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[email protected]/TRRIH. That's all, lowercase. And you'll get 20 pounds after the first time that you've spent. 18 plus. End date and promotion, T's and C's apply and Rev Points T's and C's apply. Half a league, half a league, half a league on wood, all in the valley of death, road the 600. Forward the library gate, charge for the guns, he said, into the valley of death, road the 600. Forward the library gate. Was there a man dismayed, not though the soldier knew someone had blundered. There's not to make reply. There's not to reason why. There's, but to do and die. Into the valley of death, road the 600. That was the charge of the light brigade by Britain's poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. Great poem. Very memorable poem, one of the most famous in all Victorian literature, often recited by small boys, Sandbrook Jr included in his prize-winning appearance a few years ago at his old school. So Tennyson wrote this on the 2nd of December 1854, and he wrote it less than six weeks, five and a half weeks to be precise, after one of the most celebrated moments in the long history of British warfare. So a moment that's perhaps it's not one of the great victories in British history. It was glorious, it was catastrophic, it was heroic, it was blackly comical, it was an absolutely tremendous occasion, the kind of thing that we love on the rest is history. Now Tom, you know, there was only one way to start this story with Tennyson's poem. And Tennyson's poem actually captures, certainly in those lines that we've read, there'll be more of the poem in future episodes. In those lines that we've read, it captures quite a lot of the detail actually of this story, doesn't it? Yeah, the sheer mad drama of it. And Dominic, I've got a compliment, that was a fantastic reading, and I can see where Sandbrook Jr gets it from. Joe, I actually watched his performance to inspire me. Oh, and you copied it? He was so good. He was so good, there was like 300 kids or something doing these readings. He went first, and I thought, Christ, they made him go first, and you could have heard a pin drop. It was brilliant. And also all the others did like woke poems, so he did something, he did something really punchy. And I can see loads of the other, like parents look at me and going, come on, you must be so proud. I mean, it's not unwoke, because it's about the common man galloping it into this kind of disastrous furnace of gunfire led by aristocrats, as we've said, that's basically the story. So we'll see where that goes. Yeah, Lions led by donkeys. I think this is the kind of the primal origin of that trope. Yeah. And as you say, Tennyson's poem, which is an absolute kind of a class banger, it does give you quite a lot of detail. The Valley of Death, such a memorable phrase, where is that? It lies to the north of a place called Balaklava, which is a port on the coast of Crimea in the Black Sea, which had been occupied by the British army on the 26th of September 1854. And it is 100% a death trap. So it's a mile and a half long. It's a mile wide. There is cannon to the right. There is cannon to the left. There is cannon in front. And in total, there are about 50 heavy guns loaded with grape shot and shells. And it's a very bad place to be a cavalryman. The light brigade are separated from the guns at the bottom of the valley by about a mile and a quarter. And so only a complete lunatic would ever lead a charge down this valley. But that is exactly what the light brigade ended up doing at 1110 on the morning of 25th October 1854. And unsurprisingly, this charge resulted in utter carnage. And Tennyson, when he came to write the poem, was relying for his details on an initial report in the Times, which had actually got its numbers wrong. The light brigade's total was closer to 700 than 600. And when Tennyson was told this, he said, well, I can't change it because it would ruin the scansion. So in Tennyson's poem, it's the 600. But historically, it was 700. And of these 700, a mere 195 managed to make their way back up the valley. And behind them, they left the mangled remains of their fallen comrades. Many hundreds of horses as well, dead or dying amid the dust of the Crimea. So it was an absolutely stupor-fying display of courage. But also in military terms, a complete screw-up. And that is how the Victorian public, like there, they're kind of military feats. They like it to be a mixture of utter heroism and total incompetence. And the charge of the light brigade is the archetype of that. There's an interesting book about this by Stephanie Barchewski, called Heroic Failure in the British. And she argues that basically the Victorian public became fixated on stories of ludicrous disasters. So it enabled them to cope with the moral ambiguities of empire. It's certainly a perspective. Yeah. I think people just love stories of like ludicrous incompetence. And people love disasters, no? Also, I think there's something hard-wired that the sort of the island nation with its backs to the wall. But, you know, even though the odds are against us, we don't lose that stiff upper lip. I think people love that. It's part of the self-image. I think also, in the context of the light brigade, it's because there is an incredible degree of flamboyance about it, as we will see. They're kind of amazing uniforms. Right. Good whiskers. Tremendous whiskers. And of course, Tennyson is right. Someone had blundered. So a really spectacular military blunder, especially if it's coming from a gormless aristocrat. I think people love that as well. So the question is, I guess, why is the charge launched and who, if anyone, had blundered and say that's what we're going to be exploring over the course of this series. And it's a series that is going to feature not just one blunder, but numerous blunders. And I would say that the rule of thumb in this series is that if something can be screwed up, it is screwed up. Okay. So let's pull the camera back for a second. And ask a question that's bothering me. It's bothering our listeners. And it definitely bothered friend of the show, the Emperor Ted Wardros II of Abbasinia. So you may remember, if you listen to the Abbasinian expedition, Teotros was obsessed with the Crimean War. And he couldn't get his head around the fact that Britain and France, Christian countries, had teamed up with the preeminent Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, to have a crack at the Russians. Who were, of course, Orthodox Christians. And what clearly would have baffled Teodros even more was one earth which you attack in the Crimea. I mean, why don't you attack over land? Why don't you do one Napoleon did or whatever? So what are the British doing there? Just to say upfront, the question of why the British and French have gone to war with Russia is, I mean, it's not surprising that Teodros was puzzled because lots of people in Britain end up being puzzled as well. And the truth is that the reasons for it are never entirely nailed down. And you could say that this is kind of the ultimate blunder. There's no particular reason why they needed to go to Crimea, as we shall see. And the war itself, one of the reasons why Teodros is obsessed by it, why so many people are, is that it's the first war that is fought by the great powers of Europe against one another since Waterloo. And even in 1854 so that is almost 40 years since the end of the Napoleon it was, the shadow of Napoleon's campaigns, the struggle to bring Napoleon down, the shadow of that struggle still lies over the entire continent. So if we look at the three major competence in the Crimean War, you can see how memories of the Napoleon it was, shape all three. So Russia first, a bit like with the defeat of the Nazis, so with the defeat of Napoleon, the Russians feel incredible pride at the role that they've played. So in 1812 Napoleon had invaded Russia, the Russians had burnt Moscow and withdrawn. Napoleon had been forced to retreat and it was effectively kind of destroys his invasion force. And it enables the Russians in 1814
to enter Paris as the self-appointed saviors of Europe and in 1815 they are at this great Congress in Vienna with the British, with the Austrians, with the Prussians and they agree opposed to our settlement and the Russians are one of the guarantors of this settlement. Now obviously for the French, the Congress of Vienna, the Treaty of Vienna, this is very bad news and Waterloo and this treaty are still being experienced decades on as great humiliations. And by this point the nephew of Napoleon, so Louis Napoleon had staged a coup in 1851 and the following year had proclaimed himself Emperor as his uncle had been and is now ruling France as Napoleon III and as an Napoleon and as a Frenchman he is very keen to reclaim France's traditional role as the leading military power in Europe but with the caveat that he wants to get this status but he doesn't want to risk war with Britain in the process of obtaining it because the one lesson that he's picked up from the Napoleon it was is never go to war with Britain and so this is why the French are very open to an alliance with Britain. Now Britain, Britain has immense self-confidence and I think this is another reason why they can enjoy tales of catastrophe is that the kind of the gut sense that they are the top nation and it doesn't really matter what happens. I think is hardwired, there's enormous complacency, they're rich, they're prosperous, they've got an enormous empire, they've in 1851 they just staged the Great Exhibition to show off how advanced they were with all their steam engines and dinosaurs and things like that. But there does remain from the age of the Napoleon and it was a kind of enduring dread of France, a suspicion that they're always waiting to seize power in Europe again but it's combined with a growing anxiety about Russia, they're looking eastwards and thinking well actually I don't know maybe Russia's a bigger threat than France and on top of that the other way in which the Napoleon it was has an enduring legacy in Britain is the legacy of the Duke of Wellington, the man who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and who had died in 1852 and Tennyson again in his role as poet laureate, he's always popping up, he'd written a tremendous energy on Wellington and he framed it as though with Wellington's passing, Britain's own age of military glory was gone so he wrote more than fact to us he seems the last remembering all his greatness in the past and the army which had always looked to Wellington in the wake of his death, there's a feeling that to be true to his legacy they have to kind of constantly ask themselves well what would Wellington have done and that means I think that to agree the army has become a bit fossilized, I mean not entirely there have been kind of developments as we will see innovations, they're always asking what would Wellington have done, ignore the fact that Wellington had fought his last battle 40 years before, so you can see in all of those that the Napoleonic Wars are a completely kind of living thing for people in all that three of those countries. Well we'll come back to the causes of the Crime In War because of course there are lots of ways in which you could argue this is the first modern war, you know, newspaper reports and photography and you know the new technology of killing and so on, but I think you're dead right that there is something Napoleonic about this idea of the cavalry charged towards the gun, I mean it feels like you know a scene from Waterloo doesn't it? Yes, completely so for the British to fate there's this famous cavalry charge, the Union Brigade so it's kind of made up of an English, a Scottish and an Irish cavalry regiments so hence the Union Brigade and they launched this heroic attack at French infantry and people keep going on and on about it, the cavalry absolutely love it, it's their kind of battle of Britain I guess and then the uniforms, so in the series we did on the Episcopal expedition you mentioned that the British have begun wearing car key but there's absolutely none of that nonsense in the Crimea, it's kind of blood red uniforms are actually, I mean even more spectacular uniforms because the light brigade as we will see are probably the most handsomely dressed unit not just in the British army but in the world, I mean the blaze of colour that they bring to their charge is a crucial aspect of its glamour and then you have the commanding officers and some of them as we will see had actually fought in the Napoleon it was and even those who were too young to have done so kind of dreamed you know wished that they had done and I think that that that sense of yearning that sense of identity with the glory of the past is strongest in the cavalry and particularly among the the guys who are commanding the cavalry and on the guys who are commanding the cavalry so the people who will really be the main characters in these four episodes and these are people from the absolute the highest echelon of the British social system aren't they there was no there was no pretence whatsoever of this being a meritocratic army as we will see this lies behind some of the blunders I mean this was true waterloo or the Napoleon was as well the cavalry particularly so the commander of the cavalry at waterloo is Lord Usbridge he famously loses his leg to a cannibal and cries out by God so I've lost my leg and that you bet that's by God sir so you have and I was just that surely the greatest exchange in the history of the British army and then the command of the union brigade was a guy called Major General Sir William Ponsonby or is that Ponsby I don't know I mean it's a kind of posh pronunciation yeah exactly Ponsby yeah he's the son of a Baron so the commanders of the cavalry they're kind of completely blue blooded absolutely from the top echelons of the of the aristocracy and at the Battle of Balaklava 2 where the Child of the Lightgate happens both of the leading cavalry commanders are peers so the overall commander of the cavalry is a guy called Lord Lucan and he is the great great grandfather of the Lord Lucan who in 1974 vanished into thin air after attacking his wife and almost certainly bludgeoning his children's and Annie to death so that's Lord Lucan and then the commander of the Light Brigade is a guy called Lord Cardigan and he is the man who gives his name to Jimmy Carter's favorite item of it where the Cardigan so hold on let me just dig into this for a second did Lord Cardigan invent the Cardigan no he didn't but he becomes so famous in the wake of the Light Brigade and the Cardigan is being warned by people in the Crimea because it's getting very very cold that it comes to be associated with him wow okay good fact as we will see Lord Cardigan sense of fashion doesn't really lend itself to Cardigans that's the irony of it yeah he's the last person who would have won a Cardigan I think so yes and now important point about these two characters Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan they are not just you know fellow members of the British Peerage they are brothers in law aren't they and brothers in law with a lovely twist they absolutely detest each other and say the question of whether this mutual hostility between them which is often almost comical dimension the degree to which this plays into the disaster sequence of events which culminates in the charge of the Light Brigade it's very interesting question we will be exploring it over the course of the series but I think one thing is absolutely not in question and that is the fact that the characters of these two men are a crucial part of the story and so I think we should in this episode we should look at both of them and we should begin by looking at the guy who is undoubtedly the star of the whole story this is the man who will end up leading the charge of the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death and this is James Thomas Brudinnell the seventh Earl of Cardigan and dominant your big fan of Flashman aren't you the Flashman novels yeah so you will know that you will know from reading the Flashman novels that Cardigan ranks as one of the kind of the great comedy grotesques of the Victoria period well he of course wouldn't say ranks would he ranks yes he would say hello Flashman so we will come onto his extraordinary way of speaking so he has like lots of aristocrats going back to the 70th century he has bought his command hasn't he he's not a man who has worked his way through the ranks of the army he has bought his place and just to say why that happens it's not just because the the aristocracy want to monopolise everything well that's definitely a factor it's because it's seen as an expression of English liberty that they will never again be something like Cromwell's army where you have professional soldiers in a position to take over the country that if you have a pier in charge of the cavalry then you can rely on them to do the decent thing that's the thinking so I'm just sticking up for the Victorian aristocracy there so let's go to the spring of 1853 let's say so a year before the outbreak of the Crimean War imagine that I bumped into Lord Cardigan at a restless history you know club members get together well well he's not the kind of person who would go to such a thing I suppose but what would I make of him so what's he like to meet well Tilly one thing you couldn't do is ask him about his campaigns because he hasn't been on any he sounds like a brilliant man to be commanding the levogade he's 56 years old and he has never seen active service so that's one thing to bear in mind mm-hmm I think even you Dominic would find it a little bit intimidating you are of the middle class background yes no question about that and Lord Cardigan as we will see does not like the middle classes he's he's very haughty he's very snobbish he's very petulant he's very vain
He's a massive bully, basically. And so liberals and literary types, and doubtless prune juice drinkers, don't they? - No, no, no. - They all to test him. But he does have a certain kind of social cachet among the kind of people who love a lord. - Yeah, yeah. - I mean, he's the kind of the archetype of a haughty lord. And I think the reason that people love him is because he's the embodiment of what the Victorians call a swell. And specifically, he's a plunger, which is a very aristocratic kind of cavalryman. They have their own, as we will see, their own language, their own style, their own swagger. And Cardigan is the absolute archetype. I mean, he's the guy who sets the fashion for the plunger across Britain. So just to give him a physical description, as I said, he's 56 in 1853, but he's still very, very handsome. He's tall. He's a slender as a young man. He's got golden hair. He's got pale blue eyes. And he has a luxuriant moustaches and whiskers, which tabby weirdly doesn't seem to like. But the ladies back in the mid-19th century, they loved a resplendent set of whiskers. And Lord Cardigan has them to a magnificent degree. - And he's a man who loves to ride, isn't he? - Of course, he's one of the best riders in the country. He is famously fearless. And he's a veteran of numerous celebrated hunts. - I'm dying. - Oh, I'm sorry. - Yeah, that's one of the markers of the way that Britain has changed. Back in the mid-Victorian period, if you were someone who stormed your way through a celebrated hunt, fox hunt, then you became an absolute sports star. - And there's one particular hunt, isn't there, in which he distinguished himself. There's a run of the corn, the corn hunt. So 200 riders had set off over the fields, and only 10 had managed to keep up the pace. And Cardigan is the person who goes the fastest and gets the fox. And the key to his success, it was observed by a kind of fox hunting sports correspondent. That it was observed that he leaves his horses very much to their own sagacity, never pulling them about. So in other words, he relies on the horse. He's man and horse are perfectly integrated. He is also, of course, a superb swordsman. And he's a first-class shot. Or more properly, a crack shot. He's a crack shot. - Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you're doing a good job of selling him. - He has a glamour, he has a glamour. - And he looks incredible. And his regiment, to the 11th of SARS, they look incredible too, which is no coincidence because Cardigan has basically kitted them out himself, isn't he? - Yeah, so he spends 10,000 pounds a year on their uniforms. I mean, that is millions in today's money. They are, by miles, the best dress soldiers in the British army, which means probably they're the best dress soldiers in the world. And the uniforms have run up by a top-bond street tailor. So they wear bright cherry pants, which are unfeasibly tight. And they have yellow stripes if you're a trooper, gold stripes if you're an officer down the sides. And so the 11th of SARS are nicknamed cherry pickers or cherry bums. They also wear a nine-inch bus B, and they have a matching cherry bag. - And what's the bag, exactly? - A piece of fabric, which placed over the top of the bus B, and it drapes down the side, and you compliment it with a white plume. And then you have magnificent jackets, they're royal blue, they've got yellow frogging if you're a trooper, gold again, if you're an officer. And they're worn with fur trimmed polises on the shoulder, so kind of little jackets. And again, they're laced with gold frogging. And this is the kind of police, Jimmy Hendrix, a century on Woodware, when he came to London. - I was law-kitchen as valid. - Yeah. - So he's still looking stylish in the '60s. - But what Jimmy Hendrix doesn't do, although personally, I think he should have done, is to emulate the way that Lord Cardigan and co-speak, because they have a very particular style of speech, the flashroom book actually captures this perfectly. - The cavalry drawl. - Right. - I hadn't realized that it was so affected, that it's consciously affected rather than organic. So give us your very best Cardigan style cavalry drawl, please Tom. - No, it's a style that is affected by all the quack. Cavalry wed your mind. - Right. - And it is Cardigan who basically sets the fashion. And so it involves very elongated vowels, kind of agonizingly slow speech patterns, a lot of yawning, if anyone says anything, even faithfully middle class. - Right, yeah. - Or if you're excessively enthusiastic, or sort of earnest about something, then-- - Yeah, I have to follow the guy. (laughing) - So the other thing that you do is you drop the G off participles, and the legacy of that still with us, so hunting, shooting, fishing. The brilliant example was Ed of the Seventh, seeing Lord Harris at Ascot wearing a brown bowler. And he said, "Go in, ratten." So there's a legacy there of the cavalry drawl. And as we said, the R's are pronounced as W, so it's holly and sorry and very bit land to eat. - Flashman's wife, her father was a Glasgow weaver. - And so the question is, "Why does he adopt this ludicrous pattern of speech?" And the answer is basically 'cause he wants to put the middle classes in their place. He despises self-made men, the kind of person who buys his own furniture, despises some. And in the military context, his particular target are, officers who he refers to as Indian officers. And so these are men who had secured commissions by serving overseas stereotypically in India, and proving themselves in combat rather than purchasing them. And so Cardigan despises this. - No, I have a common vulgar, very vulgar. - Basically snubbing these kind of people is his whole vibe. That's what he's about, and this tendency in turn and his general utter arrogance over the course of his career has resulted in a succession of scandals with the result that by 1853, so the year before the charge of the light brigade, he's not just one of the most famous men in Britain, he's one of the most notorious. He is an absolute staple of the newspapers, almost invariably portrayed in a negative manner. So I'll just list just a few of these scandals, some of the greatest hits. So the first to kick off back in 1823 when Cardigan was, he was only 26, and he was just plain humble Lord Brudenel, 'cause Brudenel is his family name. - Lord Brudenel. - Yeah, Lord Brudenel. And he had seduced a woman called Elizabeth Johnston, and Elizabeth Johnston inevitably was the wife of an old family friend, Captain Johnston. And Johnston had sued Brudenel, as he was then, and Brudenel had had to pay a thousand pounds in damages. And then having done that, he'd eloped with Elizabeth, and there'd been a very messy and expensive divorce, and divorce is very difficult to get in the mid-19th century. And Brudenel and Elizabeth had then got married, and the marriage was a disaster. And the reason for this may be suggested by Captain Johnston's comment on his wife. Brudenel wrote and apologized for having eloped with his wife, and he replied, "I don't care. She's the most damned bed-tempered and extravagant bitch in the kingdom." - Oh my God, that's crazy. - No hard feelings, sir. - Yeah, no clearly. - And I'm just gonna give a shout out to a book, I read when I was a child, the reason why by, it's either Cecil or Sissal Woodham Smith, and she's a woman, not a man. - Oh! - But this is an absolutely brilliant book, and I loved it so much, I must have read it four or five times, and I returned to it to do the research for the series, and it's just as good as I remembered it. And so this is her comment on the marriage, and why it was a disaster that it was a bad marriage. So she wrote, "It is too much to say that married to a different woman, he might have been a different man, but perhaps married to a different woman, his faults might not have been so public and nuisance." However, they do go on to become a public nuisance, because by this point, he's purchased his command, and in 1833, there's a massive bust up about tailoring, and specifically jackets, with an officer called Augustus Watham, who is a captain, and that's not Ratham, that's Watham, it's literally with a W, who's a captain in Brudnell's regimen, who had fought at Waterloo, and Watham complains that the jackets that Brudnell is buying for the regimen are too expensive, and that there's too much bling on the jackets, and Brudnell has absolutely exploded at this, I rate, I mean, you can't get more middle-class than complaining about there being too much bling on a jacket, and he has Watham arrested and put on court martial, and at the court martial, the case against him completely falls to pieces, because it's a ludicrous one, I mean arguing over jackets, that's mad. So Watham gets acquitted, and Brudnell is not only officially rebuked, but actually dismissed from service by the king, William IV himself, so it's a massive humiliation, and I think that anyone else would have kind of crawled away and licked his wounds and just led a life of obscurity, of silent obscurity, but that is not how Cardigan rolls, so he is utterly shameless, and he pulls on every string he can, he draws on every aristocratic connection that he possesses, and he ends up winning himself an official exoneration in Parliament, so parliamentary time is used up to say that Brudnell has been mistreated, and it's unfair, and so he gets another commission, and he buys himself the commander.
and then shortly after that he, his father dies and so he inherits his title and he becomes the Earl of Cardigan. But this is just the, the prelude to the best of these scandals, my favourite bus stop. This is over, I mean, I mean, everyone knows we love a joke about the wrong shoes, but this is a joke about the wrong bottle, am I wrong? Yeah, and specifically a black bottle. And shockingly there's, at the regimental mess hall, on the mess table, there appears a black bottle. Oh my god, I'll know. And this is, this is, this is a horror show because Cardigan has specified that only champagne should be served at the mess table. I mean, obviously. And so he, he sees this black bottle and he assumes that it's a bottle of porter, you know, porter's beer, that kind of beer, that beer in the regimental mess table. And he explodes and again, there's this kind of massive bus stop. Now in fact, the black bottle is a bottle of moselle and it's been ordered by the guest of an officer called Captain John Reynolds. This doesn't really change things because Reynolds is an Indian officer, Cardigan is inherently prejudiced against him and the fact that it wasn't a bottle of porter doesn't really make things better. And so Reynolds tries to explain this Cardigan isn't having it, the mess should be conducted like a gentleman's table, not a pot house, he says. And so again, as he had done with Wath and so now with Reynolds, he has him arrested for bringing, bringing the wrong bottle to the mess table. And this time, I'm delighted to report the military authority's back if, but we would be like this if it was the rest of history, Christmas lunch, if people brought the wrong bottles to the table, that would be unforgivable, absolutely unforgivable. I'm admitting to some sympathy with Cardigan here. So Cardigan, he becomes an object of absolute public hatred because it gets leaked to the press and the press think this is hilarious and they can't leave it alone and they go on and on about it. And whenever Cardigan appears now in public, everyone starts shouting, black bottle at him, wherever he goes. And then booing him and hissing him and he starts precipitating riots so he goes to a show at Drury Lane, where we have performed our self-dominant, love this story. The reaction is so extraordinary that gets reported in the times, so hits the times. The first audible indication of his presence was a cry of the black bottle, followed by a general hiss, a crowd gathered under his box, shaking their fists and shouting, turn him out, shame, but Cardigan, I mean, he's nothing abashed. He treats the display with open contempt, so the times again, his lordship advancing very deliberately to the front of the box, put on his great coat and making about retired amid one universal shout of disapprobation. And I think this is his reaction to every criticism, one of utter contempt. It just never crosses his mind that he might ever be in the wrong. So because he has that utter sense of conviction, of self-confidence, it enables him to ride out escapades that would utterly have destroyed someone less, kind of, less obtuse. So just a couple of examples of this before we come to the break. So in 1841, a former officer criticises him in the press, this is kind of the follow-up from the black bottle affair. The Cardigan promptly challenges him to a duel and it's held on Wimbledon Common and Cardigan shoots this officer in the lower ribs. This is a capital offense. You can't go around shooting people. And he's arrested and he ends up being tried by his peers in the House of Lords for attempted murder. Even if you don't get sentenced to death for this, you might get kind of years of hard labor and that the times who's clearly taken against Cardigan is gloating about this, let his head be cropped, let him be put on a note meal diet, let him labor on the treadmill. They really think that Cardigan is going to be convicted, but of course he isn't because he's a little Cardigan, he's a peer, he's not going to convict him and so he gets off on a ludicrous technicality, and again, there's outrage and again, Cardigan doesn't care. And then just a year later, an amusing kind of sexual misconduct, yes, he's the victim of a sting. So he is having an affair with the wife of a chap called Lord William Paget and Paget suspects what's going on and so he employs a private detective to hide under a sofa and the detective hides under this sofa and Lord Cardigan and Lady Paget come in and they lie down on the sofa and the detective reports that Cardigan is wearing his full SARS uniform. Brennan, there's tight cherry pants or whatever they call it, very tight cherry pants. And he also reports that the breathing of the couple was hard, like that of persons distressed for breath after running, but again, when Cardigan is brought to court and that this detective is produced as a witness, Cardigan's able to get off on a technicality because the detective is brought to confess that he hadn't actually seen the adulterous couple on the sofa because Cardigan had been wearing spurs and so the detective was so nervous of being hit in the face by Lord Cardigan's spurs that he hadn't wanted to show his face. So Cardigan gets off and so this is the guy who in 1853 is, I would say, by some measure, the best known officer in the British army. He is famous in breakfast rooms across Britain for his pride, for his arrogance, for his stubbornness, for his ability to attract trouble, his refusal, ever to back down. And yet, as we said, despite his fame, he has never actually experienced military combat. Well, that would seem to be the one thing missing on his CV as a potential leader of men into battle, is that he has never actually been anywhere near a battle, right? No, he hasn't, and by 1853, it seems like he never will. He's 56, after all, you're it's been a piece for almost four decades. No prospect of a war, surely. But then Dominic, that winter, news reaches Britain of dramatic developments in the Black Sea and suddenly people realise that the storm clouds of war have not only gathered but might be ready to break. Oh my word, we're on that 3D note, let's take a break and we'll return with the Crimean War. This episode is brought to you by Hanthropic, the team behind Claude. Yeah, Dominic, we have been in the rest of the history now for six years, we've done over 700 episodes. And I think one of the interesting things about that is that over the time we've developed our own verbal ticks, our own vocabulary, which kind of turns up again and again in episode after episode. What's lovely about it is it's so authentic and organic, isn't it? It's something you can drive to artificial about it. So, ask the archive built with Claude, lets you search through the episode transcripts and you can find or a person, a phrase or completely organic, authentic catchphrase has cropped up across the show. So to just take the kind of things that I know we say a lot in our ordinary lives, Tom, which phrase do you think has appeared in more episodes, sacral or poor form? Oh, poor form. Do you think so? Yeah. This is so exciting. I see sacral that much. Which phrase appears more often? What do you think? I think probably poor form, sadly. Okay, you've got a massive, you've got a massive shot coming. You can have to rethink some of your life choices. Sacral has been mentioned 130 times, but poor form doesn't even remotely, I think poor form might have come up in England versus Italy, first of all. So sacral has appeared 130 times in poor form in 33 only, okay, well I'm astounded and that is an amazing tribute, isn't it, to the power of anthropic, that they can uncover these incredible facts? First of the archive is built with Claude from Anthropic. You can find it at askhyphentheifanarchives.com and ask it something you've always wanted about and it will find the episodes where we've talked about it. Welcome back to the rest of this history. It is the 12th of December, 1853 and bombshell news has just reached Britain, literally. So a fortnight earlier, the 30th of November, a Russian fleet had attacked the fleet of the Ottoman Empire at Synope, which is a port midway along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. People in Russia remember this, but nobody else remembers this today. But I'm told, Tom, by you, that Trevor Royal, no less, thinks the result was to be a turning point in the history of naval warfare. Why does he think that? He absolutely does, so author of the best military account of the Crimean War, so he is entirely to be trusted. And the reason why he thinks this is because the attack at Synope, spectacularly demonstrates how vulnerable wooden ships, so ships of the kind that had won the Battle of Trafalgar, have become to recent developments in munition technology. So instead of cannon-shot, the Russians use explosive shells to attack the Ottoman fleet, and the result is complete carnage, the entire Ottoman fleet is sent to the sea, thousands of Turkish sailors are killed, and the whole port is set on fire. And there's a British observer from the Navy who's watching this, and is completely stunned by what he sees. So he wrote, "The shore of the bay was lined with wrecks and screwed with corpses.
work had done her worst. Not a mast was standing, not a timber was left whole. And obviously if you are a British naval officer, this is a very alarming sight because you've got to ask yourself, what does this mean for the viability of the Royal Navy? If suddenly, you know, these kind of shells can inflict this on timber. So it's unsettling for that reason, but I think what happens at the massacre of synopeia as the British press immediately call it. It's unsettling to Britain and also to France for a more immediate reason as well. And this is because the Russian attack on the Ottoman fleet strikes the British and the French as basically being an attack on them as well, because less than a week before it was launched, both Britain and France had signed a defensive treaty with the sublime port as its cause. It's a metonym. Yeah, which is the, that's the gate, isn't it? Through which ambassadors come to visit the, the, the Sultan's cause or something like that. So it's like using the White House to refer to the American government. So the sublime port, that's the, the Ottoman government. So not merely had they signed a defensive alliance, but they had sent a fleet. And they, a Franco-British fleet to protect the Mosterus, because basically Britain and France, the storm clouds of war have been gathering. And Britain and France had tried to deter the Russians by sending this fleet. Now, if the Emperor Teodoros II of Abyssinia was this into this podcast, he'd have loved all the stuff about Lord Cardigan. But at this point, he would be frowning with this pleasure. He would say, hold on. These are two Christian powers teaming up with the leading Muslim power against another Christian power. What on earth is going on here? So Tom, now, now's your chance to explain the entire origins of the Crimean War. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think the key to understanding it is to remember that just as the Crimean War happened 40 years after Napoleon, it was, it also happened 60 years before the outbreak of the First World War. Yeah. You said, you know, you, you could see this as being the first modern war. And you know who else thinks that? Is Orlando Faijis, the great historian of Russia? So he's written the definitive history, really recent history of the Prime Minister. He'd agree with you, Dominic. It was the earliest example of a truly modern war, fought with new industrial technologies, modern rifles, steamships and railways, novel forms of logistics and communications like telegraph, important innovations in military medicine and war reporters and photographers directly on the scene. In all those ways, it's like the First World War. But I think that even more striking is the way that the Great Powers in late 1853 and early 1854, as in 1914, kind of find themselves sleepwalking into conflict. And the context is the same as in the July crisis of 1914. So it's the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the sense of chaos that this is breeding in the Balkans. The question of what might replace Ottoman power. As we said, the settings are saying the Balkans. And the misjudgments are the same. So you get military moves that are intended to intimidate your opponents that instead serve as provocations. You have alliances. You have ultimatums that are designed to ward off conflict that instead help lead to it. And you have disastrous misreadings in all the major capitals of how the crisis is being seen by their rivals. And if the First World War was triggered by an assassination in Sarajevo, the Crimean War is triggered by an argument over a key in Bethlehem. I mean, this is the brilliant thing about this story that never has there been a war. It's a possibility for the war of Jenkins' ear, where the immediate cause, the kind of trigger, appears to be so extraordinarily inconsequential. So talk us through the key in Bethlehem and why that matters. I mean, I think to public opinion in Britain, it does seem inconsequential. But there are people in France and in definitely Russia for whom this argument is something very, very serious indeed. And ultimately, it goes back to the age of the Crusades because the churches in the Holy Land did not look to Rome. And then you have the Catholic powers turning up the Crusades and everything. And so it introduces the Catholic Church there. And so you have these endless rouse between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church over who has primacy. And because the Holy Land has been subject to the Ottoman Empire for about 300 years in the 1850s, it's ultimately up to the Sultan who gets to hold the key to the Church of the Nativity. So it's the Church of the Nativity that's the center of this. A massive tourist attraction for pilgrims and stuff, I suppose. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's the place of Christ's birth. And the question of who has which key, who has the precedence, who's allowed to put up what's starware? I mean, it's just been going on and on and on. And it suddenly really starts kicking off in the 1850s. And the reason for this is basically, it's the machinations of French politics. And specifically the coup in 1851 that had brought Louis Napoleon to power. So he becomes Napoleon III. And in May 1851, Napoleon sends a very close ally of his, a guy called the Mucky de Lavalette to be his ambassador to the sublime port in Constantinople. And this guy is a very, very fervent Catholic. And when he gets to the Constantinople, he immediately starts throwing his weight around, endlessly pestering the Sultan's court about this key issue in Bethlehem. And essentially threatening war. And if the Catholics don't get the top key, he's always muttering about gunboats and things like that. He's like, it would be Lord Palmerston. Yeah, kind of. But I don't think Lord Palmerston would care about keys in Bethlehem. Whereas de Lavalette, he's all over it. And the question is, what does Napoleon think of this? Because Napoleon himself has no real interest in religion at all. He doesn't really care about keys in Bethlehem. But I think he probably has given de Lavalette the green light. And probably for two reasons. And the first is that he needs Catholic backing. There are lots of people in France who are very against him. Catholics are naturally his allies. So he's throwing them some red meat, I guess. But also he is looking to sow mischief between the two most powerful victors in the Napoleonic Wars. And these are the countries that for almost four decades have been serving as the guarantors of the post-Waterloo settlement in Europe. And these of course are Russia and Britain. And Napoleon is able to recognize an opportunity to make mischief between Russia and Britain. Because he's familiar with both of them. He knows their workings. So let's go with Russia first. So you already said this. You only made this point. That the issue of the key, which I dismissed as inconsequential, were I a Russian in the 1840s or 1850s? Were you a sour Dominic? Yeah. This issue of the key is of tremendous spiritual and therefore political importance because the spiritual and the political are interwoven in 19th century Russia in a way perhaps that they're not in Western Europe. Is that fair? Yeah. And Russia sees herself as the new Byzantium as the divinely appointed protector of the many millions of Orthodox Christians who live as subjects of the Muslim Sultan. And more than that, I think they see the the growth of the Russian Empire as a kind of an Orthodox crusade. The expression of a mission to liberate the Orthodox from Muslim rule and ultimately restore Constantinople to her ancient status as a great Christian capital. And the first step of this crusade had come in 1783 under Catherine the Great. And this was the annexation of Crimea. And this was the first ever territory to be lost by the Ottomans to a Christian power. So it seems to both the Russians and the Ottomans are real straw in the wind. And of course we've talked about this a lot on the rest of history in the past. But Crimea is holy to the Russians because it's the site of Chess and Esos where Vladimir had been baptized in 988. So the Prince of Kiev, the kind of the founder of Russian Orthodoxy as the Russians see him. And so this site becomes a place of Pilgrims for Russians. And they excavated in 1827 and they build a church on the site of the supposed site of the of the baptism. And I guess it kind of turbocharges a sense of mission in the Kremlin and in Russian more generally, thinking, well, if we've taken Crimea, why not more, what about all those Orthodox Christians in the Balkans? Yeah, remember what's now Romania, Bulgaria and so on, so forth. And the Tsar, Nicholas I, he believes in this mission, absolutely. I mean very, very fervently, very devoutly. And in 1853, he is 59. He's been on the Russian throne since 1825. He's a very uptight man. He's a man of rigid principle. Very tall has a notoriously terrifying stare. If he fixes his eye on you, you kind of shrivel up. He'd been trained as a military engineer. So he he was a younger son who ends up inheriting. So this is why he has this engineering background. And he he's all about military discipline. He gets up very early. He works till late. He sleeps on a narrow camp bed with a mattress made of straw. And he takes it with him wherever he goes. And judge by his own standards. And I guess by the standards, probably of the royal classes in Europe in the 19th century, he is a man of honor. And he expects the rulers of other countries to behave according
to similar standards of honour. The people he does not trust at all to do this are the French because they are republican and revolutionary and they're always throwing up shysters like Napoleon III. He doesn't trust them at all. He thinks they have no sense of honour whatsoever. And he's familiar with Paris because he had ridden into it in 1814 with the Cossacks. So he feels that this gives him an ability to take the temperature of the French state. The British, however, he thinks they are tremendous. He loves them. And actually in 1844 he'd kind of done a pete of the great who'd come in Cochnito to London and Nicholas does the same. He arrives in Cochnito in London on a steamer and he'd met with Queen Victoria. I got on very well with her and he'd enjoyed what he had assumed at the time were very fruitful discussions with assorted British ministers. And when he left London, he assumed that he had a gentleman's agreement that the British would not object to his liberation of the Balkans and that together the Russians and the British could carve up the Ottoman Empire. And he thinks that in his discussions in Downing Street and in Buckingham Palace and at Windsor, this has all basically been agreed. But it's a fateful miscalculation because Britain doesn't work like that. There are too many different centres of power. And the star thinks that if you've talked about it with Queen, if you've talked about it with the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, then that's all that matters. He doesn't appreciate that the operation of politics in Britain by the mid-19th century is becoming very, very complicated indeed. So that's the Tsar, Nicholas I. But Napoleon has been in London as an exile, hasn't he? He'd return from London to France to become presidents and then Emperor. And Napoleon understands the British much better. And he knows how much British policy is driven by distrust of rivals. So that could be France, it could of course be Russia as well. Yeah, I mean, definitely France. So when Napoleon comes to power and makes himself Emperor, there's a massive war panic in Britain. And they start rushing around trying to beef up their defenses. And we'll actually be meeting in our next episode, the general who isn't put in charge of that policy. But Napoleon knows that in Britain, the hostility to Russia is even greater than the hostility to France, not necessarily in the government itself, which is quite broadly split, but more generally in the country. And he knows that by 1853, the mood in Parliament in the press among the mass of people in Britain is really quite violently russafobic. And this is for a number of reasons. And some of these reasons may sound familiar to people who are reading the newspapers today. So there's kind of a dread of Russia as a despotism, as an autocracy, where the rule of law doesn't apply. And the saw himself is seen as a menacing and sinister figure. So his nickname among liberals in Europe is the Jean-Dame of Europe. And the particular focus of russafobia in Britain is the treatment of the polls by the Russians. So the polls have had an absolutely terrible time, they've been kind of carved up and occupied and chopped around, and after the period of war, they've ended up under Russian rule. And in 1831, the polls had risen in rebellion, and Nicholas had crushed it incredibly brutally. And the British, I think, see the polls as embodying ideals that they like to think of as their own. So to quote Orlando Faijis, "A love of liberty and the commitment to defend the little man against the bullies." But also there's some very melodramatic sort of tabloid worthy stories, aren't there? So there's one about some nuns, manacled, lashed, and Polish nuns. So what's gone on with them? They've been told to submit to an orthodox bishop, and they're Catholic, and so they refuse, and they have the head shaved, and they're shackled, and whipped, and led, and deported, and put to hard labor. And it becomes, of course, the labor, because it gets written up by a woman who's not very well known, she's a nurse, so she has quite a few contacts, but she's not by any means a household name, and the name of this woman is Florence Lightingale, nobody's heard of her. But she manages to get the story published by Charles Dickens in his journal "Household Words", and so that has a massive readership. And so it's all part of the propaganda war against Russian despotism. But there is a sort of quite a serious point about the balance of power here, isn't there? Because the great anxiety in mid-century Britain is about India, and it's about the enormously rapid expansion of Russian power across Asia, and Russian power is beginning to penetrate kind of central Asia, so this is the heyday of the great game. And, you know, successive kind of British governments and legions of British policymakers and diplomats and spies and so on, are drawn into this great drama for control of central Asia, because they see it as the key to India. And if we lose to Russia here, if we give ground to the Russians, if we don't contain them, then they will expand and expand and they will supplant us in India, and then we will be nothing. I mean, that's the anxiety that underpins all this, isn't it? Yeah, it's something that the British have worked themselves into an absolute lather about, and will continue to do, you know, right the way up to the outbreak of the First World War, this will be their great strategic anxiety. At this point, it's a ludicrous thing to be worrying about. The Russians have no, you know, in no position to invade India, it's simply not on their horizon, but the British have worked themselves up into a lather of paranoia about it. That means that in the councils of power in Whitehall, you know, they're endlessly pouring over maps of central Asia and panicking about it. In the Kremlin, it's just not an issue, and the Tsar, Nicholas, I mean, he's completely oblivious to this as a factor in his relationships with Britain. And so even in early 1853, he's still assuming that he has this gentleman's agreement with Britain to go ahead and carve up the Ottoman Empire, and he summons the British ambassador in Moscow for talks, and he makes this absolutely explicit, and he adopts a very celebrated metaphor. The Tsar says to the British ambassador, "We have a sick man on our hands. A man gravely ill. It will be a great misfortune if he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made." And Nicholas, over the course of 1853, thinks that it is time to make the arrangements to finish off this sick man, the Ottoman Empire. This is where the phrase the sick man of Europe originates it. And Nicholas feels that Russia cannot squander a God-given opportunity to, you know, to dispatch the invalid and take over all his possessions. God has appointed him the defender of the Orthodox Christians, and he is summoned to liberate them from the evils of Muslim tyranny. And so, over the course of 1853, he duly pushes his advantage, never suspecting that the British will object to this. So he sends a diplomatic mission to Browby the Sultan into accepting his status as the protector of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. There's loads of stuff about keys in Bethlehem and all of that. And the Ottomans hold firm. They refuse to give into this brow-beating. And so, the next step that Nicholas takes is an armed invasion, and he sends a Russian army across the border into the two most northerly provinces that the Ottomans rule in the Balkans, and he's in Moldova and Wallachia. So there are a pair of principalities both of which lie north of the Danube. So the Danube, kind of, you know, is a key divider between these two provinces and the rest of Ottoman Europe. Basically, it's Romania, the country of Romania today. And then there is a declaration of war by the Ottomans on Russia after this invasion, understandably. And so, on the 30th and November, as we've heard, the Russians send the Black Sea fleet from Sebastopol in the Crimea to attack the Ottoman fleet in Sinope and wipe it out. And it is now with the destruction of the Turkish fleet that preparations start to be made back in London for war. And it's now that you get high-ranking officers in the British army, many who have known nothing, all their careers save for a kind of dreary peace. These men are starting for the first time to dream of glory. So one of these people, obviously, is the Earl of Cardigan, who's been the great protagonist of today's episode. He's now 57. And, you know, the storm clouds of war have gathered, have broken in the early weeks of 1854. He's drawing all his contacts, isn't he? It's trying to wangular posts. But he has, well, there is another officer who, you know, has connections to Cardigan. And he is a much more obvious candidate to send East, because this is an officer who already has experience in the Balkans. He's an old hand, and he is George Charles Bingham III, Earl of Lucan. And Tom, how come he's been to the Balkans? So he'd gone there in 1828, and he was age 28, and he went there kind of as an observer, a military observer, and served on the staff of a Russian prince who was campaigning against the Turk in Bulgaria. And Lucan had been a great success. He was Lord Bingham at that point. I mean, he hadn't yet inherited the title, but we'll call him Lucan. The Russians thought he was, they were impressed by him. And Lucan does have numerous qualities. So he's very brave. He's completely indifferent to hardship, and he is madly hardworking. I mean, he just cannot stop.
working and so when he when he leaves Russia he's been noted by the Tsar by Nicholas himself and praised by him and he's awarded the Order of St Anna second class which I think is a great honour I mean you'd accept that but when he comes back to Britain his career it's a bit of a disappointment he never really makes the name for himself that his record in the Balkans suggested that he should have done and maybe this is because like Cardigan he's bought his commission and so there is that kind of snobbery towards men with actual experience like Cardigan he lavishes insane amounts of money on his regiments his men wear uniforms designed by London's most fashionable tailor and they're nicknamed Bingham's Dandies so there's probably a kind of sartorial rivalry between the two brothers in law as well as everything else going on but we'll come to the rivalry into you course massive temperamental difference right the cardigan is is a swell where we see a plunger a plunger whereas this bloke luchen is a much more prickly and difficult and it's not a charmer cardigan is a charmer for all his ludicrous ex-centricities whereas this bloke's not a charmer at all no and there's an additional reason which will come to in a minute but first just on on luchen's character so he does have these qualities but as you said he is very prickly and I think he he lacks any hint of charmer charisma he has none of it people basically don't really like him so to quote us a wooden smith he was totally unable to distinguish between what was important and what was not he was perpetually entangled in trifles for ever struggling in a web of trivialities his temple is irritable and his severity grew and so no one in his regiment likes him and nor as we've been saying does his brother in law the Earl of Cardigan and nor does luchen's wife cardigan's younger sister and and that's sad because initially it had been a love match and was very famously beautiful one of the great beauties of the kingdom and luchen's young man had you know he's kind of handsome in a dark byronic manner but they fall out very rapidly and Anne ends up detesting her husband and she hates everything about him she hates the way that he's very harsh very controlling he's unbelievably stingy and he is a member of the Irish aristocracy so he has ancestral lands in mayo and these have been carved out by an ancestor back in the age of Elizabeth and Anne finds her husband's lands in mayo kind of very poverty-stricken very backward and worst of all rightfully boring can't stand it wet dripping dull they want to talk to and so this generates this great feud between luke and cardigan who absolutely adores Anne as he adores all his sisters because he is he's the only brother with seven sisters and so they have spoiled him rotten as a child you know helps to explain his psychology perhaps right yeah anyway by the 1840s Anne has given up on living in mayo she's returned to to England luchen is mostly in mayo which is unusual most of the the Irish aristocrats you know their absentee luchen is typically he feels in immense responsibility towards his holdings and he wants to make them pay and he wants to do this by modernizing his agricultural holdings and people may wonder what does this mean in practice and what it means in practice is mass affixions and mass clearances and luke and being luke and he carries on doing this even as the potato famine hits Ireland because he feels it's the obvious rational thing to do and he's not going to be swayed by sentimental concern for people starving to death that's that's his kind of his approach to things and in fact right in the teeth of the potato famine he intensifies his modernization program so he affects over 2,000 people he demolishes over 300 homes and he even I mean he think he closes down the local workhouse which is the only place that's starving have to go and even at the time he gets a lot of criticism for it doesn't he gets criticism in the House of Lords for example yeah so he's accused but in the House of Lords of having turned out his tenants when there was no food in the country and they money to buy it and in mayo itself he is called the exterminator to reiterate he's not doing it as he would see it out of cruelty he's doing it as he sees it because these are backward lands and they need to be modernized but it's just he has no you know he lacks the heart he lacks the soul to see what this means in practical terms he's not a man of great sensitivity but it that way I think he has no theory of mind he's unable to to think himself into the you know the shoes of other people and of course the people that he's evicting may not even have shoes so that it's it's a it's definitely a character flaw but I mean the truth is that the feeling that he's prepared to do whatever it takes to get something done is noted by the war office so in the early weeks of 1854 this combines with the fact that he does have experience of service with the Russians in the Balkans to you know kind of it makes people at the war of a sink well this may be someone who we can use and so in early February 1854 Luke and writes to Lord Harding he's the commander in chief of the British army he's he's become commander in chief in the wake of the death of the Duke of Wellington and Luke and puts in his application to Harding and he requests command of a cavalry regiment in the war against Russia should it come to that should war be declared against Russia and the essence of his civic of his CV is you know I've commanded this regiment I have familiarity with the Balkans and I know how the Russian military mind works his job application is incredibly successful and on the 21st of February Luke is awarded a really splendid command not of a single cavalry regiment but of the entire cavalry division and one month later on the 28th of March Britain and France declared war on Russia and this means that Lord Luke is heading eastwards again he is going to resume his familiarity with the Balkans he is going to war so ahead lie the peninsula of Crimea the valley of death and the charge of the library gate of course Luke and his heading eastwards but what about Lord Cardigan is he heading there too if they do end up going to war together how are they going to get on and does this boat well or ill for the performance of the British cavalry as they come up against the Russian guns well there's any one way to find out so if you are a member of the rest of history club you can find out right now you can stop listening to me doing this hard sell and you can run straight back in you know what's not to like if you're not a member of the rest of history club when you would you know you'd want to rethink your life choices what you want to do you want to join our own crack brigade of swells and plungers and head to the rest of history.com sign up you get a whole range of supplementary benefits it's not quite a uniform I wouldn't say you get a 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