A Day Like Any Other Day, Again

I have things to do, places to go, and people to see over the next few weeks (Look out and look lively: just in case you hadn't heard, Christmas is coming!). I imagine you, too, have better and more urgent things to be doing at this time of year. So I'm going to pack up the blog slightly earlier than usual this year to relieve some of the pressure to write stuff – an entirely self-imposed task anyway – and I'll take this opportunity to wish you all the best for the coming year. It's only weeks away, after all... I should be back early in January.

As I have started a certain amount of recycling of old posts, I thought it would be appropriate to revive this seasonal one from December 2012, lightly revised, and brought up to date.

A Day Like Any Other Day

I have confessed several times in this blog that my understanding of history is poor, and arranged around various tropes from popular culture. For me, there are the Pirate Days, the Age of Wigs, Top Hat Times, and so on. In recent times (that is, the Internet Era) I have been attempting to address this failing, mainly through the medium of historical novels, films, and TV series. If I now have any greater understanding of the Napoleonic Wars, it is by following the adventures of Richard Sharpe and Jack Aubrey. I am aware that this is rather like trying to grasp the politics of the Cold War Era by reading John Le Carré and Len Deighton, but I simply can't handle too many books without pictures and conversations any more, and it's not as if I'm going to be sitting any exams.

One thing this approach has revealed is that popular culture has its historical blind spots (not unlike the school history curriculum). The 17th century, for example, is quite poorly represented, even that period of turmoil known variously as the Civil War, the War of Three Nations, or the English Revolution. This is very odd, given that the conflicts of this era and their outcomes are the crucible of our modern British world. I'm not sure whether Germans have a similar amnesia about the Thirty Years War, but I suspect they might.

It's largely to do with religion, of course. Most modern Brits have reverted to a sort of secular paganism, which is our default spiritual setting, one which regards cruelty to animals as the Sin Against the Holy Ghost, and Live And Let Live (except for paedophiles, dog abusers, and queue jumpers) as the whole of the law. I doubt many today could point out the dogmatic differences between a Protestant and a Catholic, let alone the internecine issues that separated the official Church of England from the various emerging "low church" protestant sects in previous centuries. These once heartfelt things are complex, "unrelatable", and difficult to dramatize.

"So, Ensign Brown, we are agreed that rule of the church by bishops is an outrage?"
"No, colonel, I hold that all priests are usurpers of God's word!"
"Why, sir, I go further, and hold that God's presence in my soul means I am saved and therefore free to do whatsoever I do like. And I do quite like your wife!"
[A scuffle breaks out]

Complexity is pop-culture poison, and the whole thing is as mystifying now as, in Jorge Luis Borges' words about the Falklands War, two bald men fighting over a comb.

The broader issues of liberty, democracy, and freedom from tyranny are easier to grasp. When I was a student, in the heyday of the New Left, there was a vogue for seeing the radical wing of the Parliamentarian cause – the so-called Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters – as an alternative, dissenting strand in British history, suppressed and sublimated, but eternally bubbling under. There is clearly a great deal of truth in this, but it is equally clearly a demonstration of the idea that we make history in our own image. In 17th-century reality, the demands for liberty, democracy, freedom of worship, and religious reform were as inextricably linked as a box of tangled Christmas-tree lights.

A puritan Christmas flag

Which brings me conveniently to Christmas. Oliver Cromwell is remembered as The Man Who Banned Christmas. Gasp! In the Disneyfied world of 2022, what greater crime against consuming humanity could be imagined? Unless it were to be the closing down of the TV and streaming channels – nooo! – which, if you consider the theatres were the contemporary equivalent in Cromwell's day, is exactly what they did do. Strictly Come Dancing is henceforth banned. Graham Norton is to undergo re-education. The revolution will not be televised.

That said, a whole fourteen years ago there was a TV miniseries set in the Civil War, The Devil's Whore, the first part of which showed Croyland Abbey under siege by the troops of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough – the highest ranking Leveller in Cromwell's New Model Army – on Christmas Day. In a brave attempt to dramatise some of the ideological conflicts within the roundhead ranks, Rainsborough is shown turning on a subordinate who has suggested that bombarding the Royalists sheltering in the Abbey on Christmas Day is, well, perhaps, just a little OTT?  Rainsborough snarls, "It is a day like any other day!"

At which point, either your inner Roundhead or your inner Cavalier is roused. Christmas: blessed occasion for revels and extravagance, or wasteful descent into mindless hedonism?

Perhaps, like that subordinate, you are conflicted, but will take a firmer grasp on your 16-foot pike or matchlock musket, remembering Rainsborough's rousing words at the Putney Debates:

I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.

Turning the home of some aristo into rubble on Christmas Day would certainly have seemed a small price to pay for that, wouldn't you say? It was surely a high point in our history, but one that doesn't get celebrated much or mythologised in popular culture. Instead, like the left of the Labour Party today (never mind those even "lefter" than that), it is regarded more as an embarrassing smell emanating from history's bad plumbing, best ignored in polite company, or covered up with the latest political air-freshener (New! Plug-in Starmeriser!).

A certain number of Brits on either side didn't like what happened next, and what they foresaw would happen after that: the betrayals, the compromises, the broken promises, the restoration of the monarchy, enclosure of common land, industrialisation, rule by top-hat wearers, Christmas as a retail opportunity, and endless repeats of The Snowman on the TV... So shiploads of them decided to head over to the New World, and become Americans.

Sorry about that, you Wampanoags, Pequots and all tribes west. They meant well. Puritans always do, but it somehow never quite works out, and always seems to end in tyranny and massacres. And as for the discomfited Royalists who headed for the plantations of Virginia, southern slavery may fairly be regarded as their rotten legacy. As Pascal famously wrote in the Pensées, "J’ai découvert que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre" (I have discovered that all of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room). An admirably Quaker-ish sentiment for a Jansenist, but the sad truth is that it's life's restless fidgets who make the history the rest of us have to deal with.

So, all best wishes for a tolerable Christmas, if Christmas is your thing, and a happy and fulfilling New Year!