Man belonged to the cosmos and was fulfilled through his natural instincts, of which love was the greatest.
(Burgess’s summary of Lawrence’s credo, page 62)
Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993) was a composer, poet, novelist, essayist, librettist, screenwriter, critic, provocateur and media personality. In the 1980s I watched him appear on TV arts programmes and read his numerous book reviews, essays and novels (notably ‘Earthly Powers’, 1980, and ‘The End of the World News’, 1982). He was great fun, an unashamed entertainer. This book is a classic example of his work: opinionated, interesting, drily amusing, sensible, packed with ideas and insights.
Preface
Part of this is because Burgess, like Lawrence, was an outsider. Most 20th century English authors went to private school and Oxbridge and so, whether they were radicals or conservatives, maintained the same kind of tone and worldview, the same manners, the same limited, privileged experience of life in their works. Burgess, as he explains in his preface, grew up in the pub and shop culture of working class Manchester, with little cultural capital and, like Lawrence, largely had to teach himself about literature. And they both married foreign wives and left England to live abroad, Lawrence in his pilgrimage round the world, Burgess to live in Monte Carlo.
That said, Burgess says there are also big differences. Burgess came of an Irish family and was raised a Catholic. This explains his attraction to James Joyce. But also puts him in a different tradition from Lawrence who came from non-conformist stock, proud of his puritanism, attracted to the old pagan gods, son of a miner.
Burgess admires Lawrence’s intransigence and sympathises with his sufferings on behalf of free expression. Lawrence stands for:
that fighting element in the practice of literature without which books are a mere decor or confirmation of the beliefs and prejudices of the ruling class. (p.x)
‘Literature is essentially subversive’ and Lawrence was a leading practitioner of that subversion.
Chapter 1. Lawrence and Myself When Young
Burgess quotes Lawrence’s biographer and critic Richard Aldington saying Joyce and Lawrence are diametrically opposed: Joyce is about being and Lawrence is about becoming.
Stylistically Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. (p.4)
This strikes me as the single most important aspect of Lawrence’s style as a writer of prose and poetry. His paragraphs feel like they’re being shaped and formed, often reusing the same words and phrases, as you watch. It’s a unique experience of being involved in the writing, as it happens.
His writing does not seem to have emerged, lathed and polished, from the workshop: when we read him we are in that workshop, witnessing a hit-and-miss process of creation in which orthodox faults – prolixity, repetition, apparent absurdity – are idiosyncratic virtues. (p.9)
He is a writer taking chances and trusting that he will be taken seriously.
In the 1910s literature was influenced by the serious scientific predictions of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw with their promotion of Scientific, Rational solutions to society’s ills. Lawrence reacted against all this, despised all politics – maybe all rationality – and spoke for the Natural Man.
The purest exponent of the Natural Man after the Great War was Ernest Hemingway who saw that the complex sentences of Edwardian literature reflected a society and values which had all been exploded. He developed a stripped back, simple and repetitive style which promoted a simplistic code of honour. I like where Burgess says:
It may be that Hemingway’s prose is the biggest stylistic innovation of the century… Hemingway genuinely starts again from scratch. (p.8)
When I was a schoolboy and student, that was my view. From E.M. Forster to Ernest Hemingway was a leap from the 19th into the 20th century and, reading literary books today, they almost all still copy the Hemingway formula: short sentences, simple vocabulary, delete all adjectives and adverbs.
The pre-scientific or irrational in Lawrence made him a genuine primitive man, a pagan. He has a profound feeling for the pagan gods. Even the books set in England contain characters who talk like pagan deities. His people aspire to be naked, and their dialogue is voices from the unconscious, from another realm of experience.
Chapter 2. Beginnings
Lawrence’s father was a miner who worked at Brinsley Colliery, Eastwood, so you might have expected Lawrence’s subject to be squalor, dirt and struggle, for him to have become a proletarian writer. But Eastwood, ten miles north-east of Nottingham, in his day looked out over countryside, and Lawrence chose instead to become a writer of the countryside, flowers and animals.
Lawrence’s parents’ marriage was a warzone. His father was a miner, technically a ‘butty’ or supervisor of a gang of other miners. He was almost illiterate, spelling out the newspaper a word at a time, whereas Lawrence’s mother had been a teacher and clung to the idea that she came of gentle stock. Lawrence was unusually close to his mother – she is the central figure in his first major novel Sons and Lovers, and he was devastated when she died – but, by the same token, he was impressed by his father’s big beefy masculinity and the sodality of the miners.
Lawrence was an amateur painter till he was 20. His surviving paintings are vivid but demonstrate his complete lack of training in perspective or anatomy. Words were different. Poems and prose bent to the force of his imagination with little or no training.
At 17 he went as a pupil-teacher to Ilkeston training centre. At 21 he went to Nottingham University. Aged 23 he went to teach in Croydon. He discovered the ‘English Review’, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, who ‘had the greatest editorial flair of his time, if not of the century’ and sent in some poems (p.20). Hueffer recognised the boy’s genius, invited him up to tea, introduced him to Ezra Pound. Lawrence showed Hueffer his first novel, ‘The White Peacock’.
Burgess makes a characteristically sweeping statement:
One of the uses of fiction is to affirm the values of the bourgeoisie. (p.24)
Lawrence is ‘this most visual of novelists’. Burgess emphasises the brilliant physical details in so many scenes.
Joyce, by contrast, was an urban man and knew nothing of flowers. Lawrence is the great novelist of flowers.
Snobbishness Lawrence’s mother felt she married down when she married his father. She aspired for her boys, wanted them to climb the social ladder. This is reflected from as early as ‘The Peacock’, with characters saying ‘awfully’ and ‘frightfully’, words never used in the Lawrence household. He was aping his social superiors, he was pitching the narrative at a higher social level.
Chapter 3. The Denial of Life
Lawrence’s second novel, ‘The Trespasser’, was published in 1912. It’s set on the Isle of Wight which was as far abroad as he’d managed to get by that point. The lead character Siegmund, hangs himself. The is the only suicide in Lawrence’s oeuvre.
In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Richtofen, the wife of his French tutor at Nottingham University, philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley. She describes how they fell in love in her memoir, Not I, but the Wind…, how she was forced to abandon her three children when they eloped abroad, ending up in a rented house on Lake Garda in north Italy.
Mr Noon: Lawrence drafted the first part of this novel before the war. It was published as a fragment in 1934. Only 50 years later, in 1984, was the second part, which existed in papers belonging to a friend of Lawrence’s, published. The two halves or parts were first published together in 1984. The second half is quite different from the first. It appears to be a factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations. Burgess makes the point that:
It was common practice for Lawrence to write half a novel, abandon it, and then pick it up again with no great concern for plausible continuity; when in doubt, change your main character’s character, though retaining the name, and make him or her start a new life somewhere, preferably in Italy. (p.33)
This happens in ‘Mr Noon’, ‘The Lost Girl’ and ‘Aaron’s Rod’.
Marriage It is amusing that Lawrence was very fierce for marital fidelity, had a pagan reverence for the union of one man and one woman and yet the partner of his life was secured by wrecking her marriage to Professor Weekley. Also ironic that Frieda was (allegedly) unfaithful to him.
Anywhere Lawrence was one of those rare writers who could write anywhere, even amid noise and distractions. He never had a permanent home and so no book-lined study, was able to be interrupted mid-sentence to meet people or go and do some chore, come back hours later and pick up where he left off. In the relationship with Frieda, he did all the household chores while she lay in bed smoking. He reflected this aspect of himself in the character of Rawdon Lilly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’:
He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid. (Aaron’s Rod, p.121)
England, My England Soon after eloping, Burgess quotes letters in which Lawrence lambasted the English and England in extreme terms. And yet he remained an Englishman through and through. Richard Aldington amusingly said Lawrence was as English as a wet Sunday in Hull.
Son and Lovers Another joke: given the theme of this novel is a young man’s struggle to break free from the smothering influence of his mother, Frieda playfully suggested it should be titled ‘Sons and Lovers: Or, His Mother’s Darling’. Lawrence was not amused.
Chapter 4. Son and Lover
David Herbert Lawrence was called Bert in the family home. He disliked his first name. After he eloped and became more cosmopolitan he liked his female admirers, starting with Frieda, to call him Lorenzo.
‘Sons and Lovers’ was published in May 1913. Giving its protagonist the French surname Morel is symptomatic of Lawrence’s aspiring cosmopolitanism. Burgess describes it as a ‘florescent, leafy, pullulent’ book (p.50).
Lawrence’s modernism lies not in the formal technique of his novels: they display none of the agonising over technique obvious in Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James or Joyce. The modernism is in the content for two reasons to do with the characters.
1) His characters’ identities are extraordinarily labile: they change all the time. Not just that, but sometimes they disappear altogether, subsumed into the weather, the moonlight or other settings or environments.
2) All Lawrence’s characters point away from the conventions of normal social life towards primeval depths. They repeatedly sink to, or strip back layers to reveal, the elemental layer of human existence. This is deeper than anything in the history of the novel, deeper even than the Greeks in their tragedies.
Symptomatic that, ‘no strong believer in the solidity of human identities’ Lawrence had a lifelong fondness for charades (p.54). This spilled over into the best poems where he mimics or inhabits a bird, beast or flower to an extraordinary degree.
Masculinity All his life Lawrence kept a reverence for beautiful men, for the beauty of the male body, linking back to the strong nudity of his coal-miner father (stripped to the waist and washing in a tin bath every evening) and the community of tough men he managed.
Chapter 5. Coming Through
Lawrence was ‘arrogant, dogmatic, messianic, inconsistent’ but also loveable. He wasn’t troubled by his own faults or the impression they gave in society because society was a spume, a phantom: reality lay much, much deeper, and chasing, revealing and describing the depths of human experience was his challenge.
Reason Lawrence never understood rational argument, which was a kind of giving-in to the surface, the superficial, instead of seeking the core.
Friendship pattern The success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ introduced him to the upper echelons of English culture and society and inaugurated the rhythm he enacted with almost everyone he met: 1) ingratiating charm; 2) lecturing about eternal depths which they barely understood; 3) bitter rejection and immortalisation as satirised characters in whichever novel he was working on; 4) with the frequent threat of libel action (p.55).
‘Love Poems and Others’ published February 1913. In the summer Lawrence and Frieda returned from Germany to England principally because Frieda wanted to see her three children by Weekley.
In the autumn of 1913 he wrote a good deal of The Rainbow, provisionally titled ‘The Sisters’. In July 1914 Frieda’s divorce came through and the couple came to London to sign the papers, then get married. A few weeks later the Great War erupted and they were trapped in England for four long bitter years.
Chapter 6. Dementia
The Lawrences didn’t have money to pay the lawyers’ fees for the divorce so he was declared bankrupt. In December The Prussian Officer and Other Stories was published. In 1915 the odd story England, My England‘. Lawrence is always unsettling because he says the uncomfortable, inconvenient thing.
In 1915 Lawrence worked on ‘The Sisters’ and decided to divide it in two. He developed the notion of setting up a commune of like-minded artistic people in Cornwall. He tried to recruit Lady Ottoline Morrell for this. He wrote long letters raving about the collapse of British society to poor Bertrand Russell, with whom he was initially very taken before they had a huge falling out. Russell accused him (after his death) of being a proto-fascist.
Lawrence said he rewrote ‘The Rainbow’ about seven times. It was published on 30 September 1915. Just a week later, a negative review in the Daily News triggered outcry at the book’s supposed obscenity. The book was taken to court for breaching obscenity laws. Many witnesses for the prosecution and none for the defence. Lawrence wasn’t called. His publisher, Methuen, meekly apologised, withdrew the book, pulped the remaining copies and paid a fine of ten guineas. Britain’s writers did nothing. The Society of Authors did nothing. That maligned figure, Arnold Bennett, was the sole author to publicly protest (he had already sent the impoverished author a gift of £40).
The impact was to ruin Lawrence’s reputation, livelihood and career. It delayed publication of the second half of the novel, Women In Love, by five years, giving the misleading impression that it is a book of the 1920s, which it very much isn’t.
Burgess, of course, defends ‘The Rainbow’ but even he, in his summary, zeroes in and quotes some of the passages describing sex (in extremely vague and gaseous way). He himself doesn’t convey how much of the novel isn’t about sex at all, but about the tempestuous and primeval emotions of the characters, described in an amazingly impassioned prose.
In my review of The Rainbow I point out that with the arrival of Ursula to young womanhood the novel drastically changes tone, moving out of its kind of primitive pagan rural background and arriving in the modern world of schools and trams. Burgess makes the nice point that this is the ‘Wellsian mode’, the tone of Ann Veronica and Wells’s Edwardian social novels.
Chapter 7. Westward
Lawrence fantasised about setting up a colony of like-minded artists in America, maybe Florida, until the authorities made it clear he couldn’t leave the country. So he settled on Cornwall where he founded an artistic community. Two leading figures were the gifted editor John Middleton Murry and the brilliant New Zealand short story writer, Katherine Mansfield.
Lawrence was at one point so close to Murry that he suggested becoming blood brothers. The quartet shared a cottage for a while but inevitably fell out. Nearly 20 years later Murray was cruelly satirised as the slimy seducer Denis Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Point Counter Point’.
In Cornwall Lawrence revised part two of The Sisters, which came to be titled Women in Love. He finished in November 1916 but could find no publisher. July 1916, his travel book about his time in Italy, Twilight in Italy, was published.
During this period he was summoned to several Army medicals in Bodmin. He was always rejected but found the poking and prodding of his body deeply humiliating. His horrible wartime experiences are dramatised in the long, brilliantly vivid ‘Nightmare’ chapter in ‘Kangaroo’.
Lawrence spoke openly against the madness of the war. His wife was German. On 12 October 1917 local police raided his home and ransacked it for evidence they were spies, signalling to German U-boats with their washing or their late-night lights. No evidence was found but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall.
Lawrence and Frieda went to stay with H.D. in London. He started writing Aaron’s Rod. In November 1917 the poetry collection ‘Look! We Have Come Through’ was published. In 1918 they went to live in Derbyshire. In October ‘New Poems’ came out. As soon as the war finished (November 1918) they set about leaving England but it took a year, until October 1919, before they could get passports.
During this period Lawrence did the reading for his book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature, which was eventually published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. It contains essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. It contributed to establishing Herman Melville as a seminal figure in American literature.
Some critics criticise it for being a rushed, superficial and highly impressionistic study; Burgess calls it ‘a series of jolts and lunges… meant to jolt Americans’ into reading their great authors. He claims it is one of the few books which created an entire new discipline, as it apparently helped jolt Americans into creating course of America literature at their universities.
Chapter 8. Nakedness
Burgess devotes an entire chapter to ‘Women in Love‘ which Burgess considers one of the ten great novels of the century. The central point of the novel is the way the characters are stripped down to their essentials, stripped to their primitive emotional cores which are depicted as bubbling over with extreme emotions, continually changing.
They are not human beings as we expect to meet them either in real life or in fiction. They are close to animals in the discontinuousness of their emotions, with unpredictable shifts of feeling which are always intense… they are capable of great emotional and even physical violence; they seem to have a skin missing. This is the peculiar quality of Women in Love which could as well be called Women in Hate. (p.89)
He outlines the main characters, identifies some of their real-life bases (Rupert Birkin is Lawrence, Hermione Roddice was partly based on Ottoline Morrell, Gudrun bears many of the traits of Katherine Mansfield).
Burgess singles out three big scenes: 1) how the violence of the big half-wild rabbit scene, in which it scratches and draws blood from both Gudrun and Gerald, anticipates the violence of their relationship and his final attempt to murder her.
2) When Ursula comes across Rupert throwing stones at the reflection of the moon in the millpond to try and abolish the power of the feminine moon over him.
3) The naked wrestling scene between Birkin and the mine owner Gerald Crich, which is deeper than homoerotic, far more primal, and its sad incompletion, the way Gerald can’t rise to Birkin’s wishes.
If we are startled by this scene we are merely experiencing the shock that it was Lawrence’s lifelong mission to impart – the shock of meeting [elemental] truths which logic and science… have tried to drive out. (p.96)
Burgess thinks it is a great novel because it is completely new: the novel, as a form, is mostly concerned with people in a social context, it is the quintessentially bourgeois art form, hedged round by manners and etiquette. From Samuel Richardson through Jane Austen to Henry James and E.M. Forster, the most earnest novels had always been about social convention and good manners. Lawrence tears the face off all this and shows his characters as madly irrational complexes of blood and nerves; primal, pagan wild animals: they have a social face (they have jobs and responsibilities) but their private lives are thronged with out-of-control primeval forces, ‘naked primitives’.
He makes the further point that the novel, up to that point, existed to convey a plot, a story. In their different ways Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford showed that you could achieve new literary heights by jettisoning the straitjacket of a logical plot and instead showing human reality in a heightened form.
Chapter 9. A Snake and Sardinia
Burgess is dismissive of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the novel Lawrence began in 1918, set aside, then completed in the spring of 1921. ‘It is a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’ (p.101).
More interesting is The Lost Girl, which he had also abandoned, and now took up and completed. It is a hokey tale in the popular style of Arnold Bennett with lots of authorial buttonholing – ‘Now fancy our two young heroes walking up the steps to the hotel…’ and, being absolutely unthreatening, won a literary prize and £100.
Lawrence and Frieda visited Florence, which he liked. He fancied it a place of manliness and virile statues, now gone to seed and packed with a large expatriate British community of ‘aesthetes’. Some of these are portrayed pretty blatantly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’ leading to accusations of bad manners and caddishness.
They moved on to Sardinia, then to Sicily where they found a cottage where they lived, off and on, for two years. The stay in Sardinia inspired Sea and Sardinia the most charming book Lawrence ever wrote and, in Burgess’s opinion, the best single introduction to his oeuvre.
Chapter 10. The Prophecy is in the Poetry
This chapter covers:
- Lawrence’s best book of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- his two works triggered by Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
- his final, posthumous work, Apocalypse
Chapter 11. Eastward
1921, year of The Captain’s Doll, in which the captain and his German paramour turn into Lawrence and Frieda, endlessly bickering, with their famously arduous trek up a glacier during which they bickered and argued every inch of the way there and back.
In October 1921 ‘Sea and Sardinia’ was serialised in The Dial magazine and was read by the American socialite Mrs Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was starting an artists’ community in Taos, New Mexico, with the aim of preserving the arts and crafts of the local Indians. She fancied having a writer-in-residence to record the way of life and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ convinced her that D.H. was the man. She wrote offering him free board and lodging and Lawrence bit.
He and Frieda decided to visit America not by crossing the Atlantic but by heading East. They took ship from Naples in February 1922, passed through the Suez Canal arriving at Ceylon in March. He discovered he really hated tropical jungles.
They sailed on to Australia, arriving at Perth at the start of May 1922 and stayed with friends for a fortnight. Staying in a town outside Perth they met Maria Louisa Skinner, a minor writer who was emboldened to show Lawrence her manuscript of a novel. For reasons that puzzle Lawrence scholars to this day, he was inspired to take it up as a collaboration and rewrite it the Lawrence way. It was eventually published as The Boy in the Bush with Skinner credited as co-author. Burgess thinks Lawrence collaborated because Australia made a big impact on him but he simply wasn’t there long enough to pick up the local lore. This manuscript was packed with local lore and just needed the psychological depth which he tried to add.
After just two weeks, they took ship to Sydney. He only stayed here two days (too expensive) before heading to a house 50 kilometres south.
Chapter 12. A Comical-Looking Bloke
Here Lawrence wrote Kangaroo which Burgess calls ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It was an improvisation i.e. he set off without having a plot or characters but the book’s slapdash unevenness of tone 1) allows for all kinds of elements, including extended lyrical descriptions of the Australian landscape and 2) creates an overall sense of spontaneity and immediacy which is very appealing.
Kangaroo’s main characters are transparently based on Lawrence and Frieda, being Richard Lovat Somers, an English writer, and his wife Harriet, who has a foreign look. They arrive in Sydney, find a house to rent. The neighbours are a childless couple and the husband, Jack Callcott, explains he’s a member of a secretive authoritarian political movement, the Diggers, who are seeking to overthrow democracy. He introduces Lovat to their leader, a charismatic Jewish lawyer named Ben Cooley and codenamed ‘Kangaroo’.
Burgess points out that the novel is about types of power:
- there is an entire chapter devoted to the dynamic of Frieda and Lawrence’s marriage, and Lawrence’s preposterous efforts to convince her that she should submit to him as lord and master, which she robustly ridicules
- the political plot, sort of, about the Diggers and Cooley, although his so-called ideology is disappointingly wishy-washy, all about love of your fellow men, and Colley asks Somers (in several embarrassingly bad scenes) to love him
The plot, such as it is, leads up to a riot at a meeting of the Australian Socialist Party, which is attacked by a phalanx of pseudo-fascist Diggers, complete with gunshots, a bomb being thrown, and Kangaroo being mortally wounded. Burgess points out how all this is prefaced by an extended passage about the nature of the ‘mob’, reminiscent of Freud’s work ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ which had just come out (in 1921), which Burgess says ‘shows an acuteness worthy of Adolf Hitler’ (p.142). I found it, like most of Lawrence’s attempts to tackle serious political or sociological issues, so wordy, so convoluted, and so embroiled with his personal mythology around the sexes and the deep gods, as to be almost unreadable.
Burgess briskly summarises that Lovat cannot give his allegiance to Kangaroo because the latter’s philosophy of brotherly love is shallow piffle beside Lovat’s deep feeling for the dark gods lying behind everything, deeper than humanity.
In a side note, Burgess picks out one of the final scenes of Lovat walking by moonlight by the seashore as being as magical and symbolic as Burkin throwing stones in the millpond to break the image of the moon in ‘Women in Love’. Lawrence’s novels overflow with wonderful, wonderful nature descriptions.
Chapter 12. Quetzalcoatl
After their Australian sojourn Lawrence and Frieda continued their odyssey east, arrived in San Francisco and took train to the artists’ community at the pueblo town of Taos, New Mexico, in the south-west USA. They had, as you recall, been invited by its owner Mabel Dodge Luhan, the American socialite, who had read Lawrence’s poetry and thought he’d be a perfect fit.
They were found a ranch fifteen or so miles from the town and endured a tough and demanding winter in its very primitive conditions, helped by a couple of Danish artists they sub-let some outhouses to.
By spring 1923 they needed a break and Lawrence took Frieda to Mexico. After some weeks in Mexico City, they headed south west and settled in a house on Lake Chapala. Over the next few years they made three trips in all. Out of them came a long novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), an epic 462 pages in the Penguin edition, and the travel book, Mornings in Mexico (1927).
Burgess gives a workmanlike summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ but doesn’t do this vast, complex, brilliant and ridiculous book justice. He calls it ‘the least liked of Lawrence’s novels and one can see why’. It is humourless, and pontificates, at length, on a subject of little interest to most English readers (a couple of Mexicans leading the rise of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl ).
One key point I nearly forgot by the time I’d staggered to the end of it, is that it, also, was very obviously written at two different times. The opening chapters are written in a surprisingly pared-back prose, lacking the usual Lawrentian guff, repetition and rhetoric. Almost as if he’d been reading Hemingway (who, however, hadn’t published much yet). Whereas the second half, describing the proponents of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is an orgy of half-baked mysticism, pseudo-psychology and tedious ‘hymns’.
Burgess suggests the difference in style is explained by facts on the ground. After 6 months Frieda was fed up of Mexico’s searing heat and (probably) Lawrence’s insistence on her submission to his religious fantasies. So she booked a berth on a ship from New York back to Britain (as the novel’s protagonist Kate Leslie, also does). On the New York quayside they had such an intense argument that they for a while thought the marriage was over.
He travelled west across America, stopping in the young Hollywood, before making it back to Mexico City. Here he completed the novel unrestrained by Frieda’s presence and influence. So you could argue that the first, very restrained and unLawrentian half, with its sensible characters doing believable things, was written under Frieda’s influence; and that the wildly self-indulgent second half, a fantasia of the new religion, accompanied by long poem-hymns he attributes to the new religionists, is Lawrence unleashed.
In real life Lawrence for a while felt he had lost Frieda and that, in her insistence on being free, independent and going her own way (home), she had ‘won’ their endless battle; whereas in the novel, Lawrence has the very strong character Kate Leslie in the end bow and submit to the male principle of her dark native husband. I.e. in the novel Lawrence faked that he’d won. In reality he swallowed his pride, and also took ship to Britain, ending in London where he realised just how much he disliked the English.
In his brisk summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ Burgess doesn’t mention the book’s countless breath-takingly beautiful prose descriptions of the Mexican landscape and mood. Equivalents to the wonderful evocation of the Australian landscape in ‘Kangaroo’. In both these novels, for my money, the ‘plot’ is dubious but the sense of place is astonishing.
Burgess thinks ‘there is no less convincing ending in the Lawrence oeuvre’ (p.157) but I found the ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ appropriately ambiguous and uncertain. It just stops in mid-conversation as the protagonist, Kate Leslie, rather hopelessly asks the Mexican general she’s married and who wants her to join their religious movement, Cipriano Viedma, to make her stay with him – despite the fact that we’ve seen her pining for Britain and booking a berth on a ship home. It ends on a note of irresolution and ambiguity which, I thought, accurately sums up the Lawrentian protagonist, endlessly conflicted and contradictory and changeable.
Chapter 13. A Spot of Red
In London Frieda and Lawrence became close to the artist (the Right Honourable) Dorothy Brett, and she accompanied them when they sailed back across the Atlantic in March 1924. They travelled from New York to Chicago and then back to Taos. Here Mable Luhan gave the Lawrences 170 acres of land and Lawrence, always surprisingly practical, threw himself (alongside native labourers) into rebuilding the adobe shacks, clearing the irrigation ditches, planting a flower garden.
In this period Lawrence wrote St Mawr. Like so many of Lawrence’s fictions it splits into two distinct parts (England and America), maybe three (London, Shropshire, Texas). The first, longer part portrays the posh, upper-middle-class world Lawrence was now moving in (the miner’s son had come a long, long way in a little over 10 years), set in London mews cottages and posh grand houses.
St Mawr is the name of a horse, a stallion, bought by Mrs Witt, a redoubtable American widow of independent means, for her son-in-law Henry Carrington, so he can join her and her daughter, Louise (Lou), as they go riding in Rotten Row (in Hyde Park) and mingle with London’s elite. Here the nervy, uncontrollable horse causes a scene and is banned as a danger to the public.
The scene then shifts to the West Midlands on the Welsh border, where a posse of posh people go for an extended break and where St Mawr is startled by a snake in the heather and rears backwards, kicking one of the men in the party in the face then rolling onto Henry and crushing his foot.
In part two, the leading figure, Mrs Witt, takes daughter, son-in-law and difficult horse by ship back to America, to the ranch where she grew up and whose profits pay for her pampered lifestyle travelling round Europe (and which explains why she and her daughter like horses).
But they don’t stop here. Lou looks for somewhere isolated where she can be herself and discovers a half-abandoned old ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and buys it, and persuades her mother to join her and the family retainer, a native American named Phoenix, in rebuilding and furbishing it.
Burgess makes the obvious point that the entire narrative arc of the story follows Lawrence’s recent life, from posh nobs in London, via an excursion into the English countryside, then back to the States, to the dusty desert reminiscent of Taos, and then the final 20 pages are a pretty literal description of the ranch which Mabel Luhan, with great generosity, gave to Lawrence.
Burgess goes on to make the fairly obvious point which I’d completely missed that St Mawr is Lawrence: wounded, angry, liable to lash out. When the horse kicks a nice posh chap in the face up in the Shropshire hills it is Lawrence spitting in the face of the posh people he met in London and claimed to love his work and who he loathed. In fact St Mawr overflows with hatred of just about everyone, as I itemise in my review of it.
According to Burgess, right at the end of 1924 Lawrence travelled with Frieda and Brett back to Mexico. The British vice-consul found them a cottage in Oaxaca and it was here that he completed ‘The Plumed Serpent’, in all its madness.
He also completed the odd book of travel sketches combined with anthropological reportage, ‘Mornings in Mexico’. The book starts out as restrained and observant sketches of his hacienda, his servant, a long walk to a remote village and a description of a market day; but then the second half and the last three or four chapters become more anthropological, describing trips to observe traditional Indian music and dances, and taking it on himself to explain the Indians’ entire animistic worldview. Several of these chapters do not take place in Mexico at all, but in the United States, so the title of the book is pretty misleading.
Here in Oaxaca, in early 1925, Lawrence fell very ill. He went down with malaria but also food poisoning causing diarrhoea. To compound his misery, the region was hit by an earthquake. He was moved to the one decent hotel in Oaxaca. He was left weak and ill. All the old fight went out of him. For years he had written fantasies of subjecting Frieda to his imperious male will. Now he could barely walk and realised how utterly dependent on her he had become.
A doctor in Mexico City diagnosed tuberculosis and told Frieda that Lawrence only had a year or two left to live. When they tried to return to Taos the US immigration officials prevented him, until overridden by a kindly official in the embassy in Mexico City. But only with a 6-month visa.
In the event Lawrence recovered back on the ranch and was fit enough to get involved in all manner of outdoor chores and work. Burgess dwells on his finding a porcupine with cactus needles in its nose and carefully extracting them, which led to one of his many essays about man’s place in nature.
In September 1925 his US visa expired, he travelled to Washington with Frieda, then they caught a liner back across the Atlantic. He kidded himself he’d come back but, of course, he never did. His ranch is now a museum dedicated to him, the D.H. Lawrence ranch.
Lawrence disapproved of the Atlantic – ‘a dismal kind of ocean; it always affects me as the grave of Atlantis’ – although not as much as he disapproved of England.
Chapter 14. Life in Death
Lawrence passed through England en route for the continent. Burgess thinks Italy was Lawrence’s true home and the Mediterranean his proper sea. By the autumn of 1925 they had settled at a place called Spotorno, on the coast just over the border from France. Here he turned 40.
Burgess summarises Lawrence’s life to date: he had travelled right around the world looking for a race unspoiled by western materialism but hadn’t found it. He had hated the tropics (Ceylon), ignored the native people of Australia, seen the corruption and lassitude of the Mexicans, hated America’s Fordist culture, loathed England’s imperial snobbery.
Etruscan Places Now, back in Italy, he persuaded himself he’d found it in the long-extinct and legendary race of the Etruscans. Hence his book Etruscan Places. The Etruscans created a civilisation in west and north-west Italy which reached its height around 500 BC. To Lawrence’s mind they were an example of a primitive people in touch with their sensual pagan selves who were crushed out of existence by the cerebral, law-obsessed, imperialistic Romans.
This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the historical facts since 1) if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars), 2) the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they also practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have had sympathy for.
But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans into his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’. This is why the book opens with an attack on all historians of the ancient world who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures.
And, as Burgess points out, when Lawrence was anathematising an empire which crushed scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ he was also obviously referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.
The Man Who Died Burgess devotes 4 pages to a summary of this vivid short story depicting Jesus waking from the dead in his tomb. In the story Jesus stumbles out and takes shelter with a peasant before the several encounters with disciples described in the New Testament.
These encounters are given according to the Biblical sources but we see that the resurrected man who lived them is radically different from the Jesus of the Bible account. For he has thrown off his mission to convert the world to love. He now sees all that as a form of narcissism. Now he will live for the instinctive life within him i.e. become Lawrentian man.
And so in the second half of the story (and, as Burgess points out, so many of Lawrence’s stories and novels fall into two distinct halves) he travels south along the coast. Here he comes to a small domestic temple to the goddess Isis and falls under the spell of its priestess, culminating in their having sex at the pagan altar.
Burgess doesn’t quite bring out how brilliantly vivid and imaginative this story is, with scores of moments of insight, starting with the searing description of what it feels like to rise from the dead – but he correctly points out the other striking thing about it which is – why wasn’t it banned? Why wasn’t Lawrence prosecuted for blasphemy? What kind of story could possibly be more blasphemous? Instead, as we know, the Establishment reserved its fury for his next novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s always sex with the philistine, guttersnipe British, who are too thick to notice transgressive ideas.
Chapter 15. A Woman’s Love
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a book about fidelity. Lady Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors must be true to each other and what they awaken in each other – a true awakening of their bodies’ sensual and sexual identities – despite the full panoply of opposition society can throw at them: gossip and rumour, social disapproval, censure from her father and sister, the howling anger of his shrewish wife, the cold anger of her husband, and the minefields of the law.
He began it at Scandicci in Italy in October 1926 and over the next two years wrote three versions. Many critics think the shorter first version is best, but it was the longest version which he chose to have privately printed in 1928.
Burgess correctly points out that for a book which supposedly champions free and ecstatic sex, ‘Chatterley’ is embarrassingly limited and ignorant. Lawrence is embarrassingly fixated on the penis, the phallus, on Mellors’s erect penis, and the sex is entirely orientated around his quick phallic penetration of Lady C. There is little or no foreplay and no attention whatsoever is given to Connie’s pleasure or orgasm. She is condemned to find all her pleasure in response to his quick thrusting cock.
As Burgess says, not just any modern westerner with an interest in the subject, but any literate member of the world’s other cultures, readers of Japanese, Chinese or India erotica, would know vastly more than Lawrence describes. Lawrence’s supposed sex set-pieces make us look like an embarrassment on the world stage. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ only counts as a ‘sexy’ book when set against the narrow, blinkered, strangled, philistine background of early 20th century Anglo-Saxon culture. Compared with the erotic writings of virtually any other tradition, it is pitifully inadequate.
Burgess is critical of it. He thinks Connie isn’t as interesting a female figure as Ursula, Gudrun (who is?) or Kate Leslie, while her desertion of a crippled husband subverts her moral standing. Mellors is less attractive than the gamekeeper in The White Peacock. In my reading, I didn’t like Mellors. He is unnecessarily chippy and shirty with Clifford and, especially with the painter Duncan Forbes who offers to help them out and Mellors rudely dismisses. By the end I didn’t like either of the lovers. My sympathy went out to Mrs Bolton, a battling single mum from the village who comes to be Clifford’s housekeeper and manages to stay sympathetic to all three parties in the love triangle.
Both Lawrence’s US and British publishers refused to publish it. Lawrence had a full version privately printed in Italy and distributed 2,000 copies. Wikipedia describes the fate of various expurgated and pirated editions. Burgess summarises Lawrence’s own account of printing a private edition, as given in ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.
The famous 1960 trial came about because Penguin decided to use the text as a test of the recent Obscene Publications Act 1959.
When the jury found against the prosecution i.e. that paperback publication could go ahead, Burgess and other critics like him were relieved because now they were free to discuss the book on its merits and admit the fact that it’s a flawed novel.
Official persecution continued. When he sent the manuscript of his poetry collection ‘Pansies’ to his London publisher, it was intercepted, opened, and alleged ‘obscenities’ cut.
In 1919 the Warren Gallery held an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings. A surprising 12,000 people paid to see them. They yellow press got wind of the nudity and egged on the police to raid the gallery and confiscate 14 of the pictures. The authorities proposed to destroy the paintings and the book of the exhibition though the gallery owners rounded up some contemporary artists to defend him.
Burgess doesn’t think much of the paintings, says the paintings ascribed to Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, are better.
Chapter 17. Death in Vence
Burgess dwells on the friendship between Aldous Huxley and Lawrence and he quotes a nice section from an interview given late in life where Huxley says that Lawrence was, above all, happy. Burgess thinks Huxley absorbed enough of the scientific worldview ‘to bring a new intellectual rigour to the novel’. Having just read a load of Huxley’s novels I think this is rubbish. There’s nothing intellectually rigorous about them, my abiding impression is of the endless vapouring gaseous trip about Love and Art gassed by preposterous pseudo-intellectual rentiers. And his later writings about drugs and religion dress up in scientific terminology but are basically spiritualist nonsense.
What comes over from Lawrence’s last months spent dying from tuberculosis was his own foolish denialism, and the complete wretched inadequacy of contemporary medicine. Only antibiotics can treat TB and they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet.
Testimony from various sources suggest that Frieda was worse than useless at looking after Lawrence. She couldn’t cook, turned the kitchen of the villa where he spent his last weeks into a slum. Everything had to be cleaned and tidied by Aldous and especially Maria Huxley who worshipped Lawrence like a god.
We have it on the testimony of Aldous Huxley that, a day or two before he died, Lawrence said of his wife: ‘Frieda, you have killed me.’ The best source for his final days is from the English poet Robert Nichol. He wrote:
Aldous would not repeat such a terrible saying unless he felt it to be true. And he said, ‘I like Frieda in many ways but she is incurably and incredibly stupid – the most maddening woman I think I ever came across. Nevertheless she was the only sort of woman with whom D.H.L. could live. (quoted p.196)
Burgess makes the point that if Lawrence had married little Maria Huxley, she would have been a faithful, efficient, kind wife, creating order and tidiness everywhere, as she did for Huxley – but Lawrence needed chaos. He thrived on the battle of wills, the clash between his domesticity and Frieda’s slovenliness, between his working class background and her aristocratic hauteur, between his English puritanism and her continental sensuality, on her willingness to fight back.
Mind you, these comments shed light on Frieda’s own memoirs, one of the most salient parts of which, for me, was the way she doesn’t actually comment on any of the numerous books he wrote during their 18-year marriage. I thought it was tact. Maybe she was just too stupid, and didn’t try.
He died peacefully in his sleep and was buried at Vence. A year later he was exhumed and shipped over to Taos where Fried built a shrine for him at the ranch.
Burgess calls him ‘the most English of our writers’, is that true? More English than Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens? He’s nearer the mark when he says:
The British expect comfort from their writers, and Lawrence offers very little. (p.197)
The tenor of the text and endings of most of his stories offer very little comfort, from the bleak endings of ‘Women in Love’ and ‘The Fox’, to the uncertain ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ or the hanging ending of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ – you go through these great emotional rollercoaster rides reading his stories but then, at the end… what?
Chapter 18. On The Side of Life
Burgess has a half-hearted go at speculating what might have happened if Lawrence had lived longer. Would he have come over to Huxley’s way of seeing i.e. combining all the blood and dark gods stuff with a more rational point of view? Unlikely.
Like most critics, Burgess thinks Lawrence had, in fact, done his best work. Some people think Sons and Lovers is his masterpiece; Burgess thinks it’s Women In Love. But after that it was all slowly downhill, there is a steady diminution in force, he is never so wildly radical again.
Then Burgess adds his own interpretation which is that Lawrence was a professional writer. He could sit down anywhere and bang out letters, stories, essays, poems or continue with a novel. More than most we have to take his oeuvre, across its many genres, as one thing.
Was he a prophet? Burgess acknowledges Lawrence’s writings about power, his dislike of Italian fascism, but his own flirting with power and submission in ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’. But he doesn’t mention what I think is stronger, which is the sense of doom which dogs Mellors in ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mellor’s conviction that a great crash was coming and the future was going to be very dark proved to be right.
Lawrence would have been dismayed to learn his name is associated in the common culture with sex, with the scandal surrounding Lady Chatterley, with the soft porn movie versions, as a prophet of soft-porn sensuality. There’s nothing soft porn about Lawrence: his writings are hard and rebarbative, they are not relaxing or lulling.
This is Burgess at his weakest. He wanders off into a lengthy consideration of Henry James and his criticism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as he tries to define what ‘life’ means in the context of a novel. But he’s over-thinking it. Think back to reading ‘The Rainbow’: it is the most fantastic depiction of the complexity of human existence, of being a person plonked down amid families, in settlements and cultures, in the natural and man-made worlds, and the endless fizzing popping confusing experience of being alive to all these endless inputs and experiences. Comparisons with Henry James or James Joyce or any other writers are beside the point. Lawrence was the poet laureate of the teeming richness of Life and delves so deep, drilling beneath all conventional notions of identity, taking his characters to primeval, archetypal depths. And his novels inhabit the animals they describe and bring to life the myriads of flowers quite as fully as his human characters, maybe more so.
It seems overblown when Lawrence writes about the ‘cosmos’ but surely Lawrence, more than any other writer, had the right to do so, because he deliberately moved out of all his comfort zones, left England behind, and wrote dazzling evocations of the landscapes, flora and fauna of the Mediterranean, Australia, and the American and Mexican desert. Who cares what Henry James wrote about ‘form’ or why James Joyce deployed such complex symbolical structures – you only have to read any of Lawrence’s descriptions of the Australian outback, of the silver fish in the cold Pacific, of the thunderhead clouds massing over the distant mountains in Mexico, and you realise you are in the presence of a great, great writer, who owned and described more of the world than most of his contemporaries even saw.
Burgessian vocabulary
- allumeuse = French for ‘tease’
- hypergamy = the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological or educational background (as working class men do with upper class women, as Lawrence men do in a number of his stories: Virgin and Gypsy, Lady Chatterley)
- prevernal = relating to the early stages of spring, or the end of winter
Credit
Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess was published by William Heinemann in 1985. Page references are to the 1986 Abacus paperback version.
Books & Boots 
Political documents of the British civil wars
What follows are summaries of some of the key political documents produced between the start of Charles I’s conflict with Scotland in 1637 and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Instead of a chronological or thematic approach to the period, this is a different angle from which to consider events, a record of the proliferation of plans and constitutions cooked up by all sides in their attempts to find a solution to the nation’s deep divisions.
Lining them up like this brings out one of the central ideas of Mark Kishlansky’s history of the 17th century, namely the collapse of consensus, the collapse of belief in a central set of political and religious values which characterised the era, and the countless attempts made by different political players to rebuild it.
In the last few documents of the series you can see the realisation emerging that the late-medieval idea of a hierarchical and completely homogeneous society was permanently broken and that only a system which allowed for some measure of tolerance and pluralism could replace it.
The question of just how much pluralism and tolerance could be permitted and society remain, in some sense, united or coherent, remained an open question – in fact, arguably, it’s one of the main threads of British social and political history right up to the present day.
To me what this proliferation of documents indicates is how very difficult it is, once you abandon tradition and precedent, to draw up a new political constitution in a period of crisis. It’s one of the reasons revolutions are so tumultuous. Getting rid of the ancien regime, especially if it’s embodied in one hated ruler (Charles I, Louis XVIII, Czar Nicholas II, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi) is relatively easy. Finding a successor system which all the competing factions can unite behind… almost impossible.
Which is why revolutions often become uncontrollable by all except the most ideological, ruthless and uncompromising: Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Ayatollah Khomeini. Or collapse into civil war: Iraq, Libya.
I’m aware that the documents are in a broad range of genres – from constitutions enacted by central government to the manifestos of fringe groups (the Levellers and even more so, the Diggers), from religious oaths to political treaties. A proper study would take this more into account. I am concerned simply to give an indication of a) the sheer number of them b) their range and variety, and – as said above – the way they show how, once a shared consensus has collapsed, it is so very difficult to create a new one.
1638 The Scottish National Covenant
In 1637 King Charles I and Archbishop Laud tried to bring the separate churches of England and Scotland closer together, firstly by the introduction of a new Book of Canons to replace John Knox’s Book of Discipline as the authority for the organisation of the Kirk, and secondly by the introduction of a modified form of the Book of Common Prayer into Scotland. Charles and Laud consulted neither the Scottish Parliament or the Assembly of the Kirk with the inevitable result that the proposals met with outrage from Scots determined to preserve their national and religious identity.
At the first service where they were introduced, on 23 July 1637 in St Giles’s cathedral in Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes flung her prayer stool at the dean as he read from the book, and started a riot. Similar demonstrations took place in churches all across Scotland where the new liturgy was introduced.
This spontaneous protest was soon organised by Presbyterian elders and aristocrats into a campaign of petitions denouncing the Laudian prayer book and the power of the bishops. These coalesced into a committee which drew up a National Covenant to unite the protesters. The Covenant called for adherence to doctrines already enshrined by Acts of Parliament and for a rejection of untried ‘innovations’ in religion.
In February 1638, at a ceremony in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, large numbers of Scottish noblemen, gentry, clergy and burgesses signed the Covenant, committing themselves under God to preserving the purity of the Kirk. Copies were distributed throughout Scotland for signing on a wave of popular support. Those who hesitated were often intimidated into signing and clergymen who opposed it were deposed. By the end of May 1638, the only areas of Scotland where the Covenant had not been widely accepted were the remote western highlands and the counties of Aberdeen and Banff, where resistance to it was led by the Royalist George Gordon, Marquis of Huntly.
An Assembly was held at Glasgow in 1638 where the Covenanter movement became the dominant political and religious force in Scotland.
In 1643 the objectives of the Covenant were incorporated into the Solemn League and Covenant which formed the basis of the military alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters against the Royalists.
1641 The Grand Remonstrance
A Remonstrance against King Charles I was first proposed by George Digby, MP for Dorset, soon after the Long Parliament assembled in November 1640. The idea was taken up by John Pym in 1641. Pym planned to use it as part of his campaign to transfer control of the armed forces to Parliament by undermining confidence in the King and his ministers and by demonstrating the integrity of Parliament.
The Remonstrance was drafted between August and November 1641 by Pym and his supporters. These included John Hampden, John Glynn, Sir John Clotworthy, Arthur Goodwyn and others who later formed the ‘Middle Group’ that was associated with Pym’s efforts to bridge the parliamentarian ‘War’ and ‘Peace’ parties during the early years of the English Civil War.
The Grand Remonstrance was a long, wide-ranging document that listed all the grievances perpetrated by the King’s government in Church and State since the beginning of his reign. Rather than blaming the King himself, the Remonstrance emphasised the role of bishops, papists and ‘malignant’ ministers and advisers who were alleged to have deliberately provoked discord and division between King and Parliament.
In contrast, the Remonstrance described the measures taken by the Long Parliament towards rectifying these grievances during its first year in office, including the abolition of prerogative courts and illegal taxes, legislation for the regular summoning of Parliament, and a partial reform of the Church. Thus the House of Commons was presented as the true defender of the King’s rightful prerogative, of the Protestant faith, of the privileges of Parliament and the liberties of the people.
In order to continue its work, the Remonstrance called for the setting up of an Assembly of Divines, nominated by Parliament, to supervise ongoing reform of the Church; furthermore, it demanded that the King’s ministers should be approved by Parliament, with the right of veto over those it considered unsuitable.
On 22 November 1641, after a stormy debate that lasted long into the night, the House of Commons passed the Remonstrance by a narrow margin of 159 votes to 148. The King’s supporters who tried to enter a protest were shouted down in a bad-tempered confrontation that almost ended in a riot. Oliver Cromwell is said to have remarked that if the Remonstrance had not been passed he would have sold all he had and gone overseas to America.
Opponents of the Remonstrance, who included Viscount Falkland and Edward Hyde, formed what was, for the first time, a recognisable Royalist party in Parliament. The Remonstrance was presented to the King on 1 December 1641. He ignored it for as long as possible, so Parliament took the unprecedented step of having it printed and circulated in order to rally outside support. On 23 December, the King finally presented his reply. Drafted by Edward Hyde, it rejected the Remonstrance but in reasoned and conciliatory tones calculated to appeal to moderate opinion.
1643 The Solemn League and Covenant
The alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters was sealed with the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant by both Houses of Parliament and the Scottish commissioners on 25 September 1643. It was a military league and a religious covenant. Its immediate purpose was to overwhelm the Royalists, who in 1643 seemed in a strong position to win the English Civil War.
An alliance between Parliament and the Scots was first proposed by John Pym early in 1643. Parliament was anxious to secure military help from Scotland in order to counter Royalist victories in England. The Convention of Estates in Edinburgh favoured the alliance after the discovery of the Earl of Antrim’s conspiracy to bring over an Irish Catholic army to support a projected uprising of Scottish Royalists. However, the Covenanters regarded the alliance principally as a religious union of the two nations. They hoped to unite the churches of Scotland and England under a Presbyterian system of church government.
In August 1643, the four commissioners appointed by the House of Commons arrived in Edinburgh. They were Sir Henry Vane, Sir William Armyne, Thomas Hatcher and Henry Darley. They were accompanied by two clergymen, the Presbyterian Stephen Marshall and the Independent Philip Nye. Although the House of Lords had voted in favour of the alliance, no peers were prepared to go to Scotland to take part in the negotiations. Sir Henry Vane emerged as the leading spokesman of the English delegation.
Both sides were eager to defeat the Royalists so the negotiations proceeded quickly. The Westminster Parliament ratified the new covenant within two weeks of receiving it at the end of August 1643. Certain alterations were made to avoid an immediate commitment to strict Presbyterianism and these were accepted by the Convention of Estates.
The Scots agreed to send an army into England on condition that Parliament would co-operate with the Kirk in upholding the Protestant religion and uprooting all remaining traces of popery. Although it was implied that Presbyterian forms of worship and church government would be enforced in England, Wales and Ireland, the clause was qualified to read that church reform would be carried out ‘according to the Word of God’ – which was open to different interpretations.
Reform of the Anglican church was debated at the Westminster Assembly, but a Presbyterian religious settlement for England was strongly opposed by Independents and others. The settlement that was eventually imposed was regarded as a compromise by the Covenanters.
In January 1644, the Army of the Covenant marched into England to take the field against the Royalists. Parliament decreed that the Covenant was to be taken by every Englishman over the age of eighteen. Although no penalty was specified, the names of those who refused to sign were to be certified to Parliament. Signing the Covenant became a prerequisite for holding any command or office under Parliament until King Charles I made his own alliance with the Scots in 1648.
After the execution of Charles I, Kirk leaders pressed the Solemn League and Covenant on his son Charles II at the Treaty of Breda (1650). However, the defeat of the Royalist-Scots alliance at the battle of Worcester in September 1651 ended all attempts to impose Presbyterianism in England.
1646 The Newcastle Propositions
The Newcastle Propositions were drawn up by the Westminster Parliament as a basis for a treaty with King Charles I in July 1646 after the defeat of the Royalists in the First Civil War. The King had surrendered to Parliament’s Scottish allies rather than to Parliament itself and was held in semi-captivity at Newcastle.
There was resentment among English Parliamentarians that the King was in the hands of the Scots, and tension had increased after an intercepted letter revealed that secret negotiations had passed between the King and the Scots earlier in the year. Fearing that the alliance with Parliament was under threat, the Committee of Estates in Edinburgh instructed the Scottish commissioners in London to consent to Parliament’s proposals, even though they fell short of the Covenanters’ ideals in the settlement of religion.
The Propositions put to the King consisted of nineteen clauses. The main points were:
1647 The Heads of the Proposals
These were a set of propositions intended to be a basis for a constitutional settlement after King Charles I was defeated in the First English Civil War. The document was drafted by Commissionary-General Henry Ireton and Major-General John Lambert. during the summer of 1647 when the Army was engaged in a political power struggle with Presbyterian MPs over the settlement of the nation. The proposals were termed the ‘Heads’ to indicate that they were a broad outline, to be negotiated in detail later.
Although the Army proposals were more lenient than the terms offered in Parliament’s Newcastle Propositions, the King regarded them as too restrictive and rejected them outright. During the negotiations, Ireton and Cromwell lost the support of the Army radicals, who were disappointed that the proposals made no concessions to Leveller demands for a wider franchise, and who criticised the Grandees’ ‘servility’ in their dealings with the King.
Meanwhile, Charles continued his attempts to play off the Army and Parliament against one another. He also began secretly negotiating with a faction among the Scots, which was to lead to the Second Civil War in 1648.
At the Putney Debates (October-November 1647), where the Army Council discussed a new constitution for England, Ireton promoted the Heads of the Proposals as a moderate alternative to the Leveller-inspired Agreement of the People.
Six years later, elements of Ireton’s proposals were incorporated into the Instrument of Government – the written constitution that defined Cromwell’s powers as Lord Protector. The religious settlement proposed by Ireton in 1647 was virtually identical to that finally adopted in the Toleration Act of 1689.
1647 to 1649 An Agreement of the People
The Agreement of the People was the principal constitutional manifesto associated with the Levellers. It was intended to be a written constitution that would define the form and powers of government and would also set limits on those powers by reserving a set of inalienable rights to the people. It would take the form of a contract between the electorate and the representative, to be renewed at each election. The Agreement developed over several versions between October 1647 and May 1649.
Original Draft, 1647
An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right was first drafted in October 1647 when Agitators of the New Model Army and civilian Levellers collaborated to propose an outline for a new constitution in the aftermath of the First Civil War. It was probably drafted by John Wildman though its authorship is not known for certain. Stating that sovereign power should reside in the people of England rather than with the discredited King or Parliament, the original Agreement consisted of four clauses:
Certain constraints were placed on Parliament: it was not to interfere with freedom of religion; it was not to press men to serve in the armed forces; it could not prosecute anyone for their part in the recent war; it was not to exempt anyone from the ordinary course of the law; all laws passed by Parliament should be for the common good.
The proposals were debated at the Putney Debates of October and November 1647 where the Grandees Cromwell and Ireton tried to curb Leveller extremism, particularly over a proposal to extend the franchise to all adult males. Parliament denounced the Agreement as destructive to the government of the nation and ordered Fairfax to investigate its authorship. Attempts to gain wider Army support for the Agreement at the Corkbush Field rendezvous were forcibly suppressed by the Grandees.
The Whitehall Debates, 1648 to 1649
During 1648, civilian and military supporters of the Agreement continued to debate and refine its proposals. The Armies Petition or a new Engagement was drafted by a group of Agitators at St Albans in April 1648 and was published in tandem with a related civilian broadside, A New Engagement, or Manifesto. These documents expanded upon the original Agreement to include more specific proposals for legal and economic reform.
After the King’s defeat in the Second Civil War, John Lilburne promoted an extended version of the Agreement which was discussed by a committee of Levellers, London Independents, MPs and army Grandees at Whitehall in December 1648. These discussions took place in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge when the King’s trial was imminent.
Lilburne wanted to secure Parliament’s acceptance of the Agreement before the King was brought to trial so that the trial would have a basis in a legitimate and legal constitution. However, Lilburne and his colleague Richard Overton walked out of the discussions when Army officers led by Henry Ireton insisted upon making further modifications to the Agreement before it was presented to Parliament.
The discussions continued in Lilburne’s absence. While Ireton appeared to make concessions to the Levellers over the franchise, it is probable that he was playing for time to distract the Army Levellers while preparations for the King’s trial went ahead. The revised Agreement was finally presented to the House of Commons as a proposal for a new constitution on 20 January 1649, the very day that the public sessions of the High Court of Justice began. As Ireton had calculated, MPs postponed discussion of the Agreement until after the trial, and it was never taken up again by Parliament.
Final version, May 1649
The Grandees’ modification of the Agreement of January 1649 was the Army’s last official involvement in its evolution. However, Lilburne and the civilian Levellers regarded Ireton’s intervention as a betrayal and continued to refine their proposals. A fully developed version of the Agreement – An Agreement of the Free People of England, tendered as a Peace-Offering to this distressed Nation – was published in May 1649, signed jointly by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince. Its proposals included:
The final version was published after the Leveller leaders had been imprisoned by order of the Council of State and a few weeks before the suppression of the Army Levellers at Burford on 17 May 1649, after which the Leveller movement was effectively finished.
1648 The Army Remonstrance
The Remonstrance of General Fairfax and the Council of Officers was a manifesto adopted by the New Model Army in November 1648 to justify its intention to abandon treaty negotiations with King Charles and to bring him to trial as an enemy of the people. Although it was issued under the authority of Fairfax and the Council of Officers, the Remonstrance was primarily the work of Henry Ireton.
In September 1648, Parliament opened negotiations for a settlement with King Charles at the Treaty of Newport. However, Army radicals demanded that the negotiations should be abandoned and the King brought to justice for inflicting the Second Civil War upon the nation.
Ireton wrote to General Fairfax proposing that the Army should purge Parliament of MPs who supported the Treaty. After Fairfax rejected the proposal, Ireton began drafting the Remonstrance. Several petitions from radical regiments demanding justice against the King were presented to Fairfax during the following weeks, possibly under Ireton’s direction. Under pressure from the radicals, Fairfax agreed to call a meeting of the General Council of the Army at St Albans to discuss the situation. In contrast to the Putney Debates of the previous year, representatives of the common soldiers were excluded from the discussions.
The General Council convened in St Albans Abbey on 7 November 1648. After discussion of the petitions and general grievances of the soldiers, Ireton presented the draft of the Army Remonstrance on 10 November. It was initially rejected by Fairfax and the moderate officers but their opposition evaporated after 15 November when the House of Commons voted to allow the King to return to London on completion of the Newport Treaty and to restore his lands and revenues.
Fearing that Parliament intended to grant an unconditional restoration, the Army united behind Ireton’s Remonstrance. After some last-minute amendments to ensure the support of the Levellers, the Remonstrance was adopted by the General Council on 18 November 1648.
Under the maxim salus populi suprema lex (‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’), the Remonstrance proclaimed the sovereignty of the people under a representative government. Divine providence would prove the righteousness or otherwise of the government’s actions, and would also thwart unjustified rebellion against authority. Thus, the defeat of King Charles in the Second Civil War vindicated the actions of the Army as the defenders of the people. It was argued that the King should be brought to account because he had broken the sacred covenant with his people and attempted to place himself above the law.
The Remonstrance also proposed a set of Leveller-inspired constitutional reforms, including the possibility of an elective monarchy. Parliament was to set a date for its own dissolution, to be followed by annual or bi-annual Parliaments elected on a reformed franchise. There was to be a written constitution with a declaration of parliamentary authority over the King and Lords. All office-holders, including the monarch, were to subscribe to the Levellers’ Agreement of the People.
A delegation of officers headed by Colonel Ewer presented the Remonstrance to Parliament on 20 November. After an initial flurry of opposition led by William Prynne, Parliament postponed further discussion until treaty negotiations with the King at Newport were completed. Meanwhile, the Army moved its headquarters from St Albans to Windsor. On 28 November, the General Council of the Army resolved to march into London. With Parliament still refusing to discuss the Remonstrance and apparently intent on implementing the Treaty of Newport, Ireton initiated the train of events that led to Pride’s Purge in December 1648.
1649 England’s New Chains Discovered
On 26 February one of the leading radicals in the army, John Lilburne, published this attack on the new Commonwealth, in which he asserted the illegality of the High Court of Justice, the Council of State (which, he pointed out ,rested solely on the diminished or Rump Parliament) and the Council of the Army, which he accused of having become an instrument for the rich officers against the rank and file.
His agitation did not go unnoticed. In March 1649, Lilburne and other Leveller leaders were arrested. In October, Lilburne was brought to trial at the Guildhall, charged with high treason and with inciting the Leveller mutinies. He conducted his own defence, during which he raised strong objections to all aspects of the prosecution and quoted directly from Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes, or commentaries on the laws of England. The jury found Lilburne Not Guilty, to enthusiastic cheers from crowds of his supporters and well-wishers.
April 1649 The True Levellers Standard Advanced
This was the manifesto of the splinter group of Levellers who decided to put theory into practice and claimed a patch of common land near Weybridge in Surrey and began digging it. It was written by their leader Gerard Winstanley who has gone down as a hero to Marxists and left-leaning liberals. They thought all hierarchy should be abolished, wealth should be redistributed to abolish poverty, that the land was a common treasury and all the land parcelled out to households who would have equal rights to cultivate them and share the proceeds. As a result they were nicknamed the Diggers. Within months they’d been driven from the original site by the local landowners, and attempted their communal experiment in various other locations until fading away.
1650 The Treaty of Breda
After the execution of Charles I in January 1649, the Scottish Parliament proclaimed his son the new king, Charles II. However, the government of Scotland was dominated by the covenanting Kirk Party, which was determined that Charles should take the Covenant and agree to impose Presbyterianism throughout the Three Kingdoms before he could be crowned King of Scots or receive Scottish help to regain the throne of England.
Initial negotiations between Charles and representatives of the Scottish government were held at The Hague in March 1649 but broke down because Charles did not accept the legitimacy of the Kirk Party régime. However, his hopes of using Ireland as a rallying ground for the Royalist cause were thwarted by Cromwell’s invasion in August 1649. Various European heads of state offered sympathy but no practical help for regaining the throne, so Charles and his council were obliged to call for another round of negotiations with the Scots.
Negotiations between Charles II and a delegation of Scottish commissioners opened at Breda in the Netherlands on 25 March 1650. Aware of Charles’ desperate situation, the demands made by the Scottish Parliament were harsh:
Bad-tempered wrangling continued through March and April. Charles tried to gain concessions that would allow a reconciliation with the Engagers, who were excluded from office in Scotland by the Act of Classes. He would not impose Presbyterianism in England nor would he annul the Irish treaty. But to the dismay of English Royalists, Charles finally agreed to take the Oath of the Covenant. Other contentious issues were to be discussed upon his arrival in Scotland. He signed the Treaty of Breda on 1 May 1650 and took the Covenant immediately before landing in Scotland on 23 June 1650.
Charles then led a Scottish army into England which was comprehensively crushed at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, the final engagement of the war in England which had started in 1642. Charles escaped the battlefield and was on the run for 45 days till he managed to take ship to France and nine years of exile.
1653 The Instrument of Government
England’s first written constitution, the Instrument of Government was a constitutional settlement drafted by Major-General John Lambert during the autumn of 1653 and adopted by the Council of Officers when the Nominated Assembly surrendered its powers to Oliver Cromwell in December.
Lambert’s original intention had been that the old constitution of King, Lords and Commons should be replaced by one of King, Council and Parliament. In discussion with a few trusted advisers after the abdication of the Nominated Assembly, Cromwell amended the Instrument to avoid reference to the royal title, which was likely to be unacceptable to the Army.
Under the terms of the Instrument of Government, executive power passed to an elected Lord Protector, in consultation with a Council of State numbering between thirteen and twenty-one members. Cromwell was declared Lord Protector for life, though it was stressed that the office was not hereditary. He was required to call triennial Parliaments consisting of a single House of 400 members from England and 30 each from Scotland and Ireland, to remain in session for at least five months.
Parliamentary constituencies were re-arranged in an attempt to lessen the influence of the gentry in favour of the emerging middle class who, it was hoped, would be more inclined to support the Protectorate government. The number of MPs from towns and boroughs (where voting was traditionally influenced by the local gentry) was significantly reduced and representation of the universities was limited. To balance the representative, the number of MPs from the counties was correspondingly increased.
In a direct repudiation of Leveller ideas, the county franchise was restricted to persons with land or personal property valued at £200 or more. The borough franchise remained with aldermen, councillors and burgesses. Furthermore, Roman Catholics and known Royalists were declared ineligible to vote or seek election.
Under the Instrument, Parliament was charged with raising revenue for establishing and maintaining a standing army of 10,000 horse and dragoons and 20,000 foot for the defence of England, Scotland and Ireland.
Liberty of worship was granted to all except Roman Catholics and those guilty of ‘licentiousness’ (i.e. the extreme sectarians).
The Instrument of Government was England’s first written constitution. It was adopted by the Council of Officers on 15 December 1653 and Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector the next day. The First Protectorate Parliament duly assembled on 3 September 1654. However, the abrupt termination of Parliament in January 1655 meant that MPs never finished revising the Instrument of Government and so it was never legally endorsed. Doubts regarding its legal authority led to the resignation of the Lord Chief Justice Henry Rolle in June 1655.
The Instrument was superseded in 1657 by the Humble Petition and Advice.
1657 Humble Petition and Advice
The Humble Petition and Advice was a constitutional document drawn up by a group of MPs in 1657 under which Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was offered the Crown. It represented an attempt by civilian Parliamentarians to move back towards traditional forms of government after the imposition of various army-led constitutional experiments, in particular the unpopular Rule of the Major-Generals.
The offer of the Crown was intended to limit Cromwell’s power rather than extend it, because as King his power would be defined by precedent. The Humble Petition aimed to legitimise the constitution since it came from an elected Parliament, unlike its predecessor the Instrument of Government.
The first version of the Humble Petition was known as the Humble Address and Remonstrance. It was drafted by a small group which included Lord Broghill, Edward Montagu and Oliver St John. The Remonstrance was brought before the Second Protectorate Parliament on 23 February 1657 by Sir Christopher Packe, a former lord mayor of London. It included proposals for the re-introduction of a second House of Parliament and for the establishment of a national church regulated by a Confession of Faith, but its most controversial proposal was that the Protector should be invited to assume the office and title of King.
This proposal was supported by most lawyers and civilian MPs but was fiercely opposed by Major-General Lambert and other army officers as well as by republicans and religious radicals.
Cromwell agonised over the decision for several months and finally declined the offer of the Crown on 8 May. A revised version of the proposal, which avoided reference to the royal title, was adopted on 25 May. Cromwell was re-installed as Lord Protector in a ceremony still reminiscent of a royal coronation on 26 June 1657.
Under the new constitution, Cromwell was to remain Lord Protector for life and could now choose his own successor. He was required to call triennial Parliaments which were to consist of two chambers: the elected House of Commons and a second chamber, or Upper House (referred to only as the ‘other house’), of between forty and seventy persons nominated by the Protector but approved by Parliament. The Upper House was intended to mediate between the Lower House and the Protector. It had the right to veto any legislation passed in the Lower House and was roundly condemned by republicans as too reminiscent of the old House of Lords. The Council of State was to become the Protector’s privy council, consisting of 21 members chosen by the Protector and approved by Parliament.
After the Instrument of Government, the Humble Petition and Advice was England’s second – and last – written constitution. It differed significantly from the Instrument in that it was drawn up by civilian parliamentarians rather than by army officers and also in that it was legally endorsed by Parliament. It remained in force throughout the remainder of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and during the brief jurisdiction of his successor Richard Cromwell.
1660 The Declaration of Breda
This was a manifesto issued in April 1660 by the exiled Charles II in which he outlined his initial terms for the Restoration of the monarchy. The Declaration was drawn up by Charles himself and his three principal advisers, Sir Edward Hyde, the Marquis of Ormond and Sir Edward Nicholas.
In March 1660, shortly after the final dissolution of the Long Parliament, General George Monck entered into secret negotiations with Charles’ representative Sir John Grenville regarding the possibility of the King’s return to power. Grenville was authorised to offer Monck high office in return for his help, while Monck himself claimed to have always been secretly working towards the Restoration – a view that came to be widely accepted later.
Monck’s terms were geared primarily towards satisfying the material concerns of the army:
Following Monck’s advice to move from Spanish territory to Breda in the Protestant Netherlands, Charles and his principal advisers prepared a conciliatory declaration that touched upon the major issues of indemnity, confirmation of land sales and the religious settlement. A free pardon and amnesty was offered to all who would swear loyalty to the Crown within forty day of the King’s return.
However, Charles skirted around all points of contention by referring the final details of the Restoration settlement to a future Parliament. Charles was aware that any legislation passed by the forthcoming Convention Parliament would have to be confirmed or refuted by a later Parliament summoned under the King’s authority, and that the blame for inevitable disappointments in the Restoration settlement would then be borne by Parliament rather than by the Crown.
Smart thinking.
The Declaration was signed by Charles on 4 April 1660. Copies were prepared with separate letters to the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the army, the fleet and the City of London. Monck was offered a commission as commander-in-chief of the army. When Sir John Grenville delivered the Declaration to the newly-elected Convention Parliament on 1 May, both Houses unanimously voted for the Restoration.
Sources
The period 1649 to 1658 is covered by pages 189 to 212 of A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky. I’ve also sourced information from Wikipedia. But the main source for a lot of this information was the excellent British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate website, which covers all aspects of the subject and includes really excellent maps.
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Posted by Simon on August 30, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/political-documents-of-the-civil-wars/