On March 23, 1540, Henry VIII bagged Waltham Abbey. Which might not sound like much, since he bagged a lot of abbeys in a violent, greedy, unlawful and frankly barbaric manner. What makes Waltham special is that it was the last in his dispossession of the English church. Not because he thought better of it, but because it was the last important one left.

There is little doubt about the violent, bullying manner in which the abbeys were seized following Henry’s break with Rome. And it was distinctly greedy in that instead of keeping them operating as Anglican abbeys, which would surely have been logical given that Henry did not actually propose changing the theology of England, he just wanted to be Pope and get to bed Anne Boleyn, he broke them up and grabbed the proceeds or handed them out to his supporters.

Doing so was also illegal even if the dissolution itself was not. I rather think it was; at that time there were constitutional limits on what could be done in England even by act of Parliament duly passed and approved by the Monarch. And Magna Carta’s guarantee of liberty to the Church seems to me to protect it from being suddenly seized, plundered and subverted by a grasping, thuggish, lecherous king.

Even if you grant all that, here’s the problem. The legal rule is that if a charitable entity is dissolved, the assets are to revert to the original donors or their heirs and assigns where they can be identified. And the property of the great abbeys and monasteries was, by and large, the result of contributions by the English, especially obviously the nobility. So even if dissolving the monasteries was lawful, keeping the loot wasn’t. And I’ll bet you pounds sterling to pease porridge in a pot three days old that if Henry hadn’t been able to plunder them he wouldn’t have dissolved them.

Finally, the dissolution was barbaric, in that the seized buildings, often many centuries old, were frequently not just vandalized but knocked down. I’ve actually been to Evesham Abbey, or what’s left of it, while we were making the Magna Carta documentary. Founded at some point between 700 and 710 AD, it stood for nearly 1000 years before Henry’s henchthugs demolished everything but the bell tower. And it’s just heartbreaking to think of what beautiful, old, dignified buildings, surely hallowed by long reverence even if you’re not Christian, were maliciously knocked down just to make the point that Henry had a big fist.

The same is true at Waltham where, incidentally, some rumours hold that whatever the Normans left of Harold Godwinson eventually got buried because he had refounded it in 1060. That’s right. Refounded. The abbey had been a place of worship since the 7^th century, the very early post-Roman evangelization of Britain. For a man once dubbed “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope, and who kept the title even as he chucked the Pope under the wagon, to show so little reverence for so many centuries of worship is simply barbaric.

The dissolution of the monasteries and the seizing of church property had many other implications. Some were not all that bad, at least in that England under the Anglican Church remained as free as it had been under Catholicism. Arguably that was due to the English devotion to liberty not to Henry’s institutional aggression. But however it happened, it remains true. And the Anglican church has inspired much genuine piety and filled the lives of untold millions since. But some consequences of Henry’s cynical, intolerant, lustful lunge for control of the English church were problematic.

A serious period of religious upheaval and persecution was one. The collapse of the existing, long-standing, flexible, decentralized, human-centred welfare network maintained by the church was another. It led to various unhappy experiments with public relief including the Poor Law passed under Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I that funded welfare from taxes and created all sorts of issues with dependence and public resentment.

When you bend or break the law to seize ancient places of worship, pass the proceeds to your buddies, and vandalize holy places centuries old, you just have to be on the wrong track. Fortunately such wholesale breaches of liberty and decency were comparatively rare in England. But they did sometimes happen, including this egregious example under the egregious Henry VIII.

It’s heartbreaking to think of the beautiful buildings, the site and focus of so much devotion for so many centuries, barbarically knocked down.

On this date back in 1622, March 22, thousands of Indians around the fledgling struggling Jamestown settlement struck suddenly and treacherously, wiping out about a quarter of the English inhabitants. The result, obviously, was decisive in the balance of power. Jamestown flattened the attackers.

No. Really. The stunned colonists rallied, struck back, and crushed the power of the Powhatan Confederacy forever. If you needed proof of the lopsided nature of the collision between the “old” and “new” worlds, look no further than this incident.

I don’t totally blame the Indians. Under Powhatan they had welcomed the English at first. But gradually it had dawned on at least some of them that the newcomers were here to stay and, if not pushed into the sea, would disrupt the traditional way of life beyond recognition.

Among those most militant on this point was Powhatan’s brother or perhaps half-brother Opechancanough, who became head of the Confederacy shortly after Powhatan’s death in 1618. It was he who captured John Smith and brought him before Powhatan where Pocahontas famously saved him, perhaps spontaneously, perhaps in a piece of carefully contrived theatre. When he took over, he decided to strike. And while I cannot applaud the treacherous nature of the attack, in which the Indians came to trade as usual and at a signal slaughtered those who had welcomed them, I do understand his concerns.

Which is more than he did. His unease was justified, of course. But also rendered pointless, even dangerous, by his and his fellows’ inability to understand what was upon them.

At first they treated the Europeans as just one more tribe, useful in the habitual trading, maneuvering and skirmishing between various tribes and tribal groupings. Their strangely huge ships, wonderful technology and different skin colour were more or less written off as anomalies because they lay too far outside the experience of the native Americans to be assimilated into any other category. To them life was on a small scale; Powhatan and his advisors knew nothing of Indian tribes a few hundred miles away whereas the English knew about distant lands; indeed John Smith had been to Turkey (where he escaped slavery by killing his captor and fleeing on his horse) and Russia.

Gradually it dawned on the aboriginals around Jamestown that something else was happening, something far bigger than anything in their experience. But they simply couldn’t figure out what it was. Indeed, when Powhatan sent a trusted advisor to England with Pocahontas in 1616, he told him to count the English by cutting notches in a stick to report back how strong they were. As Smith noted, he soon grew “weary of that task”.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the crucial factor in the displacement of aboriginals by Europeans in the New World was diseases. But those diseases, and the lack of resistance to them, arose from intensive farming and urban living in Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia. And urban living and intensive farming were not isolated developments. They were the product initially of far more favourable geographic conditions, combined with the accident of a profusion of highly productive domesticable plants and animals in the “fertile crescent” with no equivalent in the Americas, that created a social and intellectual dynamism from the alphabet to monotheism to metallurgy and on down the line with no New World equivalent.

By the time Opechancanough launched his attack, just 15 years after Jamestown was founded by a handful of baffled, starving, disease-ridden Englishmen financed by delusional backers, the resulting imbalance was so great that the success of his assault, particularly given its treacherous quality, only doomed his people to lethal retaliation.

If it hadn’t happened it would be hard to credit. The Powhatan Confederacy numbered in the tens of thousands. Yet fewer than a thousand English, including women and children, were capable of routing them militarily following a stunning, shocking slaughter, and drive them to the margins of the contested territory, and there was never anything the aboriginals could do, then or later, to stem the tide.

It is no reflection on them as individuals or as human beings. It is a question of culture and technology feeding back on one another, creating a dynamic social organization among whose critical features is that the Europeans had a very accurate impression of the locals, their numbers, their way of life, their military abilities and everything else, while the aboriginals were utterly baffled by everything about the Europeans including the likely result even of a dramatically successful surprise attack.

Sometimes you do history a big favour by losing a battle. For instance Ragenfrid. Mind you he seems to have had a lot of practice. But the key moment was when he flopped against Charles Martel at Vincy on March 21 of 717 AD. I’d shake his boney hand if anyone was sure where it was, because if he’d beaten Martel it might have meant no Battle of Tours 15 years later.

The latter, it might not be politically correct to point out even if it is factually accurate, stopped the Muslim invasion of France just 240 kilometres from Paris or, in those unenlightened times, 150 miles. It’s not obvious, to me at least, what exactly the Muslims were doing invading France. Doubtless some grievance deeply rooted in history, possibly involving Israel and the United States.

You know. The usual. But whatever the cause, Charles Martel was there to stop them and drive them back into Spain, where they remained for almost eight more centuries.

Formally his title was Duke and Prince of the Franks and Mayor of the Palace, the latter essentially chief of staff to the king. Informally I think it was “the guy who convinced people he could do the job”. But he was only in a position to do so because he’d seen off various rivals including Ragenfrid who had been Mayor of the Palace of Neustria and Burgundy, one of many fragmentary Frankish kingdom-like objects clonking together in the area at the time. By 718 Charles Martel was basically master of the whole mess.

Ragenfrid himself didn’t defeat easily. Or perhaps he did since it seemed to happen a lot before he finally and decisively threw in the towel. I’m not sure if anyone knows a whole lot about him, including whether he was actually called Ragenfred, Raganfrid, Ragamfred or just “that guy fleeing the battlefield” except that after finally admitting he was not winning battles in 720, and again in 724, he lived until 731 as a count in Anjou. Maybe he wasn’t worth getting a sword dirty to kill.

Martel was another story. Although he never formally declared himself king, he did make his son Pepin the first Carolingian king and his son you’ve certainly heard of: Charlemagne or “Big Chuck”. But none of that would have happened, nor a great deal else either, if it hadn’t been for the hapless Ragenfrid’s defeat at Vincy.

Worth him showing up for, I’d say.

You can’t go back to Constantinople. Or ancient Rome. But people used to think there were lessons there including, even, the brief reign of Maximinus Thrax. Whoever he was.

This is a genuine question. Thrax, the first “foreigner”, meaning barbarian, to become Emperor, on March 21 235, was clearly not from the Roman elite. Rather, he was a soldier of obscure peasant origins, one of a number of “barracks emperors” who fought and murdered their way to the throne only to be removed the same way. Thrax himself died during a Senatorial revolt in 238, and his reign, such as it was, is generally held to begin the “Crisis of the Third Century” also known as “Military Anarchy” (that can’t be good) in which 26 men claimed the imperial purple with sufficient plausibility to be recognized by the Senate in fifty years, and the Empire split into three hostile states.

Thrax himself is described as the product of a Gothic father and an Alanic mother by a history, the “Augustan”, that nobody believes anyway. So his identity is sort of a “maxi-minus” problem (a little joke for mathematicians there). And again his reign mattered far less for who he was or what he did than for what he ushered it.

What I find remarkable about the whole business is that after 50 years of apparently fatal turmoil, the anarchy was ushered out again. With the accession of Aurelian in 270, and the reforms of Diocletian in 284, the Empire rebounded. It is a tribute to its underlying dynamic strength that it could endure such a process.

I know, I know. It eventually folded up in the 5^th century, although in a very real sense it never fell and we still live in it today. The West, with its liberty under law, its Christianity, and its sense of the value of the individual, is distinctly Roman, with important improvements most notably in functioning representative institutions. If you want to know whether a country is decent to live in, the fastest test is whether it is part of the lands the Romans ruled or places settled from those lands, excepting those torn away from this patrimony most notably by Islam.

Following the “Crisis of the Third Century” and the restoration of sensible order, you get names we have once again heard of, including Diocletian and of course Constantine under whom, it was once generally known, Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, having conquered from within and below rather than above and without. Also Valentinian I, the last emperor whose reign was so successful as to recall the glory days of emperors from Augustus to Hadrian or Septimius Severus and obscure the long period of crisis between the two.

Ultimately Rome did fall formally in the West, and after a very long decline its very different Eastern branch bought it in 1453 leaving a far less solid legacy. But it took a lot of ruin to do it in after many remarkable centuries of solid achievements as well as idiotic politics, intrigues that put soap operas to shame and realpolitik in foreign policy that did sometimes forget elementary decency but also kept the genuine barbarians at bay for many long years and often persuaded them by its example to abandon barbarism.

So robust was Rome that even a half-century-long parade of characters like Maximinus Thrax couldn’t manage to stink the place out all that badly. Not a claim most empires, or political organizations of any sort, can make.

“The greatest sin is not to be filled with joy.” Rabbi Leveratov (but while this quotation is widely cited online, Google thinks the proper spelling of the name is Levertov and offers no instances of a “Rabbi Leveratov” other than this quotation, or any indication which “Rabbi Levertov” if any it’s actually from; anyone who knows please drop me a note)

On March 19 the English House of Commons ditched the House of Lords. No, really.

Boldly modern, impatient and irritable with archaic institutions, they said indignantly that “The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued, have thought fit to ordain and enact, and be it ordained and enacted by this present Parliament, and by the authority of the same, that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away; and that the Lords shall not from henceforth meet or sit in the said House called the Lords' House, or in any other house or place whatsoever ...” It didn’t take, though.

You see, that measure was passed in 1649 by a Commonwealth Parliament that was, itself, remarkably undemocratic, even unconstitutional, having been purged by the army of all members not sufficiently radical for Cromwell. The House of Lords stayed gone for just over a decade, and then reappeared in the Stuart Restoration. To be sure, the Stuart Restoration didn’t pan out all that well; two monarchs later, they had to be chased out again and two monarchs after that the line fizzled out except for irritating pretenders who kept luring the Scots into singularly ill-considered uprisings. But the Lords remained.

In doing so they taught an important lesson. Institutions that are overly rational without arising organically from the people have trouble functioning properly. And institutions that lack checks and balances are perilous to liberty and stability alike.

The best situation is organically developed institutions that check one another. Indeed the Lords, an extremely important but not dominant part of the Parliament for centuries, was a bulwark of republicanism against extreme democracy.

Pardon me if I just caused you to snort a beverage out your nose at my description of monarchical Britain as a republic in part because of its hereditary aristocracy. But ages wiser than our own understood that the essence of a republic was not whether it had, say, Prince Charles in it. It was whether it was a “public thing” (res publica being the Latin root here), whether it was a polity in which the rule of law prevailed, the people were ultimately masters, and reasons of state could not trump due process.

In that very important sense, England was a republic from before Magna Carta, and was so described in polemics over the years, from the revolt of the Percies against Henry IV (“Therefore we send mortal diffidatio to you and your accomplices and allies, as traitors and destroyers to the respublica of the realm and invaders [of the right] of the true and direct heir to England and France…”) to John Adams (“They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men.”). And those who most aggressively sought to make it a “republic” in the superficial sense, Cromwell’s Puritans, actually made it much less of one by substituting force for law and the form for the substance of self-government.

As I said, their language resonates today. But not in a good way.

So close… and yet so far. That’s my feeling about Edward Clark becoming governor of Texas on March 18, 1861.

Well, no. Actually I have no feelings about Clark becoming governor of Texas or anything else about him. Except in this one regard. He became governor because they booted out Sam Houston for refusing to endorse Texas seceding from the Union and joining the Confederacy.

Sam Houston had a very interesting life and not only for winning the pivotal Battle of San Jacinto and securing Texas independence after being repeatedly criticized for lacking fighting spirit. He is the only man popularly elected governor of two different states (both starting with T, namely Tennessee and Texas) and he is the last former foreign head of state to sit in the United States Congress, having been President of Texas twice during its brief period of Independence and then a United States Senator from Texas from 1846-1859. Here’s the “so close… and yet” bit.

Houston was the only governor of a future Confederate state to refuse to endorse secession or take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. And earlier in his career, including in Congress, he was an opponent of the most egregious abuses committed by the American government against aboriginals. Indeed, his second wife was a Cherokee. You could almost get the impression he was far more decent on race than most of his compatriots northern or southern. Except he was a slave-owner and an opponent of abolition.

He opposed the Civil War primarily on the grounds that the South would lose. Which again makes him more far-sighted than the vast majority of Southerners. A passionate supporter of the Union in principle, vehement in opposition to secession from the late 1840s on, a man who warned that “A nation divided against itself cannot stand” in 1850, eight years before Lincoln immortalized this paraphrase of Matthew 12:25 in this context, Houston also realized the war would be long and destructive without being successful.

In 1854, as one of only two Southern Senators to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he thundered “... what fields of blood, what scenes of horror, what mighty cities in smoke and ruins—it is brother murdering brother ... I see my beloved South go down in the unequal contest, in a sea of blood and smoking ruin.”

If he could see that far, he was far from ordinary in his perceptions and cannot claim simply to have been one among many whose vision was restricted. So why couldn’t he see that the “peculiar institution” that was, despite any amount of Southern apologetics, the central and indispensable cause of the war, was also wrong?

As I’ve noted elsewhere, slavery was an issue too big for politics, one on which the habitual equivocation of the greasy-pole-climbers was ruinous to their own careers as well as their nation. Houston himself, having opposed joining the Confederacy, refused Lincoln’s offer of 50,000 federal troops to put down the rebellion. He loved Texas too much to make war on its white populace who did overwhelmingly favour secession. And yet the result was that he faded from the scene. Honoured as he has been since his death, by a city, naval vessels, an army base and a national forest, he simply withdrew from public life while the catastrophe unfolded around him, and died in 1863 in Huntsville, TX.

For all his flaws, he was a great man. Yet even he stumbled, and fell, on this critical issue of racial slavery, unable to support abolition or secession and with no third option available. It is one of those, rare but not unique, where no amount of equivocation, dissembling or even prudent moderation is appropriate to the occasion. And those who did see better than their fellows on so many points have, I fear, even less excuse for not seeing clearly here.

On March 17 of 1677 France captured Valenciennes in the Franco-Dutch War. Would you please stop it? I mean seriously. Just stop it.

It’s another of those events that doesn’t really jump out of the pages of history. Although I wouldn’t have wanted to be there when it happened, its unpleasantness was mostly localized. But this is one of those wars that help make Europe’s ancien regime, and the various excuses put forward for war in general, seem at once pitiful and vicious.

In case you missed it, France and the Netherlands had been allies for about a century, despite being religious and economic rivals. But then the Dutch suddenly signed an alliance with England in 1668, after fighting them twice in 16 years (Sweden was also involved, in one of those “Triple Alliances” you don’t want to have to memorize). So French King Louis XIV decided to attack the Netherlands, on the general theory that attacking all and sundry was both moral and prudent.

He convinced the English to back the war, partly because its Stuart king Charles II was on the French take to avoid having to listen to Parliament. And he got the Dutch “ally” Sweden to threaten to wallop Brandenburg-Prussia if it tried to help the Netherlands. Clearly with friends like this you don’t need enemies.

In the chaos of European dynastic, religious and just plain stupid war you probably will pick up a coalition of friends, mind you. And sure enough, Prussia-Brandenburg did come in anyway, joined by “the Austrian Hapsburg lands” that would later coalesce, sort of, into Austria-Hungary or something equally feeble, and also Spain for some reason if indeed anyone really needed one.

So they marched around betraying each other and killing people until they decided to stop for a bit, and signed the Treaty of Nijmegen under which Spain lost the Franche-Comté and a few cities in Flanders and Hainaut to France, while France gave the Dutch Republic Maastricht and the Principality of Orange. So I can’t even tell who won and, apparently, they couldn’t either.

It didn’t matter. Europe went on having wars like “the War of the Reunions” (I know you’re not always glad to see old classmates but really) and those the Americans derided as “King William’s War” and “Queen Anne’s War” and “the War of Jenkin’s Ear”. It really is like that Monty Python sketch about the complexities of European politics except, as noted, if you happened to be there and died a grisly death.

Wars like the Franco-Dutch war could easily create the impression that all war is futile, at once silly and brutally cynical. But it’s not. I’m no pacifist, as regular readers are well aware. I don’t glorify war. I just say it’s necessary to be ready at all times to fight in defence of liberty and decency given how often people start wars for utterly worthless reasons.

Like whatever that business was about Hainault and Maastricht which wasn’t even why they started it to begin with, that turned innocent bystanders as well as soldiers in places like Valenciennes into mangled corpses.