My New Year Reading Resolutions

I had a great haul of books in my Christmas stocking. Here's a list of what I got from family and friends and will be reading over the next few months. Some of them are for general interest, some work, and some just for fun.

First of all, I was given Mark Ormrod's Edward III, one of the Yale English Monarchs series. Over 20 years in gestation, it's a massive book, as is needed for a King who ruled for 50 years and whose reign shaped the fourteenth century both at home and abroad. I wrote my doctorate on Edward III's court and household in the first third of his reign so I'm dying to read what I imagine will be a great book by a great historian.

Next up is Claire Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens that has received rave reviews. Now it's actually 2012 - Dickens' bicentenary - I'm looking forward to diving in as soon as possible to give myself some background for the celebrations.  PD James' Death Comes to Pemberley has me licking my lips, as does the secret santa present I received on New Year's Eve: Decadence Mandchoue - a modern edition of the scurrilous Chinese memoirs of the Edwardian scholar Sir Edmund Backhouse, who claimed to have slept with both Lord Salisbury and the Dowager Empress of China, among many others (though not at the same time, I think).  Are they fake or not?  I'll soon find out.

Back to some more serious books to tick off: A Short History of Parliament edited by Clyve Jones and John Tosh's Why History Matters. Which reminds me that I have still to finish John Maddicott's Origins of the English Parliament 924-1327. To my deep shame, this marvellous book got sidelined last year when all my spare time was taken up with, well, you know what...

I bought myself David Abulafia's The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean just before Christmas, one of the surprise hits of last year. It's another massive doorstop - hard to read on the train - so that'll be for evenings and weekends only. Over the holidays I've also been reminded of the difference in meaning between 'historic' and 'historical' by Simon Heffer's Strictly English, a rather humourless grammar refresher.

What's still on my wish list but not in my hand? Well, I keep meaning to read Simon Winchester's Atlantic: Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, and Helen Castor's She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth (probably good ebook downloads for my commute), and I have a few unread monsters on my shelves which have been languishing there for too long.  I'd also like to take a look soon at Thomas Penn's Winter King, which breaks new ground on Henry VII (the essential but forgotten Tudor), and Mathew Lyons' book The Favourite, on Walter Raleigh.

That's enough to be going on with, I think.  In the words of the title of a final stocking filler anthology, I am Buried in Books.  What books did you get for Christmas?

Remember, Remember, the Old Palace of Westminster

Because of the 1834 fire which burnt it down, many people don't realise that there was a Houses of Parliament on site at Westminster - the old Palace  - before Barry and Pugin designed the current one.  Still fewer know what it looked like.  That's led to some startling anachronisms when illustrating historic Parliamentary events, particularly in relation to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.  Today is Bonfire Night, so I offer these historical thoughts for you to ponder between bangers of all kinds. (For non-UK readers this blog, find out more about Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night before reading on). 


In 2003, I remember being struck by an Institute of Physics project at the University of Wales which had tried to model the impact the explosion would have had, if it had succeeded. The physicists found that the damage to surrounding buildings was enormous, with Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey being flattened and damage as far as Whitehall, over a third of mile away. They worked out that Guy Fawkes had used 25 times the amount of gunpowder he actually would have needed to achieve his aims.  But a newspaper report that caught my eye the next day showed a picture of the new Palace in ruins (not a happy thought).  The Gunpowder Plot is a source of endless fascination and many books, websites and educational items have been produced on it.  But unfortunately, they often make the same mistake and set the Plot against a background of the neo-Gothic Palace, built in the middle of the 19th century.  Some good examples of this are here, here, here and here (hmmm...).


There are exceptions.  In 2005, for the 400th anniversary of the foiling of the Plot, a TV programme simulated the explosion to see what might have happened if the Plot had succeeded, correctly blowing up a facsimile of the old House of Lords, with spectacular results.  The film doesn't give you the impact on surrounding buildings, but you get the idea - and the size and shape of the Lords Chamber is correct, for once (the cross section of the old House of Lords below is held in the Parliamentary Archives: note the ground floor 'cellar' underneath).

In fact, the House of Lords chamber which Guy Fawkes tried to destroy (originally the 13th century Queen's Chamber of the medieval Palace) didn't even make it to 1834.  The Lords moved out of the ancient building in 1801 following the Act of Union with Ireland, and the decaying building was later pulled down by the architect Sir John Soane, to make way for his new Royal Gallery and Staircase (in fact the plan above is by the famous architect).   The Soane buildings survived until 1851 when they  in turn were demolished to make way for the new House of Lords, and there is a fascinating engraving of Queen Victoria opening her first Parliament by processing through Soane's Royal Gallery; not what one imagines at all!  All that remains today to commemorate the site at Westminster is this brass plaque tucked away in one of the inner courtyards of the new Palace, marking the spot of the original House of Lords chamber.

Gainful Employment

Here is a little bit more about my day job (quite a lot of people seem interested in this!) which - along with my colleagues - is a great source of inspiration, posted by the lovely Peter Hay on his blog. 

Also, you can view my contribution to Parliament Week on YouTube, where I talk about some of my favourite records in the Parliamentary Archives.

Westminster's Throne on Wheels

Last week I made a whistle-stop trip to the Museum of London to look at Adam Lee's 1808 plan of the old Palace of Westminster in their Library.  This was a document I had been trying to track down for at least a year, thanks to a garbled footnote.  Job done, I headed for the exit via the galleries and passed the Lord Mayor's Coach, which the Museum described - very memorably - as a "Throne on Wheels".


The Palace of Westminster has its own "Thone on Wheels" in the form of the Speaker's State Coach, last used in 1981 at the wedding of Charles and Diana.  Originally made for William III in 1698, it was presented to the Speaker by Queen Anne shortly afterwards.  We know that the Speaker's residence in the old Palace of Westminster included an extensive range of stables, outbuildings and kitchens running along the riverside east of New Palace Yard.  It must have been there that the Speaker's State Coach was parked at the time of the 1834 fire.  For some years it was on display in Westminster Hall, but earlier this year it was loaned to the National Trust's Carriage Collection at Arlington Court, in Devon, fully conserved and put on view for the public alongside other fantastic chariots, broughams, landaus, barouches and phaetons.

The Speaker's State Coach undergoing conservation

John Rickman, Census Man

22 August marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of John Rickman (b. 1771). Successively Speaker's Secretary and Clerk Assistant of the Commons, Rickman was a brilliant polymath: a proto-statistician, founder of the UK Census, reforming Parliamentary official and friend of Byron, Charles Lamb and Telford.  He is also a key figure in the story of the 1834 fire at Parliament.

This year has of course been census year in the UK: possibly the last one ever.  Amid all the publicity about it, few remember Rickman's original vision.  His interest was piqued by the contemporary debate about population growth and the causes of poverty.  In 1798 the political economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had published An Essay on the Principle of Population which sought to identify the causes of national prosperity and personal happiness by linking population trends with the availability of food.  The view at the turn of the 19th century was that the British population was falling, and Malthus considered this a harshly utilitarian inevitability:  a series of checks such as war, famine, delayed marriage, contraception and so on, would  (by a form of natural selection, though it was not called this at the time) lead ultimately to a more sustainable and content populace, less likely to revolt.  Rickman, however, believed that the population had continued to rise without ill effect, and created the Census to collect the necessary data to prove whether this hypothesis was true or not, and to aid the government in military recruitment and the continuing discussions over reform of the old Poor Law.  In fact he had first put forward his proposals in an essay written in 1796, two years before that of Malthus whose views he continued to oppose until his death.  The 1801 Census was passed by Act of Parliament after Rickman came to the attention of Speaker Abbott (and was subsequently his private secretary).  He continued his work on refining and testing out new questions in the 1811, 1821 and 1831 censuses, also back-projecting population trends for the 18th century based on parish registers, which turned out also to be pretty accurate by modern standards. 

© Parliamentary Works of Art Collection

But it is as a senior Parliamentary official (number two in the administration of the House of Commons) that he appears in Conflagration.  When fire broke out at the Palace of Westminster in the early evening of 16 October 1834, he was snoozing at home after a good dinner with some friends at his club, The Athenaeum. His account of the disaster, and those of his wife and feisty daughter Frances (on whom more in a later blog post), are some of the most thrilling eyewitness descriptions which survive, because the family watched the fire as it headed right towards them in their house in the Palace precincts as they frantically packed up all their belongings. Their letters and notes provide the backbone of several chapters in Conflagration. So what happens to them, their servants, their possessions and their lovely home? My lips are sealed until publication day...

What the Dickens...?

Dickens in the 1830s, looking a good deal
 more glamorous than in later life

Filling in the publicity form, one question which came up asked about anniversaries or other events which could be used as a hook to promote THE BOOK. There's the fire itself of course (16 October every year - 178th anniversary in 2012). More topically, there's the 2012 Olympics in London which will feature lots of aerial shots of the new Palace of Westminster during the marathons and the beach volleyball in Horseguards. 2012 is also the 200th anniversary of the assassination of Spencer Perceval, the only British PM to have been murdered in office (in fact in the lobby of the Commons,and which plays a part in the book)...and finally it's the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth next year.

Dickens appears four times in Conflagration. Surprised? You shouldn't be. He began his writing career as a journalist a couple of years before the 1834 fire, and was in fact a Parliamentary reporter. He wrote for the Morning Chronicle, one of the main newspapers I used in my research, and his sketches of London life "by Boz" came out less than two years after the fire, followed by his first - serialised - novel in 1836: The Pickwick Papers. He clearly knew the old Palace and Parliament well, including some of its personnel.  Expect 2012 to be the year of Dickensmania...

On the Burning of Parliaments

I'm just back from Berlin where I was attending a conference run by the ECPRD - the association of European Parliamentary libraries. Usually I don't go to these events as they're not often about archival stuff; however, this year the theme was "Parliamentary history and its communication to the public" which was right up my street.

Anyway, working on Conflagration has raised lots of questions in my mind about what Parliamentary buildings are for - beyond housing their restless inhabitants. They can be symbols of democracy or tyranny; secrecy or openness; bureaucratic inertia or thrusting innovation; all these and more.  And when they burn down the symbolism is enormous, as are the decisions taken afterwards to replace them (or not).

Few Parliamentary buildings in the world can be more moving than the Reichstag in Berlin, which is where last week's conference was based.  The burning of the Reichstag in 1933 (staged as a "Communist" arson attack by the Nazis) ushered in Hitler's rise to power. It was never used by Hitler or his regime, and lay derelict throughout the war. It was then further damaged in the Allied bombing of Berlin in the last days of the war, its dome reduced to a phantom skeleton and its walls scrawled with graffiti by the Red Army who had captured it.

As if that wasn't enough of a metaphor of the abandonment of democracy, after 1945 the building was situated only just inside the British zone of occupation.  Subsequently, the Berlin Wall ran 7m from one of its flanks, placing it barely inside West Berlin.  Close to a bend in the River Spree, the opposite bank of the river was in East Berlin, and a considerable number of people were killed by DDR border guards trying to swim towards the Reichstag building and - therefore - freedom.  The West German government had decamped to Bonn but continued to use an undamaged part of the building for committee hearings (much to the annoyance of the DDR government).

On reunification, a massive project was launched to reinstate the Reichstag as the Parliament building of the Federal Republic of Germany.  The Bundestag (MPs) would meet there, and the Bundesrat (ministers representing the German Laender) would have seats in the chamber, even though their building was on Leipziger Strasse (and had been unused during the DDR era).  Just like the competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament after 1834, entries from architects were anonymous.   First prize was won by Sir Norman Foster, the British Architect (in fact, the top three winning plans, unknown to the judges at the time, were from non-Germans - the others being a Spaniard and a Dutchman).  More symbolism: former enemies helping to rebuild its neighbour's shattered Parliament building.

Foster made the portico which had originally been intended  for the Kaiser into the main entrance for the public (it was never used by the Kaiser in an act of contempt).  The inscription Dem Deutschen Volke (To the German People) over its entrance says it all.  The design of the dome was finally agreed on after 27 attempts, and Foster himself was not keen on the idea of a dome at all, having originally designed a tent-like canopy over the whole building.  But despite his reluctance, it was built, and the dome has now become one of the major tourist attractions of the whole city, pulling in 2m people who walk round its spiral construction each year.

Just as striking, for me, were the buildings of the Parliamentary administration.  The Marie-Elisabeth Lueders Haus and the Paul Loebe Haus were both built in a deliberately concrete brutalist style redolent of the DDR.  It was intended as a way of never forgetting the past, but the difference is that these buildings are punched through with glass walls: for transparency in every respect.  The M-EL Haus is built right over the site of the former Berlin Wall itself and memorials to those who died crossing the river outside can be seen from its window.  To cross from there to the main Reichstag building you have to move from the former East to West Berlin via a footbridge.  The whole site is a memorial to Berlin's past, present and future Parliamentary history - immensely thoughtful, stimulating and moving.

Even the Soviet graffiti from 1945 on the interior walls
has been uncovered and restored: looking as fresh as the day it was written. 

Inside the Dome

Treasures of the Victoria Tower

Delighted to see a really great review of the book I recently finished with colleagues at work.  Hits the nail right on the head about what we were trying to do.  Here's hoping my solo effort will get the same reaction...

The Afterlife of Charles I's Death Warrant

The Death Warrant

One thing leads to another when you're researching, and as a result of work on the fire book, I have gathered enough spare material for an academic article, which I'm planning to call "The Afterlife of Charles I's Death Warrant", telling the story of what happened to this iconic document, one of the most famous in the country, after Charles I's death.  It fits in well with the work done on other "relics" of Charles I; and is still "venerated" in facsimile on the line of route tour in the Houses of Parliament.  Hoping that the journal Parliamentary History might be interested in it.