The Rest Is History - 12 Days: Death of Edward the Confessor and the Dreyfus Affair

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

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Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History. We are doing the 12 days of Christmas, or indeed the 13 days of Christmas, and we have finally reached the 5th of January. It's the penultimate day, isn't it? Yes, the penultimate day, and an absolute red-letter day in The Rest Is History's calendar, in The Rest is history's calendar and the rest is history's seasonal year because

tom holland happy birthday it is thank you very thank you very much dominic um oh what a lovely moment this is it is and you know how modest i am that i haven't chosen my birthday as one of the two historical events that we're talking about are you going to be doing anything exciting for your birthday tom i don't know because uh when are we recording this it's the uh we're recording it two weeks earlier that's the 23rd of december so i have no idea what we're going to be doing probably staying in under a lockdown or something you should concoct you should have concocted some elaborate story yeah we're going skiing i've never skied i've never been skiing actually never will now i imagine never no yeah um that's a depressing later which to start isn't it um well maybe it No, I've never been skiing, actually. Never will now, I imagine. Never. No.

Yeah. That's a depressing note to which to start, isn't it? Or maybe it isn't. I mean, maybe. You can't do anything. Well, I've never had any desire to go skiing, ever. Yeah. It looks horrible. If you'd wanted to have gone skiing, you'd have gone by now.

I know I'd be terrible at it. I know. I know. Anyway, so, yeah, I'll be celebrating my birthday by not going skiing and probably staying in and shivering. Oh. Because probably by then there'll be power cuts,

won't there? Power cuts? What are you on about? Well, Russia will have invaded Ukraine, all the gas will be cut off. Yes, I'm very worried about that, actually.

So who knows what will have happened? Okay, well, let's cheer everybody up by talking about some... You know what, Dominic? Yeah. If that hasn't happened,

if maybe by the 5th of January, the day today, the Omicron wave will have peaked and passed. There won't have been any power cuts. There won't have been a war. Everything will be great. And people listening to this will have a real spring in their step. They will.

Because they'll see the path that history could have taken. They'll be thinking how bad things might have been. Yeah. But imagine if it's even worse. People listen to this in the bombed out ruins of London. Yeah, terrible. I feel this terrible

ironic podcast, people laughing. Yeah. As the Omega variant sweeps the world. Oh my word. Tom, don't do this.

Don't do it. Let's talk about something else. Let's talk, let's go back a thousand years and talk about something from the 11th century. Yes,

and cheer ourselves up with the thought that actually things could be a lot worse because my date is 5th january 1066 and that is the day on which edward the confessor dies and of course the death of edward the confessor the starting gun on the most tumultuous year perhaps in british British history. Yeah. The year that sees the Battle of Hastings, the Norman Conquest, and on Christmas Day, 1066, William the Conqueror crowned in the Great Abbey at Westminster

that Edward the Confessor had been building throughout his life, and which had been dedicated on the 28th of January, 1065. So a week or so before Edward's death. And that's really the last kind of great event of his reign. And from that point on, he basically takes to bed. He slips in and out of consciousness. He kind of mutters gibberish occasionally and the question that hangs over his sickbed westminster england northern europe is who is going to succeed him as king because he is childless he has totally

failed to provide an air yeah yeah and he has also basically he's been playing off a pair of candidates yeah harold gobbinson who is the greatest earl in the realm and william the duke of normandy and both of them feel that they have a a claim on the throne there is of course it's actually not up to edward it's up to the wit and because it's kind of an elective monarchy isn't it uh it's it's it's kind of an elective monarchy, isn't it? It's kind of an elective monarchy. But over the previous century or so, the principle has basically been established that it should be a kind of hereditary monarchy. So the hereditary principle should kick in. But what has complicated that is the fact that, as Edward well knows, because his father, Æthelred the Unready, had been kicked out and replaced by the Danish kings, so Svein Fortbeard, Canute, Harth Canute, Harald Harefoot. So there is this kind of idea that the hereditary principle is kind of moderated by violence, rapacity and opportunism and that is basically where harold comes in because

there is there is an atheling uh someone who is you know the the word for someone who is qualified to be a king in the form of edgar yeah who is um so there's a there's a kind of a a branch of ethelred's family that have fled to um edmund ironside's family who who lose who um had fought knut to a score draw decades earlier uh and edmund ironside then dies and knut takes over the whole of england um and his family line have been in hungary uh and edgar has come back he doesn't really you know not a native English speaker, doesn't have the kind of the network of connections that a king properly needs. And he's 13 years old.

So that's no good. So it isn't really any good. So Edward the Confessor, Tom, he's the seventh son of Hethera the Unready. We didn't feature him in the World Cup of English Kings. He wasn't a contender. So first of all, he spent lots of his life. He's half Norman, isn't he?

His mother is Emma of Normandy. Yeah, and so when Æthelred flees to Normandy, Edward had gone with him, and so had spent a lot of time in the Norman court. So is he kind of more, would you say, more Norman than English? Do you think? Yes. He's yes.

Well, he's very, he's very conscious of the fact that he is, he's of the line of the Kurdic ingas. So the line of Kurdic going back through Alfred. Yeah. All the way to Kurdic, the legendary founder of the West Saxon dynasty.

And that gives, you know, that's a, dare i say a sacral quality to his bloodline the listeners would expect nothing less um but yes but i think culturally he's he's he's as much norman as he is uh anglo-saxon um what about the issue with him and the godwins So Godwin is the big sort of magnate, isn't he? They, they, does he kind of, is he enthralled to them? That, that family?

He hates them. He hates them. Oh, right. Okay. So, so the Godwins are the kind of the big cheeses. Yeah.

Godwin is the Earl of Wessex. Harold Godwin's son succeeds to that. Yeah. And the Godwins, you know, have, have, have become successful as Knut's men. Okay.

Right. They're part Danish themselves. Yeah. So Godwin has married a Danish wife. And they basically are the kind of the archetype of the overmighty subject. Yeah. And Edward, basically are the kind of the archetype of the overmighty subject yeah and edward although he has this royal line bloodline he is also you know as we've said a kind of an outsider yeah and so there's an incredible tension um godwin feels that basically he you know he's the big man he has the um the patronage networks.

He should really be running the kingdom. Edward feels that he should. And there's this, you know, they kind of kick each other. Godwin kind of kicks sand in Edward's face. Edward gets back. Godwin's going to exile. Godwin's come back. They kick sand in Edward's face. And basically there's a kind of uneasy truce. And Edward ends up marrying Godwin's daughter, Edith. So Harold's sister yeah and the question of why they never have any children i mean one of the answers may be that edward refuses to allow the grandson of a godwin to sit on the english throne i mean it may be you know that's one of the theories for it okay he just can't bear to go to bed with her um we don't know i mean there's clearly a lot going on there that uh we

have no way of knowing so would you give edward the confessor low marks for kingship based on the terrible of what happens afterwards yes yeah because because the disaster of the conquest is entirely down to edward and it's not just bad luck that that happens and therefore because he plays he plays he plays harold plays Harold and William against one another. And so both of them can say, well, Edward, you know. So what happens when Edward dies? So with him, and you can see this on the bare tapestry, but it's also reported in a life of Edward that is kind of pretty much contemporaneous,

that when he dies, he has Edith. So his wife, Harold, Robert, who's the steward of the, of the, of the palace and the archbishop of Canterbury, who's a kind of a bit of a rogue called Stigand. And this,

this account kind of blurs the question of, of, of who it is that Edward on his deathbed nominates. William will claim that it was William and that he'd already nominated him. Harold obviously says it was me. But what this account says is that Edward entrusts the kingdom to Harold rather than granting it. So entrusting could imply a kind of regency for Edgar the Atheling I mean so it's all up for granted but what we know is that

Harold is crowned the following day probably in Westminster Abbey and that's incredibly quick and what that also implies is that the Witan must have all been suborned by Harold to back him before Edward dies. And the reason they can do that is that all the great earls and lords have gathered in London, in Westminster, for the consecration of the Abbey. And the two key figures who get squared are Edwin, who is the Earl of Mercia, and Morcar, who is the Earl of Northumbria Morca who is the Earl of Northumbria who are a pair of brothers and Morca marries again another Edith it's all incredibly confusing but Harold

Harold marries the sister of Edwin and Morca who is called Edith. Is that Edith Swanwick? No that's a different Edith. Oh god too many Ediths. So there are three Ediths so there's the Eda who is called Edith. Is that Edith Swanneck? No, that's a different Edith. Oh, golly, too many Ediths. There are three Ediths. So there's the Edith who is Harald's sister, who's been married to Edwin the Confessor.

There's Edith Swanneck, who is the Great Beauty, who is Harald's mistress. Yeah. And then there's Edith who is the sister of Edwin and Morka, who marries Harald, obviously as a kind of pre-packaged deal to get them to back him as king. And so he's crowned on the same day as Edward's funeral.

So there's a lot of kind of indecent hurry going on. Who knew that this podcast would bring so many Ediths? The name of our cat, bless her. Yeah, my paternal grandmother was called Edith. It's an old-fashioned name, isn't it? a great name it's a really great name yeah it's kind of name i think that's kind of coming back into vogue but it's spelt spelt in a kind of very groovy way is it old english yeah it's kind of e a d y g maybe that's just a hassle e a d that'sA-D-G-Y-T-H. Giving your name to bureaucrats, isn't it?

I mean, so much. It's like kind of Irish people have this hassle, don't they? Yes. I had lots of discussions about this with my wife. I said, if somebody's saying, sorry, how do you spell that? It's no good. That's just going to annoy the child. Anyway, we're getting off to off-piste.

The death of Edward the Confessor. So quite a dark day in English history, Tom. Yes, Tom. Yes, definitely. And after the break, I should be doing a very dark day in French history. We promised you more Gallicisms yesterday, and I have them because we should be talking about the Dreyfus case.

Yeah. Okay. That's a very dark day. Yeah. All right. But, but obviously there's a lot of light because it is my birthday. So yes.

So it's light and shade. All right. See you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back to this uh this wonderful day it's my birthday 5th of january um the penultimate uh of the 12 13 days of christmas however you like to

calculate them um and in the uh the first half we did the death of edward the confessor in 1066 and dominic your choice now well before it has a drape you sawed yeah it's a it's a drape you sawed themed uh day but before we come to that since your birthday, Tom, it occurs to me that if the listeners wish to buy you a present... Oh, the very idea! They should go to restishistorypod.com and treat themselves to Rest Is History Club membership.

Yes. That's what you'd want, isn't it, Tom? That is what I'd want. Of course it is. And if you really love Tom Holland, you could get Athelstan membership, because I know, Tom, nothing would mean more to you than that, would it? Oh, Dominic, I don't want to say that. That's because you want presents on top of that. No, just to be the podcast host of people's hearts.

That's all I want. Nothing more. So the 5th of January, 1895, we are in the Moulin Court of the military school in Paris. So cadets and so on are assembling. There are 5,000 men in the courtyard of the École Militaire. The drums are rolling. They're all lined up in their finery, in their uniforms. And out of the building come four

artillery officers and a fifth man. That fifth man is Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who is an artillery officer born in Alsace. And Jewish, right? And Jewish. That's the key. And he has been

accused, charged, and convicted of treason, of espionage, of passing secrets to the Germans of all people, the very people who had humiliated France in the Franco-Prussian War. And Dreyfus, and he tears off from Dreyfus's uniform the badges, the stripes. He tears off his cuffs, his buttons, the sleeves of his jacket, and Dreyfus is standing there sort of rigid, utterly rigid you know, like sort of Inspector Clouseau

being decorated at the end of one of the Pink Panther films by the French president for those of you who are Clouseau aficionados he's standing there, he has a tremendous sense of dignity, Dreyfus, while all this is happening to him Dreyfus the traitor, or so it seems and the crowning moment of this is that this officer takes Dreyfus the traitor or so it seems and um the crowning moment of this is that this officer

takes Dreyfus's sword and he snaps the sword in two over his knee and at that point that's the point to which Dreyfus physically staggers he sort of recoils and stumbles and then steadies himself and raises his arms. He shouts, innocent, innocent, vive la France, vive l'armée. You have degraded an innocent man, but I swear that I am innocent. And, you know, the watching men, no one moves, no one says anything. And then the men turn and they march off with Dreyfus among them. Dreyfus is taken off to prison.

Initially he's taken to a prison on the Ile de Ré. Yeah, a wonderful place. Yeah, the sort of French Cornwall. Well, Brittany, we said in the previous podcast, was the French Cornwall.

But this is the holiday destination of choice for the French liberal classes. Yes. And he's held in the Ile de Ré for a month. So then he's put on a ship. And for 15 days, they sail west, and they arrive at the Salvation Islands of French Guyana in South America.

And they're on an island called Devil's Island. Which isn't, you know, I mean, if you're going on holiday. No, you wouldn't go to Devil's Island. It is the most notorious, probably the most notorious penal colony on the planet. Yeah, in the world. And the most horrendous sort of conditions. It is the place from Papillon. Yeah.

So you go there to get to catch fever and die. Yeah, you absolutely do. And there he is, apart from the guards, his guards, Dreyfus is the only inhabitant of the island. And he is put in a stone hut that is about 13 feet by 13 feet in size.

And there he must stay, talking to no one. Rot. Trapped to rot. And you know what? Well, of course you know what. He was innocent. He was right. So the backstory to this, the Dreyfus affair is the most extraordinary

political scandal in French history. Because it makes Brexit look like a storm in a keycap. It does. It had huge crowds. It had rioting. I mean, in modern terms, that is the closest analogy, isn't it? I think.

That's what people have said, that the sense of an absolute division in the country. Yeah. People kind of refusing to speak to each other. It absolutely becomes what people would call a culture war. So it becomes ideas about patriotism,

identity, what is france all this stuff all of these things are kind of heaped up onto this one basically it's a piece of paper in a waste paper basket that is what it's all about yes sorry i interrupted the backstory so the backstory is fascinating so france has lost in the franco-prussian war of 1870-71 and germany has been created off the back of that. And the French feel terribly humiliated because they've also lost Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. And a lot of people from Alsace play a part in the Dreyfus case story.

There's lots of people in the army from Alsace. And there's this burning sense of kind of mutilation and humiliation that they want these these territories back but they you know germans germany is the powerhouse of europe so the chances of them getting them back are slim and the french there's a sort of sense in france in the 1890s and so on that there's a kind of a toxicity to politics the political life is poisoned really by the humiliations of the century. And the French are very anxious that the Germans have overtaken

them technologically and that they're spying on them and stealing all their secrets. And French military intelligence basically starts spying on the German embassy in Paris. And they have a housekeeper called Madame Bastion who is a she's working for the for the French secret service and then she's basically spying on the Germans and she finds

a torn up note in a waste paper basket which becomes known as the bordereau which means I don't know what that means let's say a torn up note anyway she finds this bordereau and she and it's they they stitch it back together and they find that it's basically the details of a gun, of a new sort of hydraulic-powered gun that the French have developed. And somebody has given this to the German military attaché, who's a man called Max von Schwarzkoppen. Basically, the sort of casting agency that supplied the German officers there. And they look around

to find out who it is. It must be somebody in artillery, blah, blah, blah. And basically suspicion falls on Dreyfus for two reasons. Well, three reasons, actually.

Reason number one is that he's from Alsace. So there's this sort of... Alsace has this strange place in the French psyche at this point because obviously it's the territory they want to recapture,

but also people from Alsace, some of them do feel German rather than French. So there is this sort of dubiousness about Dreyfus. Next, Dreyfus is a very chilly character. He doesn't have lots of friends. He's not a man to go to the pub with. Well, he's like the stereotype of a British officer. A little bit, yeah. Chilly, stiff upper lip.

Is he sort of Douglas Jardine? He's Douglas Jardine, yes. And so all that thing you were describing about his refusal to show any emotion, when this unspeakable humiliation, public humiliation is being visited. Oh, a public humiliation, which is literally called a degradation.

A degradation. That's its official title. humiliation, which is literally called a degradation. A degradation. That's its official title. And he, you know, he... Yeah. He draws on the inner ice. He does. And then Robert Harris has an absolutely wonderful novel about the Dreyfus affair.

Yeah, it's great. What's it called? An Officer and a Spy, is it? I think something like that. And it's amazing because you know exactly what's going to happen. And you keep telling pages to find out what's going to happen. Yeah, agreed. I think for me, it's actually because you, you know exactly what's going to happen and you keep telling pages to find out what's going to happen.

Agreed. I think it's, for me, it's actually his best novel. And in that, one of the, one of the really interesting things in that is it would be a much more Hollywood story.

If Dreyfus was just kind of terribly sentimental. Yeah. If he was Tom Hanks, but he's absolutely not. He's played by a sort of, he'd be played by some sort of, you know, British character actor who might otherwise be playing Neville Chamberlain

or something, isn't he? Jeremy Irons. Yeah. And because he's so unlovable, that kind of gives an extra layer of irony, I suppose, to the story. But, of course, the big thing about Dreyfus is that he's Jewish. And anti-Semitism is really, really rampant in France in the 1890s and 1900s.

It's a sort of, I don't know, it's a reaction against modernity. It's a search for scapegoats after defeat in war. And there's this all this sort of, there's this kind of Catholic conservative politics kind of bubbling away. And Dreyfus makes the perfect person. And once the military have seized um Dreyfus makes the perfect person and once the military have seized on Dreyfus and they've said it's him they refuse to accept a lot of the officers refuse to accept any questioning or to entertain any doubts at all even as the doubts start worse than that I mean they they start forging yeah they start forging evidence. That's exactly right. And that's what makes it so toxic,

is that actually it kind of ends up where people have to decide either Dreyfus is guilty or the army. Yeah, or the army have been lying to you. Because once the army start forging evidence, and I think they do it at first, the honour of the army is at stake. Dreyfus must be proved to be guilty.

And once they've started doing that, because quite quickly, within a few years, suspicion falls on another man called Esterhazy, who is in fact the guilty party. And then it starts to get taken up by kind of liberal or left-wing writers. Most famously,

Émile Zola, who writes the front-page story, Jacuzzi, in which he basically says the entire French establishment... Which he writes when he's in exile, doesn't he? Yes, he has to go into exile. Because you see, the Dreyfus case becomes so incendiary that to take a side on it means absolutely... I mean, it's far greater than Brexit,

far more incendiary than Brexit. It means you absolutely identify yourself politically in the eyes of your contemporaries. And it means that half the country will hate you because either you are on the side of Dreyfus and of sort of justice or you're on the side of the army and the honour of France and the nation

and all this sort of stuff. It's very good in Proust. I've never read Proust. Oh, it's so good. It's really brilliant. It looks terribly long. I mean, it is very long. I mean, it's indisputably very long, but it's as a portrait of French society in this period, it's kind of incomparable. A priest, obviously, would be a Dreyfus partisan, wouldn't he?

Well, because he's Jewish, yes. Yeah. Yes. But people's attitudes to Dreyfus is kind of very useful signifier as to where they stand on a whole host of other issues. So to cut a long story short, I think we should definitely do a whole podcast on the Dreyfus case because it's such a fascinating story.

But those of you who don't know how it ends probably do want to know how it ends. So Dreyfus is eventually pardoned. He's not exonerated at first. He's basically found guilty again, completely unfairly. But the French president gives him a pardon, which Dreyfus accepts very reluctantly because of course accepting a pardon carries the imputation of guilt uh which he and

he knows he wasn't guilty but he accepts it he's persuaded to accept it he's not exonerated until 1906 and then he actually serves in the french army in world war one and even then you know nobody really likes him that's the thing even the people who've supported him say, God, he's such a chilly kind of unlovable character. But to who he's become this great martyr. But the interesting thing now is that the French kind of ultra right wing polemicist, demagogue and kind of presidential Eric Zemmour, who is himself Jewish, has brought the Dreyfus case back up again and says,

he thinks Dreyfus was possibly guilty. I think that's exactly what France needs at the moment. To reopen the Dreyfus case. Well, it would make Britain's arguments

about Brexit look, you know, restrained and dignified by comparison, wouldn't it? Yes, Eric Zemmour, I mean, he has, so he also thinks that Marshall Petter was unfairly treated and he thinks that Dreyfus was guilty.

Shocking. I mean, these seem unnecessary. Plus, yeah, to rip, be ripping off at the moment. This is,

this is not where, if you're just a controversialist, this is just where you end up being led. You just end up... We must not do that, Tom. No, we must stay on the straight and narrow and avoid taking ludicrous positions. Unnecessary polemical positions.

We would never do that. We'd never, ever do that. Absolutely not. Anyway, Dreyfus was clearly innocent, so we're not going to do it on the Dreyfus case. So that's the Dreyfus affair. I mean, that is a sad story, I think. Poor old Dreyfus.

That's an incredibly sad story. I mean, well, it's actually, it's a kind of, a slight echo of Torvio as a slave, of kind of dynamics of race leading to, you know, someone being uprooted from the society in which they belong and sent away to, to suffer appallingly away from their family and everybody. Cosmic injustice. Yeah.

Cosmic injustice. Um, which I guess is why it still has a kind of resonance that it does today. Yeah. God, this is, this series is getting very depressing. I think we should,

we've got one more day. Haven't we? We've got a great one tomorrow. A really cheering one series is getting very depressing. I think we've got one more day, haven't we? We've got a great one tomorrow, a really cheering one. We've got one, and we've got the appearance of Samuel Peeps at last. I don't think we've had enough Peeps in these 12 days. No, we've got a very, very, very cheery one tomorrow, which is one of the great days in history. Well, today is one of the great days in history, Tom,

because happy birthday. And on that note. Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community please sign up up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.