English Medieval Royal “Faction” and the Irrational

The facts are facts. Names, titles, the sequence of depositions, marriages, and civil wars can be checked. Readers of historical fiction about the English Middle Ages come wanting a textured sense of the past—costumes that look lived-in, dialogue that does not sound like a modern committee meeting, relationships shaped by hierarchy, faith, and scarcity. They do not, usually, want the full sensory inventory: the state of teeth, the hygiene, the practices that modern sensibility finds unacceptable. That selective appetite is understandable. The problem arises when the modern writer, having been invited into the past, proceeds to rearrange its furniture according to contemporary ideals.

Modern agendas arrive wearing period dress. Sometimes the hooks are useful; they let a present-day audience decode an ancient conflict. Often they become tropes, repeated until they flatten the very strangeness that made the period worth visiting. Consider the faithful Christian who accepts that God may turn a staff into a serpent before Pharaoh, yet finds it jarring that the Egyptian court can perform the same trick. The text presents both. The modern reader is tempted to decide which miracle is “real” and which is propaganda. Historical fiction about medieval queens frequently performs a similar sorting. Elizabeth I’s speech on the approach of the Armada remains powerful precisely because it does not collapse into modern categories. She told Parliament she had the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king of England. That claim registered because the audience shared the assumptions it both invoked and overturned. When modern writers give Isabella of France or a Yorkist queen the interior life and rhetorical freedom of a twenty-first-century professional woman, they risk producing characters who would have been unintelligible—or quickly removed—in their own courts.

Two persistent devices illustrate the difficulty. Witches are granted effective powers. Monks are cast as systematic promoters of ignorance. Both choices simplify. In the actual Middle Ages some theologians argued that God could not see in the dark; the practical consequence was not abstract philosophy but a temporary license for behaviour people preferred to hide. Characters in these dramas are rarely allowed the same compromised interiority. They are either enlightened forerunners of us or benighted obstacles to progress. The 2012 miniseries World Without End, drawn from Ken Follett’s novel, supplies a neat example. Edward II’s wound is treated with a poultice of excrement and he loses the arm; a healer figure employs techniques that read as modern medicine in costume. In The White Queen, Jacquetta of Luxembourg is given genuine powers of foresight. The Princes in the Tower, meanwhile, remain as historically unresolved as ever. The supernatural is admitted where it flatters a preferred narrative and withheld where it would complicate one.

We congratulate ourselves on rationality. Yet the evidence of our storytelling suggests otherwise. We cannot consistently grant medieval people the mixture of calculation, superstition, piety, and self-interest that the records show they possessed. We prefer them either as primitive versions of ourselves or as cautionary opposites. The result is faction that feels contemporary even when the costumes are accurate. A more disciplined approach would leave more of the irrational in place—not as decoration or as proof of progressive superiority, but as the ordinary weather of the age. Only then does the past become strange enough to be interesting again.

The Nuking of Nagasaki Has Robbed the West of Legitimacy But a partisan press has protected Democrats from the criticism they would have levelled had the GOP been equivalent.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 did more than end a war. It stripped the West of a lasting claim to moral authority. Hiroshima had already demonstrated the weapon’s power three days earlier. Dropping a second bomb on a second city, when Japan’s capacity to continue was collapsing, crossed a threshold that no later appeal to necessity fully erases. A partisan press and political culture have since protected the Democratic administration that ordered it from the sustained scrutiny that would have followed had a Republican president taken the same decision.

Australia’s experience in the same war reveals a parallel pattern of political convenience and selective memory. At the outset of the Pacific conflict, Australia had already turfed its conservatives. John Curtin’s Labor government took office in October 1941 and immediately began what looked like panic moves: withdrawing battle-hardened divisions from the Middle East. The gesture was presented as national self-defence. In reality it was also political theatre. Australia’s primary defensive stock had been placed in Singapore. That fortress, held by a numerically superior Allied force, surrendered on 15 February 1942 to a smaller but better-led Japanese army. Roughly 15,000 Australians went into captivity; more than 7,000 of them would die as prisoners.

Domestically, democracy itself proved a source of division. Sections of the union movement had opposed robust war measures while the Soviet Union remained aligned with Germany. After the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the political weather changed. Labor won a decisive mandate in 1943. Yet even under wartime conditions, strikes continued in pursuit of industrial advantage. A partisan press that had criticised Menzies for unpreparedness proved far more forgiving of Curtin. The conservative opposition, reduced and cautious, largely supported the national effort while receiving little credit for restraint.

Young, often under-trained Australian troops were thrown into the defence of Papua New Guinea. They helped halt the Japanese southern advance on the Kokoda Track and elsewhere. Their achievement was real. It does not erase the earlier strategic failure at Singapore or the domestic political manoeuvring that accompanied it. American forces, meanwhile, were themselves divided: MacArthur’s South West Pacific command competed with the Navy’s Central Pacific drive, producing duplication and inter-service rivalry even as both pushed toward Japan.

Australia gave general support to American strategy and offered information about its prisoners. There is little evidence of a determined national policy aimed at the early recovery of those prisoners while the war continued. Large-scale rescue was militarily difficult; political will to prioritise it over the broader campaign was limited.

Truman’s decision to use the bomb at Hiroshima failed to produce immediate Japanese surrender. Nagasaki followed. Intelligence and postwar surveys showed that the military toll of the blasts was far lower than the civilian one. Hiroshima’s garrison suffered several thousand dead out of roughly 24,000 present; Nagasaki’s military deaths numbered only in the low hundreds. Total deaths across both cities reached the tens of thousands by the end of 1945, the great majority civilians. Japan surrendered shortly after the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Manchuria on 8–9 August. The Soviet entry destroyed Tokyo’s remaining hope of a mediated peace and threatened the home islands from a new direction. Both shocks mattered. The second atomic bomb was not the sole or even the decisive blow.

Counterfactuals sharpen the point. Had the United States withheld the Nagasaki bomb, the combination of Soviet invasion, continued conventional bombing, and naval blockade might still have forced surrender before any invasion of the home islands—though at higher cost in time and further conventional casualties. Had Australia followed Churchill’s demand and sent the returning 7th Division into Burma in February 1942, those troops would likely have been destroyed or captured as Rangoon fell; the New Guinea campaigns would have been weaker. Had the Soviet Union stayed neutral, Japan’s hardliners would have retained a diplomatic lifeline and the military argument for fighting on would have been stronger. In each case the historical outcome was shaped as much by timing and politics as by pure military necessity.

At war’s end the pattern of selective justice continued. Thailand, a Japanese ally that had facilitated logistics for the Thai-Burma Railway, was treated leniently once the Free Thai movement and a late switch of sides were accepted. The railway’s death marches and forced labour remained primarily a Japanese responsibility, yet the broader regional accounting was muted. Japan and West Germany were not subjected to permanent economic suppression. Instead they were reformed under occupation and then rebuilt as industrial hubs, drawing on the same organisational and technical capacities that had served wartime regimes. The Cold War made former enemies into frontline partners against the Soviet Union. Strategic necessity again overrode earlier moral language.

The West still claims the mantle of liberal order and humanitarian restraint. The second atomic bombing, the political protection afforded its authors, and the uneven postwar settlements sit uneasily with that claim. A press and political class that would have demanded relentless scrutiny of equivalent Republican decisions have preferred silence or justification when the responsibility was Democratic. History is not obliged to be tidy. It is obliged to be remembered without partisan filter.

Betty Cuthbert: A Golden Life Unmarked

Some things should not happen, yet they do. When Betty Cuthbert died in August 2017, Australia’s parliament found time to honour two prominent Aboriginal figures. It found no time for the Golden Girl. That omission was not a procedural oversight. It was a cultural failure.

Australia has been unusually blessed in sporting talent. Don Bradman remains the towering figure of cricket. Tennis produced Laver, Newcombe, Margaret Court and a long procession of others. Swimming gave us Dawn Fraser, Murray Rose, Ian Thorpe and more. On the track, Edwin Flack, Herb Elliott, Cathy Freeman and Betty Cuthbert stand in the first rank. Cuthbert was the equal of any of them. She deserved the same public respect and institutional acknowledgement.

Elizabeth Alyse “Betty” Cuthbert was born on 20 April 1938 in Merrylands, a western Sydney suburb, twenty minutes ahead of her non-identical twin sister Marie, later known as Midge. She had an older brother, John, and an older sister, Jean. When the twins were five the family moved to Ermington, where her father, Leslie, established a flower and vegetable plant nursery. Her mother, Marion, took the children to Sunday school. The household was modest, practical and close-knit.

From early childhood Betty ran. She ran barefoot between the nursery rows because she felt free. She ran to and from Ermington Public School, around the playground, and through the neighbourhood until called in for dinner. By the age of eight she was already winning New South Wales titles and the school trophy for best girl athlete. She later said she knew then that she had a gift from God.

At Parramatta Home Science School her physical education teacher was June Ferguson, a 1948 Olympian. Ferguson recognised the raw talent, spoke to Betty’s mother about the cold winter nights, and persuaded the girl to join the Western Suburbs Athletic Club. Under Ferguson’s coaching the awkward, high-knee, open-mouthed style was refined rather than reinvented. Betty left school at fifteen or sixteen, worked briefly in a children’s clothing factory, then returned to the family nursery. She remained, in her own words, an ordinary girl from the suburbs who happened to run very fast.

In September 1956, still only eighteen and so unsure of selection that she had bought spectator tickets for the Melbourne Olympics, she broke the world 200 metres record. At the Games she won three gold medals in six days: the 100 metres (after setting a world record of 11.4 in her heat), the 200 metres, and the anchor leg of the 4 × 100 metres relay that set another world record. She became the first Australian to win three gold medals at a single Olympics and was instantly christened the Golden Girl. Injury limited her at Rome in 1960. She returned in Tokyo in 1964 and won the inaugural women’s Olympic 400 metres in what she called the only perfect race of her life. She remains the only athlete, male or female, to have claimed Olympic gold in the 100, 200 and 400 metres. Across her career she set or equalled more than a dozen world records from 60 metres to 440 yards and in relays. She also collected Commonwealth medals, including gold in the 4 × 110 yards relay in Perth in 1962.

After Tokyo she retired for good and went back to the nursery. Five years later the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis appeared. The formal diagnosis came in the early 1970s. For nearly half a century the disease progressively stole her mobility until she was confined to a wheelchair, able to move only her left arm. She never asked God “Why me?” She believed instead that the illness had been given so she might help other people.

In 1985, at the age of forty-seven, she became a born-again Christian. From that point her public life took on a new purpose. She became Australia’s most visible advocate for multiple sclerosis research and awareness. She was present at the inauguration of MS Research Australia in 2004 alongside then-Prime Minister John Howard. She lent her name, her presence and her remaining strength to fundraising, public education and encouragement of those living with the disease. Research fellowships and scholarships carry her name. A rose was named after her, with proceeds directed to MS research. Those who worked with the organisation later credited her with an immeasurable impact on national understanding of the condition.

She never married and had no children. In later years she was sustained by her twin sister and by her close friend and carer, Rhonda Gillam. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics she appeared in her wheelchair, still recognisable, still smiling, still carrying the quiet authority of the Golden Girl. She died on 6 August 2017 in Mandurah, Western Australia, aged seventy-nine.

Mortality is hard and the ending is often rough. Few have endured it with such grace. Her early life in the nursery rows of Ermington, her unmatched Olympic record, her long public struggle with multiple sclerosis, and her steady Christian witness form a single coherent story. That story remains a cultural asset. Parliament should have observed it. The failure to do so says more about the selective instincts of the institution than about the stature of the woman who once ran with her mouth open and her heart fixed on something higher.