A question of inches, facial hair and screaming babies
PAUL JOHNSON
In reading history, which I do incessantly, what I like most is to come across those details which instantly bring the character to life, as if standing in the room next to me. Height, for instance. The importance of height in history cannot be overstressed. When I was a cadet in the army, I was told, being over six foot, 'Watch out for small generals. They'll go for you.' Small generals are often excellent — witness Wellington and Napoleon — but they are fierce and critical. I read last week that Queen Victoria was slightly under five foot. I knew she was small, but not that small. Dorothy Wordsworth was exactly the same height, and felt it. When she met Thomas De Quincey, who was only four foot ten, she wrote, 'I was so glad to meet Mr De Quincey. For the first time in my life I was able to look down on a man,'
Queen Victoria never had that experience, at least among her prime ministers. The smallest of them was Lord John Russell, who was five foot four and three-quarter inches and weighed only eight stone. Most of them, like Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone and Salisbury, loomed over her. Lack of inches helps to explain her often needless assertiveness. Small kings, as well as queens, create difficulties. James I was always looking for troublemakers, especially if, like Raleigh, they were tall. To make things worse, James had a tall wife, Anne of Denmark, a Scandinavian high-jumper in the court masques. Charles I was small, too. In fact, I think all our small kings have come a cropper — look at Edward VIII. By contrast. Charles II inherited his grandmother's height and the dark, sallow complexion of his mother, Henrietta Maria. Hence, when he was on the run after the battle of Worcester in 1651, the parliamentary posters proclaimed, 'Wanted: Charles Stuart. A Black Man, two Yards high.' Charles II's height made him much more relaxed in dealing with politicians: he could look down on most of them with an amused eye. His complaint was not about height but colour. A constant theatre-goer, he said he had noticed that in London villains were always played by men with dark hair, and heroes by blonds, if necessary by actors wearing a blond wig. The English, he said, associated those who had fair hair with moral goodness, while the dark, like himself, were automatically baddies. He instanced the case of Shaftesbury, whom he had sacked as lord chancellor for duplicity and double-dealing. He argued that Shaftesbury was the biggest rogue unhanged, without any consistent principles, whose word was worthless and who was always up to knavish tricks. Yet, because the fellow was a resplendent blond, he was popular — the English saw him as a natural hero. Is there not a case for a PhD on this topic?
There is certainly a case for a study on the role of beards. It is a perpetual fact of human life that lazy men are tempted to grow beards, and that wives, by a great majority, prefer their husbands to be cleanshaven. Take the case of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. When Cardinal Wolsey — as part of his 'summit' policy to bring about European peace — was negotiating for a personal meeting between Henry and Francois I of France, which eventually took place on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he got the two monarchs to make a mutual pledge: neither would shave until the encounter occurred, their beards being witness to their fidelity. Francois preferred to be clean-shaven, so the promise was a penance to him. What his sore-tried wife said about it is not recorded. Henry, however, was happy to dispense with the chore of shaving or, worse, the irritation and danger of being shaved, and had several times in the past tried to grow a beard. But the obstacle was the plain-spoken, determined and imperious Catherine of Aragon, who hated Henry bearded. She had, a council paper noted, 'daily made him great instance and desired him to put it off for her sake'. This continual nagging had always aborted his beards, and did so on this occasion. The summit did indeed take place, halfway between Quines and Ardres, at a place called the Val d'Or. The English provided the food, which included 700 conger eels, 2,014 sheep, 26 dozen heron, four bushels of mustard and £1 Os 10d worth of cream 'for the King's cakes'. So Henry was allowed to gorge himself on that occasion but had to remain clean-shaven. We do not know whether this periodic dispute over beards was a factor in the breakdown of Henry's marriage to Catherine, but it is notable that, once she had been dispensed with, the king's beard flourished.
On the whole, the English do not like their public men bearded. But there are exceptions. In 1850 there were not half-a dozen beards in the entire House of Commons; but the terrible winter of 1854-55 in the Crimea brought a change. The soldiers were dispensed from shaving, and grew splendid beards. They returned home as an army of hirsute heroes, and beards became fashionable, almost mandatory. By 1860 the House of Commons was a forest, and remained so till the end of the century. Since then, however, the public associates beards only with poets and the like.
Yet it is an odd fact that, during the great romantic age of poetry, the beard was not associated with the art. Byron on his travels grew an offensive little moustache, with twirled ends, as can be seen in Thomas Phillips's portrait of him in Albanian dress. But Burns was clean-shaven, as were Keats and Clare, Lamb and Southey, Coleridge (as a rule), Wordsworth, Blake, Crabbe, Cowper and Scott. Shelley never grew a beard — something one would have expected him to attempt in youth. Perhaps he did, and it would not work. It is possible he did not need to shave. It would not surprise me. Though easily aroused sexually, and even philoprogenitive up to a point, there is something curiously unearthly about him.
He was certainly not, as Matthew Arnold called him, a 'beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain'. But he came close to being a disembodied intellectual, pursuing his thought at the expense of normal human emotions, In my book Intellectuals I define the caste as those who believe ideas matter more than people, and I cite Shelley as the quintessential example. Last week I was delighted to discover an incident which perfectly illustrates the point. In 1811, Shelley and his friend Hogg, then both undergraduates at University College, Oxford, were strolling down the High and reached Magdalen Bridge. Shelley was discoursing on metempsychosis and Plato's theory of preexistence. He suddenly spotted a young woman with a tiny baby in her arms, crossing the bridge. He rushed up to them, seized the baby, and was questioning it about its prenatal experience when the screams of the woman and the terrified howls of the child attracted an angry crowd. Shelley was astonished. He was only trying to prove a philosophical point. We can be sure, had he been alive, he would have marched for Saddam.
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