Reflections on the Regency

I started watching Lucy Worsley's new series 'Elegance & Decadence: the Age of the Regency' on BBC 4 last night.

Seeing the Prince Regent reminded me of an obvious point; how often in the history of rulers of England you get parsimonious ones followed by profligate ones; the temperament and personality of each being reflected in the society of their time. So we could list: Henry VII / Henry VIII; Cromwell / Charles II; George III / George IV; Victoria / Edward VII; George V / Duke of Windsor. A common pattern. Clearly the extravagant ones are reacting against the strictures of their upbringing.

Much more importantly though, I only watched half the programme before I got impatient at its jolly japes, uncritical, the-Regency-at-its-own-estimation tone. After all, where did all the wealth that the Regent and the elite of society of that time were throwing about come from ?

The Regency was a very dark time indeed for many of those in this country who lived through it. On a brief survey, here are some examples.

There were the endless wars with revolutionary France that had been going on almost uninterrupted since 1793 and continued until Waterloo in 1815.

There were the agricultural workers moving to the new industrial centres, the raw beginnings of the factory system with all its injustices, including the destruction of the livelihoods of artisan families (hence the organised frame breakers in the 1810s.) It was illegal since the Combination Acts of 1799 & 1800 for working people to organise trade unions or bargain collectively to improve their conditions; the object being to prevent strikes undermining the war effort. (There is an episode of the Sharpe tv series called Sharpe's Justice which is set in Yorkshire during 1814, and within the framework of an adventure story portrays these clashes between factory owners and their workers of the time very well.)

There was colonial exploitation abroad, particularly for instance in the Atlantic slave trade, which was not prohibited in the British Empire until 1807; and slave labour on the plantations in the West Indies, which continued until 1839. Remember: it was British merchants and planters who were profiting from all this misery.

There was violent suppression by the authorities of any groups trying to get reform to representation in the Parliamentary system, most horrifically at Peterloo in 1819.

Another common and accepted abuse before and during the Regency period was the use of child soldiers, something we readily condemn in Third World conflicts today (Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia etc. etc.). During these particular days of Britannia's greatness you had as a normal part of a full military complement drummer boys in the Army, and powder monkeys in the Navy; these would be 10 years old and upwards.

Children also worked in the factories for unregulatedly long hours and low wages, at constant risk of serious injury. The first Factory Act to try and regulate their conditions of employment, with age and working hours restrictions and so on, came only in 1802. It did not provide for inspections and was widely ignored.

All in all, the Regency was not such a pretty picture to the majority of those living through it.

Now I realise that the programme was deliberately light-hearted and not meant to look at the things I mention above. Nor to be fair do I know whether they were raised later in the programme, or are raised later in the series, since I only as I have said watched the first half of the first one.

But my reaction to it made me reflect on something else; what a solemn Puritan I can be. And that made me reflect how the Puritan / Cavalier cleft in our political life is continuous until today from when it exploded into civil war in the 17th century. To some extent, Labour and the Conservatives still represent the different sides of that split. The Tories are more direct historical heirs of the Cavaliers of course. But if you consider the Labour Party's roots in Methodism and non-conformist Christianity generally, you can trace them by those means right back to the 17th century.

Myth and Truth: An Axiom

" [45.] Then answered one of the lawyers, and said unto him, Master, thus saying thou reproachest us also. [46.] And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers ... [52.] ... For ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered."

- the Gospel according to Luke, ch.11


We should despise neither the myth nor the truth upon which the myth is built, or to which the myth attaches itself. Rather, we should attempt (in so far as our resources allow) to investigate the myth, and the truth correspondent to it, more thoroughly. The truth, the myth and the relationship between them, why the myth is perpetuated, by whom - all of this is important.

To seize upon one or other aspect and proclaim that as the sole or almost exclusively significant one is a mistake, however apparently sophisticated; despite which this is a common error.

The following are some examples where this observation may be applied, presented in the order Truth / Myth :

1. Jesus in his historical context / Christianity the religion

2. The Aegean Bronze Age / The Iliad and the Odyssey

3. the Frontier in the U.S.A. 1840-1910 / The Wild West

4. 5th Century Britain / Arthurian Romance

5. 13th Century England / Robin Hood

6. The actual history + personality of a given individual / That individual's self-image

7. The actual history + personality of a given Nation / That Nation's collective self-image

8. The actual processes of the Universe / The account given of them in Physics at this time

9. The Second World War as a Clash of Empires / The Second World War in the folk memory of the British people

10. Leading people and main events during the collapse of the Roman Republic / Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' and 'Antony and Cleopatra'

11. Beethoven, avant-garde composer and piano virtuoso / Beethoven, the Genius

12. The painting as practical object / The Masterpiece

13. Alexander Selkirk / 'Robinson Crusoe'

14. The real events which triggered the stories / 'Anna Karenina' & 'Madame Bovary'

15. The actual terrain / a map of the terrain

16. Experience / Art

(It is important to note that the 'Truth' side in each of these equations is always presented with the caveat 'in so far as it can ever be established'.)

This observation also applies to both elements of the person who becomes a hero or saint - on the one hand, their actual career and its context; on the other, the legend which develops out of it. Illustrative examples include (from the top going right):

Churchill, Diogenes of Sinope, Orwell, John Lennon, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Lenin, Napoleon, van Gogh.

The Wild West furnishes many excellent examples: Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickock, Butch Cassidy, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid -

and above all William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill himself, whose true story embodies almost the whole history of the West, from the lead up to the Civil War in Kansas to portraying himself on film in the early days of cinema, and who through his Wild West Exhibition was a key figure in consciously creating the myth of the West as we have it today.

Two photos of William F. Cody, 'Buffalo Bill', 1846-1917

Two posters for "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" as his show was called

In points 6 and 7, I do not propose the idea of national self-image as a monolith: rather as a spectrum, with dissonant elements; just as in personal self-image.

I am also perfectly aware that each side of each equation is a vast topic in itself. To take one example, it is ludicrous to see a topic of the dimensions of Arthurian Romance reduced to a heading of only two words, the minimum to which it could possible be reduced; whose very ubiquity renders it by a paradox almost invisible; since it is a topic which draws in adherents, practitioners and associated figures as diverse as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Francis of Assisi, Edmund Spenser, Wagner, Mark Twain, William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, Heinrich Himmler, John Steinbeck, John Boorman, Lerner and Lowe. Note that this is very far from an exhaustive list.

All of these figures have a significant involvement in Arthurian myth

A map is the myth based on the reality of the physical terrain, Art is the myth based on the reality of the emotional terrain. Let me try to explain these statements, expand on them, justify them and trace some of their consequences.

A map is an abstract symbolic representation of an actual physical terrain. Its value lies in its accuracy. However, the person reading the map must understand the conventions of the system of representation used in the particular map, and how it relates to the actual terrain. Only then can the accuracy of the map be tested meaningfully. Music, literature, painting are just as much abstract symbolic representations of actual emotional terrain. The analogy with a map is almost perfect; it is equally valid to speak of accuracy and inaccuracy in Art; but the person who does so must understand the conventions of the artform, and those of the genre within that artform, with which they are dealing. Otherwise they are like someone looking at a map of a city centre for directions who can't read that map and, because it's baffling and unhelpful to them, they start to fume and cry 'This map is useless !' Or it's like someone watching a football match who understands neither the rules, nor the traditions, nor the history of the game, and therefore dismisses the event as meaningless, and the players and spectators as fools. The absurdity is obvious in both cases.

(Philosophy is often a victim of this process. People think it is nonsense and are suspicious of it because they do not understand the terms in which it is expressed.)

With football and popular music, people are not conscious of all the conventions that they have learned, or are referring to in order to understand the significance of a particular match, a particular song, because they have 'grown up with it'; that is they were partly taught and partly absorbed those conventions since they were young, because they were interested in them. Philosophy and art are no different, just less widespread as interests, especially the former.

To a certain extent though people's suspicion of philosophy and art, of intellectualism, is justified because general ignorance of these subjects is in fact often a refuge for charlatans among the practitioners of them; who attempt to regard all negative criticism of their work as the carping of philistines, the product of ignorance about and contempt for Art in general. Whereas in fact they are the fools they are suspected of being.

Myths arise because they meet the needs of an individual or a community; and they endure because they continue to meet the needs of other subsequent individuals and other communities. 'Needs' and 'communities' are chosen deliberately as terms with the widest possible application. 'Needs' include:

Coherence
Direction / Mission
Legitimacy
History / Origins
Explanation
Compensation
Entertainment

The term 'community' includes:

A district, a city, region, country, empire;

Any institution within the above;

Any power elite within the above;

Any religion, denomination within that religion, specific local branches which make up that denomination;

Political parties and their followers;

Fans, whether of musicians, writers, artists of all kinds, sports people or teams;

Racial communities e.g. Slavs, Arabs;

Geographic communities e.g. European, Chinese


Myth is as wayward as thought, as structured as language.

Note: This piece was originally written in 2010. It was edited and had the illustrations added in 2025.

Historical background to the current conflict in Kyrgyzstan

BBC News - Death toll in Kyrgyzstan clashes could be 'much higher'

www.reliefweb.int/mapc/cis/reg/cau/caucia.html

Kyrgyzstan is a country in Central Asia. It and its four neighbouring countries (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan & Uzbekistan) were all Soviet Republics within the USSR until they became abruptly independent late in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.

The region is a borderland and crossing-point between powerful neighbours and close to several flash-points in international affairs at this time: Russia to the north; China to the east; Afghanistan to the south; Pakistan & India to the south-east, including especially Kashmir, which is a subject of ongoing dispute between those two countries; Iran to the south-west; Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan & Turkey to the west, on the other side of the Caspian Sea.

Kyrgystan itself is host to major military bases for both Russia & the USA; the American one is the primary supply base for men & supplies for NATO operations in Afghanistan.

At the moment in the south of Kyrgyzstan, around the cities of Osh & Jalalabad, some of the Kyrgyz, who are the majority population (c.70%), are persecuting & driving out the Uzbeks, who are a minority in the country (c.14%), in a manner all too familiar to us from around the world over the last 20 years; one need only list Kenya, Sudan, Rwanda, Iraq, former Yugoslavia.

The problem is - unfortunately again a familiar one - that the borders in the region do not correspond to & in fact cut across the distribution of the different ethnicities. All of the Central Asian republics have significant minorities of one or more nationalities from the neighbouring states: Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, as outlined above; Tajiks (c.5%) in Uzbekistan; Uzbeks in Tajikistan; Uzbeks (c.3%) in Kazakhstan; and so on.

There are also significant populations of Tajiks (c.27%) & Uzbeks (c.9%) in the north of Afghanistan, among the more than 12 different nationalities which inhabit that country.

From this, the complexity of allegiance (clan / ethnicity / nation) & the potential for conflict in the region is evident.

What is the background to this situation of extreme confusion ? The borders between the Central Asian republics are not ancient, nor did they arise by accident or by evolution. They were set by Stalin himself in a series of decisions from 1927 to 1936. They were not the product of carelessness or indifference, or lack of detailed knowledge of the region; on the contrary, the confusion was created by deliberate policy, to disrupt & disunite the ethnic communities in order to forestall them becoming centres of organised resistance to the central government in Moscow. This was after the Bolsheviks had fought for 10 years to re-establish control over the region.

It was a case of the classic Imperial tactic of divide in order to rule, as practiced by us (I mean, the British) & the French all over Africa, the Far East & the Middle East in the 19th & 20th centuries. But the tensions & conflicts remain long after the original need (Imperial domination) for which those boundaries were drawn has disappeared; as we can see in Nigeria, Lebanon, Congo; the list goes on & on & on.