On this date in history something pretty horrible happened. Well, OK, on every day in history something pretty horrible happened. Repeatedly. Everywhere. Those who expect to construct a utopia of human material seem to me to be suffering a variety of serious delusions.

That broadside delivered, I want to zoom in on the hanging, drawing and quartering of nine English regicides on October 17, 1660. Yes, here we go again (see the Oct. 3, 2016 It Happened Today) with the strangling, disemboweling and worse and so on. In this case it was nine of the 51 people not amnestied over their involvement in the execution of Charles I eleven years earlier.

By 1660 people were pretty fed up with the Commonwealth, the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell and political radicalism generally. They didn’t just bring back the Stuarts in the smooth, genial, totally smilingly dishonest person of the Merry Monarch Charles II. They sought revenge.

So they tried 27 people on a capital charge. Why 27? Because 24 had died. Of the 27, one was beheaded and nine were hanged, drawn and quartered on Oct. 17. Three more were HDQed (man, you don’t want that to be so common you have an acronym) two years later, 19 were given life in prison back when it meant something, some were pardoned, and some fled, including three to New England where they were never captured by the British authorities. New England was always singularly favourable to the Puritan cause in England as in the New World.

Not so the folks back home. I was going to say 24 of the 51 accused were excused on grounds of being dead. But it ain’t so. Three of these, including Cromwell, were dug up and killed a second time, being first hanged and then beheaded (so perhaps that makes three) and then the bulk of them hurled into a pit beneath the gallows while the heads were put on spikes facing the spot where Charles I had himself been executed.

I don’t get it. Did you want Charles back? Don’t you remember why the Civil War happened? And aren’t you a bit embarrassed to be hurling invective and inflicting indignities upon a decaying body part? Don’t you feel that in some sense it is your dignity not that of the departed that is diminished by this spectacle?

Ultimately people calmed down. A bit. Cromwell’s head was on display outside Westminster until 1685 by which time I cannot help thinking it would have been rather sadly disgusting. It was then carried off, publicly exhibited, sold or given several times and finally buried in 1960 in an undisclosed location in case people are still raging mad. But he does now have a statue of his entire body outside parliament instead of just a spike for a neck.

Look, I’m no fan of Cromwell. I can see killing him once if malaria hadn’t gotten there first. But at some point you have to take a few deep breaths and try to regain perspective. Including, surely, on just how horribly you want to kill people who, eleven years earlier, had decided with varying degrees of reluctance that a bad king had to become a dead one.

If the point is to put the unpleasantness behind you, how does it help to revel in an exhibit of it in front of you?

“no one can create beauty, be it a work of art or on a golfing links, unless he has both disciplined control and the ability to let go to the sudden glimmer.”

Michael Murphy Golf in the Kingdom

https://youtu.be/JeA3kHVbo4M The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Ask the Professor, October 16"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/October/Ask_Professor_58.mp3[/podcast]

So here’s a big surprise. On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was convicted of having been Queen of France. Revolutionary justice being what it is, she was executed the same day.

The whole farce lasted just three days, from the opening of the trial on the 14th; four if you count the part of a day her lawyers had to prepare her defence. (Or perhaps flee; defending Marie Antoinette in the face of Robespierre’s frenzied rage is far more likely to do you harm than her good.) Which shows what such trials are worth.

I don’t just mean trials by French revolutionaries, although obviously they worked on the verdict first, trial afterward premise that tyrants find so helpfully tidy. I mean the whole genre of trying people for offenses that are not, at bottom, judicial at all.

The real charge against Marie Antoinette was having been part of an unjust regime and social order. The actual formal charges included incest which again tells you what sort of proceeding it was. But she was actually convicted of depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, intelligence with the enemy, all of which amount to saying she was Marie Antoinette and had the same friends and attitudes after being deposed as beforehand.

What sort of “trial” do you hold to determine that sort of thing? And there’s no question that to face such charges is to be convicted of them unless you can prove mistaken identity in a big hurry. There was no question that Marie Antoinette had been the wife of Louis XVI and had not used the post to conspire to overthrow the monarchy, abolish the established church, dispossess the nobility and so forth. And perhaps that’s a crime against history or even humanity. But it’s not a crime against any statute in force at the time.

To say so is not to say that whatever is written is legitimate. Far from it. The French Ancien régime was rotten to the core. But what do you do when you oust a tyrant from within or by war from without? It’s like the problem of what to do with the Nazi leadership in 1945. (Sorry, another Hitler analogy, but he was kind of important in an instructive way.)

Obviously you don’t say oh well chaps, you had a good run, off you go. But nor does it make much sense to charge someone with having been Himmler because the trial is rendered a farce by the fact that he is obviously guilty of mass murder, genocide, warmongering and oppression and needs to die. The trial basically goes “Are you Heinrich Himmler?” “Ja.” Bang!

Oddly, to proceed with legal formalities under the circumstances does not elevate the proceedings, it debases the law. Especially if you join forces with Stalin’s bloodstained henchmen to do it. Or Robespierre’s. There might be some point in trying lesser functionaries to determine how aware they were of what was going on. But the disagreement between revolutionaries and the establishment, or between one warring government and another, is philosophical rather than legal.

Had it been up to me I’d have deposed Louis XVI and sent him and his family into obscure exile somewhere. And I’d have shot Robespierre. Repeatedly. But if she was so bad that she deserved to die, I think it’s appropriate as it would have been with the Nazis to say that we regard them as having transgressed basic moral laws in such a way that any trial would be a summary farce so we’re skipping the farce and going straight to the summary. Blindfold? Cigarette? Goodbye!

Personally I regard Marie Antoinette as a sad and deluded rather than a wicked person. And no, she never did say “Qu’ils mangent les brioches”; it was a rural legend that attached itself to any rich important person regarded as badly out of touch with reality, which in fact she was. Her trial was a pathetic as well as an evil farce. And even she deserved better. France certainly did.

“It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, quoted by David Beresford in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 March/April 2005

Perhaps we need a reality show “Bold Visionary or Reckless Moron?” Or perhaps not, since we have history.

I was prompted to this sage and witty armchair philosophizing by the thought that on October 15 1863 the first submarine to sink a ship, the Confederate vessel H.L. Hunley, did… what? What do you suppose the first submarine, a hand-cranked experimental iron sort-of-floating tomb, did?

If you say “it sank” congratulations. You get a B. If you say “it sank, killing its inventor” you get an A-. And if you say “it sank again, killing its inventor H.L. Hunley” you get an A+.

After scuppering one prototype to avoid its capture by Union forces, the inventors produced a second that sank in Mobile Bay in February 1863. So they built the Hunley, which actually sank a coal barge before some dimwit stepped on the dive lever with the hatches open on August 29, 1863, drowning five of eight on board not including himself. Then on October 15 Hunley took her down in the intended manner to demonstrate a simulated attack and… and… do you see anything? No, I don’t. Shouldn’t she be back up by now? Is that a ripple? A swimmer? Nope. Um… maybe we better send down some divers.

Sure enough, the Confederates salvaged Hunley, and in place of the original plan to dive under an enemy ship towing a “mine” on a rope, they stuck a ram with a bomb on the end on her. And by golly, on February 17, 1864, Hunley rammed, exploded and deep-sixed the steam-powered 12-gun sloop Housatonic. And sank with all hands again.

It’s not quite clear why. It may have been a malfunctioning charge on the ram, she may have been run down by a Union vessel, the crew may have asphyxiated. There are so many possibilities. And that’s really my point.

On the one hand, to get into the Hunley even to test it was manifestly an act of insanity. On the other, if it weren’t for that brand of insanity we wouldn’t have submarines, blimps, airplanes and a lot of other things we don’t have because for every genius vindicated during his life or shortly after he perished in his invention, there are 50 guys who remain cranks, some with a Darwin Award asterisk beside their crankery.

So, Bold Visionary or Reckless Moron? Or could it just be that a lot of these guys were both? It sure looks that way from my armchair.

“If a man may not laugh at his own jokes, at whose jokes may he laugh? May not an architect pray in his own cathedral?”

Editor’s note in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000)

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