Charles MooreCharles Moore
the audience, who have no seats, and are
subtly choreographed by actors moving
in their midst. This is not a gimmick: it
is, one realises, the true context. If, as we
did, you sit in the gallery, you can see
Caesar, Brutus and Antony acting on the
stage of politics just as dramatically as
the actors are acting them. In that sense,
it is a play within a play.O
ne of the pleasures of being a
Catholic convert from Anglicanism
is that I feel much warmer towards the
Church of England than when I was in
it. Last week, I went to a truly endearing
Anglican ceremony in Westminster
Abbey. After evensong, there was a short
service to unveil a plaque in memory
of the Chadwick brothers, Owen and
Henry. Both were clergymen, both were
Regius professors (Owen at Cambridge,
Henry at Cambridge and Oxford).
Both were tipped to be Archbishops,
but preferred the life of the mind. They
are the first brothers to be thus linked
in an Abbey monument since John and
Charles Wesley. Professor Eamon Duffy
— who is, as his name hints, Catholic
— gave a brilliant tribute to the two.
He told how Henry, the mastermind
of ARCIC — the Anglican/Roman
Catholic conversations which did so
much to break down theological barriers
— collapsed at a conference in Venice.
He woke up in hospital to find himself
surrounded by ARCIC colleagues. ‘I see
I am not in Heaven,’ he murmured. The
inscription on the plaque describes the
brothers simply as ‘Priests and Scholars’.
The Chadwicks were almost the last
embodiment of that combination,
in its distinctively Anglican form of
sweetness and light.I
am overwhelmed by correspondence
about the usage ‘I am sat’ (see Notes,
27 January). It is very learned, and
comes down firmly on the side of strict
grammar. Strict but, like most strict
things, never wholly successful among the
people: one anonymous correspondent
kindly reminds me of the Tudor ballad,
‘There were three ravens sat on a tree./
They were as black as black could be, /
And one of them said to his mate/ Oh
where shall we our breakfast take?’A
reader writes: ‘In my last letter,
I called you a numbskull. However
I should have qualified this with
“sometimes you are a numbskull”.’
I must apologise for an example of
my sometimes-numbskullery in this
column last week when I asserted that
Joe Chamberlain had opposed votes
for women in Parliament in 1917. This
would have been impossible, as he had
been dead three years. I saw the ‘Rt Hon.
J.A. Chamberlain’ in Hansard’s division
lists and lazily failed to check. J.A. was,
in fact, Joe’s son, Austen.
I
n the course of looking into my
error, I learn that all Chamberlains
(including Neville) inherited Joe’s
hostility to women’s suffrage; but his
daughter Beatrice, who campaigned
for the Women’s National Anti-
Suffrage League (of which Gertrude
Bell was hon. secretary), changed her
mind because of the first world war.
She became zealous for Unionist (i.e.
Conservative) women’s organisations,
fearing that ‘lively’ women would
otherwise be dragged into movements
‘ostensibly outside politics, but in reality
under Radical direction’. One feels she
was on to something as one follows this
week’s coverage of the centenary of
votes for women. If the version of history
being promoted were the whole truth,
one would have to believe that it was
only radical women activists who won
the day. This ignores at least two vital
agencies. First, the all-male Parliament
which, in the end, voted overwhelmingly
for the change. Second, the fact that
women’s suffrage was not an isolated
event, but part of a massive alteration in
the idea of who should vote, which took
a century to work through to all adult
men and women. In the 19th century,
the word ‘reform’, unqualified by any
adjective, meant reform of the franchise,
because the issue was so dominant. The
extension of suffrage moved in stages
from 1832 (under a Whig government)
to 1867 (Conservative) — when John
Stuart Mill tried to amend it to include
votes for women — to 1884 (Liberal) to
1918 (Unionist/National Liberal) to 1928
(Conservative). The long story is a better
advertisement for our parliamentary
system than for throwing yourself under
the King’s horse at the Derby.N
evertheless, I am proud of my great-
aunt Kathleen Brown, who once
hijacked a horse-drawn fire-engine in the
suffragette cause and charged it down
Tottenham Court Road clanging its bell.
She did time in Holloway. She was also
sent to prison in Newcastle for breaking
a window in Pink Lane Post Office, and
went on hunger strike. She was tiny and
brave and I remember her for having hair
so long she could sit on it. Would she have
wanted to be pardoned by Jeremy Corbyn,
as he now proposes? Surely the point of a
pardon is to correct an individual injustice
— because the person concerned did not
commit the crime, for instance. It is not
to apply a retrospective political view to
what happened. When, in a free society,
one breaks the law in order to change it,
one is not absolved from punishment just
because one acts out of conscience. Indeed,
one accepts the state’s right to punish
(‘I am ready to go to jail’). Why should
suffragettes who broke ordinary law —
criminal damage, assault etc — now have
it formally and legally declared that they
didn’t? It is a form of victor’s justice which
reduces the law to a mere matter of power.D
on’t let the craze for triumphalist
feminism put you off going to see
Nick Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge
Theatre. It is pointless that women act
Cassius, Casca and one or two other
parts, and that the text is altered to make
these characters ‘she’. It is annoying that
this fashion is welcomed almost without
challenge because no one dares. But it
does not spoil the production’s wonderful
understanding of the power of the crowd.
The mob is composed of many members of