Somebody had a plan

Reading is now overtaking me – again, there is just no lack of great fiction at the moment. I have to save my reading of “The Other Queen” which I have bought as an audiobook, and which - again - yielded a surprise.

I bought it because Richard Armitage performed the part of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury – and because I like the books by Philippa Gregory. In fact, I noticed only after I had ordered it, that I have already read TEN of them. And that I had conveniently stopped after the one that, in historical order,  came before “The Other Queen”! If I remember this right, it was the one about the short and dismal reign of Jane Grey – whom I had never noticed to have been Queen of England in the first place. Well, it might be contestable …

Nonetheless – I was so fed up with these horrible Tudors then that I stopped, and now I had the guts to go on with it. Didn’t take a lot of persuasion because the book – and the performance! – is amazing. I think I never bought this one as a paperback because I had had so many different accounts of this brief period of history – when there were two queens in England and the country got divided over them – that I thought I didn’t need this one on top of it. Well, I was wrong. Maybe I really didn’t need it to understand the history – but I needed it to finally understand BREXIT.

By the way, not one of these ten books is redundant or boring because she always tells the story from such an interesting perspective that it cannot fail to upset me at some point. That is, she tells it from DIFFERENT perspectives, radically subjectively, so that I always come to emphasize with ALL the characters at some point. Even, marginally, with the absent Queen Elizabeth … I just could understand her terrible predicament. (And I always quite LIKED Queen Elizabeth – even though she was horrible!)

Much more surprising that I should ever come to emphasize with Mary, Queen of Scots, whom I have never liked. Only very briefly - where her fate touches one of my deepest fears: of being hung out to dry. But it is certainly understandable that she did what she did. Philippa Gregory always manages to distress me at some point because she always gets so close to people’s “innermost” person – and so convincingly, because she always keeps this consistency with their “outermost” person as a political and social being – that I always believe her about everybody. (Even when I am totally convinced AT THE SAME TIME that the real George Talbot, and the real Queen of Scots - and probably even Queen Elizabeth – if they lived today, would have been right to sue for libel …) This time I got distressed on three different accounts – at least! – and, at some point, just thought: I CANNOT believe this godawful mess!!!

This time, for once, there is even somebody who can be made RESPONSIBLE for the mess. According to Philippa Gregory, the culprit is William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Everybody hates him, or is extremely wary of him, and, of course, nobody likes him. I always get suspicious when I notice this happening about a fictional character. It always raises a spirit of contradiction. Besides, I always quite LIKED Lord Burghley …

I never knew why I liked him. Of course he played for the winning team, and he played it so very shrewdly … Maybe it is cheap to like somebody because he was on the “right” side of history, but it is also stupid to automatically side with the losers. Besides, I am not always for the winners. I “always” was a Yorkist – that is, I was a Yorkist a long time BEFORE I had an obvious reason to be. I always kind of hated the Tudors … NOT because of Henry VIII, but BECAUSE of Shakespeare!???

I suddenly understood why I have always liked Cecil when it came to the trial of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. I had had this distinct feeling a few times before this that this entirely historical story – and this way of analyzing it – is telling us a lot about what is going on RIGHT NOW, right there where it happened. But, at that moment, I realized that the reason for the godawful mess - and why so many people died for no good reason, or were brought so low they never would have dreamt they could be – was FEAR. That the party in power was living in fear, and was so deeply distrustful of ALL THE REST OF EUROPE. (With good reason, by the way!) Therefore, the Queen of Scots acted as some kind of catalyst, and had to be removed. And I realized that the predicament today is almost exactly the same. Or rather MY analysis of the predicament is exactly the same. I couldn’t analyze it, though, on my own, I just always thought when I heard German journalists comment on the issue: Don’t you know ANYTHING? Believe me, you have the wrong end of the stick entirely …

Where I am concerned, I ALWAYS understood why the British – or rather the slight majority that never got used to “us”! – wanted Brexit. When I came to think of it, I even realized that I have never understood why they joined the European Union in the first place. Strictly speaking, THIS was their historical error – which is now almost impossible to undo. “What’s done cannot be undone …” – maybe I am not quite as pessimistic. But I think that everybody who believes that they can “undo” this mess now, or even should, by undoing Brexit, is wrong. - I will miss them. I am already missing them more than I can say, more than I even ALLOW myself to feel, and I so HATE them for leaving us – but I was never surprised that Brexit did appeal to so many people. Let’s face it: They NEVER liked us, and they never TRUSTED us, and they never took us as seriously as we are taking ourselves, by the way - with good cause! Whereas the rest of Europe will be so much the loser for losing the part of its soul where a brain and a heart can still work TOGETHER, I am afraid that they won’t miss us so very much in the long run.

Obviously, I always liked William Cecil because he was the man who had a plan. He “saved” Britain by coming down on everybody who threatened its independence: He subdued the “papists”, the Irish, and he even had a plan for Scotland that worked – in the long run. He actually set up Britain PERMANENTLY as what it is today! And I even think, in their historical subconscious, many British people will be missing Lord Burghley these days, fervently wishing that there was just ANYBODY who had a plan …