen’s council, I intend to help him do so.

GREVILLE: Did you kill him?

STELLA: I hadn’t the heart; just a sleeping-philtre. Tie him up tight and we’ll take him with us.

GREVILLE: Where are we going, my lady?

STELLA: After Philip, of course.