A selection of answers to questions posed by readers of AskHistorians. Refreshed most weeks, with the latest postings at the top.

Or go here for more answers from Mike.

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Short index to questions (the lower the number, the further down the column the answer will be found)

[52] Who is the performer shown on a leash in this image of the “Congress of Freaks” at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus?

[51] Henry Ford died of a stroke after seeing footage of Nazi concentration camps. I’ve read that Eisenhower and Nixon alike detested him and other Nazis and sent him the footage before it went public and he watched it alone in his private theatre. Can anyone prove this really happened?

[50] How could Russian coins from 1811 have ended up in Eastern Canada in 1934?

[49] What is the highest rank a commoner could rise to in medieval England?

[48] “In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive,” claimed George Orwell. Is this actually true? If not, where could he have heard such a report from?

[47] Did Anne of Cleves really hang the famous Holbein portrait in her castle to troll King Henry?

[46] Did the Empire of Japan seriously try to make conman Ignaz Trebitsch Lincoln the 14th Dalai Lama?

[45] According to Sir James Frazer, in his famous book The Golden Bough, Iron Age kings were regularly sacrificed after completing a fixed term as monarchs, in order to safeguard the fertility of the soil. Was Frazer right about this? What do we know about the kings who were supposedly sacrificed, and the people who killed them?

[44] Supposedly Madagascar was pretty close to industrialization prior to European colonialism. Is this true?

[43] Is the story of the Man in the Iron Mask real? If he was, how did he get so well known, even in his contemporary time? And why was his identity concealed?

[42] I live in London in 1670, I have up to date fire insurance and a fire mark for my insurer, a fire has just broken out. How do I tell my insurer I need their fire brigade? What happens if there are multiple fires and all the services are being used?

[41] I’ve seen it claimed, without any sources, that Lord Byron lost his virginity at age nine with his family nurse. What evidence is there that this actually happened and what are the details?

[40] What should we think of the early medieval stories of sky-ships, crewed by sky- sailors, appearing in the air over monasteries and towns?

[39] Does anyone know, for real, which the oldest pub in England actually is?

[38] During the 9th century, a Tang Dynasty author wrote a story about a Black Person (“Negrito”) active during the 8th century in the Tang Dynasty. How many Black People were in Tang China, how did they get there, and what were their lives like?

[37] Were there links between William the Conqueror’s banning of the slave trade in England, and England’s later invasion of Ireland?

[36] Do we know what Joan of Arc looked like?

[35] Warning: NSFW. Did Wu Zetian really demand that foreign diplomats perform cunnilingus on her in in open court as a show of obedience–or is this a myth?

[34] Why did Fine Gael run a candidate in Inverness, Scotland, in the February 1974 and 1979 UK General elections? They’re an Irish party, so I have no idea why they would run there. It was the same candidate (U. Bell) both times. Any ideas?

[33] Is it true that a portrait of Cleopatra, painted in about 30 BCE by someone who had met her, was unearthed in Italy in 1818? What happened to the image?

[32] Did anyone really say “Her Majesty takes a bath once a month whether she need it or no” about Elizabeth I? Where did this come from? Why is it always referenced in quasi-academic literature without sources?

[31] What do we know about the history of the True Cross after the 1st Century?

[30] Every once in a while, a website will claim that teeth extracted from dead soldiers at Waterloo supplied dentures across Europe for years. Is this a myth?

[29] In 1765, a chimney sweep was exiled from Edinburgh for five years for assisting in a public hanging. Why?

[28] The medieval legend of the Dry Tree.

[27] Did the NYTimes run the headline “The Apostle of Hate is Dead” in response to Malcolm X’s assassination?

[26] There where many types of guilds in the middle ages. Did any of them focus ONLY on illegal activities (smuggler guilds, thieves guild etc) ? Or does this only happen in fantasy novels?

[25] How did the ancient White Horse, a huge hill-figure carved into a chalky down in the south of England in about 1,000 BCE, survive all the political, social and military changes that took place in the area for thousands of years without growing over?

[24] Is it possible that an Islamic city-state, rather like Venice, might have flourished on the desert coast of Somalia in the medieval period, sent envoys all the way to Beijing, and evolved a stable form of republican government that lasted well into the nineteenth century?

[23] How did the general public in England regard Halley’s Comet in 1066? Was universally seen as an ill portent?

[22] How did the sack of Guangzhou (Canton) in 879, at the end of the Tang dynasty, affect transoceanic trade between the Tang empire and Abbasid caliphate?

[21] I was reading about the history of the stapler and found that the first stapler was made for King Louis XV. “The ornate staples it used were forged from gold, encrusted with precious stones, and bore his Royal Court’s insignia.” Is this true? Does the stapler still exist?

[20] Why can’t I find very much information about the 14th Century Black Death in Asia?

[19] In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo claims that children were kidnapped during the reign of Louis XV, and rumours were whispered of the King’s ‘purple baths’. What is Hugo referring to here, and would the rumours have been common knowledge to a reader at the time?

[18] Do we know of any cases in the Catholic Church when the Advocatus Diaboli (or Devil’s Advocate) successfully argued against someone becoming a saint?

[17] Did Britain fund and direct the 1801 assassination of Tsar Paul?

[16] Did Coca-Cola produce a clear version of Coke for General Zhukov that could be disguised as vodka? If so, for how long was this going on?

[15] Why did Poland have lower rates of Black Death than other European countries during the 1300s?

[14] What is the truth about “getting shanghaied”? Was there such a thing as a bar in 19th-century San Francisco with a chair that dumped drugged people down a trapdoor to kidnap them and force them into the sailing life?

[13] During the New York Draft Riots (1863), supposedly the New York Times defended their office from the mob with 2 Gatling guns. Where did they obtain these guns and ammunition and how did they turn away the mob?

[12] Is it true that Henry VIII feared being attacked so much he had himself bricked into his bedroom every night?

[11] On the giants of Patagonia.

[10] Whatever happened to the hotel detective?

[9] At any point between the end of WWI and the end of WWII was there ever a rise of supernatural beliefs in Japan?

[8] Why did Hatshepsut’s successors attempt to proscribe her memory?

[7] What was the murder rate during the medieval period?

[6] I am a hot-blooded young British woman in the Victorian era, hitting the streets of Manchester for a night out with my fellow ladies and I’ve got a shilling burning a hole in my purse. What kind of vice and wanton pleasures are available to me?

[5] Did British criminals in the 1700s and 1800s really worship a deity called the Tawny Prince? If so, what were the origins of this deity?

[4] How bad would it have smelled in a medieval city?

[3] What exactly were the relics on which Harold Godwinson swore his oath to William of Normandy?

[2] What prompted the first emperor of Qin to have hundreds of scholars buried alive and their works burned?

1] Were the pyramids still kept in repair at the time of Cleopatra?

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[52]

Q: Who is the performer shown on a leash in the front centre of this image of the “Congress of Freaks” at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus?

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[50]

Q: How could Russian coins from 1811 have ended up in Eastern Canada in 1934?

A: Coins are durable objects, and, as a result, they have cropped up in some pretty surprising places over the years. Favourite oddities include Roman currency found in Iceland and – a particular surprise, this one – a coin dating to the reign of the Emperor Hadrian that was excavated from under several feet of soil about a hundred miles up the river Congo in central Africa in about 1890. There is also an ongoing investigation into the mystery of how a small group of coins minted in the coastal African state of Kilwa (in modern Tanzania) in about 1200 found their way to the Wessel Islands, 5,000 miles to the east, off the north coast of Australia, where they were uncovered during the Second World War.

There is a tendency, when dealing with stories of this sort, for the imagination to conjure up a one-step, and generally romantic, solution to such mysteries – coming up with adventurous scenarios that might have taken a Roman legionary of the second century way south of the Sahara, or envisioning a Kilwan trading ship disabled by the monsoon winds and drifting thousands of miles off course to strand her crew amidst the unintelligibly alien culture of the indigenous Yolngu peoples of Australia. The reality, insofar as we can work it out, tends to be both more complex and also a lot more prosaic. The Congo coin had a high silver content, enough to make it a valuable item of exchange hundreds of years after it was struck in Rome and the empire that had made it had declined and fallen. Rather than being dropped by a solitary, way-out-of-place Roman soldier, it’s far more likely that it made its way south via a lengthy series of transactions. Possibly these started on the north shores of the Mediterranean, but continued in the Roman provinces of North Africa, from where the coin eventually made its way into the hands of desert nomads – who crossed the Sahara and then traded it to someone in the Sahel, from whence it eventually continued its journey south. Or, perhaps more likely, the coin stayed in the Mediterranean for centuries, eventually to find its way on board a Portuguese ship headed for the Kingdom of Kongo sometime after contact was established between the two states in the 1480s. Either way, it’s probable that no one person took the coin from its point of origin to its point of discovery, and the same most likely applies to the Wessel Islands coins too – which were found mixed with Dutch currency dating to the 17th century, and so, we can deduce, probably didn’t actually come direct from the Swahili Coast in the 13th century.

Without having seen the article you read (which I’d love to have a reference to…), it’s hard to know what to make of the find that you are interested in, but a few thoughts do occur. First, the coins were found inside a kettle. That strongly suggests they were not trade objects but rather a hoard, deliberately buried by someone who wanted them to stay together in one place, and hoped to come back eventually to recover them. The fact that the coins were all minted around the same date points in the same direction. But the value of the coins was very low, even in 1811, and Alexander I kopeks were minted from soft copper. That meant they contained no precious metals that would have made them intrinsically valuable to anyone outside Russia in the early 19th century, whether as trade objects or as a source of useful materials in areas where there are no naturally occurring lodes of workable metal (I commented in an earlier response on the ways in which iron carried across the Pacific on disabled Japanese merchant ships may have eventually found its way into use by indigenous communities in the Pacific north-west). So, actually, it’s unlikely the coins you are interested in made their way to eastern Canada via the sort of lengthy series of unremarkable financial transactions I was describing above – any such trades would have tended to break up the collection of currency found in the hoard, and the out-of-place discoveries I have mentioned involved single coins, or at most a small handful of them, not more than a hundred apparently struck in the same time or place. But this realisation, by itself, doesn’t take us a whole lot closer a solution to your mystery.

I can make a couple of observations that might move us a bit further forward, nonetheless. Firstly, as is well known, Russians certainly were present in what’s now Canada in about the period we are interested in – Alaska was an imperial colony until its purchase by the US in 1867. That fact, however, is almost certainly less significant than it might at first appear – New Brunswick is an entire continent, and some 3,000 miles, away from any Russian settlement of the period, and getting from one side of the Americas to the other as early as the first decades of the 19th century would have been an incredibly difficult, lengthy and arduous affair, one that would have almost certainly required careful planning and involved a distinct objective. It’s very difficult to imagine what the latter might have been, nor why anyone would think it a good idea to take a big bag of kopeks with them on what would have been an unimaginably arduous trek. Overall, I think it extraordinarily unlikely that any individual or group of Russians would have made their way from Alaska to the Canadian Maritimes overland in the first half of the 19th century.

More probably, the coins arrived in Canada from the opposite direction – coming from the east. The existence of a hoard of identical coins suggests to me that they were once the property of a single person who placed some value on them and had some potential future use for them, which in turn suggests the person who buried the hoard was probably a Russian. By far the most obvious reason for such outsiders to come to New Brunswick in the 19th century would have been involvement in the fisheries there. Ships and merchants from what is now New Brunswick were heavily involved in the highly lucrative cod industry, for instance (there was also a prominent local logging industry which might also have proved attractive to immigrants). We do know that at least one Russian reached the eastern Canadian coast as a result of his involvement in the fishing trade – William Hyman, who was born into a Russian Jewish community in Lódz, in what is now Poland, in 1807, fetched up in Gaspé, Quebec, in about 1843, and built up a successful stake in the dried cod business there. By the time of his death in 1882, Hyman was one of the most successful businessmen in town, accounting for about 10% of the port’s exports, and he was able to bequeath to his heirs

a dock, storehouses and a warehouse at Gaspé, a hotel and several properties and mortgages in the Forillon peninsula region, and six fishing establishments… He had also accumulated many securities in banks at Quebec City and Montreal, and owned a Montreal residence where he had spent the winters since 1874.

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[48]

Q: “In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive,” claimed George Orwell. Is this actually true? If not, where could he have heard such a report from?

A: The Shanghai massacre, which took place in April 1927, was a fairly significant event in the history of the civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces in China; by killing what were probably fairly large numbers of urban communists in one of the most notably left-wing cities in China, Chiang and his supporters arguably helped tilt the balance of power within communist ranks towards the peasant rebel forces led by Mao Zedong.

Nonetheless, exactly what happened in Shanghai that month, how many died, and how they did so, remains very difficult to establish. The massacre was chaotic, and it was carried out not only by Chinese nationalist forces but also by criminal elements in Shanghai who worked alongside them. No records were kept, no bodycounts were made – historians’ estimates of deaths vary from a couple of hundred all the way up to 10,000 – and the handful of western reporters in the city at the time seem to have had little access to firm details, and to have written nothing at all about any “boilings” at the time. I have searched digitised editions of newspapers published in 1927 in both the US and UK fairly extensively without finding contemporary reports that suggest any such executions took place, and Orwell’s account, rather notably, dates only to 1945.

It certainly does seem to be true, however, that stories of such killings did circulate at a later date. Here it’s helpful to turn to Roy Rowan’s memoir Chasing the Dragon, a book written by a long-lived American foreign correspondent who reported the Chinese revolution for Time-Life. Rowan (1920-2016) was far too young to have reported the Shanghai Massacre when it took place, but he was in the country a couple of decades later, and that put him on the spot in time to pick up rumours of what had actually taken place back then.

One of the characters that Rowan wrote about was Du Yuesheng, better known as “Big Ears” Du, a gangster who ran much of the sex trade in Shanghai during the 1920s and was leader of an organised crime group known familiarly as the Green Gang. This group acted, at times, as the enforcement arm of local Nationalist leaders, and, according to Rowan, it was “Du’s thugs” who carried out most of the killings in 1927:

Heads rolled in the gutter like ripe plums,” according to an eyewitness [and] a number of Communist railway workers were also cooked alive in the boilers of their steam engines… Du’s reward for masterminding the massacre was the tight hold he still enjoyed on the city’s variety of vices, from the opium section of Nantao, to the waterfront bars of Hongkew, lined with smiling Chinese singsong girl and White Russian ‘hostesses’.

So Rowan, who arrived in Shanghai in July 1946, picked up a story that could plausibly match Orwell’s perhaps-exaggerated “hundreds” of deaths by boiling, written the previous year. Where, though, might such accounts have actually originated from?

I should make clear that there is certainly nothing to absolutely invalidate the idea that this unpleasant method of execution actually was employed in 1927. But with no contemporary accounts suggesting that such killings did take place, it’s worth looking a bit further afield. The first thing to say in this respect is that wild stories about people being boiled alive in China certainly did circulate throughout this period, and were very arguably one fragment of a much broader western Orientalist discourse derived from popular notions of exotic, barbarous Chinese cruelty that dated back at least a century. The infamous French novel The Torture Garden (1899), Bear’s underground Actual Photographs of Chinese Executions (c.1915), and the circulation of images supposed to show the 1904 execution of a criminal named Wang Weiqin by the “death of a thousand cuts”, all drew on (and contributed to) this trope, and one consequence was the circulation of demonstrably unreliable tall stories alleging deaths by boiling in the first quarter of the 20th century. For example, the Russian diplomat Roman Romanovich (Baron Rosen) recorded that stories circulated at the time of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) that one of his colleagues, Michael de Giers, had been boiled alive by the rebels; in fact, De Giers survive the uprising to die in 1932. Similarly, the British journalist Arnold Wright, writing in 1908, noted that other accounts (in circulation at the time of the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing, during the rising) confidently reported “the boiling alive in oil of every foreign man, woman, and child in the capital.” Again, no such killings actually took place. Rather, their circulation was attributed at the time to a shadowy figure nick-named “The Shanghai Liar”.

So all this background perhaps helps us understand how stories of atrocities in which people were boiled alive might plausibly have begun to circulate as a result of the Shanghai Massacre. But how did George Orwell, who had never visited China, get hold of the tale earlier than did Roy Rowan, who actually was in Shanghai in 1946? As it happens, there is a very plausible, and very fictional, explanation which seems to locate the origins of this specific story in the mind of the renowned French novelist Andre Malraux, whose best-selling La Condition Humaine (translated into English as Man’s Fate) – a book set in Shanghai in 1927 – contains a passage in which a wounded Chinese man

began to mumble. It was too dark now for Katov to make out his features, but he heard his voice, he felt he was becoming coherent. Yes – “… don’t shoot, they throw them alive into the boiler of the locomotive,” he was saying… the sentry was approaching again. Silence, except for the pain.

Exactly where Malraux got this detail from, or how he dreamed it up, is not known. He was in Cambodia – then part of the French colony of Indochina – in 1926, and later claimed to have crossed over into China and experienced the horrors of the civil war period at first hand. But this, according to Anne Lijing Xu, was a fabrication; Malraux was in fact at home in France at the time, and did not first visit China until 1931. Given this, it seems well worth noting that, in the opinion of his biographer Oliver Todd, the China that he portrayed was

neither true in its detail nor false overall, but it is nonetheless imaginary. Malraux cannot quite break clear of a conventional idea of China with coolies, bamboo shoots, opium smokers, destitutes, and prostitutes.”

And exotic methods of execution? One cannot help but wonder.

What matters, nonetheless, is that La Condition Humaine was a colossal success, winning the Prix Goncourt in 1933, and going on to sell in excess of 5 million copies. Given its very wide circulation, it seems more than plausible that Orwell read it, and that some memory of doing so might have formed the basis of his passing reference to the boiling deaths of Shanghai. Certainly no account that I have read takes this story back any further than Malraux, who published in 1933.

Sources

Baron Rosen, Forty Years of Diplomacy (1922); Timothy Brook et al, Death By a Thousand Cuts (2008); André Malraux, La Condition Humaine (1933); Roy Rowan, Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist’s Firsthand Account of the Chinese Revolution(2004); Harold Schiffrin, Sun Yat-Sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (1968); Oliver Todd, Malraux: A Life (2005); Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Other Treaty Ports of China(1908); Anne Lijing Xu, The Sublime Writer and the Lure of Action: Malraux, Brecht, and Lu Xun on China and Beyond (2007).

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[47]

Q: Did Anne of Cleves really hang the famous Holbein portrait in her castle to troll King Henry?

In honor of Broadway reopening in September (and my ticket purchase for October!!) I spent all week listening to Six: the Musical. The chorus for Anne’s song goes:

You, you said that I tricked ya

Cause I, I didn’t look like my profile picture

Too, too bad I don’t agree

So I’m gonna hang it up for everyone to see

And you can’t stop me

Cause I’m the Queen of the castle

I tried some googling and couldn’t find out what happened to the portrait during that time. Is this just a fun line for the show or was the portrait actually hung in Richmond Palace?

A: What a remarkably interesting question – because, oddly enough, it turns out to be extremely difficult to answer. In fact, so far as I can tell, no historian, nor art historian, has ever paid any attention to the problem of what became of Anne’s famous portrait after it was presented to Henry VIII, and before it turned up again among the possessions of a famous collector during the 1650s.

Because of this, I can’t answer your query definitively, but I can, I think, push things forward a little bit for you, and suggest at least a couple of plausible alternative ideas about what may have become of painting in this missing period. But before we move on to the answer you are looking for, we ought, I think, to begin by re-examining the idea that Hans Holbein’s famous image of Anne of Cleves played an important part in the history of the period because – as the lyrics you cite suggest – it “tricked” Henry into thinking she was far more beautiful than she was.

This certainly is a very familiar story, one that a lot of people who have no real knowledge of the Tudor period have likely heard – and if they have heard it, they’re probably also familiar with Henry’s dismayed dismissal of the woman who journeyed to England to marry him as a “fat Flanders mare”, and possibly even with the notion that Henry was so displeased with Holbein that the German master fell out of royal favour, and was never commissioned by Henry again. But none of this is actually true. Recent historiography strongly disputes the celebrated narrative, and downplays the part that Holbein’s painting played in the disaster that was Henry’s marriage to Anne. Rentha Warnicke, for example, notes that the English diplomat Nicholas Wotton, who accompanied Holbein on his journey to Cleves, and was responsible for much of the detailed negotiation of the marriage terms, considered the painting to be an accurate portrait. Moreover,

when Henry was later divorced from Anne, he complained bitterly about his ministers’ activities, but not about the artist’s honesty or the ambassador’s efforts

…. and Holbein continued to be employed as Henry’s court painter until his death in 1543.

We actually have no contemporary record of Henry’s reaction to the portrait, though we do know that he responded positively to others – when he was shown an image of Christina of Denmark, it delighted him so much he had his court musicians play all day, so he could “feast on the food of love.” And in fact, the idea that the image was inaccurate, and deliberately portrayed Anne as attractive when she was not, was not first reported until the 17th century, which is also the earliest that we hear of Anne described as a “Flanders mare” – the phrase, not even actually attributed to Henry, first appears in Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation in 1679. For all these reasons, there’s no obvious reason why Anne would have responded as she does in the song lyrics, and sought out the painting to display it in her own home. In its day, it was apparently considered unremarkable, a perfectly accurate portrait of its moderately attractive subject.

With all this said, we can turn to the problematic issue of what happened to the painting after it was presented to Henry in the early autumn of 1539. It was, at this point, already technically a royal possession – the king paid Holbein an annual salary to act as his court painter, taking his yearly output of panels and vellums in exchange – though the idea that there was such a thing as a royal “collection” of paintings was not actually formalised until the first half of the 17th century. However, Chamberlain, the author of the first major critical biography of Holbein, noted as early as 1913 that, while the original was by then on display at the Louvre, in Paris,

nothing is known of the painting, or how it came to find a home in France, except that it was at one time in the Earl of Arundel’s possession, and afterwards in the collection of Louis XIV.

We can trace this reference to the Earl of Arundel a little further than that, since we do also know that Holbein’s painting of Anne was among a group of portraits acquired by a French art collector named Everard Jabach during the 1650s, at a time when Arundel had been forced into exile after the execution of Charles I and found himself forced to dispose of some of his possessions to meet his debts. The most reasonable explanation of the painting’s movements from that point is that Jabach sold it on to the Sun King or his representatives, and that it thus entered the French royal collection, only to be effectively nationalised during the French Revolution. This would explain how it comes to hang in Louvre today.

But who was the 14th Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), how did he come to possess the painting, and why did he choose to dispose of it when he did? The answers to these questions turn out to take us quite a lot closer to resolving your central query, because Arundel (whose actual name was Thomas Howard) was, in fact, more than simply the 14th in a long line of Tudor and Stuart aristocrats. He was also, to quote Lionel Cox and Mary Cust, “the pioneer of art-collectors” – one of the earliest connoisseurs and, indeed, arguably the first to seek out and purchase works of art (and also sculpture and manuscripts) for their merit, and then attempt to assemble them into a coherent collection. On top of that, rather intriguingly, we also need to note that Arundel was a scion of one of the most distinguished families in England, the Howard dukes of Norfolk. He was, in fact, the great-great grandson of Thomas Howard, Third Duke, whose sister Elizabeth was the mother of another of Henry’s queens, Anne of Cleves’s predecessor Anne Boleyn.

We don’t know for certain how Arundel came by the Holbein painting that you’re interested in, but we can make some educated guesses. To begin with, he definitely looked out for works by Holbein. We know this because an inventory of his collection, drawn up shortly after his death and published in Hervey’s Life, Correspondence and Collections, lists more than 40 works by the two Holbeins, father and son. But it’s not clear whether Arundel found and purchased the portrait of Anne of Cleves, or acquired it via inheritance. Some of his collection did come from other members of his family; for example, we know that his grandfather, the 12th Earl, filled both his London home and his country estate at Nonsuch Palace, near Cheam, with pictures, other works of art, and a library which contemporaries considers to be “right worthy of remembrance”. What is almost certainly a partial inventory of this collection survives in the form of a list of works owned by the 12th Earl’s daughter, Jane, Lady Lumley, and kept by her at Lumley Castle. It makes no mention of the Cleves portrait, but this does not necessarily mean it may not have been in the family’s collection at this time, but kept at some other property – the family also owned Arundel House in London, Arundel Castle, and Welbeck Abbey, among a number of very prominent properties. And certainly the 12th Earl would have been in an excellent position to have acquired the Holbein portrait, had King Henry decided that he had no further use for it – he had served both Henry VIII and his son Edward VI as Lord Chamberlain, making him the man responsible for managing the royal household.

There is one other possible chain of transmission that might also account for the presence of the Holbein portrait in Arundel’s collection, and that is that it remained a part of the royal collection well into the 17th century, and thus came into the possession of Charles I. Charles was also a noted connoisseur of art, and he and Arundel were well known to each other; in fact, Cust tells us, they frequently “used to exchange pictures.” This seems to be another distinct lead, since the inventory of works in Arundel’s possession mentioned above, and dated to 1655, mentions not only the Cleves portrait, but another of Jane Seymour and a third, noted in the document as “Duchessa de Lorena grande del naturale,” which is actually the famous Holbein portrait of Christina of Denmark that Henry liked so much – she became, by marriage both Duchess of Lorraine and Duchess of Milan. (The Christina of Denmark painting is now in the National Gallery in London, and if you want to get a better idea of Henry VIII’s taste in women, you could do worse than take a look at it.) At least one other of Arundel’s paintings, then (the Christina), and probably at least two (that and the Seymour), had also once been in the royal collection.

I would have thought that the presence of so many pictures that had once been part of the royal collection among the paintings that Arundel took into exile with him could well be explained by an exchange or series of exchanges of the sort mentioned by Cust; it’s certainly more likely that the Cleves portrait was acquired in this way than that Arundel got hold of it from some other collector. Such people did exist; the Dutch painter and early art historian Karel Van Mander (1548-1606) mentions in passing another collector of Holbeins, a turn-of-the-seventeenth century “gentleman residing near Temple Bar, in London,” who possessed a number of the painter’s works, and Cust conjectures that Arundel may have purchased this man’s collection. But even if he did, it’s far from clear how a gentleman collector, hailing from several rungs further down the social scale than an Arundel earl, might have come to have access he would have needed to the royal collection to have laid hands on the Anne of Cleves portrait.

So there you have it. Arundel owned the painting, and he may have acquired it in the form of an inheritance from his grandfather, who would have purchased it or been gifted it as a result of his service to Henry VIII. Or – more probably, in my opinion – he was given it by Charles I, who in the 1620s and 1630s exchanged numerous paintings in the royal collection with the earl because both men were noted connoisseurs of art.

Neither of these possible chains of ownership runs through Anne of Cleves, and my investigation suggests that there is no reason to suppose she ever had possession of the painting made of her.

Sources

Arthur B. Chamberlain, Hans Holbein the Younger (New York, 2 vols, 1913)

Lionel Cust & Mary Cox, “Notes on the Collections Formed by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, K. G.”, 5-part series in Burlington Magazine vols.19-21 (1911-12)

Mary F.S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence & Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel(Cambridge 1921)

Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-boek (Haarlem 1604)

Edith Miller, Records of the Lumleys of Lumley Castle (London 1904)

David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (London 2003)

Rentha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England (Cambridge 2011)

Ralph Nicolson Wornum, Some Account Of The Life And Works Of Hans Holbein, Painter, of Augsburg(London 1867)

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[46]

Q: Did the Empire of Japan seriously try to make conman Ignaz Trebitsch Lincoln the 14th Dalai Lama?

From Wikipedia: “Supposedly after a mystic experience in the late 1920s, Trebitsch converted to Buddhism, becoming a monk. In 1931 he rose to the rank of abbot, establishing his own monastery in Shanghai. All initiates were required to hand over their possessions to Abbot Chao Kung as he now called himself. He also spent time seducing nuns…. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he also made contact with the Nazis, offering to broadcast for them and to raise up all the Buddhists of the East against any remaining British influence in the area. The chief of the Gestapo in the Far East, SS Colonel Josef Meisinger, urged that this scheme receive serious attention. It was even seriously suggested that Trebitsch be allowed to accompany German agents to Tibet to implement the scheme. He proclaimed himself the new Dalai Lama after the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, a move that was supported by the Japanese but rejected by the Tibetans.”

A: For those who aren’t familiar with the name, Trebitsch Lincoln was quite a bit more than just a “con man”; indeed, one of the remarkable things about him, certainly at this late stage in his career, seems to have been his ability to persuade himself that the things he was doing and the things that he wanted were real. His biographer, Bernard Wasserstein – an otherwise pretty sober professor of history at Oxford – prefers the term “political adventurer,” and calls him “one of the most astounding and bizarre figures in modern history.”

In the course of a long career that began at the turn of the 20th century, Lincoln (1879-1943) – who was born into a Jewish family in Hungary – was successively a trainee actor, Presbyterian missionary in Canada, Anglican curate, British Liberal MP, bankrupt, oilman, tramp and German spy. During the First World War he served a three-year prison term in Britain for fraud; after his release, he left for Germany, where be became head of press for the very short-lived post-war government installed during the Kapp Putsch of 1920, and later a prominent member of the inter-war White International. Indicted for high treason in Vienna, Lincoln fled to China, where he became political advisor to a succession of prominent warlords. He spent the remainder of his life in Asia as an arms dealer, Buddhist abbot, and Bodhisattva, living in Shanghai under the name Chao Kung. All this, as Wasserstein observes, makes Lincoln

the only person ever to have been formally adopted by a major British political party as a parliamentary candidate while still a Hungarian citizen …[and also] the only former British MP ever to serve as a member of a German government.”

Attempting to install oneself as Dalai Lama might have seemed ambitious even for a man of all these many talents, but it was certainly something that might conceivably have been in line with Lincoln’s personality and interests – Wasserstein comments that he had developed “an obsession with the idea of travelling to Tibet” as early as the 1920s. However, the source that Wiki cites for the information you are interested in is not an especially reliable one. It’s a feature published in an Australian newspaper by a former Buddhist monk turned journalist, and it appeared in April 1945, two years after Lincoln’s death and still several months before Japan’s surrender, at a a time when none of those with knowledge of what had happened was actually available for interview. As such, the Australian report seems to have relied more on rumour than anything else to label Lincoln as someone suffering from a life-long “religious mania” and suggest that

When the Dalai Lama died, Trebitsch-Lincoln notified the Buddhist Lamas of Tibet that the old Lama had been reincarnated in him – Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln! The Japanese government and Buddhist hierarchy gave him an eager backing and vehemently confirmed his claim to the Dalai Lamahood. Japan began to press his claim.

But the Tibetans thought otherwise, and found their new Dalai Lama [who was, in fact, the present one, who we’re all pretty familiar with] in the person of a Chinese baby. So Trebitsch-Lincoln committed hara-kiri to save Japanese face, or, more likely, he was “happily despatched by the Japanese themselves.

There is much that is demonstrably wrong with this report. For example, the 14th Dalai Lama was not a “Chinese” baby. And Lincoln certainly did not commit suicide – though his death was in fact rather mysterious, and Wasserstein concedes it is possible he was killed by the Japanese. But it seems to be the only published report that mentions the story you are interested in at all.

Wasserstein’s biography of Lincoln is the the best-sourced and most carefully considered account of his life that we have, so we need to turn to him to try to discern the actual course of events. He begins by pointing out that Lincoln was living in Asia during a period of incredible disruption. There had been tension between China and Japan since the beginning of the 1930s, and full-scale war had broken out in 1937. Furthermore, the death of the 13th Dalai Lama in 1933 was followed fairly closely by that of the second most important Tibetan leader, the Panchen Lama, in 1937, threatening the fragile internal stability of Tibet.

It was, Wasserstein relates, against this background that the British consul-general in Chungking composed a dispatch in September 1938 reporting that

Trebitsch Lincoln is proceeding towards Tibet and that he claims to be, by some extraordinary metempsychosis, a reincarnation of both the Dalai and the Tashi [Panchen] Lamas.

This dispatch, then, appears to be the origin of the story that Lincoln schemed to become the Dalai Lama, but Wasserstein is quick to point out that the original informant, a “Mr Cunningham of Tatsienlu,” about whom nothing else at all is known, had apparently confused Lincoln (then definitely in Shanghai) with an American by the name of Engler who had been passing through his city. We are as certain as we can be that Lincoln himself made no attempt to reach Tibet and, in any case, the boy who would become the 14th Dalai Lama had by that point already been identified as the tulku (reincarnate custodian) of the spirit of the previous 13 holders of that office; he would be formally recognised as such in 1939.

What, though, of the involvement of the Japanese and the Germans in the selection of the new Dalai Lama? It is certainly the case that foreign interference in the process was so commonplace by this time as to be unremarkable; China had laid claim to a major role in the selection of a successor since the 18th century. And Lincoln certainly was known to Police-Colonel Josph Meisinger, the senior Gestapo officer mentioned by Wiki. But Meisinger came onto the scene only four years after the events set out above occurred. In 1937-38 he was still in Germany, where he had charge of the Gestapo office responsible for the investigation of homosexuality and abortions; in 1939 he was in Warsaw, where he ordered the execution of 16,000 Jewish people, a crime for which Poland would execute him after the war. He was not appointed to the Far East until 1941, when he was made “police attache” at the German embassy in Tokyo, and he did not visit Shanghai until May of that year.

Lincoln was well known to be a charismatic and persuasive individual, and he certainly seems to have had an impact on Meisinger. He sent a telegram to Berlin urging that the German government take seriously the “plans” Lincoln had for “China, Tibet and India,” which Meisinger considered “worthy of consideration.” What these plans were, we do not know, but certainly Meisinger’s enthusiasm for Lincoln was not shared by other German officials in the Far East. The Consul-General in Japan, Martin Fischer, appended his own commentary to the telegram, pointing out that Lincoln was a “political adventurer” with no known influence in “lama circles”, and, when the message did reach Germany, there were plenty of people there with memories long enough to remember the Lincoln of the 1920s; one of these, a Foreign Office official named Martin Luther – who readers of historical fiction may recognise as an important character in Robert Harris’s famous counter-factual thriller Fatherland – wrote a strongly-worded memo pointing out that Lincoln was not only wildly unreliable, but also “by birth a Hungarian Jew”. Meisinger’s interest in Lincoln promptly cooled, and Wasserstein does not mention any connection between Lincoln and the Japanese at all.

Did Lincoln proclaim himself the new Dalai Lama? We have no evidence he did so, though it would not, apparently, have been wholly out of character for him to have harboured such a dream. Did the Japanese support that candidacy, or indeed make any effort to meddle in the selection and installation of the 14th Dalai Lama? I can find nothing to suggest as much, and Japan seems to have taken very little interest in Tibet at all during this period; a single Japanese agent, Hisao Kimura, who posed as a Mongolian, is known to have spent 18 months in the country in 1940-1, but, other than that, there seems to be very little to suggest that Japan took any interest in Tibetan affairs.

I note that Wiki does not include Wasserstein’s important and conspicuously well-researched book among the sources for its article on Trebitsch Lincoln; this explains why it carries such an inaccurate account. Regrettably and unfortunately, this seems to be yet another example of the need to treat the material it publishes with caution.

Sources

Daisuke Murakami, “Japanese imaginings of Tibet: past and present,” Inner Asia 12 (2010); Ivan Orlov-Abstrebski, “Buddha threatens the Japanese,” Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 1945; Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (New Haven, 1988); Bernard Wasserstein, “Lincoln, Ignatius Timotheus Trebitsch,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

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[45]

Q: According to Sir James Frazer, in his famous book The Golden Bough, Iron Age kings were regularly sacrificed after completing a fixed term as monarchs. What do we know about the kings who were supposedly sacrificed, and the people who killed them?

I heard a story about sacrificial Celtic kings or “corn kings” These kings were supposedly sacrificed in times of famine or to placate their gods for food harvests. Apparently they were fed year round and treated like kings only to be sacrificed to appease the gods. Is this true? What real sources cite these kings?

A: The rex nemorensis, as everyone agrees, is a very primitive figure, a remnant from the distant past, when the first settlements of Latin peoples were forming in the Alban hills and probably no more than the odd shepherd had as yet taken up residence on the Palatine [Hill, where Rome now stands]. He was a priest of Diana and a king, whatever that might have meant. He was linked to a tree that was sacred…

When a challenger appeared, identified by his success in obtaining a bough from the sacred tree, the rex was required to fight him to the death. The victor, whether challenger or incumbent, from that moment became, or continued as, Diana’s priest and the King of the Wood. The rex was important (though we do not know precisely how) to the power of Aricia and to Aricia’s pre-eminence within that earliest alliance of Latin communities in the sixth century BCE. We know hardly anything else about his cult; and yet already what we do know far exceeds our evidence for any Italic cult outside Rome, and indeed for most cults in Rome itself.

C.M.C. Green

As Carin Green reminds us, the story that you’ve heard is an old one. Very possibly, it is one of the oldest stories of all, and certainly it’s representative of a set of ideas that have been studied and discussed for more than a century. The question is: was it ever anything more than a story? Did these things happen, and, if they did, how can we be sure about both the events themselves and – much more contentiously – what they meant?

This is far from an easy problem to address. The idea that ancient kings (or proxies for them) were regularly sacrificed as part of a pre-Christian religion that sought power over the natural world and control of its fertility was once very widely believed. The idea was highly influential between around 1915 and 1970, influential enough for the concept of the blood sacrifice of monarchs to crop up in almost every popular retelling of the history of the Celtic period, and to seep out into fiction and film as well. The classic British horror film The Wicker Man (1973) is possibly the best-known example of the latter genre, but the same idea also underpinned the more recent, well-regarded Swedish film Midsommar (2019).

The problem with all this is a twofold one. The first part concerns our sources, which are scanty and late; this makes it even harder than it usually is to guess which bits of them might refer to real practices and real events. The second part is rather more unique; this particular topic, more than any other I can think of, has been promoted by writers of such eminence that their ideas became a sort of article of faith for many people, academic and lay alike. The sacrifice of kings was first written about in detail by the pioneer anthropologist James Frazer. From there, his ideas were taken up and dramatically elaborated by the very long-lived (1863-1963) Margaret Murray, who – despite starting out as an Egyptologist, and having essentially no qualifications in the field – took up Frazer’s mantle as the English-speaking world’s most famous anthropologist between his death and hers. Murray energetically promoted the concept of sacrificial kings in a series of three books written for the general public which were published between 1921 and 1954.

It was Margaret Murray who was responsible for suggesting these sacrifices were organised and carried out by the members of a multi-generational witch cult that was responsible for preserving an “old religion” that antedated Christianity, and which flourished, underground, long into the Christian period. This is an idea that I dissected here some time ago in a response that looked at the best-known of the supposed royal sacrifices written about by Murray, the death of the English king William II (William Rufus) in 1100, and it’s one that serious scholars of pagan religion, such as Ronald Hutton, have roundly dismissed. But Murray’s claims were catnip to the new generation of self-styled witches, led by Gerald Gardner, which emerged in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s and collectively founded the religion we now know as Wicca. Gardner recognised that Murray’s claims offered his brand-new faith the chance to claim continuity with an historical religion of tremendous antiquity and, apparently, considerable power – something that made the claims of Wicca and the Wiccans vastly more impressive and imposing. The result of all this was that the ideas first pioneered by Frazer have not only long outlived him; they have become a core part of the belief systems of large numbers of modern Wiccans and New Agers, who continue to spread them as widely as they can. In the age of the internet, that is pretty widely – certainly widely enough for them to have reached you.

I could write at considerable length about Murray and Gardner, but really everything they said was based on the ideas that Frazer had pioneered – and their elaborations of those ideas are pretty much entirely ahistorical. So it probably makes more sense to return to The Golden Boughand discuss what Frazer’s lifetime of scary work habits turned up in terms of evidence for the reality of sacrificial kings (he was famous for reading and taking notes in several languages for anything up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week – but notorious among later generations of anthropologists for writing about the world he had never actually seen for himself; he practically never left his study).

Frazer devoted most of his long life to tracing, exploring and setting them down in what became, over time, The Golden Bough (1890-1915). This 12-volume study of comparative religion has certainly been more revered than actually read, but it was a foundational influence on several generations of anthropologists; no lesser figure than Bronisław Malinowski, indeed, could write that Frazer’s masterpiece was “in many respects the greatest achievement of anthropology.” Beginning his study with a famous, and highly romanticised, retelling of the legend of the rex nemorensis – the priest-king of Nemi, a runaway slave who reigned as “king of the wood”, but only for so long as he could defeat all those who sought to challenge him in a single combat fought to the death – Frazer expanded his focus to study every aspect of what he termed “the dying god”. This involved the belief that the youth and health of a divine monarch had a direct bearing on the quantity and quality of the annual harvest, and that ritual death of such a king might be (and was) used to redress crises caused by drought and bad harvests, and so restore prosperity to a people.

Frazer’s book includes discussion of the practices of Iron Age celts. According to him, their history offers numerous examples of kings who reigned for fixed periods (which might, in his original, vary from one to nine years, though seven years has become the default figure generally cited today). And, because most of the societies that took part in these practices were agrarian ones, a number of these monarchs were described in terms that made them “vegetative kings” – such as the “corn kings” you’ve encountered.

Frazer made a number of influential claims in The Golden Bough, and before I go on to discuss the historicity (or otherwise) of the kings you are interested in, it’s worth touching on some of these. First, he stressed how common the theme of a god’s, or a ruler’s, sacrifice is in myth and folklore. For example, the Norse god Odin sacrifices an eye in exchange for access to the well of wisdom; and (for Frazer), Dionysius, a Greek god; Osiris, an Egyptian one; and Tammuz, a Syrian deity, can all be seen as examples or “corn kings” who, in specific myths told of them, die as part of a harvest ritual, to ensure the bountifulness of the crops. Elsewhere, Frazer suggests that the Phrygian god Attis was addressed as the “reaped green (or yellow) ear of corn”; and, most interestingly from your perspective, he devotes significant attention to the figure of Lugh, a king and magician in European mythology who is associated with the sun. The Golden Boughargues that the same figure also appears as “Lughnasad” in pre-Christian England, Ireland and Wales; ultimately, he lends his name to the pagan festival we know as Lammas. In a second important theme in the same work, Frazer argues that the divine king possessed his powers only for so long as he remained perfect and un-mutilated. He discusses some of the precautions taken to prevent this; for instance, in the medieval Welsh story-cycle we know as the Mabinogion, the divine King Math seeks to protect the perfection of his body by always sleeping with his feet in the lap of a virgin.

Frazer is far from the only writer to point these things out. Joseph Campbell also thought there were associations between the concepts of birth and growth, and death and decay; human sacrifice, he argues, was intended to enhance life or stave off decay. Rosemary Sutcliff, the well-known author of historical novels, wrote one titled Mask of the Horse-Lord (1965) in which the hero is a Roman-Celtic king, Phaedrus, who ultimately decides to sacrifice himself for his people after listening (as Barbara Talcroft summarises things) to “a voice from a deeper past than that of Rome, and his solution belongs to the oldest of all traditions.” And the well-known writer and amateur scholar Robert Graves, taking Frazer as his departure-point, discussed Hercules as an exemplar of the “oak king”; according to Graves, some Iron Age monarchs, each cast in the role of Hercules, enjoyed reigns of a very brief duration, six months, after which successive kings were tied to an oak tree at midsummer and then ritually castrated, dismembered and slain, their blood being sprinkled over the people of their tribe, their body roasted and eaten at a ceremonial feast, and their head and genitals floated downriver on a boat to a sacred island; after that, supposedly, the head was sometimes cured and used for prophecy. Graves’s use of sources has been the subject of some significant criticism, and his work made little impression on the scholarly community, but it was much more impactful on a broader audience. In consequence, says Hutton, even today, Graves’s ideas about pagan Celtic monarchy “remain a major source of confusion about the ancient Celts and influences many un-scholarly views of Celtic paganism.”

A final key source for this inquiry into ideas about the Celtic monarchy of this period is G.F. Dalton – like Graves an amateur rather than a professional academic scholar – who during the 1970s published several papers arguing that the Irish high kings of Tara “were killed on a particular day of the year, in a ritual manner, for religious reasons, and at the end of a fixed term of years or of some multiple of this term.” According to Dalton’s reading of Irish history, the central goddess of pre-Christian Ireland was Éire (Éiru), who was an earth-goddess identified with the land itself. She was ritually “married” to a noble mortal, the High King at Tara, and in Dalton’s view each successive Irish king’s inauguration was portrayed in poetry as essentially a marriage feast. “The object of the marriage, we may reasonably assume,” he says, “was to make the land fertile.”

With all this said, then, let’s look at the historical evidence Frazer and his followers used in an attempt to prove their case that divine kings were ritually sacrificed to bring fertility to the Iron Age Celtic kingdoms they ruled before the advent of Christianity. The examples I am going to discuss here for you come not only from the Golden Bough but from the more extensive lists offered by his followers R.A.S Macalister, in his Temair Breg (1919), and G.F. Dalton, in his papers “The ritual killing of the Irish kings” and “The tradition of blood sacrifice to the goddess Éire”. Dalton compiles these suggestions into a master-list of 14 supposedly historical Irish monarchs whose deaths might be interpreted as resulting from ritual sacrifice, all of whom supposedly died on a particularly significant day – the pagan festival of Samhain, held at the onset of winter, which we know better today as the Christians’ Hallowe’en. That total is, by the way, arguably a remarkably small one, given that the Irish annals purport to trace their Iron Age monarchy back to around 3000 BCE, and so cover in excess of 3,400 years before the advent of Christianity. It represents well under 10 percent of the Irish high kings named in those annals.

Examples taken from this list include:

• Conary Mōr (Conaire Mór), who after he become high king of Erin (supposedly some time in the first century BCE), enjoyed a reign characterised by bounteous trade, rivers abounding in fish, and plentiful acorns for the swine – what Rolleston summarises as “the fair seasons and bounteous harvests always associated in Irish minds with the reign of a good king.”

• Tighearnmas (Tigernmas), who supposedly lived in the second millennium BCE and who, the Irish Annals of the Four Masters assures us, died “with three-fourths of the men of Ireland about him, at the meeting of Magh-Slecht, in Breifne, at the worshipping of Crom Cruach, which was the chief idol in Ireland. This happened on the night of Samhain precisely.”

• Eochaid (Eochu Airem), who was, according to different sources, struck by lightning, or burned to death at a banquet – either by a rival tribal group, or by the fairy-folk.

• Fergus Blacktooth (Fergus Dubdétach), who reigned for one year in the second or third centuries AD, and then was killed in a battle that took place on Samhain. According to Dalton, this ‘battle’ was a very strange affair. Fergus and his brothers were all killed on the same stone, by the same man, Lugaid Laiga, who is said to have killed seven kings. After killing these three, Lugaid was so crazy with fighting that he tried to kill his own king, Cormac, himself. But Cormac had foreseen this, and dressed his fool, Deilionn, in the royal robes, so that Lugaid killed Deilionn in mistake for Cormac. For Dalton, it is obvious that Deilionn was a mock king, who was invested with the royal robes purely in order that he might be sacrificed instead of the real king Cormac.

• Finally, Dalton suggests that an Irish legend, ‘The Adventures of Art son of Conn’, may be put beside these. This story concerns a wicked enchantress named Becuma, who marries a king of Ireland named Conn Cetcathach (Conn Cétchathach, Conn of the Hundred Battles – reigned later than most of the others on this list, in the 1st century AD; he was the supposed ancestor of most subsequent high kings). As a result of her depravity the crops fail, and there is a famine. The druids proposed to remedy this via a human sacrifice, the victim being a young man named Segda, who is, Dalton presumes, a substitute for the king himself. According to one version of the story: “When the druids saw the young man with Conn, this is the counsel they gave: to slay him and mingle his blood with the blighted earth and the withered trees, so that its due mast and fruit, its fish, and its produce might be in them.” The most interesting point, Dalton contends, is the detailed description given of the proposed sacrifice. The victim’s blood is to be allowed to sink into the ground. Dalton interprets this as an example of sympathetic magic – moistening the soil brings rain and revives the crops

Now, looking at all this from the perspective of the historian, rather than the ethnographer or the folklorist, there seem to me to be two all-too-obvious things to point out. The first is that none of these supposed rulers is a clearly historical figure. All of them date from the period of roughly 2000 BCE up to the appearance of St Patrick in Ireland, which is typically dated to roughly the first half of the fifth century CE. This means that every one of them significantly antedates any surviving written record we have for Ireland – the Annals of the Four Masters, referred to above, for instance, was not compiled till the 1630s, though the men who wrote it drew on annals which, Irish historians believe, may have been written as early as the 550s. So even these ancient records, assuming that they actually existed, could have recorded only traditions and legends about earlier Irish kings. Really, all the people on Dalton’s list have an historicity approximately equivalent to that of King Lear, a figure who supposedly ruled “Britain” in the eighth century BCE – but whose legend was not actually written down until the twelfth century CE.

The second point to be made about the list is that none of the people on it are unambiguously described as having been ritually sacrificed to protect their people or to save them from dearth. How, we might ask, did Macalister and Dalton conclude that they were, in fact, sacrificial victims? Only because they had read Frazer and were actively looking for examples of the practices outlined in the Golden Bough. Indeed, a reading of Dalton’s papers reveals they are replete with phrases such as the “it is obvious from this that…”, the “it may have been” and the “we may reasonably assume” that I quoted above – “the answer must be largely guesswork…”; “we can conjecture…” and so on. From the historian’s point of view, these sorts of phrases sound loud warning bells, because the people who write them are not evaluating their sources as historians are supposed to – they are example-seeking, and actively going in search of “evidence” to prove a case they are already convinced of. And they ignore the existence of a number of story tropes – the sacred importance of the number seven, the portrayal of fools as sorts of mirrors of the king – that might equally explain the form of some of the old legends.

To take only the example of Eochaid Airem, who is supposed to have reigned in about 100 BCE, Dalton not only ignores the fact that he is a figure from saga, not history – one who lived in a world in which fairies were very powerful and very real, and whose main purpose was to carry out acts that advance an epic story. He also cites three different possible causes of death, not one of which is obviously recognisable as a product of the sort of ritual sacrifice described by Frazer. Moreover, Eochaid’s reign is said to have lasted for 15 years. Dalton expends some energy trying to demonstrate that this figure should actually be read to show a “real” reign of 14 years, which would be a multiple of the mystic seven years he is looking for (2 x 7). There are many, many echoes of this sort of special pleading in the literature I’ve been discussing. Thus Margaret Murray’s attempt to argue that William Rufus’s death was the product of ritual sacrifice wriggles frantically around in an attempt to account for the fact that the death took place not on the pagan festival of Lammas, but on the morning afterwards. She also insists that the king was 42 years old at the time of his death (6 x 7), when, in fact, we simply don’t know when Rufus was born, and ignores the inconvenient fact that he died not after ruling for 14 years, but after a reign of 12 years and 10 months. None of this encourages much faith in the arguments of the Golden Bough brigade.

Thus far, our discussion has revolved around negatives; hopefully I’ve shown there is good reason to suppose that the historical record contains little in the way of evidence to back up the idea that Iron Age Celtic kings were ritually sacrificed in extremely similar ways in the name of a religion that survived the Christianisation of Ireland and the British Isles. In concluding, though, it’s only fair to point out that some modern evidence does possibly point to the sacrifice of significant figures from these communities. This evidence is provided by some of the bog bodies recovered in Ireland over the past couple of decades, at least two of which – the remains known as Old Croghan Man and Cashel Man – potentially fit this particular bill.

These bodies are much older than most of the people we’ve discussed in this response thus far – they date to the period 2,000–1,000 BCE. But, certainly, they belong to people who, if not definitely kings, probably were prominent figures in their communities. Old Croghan Man, in particular, would have been a striking figure; he stood about six feet five inches tall, gigantic for that time, had been reared on an expensive diet that was largely meat-based, had apparently done no manual work (his fingernails were neatly manicured), and died in his prime, aged about 25. Moreover, he had apparently been ritually killed. I covered the mystery of Old Croghan man in an earlier essay, which you can read here; the relevant passage runs:

“Forensic examination shows that he died hard, stabbed through a lung and then decapitated with an axe. After killing him, his executioners chopped his body in half at the diaphragm, and at some point, perhaps while he was still alive, they also inflicted two pairs of unusual wounds on him. Deep cuts almost severed both his nipples, and his arms were vigorously pierced so that twisted lengths of hazel withy could be threaded through from side to side, presumably to pinion him. “

These sorts of details can be, and have been, read as archaeological confirmation of Frazer’s anthropological speculation. The main proponent of these views, Eamon Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland, has written several papers based on these finds that argue in favour of the reality of Irish sacrificial kingship. And it’s hard to be certain that he’s not right about this.

What can be said, though, in conclusion, is that it’s just as hard to prove that Kelly is correct. We have no written records that date back this far; and while it seems quite reasonable to suppose that Old Croghan Man was killed in some sort of ritual, we can’t definitely link that to the ideal of sacrifice to ensure good harvests, nor even be certain he was not the victim of some other set of circumstances that we simply have no record of, and hence no reference points for. Similarly, while Kelly very interestingly speculates on the reasons why only portions of many bog bodies are recovered – he argues that, after being dismembered, various parts were buried at different spots around the boundaries of their kingdoms as a form of magical protection – it is, once again, impossible to prove what remains a theory; and some of his evidence is based on exactly the sort of wriggly special pleading that Margaret Murray used to deploy, as well. Thus, we simply don’t know what boundaries Iron Age Irish kingdoms had; to make his argument, Kelly assumes they can be traced in the bounds of m