David Crane

If anyone ever wondered why Marlborough has so seldom enjoyed the reputation his abilities warrant he could do a lot worse than start with Richard Holmes’s new biography. England’s Fragile Genius is probably as comprehensive an account of Marlborough as a single volume can hope to be, and yet at the end of 500-odd closely argued and sympathetic pages he remains so completely the creature of his age in all its factionalism, double dealing and venality, that it is hard to see him ever comfortably fitting the popular notion of the British hero. Even those who dislike Wellington’s politics can hardly deny the consistency or integrity of the man, but Marlborough presents a different range of difficulties.

It would be hard to imagine a worse title for a book, or one more likely to unite the sceptics of every camp. For those poor souls who think the Cheltenham Festival has something to do with books the idea will be ludicrous, and for the rest of us whose year begins with the Melbourne Test, and moves through the ‘Six Nations’, Champion Hurdle, Augusta, Aintree, Formula 1, the FA Cup Final, Epsom, Ascot, Wimbledon, and the Open back to the Charity Shield and another eight months’ dose of the Premiership, the notion that sport needs validation from ‘life’ or anywhere else is deeply offensive. I remember many years ago, playing in a ‘Sixes’ Hockey tournament sponsored by, I think, the Midland Bank.

There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little schoolmate or interfering adult after another is struck dead or buried upside down for doing nothing more than annoy the little Infant, the one theological message to emerge from it is a tough and unambiguous Don’t mess with me.

It would be hard to exaggerate just how good — or for those who have never read Christopher Rush — what a surprise and relief this book is. In the usual course of events there are few things to lower the spirits like a Scottish memoir, but here in the generosity, invention, compassion and wit of a story of an east coast childhood is the perfect antidote to that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the crofting world that seems to form the dismal staple of contemporary Scottish memory. Christopher Rush was born in St Monans on the east coast of Scotland in 1944, the son of a local girl and an English brute of a father just back from the war.

It has often been said that the popularity of J. M. Barrie stands as a warning to those who think they understand the Edwardians and much the same is true of Tom Moore and the Age of Romanticism. With the exceptions of Byron and Scott, Moore was by far the most successful literary figure of his day, and if his success clearly had more to do with personality and charm than anything he actually wrote, just how much charm does a man have to have to get away with verse like this? ‘Alla illa Alla!’ — the glad shout renew —‘Alla Akbar!’ — the Caliph’s in Merou.Hang out your gilded tapestry in the streets,And light your shrines and chaunt your ziraleets.

I don’t know if it is still there, but in the museum at Lord’s there used to be a glass case containing a stuffed sparrow killed in mid-flight by Jahangir Khan. It always felt somehow dismally appropriate that the one sparrow to substantiate biblical claims should have to spend its eternity at Lord’s, but a different age and a more exuberant game demand a more optimistic symbol and in an incident during a one-day match at the Oval in 2002 between India and Sri Lanka Romesh Gunesekera has found it. ‘The whole of the Oval was hushed,’ he writes on the death of a London pigeon, sacrificial victim of a Sachin Tendulkar drive: The nearest fielder walked over and picked the bird up as though it were the dove of peace. He carried it slowly towards the boundary.

One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the command of Victor Campbell might or might not still be alive, while to the south of them, somewhere out on the ice between Hut Point and the Pole itself, 700-odd miles away, lay the bodies of Scott and the four men with whom he had set out on his final journey.

It is difficult to put a finger on the reason, but there has always seemed something particularly dismal about the Gunpowder Plot. There is obviously a lot to be said for any conspiracy that can erase the Stuart line from English history at a blow, but from Robert Catesby and the rest of the old Essex mob to the wretched James everyone on both sides of the plot is so profoundly unsympathetic that it is hard to care at this distance what happened to any of them. A romantic’s case — largely rooted in Aubrey — might be made for Sir Everard Digby, but, as James Travers’s beautifully illustrated presentation of the archival sources underlines, the single real exception is the broken and sadly compromised figure of the Jesuit, Henry Garnet.

Howard and Southwell, Fortes- cue, Paine, Percy, Mayne, Milner, Owen, Houghton, Cam- pion — even the names of our prep school dormitories were a declaration of dissent. Of this list perhaps only Edmund Campion is now at all widely known, but after three years of interminable prayers for the reconversion of England and the canonisation of the 40 martyrs that quixotic collection of saints, poets, fanatics, scholars, Jesuits, Carthus- ians, plotters, aristocrats and carpenters can still conjure up an alternative sense of Englishness and English history that is difficult to shake off.

If any of Byron’s contemporaries at Cambridge had been asked to nominate The Man Most Likely To, it is a safe bet that it would have been William Bankes, and while things did not turn out quite as any but his immediate set might have guessed, that hardly detracts from his biographical appeal. Rich, clever and brave, a much lionised traveller, an inspired collector and generous patron, ‘Nubian’ Bankes would seem to have had it all, when a meeting with a guardsman in a convenience ‘that afforded accommodation for only one individual’ threatened him with disgrace and the gallows. In the same year that a Captain Henry Nicholls was hanged for sodomy, Bankes was lucky to get away with an improbable acquittal, but caution had never been his longest suit.

It is never easy to tell a story that everyone knows and still harder to tell one that everybody thinks he knows. For more than 200 years the mutiny on the Bounty has been part of British folklore, and its main protagonists — William Bligh and Fletcher Christian — enshrined in myth as types of brutal oppression and romantic defiance. The interesting thing about the Bounty story, too, is just how early this popular caricature of events succeeded in passing itself off as history.