One of Margaret Thatcher’s less felicitous comments was that there are no lost causes in politics because there are no won causes. As I observed in an Ottawa Citizen column on Oct. 29 of 2010, I agree that no victory in public affairs is permanent. But I can think of plenty of defeats and collapses that certainly were. Including Akkad, Bolshevism and the Mayan Empire. Still, you never know.

This thought is prompted by the reflection that July 5^th is the anniversary of the signing in 1295 of the “Auld Alliance” between France and Scotland against, you guessed it, England. It had a pretty good run, being regularly renewed until the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh under which Elizabeth I “persuaded” the Scots to ally with England and the French to smile and say they were happy to hear about it. But it certainly looked down for the count in 1603, when James VI of Scotland managed to become also James I of England and unite the English and Scottish crowns. And they apparently carried it from the ring entirely and permanently in 1707 with the Act of Union that united the two countries. And yet I seem to see it getting up off the stretcher and waving feebly from the bleachers.

You see, with the Brexit vote, the Scots are making noises about leaving the UK and joining Europe, turning their backs on Magna Carta, the Industrial Revolution and glorious stands against absolutism from Louis XIV and Napoleon to Hitler and the Battle of Britain, because, well, because, you know, that is… if you hate the English clap your hands or some such thing.

Before writing off the UK as a temporary aberration and going back to the auld days when their parliament had no significant influence on their rulers, Scots should reflect that for all its sentimental value, the Auld Alliance was a one-sided affair that did them no practical good and indeed didn’t help the French much either. They spent about 600 years trying to do in the English and mostly did themselves in instead, finally running to Britannia for help in the face of Prussian militarism. And thank goodness for them the Scots and English were fighting shoulder to shoulder in both world wars.

So yes, it might be possible to revive the auld alliance despite the odds. It would be remarkable after all this time, and it would therefore have a certain romanticism. But I doubt it would work any better this time.

Would you just stop it? I know history is messy and a lot of people have gone about hitting one another with swords, shooting one another, looting and all that stuff. But there comes a point where it indicates dangerous obsession.

I’m thinking here of the Ottoman siege of Belgrade, which was then Hungarian and called “Nándorfehérvár” and no I don’t know how to pronounce it, starting on July 4, 1456. And it stands out for me first because the Turks had only taken Constantinople three years earlier. Perhaps it was an important target. Perhaps they had some sort of reasonable ground for attacking it. But the fact that they went essentially “Right, one Christian kingdom down, where’s the next?” and went right after Hungary suggests what?

Exactly. A relentless determination to conquer the whole world and a kind of knotted-up defensiveness about “provocations” that always justified attacking neighbours.

Now the siege actually failed. A major counterattack by veteran Ottoman opponent John Hunyadi the “Voivode of Transylvania” drove off Mehmed II and his armies and bought more than half a century before the onslaught resumed. But it did, leading ultimately to the Gates of Vienna.

Muslims all bent out of shape about the Crusades, which were after all a counterattack against the conquest of Christian lands by Muslims rather than a spontaneous assault, should give some thought to why there are still celebrations in Hungary on July 22 and what exactly Mehmed II was doing attacking what is now Belgrade just three years after seizing what was then Constantinople.

Too much of that could get you a reputation.

Long live King Hugh. Within reason. But his dynasty sure lasted.

Hugh is Hugh Capet, the first King of the Franks from that lineage, and he succeeded the last Carolingian king, Louis V, on July 3^rd 987 AD. The Carolingians are of course the line of Charlemagne, which began with Pepin the Short (reigned 751-768) son of Charles Martel who won the crucial Battle of Tours against Muslim invaders in 732 AD. And I suppose 236 years isn’t a bad run. But let’s talk Capetians.

The line that began with Hugh didn’t end until Louis XVI in 1792 (reign) or 1793 (life) or, if you like, with the reabolition of the monarchy in 1848. It went through a couple of branches, the Capetians then after 1328 the Valois until 1589 and then the Bourbons who began well with Henri IV and ended badly as you know. The remarkable thing is that all three branches of the Capets lasted longer than the Carolingians. And within it, they had a strange tendency to produce long reigns.

You’d think it was good. You shout “Long live the king” or “Vive le roi” or some such and he does. But actually I think it played an odd role in delivering bad government in France, not of course as hideous as in most of the world but arrogant, stagnant and greedy.

There were just 15 kings in the main Capet line over a period of 341 years. England had 22, and what’s more it went through about five dynasties (Wessex, Denmark, Normandy, Blois, Anjou Plantagenet). Now chaos is bad. But the ability to get rid of unfit kings, and change direction in style of governance, is very good. And England had much more of the latter including forcing John to seal Magna Carta, a document with no French equivalent.

Then you get the Valois in France, from 1328 through 1589. But just 13 of them. England has 16 in that period, from four houses: Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, and Tudor. Some good. Some bad. But a lot of variety.

Then come the Bourbons, for a dismal if often vainglorious run of 200+ years during which France faded as Europe’s leading power, squandering blood and treasure to get weaker, and stored up internal problems that ultimately exploded. Incredibly, over that period, from 1589 through the French Revolution, France only had five kings, reigning for an average of 40.6 years. England meanwhile became a different country, the UK, and had 11 kings and queens from three houses, plus two Lords Protector. Not coincidentally it had the Glorious Revolution instead of France’s bloody one.

In sum, from 987 to 1792 France had just 33 monarchs; England/the UK had 47. No, I didn’t muff the math. Edward III overlaps the Capets and Valois; Elizabeth I the Valois and Bourbons. And France had one dynasty or, at most, three. England had 10.5 (giving the Cromwells half credit).

It’s not all genetics, of course. And monarchs can depart the throne and this life by other means than illness or old age. Daggers work. But the fact is that for the better part of a millennium, France tended to have kings who reigned longer (and no queens thanks to Salic law) and dynasties that you just couldn’t dislodge, frequently unable to admit error from within and incapable of being forced to admit it from without. English parliaments decided between rival claimants to the throne; France had no parliaments capable of doing so and mighty few occasions when it might have happened if they did.

So long live the king. But not too long. You know?

What is that puffing noise? Why, it’s a steam engine. And a pretty useless one, with no pistons. But that’s how it always starts.

I’m referring to the device patented on July 2, way back in 1698, by one Thomas Savery, “A new invention for raising of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use and advantage for drayning mines, serveing townes with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills where they have not the benefitt of water nor constant windes.” If nothing else, you have to admit they could turn a phrase back then.

Now I have to admit that Savery could turn a phrase but not much else. His device was weak and dangerous; it wasted energy, needed constant repairs due to fairly low pressure busting the soldered joints, and was liable to explode dramatically unless kept small and feeble. Nevertheless he got his patent, a remarkably broad one lasting 14 and later 22 years, outliving him in fact and requiring others to go into business with him to make “fire engines” while he lasted. Including one Thomas Newcomen, who added the piston so the thing would actually pump water out of mines in an economically useful way, and away they went. Especially after Watt came up with the crucial concept of a separate condenser, dramatically improving energy efficiency.

Then came rotary motion, also from Watt, and you got powered looms and other machines. And people kept tinkering and fussing and saying what if and before you knew it we had cars and suburbia and tins of spam and Facebook.

OK, OK. It’s not all Savery’s fault. And if he hadn’t, someone else would have. The “Industrial Revolution” customarily and reasonably dates from the later 18^th century. But the kind of mucking about in workshops that led to it was nearly a century older, and its roots lie further back still. But his engines, so dramatically exciting despite their uselessness, remind us that we tend to overestimate the power of new inventions in the short run but underestimate it in the long run. And whatever people can do with a concept they will do, sooner or later.

Indeed, the sorts of uses Savery imagined as the cutting edge of industrial dynamism now seem for the most part terribly quaint, including “working of all sorts of mills”. If you’ve seen a mill, you’ve seen a museum. But as the world has grown richer, it has also grown dirtier and in many ways scarier and certainly a lot noisier.

Quite a ruckus to arise from that small, innocuous if weird puffing sound back in 1698.

July 1 is, among many other things including Canada Day, the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. The First World War enjoys an evil reputation, but I think no battle is as widely condemned as this one, the apparent epitome of the entire war as a grotesquely massive exercise in mindless slaughter by callous generals at the behest of weak and unimaginative politicians. I think this interpretation is entirely wrong.

As I explain in the relevant sections of The Great War Remembered, the First World War was fought under very difficult circumstances. The technology of the late 19^th century, of the “Second Industrial Revolution,” conferred an enormous advantage on the defence in war generally and the conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front in particular. But to say the war was hard to fight is not the same as saying giving up would have been appropriate.

For Allied commanders in particular, that was the stark choice. Germany had started the war, both by its prewar maneuverings and by its deliberate escalation of the crisis in the summer of 1914 to justify mobilization and an effort to crush France before Russia could mobilize. Even after that effort failed, the Kaiser’s armies occupied most of Belgium, much of France and a considerable portion of Russia. Should they have been allowed to remain there?

If not, what should have been done? In early 1916 the Germans sought to break the stalemate on the Western Front by bleeding the French white at Verdun. It was a cruel and cold strategy. But it might well have worked without a bold strike somewhere else. So should the British have occupied defensive positions, and the Russians, and waited for France to collapse and lose them the war after all the sacrifices already undergone? If not, they had to do something to relieve the pressure.

They did. Russia mounted the “Brusilov Offensive” beginning in June 1916 that enjoyed spectacular early success thanks in part to innovative tactics later adopted and refined by both sides on the Western front notably including the Canadians at Vimy. Then on July 1 the Somme offensive struck the Germans so hard their attack at Verdun did peter out without breaking French will or ability to fight.

The cost was horrendous. July 1^st alone, the worst day in the history of the British army, saw some 19,000 killed and 38,000 wounded, including virtually the entire Newfoundland Regiment. And before the battle was done, Allied forces including Canadians had suffered a mind-boggling 620,000 killed or wounded, with a shocking proportion there as at Verdun simply “missing,” swallowed by the mud and the gunfire. But the battle was nevertheless a success.

First, German casualties were even higher, perhaps 680,000. That alone would be remarkable given the advantages defence enjoyed in general and the superior positions on high ground the Germans had mostly occupied since late 1914. Second, Verdun did not fall and France did not collapse. Third, the German army was so weakened that German leaders decided to withdraw into the Hindenburg line and resort to unrestricted submarine warfare, bringing the United States in and sealing their doom. Fourth, and it is worth pointing out, the Allies did win the war.

Well, not Russia. Overextended by the effort generally and the efforts of 1916 in particular, the feeble tsarist regime collapsed into chaos and then the horrors of Bolshevism. But Western leaders cannot be blamed for having gone to war with the ally they had not the ally they wished they had, any more than they can be blamed because too many Germans reacted to defeat and depression by embracing radical politics that ended with Hitler coming out on top.

The Versailles settlement did collapse and another dreadful war erupted a generation later. But the politicians of 1918 cannot be blamed for the actions of those in the 1930s, and certainly the generals cannot. And while the rows of crosses, and endless names of those with no known grave, remind us that war is a terrible thing, it is not the worst of things. As John Stuart Mill said, a worse thing is those who think nothing worth fighting for, and let others better than them fight and die in their place.

The fact is that in World War I the Western Allies found a series of plans, strategies and tactics that at terrible cost under terrible circumstances enabled them to withstand Germany’s aggressive onslaught, reject a negotiated peace that granted Germany the fruits of aggression, and win the war. And the Battle of the Somme, forced on them by unfavourable circumstances and fought under horrible ones, was a necessary part of the approach that resulted in victory.

 

He’s got mail. Specifically William of Orange. On June 30 of 1688 he received a possibly not unexpected letter from the “Seven Immortals” asking him to, you know, sort of invade England, boot out its wretched king and take the throne himself. That was an envelope worth opening.

It was also an envelope worth sealing. The specific trigger was that King James II, the most reckless and openly obnoxious of the four Stuart kings to reign in England, had just gone and produced a male Catholic heir. And so he had to go.

In ways hard to recapture today, the question of James’s Catholicism and his penchant for absolutism were inextricably entwined. There were many things the Stuarts wanted to do that were contrary to the ancient English constitution, from taxing without consent to keeping standing armies in peacetime and disarming the populace. But Catholicism was often the sharp end of the stick, especially with James, because he was determined to foist not just toleration of Catholicism but its presence high in official circles on England and the English didn’t want it.

Hence, for instance, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence in 1688 whose contents we would mostly approve of today, removing legal penalties for dissenting from the Church of England. But when seven Anglican bishops denied James’ right to dispense with laws by proclamation, we would surely side with them that the king cannot simply make law by saying “Let it be so.” Furthermore, the king reacted to their petition against the Declaration by having them tried for seditious libel. To the king’s furious horror, they were acquitted in a grotesquely inept and vitriolic proceeding.

The extent to which James would have sought to govern without the consent of the people even if he hadn’t been openly Catholic is unclear. But his predecessors, his brother Charles, his father Charles and his grandfather James, had all sought to do so in varying degree, and none of them were as ardently Catholic as James II. Indeed, James I seems not to have been at all, though he was certainly high church.

However that may be, for the most part people were content to wait James out, figuring that one of his two Protestant daughters would inherit the throne and it would all quiet down. And then came baby James Francis Edward Stuart, a.k.a. “The Old Pretender,” born June 10 1688, and the letter by the Immortal Seven.

Oh. You were wondering when they would make an appearance? You thought perhaps they were the Seven Bishops, whose picture still hangs in the House of Lords or at least did when I had tea there in 2008 (true story). No. They were in fact The Earl of Danby, The Earl of Shrewsbury, The Earl of Devonshire, The Viscount Lumley, The Bishop of London (Henry Compton, who was not one of the Seven Bishops primarily because he was already suspended for defying the king in another matter, but was very close to them), Edward Russell (later First Earl of Orford) and Henry Sydney who actually wrote the invitation and was later First Earl of Romney and also, um, a drunk.

Now that sounds like the sort of hoity-toity crowd with whom one would have tea in the House of Lords. But when they wrote to William, they staked a great deal, because they said if he brought a small force to England they and their friends would rise up in force to back him, even giving some logistical advice. And it worked.

Thus assured of the backing of important English leaders and, be it noted, their armed citizen followers, William came over and with his wife Mary, 2^nd last reigning Stuart (I did say kings above – there were two queens, Mary and Anne, definitely the best of the Stuart lot) accepted the Bill of Rights and made the Glorious Revolution a reality.

As for the Immortals, I do not think their names have lived on forever. Even I couldn’t name them without Googling. But for all their wigs and pretensions, they were statesmen. It was a trans-partisan group, some Tory, mostly Whig, ready to stake fortune, reputation and even life on defending good government. And at least some of them were quite liberal in their religious views when it came to low-church Protestants. They were just very uneasy about the association of Catholicism with tyranny, both in the persons of various Stuart kings and in their unsavory and in the case of Charles II secret links with Catholic foreign powers bitterly hostile to England and its liberty.

It is therefore worth asking whether in our wonderfully democratic age, in which we would not follow an earl nor bend our knee to a bishop, why we generally seem to have much seedier and more spineless leadership than back when there were rotten boroughs, Lords with real power, and limited government defended to the hilt by citizens with principles and actual hilts as well.

Here’s a curious item that caught my eye and that of others. The fact that on June 29, 1786, Rev. Alexander Macdonell led over 500 Roman Catholic Highland Scots to Glengarry county in Canada. It might not seem like a world-historic event like Waterloo or D-Day. And of course it wasn’t. Just one more example of people seeking a better life in the New World and, with all due regard for the vicissitudes of human existence, finding it. But Macdonell’s story has a curious minor intersection with my own life and, as part of that process of people seeking a new start in Canada, with world history including D-Day.

You see, Macdonell was rather a, shall we say, vigorous cleric, ultimately a bishop known sometimes as the “Big Bishop” and sometimes as the “Warrior.” He first led his kinsmen to Glasgow where he helped create the Glengarry Fencibles, of which he was chaplain, the first Catholic chaplain in the British army since Henry VIII’s break with Rome. And when that regiment was disbanded, he persuaded the government to grant its members land, some 160,000 acres in 1804, in what became Glengarry County, Ontario.

There he proceeded to raise another regiment in 1812, the Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles, which took part in the defence of Upper Canada and the 1813 attack on Ogdensburg during which, legend says, he threatened immediate excommunication of all who did not attack with sufficient vigour.

Wending their way through the vicissitudes of Canadian defence policy, the Light Infantry Fencibles eventually became the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders or “Glens,” a front-line regiment during World War II who were part of D-Day as a component of the 9^th Brigade, 3^rd Division. (And many were victims of a particular massacre by the 12^th SS that is still solemnly remembered in a section of their armoury officers’ mess.)

My own connection is that it was through the late Reg Dixon, Intelligence Officer for the Glens on D-Day, that I first made contact with the Canadian reserves to which the regiment now belongs, and from there to the Brockville Rifles. I owe much of my understanding of our military tradition to that connection, as well as some very memorable exercises as an embedded journalist. But it goes far beyond that.

I owe my freedom to the sorts of men who joined such regiments and fought or stood ready to fight in various wars including the Second World War. Of course if the Glens had not existed there would have been some other regiment in their place in the order of battle, and if Reg had not enlisted when war came some other officer would have done his duty. But it’s because so many people did come, and did volunteer, and did create these citizen-soldier formations, that others would have stood in the gap if this particular one had not.

So it does matter greatly that such a man as Macdonell would have understood the need to defend freedom, and have inspired his followers to do so, including settling Canada in that spirit. And for Macdonell personally, to understand the need to serve God and freedom, and indeed to serve freedom because you serve God.

Every regiment’s history matters, and all those who lie in those cemeteries in Normandy, and across northwestern Europe and elsewhere, deserve our respectful remembrance. But I confess that I do particularly look for those belonging to Glens. Because individuals matter, and our connection to larger ideals and institutes does come from individual connections.

On this date in history, June 28 of 1846, Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone. Way cool. And very lucky.

It’s lucky partly because Sax, an instrument-maker, was also an extremely unlucky child or, if you look at it from the other side, extremely lucky. At various times he suffered a three story fall and hit his head on a rock, drank a bowl of “vitriolized water” (this story is all over the internet but nobody says what it is but since vitriol is sulphuric acid I wouldn’t drink it), swallowed a pin, was seriously burned by gunpowder, fell into a hot frying pan, was poisoned and suffocated simultaneously by varnished items stored in his bedroom, was hit on the head by a cobblestone and nearly drowned in a river. His autobiography says his own mother despaired of his surviving childhood and his neighbours called him “little Sax, the ghost”. Oddly appropriate given the often haunting tone of a “sax”.

We’re also lucky because the saxophone is, as Sax himself intended, a hybrid woodwind/brass instrument with a unique sound. I’ve often commented negatively about things like, say, Facebook, that if it didn’t exist we wouldn’t go about saying “You know what would be really cool? You know what would make my life fulfilling?” and then describe it. But it’s true in a positive way about saxophones.

If they didn’t exist, you wouldn’t notice they were missing because it almost certainly wouldn’t occur to you that they could exist. There’d be brass instruments which were brassy and had three simple valves, and woodwinds with a softer sound and that totally weird fingering that I never could figure out. (I learned trumpet in high school, in the loosest possible sense of the term “learn,” before being switched to the “euphonium” which wasn’t when I played it but did evidently evolve from a lesser-known Sax invention, the “saxhorn”. But I can still remember how to play a trumpet. The clarinet seems to me to make no sense and require at least 14 fingers. Fortunately my inability to finger one cost the world nothing.)

Instead there’s also the often haunting tone of the sax, a genuine hybrid. I do not say jazz would not have been invented without it. But certainly there was a kind of synergy between them. And with the blues. Songs clearly exist today, and versions, that were inspired in part by the fact that the musician had the sax sound in their mind when pondering possibilities. And it’s proof of genuine creative genius as one of life’s wonders. Interestingly, Sax patented a series of them in different keys, but where the B♭ and E♭ ones intended for military bands caught on, including oddly for military bands, the C and F versions for orchestras never did. The sax is not really suitable for the Baroque feel. But the jazz age is a different matter.

I said above you almost certainly wouldn’t have thought of a hybrid brass-woodwind if Sax hadn’t. But you might have, because he did. And there is a remarkably steady stream of big and small pieces of miraculous creativity where people see possibilities and make them happen and bring something so new into the world that it’s hard to categorize it as simply discovering the possibility. It really feels as though they made it. Still, without Sax it might have been different, later, or indeed never, leaving a big hole in music we wouldn’t even know was there.

As for the ophicleide, which Sax manufactured, and the saxtromba he invented, well, you can’t win them all. And sadly, Sax didn’t win his long legal battles over his patents and died in utter poverty at 79. But he did survive the pin and vitriol and all that to reach that age, and in the process gave the world the saxophone.

Marvelous.