BOB'S BITS

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DOYLE

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes, in several instances, but first in The Sign of the Four(1890) by Arthur Conan Doyle.

One would not want to question Sherlock Holmes’s reputation as a paragon of deductive rationality, but this is surely dangerous advice. The more prudent course would be to say, ‘at this point, you need to conduct new experiments.’ And it’s worth pointing out, coincidentally, that by 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle was already taking great interest in ‘spiritualism,’ in that wondrous hybrid of Victorian hopes and fears that led many people to believe that could one get beyond the material world there would still be much to discover. Holmes’s fascination with that other universe of possibilities continued to intensify and became obsessive. By the time Holmes himself ‘passed’, in 1930, this eccentricity was one of the most remarkable things about him. Thus the New York Times’ 1930 obit on Doyle begins with and keeps returning to his deep interest in other-worldly phenomena. In the obit, Sherlock Holmes gets much less space and the infinitely amenable Dr. Watson and the supernaturally malevolent Moriarty rate no mention whatsoever. So much for obituarists, one might well conclude. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most famous detective (Holmes) and the world’s most consummate villain (Moriarty) was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. His father and grandfather encouraged him in artistic pursuits, which eventually won out although a passel of rich uncles tried to educate him into a medical career at Stonyhurst and the University of Edinburgh. And indeed Doyle did doctor, at first, but in the intervals between patients he sketched out mystery stories. His first big success (£25!!!) was published in 1888, and very shortly thereafter Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty (and speckled bands and silent hounds) started to disturb the slumbers of the reading public in Britain, America, and beyond. There are many interesting aspects to the Holmes-Doyle saga, but spiritualism and psychic research? These became obsessions after Doyle’s son, Kingsley, died in 1918. Doyle spent the rest of his life and much of his fortune promoting psychic research and psychic stories. It worked in the limited sense that after his death his family expected to hear from him momentarily. And they followed his spiritualist wish to be buried in a standing position, just in case. The local parish church wouldn’t have it (and, anyway, regarded Doyle as a non-believer), so he was buried upright in the garden of his mansion house. Given time, however, the Church of England can forgive almost anything. In 1955, Doyle vertical was disinterred and reburied as Doyle horizontal, next to his second wife, Jean, in All Saints churchyard, Minstead. Myself, I think it’s better to remember Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (MD Edinburgh) as a stout advocate of vaccination, indubitably a this-world medicine. ©

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INKJETS

Painting can represent all visible objects with three Colours, Yellow, Red, and Blue; for all other Colours can be comprised of these three, which I call Primitive . . . and a Mixture of these Three Original Colours makes a Black, and all other Colours whatsoever; as I have demonstrated by my invention of Printing Pictures and Figures with their natural Colour. Jakob Christoph le Blon, Coloritto (London and Paris, 1725.

And so, following a long history of technological innovation and the sweated labors of legions of patent lawyers, we have ended up with inkjet printers which, amazing as they may be, are really vehicles for selling small quantities of ink (Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta) at grossly inflated prices. In many cases, two sets of new ink cartridges will cost you more than the inkjet printer itself. Jakob Christoph le Blon understood the economic principle quite well, but living in the monarchical worlds of London and Paris he sought, instead, patent monopolies on the whole process, both in printing and in the dyeing of tapestries. It wasn’t a new idea, and le Blon gives handsome credit to Isaac Newton’s brilliant work with prisms, as well as to generations of painters and portraitists. And so he was duly granted royal patents (first by King George I, in Britain, and then by King Louis XV, in France). I am happy to say that all of le Blon’s London businesses went bust, the victims of patent pirates, plagiarism, and market competition. If he’d stuck only with his inks and dyes, le Blon might have become as rich as Croesus. Jakob Christoph le Blon was born on May 23, 1667, in Frankfurt, Hesse, where his Huguenot ancestors had fled the terrible religious wars and persecutions of 16th-century France. A literate lot, they’d become printers and engravers, specializing in books about travel and engraved printings of works of art. Young Jakob apprenticed in the same trades and moved to Rome where he worked with leading painters (and, indeed, began painting his own miniatures as well as printing the works of others). He also kept informed on the science of coloration, especially (as we know from Coloritto) with Isaac Newton’s famous work on Opticks (1704). He put experience and reading together to produce his scheme for three-color printing, his first real production coming in 1710, in Holland. Thus armed, le Blon moved to London in 1710 to begin angling for a royal patent and a monopoly on the process. Both came from King George I in 1719. There are, I am told, important theoretical differences between Newton’s science of color and Christoph le Blon’s technological adaptations, the former being ‘additive’ and the latter ‘subtractive.’ I don’t entirely understand the point, but that is basically why (if you want to blame anyone for the ridiculous price of inkjet cartridges) you should pick on Christoph le Blon and leave Isaac Newton unstained and unscathed. ©.

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CAMEOS

ƛ

That is the Greek ‘lambda’, lower case, and (in miniature) it’s the trademark a young Italian apprentice used to identify his cameos when he learned that his work was so fine that it was being pirated by his masters. His name was Benedetto Pistrucci, and he was born in Rome on May 24, 1783 into a distinguished family (his father would become a civil servant of the papacy). Benedetto was a second son who displayed considerable talent at drawing and sculpture and was soon placed with a master cameo cutter, Nicola Morelli. Cameo cutting was an ancient art, or craft, and its finest examples come to us from classical antiquity. The most famous of them are found at The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, and the British Museum, in London. Cameo cutting fell into disuse, to be revived in the late Renaissance, and at its center (which is probably where Benedetto Pistrucci apprenticed) at Torre del Greco, near Naples. Cameos are carved from coral or sea shells, and by Pistrucci’s time the Neapolitan coral fleet (the boats were called correlini) numbered over 1,600 vessels. So cameos were again a big business, and buying an Italian cameo became a near requirement for European aristocrats on their “Grand Tours.” (I believe we get the term ‘knickery-knackery’ from these small but expensive purchases.) So many of these customers were English that in 1814, Benedetto Pistrucci decided to go where the money was. His journey (overland, to London) was interrupted by Napoléon Bonaparte’s unscheduled return from Elba, but the emperor and the craftsman made use of that time, and a Pistrucci Napoléon still resides in London’s Victoria and Albert museum. Once settled in London, Pistrucci prospered mightily, patronized by the royal family (the coronation medals of both George IV and Victoria are Petrucci’s) and, as importantly, the Royal Mint. As an ‘alien,’ he never did get an official patent, and this is said to have contributed to his somewhat prickly temper. But he did important work in cameos (the raw materials presumably shipped from the Mediterranean) and in coinage. The famed Waterloo Medal, for instance, is a Pistrucci. So we can say that he profited twice from Napoléon’s brief return in 1814-1815. His cameos were so exquisite, and he was so fashionable, that he could charge top prices for his work. Pistrucci’s commission income for 1817 was £1,322 (£150,000) today, and that doesn’t include his fees for ‘official’ work done in that year. Today, you can find 48 documented Pistrucci cameos, most of them in museums. And this July a Pistrucci cameo goes on sale at Sotheby’s, for £10,000. But then it is only “attributed” to Pistrucci. Were it inscribed with a miniature ‘ƛ’ the price would inflate well beyond your bank balance. ©

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BOJANGLES

I knew a man Bojangles and he’d dance for you,

In worn-out shoes,

With silver hair, a ragged shirt, and baggy pants,

The old soft shoe.

From the song “Mr. Bojangles,” by Jerry Jeff Walker (1968).

This most evocative of modern folk songs (‘modern folk’ is no oxymoron) was recorded by all sorts, even Frankie Laine. I best remember Bob Dylan’s version, but would like to hear the recording done by Harry Belafonte. Plaintive and sad, the lyric was notabout the man best known as Mr. Bojangles, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Born poor and black in Richmond, VA, on May 25, 1878, Robinson was orphaned at 6 and then raised by his grandmother, Bedelia, a formerly enslaved woman freed by Northern victory in the Civil War. Robinson’s long career as a performer began at about the same time he was orphaned, appearing as a “pickaninny” in local minstrel shows. After that, not much is known (or too much embellished by Robinson himself), but after some service in the US Army at the time of the Spanish-American War, he hit the big time in New York vaudeville and was soon one of the most highly-paid black performers in the USA, pulling down $3,500 weekly ‘in season’ (that’s well over $100,000 today). If you look for him today you won’t find much, but in New York City he was the cat’s whiskers, several times honorary mayor of Harlem, an investor in baseball’s Negro League, and from those eminences a major fundraiser for various charities and patriotic crusades (for instance for War Bonds during WWI). Perhaps the best place to see him in action is to watch an old Fred Astaire movie in which Astaire does the stair dance, a tap routine made famous by Mr. Bojangles. Indeed, Robinson had a special stair made for his stage performances in which each riser was ‘tuned’ to a particular note. In an era where black performers were restricted to black audiences or to racially-demeaning ‘character’ roles, Robinson did well for himself. He headlined on Broadway in several shows, including a jazz version of The Mikado. But his most successful tole in otherwise “white” entertainment was to star with Shirley Temple in two films, The Little Colonel and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. After the fact, Robinson has been criticized for accepting what look like ‘minstrel’ roles, but Temple herself remembered him as a master of his art and of his person. Sadly, Robinson died penniless in 1949. His funeral was arranged, and paid for, by his friend Ed Sullivan, and was a day of mourning in Harlem. As for the “Mr. Bojangles” of the Jerry Walker song, that was a down-and-outer in New Orleans, a poor white man who’d taken on the name as a local street performer, one who’d dance at the drop of a coin, then drink off the profits. That “Mr. Bojangles” remains otherwise nameless. ©.

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OIL

Cease work, dismiss the staff, dismantle anything worth the cost of transporting to the coast for re-shipment, and come home. Cable message from William Knox D’Arcy, in London, to George B. Reynolds, in Mosjad-e-Sulayman, Persia, early May 1908.

William Knox D’Arcy was an English multi-billionaire (in today’s money values). who’d made a fortune in Australian real estate when in 1886 gold was discovered on waste land he’d bought (for the proverbial song) in Queensland, Australia. In 1889 he moved back to England, built a mansion at Grosvenor Square, London, and a country house in (then) rural Middlesex. He showed unusually good taste for a new nabob, using Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris as decorators, and when at his leisure D’Arcy indulged in horse-racing and hosting hunting parties, But he’d developed a taste for expensive stuff underground, and had used much of his gold money to head up a syndicate interested in finding underground wealth elsewhere in the empire. In 1901, at the usual chicken feed cost (a few thousand pounds to the then Shah) D’Arcy’s syndicate won a concession to explore for oil in over 480,000 square miles of southern Persia. They found enough to encourage the Shah to shake the syndicate down for a 1/6thshare of the oil, and then set up a drilling operation centered on Moshad-e-Suleyman in far southwest Persia. Under Mr. Reynolds’ supervision they drilled and drilled, piling expenses up, and by Spring 1908 D’Arcy himself was personally indebted to London banks for upwards of £150,000 and the so-called D’Arcy Concession was similarly situated. D’Arcy was like a lot of other wealthy gamblers. He could afford the loss but he didn’t like it. So he cabled Reynolds, ordering him to pull up stakes (or drills and pumps), fire the workers, and bring anything of value home. Reynolds, like all mythic wildcatters, thought that if he went just a little deeper he might find something. So Reynolds delayed, kept on drilling, and on May 26, 1908 a big gusher came in, at 1,180 feet, underneath the drilling operation at Mosjad-e-Sulayman. A great lot of oil would flow from that strike, and a lot of history, too. The D’Arcy Concession became Burmah Oil which became British Petroleum. Successive Shahs would wax rich off the 1/6th share, and a few of them would wangle additional cash from the concession, while Persia itself (later Iran) did not prosper or progress. Oil wells, like gold mines, are a near-perfect example of an extractive industry, and this (not to mention the lifestyles of successive shahs) wore thin on Iranian nationalists and religious fundamentalists, with explosive results, in 1952, then 1979, and yet again in 2026. Of course we need to know more about it than just the D’Arcy Concession’s “lucky strike” in 1908. So, too, does President Donald J. Trump need to know more about it. But then Donald Trump is not a good learner. He is a self-proclaimed know-it-all. Today his ignorance is our cost. ©

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BAZLEY

From a man without a philosophy, no one can expect philosophical completeness. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869).

Thus Arnold continued his dissection of English society, or rather its three great branches. The heart of it comes in Chapter III, “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,” wherein Arnold used “representative men” from the aristocracy, the middle class, and the working class, and one that he picked from the great middle was the Manchester cotton mill entrepreneur, Thomas Bazley. Arnold ranked Bazley among the Philistines. In the very same year, Queen Victoria made Bazley a baronet, Sir Thomas if you please, which makes one think that Matthew Arnold did not see eye to eye with the great queen on the subjects of “merit” and “virtue.” And we might add in Prince Albert, who’d made Bazley a member of the commission that mounted the Great Exhibition of 1851, and Napoléon III, who’d made Bazley a member of La Légion d’Honneur only in 1867. Thomas Bazley was born into the Manchester middle class on May 28, 1797, and may have imbibed from his father (a cotton manufacturer and a journalist) that strange brew we now call Manchester radicalism. But he’d have to make his own way, so after a time at Bolton Grammar School Bazley, aged 15, was apprenticed to a rival spinning firm. By 1818 he was on his own, working as a ‘yarn agent’. He prospered well enough to enter into partnership in 1826 as a mill owner: two mills, in fact, one in Manchester the other, Dean Mills, in Bolton. These were yarn works, linen and fine cotton, and soon Bazley and his partner employed 1400 spinners. But they thought of themselves as being far more than masters. So, especially at Dean Mills, Bazley set about the creation of his own capitalist utopia, not only employing spinners but improving them. Dean Mills had showers, a steam kitchen serving healthy meals, subsidized housing, and an educational institute for the operatives and their children, and open to all without reference to religious sect (a big deal in industrial Lancashire) and with a library, a large lecture hall, and a newspaper room. Dean Mills prospered mightily and inspired many, amongst them Prince Albert and Charles Dickens, who both thought that Dean Mills was something Victorian England should look like. And all this within the ideological framework supplied by Bazley’s low church, evangelical Anglicanism and his commitment (including in parliament) to ‘Manchester radicalism.’ Bazley bought out his partner in 1847, then sold out himself in 1862, This added to his considerable fortune, at his death in 1885 amounted to £92,000 (in excess of £15 million today). And this despite spending huge sums on a country estate (including a ‘castle’) and a seaside mansion at Lytham St. Annes. And Bazley paid something for the baronetcy, too. But in 1869 there was something about Thomas Bazley’s rise to respectability that turned Thomas Arnold’s stomach. Perhaps it was a matter of taste. ©

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GLACIERS

The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal. Louis Agassiz, 1870, in his Geological Sketches.

One of the greatest, and possibly the most famous, of 19th-century American scientists was an immigrant, Jean-Louis Rodolfe Agassiz, born in French Switzerland (the then largely Protestant canton of Neuchatel), on May 28, 1807. Louis Agassiz had a major impact on the professionalization of science and science education, and although a bit of a polymath himself was adamant in his view that university science faculty should specialize in a particular branch of science, even a particular problem. He had a major impact, himself, on geology, but his first appointment, at the new University of Neuchatel, was as Professor of Natural History. He’d gptten that position because of his connections with the great scientist Alexander von Humboldt, and because Humboldt’s patron, the King of Prussia, was seeking to shore up his (rather odd) position as Prince of Neuchatel. Agassiz’ move to Harvard was probably precipitated by the radical revolutions of 1848, and in its turn precipitated the formation of the Lawrence Scientific School (later incorporated into the university). Recently widowed by the death of his Swiss wife, Agassiz married a member in good standing of the New England elite, Elizabeth Cabot Carey. Her organizational and artistic talents secured the success of several later Agassiz expeditions, and Mrs. Agassiz would, in her own turn, became a devoted stepmother to his children (and then step-grandmama), but more importantly she would become a moving spirit behind the foundation of Radcliffe College, Harvard’s ‘female’ annex. Agassiz’ own students (e.g. David Starr Jordan, Charles Walcott, and William James) would themselves shape modern American science and philosophy. Agassiz himself was known, rightly, as the glacier man, and his work in historical geology (as well as in species classification) helped pave the way for science’s acceptance of Darwinian evolution. That was ironic, as Agassiz could never accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. He had particular difficulties with the idea that man had evolutionary ties with (as Agassiz himself put it) monkeys. Agassiz was a little fuzzy on speciation. In fact he rejected the notion, and developed the idea that great extinctions had themselves led to new episodes of divine creation. This idea of separate creations helped Agassiz develop, late in his own life, racial theories of several separate human creations in which, of course, God had smiled particularly benevolently on European man, the Caucasian. Today, in most sane quarters, the jury of facts has ruled otherwise, and Agassiz himself is seen as a throwback, an anomaly, something of a reactionary. It’s an ironic fate for a man who, in his younger days, had outraged clergymen and theologians with his own “radical” theories. ©

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GOODISON

A SET OF TEN GEORGE II MAHOGANY AND PARCEL-GILT DINING CHAIRS
ATTRIBUTED TO BENJAMIN GOODISON, POSSIBLY AFTER A DESIGN BY WILLIAM KENT, CIRCA 1754-6. From the sales catalog of Christie’s, New York, 2022.

These Georgian chairs are undoubtedly elegant and of their period. But they are not delicate. ‘Sturdy’ would be better, and the legs are braced with crossed ‘stretchers’ just to make sure. Richly carved, inlaid with gold, generously cushioned (in red velvet), their provenance is also detailed. They were first supplied to Francis North, Earl of Guilford, for his London residence, and then transferred to the North estate at Wroxham Abbey, Oxfordshire, where they were in use for generations. Then, in the mid-20th century, they were sold several times, including to the Tree family at Mereworth Castle, in Kent. Then in 1992 they crossed the Atlantic under the ownership of Gordon and Ann Getty, heirs of the Getty oil fortune. The life of their maker, Benjamin Goodison, is almost as well documented, mainly through Goodison’s sales receipts and contracts. But we do not know Goodison’s exact provenance. His will was witnessed in London on May 29, 1767,and at his death (1769) his estate was valued at £16,000 (almost £4 million today), including a country house at Mitcham and a home and workshop near Covent Garden. Benjamin Goodison first enters written history in 1719, when he (as an apprentice) did the paperwork for his master, James Moore, for a sale or contract (for £500) with Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough. After Goodison set up for himself, in 1725, he continued to help the Churchills add style and luster to their castle (itself the gift of a grateful nation) at Woodstock, Oxfordshire. As importantly, in 1729, Goodison succeeded James Moore as cabinet maker to the royal house of Hanover (by then, King George II). In that role he supplied all sorts of furnishings to royal palaces, yachts, carriages (many are still in situ), and this undoubtedly helped Goodison to establish a secure and extensive customer base, not only amongst the aristocracy and greater gentry, but also in an ascending “middle” class. The so-called ‘consumer revolution’ of the century allowed many newly rich to buy furnishings to make their homes look as if they might be fit for a king. They are in general sturdier, or in a word heavier, than the later manifestation of Georgian style, the ‘Chippendale’, much slighter in construction and more graceful in design. Many of Goodison’s furnishings can be found today in English museums, but I do not know where those Getty chairs ended up. In 2022 Christie’s sold the set of 10 for $529,000 USD. They are not to my taste, which is a good thing for they are also well beyond my pocketbook. But they do look like they might be comfortable: no small matter for a dining room set. ©.

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CHISHOLM

“Mrs. Jellyby,” said Mr. Kenge . . “ . . . has devoted herself to a variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry—AND the natives—and the happy settlement on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.” From Chapter IV of Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens.

Chapter IV is entitled “Telescopic Philanthropy,” and Dickens did not approve of coffee, either; so there’s more than one reason to think that Dickens disapproved of Mrs. Jellyby’s reforming zeal. It’s not that Dickens approved of the status quo in mid-Victorian England. The point of Dickens’ dim view of Mrs. Jellyby is her failure to remember what Ebeneezer Scrooge learned in his terrifying dreams one Christmas eve: that true charity must begin at home. Some say that Dickens modeled his Mrs. Jellyby on Caroline Chisholm. Mrs. Chisholm was in England while Dickens wrote Bleak House, the toast of many English philanthropists, for her charitable efforts on behalf of the part of ‘our superabundant home population’ that had been exported to distant Australia: first the convicts and then, unaccountably, young, poor Englishwomen sent out to find husbands. Instead, too many of them never got beyond Sydney harbor, where they fell prey to poverty and prostitution. Mrs. Chisholm arrived there in 1838, with her husband and two young sons, and almost immediately set herself to improve things for Australia’s immigrant poor, especially the young women amongst them. Caroline Chisholm was born Caroline Jones, in Northamptonshire, on May 30, 1808, the youngest child of a Church of England family devoted to good works in its local parish. At 22, she married a Catholic army officer, Archibald Chisholm, converted to the Roman communion, and traveled to India where her charitable works continued. But it was when the Chisholms moved to Australia that Caroline found her footing and became a legendary figure. She wouldn’t leave young female immigrants at the mercy of a dodgy marriage market. She took over old immigration sheds in Sydney and made them into safe, clean, comfortable hostels. Then, mounted on her white horse, ‘Captain,’ she took parties of them to the interior where they could find maid’s work with established families and, from that secure base, look for truly good husbands. Chisholm wrote books about it, and returned to England in a blaze of glory to become involved with English philanthropists and, apparently, to irritate Charles Dickens. After another period of good works in Australia, Caroline and her supportive husband returned ‘home’, to Northampton, where they died, only a few months apart, in 1877. Caroline Chisholm has left her name on many places and institutions in Australia, particularly in New South Wales. Nothing, anywhere, is named after Mrs. Jellyby. Elsewhere, Caroline Chisholm is up for sainthood in the Church of Rome, and she already has a day (every May 16) in the Church of England’s liturgical calendar. ©.

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JESSIE

Among my earliest memories of the White House is the impression that I was to keep still, and not fidget, or show pain, even if General Jackson twisted his fingers a little too tightly in my curls. Jessie Benton Frémont, in Souvenirs of My Time (1887), p. 88.

Little Jessie Benton was a privileged visitor in Andrew Jackson’s White House; though she was but a child (born on May 31, 1824), her father was Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, “Old Bullion Benton,” a leading light in Jackson’s new Democratic Party. She was ‘done up’ for these visits, curls and all, but her father (who’d always wanted a son) wanted her to be a woman in a man’s world, and that is what Jessie Benton became. Her Souvenirs recalled a charmed childhood, but an observant one, for her father (lacking a son) trained her up to be as much aware of power and history as she was of high society weddings, diplomatic soirées, embassy ménus, and fond old war heroes pulling at her curls. In her obituary, in 1902, the New York Times recalled that she had eloped at 15 with the dashing young army officer and explorer, John C. Frémont. She didn’t even meet him until she was 16. She was immediately smitten, he too, but the Senator disapproved and found Frémont an expedition to lead, up the Des Moines River, so they married (against Old Bullion’s wishes) in 1841. Jessie would follow John almost everywhere, birth five babies, one aboard a ship, and remain faithful to him in life and more so after his death in 1890. She improved upon his journals (more than one scholar thinks that she wrote them), published his memoires, and capitalized on his death with a special $2,000 widow’s pension (on which my great-grandfather must have voted) worth a cool $75,000 in today’s $$$s. Of course there was property, but she was already her own money-maker as a writer. A thoroughly remarkable woman, Jessie Benton Frémont (she always signed with the accent) said of herself that, like a deeply-built ship, she “sailed best under a strong wind.” The strongest winds assailed her in the 1850s and 1860s. John Frémont played a leading role in the foundation of the new state of California, was briefly its Senator, ran for President as an anti-slavery Republican in 1856, then offended almost everyone (including President Abraham Lincoln) as a Union Army general. He also proved to be one of the greatest philanderers in American history, and an inveterate speculator in stocks and dollars too. Through it all, Jessie remained his most faithful supporter. My favorite story of her is how, alone at their house at Black Point, overlooking the Golden Gate, she helped engineer, or lead from behind, the surprisingly successful effort to keep California in the Union. Not alone, of course, for she knew (as she recounted in Souvenirs) how to handle men. Among her male lieutenants were a tubercular Unitarian minister, Thomas Starr King, the disreputable Bret Harte, and the budding capitalist Leland Stanford. An odd crew!! But Jessie Frémont knew how to pick ‘em, as she had proven with old General Jackson. ©

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SEVERUS

Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn everybody else. Emperor Septimus Severus, AD 211.

So Septimus Severus advised his sons, from his deathbed, and since Severus had reigned for 18 years, we might regard it as good advice. Eighteen years was not bad going for Roman Emperors, who (taking them all in a bundle) averaged about eight years. But averages, like most statistics, can be deceptive. The Roman Empire, being an empire, lacked a settled means or standard of succession. Of course emperors had to be declared such by the Roman Senate, which might have been done by regular rule, but increasingly the Senate was little more than a body of rubber stampers. Senators simply declared an accomplished fact to have been accomplished. So Roman senators practiced a kind of fatalism. Nearly 3/4ths of Rome’s emperors fell from power quite dead, murdered by this or that successor or by the Praetorian Guard, that elite legion whose duty it was to safeguard the emperor. The emperor who decided not to “enrich” the Guard was unlikely to stay long in his august office. Indeed Severus became emperor because his predecessor, Pertinax, had been murdered by the Praetorians, who then decided to put the imperial office up for auction. And there were bidders, plural. Pertinax’s murder, on New Year’s Eve 192, set off the Year of the Five Emperors, so-called. It didn’t even last a whole year, but it went on long enough for all five of them to issue coinage in their name. The chaos came to a sort of resolution when, on June 1, 193, the Senate proclaimed Septimus Severus as Emperor. Was he, then, just the highest bidder? No doubt gold coins changed hands, but Severus’s success owed mainly to his single-minded ruthlessness. He killed all four of his rival “emperors,” the last of them (Clodius Albinus) in 197. And this was a neat bit of double dealing, for in order to isolate his other rivals Septimus had (through the Senate) granted great military power (as a “Caesar”) to Albinus, before then deciding to eliminate him. Albinus apart, Septimus Severus ruled for a long time, almost the average reign during the preceding two centuries. And Septimus’ reign was a prosperous one, too, and unusually peaceful (discounting his impetuous and failed attempt to conquer the Picts of ancient Scotland). I’ve been reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve possessed a nice modern edition for almost 40 years but started to read only last January, 2025. And, early on (Chapter 5, Vol. I), Gibbon nominates the Year of the Five Emperors as the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Romans. Gibbon is a tough read. His obsession for balance and accuracy leads almost every one of his paragraphs into dark forests of dependent clauses, but he is gimlet-clear on the Empire’s fatal flaws, two of them made evident i the Year of the Five Emperors. That was the power of the armies and the corresponding frailty of the senate. ©