DATES_AND_SEASONS (1).pdf

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DATES AND SEASONS (in Revision)
By Julian Scutts
Copyright Julian Scutts 2020. ISBN 9780244864507

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FOREWORD
What’s your birthday? December the 25th
. When was your first date?
Dates are part of our lives, our history, our consciousness. We divide time into
hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries and even millennia. Dates result
from the astronomical and historical facts that informs calendars, the most
influential and widespread of which is the Gregorian calendar, but there are
others. The Orthodox churches of the East go by the Julian calendar. In the
Moslem world the Islamic calendar is current. Jewish religious life is regulated by
the Jewish way of reckoning time and this goes back to a Babylonian origin. This
like other ancient calendars reconciles the passage of lunar cycles with the solar
year of 365/6 days, which is ten days longer than the period of twelve lunar
cycles. To align the solar year with months defined as lunar cycles an extra month
once in every three-year period. The Moslem calendar does not make an
allowance for the ten-day gap between a solar year and a year composed of
twelve lunar cycles, thus leading to the wandering of months such as Ramadan
through the astronomical year. A short story included in this book is based on this
calendrical factor.
The calendar of ancient Rome originated in a system that aligned months with
lunar cycles. The days of the month were identified in their relationship to three
reference points, Kalends, Ides and Nones. The Ides coincided with the middle
days of the month, between the 13th
and the 15th
, and therefore with the
appearance of the full moon. The religious and mystical associations of the Ides
linger even today in Saint Valentine’s Day, the historical recall of the Ides of
March and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on August the 15th
. The date of
Easter is variable in accordance with the need to place Easter Sunday on the first
Sunday after a new moon following the vernal equinox. In this book we trace the
course of the calendar year through various days of historical, religious or
otherwise symbolic significance.
The human psyche was penetrated by the collective experience of seasonal cycles
long before civilizations devised calendars or invented clocks. Therefore the book
includes a section on ways an analysis of words found in great literary works
expresses subconscious impulses beyond the control of rational thought.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (Page numbers in brackets)
FOREWORD (1)
TELLING DATES AND HISTORY (7)
An Anatomy of Acts of anti-Jewish Terror on Saint Valentine’s Day in 1349. (7)
April the 15th
Again (9)
A Note on how the Staplehurst Railway Accident on June 9 in 1864 Relates to Charles Dickens’
Novel Our Mutual Friend and the Closing Phase of the Author’s Life. (10)
Dates associated with the figure of the Pied Piper of Hamelin: 26th
June 1284, 22nd
July 1372,
August 24th
1572 (13)
The Storming of the Bastille on July the 14th
1789 (16)
The Same-Day Deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4th
1826 (22)
August’s Sting in the Tail (25)
November the Ninth in German History (26)
1066 AND ALL THAT, not to forget 1660
Dates that Transcend the Julian and Gregorian Calendars – and other Apparent Quirks (31)
The Odd Interplay between the Julian and Gregorian Calendars (32)
1666 MDCLXVI Did Sir Christopher Wren Have a Hand in the Burning Down of Old Saint Paul’s
Cathedral? (37)
Luther and Lutterworth (40)
WANDERING THROUGH TIME AND LITERATURE (38) Projected Word, Words, Words”: The
Application of a Logocentrically Based Method to Works by Shakespeare (38) - Wandering
through the Seasons with Shakespeare (44) - Why Wandering without History is not True
Wandering. A Critique of Northrop Frye’s Season-based Theory of Literary Genres (46) - Is the
Word ‘breeze’ in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge the Closest Poets in a Secular Age
can come to Paying Tribute to the Holy Spirit ? (48) - Entries in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal
15 April and 16 April (Good Friday) 1802 (51) - "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" – The Myth of
Narcissus and Milton’s Muse (53) - From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Heydrich: Is collective
schizophrenia mirrored in post-Romantic literature and art? (65) - The Passage from Biblical
Hermeneutics to Modern Literary Criticism Viewed in the Light of the Cyclical and Progressive
Implications of “Wandering” (73)

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Melting
Watches’ by Salvador Dali
Google Images stock picture

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1066 1660
1384 1483
1349 1943
July the 4th
July 14th
June 26
July 22
9/11

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TELLING DATES AND
HISTORY
An Anatomy of Acts of anti-Jewish Terror on Saint Valentine’s Day
in 1349.
There were numerous anti-Jewish pogroms in 1349 and the massacre of the
Jewish population of Strasbourg in 1349 was among the worst of them.1 It
inflicted two thousand deaths in one day by means of a purpose-built wooden
platform situated in the city’s Jewish cemetery whereupon the victims were
burned alive. It involves no exaggeration to claim that this act of mass murder
constituted a form of genocide, even a holocaust within the bounds set by the
means available to the perpetrators. A bitter irony inheres in the date of the
massacre, a holy day commemorating a saint who personified the power of
love. Even in the modern secular age Saint Valentine’s Day has coincided with
noted cases of excessive destruction and violence, be this in the course of war,
a reference to the strategically unnecessary fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945,
or feuds between criminal gangs, a reference to ‘the notorious ‘Saint Valentine
Day’s massacre’ in Chicago in 1929.
Massacres have occurred on other religious festivals and holidays, two of which
fell on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, one against the Jews again and the other
against French Protestants. Vlad III of Walachia (Dracula) invited 500 Boyar
nobles to a feast on Easter Sunday and then had the older guests impaled
forthwith and the younger ones enslaved and forced into building castles under
horrendous conditions, arguably in anticipation of the process of ‘Selektion’
employed in Nazi death camps.
What accounts for this outrageous discrepancy between a day in the annual
calendar that celebrates divine love and the diabolical atrocities that have
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Also in Cologne, Mainz and Basel where the Jewish populations were eradicated.

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occurred within it? Are we dealing here with a manifestation of a struggle
between the Force and cosmic evil, or are there more rational explanations for
the phenomenon of our present concern? For those intent on inflicting the
greatest possible harm on the greatest number of victims in a certain target
group, festive days offer an advantage by their ability to attract large crowns
and, on religious holidays especially, the energies released by zeal and fervor
can be channeled towards vicious and destructive ends. Let us now look more
closely at the specific circumstances in which the Jews of Strasbourg found
themselves in 1349.
Some of the worst pogroms and mass murders in history have occurred during
times of high tension and uncertainty. The massacre of the Jews of York in
1187 was in part a response to the shock caused by Saladin’s victory over the
Crusaders in the Holy Land and therewith the loss of Jerusalem to
Christendom. The privileged position of Jews as administrators of imperial
finances in Speier - the location of the largest mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) in
northern Europe - and London after the Norman conquest had eroded away
almost completely by the fourteenth century. Merchants and nobles, some of
whom were heavily in debt to Jewish lenders, were particularly interested in
the acquisition of Jewish assets by any means and urban mobs could be
readily mobilized to do their dirty work. Mind you, there were also those in the
Church and civil government, particularly the mayor Kunz von Wintertur, who
earnestly sought to protect Jews from violent attacks and extreme forms of
persecution. The events in Strasbourg in 1349 provide a copy book example of
what led to the ill fate of Jews in medieval Europe. There was one special
additional factor in operation here: the arrival of the Black Death in Europe in
1347.
Over and above all the other excuses and defamations (such as the blood libel)
for troubling the Jews came the accusation that Jews were behind the spread
of the plague by the poisoning of wells. The inhabitants of Strasbourg and the
surrounding lands of Alsace were not immune from this form of hysteria. In
Strasbourg, however, the civil government tried to protect the Jewish
community but other forces got the upper hand. The local bishop gave vocal
support to the anti-Jewish wave and local commercial interest groups, notably
the guilds of butchers and tailors, as well as merchants and members of the
local nobility for known reasons overthrew the mayor and city government and
established a rule of terror aimed at the destruction of the entire Jewish
community in Strasbourg. Geoffrey Chaucer, for his time an enlightened and
moderate man, introduced references to Saint Valentine in his poem The
parlement of fowls, but even he included current anti-Jewish propaganda into
The Canterbury Tales in the guise of the legend of the martyrdom of little Saint
Hugh, a Christian child who was said to be the victim of Jewish murderers.
Sadly, even in our own more ‘enlightened days,’ the home of a Jewish mayor in
a town near Strasbourg was recently besmirched by anti-Semitic graffiti and

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Jewish graves in Alsace were defaced with swastikas and other neo-Nazi
symbols. Saint Valentine, where art thou?
April the 15th Again
The grave misfortune which struck Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday must be
added to the death of Abraham Lincoln and the sinking of the Titanic as a
further tragedy that has taken place of the 15th of April. Perhaps only the
superstitious, or at least those of a mystically inclined disposition, will set
much store by this coincidence but it is not the first time that such
coincidences have caught the attention of serious minds. In the Jewish
religious calendar the ninth day in the month of Av recalls the destruction of
the First and the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The ninth of November fills a
significant date in German history, encompassing as it does the fall of Kaiser
Wilhelm II, the abortive Hitler-Ludendorff 'beer hall Putsch' the widespread
destruction of synagogues during the so-called Reichs-Kristallnacht and finally,
on a more cheerful note, the fall of the Berlin wall.
The three great misfortunes that are now indelibly written in the book of
history share a poignancy associated, be this obviously or tenuously, with the
season of Easter. Already there have been suggestions that the occurrence of
the conflagration that gutted Notre-Dame during Holy Week is in some way
'symbolic.' President Lincoln was fatally wounded on Good Friday before dying
in the small hours of Holy Saturday. The Titanic set out on its way to New York
immediately after the conclusion of Easter Sunday and it might be deemed a
matter worthy of reflection that in the hymn ‘Nearer my God to Thee,’ 2whose
tune was reputedly played as the Titanic sank included the words 'And though
it be a cross that raiseth me." Among the wider ramifications of a tragic event
that took place on April the 15th we might recall one that points to the Ides of
March, and for this reason:
John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, belonged to a highly reputed
family of Shakespearian actors and he himself had achieved acclaim for his
stage performances. He consciously sought to reenact the assassination of
2
By Sarah Flower Adams, a poet and acquaintance of Percy Bysshe Shellley and Robert Browning

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Julius Caesar, if not on the Ides of March then 'on the Ides of April', if not by
the use of a dagger then by the use of a pistol. In any case the exclamatory
utterance of 'sic semper tyrannis' after shooting Lincoln added a suitably
histrionic touch to his foul deed. After all Caesar met his end in a theatre too,
in the Theatre of Pompey, instead of at Curia Julia, the normal meeting place
of the Senate (where the bearing of daggers was forbidden and where building
work was in progress). In Dante's eyes the murder of Caesar and the death of
Christ posed the two most heinous acts in history, as implied by his placing
Judas Iscariot and Brutus in the deepest pit of the Inferno.
Already President Macron and others have shown their resolve to turn tragedy
into triumph, sorrow into joy with evocations of the image of the Phoenix rising
from its ashes. In their resolve President Macron and others are buoyed up by
the spirit of the Easter message announcing the triumph of the Resurrection
over death, evil and destruction. We learn from Dorothy Wordsworth's diary
that she and her famous brother were out walking in the Lake District on
Maundy Thursday (April 15th again), the day before Good Friday, when they
were overjoyed at the sight of a host of dancing daffodils fluttering in the
breeze. I once pointed out to professor that daffodils re called Osterglocken,
Easter bells in German. The gentleman in question thought the matter was
trivial. It seems common folk sometimes have a greater perception of poetic
symbols than have those who claim the authority of academic qualifications.

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A note on how the Staplehurst railway accident on June 9 in 1864 relates to
Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend and the closing phase of the author’s
life.
The novel Our Mutual Friend, the last novel Dickens was to complete, written
in installments in 1864 and 1865, marks the culmination of the author’s
novelistic artistry in more than one way. It deserves esteem as a mature credo-
like statement of Dickens’ philosophy of life that took account of human
mortality and the flaws of Victorian society in many of its most callous and
hypocritical aspects. It contains one of the author’s most poignant and
touching passages in the record of the last day in the life of a destitute woman
as she seeks dignity and freedom from the impositions of all that the
workhouse system evoked in her mind. To escape the incarceration she so
dreaded she is forced to surrender her last shilling and pence to an
unscrupulous official and in this deprivation of money from a dying person we
may trace the reverberation of a leitmotif established at the very beginning of
the novel with the macabre image of a man engaged in the process of dredging
the river Thames in order to recover corpses of the drowned and from these
any money to be found in the pockets of the clothes that covered them. The
waterman engaged in so gruesome a task as that outlined above has his

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daughter with him as his obedient albeit inwardly reluctant assistant. They
encounter a former partner of the waterman, a man of low character and an
arch schemer to boot, whose attempt at blackmail results in his own violent
death beside the river Thames as described in a chapter placed near the end of
the novel. The other, his daughter, marries a young lawyer despite the imparity
of their respective social stations and the fact that the bridegroom is fighting
for his life after a brutal assault by a rival suitor. At this juncture I may
introduce the motif of a train journey, one occasioned by the necessity of
attending the wedding of the waterman’s daughter and the lawyer now feared
to be approaching the door of death.
Then, the train rattled among the house-tops, and among the ragged
sides of houses torn down to make way for it, and over the swarming
streets, and under the fruitful earth, until it shot across the river:
bursting over the quiet surface like a bomb-shell, and gone again as if it
had exploded in the rush of smoke and steam and glare. A little more,
and again it roared across the river, a great rocket: spurning the watery
turnings and doublings with ineffable contempt, and going straight to its
end, as Father Time goes to his. To whom it is no matter what living
waters run high or low, reflect the heavenly lights and darknesses,
produce their little growth of weeds and flowers, turn here, turn there,
are noisy or still, are troubled or at rest, for their course has one sure
termination, though their sources and devices are many.
Then, a carriage ride succeeded, near the solemn river, stealing away by
night, as all things steal away, by night and by day, so quietly yielding to
the attraction of the loadstone rock of Eternity; and the nearer they drew
to the chamber where Eugene lay, the more they feared that they might
find his wanderings done. At last they saw its dim light shining out, and
it gave them hope: though Lightwood faltered as he thought: 'If he were
gone, she would still be sitting by him.'
Our Mutual Friend, Book 4, Chapter 11,
EFFECT IS GIVEN TO THE DOLLS' DRESSMAKER'S DISCOVERY
On reading this passage we note a striking contrast between the tranquility of
the English countryside and the evocation of brute force demonstrated by a
train’s power to forge ahead, underscored by terms that normally find their
place in the military sphere, such being ‘bomb-shell,’ ‘rocket,’ ‘shot’ and
‘bursting.’ Relentless progress, a callous disregard for the train’s bucolic and
Edenic surroundings, a gratuitous disruption of urban cohesion are all recalled

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in this brief description, making the train an explicit symbol of time in the
aspect of Chronos the destroyer bringing all things to their inevitable
conclusion, death in short. A ponderous philosophical note reverberates in ‘the
loadstone rock of eternity.’ The lugubrious mood of the description is further
enhanced, as the passage cited above explicitly states, by being set during the
night and the context of the narrative itself that foresees a deathbed wedding.
The reference to the ‘solemn river’ found in this passage combines two
contextual planes of so great a scope that one envelops the entire novel while
the other opens the vista of Dickens’ own life and ultimate destiny. For reasons
already intimated the image of the sluggish river Thames assumes the nature
of the river Styx in Greek mythology and even, on a positive note, absorbs a
sacramental quality in keeping with orthodox teachings on baptism and the
Resurrection. The protagonist dies in the eyes of the world when presumed to
have drowned in the Thames but returns to life under a new identity,
henceforward free to win the heart of the beloved by virtue of his own labours
of love instead of having to rely on the allurements of wealth that would be his
by right of his former identity. All this brings us to reflect on Dickens’ own
near-death experience that occurred on the ninth of June 1864.
Dickens was on the last leg of his return journey from Paris in the company of
lady generally thought to be his mistress. The train was traversing a stretch of
the line where repair work was in progress, at Staplehurst in Kent. As a result
of human error the train could not brake in time to avoid a grievous accident
involving ten deaths and many injuries as carriages either fell directly into the
muddy sludge of a riverbed or, as in the case of the carriage in which Dickens
was situated, hung precariously suspended from the raised section of the line.
Dickens not only survived but also played a heroic role in aiding and
comforting the less fortunate victims of the accident. Oddly enough, he
returned to his carriage in order to retrieve a part of the script of Our Mutual
Friend. For all that, this traumatic experience shook Dickens to his timbers. He
was never quite the same man afterwards. He avoided travelling by train if at
all possible.
I suppose the passage cited above discloses his negative feelings about trains,
never very positive to begin with, even before the Staplehurst crash. His lack of
composure invaded his outlook on life more generally but can even his
premonition of his own death explain the following?

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Six years after the accident to the day, also on a Thursday, Charles Dickens,
aged only 58, died at his Gads Hill residence near Rochester Kent on June the
ninth 1870.
Dates associated with the figure of the Pied Piper of Hamelin: 26th June 1284,
22nd July 1372, August 24th 1572
Extract from a book entitled A Universe of Symbols.3
It is not possible to separate cyclical and linear with clinical precision for they
interact even at the level of the mind of an individual person. The dreamer
experiences sequences of apparent events that follow the logic of daytime
experience and the fully awake person experiences daydreams and intrusions
of uncontrolled impulses from the inner mind. Poems in which the words
signifying wandering appear demonstrate this interplay of two states of mind,
in exemplary fashion in the case of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’ This brings
me to a ‘wandering fellow in his coat of red and yellow,’ the Pied Piper of
Hamelin.
Why the Pied Piper of Hamelin? This intriguing figure combines the cyclical
features of nature with the linear feature of historical progress, a fact that
emerges from the first known account of the Piper’s appearance in Hamelin.
Short though the account may be, it has given rise to many variant accounts of
the Pied Piper theme in works by noted European authors. It runs as follows:
In the year 1284 on the day of Saint Paul and Saint John a piper in
many-coloured clothing led 130 children born in Hamelin to Calvary next
to the Koppen, where they were lost.
We find here a mini-chronicle reporting what happened in a certain year on a
certain date. It is specific about the number of lost children and the location
where they disappeared. The time of year is the beginning of summer, just after
midsummer-night’s day. There are a number of divergent theories as to the
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http://www.lulu.com/shop/julian-scutts/a-universe-of-symbols/paperback/product-24422526.html

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possible historical basis of the account but these are
not of immediate concern in the present argument. An
obvious connector between nature and history is the
frame of the church calendar.
The earliest account mentions a saints’ day that
commemorated the martyrdom of two Christians
during the reign of Julian the Apostate in 362.(the
first picture).4 This festival represents one of the minor
holy days in the Church calendar and so why did the
chronicler deem it important enough to mention?
Chroniclers and after them poets changed this date to
the 22nd of July 1372, this day in the church calendar,
honoring the memory of Mary M
Magdalene, and there is no doubt
about her central role in the gospel
accounts of the New Testament as
the prime witness of the
Resurrection (second picture).5
A noted critic of literature by the
name of A. P. Rossiter once
asserted that the legend of the Pied
Piper underlies Richard III by
William Shakespeare where it
invokes the theme of the Dance of
Death in his analysis. 6 Richard’s usurpation of the throne occurred on the 26th
of June, the Day of the Martyrs Paul and John. Funnily enough, Richard
utters ‘by Paul’ as an oath more than once in the course of the play. The
negative aspect of the story is reinforced in Prosper Mérimée’s novel Chronique
du Règne de Charles IX as a gypsy girl recounts the tale to soldiers on their way
to Paris in 1572. Her narrative presages the massacre of Huguenots on Saint
Bartholomew’s Eve, another saints’ day, oddly enough (third picture).7 It seems
then that Browning and Mérimée overrode the date of the Piper’s appearance in
4
By Giovanni Francesco Barbieri
5
Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov Russian painter
6
A. P. Rossiter, ‘Angel with Horns’: The Unity of Richard III, Shakespeare: The Histories, ed. Eugene M. Wraith (New
York, 1965) p. 77.
7
Dubois, François: The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's DayThe Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, oil on wood
by François Dubois, 1572–84; in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. (Wickipedia)

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Hamelin as originally given but retained the matrix supplied by the general
notion of a saints’ day, aligning the specifics of a purported historical event
within the terms of a general discourse about the dualities of good and evil, life
and death.
How is it that the same figure can represent extreme opposites? Perhaps the
factor known as ‘introversion’ comes into play. The earliest versions are
ambiguous and suggestive but do not come down clearly on one side of the
dichotomy between evil and good. Calvary in the Middle Ages had negative
associations with death and the entry into the underworld. Robert Browning
implicitly treated the theme positively, making Calvary the path to victory over
death.
Dubois, François: The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's
Day, oil on wood by François Dubois, 1572–84; in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts,
Lausanne, Switzerland. (Wickipedia)

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THE STORMING OF THE BASTAILLE ON THE 14th OF JULY
SOMETHING WAS IN THE AIR
On the decade that ominously led up to the outbreak of the French Revolution
There was something in the air in France in 1783. On the literal level I could be
referring to the ascent of the first balloon in world history; on the figurative
level ‘in the air’ could signify the high hopes of the American patriots on
achieving the establishment of the United States of America, thanks largely to
the French military support that had made possible the Franco-American
victory at Yorktown in 1781.
There was something in the air too, - in meteorological terms. Europe was
submerged in a dull sunless haze until the early summer. The poet William
Cowper, during the penning of his long and discursive verse epic entitled The
Task, clearly had this phenomenon in mind, for he wrote the following lines in
Book 2. The Timepiece, in which he makes a right old moan about the current
state of the world:

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Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And nature with a dim and sickly eye
To wait the close of all? But grant her end
…
62-65 8
Elsewhere in The Task, he waxed prophetic in the following lines found in
Book V ‘The Winter Morning Walk’:
To France than all her losses and defeats,
Old or of later date, by sea or land,
Her house of bondage, worse than that of old
Which God avenged on Pharaoh—the Bastille.
Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts;
Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair,
That monarchs have supplied from age to age
With music, such as suits their sovereign ears,
The sighs and groans of miserable men!
There’s not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last; to know
That e’en our enemies, so oft employ’d
In forging chains for us, themselves were free.
William Cowper, by the way, was not so sanguine about the coming of the
balloon as many others in 1783. First, he argued: if God meant humans to fly,
He would have provided them with wings. Second, mankind had done enough
mischief on land and sea without entering the heavens. 9
No Frenchman could have rejoiced more fervently on the occasion of full
American independence than the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s staunch
ally in the victorious war against Britain. It was also he who played a leading
role in initiating promoting the French Revolution; yet it was he again whose
8
The strange weather conditions in 1783 are the subject of letter to Rev. John Newton dated
June 13, 1783. See: The Works of William Cowper / His Life and Letters, by William Hayley, ed. The
Rev. T. S. Grimshawe, A. M., Vol. II, London, 1835, p.. 139.
9
Cowper gave vent to his opposition to balloons in a letter to the Rev. John Newton, the
composer of’Amazing Grace,’ dated Dec. 15, 1783. See: The Works of William Cowper, pp 195-
200.

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error of judgment and defection to the Austrians provided a strong impetus to
the insane violence that the Revolution brought forth upon the abolition of the
monarchy.
For now, without entering into a discussion of the early phase of the French
Revolution itself, let me return to a consideration of developments during the
run-up to the 14th of July. I begin with the weather. Needless to say, I was born
in England.
1785 was a bumper year for French agriculture. A favorable harvest made
the supplies of wheat and other cereals so plentiful that no attempt was made
either for their storage or their well-placed distribution, but then a drought set
in and this led to shortages and exorbitant prices in the market for bread and
other staple foods. The effect of famine on the circumstances that led to the
storming of Versailles by famished women is too well-known to require further
comment. Freak weather bringing tornados and hailstones of biblical
proportions hit Paris on the 13th of July in 1788, exactly a year and a day
before another storm or, to be more precise, ‘storming‘ took place.
At the royal court there were mishaps that owed nothing to the weather.
Marie Antoinette’s involvement in the infamous scandal surrounding ‘the
case of the diamond necklace’ has never been satisfactorily clarified, but the
damage it did to the reputation of the Royal House contributed to its demise
and its tragic descent down the path which, with grim irony, inexorably led to
the guillotine. A well-known film on the history of the French Revolution has it
that King Louis XVI made a valuable contribution to the design of that
instrument’s fatal blade when suggesting that its cutting edge should be
slanted diagonally for greatest efficiency. Marie Antoinette has also been cited
as the originator of this ‘improvement,’ but I suspect these accounts to be
apocryphal. Hunters for evil omens might go back further in time to the local
‘reign of terror’ visited on the region of Gevaudan where a monstrous animal
reportedly devoured a hundred or more inhabitants, sparing neither women
nor children. When neither all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men could
put an end to this tribulation, royal pretentions of being the protector of the
people took a heavy knock.
The last tragedy to hit the royal family before the full onset of the Revolution
was the death of the royal couple’s first-born son. The fall of the House of
Hapsburg was also preceded by the personal tragedies suffered by its leading
members.

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References to Letters of William Cowper
The Works of William Cowper / His Life and Letters, by William Hayley, ed. The
Rev. T. S. Grimshawe, A. M., Vol. II, London, 1835. .
Online by Harvard College Library.
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=1_8pAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=cowper+william
+letters&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjO9uSGx8LdAhUHhiwKHe31ApQQ6AEITDAH#v=onepage&
q=cowper%20william%20letters&f=false
1783
An empire lost, so bleak the summer.
The fog refused to lift.
Even the cattle were listless.
Cowper’s Task was scarce begun.
In the New World twins were born,
One named Freedom, one named Rome.
In the Old, there was talk of Apocalypse.
Around Whitsuntide, to heaven, they hoped,
A Montgolfière ascended.
At Michaelmas the wains were heavy
And sallow in the fields of France.
A wistful queen fingered her necklace
Nervously, as through the crystal halls
She passed. In frame of wood
Watteau’s languid Columbine
Over the portal hanging, sadly smiled.
Even Jacques, the groom, agreed:
Something was in the air.

21
Did the circumstances that forced the Parisian insurgents to storm the Bastille
also necessitate the bloodshed their action entailed?
The title above suggests that the Bastille had to be stormed. Did it really?
Did some inexorable law governing historical events dictate the fall of that most
famous or infamous fortress which came to symbolize all that was oppressive
and tyrannical in the ancient regime? Let historians dismount their high horse
and consider with us the predicament of the Parisian insurgents on the
morning of Tuesday, the 14th of July in 1789. The king was mobilizing his
military forces, composed in great measure of non-French soldiers, whether
Austrian, Swiss or German, in and around Paris with the clear object of
‘restoring law and order,’ or, in other words, of nipping the nascent revolution
in France in the bud. Jacques Necker, the popular finance minister in the
service of the King’s regime, on whom moderate reformers pinned hopes of a
conciliatory conclusion of negotiations on the proposed new constitution for
France, had been forced to resign on the previous Sunday, a sure indication
that a counter-revolution was underway. The revolutionary leader Camille
Desmoulins raised the spectre of another massacre like the one suffered by the
Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve. Insurgents had already raided
arsenals and armories and secured a massive amount of firearms but without
at the same time finding the gunpowder needed to use them. There was plenty
of gunpowder in the Bastille.
On the morning of the fourteenth of July a crowd estimated to number
about a thousand gathered outside the walls and main gate the Bastille and
demanded the surrender of the prison and the securement of its store of arms
and munitions, in fact nothing less than the occupation of entire Bastille
complex. The governor of the citadel, Marquis Bernard-René de Launay,
reacted to the predicament he faced by bluffing and biding his time. He played
out the essentially same game within the confines of the Bastille that Louis
had played and would continue to play on a vastly greater scale in his
kingdom. First, he retracted the cannons mounted on the battlements only to
return them to their original firing positions; he parleyed with a delegation
from the crowd, explaining to them that the much dreaded prison held no more

22
than seven inmates as he dangled the prospect of conceding to their main
demands, but to no avail; the insurgents lost patience and outwitted the
governor when a number of vanqueurs, as the dissidents called themselves,
played a trick similar to the one employed by the Greeks inside the Trojan
horse whereby the enraged crowd was able invade the Bastille’s outer precinct
to the loss of 98 lives against the death of one defender. Realizing the
hopelessness of his situation once it was clear that the regular troops of the
nation sympathized with the insurgents, de Launey surrendered. So great was
the animosity of his captors that he and an adjutant were brutally murdered.
Their severed heads were paraded through the streets as trophies of victory, a
grim omen of what was yet to come.
The question as to whether the capture of the Bastille could have been
achieved without bloodshed is part of the much wider question of whether the
French Revolution had to take a violent course despite the intention of leading
figures in the early phase of the Revolution such as Mirabeau and Marquis de
Lafayette to move developments in France along the lines of a constitutional
monarchy. The anecdote that Louis or Marie Antoinette helped to improve the
design of the guillotine may well be fanciful but it could hold more than a grain
of symbolic truth. Royal miscalculations played a significant part in the tragedy
that befell the royal pair, among them the ploy to instigate a counter-revolution
in July 1789, the abortive attempt to escape to the Austrian Netherlands and,
perhaps most grave of them all, the King’s willingness to declare war on Austria
in the hope of an early French defeat and with that the restitution of the
monarchy. Arguably the mother of all miscalculations lay much earlier in the
decision to join forces with the American revolutionaries. What was good for
the United States was bad for the state of French finances. It was the need to
reform the taxation system that necessitated the summoning of the Etats-
Généraux, which in turn opened the gate to a violent revolution that could
have achieved its goals without violence. The poet William Cowper, who foresaw
the fall of the Bastille in a prophetic vision of universal brotherhood that, as
the poet generously conceded, embraced (even) the French, eventually voiced
the resentment of a disgruntled prejudiced Englishman when in reaction to the
excesses of la Terreur he wrote: Trust the French to mess things up.

23
THE SAME-DAY DEATHS OF JEFFERSON AND JOHN ADAMS ON JULY 4th 1826
Scholars in general are wary of discussing unexplained phenomena, leaving
such matters as UFOs, crop circles or the identity of the Antichrist to the
exponents of theories aired on the Internet. However, occasionally a noted
scholar picks up the gauntlet thrown down by coincidences that crop up in the
annals of history, a notable example of which we now consider. I refer to an
article appearing in the journal Historically Speaking: the Bulletin of the
Historical Society (July/August 2005, Volume 6, Number 6) by Margaret P.
Battin. It bears the title: “July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-day Deaths of
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.” 10
Margaret Battin’s article takes its departure from a recognition of the
following fact: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July
4, 1826, that fateful day being the 50th anniversary of the signing of the
Declaration of Independence. Furthermore President Monroe also died on the
4th of July, but in 1831. In the quest for an explanation Margaret Battin runs
through the gamut of six possibilities which she enumerates in the following
sequence of categories.
1. pure chance
2. divine intervention
3. “hanging on” to ensure a memorable death
4. suicide pact
5. foul play
6. an as yet barely understood psychological force
Margaret P. Battin finds within none of the above categories a completely
satisfying conclusion of her quest for an explanation. Let us consider each
possibility in turn.
10
Margaret P. Battin, “July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-day Deaths of John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson*” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society,
July/August 2005, Under the aegis of The Historical Society, ℅ ENC—James Cameron Center,
162 Old Colony Avenue, Quincy, MA 02170.

24
She observes that the statistical likelihood of two presidents dying on the
same prestigious day, the fifty-year jubilee of the signing of American
Declaration of Independence, is a very long shot indeed, as are the chances
that three of the first five American presidents should die on the same date. I
might add that only one president was born on the fourth of July, namely
Calvin Coolidge. Even in this case the odds stacked against any president’s
birth on July the fourth were roughly one in nine (the total number of
presidents divided into the number of days in the year) and yet these odds were
immeasurably greater than the chance that two presidents would die on the
same day.
As to the possibility that the phenomenon under discussion was the result
of divine intervention, Margaret Battin feels indisposed to entering into a
discussion of the imponderable theological mysteries and in this matter she
reflects the diffidence of scholars in an age when the queen of the sciences no
longer occupies her throne. In academic circles it is becoming increasingly
respectable to profess allegiance to theism, but there are few scholars bold
enough confess a firm belief in a miracle that has occurred over the last two
thousand years.
The possibilities delineated within the remaining four categories amount to
various speculations based on conjectures for which there is little verifiable
evidence and most scholars are averse to mulling over anything that smacks of
a conspiracy theory. The intriguing idea of some psychosomatically controlled
time switch affecting one’s life span might deserve further investigation. In a
history seminar I once attended at the University of Cologne the presiding
professor gingerly commented how strange it was that Oliver Cromwell died on
the 3rd of September (Old Style), the same date of two decisive battles at
Worcester and Dunbar which he had won during his military career and the
beginning of the siege of Drogheda.
The issue of coincidences is far wider than the ambit of Margaret Battin’s
particular discussion but the framework she uses to explore possible
explanations is widely applicable to a study of the entire question of
coincidences in history. One should not imagine that the example of this
phenomenon is an isolated “one-off” case. If it were, one might be tempted to
conclude that the case of the coincidences she considers could be dismissed as
a statistical quirk on the assumption that it would only be a matter of time
before enough monkeys typed the entire text of Hamlet. We have other cases to
consider, some of them well-known, such as that of the Lincoln-Kennedy
parallels or the recurrence of the ninth of November in German history.
As various pages on the Internet and other sources point out, there are
what some take to be eerie similarities between the facts that pertain to the

25
assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. In both cases a
president named Johnson was the respective victim’s successor. Both were
elected in a year that ended with “60.” Both were mortally wounded on a
Friday, in Lincoln’s case on Good Friday. Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre
and Kennedy was being driven in a Ford Lincoln, and so it goes on. If we apply
the statistical probability test to access the chances that such a row of
coincidences could take place, we should at least assess the chances of two
presidents sharing the same surname, of being assassinated and dying on the
same day of the week. There have been several cases of presidents sharing the
same surname, namely Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Roosevelt and Bush, giving
us a value of roughly one in seven (35 up to Kennedy’s administration / 5).
Four presidents have been assassinated during the course of the history of the
United States: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, giving us a factor of
roughly one in nine. Add on to this a one-in-seven factor for Friday and we
arrive at a chance of 7 x 9 x 7, which equals one in 441, a conservative
estimate in view of the fact that we have taken no account of Ford’s Theatre,
the Ford Lincoln and a few other matters .11
What about the explanation of “divine intervention”? When the speaker in a
well-known song of the Rolling Stones raised the question of who killed the
Kennedys, he did not have God in mind. As Margaret Battin warned, the
thought of divine intervention in such cases lands us in the prickly thicket of
difficult theological questions. How much leeway can God give to Satan in view
of the story of Job? The many who claim to have identified the identity of the
Antichrist so variously in President Obama, the Pope, the Freemasons, Islam,
“the Jews,” or Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge (and such a genial and
11
John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, together with his father and two brothers, was a
member of a family renowned for its prowess in the theatre. On 25 of November 1864 he and his
two brothers played leading roles in Julius Caesar, then on the stage in New York. In the
following year his theatrical cast of mind led him to believe that he would reenact the
assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, albeit in the following month of April and a
day off the 15th. He would have preferred to employ a dagger as a means of killing the President
but a pistol proved the only effective way to execute his plan. The phrase sic semper tyrannis
(“So be it ever to tyrants”) which he exclaimed to the public after jumping onto the stage
recalled the words supposedly uttered by Brutus at the scene of Caesar’s death, words also
inscribed on the Great Seal of Virginia. In much the same spirit he may have recalled that Caesar
was killed in the precincts of the Theatre of Pompey, which lay outside the Pomerium, the
bearing of arms was prohibited. Those hunting for parallels between the deaths of Lincoln and
Kennedy have found it significant that Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in a movie theatre. Of
course, they assume that Oswald was actively involved in Kennedy's assassination.

26
amiable gentleman too) seem to suggest that Satan virtually rules the roost
down here, allowing God the honorary role of clearing up at the End of Days.
And then what about more down-to-earth, rational explanations? The various
conspiracy theories which revolve around the assassination of JFK do not to
my knowledge incorporate Lincoln’s assassination. To do so would be to
construe a monstrous cult whose operations spanned centuries, a cult in
possession of immense powers of control and insight; in other words we are
slipping back to the devil again.
AUGUST’S STING IN THE TAIL
August 31 poses something of an oddity among the dates of the annual
calendar. It departs from the rhythm of an alternation of months ending on
the 31st with months that end on the 30th or, in the case of February, on the
28th or the 29th. August follows July, a month that also ends on the 31st. The
reason for this anomaly goes back to the rule of Augustus Caesar. As great
prestige derived from the honour of having a month named after one, Augustus
could not countenance having his month contain fewer days than July, the
month so named in honour of Julius Caesar.

27
To judge by events that have fallen on the 31st of August throughout history,
it cannot be held to be particularly auspicious. Let us consider certain cases in
point.
The 31st of August in 1422 marked the tragically early death of Henry V, the
king of two realms, England and France. His son Henry VI thus became king of
both realms at the tender age of nine months. His accession to the throne at so
early an age, his distaste for warfare, his abstemious and devout way of life all
combined to weaken England’s military hold on France and create the
circumstances that ended in civil war and national turmoil during the War of
the Roses.
We now jump to August the 31st in1888, which witnessed the first in a
notorious bloodcurdling series of murders, some attended by gruesome
disfigurements of the female victims’ bodies. This ended 70 days later on the
ninth of November. The culprit was none other than the figure known as Jack
the Ripper.
The next inauspicious date to consider is the 31st of August in 1939, just eighty
years ago, this marking the mother of all false flag operations. A number of
men dressed in Polish military uniforms allegedly staged an attack on a
German radio station at Gleiwitz on the Polish-German border. Some of these
supposed attackers were prisoners in Dachau concentration camp that were
murdered on the spot but l made to look as though they were Polish operatives.
On the following day Hitler used the pretext offered by the incident to order an
attack on Poland and thus precipitate the Second World War.
We conclude this macabre list by calling to mind the tragic death of Princess
Diana on the 31st of August in 1997.
Let’s hope next 31st of August will bring better luck. The ninth of November
mentioned earlier presented a pretty grim catalogue of troubling events, the
beginning of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, the Hitler-Ludendorff beer hall
putsch, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish property on the Reichs-
Kristallnacht but by the last count marked a happy event, the fall of the Berlin
Wall.

28
NOVEMBER THE 9th IN GERMAN HISTORY
12:
The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989),
The burning of synagogues and associated crimes against Jews on the
so-called Reichs-Kristallnacht (1938),
The abortive Hitler-Ludendorff Beerhall-Putsch in Munich (1923),
The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1918).
Some would add on Napoleon the First’s coup
d’état on the 18 Brumaire, VIII according to the
French Revolutionary calendar, which was the
ninth of November 1799 in fact. A historian
might also mention the less well known execution
of Robert Blum by the Austrian authorities
(1848). Blum played a leading role in the
movement to establish a liberal and democratic
pan-German parliament in the Paulskirche in
Frankfurt am Main in 1848, the year in which the
historic phase known as Vormärz 13culminated
and tragically ended. 14
12
Philipp Scheidemann’s Declaration of The German Republic, November 9, 1918. https://www.zeitklicks.de/top-
menu/zeitstrahl/navigation/topnav/jahr/1918/ausrufung-der-republik/
13
The period from c. 1841 until March 1848 during which in Prussia and other German states there was a
widespread popular movement that agitated for liberal reforms and a democratic parliament representing the entire
German people.
14
Reichskristallnacht, November 9, 1938. Yadvashem site

29
iOne can offer a rational explanation for at least one repetition in the list cited
above. Hitler may well have chosen the 9th of November as the day on which
to stage his attempted Putsch to indicate an intended reversal of the process
that led to the establishment of the Weimar Republic after the Kaiser’s

30
abdication. On the other hand it is difficult to see how any presumed
15
operatives could have engineered the date of the fall of the Berlin wall as the
timing of this event seems to have resulted from an unforeseen bungle on the
part of an East German functionary. Conspiracy theorists, here’s your cue.
15
Hiltler-Ludendorff ‘Beer Hall Putsch’: https://thewire.in/history/beer-hall-putsch-november-9-1923-germanys-9-
11

31
1066 AND ALL THAT, not to forget 1660
DATES THAT TRANSCEND THE JULIAN AND GREGORIAN CALENDARS
AND OTHER APPARENT HISTORICAL QUIRKS
Bayeux Tapestry:
The phrase “1066 and all that” is familiar to old and young in Britain, and
there are good reasons for regarding 1066 as the founder year of Britain as a
political, cultural and linguistic entity. As though gifted with vatic prescience,
Edward the Confessor inaugurated Westminster Abbey, where thenceforth the
monarchs of England and later Great Britain were to be crowned. From 1066
the monarchs of England have been designated by number, beginning with
William the First until Elizabeth the Second today (apologies to those Scots for
whom she is “Elizabeth the First”). There has been one Republican interlude
that interrupted the monarchal line established by William the First (or the

32
Conqueror) and it was in 1660, an anagram of 1066, that the monarchy was
restored.
.
Bayeux Tapestry: Battle of Hastings Charles II landing in Dover in 1660. Engraving
October 14, 1066 (Julian Calendar) by W. Sharp after B. West
.London rose from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666, a dire event prophesied
by seers such as Mother Shipton, Nostradamus and William Lilly. Many
regarded the appearance in 1066 of the heavenly body later identified as
Halley’s Comet as an omen of a drastic change in England. Those who
established the first English colony on Virginian soil left England in 1606 and a
few months after establishing a base at Jamestown witness a sighting of the
same comet.
THE ODD INTERPLAY BETWEEN THE JULIAN AND GREGORIAN CALENDARS
There have been two historic Norman invasions, the first in 1066, the
second at dawn on the sixth of June (6/6) in 1944. On both occasions a man
named Montgomery played an active role in the respective operation and when

33
Left: The Coat of arms of Roger le Grand Montgomery, William the Conqueror’s right-hand man,
who according to one source commanded the right flank a the Battle of Hastings. Centre: Field
Marshall Bernhard Montgomery. Right: Rommel’s Staff after strafing by RAF in Montgomery Foy.
being driven in a staff vehicle through the village of Montgomery Foy, Field
Dwight Eisenhower Ernst Rommel
October 14, 1890, † March 28, November 15, 1891, † October 14, 1945
1969
Marshal Erwin Rommel was badly shot up. The Battle of Hastings took
place on October the 14th according to the Julian or Old Style calendar.
General Eisenhower was born on October the 14th according to the Gregorian
or New Style calendar and Rommel was to take his life on October the 14th
under orders from Hitler. He was absent from the Normandy front on that most
crucial of all days, June the sixth, as he returned to his wife to celebrate her
birthday. To the great consternation of the secret service, on the eve of the
invasion the codenames assigned to the Normandy beaches cropped up as
solutions to a crossword puzzle in the Daily Telegraph, yet another interesting
coincidence!
I anticipate that references to the Julian and Gregorian styles of dating have
raised objections in readers’ minds. How can dates that correspond to both
styles bear comparison in any way if the days to which they assign a date
diverge by ten days? Has the fact that William Shakespeare and Miguel de
Cervantes died on 23 April 1616, albeit in accordance with the two styles of
dating, any claim to our attention, as it might well have done if they had died
on the same day? But then, perhaps the coincidence is even more striking for

34
this reason. Shakespeare was born on Saint George’s day and the 23rd of April
1616 fell on Saint George’s Day too (An interesting parallel can be drawn
between this and the fact that the great painter Raphael died on his 37th
birthday, which fell on Good Friday). Can we recognize two sides to an
equation here, on one side the common date (the 23rd of April) and on the
other, an apparent message, if you will? Shakespeare and Cervantes were
kindred spirits who respectively marked the highest pinnacles of literary
achievement in English and Spanish literature. Let us be cautious here. They
were not born on the same day as the dates of their deaths lay ten days apart
in accord with the adjustment of Gregorian calendar, so where is our great
coincidence. Let us consider a similar case.
Left: William Shakespeare † April 23, 1616. (by the Julian calendar Right:
Miguel de Cervantes † April 23, 1616. (by Gregorian calendar.
AIt is sometimes maintained that that Isaac Newton was born “in the same
year” in which Galileo died, 1642. Again, one cannot help feeling that some
implicit pointer suggests that an overruling influence, presumably God or the
all-pervading collective unconscious, saw to it that Newton was to continue
Galileo’s good work, or - to purloin a biblical metaphor - that the mantle of
Galileo should fall on the shoulders of Newton. An article by Brian Gee
published in New Scientist in1977 has this to say on the subject, countering
such a conclusion: 1

35
Returning to the problem of Newton’s birth date we note that it is
commonly recorded as 25 December 1642. To compare this with Galileo,
who died on 8 January, 1642 (ns) we would need to translate Newton’s
birth date to the Gregorian calendar date of 5 January, 1643, a date with
no standing in 17th century England. Personally, I prefer to think of
Newton being born on Christmas Day 1642 (Old Style)
Brian’s Gee’s preference for Christmas Day would certainty have received a
full endorsement from Newton himself, who understood the day of his birth as
a providential omen. Brian Gee’s nostalgic hankering after an association
rooted in religious tradition leaves no trace in his attitude to what many others
will see as a meaningful coincidence. Does he not foist his own assumption
that such a coincidence cannot be meaningful on his readers as though this
were some incontrovertible fact, - on readers who may not all share his strictly
rational attitude?
Left: Galileo by Justus Sustermans Right: Sir Isaac Newton by Godrey Kneller
If you admit the possibility at least that some Inscrutable Guiding Force uses
dates as semiotic indicators comparable to words in speech and writing, to
arbitrary signs after all, you can assume that the IGF in question would not be
much bothered by the thought of divergences between the Julian and
Gregorian calendars. I might add that the year 1879 saw another passing of
the baton from one great physicist to another, for in this year James Clerk

36
Maxwell died and Albert Einstein was born. Maxwell was the first person to
demonstrate the unity underlying the physical properties of light and
electromagnetism, thus preparing the way for Einstein’s general theory of
relativity. .
1666
MDCLXVI
Did Sir Christopher Wren Have a Hand in the
Burning Down of Old Saint Paul’s Cathedral?
A Compromise Design Sir Christopher Wren Might have Accepted but for
the Intervention of the Great Fire of London

37
Before discussing such an outrageous proposition let us consider whether the
destruction of old Saint Paul’s Cathedral, whatever its cause, afforded
Christopher Wren with an opportunity to fulfil a deep-seated ambition. The
answer to this question must be in the affirmative. From the beginning of the
Restoration in 1660, ruling circles were deeply concerned with the condition of
Saint Paul’s Cathedral. At the very least, they argued, it should be reinforced
structurally and given a facelift, having fallen on evil days during the days of
Oliver Cromwell’s rule. Wren, a brilliant up and coming architect and
mathematician, who was a major player in preparations for work on the
cathedral, advocated its total demolition to make way for a new cathedral built
in accord with a modern neoclassical cum Baroque style of church architecture
much favoured in contemporary Italy and France. On this issue Wren met with
stiff opposition from those who defended the gothic tradition that had prevailed
throughout the Middle Ages. In Wren’s mind the Middle Ages were over and
done with, and with its demise, so too old rat-infested plague-ridden London.
During the catastrophic Great Plague of London in1665 Wren spent
valuable time on the Continent studying recent trends in architecture and town
planning. So great was the impression made on him by this exercise that in
due course he was fully prepared to repopulate London with churches built in
the neoclassical style and submit a detailed street plan for a newly rebuilt city
on the site of smelly old medieval London - at extremely short notice. His alert
reaction to the consequences of the fire found a match in the sang froid with
which the Duke of York actively participated in securing firebreaks able to halt
the progress of the Fire within certain ‘acceptable’ limits. This operation
involved blowing up rows of buildings with the use of gunpowder. One must
also admire the alacrity that allowed the Crown to lay down - within ten or so
days - such regulations as were deemed necessary to govern the reconstruction
of London, even down to such details as the width of major streets, the
materials permitted in the construction of new buildings and the prohibition of
temporary shacks on the ruins of the city, thus curtailing the existence of
squalid shanty towns.
Funnily enough, Wren was a member of a group of experts who visited the
cathedral a week before the outbreak of the Fire, as it happened, at which he
reluctantly conceded that a small dome should cap the central tower of the
remodeled cathedral instead of a large cupola, not so dissimilar to the one that
was ultimately placed over the new cathedral. Maybe his vision of a future
Saint Paul’s vied in his mind with the grandeur of Saint Peter’s in Rome.

38
The cathedral burned down on the third day of the Great Fire, its
destruction being much furthered by the massive wooden cladding that
surrounded the central tower at the intersection of the cathedral’s cruciform
layout. Lurid descriptions of eyewitnesses reported that the stone masonry of
the cathedral, subject to the intense heat of molten lead, exploded and
splintered in a most frightening manner and the heat at ground level prevented
access to the cathedral by firefighters. As a matter of interest. Wren took a
scientific interest in the effect of extreme heat and even the explosive force of
gunpowder on stone masonry, affording him the ability to demolish with
surprising ease what remained of the cathedral after the Fire. The Tower of
London was spared consignment to the flames of the ‘Great Fire’ thanks only to
the massive use of gunpowder, which was stored within the Tower, an arsenal
as well as a royal palace Wren was so well stocked with supplies of gunpowder,
in fact, that with the proceeds of the sale of this commodity he financed far-
reaching construction work on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the very
outward appearance of which resembles the outline of the Tower of London.
My intention is not to assign blame or name names in the matter of
putative acts of arson; it is only to relay pertinent facts to the attention of
potential readers without further comment. However, Londoners themselves
were quick to accuse ‘foreigners,’ ‘Papists’ and pro-Cromwell ‘Fifth Monarchists’
of being the dastardly instigators of the Fire. One or two poor souls were
actually executed or lynched as a result. The Duke of Monmouth, Charles the
Second’s natural son and at length a rebel again his uncle James II, accused
his uncle of being an accessory to the Fire. Whether or not he was, James, like
the great architect Sir Christopher Wren himself, would most likely have
affirmed the voracity of the old saying. “It’s an ill wind that does nobody any
good.”

39
LUTHER AND LUTTERWORTH
John Wycliffe Lutterworth Parish Church Martin Luther
C 1328 – 1384 1483 1546
I am in the fortunate position of having no reputation to defend. Far from
being apologetic on this issue I make so bold as to point to another possible
message pertaining to the transfer of Elijah’s cloak. John Wycliffe, the
“morning star of the Reformation” died in the year 1384, just in time to avoid a
painful martyrdom. Martin Luther was born in 1483, a rearrangement of 1384.
Wycliffe spent his final years as the parish priest of Lutterworth in the
Midlands, and Lutter and Luther share the same etymological root. Against
their expectations and wishes, the teaching of both reformers excited hopes of
social freedom among the peasantry and this resulted in bloody uprisings
followed by brutal repression at the hand of the “powers that be.”

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