"Now that the Service is ready, after a generation, to let the truth be known, I can tell you..." (p. 137)
"Now it can be told..." This is metafiction. The narrator explains to those who have already read The Peregrine why it is that only now are they to be told about this earlier exploit of Trevelyan Micah. Only now is the Coordination Service ready to let the truth be known. If a generation has passed, then Trevelyan has by now left the Service and joined a Nomad ship. The narration of "The Pirate" happens after the events of The Peregrine just as, in Poul Anderson's Technic History, the narration of The Earth Book of Stormgate happens after the events of The People of the Wind.
Anderson takes this opportunity to expand on the character of Trevelyan who:
17 comments:
Also that eventually it stops working.
Note that one of the major proximate causes of the American Revolution was the Crown's attempt to stop western expansion into Indian lands with the Proclamation Line of 1763 and the Quebec Act.
The frontiersmen simply weren't going to tolerate that.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
But Trevelyan Micah did tell Murdoch and Faustina that Good Luck would be opened up, in stages, to colonization once scientists working for the Cordies had finished studying the extinct natives and their civilization. That might or might not have been practical, but it ws the declared aim of the Service.
Yes, the British Proclamation Line of 1763 was doomed to failure. An aggressively expansionist and land hungry civilization (including powerful colonials speculating in land) was not going to be stopped by such hugely unpopular means.
I don't think you are quite right about the Quebec Act. What enraged many bigoted Protestants in the 13 Colonies was how the Act exempted the French Catholic Quebecois from the oppressive anti-Catholic Penal Laws (and allowed Quebec to keep French law). That Act was a big factor in reconciling French Canadians to British rule AND preventing Canada from joining the American Rebellion.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: but the Quebec Act also increased the -area- of Quebec, very substantially; that was the sticking point for a lot of colonists.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That I had not known--AND was not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Which was not surprising, because for that document to frankly admit the rebels opposed the Quebec Act because it interfered with Colonial land speculators would tarnish that shiny gloss of idealism.
The Quebec Act also made nonsense of the Penal Laws. Why should French Canadian Catholics be exempted from them but not the Catholics of Britain and Ireland? The contradiction did its bit to spurring on Catholic Emancipation, such as the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. Altho full Emancipation was not achieved until 1829.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the British always prided themselves on their pragmatism and adaptation to local circumstances.
The one time the Empire tried to impose some uniformity -- the decade before 1776 -- it didn't end well, which emphasized the tendency.
The toleration of Catholicism in the Quebec Act was purely pragmatic -- done not because of any particular feeling for the Catholic Church or for religious toleration, but because it made Quebec easier to govern.
About the same time, the Bourbon kings in France were easing up on traditional restrictions on Protestants and Jews.
When asked about it, the minister responsible said: "So long as men worship the State, let them have whatever lesser Gods they will."
In other words, if Protestants and Jews were loyal to France, paid its taxes and served in its armies, why get your knickers in a twist about theology?
This was a fairly widespread attitude in Europe in the Enlightenment period: Frederick the Great adopted the same attitude in Prussia, welcoming useful immigrants from all over to repopulate the lands devastated in the Seven Years War.
This was a tolerance of indifference, of not giving a damn and not considering it -important- compared to really significant things like money and troops.
It horrified traditionalists at the time.
Note that traditional anti-Catholicism in England had two aspects.
One was religious -sensu strictu-; from Puritans and other extreme Protestants of Calvinist inclination.
Note how James II, after Charles, tried to get sectarians (Quakers, Congregationalists, etc.) who'd been persecuted by the Anglican establishment on his side, by extending them toleration at the same time he tried to lift restrictions on his Catholic co-religionists.
It didn't work because they knew it was a purely tactical concession, which if James succeeded in re-establishing Catholicism would be immediately withdrawn. Virtually nobody in Europe at the time (apart from a few eccentrics) actually believed in religious toleration as a -principle-.
The other strand of traditional English anti-Catholicism was more political: it suspected Catholics of disloyalty to the English state in its fights with (Catholic) European powers like Spain and then France. Often quite rightly, though not altogether.
Elizabeth I, for example, had no particular -theological- beef with Catholics, and cordially detested Puritans, but did strongly object to the Catholic tendency to listen to Jesuit propaganda on behalf of the Spanish Hapsburgs. Rome at the time was pretty much in the Hapsburg's pockets.
That forced her to rely more on Calvinist elements in the Church of England.
There was also a strong John-Bullish tendency to regard the Pope as "foreign", and the English were the first large country in Europe to be strongly nationalist in the modern sense.
That had been an element in English anti-clericalism for a long time, with the Lollards and so forth; the English were simply xenophobic and disliked foreigners of all stripes.
As Chesterton's yokel narrator put it:
"For I knew no ill of Bonaparte
And plenty of the Squire;
And for to fight the Frenchmen
I did not much desire.
But I went and bashed their bayonets
Because they came arrayed
To straighten out the rolling road
An ENGLISH drunkard made!"
Conan Doyle has a similar scene in one of his historical novels, where Little John Hordle, back from the wars in France, rhapsodizes about the English countryside:
"Ah, saw ye ever skies so blue, clouds so white, fields so green, sheep so fat, or a man so drunk as yonder rogue lying asleep in the break o' the hedge?"
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
For the most part, I agree with your comments. BUT, there was entrenched anti-Catholic bigotry in Great Britain, ranging from relatively mild to raving fanaticism. One example of the latter being the Gordon Riots of 1780, reacting against the Relief Act of 1778. The Riots were so bad that the army had to be used to suppress them. It took the threat of civil war within the UK, from an Ireland poised to rebel, before the Duke of Wellington was able to force a bigoted Parliament to pass Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
I disagree about Elizabeth I. I recall how Philip Hughes, in THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND, discussed how, when Mary I was dying, she demanded of her half sister that she would remain a Catholic and not persecute the Church, and Elizabeth swore she would do as Queen Mary demanded. Which means the Second Act of Supremacy she rammed thru a reluctant Parliament in 1559 violated the oath she gave Mary.
It's all very well, and I agree that was the case, to talk of how nationalist the English were. But, at the very least, I don't believe Protestants were a majority in 1558. It was more delicately balanced then, even a slight shove one way or the other would make either Catholics or Protestants dominant in England, and Elizabeth still chose the Protestant side when she did not HAVE to.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: she did have to if she was going to fight the Hapsburgs. They were identified with Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Mary had been aligned with them.
It was also necessary to gain the solid support of the landed gentry, the class the Tudors dynasty mostly appealed to.
The redistribution of Church lands gave them a massive vested interest. Mary hadn't dared to do much about that, but everyone knew that once solidly in control, a really seriously Catholic monarch -would- try to upset Henry's land settlement, despite any promises made to the contrary.
Lower down the social scale, most ordinary English people in 1558 were Christian, more or less (there was an astonishing level of ignorance about actual doctrine in most places) but weren't deeply attached to either the Catholic or Protestant causes as such, in a formal or theological sense.
They believed in God and Jesus roughly the way we believe in gravity or the inverse-square law -- that is, 'everyone knew' that was the way the world was made.
As for the detailed stuff, they mostly just shrugged and conformed to whatever the local authorities said they should, though most were fairly satisfied with things as they were.
Most of them couldn't have told you what Henry VIII's break with Rome was about, apart from wanting to switch wives. A large proportion tended to be vaguely anticlerical, and nearly everyone was deeply suspicious of foreigners -- including ones in Church vestments.
There were some zealous upholders of Papal supremacy and rather more smoke-out-of-the-nostrils Calvinists, but both were "active minorities".
As for Elizabeth's promises to Mary, Mary would have had her head if she hadn't said the things she did, so she calmly and deliberately lied truth out of creation about it.
It's a very old principle of English common law that "a forced oath is no oath". A promise or contract made under threat is void.
Here is an interesting lecture
"How the English learned to hate Catholics"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vLdToJ1YdM&list=PLU3TaPgchJtRjl-WiM1_CGzTSRznxOvZx&index=3&t=34s
Part of this series of lectures
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3TaPgchJtRjl-WiM1_CGzTSRznxOvZx
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The real world is again hindering participation in this blog, but I will try to respond.
Did Elizabeth I truly HAVE to fight Habsburg Spain? The great power struggles of that time were the wars between France and Spain, both of them Catholic nations. If Elizabeth truly felt the need to oppose Spain, allying with France would be one option. In that case, it would make more sense to decide England would be Catholic, to conciliate France.
Your comment about the landed gentry and the plundering of the Church interests me. Henry VIII used both fear and greed to gain their support for the First Act of Supremacy. I mean terrorizing the gentry and then letting them share in the looting of the Church. But I don't any monarch could have tried the theft of the monasteries. I'll quote what Fr. Hughes said about from Volume 2 of THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND, page 222:
The Spanish marriage settled, two things had served to keep Pole yet a
little longer from his native country and the spiritual mission so long
ago entrusted to him by the pope: there was the question of the abbey
lands; and there was the seemingly unappeasable of the emperor to Pole
himself. The question of the abbey lands is simple enough to state. All
who had taken any part of all that wealth were thieves, and sacrilegious
thieves. Nor could their sin be forgiven, any more than the sin of any
other thieve can ever be forgiven, until restitution of the stolen
property was made or really pledged--such will to restore being, in the
nature of things, an integral part of any genuine sorrow for taking
away. But, in the five years since the chantries were despiled, and in
the fifteen or more years since the monasteries were taken, that
property had changed hands and changed again, and had been broken up
and rearranged and broken up again. To have reconstructed, in 1554,
the monastic estates as they were 1535, even had this been physically
possible, would have entailed a social revolution greater than that
brought about by the dissolution. And if the restitution had been
made in cash this would have been equally true. Restitution, never-
theless, there must be--unless those to whom it was due forgave
the debt. Meanwhile, the thieves also lay under an appropriate
excommunication.
I have to stop for now, it being very late (or early!). But I wish to quote the next paragraph from Fr. Hughes' book.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I cannot get very interested in taking sides so long after the events but, if I had been alive at the appropriate time, I certainly would have wanted to keep the Spanish Armada out of England.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course! And many English Catholics would have agreed, despite the persecution and oppression they had to endure from the Protestants.
Now I'm wondering what might have happened if Spain had invaded and conquered England?
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Back, still trying to respond adequately to your comments. I'll start with that second paragraph I wanted to quote from Volume 2 of Fr. Hughes THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND, pages 222-23:
To whom, in 1554, was that restitution due, in church law? To the
apostate religious, who had ceased to have rights under church law
once they swore themselves out of the church by taking the oath
that repudiated the primacy of the pope? Never was there a clearer
case for the pope's action as 'dominus ecclesiae.' He alone had a
right to decide the fate of the vast properties; and his use of
that right none could contest. And from the very beginning, before
Rome knew anything more about English affairs than that there was
at last upon the throne a sovereign wholly Catholic at hear, the
pope decided to be absolutely generous and to ask nothing. How
then was the matter of the abbey lands the cause of the great de-
lay? It was not that Pole failed to read into his powers as legate
all that they contained; but he was certainly unwilling to let it
be known straightway what he had the power to do, partly lest the
concession be thought, and become, scandalous--an encouragement
to other like thieves, for example--but, still more, lest it be a
hindrance to any reality of repentance, and a temptation to those
who might still restore something if the condonation were not so
proclaimed as to seem to waive the very idea that between for-
giveness of theft and a willingness to restore there is any con-
nection that is at all real.
And in a footnote on page 222 Fr. Hughes discussed how Queen Mary and Philip II wrote to Cardinal Pole asking that no special court be set up to judge the legality of the title to former monastic lands by the current owners. So I have my doubts any Catholic monarch of that time would have tried to reverse what Henry VIII had done, because it would not be possible to do so without violent and dangerous upheavals.
Your paragraph "Lower down the social scale...", I mostly agree, altho stipulating there were fair numbers of ordinary people who were convinced Catholics and Protestants.
Queen Mary probably did doubt the sincerity of Elizabeth's promises that she would remain a Catholic. The problem was that there was no other heir with at least as good a claim to the throne as Elizabeth. The dying queen did not have much other choice except to take Elizabeth at her word. So I still consider her a perjurer.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that's what I said; the traditional English legal view is that if you're under threat, no oath you make has any force, so you're -entitled- to lie like a rug. Ditto if the promise was secured by deception.
This was one of the proximate causes of the Norman invasion in 1066, btw.
William, by accident, held Harold prisoner, and he hid holy relics under the altar Harold swore on and then revealed them. William had secured an oath from Harold to support his claim to the throne by deception and coercion; Harold regarded anything he'd promised to William as nugatory, and he had the support of English law and opinion in that.
Back to Tudor times: Mary didn't raise the land question because she didn't dare, not because she didn't want to.
OTOH, everyone -knew- that she didn't because she didn't dare, and that any successor who felt secure -could- raise it at some point in the future.
This gave the landed classes as a whole a massive, massive incentive to move heaven and earth to prevent a secure Catholic restoration. They may have gone to church and worshiped God on Sundays, but they worshiped their -land- 24/7, and anyone with an ounce of political sense knew it and knew they couldn't change that.
And that remained so for a long time.
James II could have kept his throne if he'd been willing to outwardly conform to Anglicanism, as Charles II did -- and the land issue was central to that; questions of actual belief were derivative.
Charles 'converted' to Catholicism on his deathbed, and as far as actual belief went, he'd been "Catholic" all his adult life.
He just realized that saying so would set the throne rocking under his feet, and James succumbed to wishful thinking. He wasn't technically stupid, he just let himself believe that he could get away with doing things because he badly, badly wanted to do them.
"James, James, I have no wish to go upon my travels again," as Charles was wont to say when James came up with some hairbrained scheme that would cause political disasters.
The irony is that this all happened more or less by accident: Henry VIII meant to keep most of the lands he'd confiscated to give him a secure revenue stream without Parliamentary approval for new taxation.
But political necessity and his own spendthrift habits (Elizabeth was notoriously thrifty, by contrast) soon distributed the land widely among the landed families; and they were the political 'core' of England and their wishes and fears simply could not be disregarded by any monarch who didn't want to end up in exile or dead.
Short form: James II didn't have the sense God gave a goose, where religion was concerned.
Sincere conviction is not a productive state of mind for a politician; not when it gets the better of common sense, at least.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Where I still disagree with you is over the issue of the status of former monastic lands after 1553. First, the popes themselves disavowed any intention of insisting on either restoration of the stolen lands (or compensation for them). Second, while I know Mary I hoped some of the plunderers would voluntarily return stolen lands, she did not insist on that. Third, I don't think, at such a LATE time as the 1680's, that James II, however disastrously inept he was in other ways, even thought of bringing up the issue of former monastic lands during his reign. Nothing I've read about him and British politics of the 1680's even mentions that issue.
I recall that incident, how Duke William used deception and fraud to get Earl Harold to swear to support William's claim to the English crown. I agree Harold Godwinson was right in repudiating it as a forced oath. I don't believe that was truly analogous to the oath Elizabeth Tudor swore to Queen Mary. English Catholics were not going to try preventing Elizabeth from succeeding Mary. We don't know what might have happened if Elizabeth I had decided to honor her promises to Mary.
If, in 1558, many landowners felt insecure and guilty, due to holding stolen land, so much so they thought only becoming Protestants would bring them security, I agree that would put pressure on Elizabeth to pick the Protestant side. But I don't think that was necessarily TRUE, not if the Catholic Church itself had renounced any intention of insisting on either restoration or compensation for the lands.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment