Vlad the Impaler

The legend of Dracula was inspired by the life and antics of Vlad III, a 15^th century prince of Wallachia, but fiction was far excelled by reality in terms of savage cruelty and murderous sadism.

Vlad was born in 1431 in Sighisoara, Transylvania (part of modern Romania). His father, Vlad II, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a secret organisation that had been created by the Holy Roman Emperor to resist incursions into Europe by the Muslim Ottomans. The younger Vlad became a member of the order at the age of five, and thus acquired the family name of Dracul.

Vlad II had been exiled from Wallachia (also in modern-day Romania) to Transylvania, and was also under severe pressure from the Ottomans. He was forced at one stage to send two of his sons into captivity, which meant that Vlad Junior spent four of his teenage years in Ottoman custody, where he developed a hatred of the Turks.

Vlad’s elder brother Mircea was murdered in 1447, as was Vlad Senior. The Ottomans invaded the region and installed Vlad Junior as a puppet ruler of Wallachia in 1448, but this did not please the Hungarians, who forced him to flee to Moldavia. However, Vlad was able to persuade the ruler of Hungary that he was a better bet to rule Wallachia than the boyars (nobles loyal to Hungary) who currently did so.

In 1456 Vlad took his opportunity to seize the Wallachian throne from the boyars. Having killed his rival, he invited the leading boyars to a banquet, ostensibly to make peace with them, but instead he forced them to become slaves in a programme of castle-building.

Vlad’s efforts to establish Wallachia as a powerful kingdom led to the elimination of anyone seen as a threat to this aim. That not only meant any noble who might challenge his rule but also anyone whom he regarded as a drain on the country’s resources. He began by inviting thousands of vagrants and people who were physically or mentally disabled to a feast, which was genuine, but after they had finished eating the hall was locked and set on fire.

Vlad also had a deep hatred for immoral women, who would have their breasts cut off and be skinned or boiled alive, with their remains being put on public display afterwards.

Another target were the “foreign parasites” who sought to get rich through unfair trading arrangements. He therefore had thousands of German and other merchants butchered in 1459.

The name Vlad the Impaler was well deserved, because impaling his victims on stakes was a preferred method of execution. Stakes would be arrayed in concentric circles around his castles and his victims forced down onto them, sometimes taking hours to die. Nobody was allowed to remove the dead bodies, which rotted where they were.

Skinning and boiling were also used as means of killing people, and on one occasion he hammered nails into the heads of foreign ambassadors whom he considered were being insufficiently polite to him. It is possible that he drank the blood of some of his victims, which filtered through to the Dracula legend.

In 1461 Vlad crossed the Danube to attack the Ottomans, capturing 20,000 Turkish prisoners in the process. When Sultan Mehmet II returned to the Danube for a counter-attack he was greeted by a forest of impaled bodies on stakes.

However, Vlad had underestimated the strength of his enemy and lost his throne. He was captured by the Hungarians and spent the next ten years as a prisoner, amusing himself by impaling birds and mice on tiny stakes. 

He was able to get back into favour with the Hungarians, even marrying a Hungarian princess (presumably with considerable reluctance on her part) and winning support for a fresh invasion of Wallachia.

However, his success was short-lived in that he was killed in 1476 when the Ottomans invaded yet again. It was perhaps fitting that his head was later stuck on a stake in Constantinople.

© John Welford

William Radam and his marvelous medicine

William Radam well deserved the label of “snake oil salesman”. He operated in the United States during the late 19^th century, selling his “Microbe Killer” for which he claimed amazing powers.

William Radam

For a pharmaceutical pioneer, Radam had an unconventional background. He was a gardener who had observed that it didn’t matter what weeds he treated with weedkiller, they all died. He reasoned that, since all diseases were caused by “microbes”, if you could kill the microbes you would cure the disease, whatever it was.

He therefore began to sell his miracle cure with the recommendation to take: “A wineglassful after meals and at bedtime … it will prevent and cure disease by destroying bacteria, the organic life that causes fermentation and decay of the blood, the tissues, and the vital organs”. By claiming to prevent disease as well as cure it, he therefore gained a marketplace among healthy people as well as sick ones. 

The diseases that Microbe Killer would prevent and cure were many and various – everything from the common cold and indigestion to syphilis and cancer. It proved to be highly popular, at three dollars a gallon, and Radam eventually set up 17 factories in countries around the world.

Needless to say, Radam was quick to rubbish the medical profession, accusing them of hoodwinking the public by pretending to know what caused a patient’s disease by diagnosing their symptoms. Clearly, applying scientific rigour to the study of medicine was all nonsense – what was needed was a hefty dose of Microbe Killer and nothing else!

Eventually, someone thought it would be a good idea to apply scientific rigour to William’s marvellous medicine. It turned out to be more than 99% water, with small quantities of sulphuric and hydrochloric acids plus a dash of red wine to add taste and colour. At least the former gardener did not think that weedkiller was an appropriate means of dealing with microbes!

Unfortunately, some people today do not seem to be any less gullible than the customers of William Radam. The market for homeopathic remedies seems to be as buoyant as ever, despite the fact that they contain nothing more in terms of clinically effective substances than did Microbe Killer. No doubt there were people in Radam’s day who swore blind that their regular dose of highly dilute and slightly acidic red wine was doing them the power of good, just as devotees of homeopathy claim today. However, apart from the beneficial placebo effect that comes from believing that something is doing you good, the old and new snake oils are no more than that – snake oil!

© John Welford

Who was Ned Ludd?

General Ned Ludd never existed, but his followers wreaked havoc in the factories of early 19^th-century Britain and provoked strong reprisals from the government of the day. The Luddites played a role in the development of the working-class movement that led eventually to the formation of legal trade unions.

The origin of the Luddites

The name probably originates with Lud, a mythical king of early Britain who was said to have built the first walls of London and after whom Ludgate Hill is named. The Luddites saw themselves as invoking the spirit of free-born British people from a past age. By claiming to be based in Sherwood Forest they also saw themselves as latter-day followers of Robin Hood, striking a blow for the ordinary working man against the forces of power and capitalism.

Their actions began in 1811 with the sending of letters to mill owners in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire who had recently installed steam-engine powered machines (known as frames) that increased production in the hosiery and knitwear industries but needed fewer people to do the work. The factory system was also making it uneconomic for people to work on hand-powered frames in their own homes, as had been the traditional pattern in these areas.

War with France had given the mill owners more incentive to install powered knitting frames, given that Napoleon Bonaparte’s “Continental System” had effectively sealed the continent of Europe against exports from Britain. In order to cut their costs, and thus make it feasible for exports to be sent to other markets, the industrialists of Britain had no option but to produce more by using fewer workers, on lower wages, and that meant installing large, steam-driven machines.

A series of poor harvests during the period from 1808 to 1812 had caused food prices to rise, so there was genuine hardship in the general population. Many people felt that they had to do something to fight against the forces that were oppressing them, and they saw the machines in the factories as the root cause of their distress.

The spread of Luddite discontent

The above-mentioned letters, signed by “Enoch”, were threats to the mill owners to remove the machines, or see them destroyed, and the actions that followed served to carry out those threats. Bands of men broke into the factories at night and smashed the machines with sledge-hammers. The “General’s Army” sometimes consisted of hundreds or even thousands of men marching in disciplined order through the streets on their way to the factories. Even if there was no actual “Ned Ludd”, somebody was hard at work organising these events.

The Luddites soon spread their activities northwards to the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where the woollen and cotton garment industries were based.  Government troops had to be brought in to protect the factories and arrest the demonstrators, one estimate being that 12,000 soldiers had to be diverted from the war effor

Needless to say, some Luddite activities did spill over into more general mayhem, with food riots riding on the back of the organised machine-breaking. There was, for example, a riot in Manchester in April 1812 in which desperate women raided the stocks of potatoes held by dealers who were charging extortionate prices for them.

Force met with force

The government’s response was to meet force with force, and a Frame-Breaking Bill was passed by Parliament in 1812. This made the destruction of machinery punishable by hanging. One opponent of the bill was Lord Byron, whose speech in the House of Lords included the words:

“Nothing but absolute want could have driven a large and once honest and industrious body of people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their family and their community.”

This statement made the case that it is wrong to regard the Luddite movement as that of an undisciplined mob, despite its excesses. On the one hand, it could be said that, by destroying the new machines, they were depriving the operators of those machines of their living, but it was also true that the goods produced in the factories were often of much lower quality than those of the handloom weavers, who were craftsmen with a real pride in their work.

Ultimately, the actions of the Luddites were futile, because economic necessity was driving the movement of industrialisation, and the machine-smashing could only delay the changes, not prevent them for ever.

The Luddite cause was not helped by the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, on 11^th May 1812. Although it soon became clear that his assassin, John Bellingham, was motivated by purely private motives, many people felt that anything that threatened violence against the establishment had to be resisted strongly, whatever the provocation. Memories of the French Revolution were vivid in many peoples’ minds, and the connection between mob violence and the murder of political leaders was an easy one to make.

The suppression of the Luddites was carried out by means of the punishment of a number of their leaders, including hangings and transportation to Australia, although none of those leaders answered to the name of Ned Ludd.

The legacy of the Luddites

The textile workers of the time had no recourse to a trade union to represent their grievances to factory owners, so there was no safety valve when problems arose. The “Combination Acts” of 1799 and 1800 made trade unions illegal, so any such activity was driven underground. Although these laws were repealed in 1824-5 the process of collective bargaining was illegal until 1860. The Luddite movement was seen by some as a good reason for suppressing trade unions, but ultimately it showed that working people needed to be able to deal with their problems in a constructive way, around a negotiating table, without being forced to take extreme measures.

The word “Luddite” is used today to describe someone who sets their face against progress and stubbornly refuses to accept change. In terms of the original Luddites this charge has some force, in that change was inevitable and breaking the machines was never going to work as a means of reversing the trend towards mechanisation in the garment industry. However, there are occasions when the Luddite mentality has its place, in that craftsmanship should be protected and preserved when under threat. Once certain skills are lost they will be lost for ever, and actions that remind people of that fact should not always be rejected on the grounds that they are anti-progressive.

© John Welford

Three favourite quotes from Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was not only one of the greatest scientists of all time but he also had a “way with words” that he used to express deep truths in memorable ways. Here are three quotations from him (sorry that I don’t know the circumstances under which they were written or said) that I find to be particularly appealing:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

This is similar to his assertion that the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits, and one can see that a life lived through the first half of the 20^th century, when the world tried twice to tear itself apart through war, would naturally tend to this point of view.

Einstein described himself as a “militant pacifist” who would fight for peace, and would no doubt have agreed 100% with his near-contemporary and fellow pacifist Bertrand Russell who said that “War does not determine who is right, only who is left”. What could be more stupid than behaviour that costs so much and produces so little?

However, Einstein might also have been influenced by his great predecessor Isaac Newton, whose theories inspired his own re-interpretation of them. Newton once wrote: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” Those two great minds clearly both recognized that science had its limits, and working out what their fellow humans would do with the discoveries made by scientists was clearly one of those limits.

Those who seek to deny what science says now about climate change and man-made global warming would surely be on the “stupid” list of both Newton and Einstein were they alive today.

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

My desk is always cluttered! That is because I like to have everything I need close at hand and not have to be constantly getting up and either fetching things or putting them away. Librarians are supposed – in theory – to be tidy people who always know where everything is, but tidiness has never been my number one priority!

I once worked for a company in which a decree went around from “upstairs” that nobody was allowed to have more than two pieces of paper on their desk at any one time.  Needless to say, I took absolutely no notice of this edict! Nothing came of it – possibly because the manager who issued this command was too empty-minded to ever think of visiting the library!

It was good to know that – should I have ever been challenged to defend my desk clutter – I would have had Albert Einstein on my side!

The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.

Again – it’s good to know that one’s efforts have the support of one of the greatest minds ever to have existed!

The company I mentioned above did not agree with this sentiment towards the end of my time with them. It was a major UK player in the telecommunications industry, with offices and factories in towns and cities throughout the country. I was the chief librarian, with responsibility for coordinating the company’s four libraries (in Coventry, Liverpool, Poole and Nottingham). As time went by, each library was closed in turn, and the staff made redundant, leaving me with just the Coventry library from which to serve the needs of a 50,000 strong workforce with just one library assistant as my support staff. The fact that this was plainly impossible was all that management needed to declare that the job did not need to be done at all, so the final library was closed as well. The whole company went to the wall six months later.

The thinking was that libraries were not necessary because “it’s all on the Internet”. Somebody once said that the Internet was the world’s largest library, in which all the books had been thrown on the floor. In other words, in order to get the best value from the undoubted benefits that the Internet can provide, you need somebody who can help you to find what you need, and what you can trust, in the shortest possible time. Can I suggest that a professional fully-trained librarian might be just that person?

Libraries have moved on since Einstein’s time, but the principle enshrined in the above quotation still applies. Perhaps it needs a slight rewording – the only thing you absolutely have to know is who you can call upon to help you when you come to a grinding halt in your search for information!

© John Welford

Thomas Clarkson and the fight against the slave trade

 

The story of the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain is always linked with the name of William Wilberforce, and rightly so, but he was not the only person who deserves credit for this. One person who should be remembered alongside Wilberforce is Thomas Clarkson.

Thomas Clarkson was born on 28^th March 1760 at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, where his father was headmaster of the grammar school. Thomas was educated in his father’s school and went up to Cambridge University in 1779. He took a degree in mathematics in 1783. His intention was to take holy orders, so he stayed on at Cambridge for that purpose. In 1785 he entered a competition for an essay in Latin, and this was the key to his life taking a completely different direction.

The title set for the competition was “Anne liceat invitos in servitutum?” which translates as “Is it lawful to make men slaves against their will?” Clarkson decided to develop the theme in terms of the Atlantic slave trade, although at first he regarded the topic as a purely academic exercise. In order to write the essay he needed to do a bit of research, and the works he read, such as Anthony Benezet’s “Historical Account of Guinea” affected him deeply.

The slave trade, which began in the mid 17^th century, was a brilliant device for making a lot of people very rich. It worked by ships making three voyages. They left British ports (such as Bristol and Liverpool) loaded with cheap manufactured goods such as pots and pans as well as guns and alcoholic beverages. These were taken to the coast of West Africa where native chiefs were happy to do deals, their payment being prisoners of war and other undesirables. The traders were also not averse to capturing “free” natives on their own account. The ships then headed west with their human cargoes, who were sold as slaves in the West Indies and the American colonies. With the proceeds, the traders then bought products such as sugar, rum and tobacco, all of which would find a ready market back in England.

As far as the British people were concerned, one set of products was exported and another set was imported. They had no need to know about the “middle passage” which was where the real damage was done in terms of human misery. Some slaves did make their way to Britain, where they were often used as domestic servants and regarded by their employers as exotic status symbols. These were the fortunate few.

Thomas Clarkson read his essay aloud in the Senate House at Cambridge and won his prize. However, when making his homeward journey on horseback (he was now living in London) he gave thought to the contents of what he had written. He later wrote: “I frequently tried to persuade myself that the contents of my essay could not be true”. However, his conclusion was that: “if the essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end”.

He now abandoned all thoughts of a clerical career and started work on a campaign to eradicate the slave trade. In 1786 he published his essay in an English translation and in 1787 founded a “Committee for Advocating the Abolition of the Slave Trade”. One of their first acts was to get Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery manufacturer, to design and produce a campaign badge that showed a manacled slave with the slogan: “Am I not a man and a brother?”

William Wilberforce, an MP from Hull, was recruited by the Committee in 1787 as their voice in Parliament, and the long process began of trying to change the law. Wilberforce made many speeches and produced copious evidence to support the cause, but what is not generally known is that it was Thomas Clarkson who gathered much of that material.

For example, he rode his horse to Bristol where he talked to off-duty sailors about their experiences on the slave ships and collected various pieces of equipment that were used on the ships to subdue their unwilling passengers. These included whips, branding irons, thumbscrews and mouth-openers.

He went to Liverpool, another slave trade port, where he got hold of a diagram showing how the slave ship “Brookes” was loaded to contain the maximum number of slaves. More than 600 slaves could be laid down side by side and head to toe so as to leave hardly any space unused in the cargo hold. Under these conditions, with no sanitation, disease was rife and many Africans died during the passage (as did a disproportionate number of the sailors). Other ships knew not to steer downwind of slave ships, to avoid the stench.

Clarkson continued his travels and campaigning for seven years, riding about 35,000 miles in all. He set up many anti-slavery societies and organised petitions which gathered around 400,000 signatures. Some 300,000 people agreed to give up using sugar when they were told how it had been obtained.

His work was not without its dangers, as he was up against some very powerful vested interests which stood to lose huge fortunes if the slave trade ended. He had good cause to fear for his life, for example when he was thrown into a dock at Liverpool by some slavers.

In 1794 he retired from the campaign, being physically exhausted and running out of money, as he had financed himself from his private means during this time. It was also becoming difficult to keep people interested in the campaign, given that Parliament constantly refused to pass Wilberforce’s bill, plus the fact that war with Revolutionary France had broken out in 1793.

However, he returned to the cause in 1804 and continued to help Wilberforce until 1807, when the Slave Trade Act was finally passed.

The cause now was the complete abolition of slavery itself within the British Empire. Wilberforce and Clarkson again worked together to drum up support, and Clarkson rode another 10,000 miles as he organised hundreds of petitions to Parliament. Wilberforce’s health began to fail in the 1820s and he left the House of Commons in 1825, passing the abolitionist mantle to Thomas Buxton. Clarkson continued his work, helping to found the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and acting as an international ambassador for the cause as well as writing copiously. One of his aims was to end slavery in the United States.

Success finally came in 1833, with the Slavery Abolition Act being passed, although Wilberforce had died a month before this happened. Thomas Clarkson, who was 73 at the time of the triumph he had devoted his life to accomplishing, lived for another 13 years during which he continued to write in support of worldwide abolition.

It is unfortunate that such a high proportion of the credit for abolishing slavery has been given to Wilberforce, because it was truly a team effort. Many people worked for this cause, with Thomas Clarkson being one of the most effective and important.

© John Welford

The three wives of King Henry VIII

That’s right – three wives, not six as is popularly believed!

Surely not, you might say. Everyone knows the list - Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr - and the manner in which they ceased to be Henry’s wives (all but the last): divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

The problem, albeit a technical one, is that Henry did not divorce wives one and four. He had the marriages annulled, and the same applies to Anne Boleyn who was separated from Henry by these means just before her head was separated from the rest of her.

So what’s the difference? It’s quite an important one, because an annulled marriage is one that is recognized as never having existed. Divorce as we know it today is a relatively modern invention, dating from the 18^th century, and simply wasn’t available as an option to King Henry.

The first annulment was a huge problem, because Pope Clement VII refused to grant it. Henry took the extraordinary step of giving himself the power to declare his marriage annulled, by declaring himself to be the head of the Church in England, and not the pope.

He used this power again to annul his marriage to Anne Boleyn when it was pointed out to him that she had previously been engaged to someone else. Her execution does therefore seem to have been founded on somewhat shaky ground in that she was accused of committing adultery at a time when she and Henry had not been legally married!

That means that King Henry’s first marriage was with Jane Seymour, the wife who gave him his long-wanted son but died shortly after giving birth.

The third annulment was the only one that would be recognized as valid today, as there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the marriage to Anne of Cleves was never consummated.

Catherine Howard’s short reign as Henry’s queen might have gone exactly the same way as that of Anne Boleyn – annulment followed by execution - were it not that she refused to agree to the charge that she had been engaged prior to her marriage to Henry, although she almost certainly had been. Had she admitted this it would have made no difference to her fate, but the net result was that she has to count as official wife number two.

Catherine Parr was definitely married to Henry, as wife number three, and she was his only widow.

So there we are. King Henry VIII officially had only three wives, not six!

© John Welford

The king who rode over a cliff

In 1286 King Alexander III of Scotland came to an unfortunate and unusual end. Born in 1241, he became king in 1249 when aged only seven. In 1251, aged ten, he was married to 11-year-old Margaret, the daughter of King Henry III of England. When he reached the age of 18 in 1259 and took up the reins of kingship in his own right, all seemed well for a long and successful reign and the production of suitable heirs.

However, things started to go awry when Queen Margaret died in 1275. This tragedy was followed by the deaths of her two sons, Alexander’s heirs, in 1281 and 1284. He also lost his only daughter in childbirth in 1283, although her child, a daughter, survived and was therefore Alexander’s sole heir.

In order for the royal succession to continue in the preferred male line, the king needed a new wife who could bear him more sons. He was therefore delighted to make a match with a French heiress, Yolande de Dreux, whom he married on 14^th October 1285.

By the following March there was no sign of the new queen being pregnant, but that did not cause Alexander undue concern. There appeared to be plenty of time for that to change, given that both Alexander and Yolande were still young and healthy.

On 18^th March 1286 Alexander was in Edinburgh while his wife was at the royal castle of Kinghorn, on the opposite side of the Firth of Forth. When his business was concluded Alexander decided to proceed straight to Kinghorn, despite the late hour and the fact that the journey involved crossing the Firth in bad weather and riding along the north shore in pitch darkness.

The ferryman tried to dissuade him from making the two-mile crossing, but Alexander insisted on doing so and the boat did in fact get across safely. Further efforts were made to hold him back when he reached Inverkeithing, with offers to put him up for the night so that he could travel further the next day in daylight and better weather, but Alexander would not be dissuaded from reaching his wife as soon as possible.

He therefore set off along the coast on horseback with two companions, but he never reached his destination. The king became separated from the other two horsemen in the darkness and he blundered on without knowing where he was going.

The following morning the bodies of horse and rider were found on the seashore at the foot of a cliff, over which they had stumbled in the dark. The point is still known to this day as “King’s Crag”.

With Alexander dead, and Queen Yolande not with child, the throne now technically belonged to Alexander’s 3-year-old grandchild, another Margaret. Guardians were appointed to look after matters, and it was widely expected that one of these would emerge as the true power in the land and be appointed as the new king, especially after young Margaret died at the age of six. However, King Edward I of England (Margaret’s great-uncle) now showed his hand and it soon became clear that no solution would be found that did not have his approval.

The net result of Alexander’s foolish decision to ride along a clifftop at night was that the throne of Scotland stayed empty for six years and when the next king, John Balliol, took his seat in 1292 it was only as a puppet of the much more powerful monarch in the southern kingdom.

© John Welford