From the Heart of Europe

A couple of weeks back the Newsletter published my analysis of the 2010 election in Northern Ireland, which gave rise to a typically long discussion on Slugger O'Toole, in the course of which several discussants gently critiqued me for one particular sentence: "The decline from 51.8 per cent of votes for unionist parties in 2005 to 50.5 per cent in 2010 is more than accounted for by the gains made by Alliance and smaller centre parties." Commentators responded:

...I suggest that the fall in nationalist turnout to levels approximating to Unionist turnout is a more important factor...

...It seems to me that nationalist/republican exuberence with the GFA, and a latter realisation that they don’t need ‘every vote’ to win most western constituencies caused an exceptional voter-turnout in early post GFA elections. Whyte shows that nationalist vote is constant despite latter lower voter turnout down in nat-majority areas...

...do you agree that in the Westminster election there was a narrowing of the differential in the community background turnout with the Nationlaist turnout falling and the unionist turnout either stabilsing or growing?...

I posted a comment that turnout differential between the communities may not tell us all that much, but agreeing that we might learn more from some more analysis. This post is that analysis.

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So, my conclusions are that i) the relatively greater drop in Unionist turnout is very marginal and more than accounted for by the East Belfast result alone; ii) we're now seeing a lower turnout from both Catholic and Protestant voters in the rural areas where a high turnout was once accepted as inevitable; and iii) voters, like commentators, will pay more attention if the race appears to be a close one.

broadcast anniversaries

31 October 1964: broadcast of "Planet of Giants", first episode of the story we also now call Planet of Giants, starting Season 2 of Classic Who. The Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara arrive in contemporary England, but miniaturised; they witness a murder and face peril from a cat.

31 October 2009: broadcast of Regeneration, the first episode of the K9 spinoff series. In a totalitarian London in 2050, K9 Mark 1 appears, regenerates, and teams up with teenagers Starkey and Jorjie. (This is the only episode I have seen but I enjoyed it.)

I thought this was a rather good Eighth Doctor novel, with the Doctor and Sam finally reuniting after three years in which Sam becomes an environmental activist and basically grows up, while the Doctor is held in a very creepy and nasty prison. I was one of many Old Who fans who took a while to get used to the romance element between the companions and the Doctor in New Who, but here is an example of it being worked rather well into the narrative. The last few books in the series I have read have been pretty decent, and I hope this trend continues.

One of those classics which one really ought to see on stage, but can try to get to grips with by reading the script. A rather good psychological study of a woman who is stuck in a bad marriage, infantilised by society, but doesn't actually realise what is going on until she is confronted with her husband's readiness to dump her to avoid scandal - at which point she suddenly (and perhaps a little unrealistically) catches herself on. Today (I hope) the situation itself would seem rather unrealistic, but I can see how it might have shocked the audience of 1879.

A very interesting biography of Elizabeth 's chief minister, who basically ran England from her accession in 1558 to his death in 1598 (and had held the same office of Secretary of State, though with less power, during the earlier reign of her younger brother). I found it generally more interesting, though in places more frustrating, than David Loades' The Cecils which I read two years ago.

Alford is excellent at the big picture. The book is beautifully organised - in general chonologically, with occasional excursions into family life or household economics (facilitated by Burghley/Cecil's obsessional record keeping) - and he usually has interesting things to say about what it meant to Burghley to be in a position of such political power, while running a growing household. He's also very good at cautioning against Whiggism: Burghley did not know that Elizabeth would live to 1603, that she would never marry, that the Spanish Armada would fail, that Mary Queen of Scots would lose their decades-long battle of wits. I found it fascinating that Burghley/Cecil was so heavily involved with the intellectual leadership of the time, as was his second wife Mildred; even more fascinating that, while keeping meticulous records of his own correspondence and affairs, he was apparently instructing printers to generate largely fictional and utterly propagandistic pamphlets describing the issues of the day, which of course in the days before newspapers, and in a society where information was heavily censored, meant that he largely controlled public political discourse.

Burghley/Cecil was also a keen genealogist, but Alford has him as a man of Lincolnshire (rather than Wales as Loades has it), and the evidence is in his favour. Indeed, there is very little about Wales in this book, but lots about Scotland, which Cecil had first visited in the train of the English army during the Rough Wooing. Alford has Cecil obsessed with securing stability and Protestantism in Scotland, in order to secure England's rear from the Catholic enemies on the Continent; Mary Queen of Scots became a direct threat to that policy, and had to be neutralised. Alford's analysis of Burghley/Cecil's Scottish policy is particularly lucid and convincing. Slightly frustratingly, given my own interest, Ireland appears only as a background issue - my ancestor Sir Nicholas White comes up as a correspondent to whom Cecil/Burghley would confide his concerns, though of course with an eye to the possible interception of the correspondence.

I'm sorry to say that I found some serious flaws in the book. Alford's prose is sometimes clunky and often repetitious. His efforts to get inside Burghley's head do not always succeed. An early and unsuccessful chapter deals with how Burghley (then plain William Cecil) dealt with the nine day reign in 1553 of Lady Jane Grey/Dudley, in a situation where he was still Secretary of State (as he had been for Edward VI) but faced with the crumbling of the new queen's rule from the moment her accession was proclaimed. Alford concentrates on the tension between Cecil's loyalty to the wishes of the dying teenage king and his obligations under the law passed by Henry VIII. To me the much more interesting story is that Cecil obviously spotted that Jane was dead in the water from the word go, and made sure he had not signed a single document which could demonstrate that he was seriously complicit in her attempt to take power - which is pretty impressive given that he was the chief minister of the government. He obviously could not know whether Mary would take months, weeks or days to take power (in the end it was only days) but equally obvously saw what was going to happen from pretty early on and made his plans accordingly.

So, a bit annoying in places but generally enlightening and stimulating, if you are interested in the period.

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