A regal relative
In November’s Letters, Jenny Martin requested a feature on Queen Margaret of Scotland (c1045–93). However, the Saxon Princess Margaret of Wessex – as she was also known – is not all she seems.
Rightly revered as a saint, her legacy was, though, not at first appreciated in Scotland. On her death – days after that of her husband, Malcolm III – the perceived Anglicisation of the Scottish court and church was immediately overturned, and the royal children were forced into exile in England.
Margaret’s marriage to Malcolm III was a political move to advance the cause of her brother, Edgar AEtheling. Both Edgar – the Saxon claimant to the English throne usurped by William the Conqueror – and Margaret were direct descendants of Alfred the Great. However, events – and the Conqueror – conspired against them. By 1068 (two years after William’s invasion of England), Margaret and Edgar were fleeing north.
Edgar never took the English throne, and nor did Margaret’s sons. However, her daughter, Edith (later known as Matilda), married Henry I of England. And Matilda’s grandson, Henry II – first of the Plantagenet dynasty of English monarchs – challenged the Norman hold on England.
Perhaps I should write the feature on Queen Margaret of Scotland – being her 23-times great-granddaughter!
,une (oZ Chester
Prescient president
Your article by David Reynolds, Kristina Spohr and Evan Mawdsley about Mikhail Gorbachev was very helpful (Cold War Hero or Failed Idealist?, November). I believe Gorbachev’s death is an apt moment to recall the foresight of Harry S Truman (US president 1945–53). Through the creation of the United Nations, Nato and the Marshall plan, his administration resisted the Soviet Union after 1945, and he is acknowledged by most historians as one of the great US presidents.
In his final speech as president, Truman outlined how he thought the Cold War would end: “As the free world grows stronger, more united, more attractive… there will have to come a time of change in the Soviet world… by revolution, or trouble in the satellite states, or by a change inside the Kremlin.”
His words proved remarkably prescient. And he spoke them on 15 January 1953 – more than 30 years before Gorbachev came to power, when Ronald Reagan was still an actor and a Democrat, and Pope John Paul II was a parish priest in Poland.
9illiam ,olliʘe Oxford
Screen heroes
I read with interest Robert Lyman’s review of the book Devil Dogs by Saul David (December) about the role of US marines in the war in the Pacific. In the opening paragraph, he suggested that the book should be made into a TV miniseries, the Pacific equivalent of Band of Brothers. In fact, the makers of that show have already produced an excellent 10-part TV series, The Pacific, accompanied by a book of the same name, based on true accounts by the marines who fought in that theatre of war.
#drian $unn
Cheshire
Hell in America
Thank you for the excellent article on prison ships (Floating Hell, October) – an almostforgotten bit of history that deserved a good airing. But an equally forgotten relative to this story also merits a mention. At Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, New York, stands the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument. It is a memorial to the more than 11,000 American colonial prisoners of war who died aboard 16 British prison ships in New York Harbor during the American Revolutionary War. We need to remember all those poor wretches who lived, suffered and died in such abominable conditions, regardless of which side of the ocean they were on.
%harles 95ha[ New York
Britain’s last prison ship?
From 2000 to 2001, I taught on HMP Weare, a prison ship moored in Portland Harbour, in which men serving the last three to nine months of their sentences were held. It was not a healthy place – that’s why it was shut down – though nothing in comparison to the Victorian hulks described in your article.
Prisoners had only one hour of fresh air each day, and there were no opening windows, nor an adequate air-conditioning system. As a result, a high number of both prisoners and staff became sick with respiratory illnesses; one colleague came down with pleurisy. I believe that HMP Weare may have been the last prison ship used in the UK. %harlotte 6roubridge Portland
Special source
Please exonerate Herodotus from the accusation that he constructed a lie in his description of the building of Egypt’s Great Pyramid (Why We Need to Get Our Facts Straight, November). He made it clear that he was relying on what he was told by the priests – the “father of history” initiating the most important historiographical tradition: acknowledging his source. He cannot be held responsible for the failure of succeeding historians to recognise this evidence.
*ugh *ollinghurst Liverpool
4obert $lackmore replies Herodotus indeed often cited his sources in his Histories, including for the building of the pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) at Giza. In this he certainly applied an essential historiographical convention, even
though we can’t verify if he himself initiated it. Yet citing sources is one thing; the next step would be to analyse those sources critically. In this, Herodotus was notably lacking. Instead, he continued an ancient Ionian narrative tradition from near his birthplace in what’s now Turkey.
He was a master of assembling information, but without applying any systematic historical methodology. For this reason, his near contemporary Thucydides implied that Herodotus remained a “logos-writer”: a storyteller, one “less interested in revealing the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology”.
Elusive truth
I very much enjoyed Robert Blackmore’s article on the importance of getting our facts straight. It occurs to me that so many people – professional historians included – present as fact the suggestion that Richard III killed the princes in the Tower. He may have done, but this remains speculation and conjecture, and should always be presented as such. Sadly, we are never likely to discover the exact truth of the matter.
%hris 9ard Sheffield