On May 10 back in 1773 the British got themselves into a mess of hot water with the Tea Act. This measure, a.k.a. 13 Geo 3 c 44 when it received royal assent on that date, was itself the product of some hot Pacific water. But it brewed up an Atlantic-sized helping.

The basic problem, or so they thought, was that the East India Company was a victim of its own success, with so much tea in its London warehouses that it was going to go broke in the face of low taxes. Well, also a victim of mercantilism, a cunning plan to enrich a nation by restricting trade of the sort we never seem to hear the end of.

The basic solution, or so they thought, was to allow the East India Company to ship tea directly to the North American colonies rather than having to send it through London, and to export tea duty-free from London. There would still be an import levy when it arrived in America. But the tea would be cheaper for the colonists who would therefore be happy, and profits would be higher for the company which would therefore survive.

Except the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay and when the men are in government the plans aren’t always very well laid to begin with.

In this case two things went wrong.

The first was that the Americans, as true English people, were busily evading excessive taxes by smuggling. So the new, lower duties were actually going to cost them more if they were rigorously collected as the British also intended.

The second was that the Americans, as true English people, were utterly opposed to taxation without representation. So much so that even a tax cut enacted without their consent was resented to the point of active, throw-it-in-the-harbor resistance.

The colonists had already shown mighty opposition to the Stamp Act levies of 1765, taxes imposed without the agreement of their legislatures, which they rightly believed violated a guarantee over 500 years old in Magna Carta against levies without the consent of the kingdom (“nisi per commune consilium regni nostri”). But politics is too often about cunning rather than principle and, as Sir Humphrey Appleby memorably observed, while statesmanship “is about surviving into the next century; politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.”

The colonists were not impressed. They took up arms in small, local actions against the landing of tea and famously on December 16 1773 they took up tea chests and gave them the old heave ho into Boston Harbor. The British doubled down on their coercion, suspending local democracy and pushing the colonists into taking up arms on a large scale and ultimately dismembering the first British Empire.

Interestingly, the British in 1778 repealed the tea tax in the Taxation of Colonies Act that said Parliament would not impose any internal taxes, only external ones, which had been the colonial demand a decade earlier. But by then it was too late. The war was under way and it was sovereignty rather than the details of administration that were at stake. For what it’s worth, the Tea Act itself lingered pointlessly on until 1861 long after bad coffee had become the American national drink, the 13 colonies had become the American nation and Britain had been converted from mercantilism to fervent advocacy of free trade. As for the East India Company, it was effectively nationalized in 1773 and survived in this odd hybrid form until the Indian Mutiny of 1857. On the whole it doesn’t seem to have been very good for the Empire.

Nor did the assumption that people in the Anglosphere would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. The authorities in London cynically assumed a tax cut would buy acquiescence in taxation without representation in Boston, Charleston and points between. To be sure, they even bungled the tax cut. But the deeper point was that in those days, freedom didn’t have a price.

If it does today, we’re getting ourselves into even hotter water than the British did with the Tea Act.

This one is more weird than inspiring. Apparently May 9 is the first recorded appearance in England of the guy who would become “Mr. Punch” in the Punch and Judy show. Samuel Pepys recorded it in his diary, a marionette show by an Italian. It’s a pity they didn’t deport him. Mr. Punch, I mean.

In case you aren’t familiar with Punch and Judy… neither am I. I gather it’s a violent puppet show where Mr. Punch hits a lot of people while mistreating a baby. You just can’t buy that kind of entertainment. Or rather, you can but you shouldn’t want to. Basically what happens is Mr. Punch clowns around on stage and hurts people, provoking shocked laughter by people who already know what’s coming and don’t know what’s funny.

Somehow Punch became an emblem of Britain, “a subversive maverick who defies authority” according to one performer. If so Britain has a hunchback, bad clothes sense, a big hook nose and an even bigger stick. Oh, and he talks through a sort of a kazoo thing to the point that enthusiasts debate whether it’s a real Punch and Judy show if the main character’s voice is “non-swazzled”. There must be something better to worry about in life.

Maybe I will now get angry letters from aficionados of this traditional entertainment derived from 16^th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, a term I gather means comedy of art despite, at least in this derivation, containing neither. Yet it is elaborate, long-standing, formalized and thus has to have fans and even the sort of hobbyists who pore over the details and discuss the canon.

Yes, the canon. You see Punch and Judy does have a kind of set format within which there’s considerable fluidity. Apparently Punch no longer hits his wife or the baby, though he still sits on it. And you still have the crocodile, clown, policeman and string of sausages and the audience shouts warnings like “Look out there’s a crocodile.” Hilarious. The devil is apparently optional though for my money he can take the whole show.

The good news is that television apparently didn’t make us stupid or debase popular entertainment. The bad news is it didn’t need to.

Incidentally Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker features a post-nuclear culture some 2,000 years in the future based on fragmentary remembrance of Saint Eustace and Punch and Judy which have somehow been combined in a way that makes no sense.

Sort of like how Punch came to England, was allowed to stay and became wildly popular in the first place.

Speaking of the French revolution, today is the day they cut off chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s head, on May 8 1794, for putting water in the tobacco or something. He hadn’t. But the French revolution wasn’t hung up, or chopped off, on that sort of technicality. He was tried, convicted and guillotined on the same day. And two years later another regime sent his widow a note saying sorry.

Now Lavoisier seems to have been an excellent chemist and a brilliant self-promoter. He is widely considered the “father of modern chemistry” although he drew rather heavily on the work of others. But there’s no real question that he was instrumental in changing chemistry into a mathematically precise science. (Regular readers will know that I am on the whole opposed to the quantification of things. But I don’t object to it in sciences where it works, definitely including chemistry. What I mind is thinking that chemistry is the model for all knowledge and trying to quantify history or sociology.)

Lavoisier helped create the metric system, which I do consider bad. But he wrote the first thorough list of chemical elements, predicted silicon, showed sulphur was an element not a compound, helped get rid of phlogiston and so on. A lot of good things, none of which you’d probably be inclined to kill a man for.

He was also an important aristocrat, which was the sort of thing they killed you for in France in 1794. Worse, he had taken part in the rightly loathed “Ferme générale,” a lawless system of farming out tax collection that encouraged rapaciousness. And he did profit from his place in the ancien régime to support his studies and his lifestyle. On the other hand, he was an efficient public servant, especially by the standards of France in his day. As a member of the Gunpowder Commission he dramatically improved the quality and profitability of its manufacture and, being something of a “chancer” as the British put it, also bagged a house and laboratory in the Royal Arsenal.

Moreover, as an enlightened 18^th-century-style liberal, he was trying to reform the system from within, putting forward proposals to reform taxation, monetary policy and education in the interest of the common people. He was quite mistaken about the ability or desire of “enlightened” despots to adopt good ideas, though very right to fear the violence that might erupt if sensible reforms were not undertaken. And indeed he was caught up in the “deluge” predicted by Louis XV, not least because the Ferme Générale was so rightly hated. But also because the revolution like Saturn devoured even its own children and certainly everyone else; all France’s learned societies were suppressed on August 8 1793 in a singularly virulent outbreak of the notion that all you need is political will. And he was executed along with 27 codefendants on May 8 of the next year.

Clearly the charges were trumped up, at least in his case, from plundering the people and treasury to funding France’s enemies to the business about tobacco, I presume fraudulently to increase its weight. He was posthumously exonerated and his name is now inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. Whereas phlogiston has not been rehabilitated.

An important lesson here is that in politics it is far easier to acquire the vices of our adversaries than their virtues. Lavoisier is exactly the sort of man the monarchy should have listened to and the revolution should have cherished. And exactly the sort of man neither would have and neither did.

You know what’s cool? Versailles, for one thing. What a pity it was ever built.

No, really. It is very nice, and was probably a lot nicer when it was in a bucolic village miles from the stench and upheaval of Paris instead of being smack dab inside it. It was begun on May 7 back in 1664 by Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” precisely to get away from the rabble and carry on as if they didn’t exist except on tax day.

Actually Louis XIV began the palace proper. His father Louis XIII had built a hunting lodge there and the Sun King expanded it in characteristically grandiose fashion. But it was unfortunately a symbol, and a product, of an arrogant, out-of-touch government that loved to display its magnificence regardless of the cost, one to which humility was not so much a virtue rarely practised as a distant rumour.

It’s also a sobering reflection on the odd business of architecture that the resources of the absolute French monarchy could conjure up such a brilliant building. But living in it didn’t do anything to elevate them in desirable ways. In a fascinating meditation on architecture, philosopher Alain de Botton has written in The Architecture of Happiness that “Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch.”

Certainly saints have flourished in dumps and tyrants and layabouts have misspent their lives in mansions. And yet most of us try, within the limits of the possible, to make the place we live nice and even, sometimes, the place we work.

I think part of the key is whether the place is nice honestly, because we put the sweat of our own brow into it or, in hiring designers and workers, paid them properly and listened carefully to their advice while retaining independent judgement. If by contrast we coerced others into doing the work or paying for it, if we strove for effect rather than genuine comfort and organic beauty, the chances are that the magnificence would corrupt rather than ennoble us.

Certainly it did not help that Louis XIV forced French nobles to spend much of the year at Versailles rather than in the regions where they actually held land, simultaneously preventing them from developing decentralized power that might have checked the French state before it pranced into revolutionary disasters and from developing genuine organic links with the populace in those regions, thus keeping the revolution from degenerating into such a vicious class war. It cannot have improved the character of the nobles to spend so much time living so high off the hog at other people’s expense while doing nothing more useful than seeking to flatter and intrigue their way into the monarch’s favour. The French thought they were better than the British because they had more spectacular royal palaces. The reverse was in fact true.

Thus Versailles was an incredibly beautiful building that did its occupants, and via them its nation, much harm. You definitely want to visit if you’re in the area. And it should never have been built.

Ahh, the wonders of the steam age. For instance May 6^th is the anniversary of the opening of the Glaciarium back in 1844. It was, of course, the world’s first mechanically frozen skating rink.

Quaint. Especially the name, you may say. Even in the 1950s it would have seemed corny. And it may not seem like a giant leap for mankind, or possibly a giant glide or even a giant Lutz, that inhabitants of London, England could skate without going outside. Especially as the Glaciarium and associated enterprises tended to fail due to excessive mist, even as rising temperatures as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age put an end to Londoners skating on the Thames as they fairly often did in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. But these things take time.

You see, the crucial point about an artificial skating rink, which might not seem to have much to do with steam which is famously hot, unless you count the mist which is sort of chilly steam, is that it’s refrigeration technology.

One John Gamgee, who opened several rinks in the 1870s with a disgusting-sounding arrangement of layers of earth, cow hair and planks on top of concrete, and a solution of glycerine, ether, nitrogen peroxide and water run through copper pipes submerged in water, had come up with the idea while trying to freeze meat to bring it from Australia and New Zealand to Britain. See? Globalization and exciting dynamic technological change. There’s the wonder of the steam age.

We get all bent out of shape these days about new iPhones. And some impressive things have come along and some worrying ones with more in the pipe, from efficient cars to computer chips to nuclear weapons to artificial intelligence. But a world in which traditional arrangements were vanishing like mist on a well-ventilated indoor skating rink is not a recent invention.

Indeed, the late 19^th century saw such marvels as cheap quality steel, petrochemicals, and electricity including in telegraphs, that dramatically shrunk the world and brought ever-faster and more amazing news from around the globe, as well as an astounding range of products including bananas.

I think this point is worth raising because we are forever promised a glorious breakthrough into life truly worth living if only we can really get behind an innovation agenda. But how much is enough? When do we arrive? Victorians had technology the 18^th century literally could not imagine. Suburbanites in the 1950s had technology the Victorians literally could not imagine. And we have technology suburbanites in the 1950s literally could not imagine… and use it to look at videos of cats and compare complete strangers to Hitler in chat rooms where no good thing could have happened even if we’d kept our tempers.

Are we there yet? And are we sure we want to be?

Indoor rinks have of course turned hockey into a spectacular diversion, with millionaires trying to hurt one another and every Canadian team failing to make the playoffs. But I have this odd feeling that the novelty is starting to wear off and with it, I hope, the infatuation with change for the sake of change and the belief that money could buy happiness at least in the sense that sufficiently new stuff could infuse our lives with hitherto absent meaning.

I do like my refrigerator, though.

There’s a wise saying that it’s never a bad time to do the right thing. But it’s sometimes awfully late to get around to it. For instance on May 5 1789, when French King Louis the Doomed summoned the Estates-General, their partial equivalent of Britain’s Parliament. For the first time in 175 years. And the last.

Louis XVI was a hapless man sitting atop a volcano. And that scenario never ends well. But to his limited credit, he didn’t create the volcano. And he didn’t get a lot of good advice about getting off it.

Had I been there… well, I wouldn’t have been me. That’s the problem with that sort of counterfactual. I’d have been an 18^th-century French noble and unlikely to give wise counsel based on the record. But someone should have told him to convene the Estates-General earlier. A lot earlier. Well before he was born, in fact.

OK, you see the problem. Although allowing a Parliament to meet and limit the actions of the executive is the right thing to do, and better late than never, sometimes it’s so late it’s very hard to make it work. France didn’t just need a meeting of Parliament. It needed a Parliamentary tradition. And it had nothing of the sort.

To take one trivial example, the Estates-General met, when it did meet, as three separate estates not two. Secular nobility, church prelates and wretched commoners each had their own chamber. And the commoners were definitely outnumbered and disdained. Part of the magic of the British system is that somehow they locked all the muckymucks in one House and the regular Joes in the other and, from the very early 15^th century, the regular Joes without even a regular meeting place managed to assert their primacy on money bills since you know who always ends up paying. So it’s not a trivial example after all.

Especially as the final meeting of the Estates-General disintegrated over the critical issue of whether to vote by estates or as one body, basically the same surly confrontation between commons and their supposed betters that had paralyzed the last meeting in 1614. And it’s not as though it had been vibrant before that; no Estates General had met, for instance, between 1484 and 1560. But in 1789 instead of just going away mad, the Third Estate declared itself the political nation, in the form of the National Assembly, and took over without institutional restraints, leading to the Reign of Terror and then Napoleon and much else that you wouldn’t want including chronic instability lasting almost two centuries.

The reason they didn’t know how to vote, apart from not having done it in 175 years, is that their votes never mattered anyway. Writing in the 16th century the distinguished French jurist Jean Bodin had written, sadly correctly, that “When edicts are ratified by Estates or Parlements, it is for the purpose of securing obedience to them, and not because otherwise a sovereign prince could not validly make law”. It wasn’t better elsewhere in the government; in 1527 the president of the highest French court assured King François I “we do not wish to dispute or minimize your power; that would be sacrilege, and we know very well that you are above the laws”

The funny thing is, at the time the king was probably mightily pleased. No checks on his power seemed to mean he could accomplish great things. But instead it meant French kings could do any fool thing they liked and nobody could stop them or even tell them it was a mistake. And so the mistakes piled up and piled up and every institution that might have blocked the reign of error was treated as a problem instead of a solution.

By the time Louis XVI was finally forced to summon the non-functioning semi-Parliament known as the Estates-General, and see if he could somehow enlist the French nation in governing, of all things, the French nation, it was probably too late. Given the alternatives, which didn’t include time travel, it was the right thing. But it would have been much better if he’d done it sooner. Say 350 years sooner.

Are we quite done with the Wars of the Roses? I’m afraid not. But the same cannot be said of Edward of Westminster. Well, perhaps you were done with him before you even got to him. But he does enjoy the distinction of being the only heir apparent to the English throne ever to die in battle, at Tewkesbury on May 4 of 1471. I guess that’s something.

Poor Edward. He never did have much, as heirs apparent to the English throne go. He was the only son of Henry VI and his wife Margaret of Anjou. And Henry VI was somewhat insane, in a hapless rather than psychotically domineering way. Indeed, there were widespread rumors that Edward was illegitimate, the result of an affair between Margaret and one of her supporters, the Duke of Somerset or the Earl of Ormonde.

We don’t know, and Henry VI publicly acknowledged paternity. Though it’s not obvious what else he could have done, having no other sons and being a sufficiently feeble monarch that he didn’t need any other reasons for people to ridicule him or say we might as well be rid of him now since he doesn’t even have an heir or anything like that.

However that may be, Henry was semi-deposed by Richard Plantagent, 3rd Duke of York, in 1460. In an act of tactful usurpation, if such a thing is possible, the Duke did not personally claim the throne but did have Parliament pass the Act of Accord whereby Edward was disinherited and York or his heirs would succeed Henry whenever he happened to… die. As he mysteriously did during a subsequent period of captivity in 1471.

Now at this point, in 1460 I mean, Edward might have taken the hint and also holy orders, or fled to the continent or changed his name and taken up farming or something else less perilous than hanging around looking stunned. But he didn’t. And to be fair, he was only 7 at the time and not in control of his own destiny. Instead his mother took him to Wales and then Scotland, raising support for him while the Yorkists mustered in northern England.

Margaret’s army prevailed, defeating and killing York at Wakefield and then defeating but not killing Warwick the Kingmaker (see the April 14 entry on Edward IV) at the Second Battle of St. Albans. Rather embarrassingly, the captive Henry VI was found abandoned on the battlefield. “What do we do with this thing?” “Aaaah, chuck it, nobody wants that.” “But it’s the king.” “I said chuck it, buddy.” (NB this is not historically attested dialogue. I made it up. But still, if you had a captive king wouldn’t you stuff him in a sack and drag him along figuring they’d trade you something for him, at least a fast horse and a ten minute head start?)

Actually two of Warwick’s knights had been left to guard the stunned king and see that he came to no harm and were captured with him. On Edward’s advice, Margaret had them beheaded.

She then decided not to attack London with her somewhat chaotic army, which was instead hammered in the Battle of Towton shortly after St. Albans Mark II. At this point discretion proved the better part of valour so the royal family royally fled, first to Scotland to continue resistance and later to France. OK, Margaret and Edward did. Henry was somehow left behind and was plunked into the Tower of London in 1465. Eventually Margaret cooked up an alliance with various potentates including Warwick, returned and briefly chased off Richard Plantagenet’s son Edward, who had taken the throne in 1461 as Edward IV.

Even this victory was more than a little ominous for the hapless Edward Winchester. Margaret had made a deal with Edward IV’s slippery younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, that he would help restore Henrv VI with Edward Westminster as Prince of Wales and his heir. But if Edward were to somehow, you know, die suddenly, Clarence would become king. Such arrangements make it hard to buy life insurance.

On the plus side, Edward got a wife, Anne Neville, youngest daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker. On the downside, Henry’s restoration lasted a grand total of six months. It was all over but the beheadings after Edward IV crushed Warwick’s forces at Barnet on April 14 and Warwick was killed. Awkwardly, the very same day Margaret and Edward Winchester, by now a hapless 17-year-old, landed in England and for want of a better plan led a weak army against Edward IV at Tewkesbury on May 4 and she was captured and her son killed.

You knew it was going to end that way, didn’t you? And not just because I said so at the beginning. This guy just had “lost power struggle and life” written all over him. As did Clarence, drowned in a butt of malmsey wine on Edward IV’s orders and good riddance to him.

To add insult to injury for Edward Winchester, his widow married the top surviving Yorkist dog, Richard III. Mind you, if it’s any consolation, Richard would become the last English king to die in battle 14 years later. But hardly the only one; even William the Conqueror did that. (As did two Scottish kings after Richard III.)

Meanwhile Edward Winchester is still the only heir apparent to do so and likely to remain so although Prince Charles was in the navy as Prince of Wales. Despite the rarity, indeed uniqueness, of this feat, you have to admit Edward did seem to have precisely the qualifications needed to pull it off.

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