At the end of May 1651 Queen Henrietta Maria invited Prince James, the future James II, to join her in a palace near Paris. He had been visiting his sister Mary in The Hague, where:

“The boys of the town had greeted the regicide’s ambassadors with cries of ‘Connick-stickers’. James and his sister took much pleasure in openly riding past the official residence allotted to Cromwell’s representatives. Their attendants took equal delight in teaching the willing youngsters to shout ‘Cromwell’s bastards’ after them whenever they appeared in public. Such was the widespread hostility that [Walter] St John and [Oliver] Strickland were at times reluctant to venture out of their lodgings.”
Footnote: “The cat-calls were not difficult for the ambassadors to understand: “Crownels-Bastardts, Koninghs-Moorders, Enherlsche-Beuls.”

OK, I’ve got the first two of those, but not “Connick-stickers”, or the last, “English balls?”.

Any Dutch-speakers out there to help?

From: “Six Unpublished Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria,” by R.A. Beddard, The British Library Journal, Volume 25, 199, pp. 129-143.

History

A dissection of the tactics of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which specialises in extreme stunts and advocates universal vegetarianism.

I became engrossed with its media tactics, which, to sum them up would be to say they say and do anything at all to draw attention. It sounds simple and obvious enough — anything at all — but it clearly isn’t, or other groups would be following its lead. Other than the ACLU, which progressive advocacy group (yes, PETA is progressive) garners a regular share of news coverage across the country on a daily basis? Not a single one.

PETA goes after places, people, events and ideas of social meaning and finds a way to seize the headlines — or create its own. It will do whatever it takes to expose people to its point of view. When PETA asks an agricultural town to change its name from say, Cowtown to Liberated Cowtown, it knows that a bored reporter in the surrounding region will fall for it and write a story about it, and that a bunch of readers sick of stories about septic tanks and cattle prices will fall for the headline. Somewhere in that story will be the sentence: “A PETA representative told the mayor that killing animals is wrong.”

With that sentence, PETA scores a victory.

The question is, of course, whether such tactics don’t put off as many people as they attract. I’m broadly pro-animal rights, and think a fair measure of the degree of civilisation of a society can be its treatment of animals, but the extreme image of some aspects of the movement -such as Peta – makes me rather wary of saying or doing much about it.

I’m not a vegetarian, because I think, if you go back to basics, humans’ place in the ecosystem is as omnivores. Not eating necessarily a lot of meat – for lots of reasons, environmental, health and human rights, eating large amounts of meat (say every day) is not defensible, but going to great lengths to avoid doing so seems to me unnecessary.

I try to buy meat from ethical sources – where animals are treated well. (Having studied agricultural science and worked on a number of farms in Australia I know that is far from always the case. (A couple of the worst horror stories: caged sows eating their own piglets, probably a result of the stress of not being able to even turn around, and poor cross-bred ewes carrying 18-months’ wool in the heat of an Australian summer, being eaten alive by fly maggots.)

So I’m in many ways a natural animal rights supporter. But Peta, with its current tactics, isn’t going to win me over.

Three queens reigned over the great age of the English detective novel – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham. If they’d been served at a dinner party, Allingham would have been the clear, carefully strained soup, Sayers the rich and complex game pie and Christie the comforting nursery pudding. It’s thus perhaps not surprising that Christie has continued her reign over the genre, while Sayers has been reduced to the retired queen mother in a nunnery, venerated still by a small coterie of loyalists, and Allingham is a mere ghost of memory.

Yet Sayers deserves to be restored to her throne, to be read and enjoyed by many, for her novels have a richness of texture, a complexity of character and exploration of still-current themes that the sweet, unchallenging Christie utterly lacks.

Sayers fans can be divided into two: the first group is those who prefer Busman’s Honeymoon, in which Sayers’ two great characters, the mystery writer Harriet Vane and the diplomat/detective Lord Peter Wimsey, finally get hitched. And the epistolary appearance of Lord Peter’s mother – the apparently fluttery but always acute duchess, is certainly a Sayers highlight. But that is for the romantics – it has two minds finding perfect accord.

Those of a less romantic bent, among whom I would include myself, prefer Gaudy Night, and this is the novel to which I would direct the Sayers neophyte. Here Sayers is wrestling with the question – new in the 1930s, but still, astonishingly, current today, of whether it is right for a woman to chose profession over domesticity, and whether she should put her ethics and integrity first or always, as politicians’ wives still so often seem to, “stand by her man”, whatever the personal cost.

It is set in a fictitious women’s college in a wholly real Oxford, where a poison pen is causing increasing alarm and distress among students and staff. What the former don’t know is that the offender must be among the latter, and Harriet is forced to look hard at each of the women who have chosen the celibate and professional path, and ask: why?

Some delightful, and delightfully awful, fringe characters also pop into this novel. My personal favourite is the dreadful Miss Schuster-Slatt, a loud American proponent of eugenics and middle-class brood-mare mothers. You get the feeling, however, that Sayers’ favourite might have been the delightful jolly historian, Phoebe Tucker, married to an archaeologist, who has managed the perfect blend of partnership, personal and professional.

Lord Peter, that foppish, high-bred but utterly moral aristocrat, is in the background for much of this book, but brings together the strings of plot and theme in a dramatic denouncement, at which point Harriet has to decide which of the paths she has seen laid out is hers.

The writing is rich – some might say too rich for modern palettes – quotations and allusions to the Great White Males of English letters, to Greek philosophers and Latin poets, fly thick and fast. My 1936 edition even boasts touches of Greek, in the original script. But this is never gratuitous, the references always apt – indeed you might say, Sayers is an original “rapper”, drawing in, melding and remaking, well-worn tracks.

If you want to fill in an hour’s train journey after a tiring day, Christie’s lightweight predictability will meet the bill. But for a satisfying, enriching evening in a cultivated world, Sayers must be the choice.

Books

Don’t buy a PcLine keyboard/optical mouse set. I’ve just taken back the second one with the same problem, which started in both cases after a month or so – main mouse function not working, although scroll and clicks were. Found it is very hard these days to run a computer just with a keyboard. Now got to get used to another different keyboard and mousing, having had to pay £15 more for them. Grrrrrr!

The BBC held a vote for the leader of a “world government”. The results:

1 – Nelson Mandela
2 – Bill Clinton
3 – Dalai Lama
4 – Noam Chomsky
5 – Alan Greenspan
6 – Bill Gates
7 – Steve Jobs
8 – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
9 – Richard Branson
10 – George Soros
11 – Kofi Annan

Interesting that Clinton ranks so highly, and Chomsky for that matter. (Was there some sort of campaign for the latter, I can’t help wondering?)

There’s a distinct broadly leftish tinge to the list – perhaps reflecting the sort of people (15,000 in total apparently, half from America) who are likely to be intrigued by the question.

You’d have to say it is a small feather in the cap of South Africa that it gets two nominees – a reflection, fair enough when you think of it, of the amazing peaceful transition in which those two men played such a part.

But the only Briton being Branson – you should be able to hear me wince – oh he’s entertaining enough, but …! (Tony Blair was 12th, which I guess you could call the British “donkey” vote.)

But, surprise surprise, no women. The BBC reports:

“Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi [was] the highest-ranking woman at 13th. Hillary Clinton was the next most popular woman at 16th.”

J.K. Rowling was 49th – presumably with the youth vote.

Who would I choose? I think Mary Robinson, former Irish President and UN Commissioner for Human Rights might get my vote, although I’m open to other suggestions …