Great Assholes of History: Judge Jeffreys

Earlier this year, I read  The History of England from the Accession of James II, by the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859).  Long but very readable, the five-volume work mainly treats the period ending with the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, during which the monarchy of James II was overthrown and his daughter Mary reigned jointly with her husband, the Dutchman William of Orange.

James II (1633-1701) was the fourth and final king of the house of Stuart, a dynasty of Scottish kings who succeeded to the throne after the death of Elizabeth I.  Succeeding his brother, Charles II, in 1685, James was a convert to Catholicism in a country where the established church of which he, as sovereign, was head, the Church of England, was Protestant, and his attempts to undermine the Anglican establishment and the parliamentary system in England began to alienate even his most loyal subjects, leading to his being deposed in 1688.  A vindictive, nasty man who tried to model his own monarchy after that of the absolutist Louis XIV of France, he was an asshole in his own right, but he couldn't come up to the standards of one of his most useful henchmen, the magistrate Sir George Jeffreys, the so-called “Hanging Judge” (1645-1689), an able legal mind but also an uncouth, drunken, foul-mouthed, bigoted, cruel, vindictive, corrupt son-of-a-bitch.

It was while reading Macaulay's book that the idea came to me of writing about Jeffreys.  Of the various personages in the book, he is one of the most memorable.  In fact, he is the only historical figure I have ever encountered whose description made me think, “Christ, what an asshole.”

I find it amusing in myself (though perhaps, not to be over-thought too much) that I would react this way to Jeffreys but not to someone like, say, Adolf Hitler.  For one thing, “asshole” is not a word that comes much to mind when reading history: usually, the characters of history seem too big and too far away to fit into such everyday vulgar language, and with figures like Hitler, the word seems scarcely appropriate or even to fit: it seems too small, too petty.  And perhaps it's only Macaulay's particularly vivid portrait of Jeffreys that triggered such a spontaneous and visceral response, but he was a man whose personal unpleasantness seems utterly, seamlessly of a piece with his career, which peaked with his presiding over the Bloody Assizes of 1685.  In Macaulay's pages he cuts a Snidely Whiplash-like figure, handing out sentences and penalties with a relish that would suit any good movie villain, scowling at his victims with a face that left them soiling themselves with terror, gloating over their fear and misery, cracking morbid jokes at their expense, and not caring a lick what people thought of him, provided James had his back.

Born to a family of Welsh gentry in Denbighshire, he went in for the law in 1663 at the Inner Temple in London after a year at Trinity College, Cambridge.  English law courts were notoriously ferocious, and Jeffreys was in his element.  As a barrister in London he examined and cross-examined scores of thieves, prostitutes, and other low criminals, honing his powers of invective, nastiness and cruelty and, quickly enough for men in his profession at the time, crossed from the bar to the bench.

Daily life in the seventeenth century was full of casual violence and brutality to an extent unimaginable to most of us: one popular spectator sport was watching bears torn apart by dogs, and far from being disinterested carryings-out of justice and statute, most criminal punishments were public spectacles designed to be as painful, humiliating and degrading as possible.  For capital crimes, hanging was one form of punishment, another was hanging, drawing and quartering, in which the body was cut down, disemboweled, and then dismembered, the various parts then either parboiled or dipped in pitch and salt and stuck on poles for public display.  If you were an important person, beheading was a somewhat more dignified end, but the operation might take several blows with the axe to finally separate the head from the body.  For more petty crimes, there was whipping at the cart's tail until the blood flowed; sometimes the sentence called for multiple applications of this punishment, increasing the chances that you would die as a result of wounds and shock.  “It is Christmas, a cold time to strip in!” Jeffreys reminded the hangman when passing this sentence on a woman convicted of prostitution.  “See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!”  Or there was the pillory, where the criminal would be exposed to the fury of the public and pelted with objects of all sorts, some of which included rocks and brickbats.

Passing his sentences and verbally abusing his court officers, plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and barristers, and spending his nights in drinking bouts with a crew of junior court officers and toadies (many of whom he would abuse from the bench the next morning, “having kept the court waiting long, and yet having but half slept off his debauch, his cheeks on fire, his eyes staring like those of a maniac”, according to Macaulay), Jeffreys also climbed the professional ladder, earning the posts first of Common Serjeant of London and later, Recorder of London.  Seeking to advance his career and fortune, he cultivated contacts with the royal court.

Charles II disliked the man, saying of him, according to Macaulay, that he had “no learning, no sense, no manners, and more impudence than ten carted street-walkers”, but Jeffreys found a patron in James, who was at the time Duke of York, and he advanced further, becoming a baronet in 1681, and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1683.  Jeffreys had presided at many of the trials that followed the so-called “Popish Plot”, a wild fictional conspiracy allegedly intending to kill Charles and put the Duke of York on the throne. The trials condemned innocent men on the false testimony of one Titus Oates, a defrocked Anglican priest and a former Roman Catholic who concocted wild stories of Jesuit plots to take over England for the Catholic Church.  Oates' ravings fanned anti-Catholic feeling in England, and Jeffreys, a staunch Anglican and even more staunch an asshole, took even more delight in punishing Catholic priests who were implicated in the plot than he did in punishing ordinary criminals, cruelly announcing to them that they were to be cut down while still alive and to see their own bowels burned before their eyes.  Nevertheless, he was useful to James in spite of his past treatment of Catholics, and he went on to prosecute Titus Oates for those same perjuries in 1685.

The minds of the English of the seventeenth century were unburdened by modern concepts such as ecumenicism, religious tolerance and church-state separation.  The Church of England—founded famously by the Tudor king Henry VIII, desirous of a male heir when Cardinal Wolsey refused, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who couldn't give him a male heir—was as much a political and state institution as a spiritual one, if not more.  Henry, devoted to making England a great power and competing with other kingdoms such as France and Spain, didn't want the loyalties of the English church divided between himself and the Holy See.  Considering himself a good Catholic in spite of his break with the church, and no theologian, he envisioned a sort of “independent” or “autonomous” national church, not with the Pope but the sovereign at its head.  Over the reigns of Elizabeth I and her successor, the first Stuart king of England, James I (who authorized the English translation of the Bible that bears his name today) the “C of E” counted itself in the Protestant camp, but steered a middle course between the elaborate theology, liturgy, and organization of Roman Catholicism and the stripped-down, decentralized Protestantism of Luther and Calvin.  In modified forms, it retained some of the liturgy and, even more importantly, the top-down ecclesiastical structure of its Roman Catholic origins while incorporating some of the theology and practices of Protestantism, most notably, the use of the vernacular instead of Latin and the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Most importantly, the Church of England had legal supremacy over spiritual affairs in England, just as the Catholic church had over spiritual affairs in other countries.  It was part of the government, just as Parliament and the Crown were.  The bishops of the church sat in the House of Lords and deliberated along with the other nobles on matters of state.  More generally, the legal supremacy of the Anglican church gave an inevitable political cast to one's religious affiliations.  If you were an Anglican, everyone accepted you as a loyal and patriotic Englishman.  If you were of one of the more extreme varieties of Calvinist Protestant, such as the Scottish Presbyterians or the English Puritans, you were not only not respected as a faithful Christian, you were practically a Satanist and moreover, your loyalties were suspect.  This went double for Catholics, who evoked a whole history of bloody reaction against Protestants under the reign of Henry VIII's successor, “Bloody” Mary I, as well as tales of the Inquisition, the Gunpowder Plot, and more generally prejudicial stereotypes of being opposed to the traditional English way of life and government and being more loyal to the Pope than to one's country.  Catholicism in England at the time was identified with absolutism.  This is what made having a Catholic in the role of head of the Church of England such a sore point: it was like having a Communist in the White House during the McCarthy era.

In spite of some apprehension at having a Catholic in the line of succession, and some unsuccessful machinations designed to prevent such an event (the Rye House Plot of 1683, hatched at a fortified medieval mansion in Hertfordshire, was intended to kill Charles and the Duke of York as they rode to the races at Newmarket, included a number of conspirators and was the subject of high-profile trials resulting in many executions, imprisonments and exiles), English parliamentarians initially got on well with James on his accession.  Since he had at that time no male heirs, only daughters who were raised as Protestants in accordance with the orders of Charles, Parliament seemed to hope that he would keep his Catholicism to himself and not impose it on the country.  But not everyone was satisfied that he would preserve the privileges of the Church of England, and in June 1685, two rebellions, one in Scotland and one in the southwest of England, led by former Rye House conspirators who took refuge in Holland, took place that heightened tensions and brought on a new round of ominous fears of repression and Catholic absolutism.

The Scottish rebellion was led by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, in coordination with the English one, which was led by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II.  Both rebellions, which began with small numbers of followers and failed to attract enough troops to defeat even a small army of trained professional soldiers, were crushed handily enough by James' army, but it was James' intention to make an example of those who had had anything to do with taking up arms against the king, and he knew just the man for the job: an asshole.

Jeffreys was sent with four other judges to preside over the so-called “Bloody Assizes” (August-September 1685), a circuit court that went through the west country where Monmouth raised his army, mostly country people with crude weapons and no military experience or training, and in scaring the populace into submission to James' rule, Jeffreys did his work thoroughly.

The first notable case was that of Dame Alice Lyle (or Lisle), widow of an official of Cromwell's Commonwealth, who was accused of giving food and shelter to two fugitive rebels.  This made her liable to a charge of high treason, which in English law did not distinguish between principal and accessory, and one which would in more enlightened circumstances would have been treated leniently, since she was being threatened with death by burning at the stake for no more than being kind.  Even more, the two rebels in question had not yet been tried themselves.  Witnesses and jury alike were reluctant to send this woman, who was generally liked and respected in the community by people of all political persuasions, to the stake, but Jeffreys was determined to make an example of her, browbeating terrified witnesses and intimidating the jury until a guilty verdict was reached.  Dame Lyle was sentenced to be burned, but after appeals on her behalf to the King, the sentence was commuted to beheading.  After her execution, writes Macaulay, “the judicial massacre began.”

All in all, Macaulay estimated the number of rebels executed at 320, out of some fourteen hundred accused of rebelling against the king.  In the county of Somerset, Macaulay writes:

At every spot where two roads met, on every marketplace, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The Chief Justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work went on. He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy.

One local peer, a Tory named Lord Stawell, found a corpse hung in chains at his park gate in retribution for his publicly expressing horror at the butchery.

Most of the accused rebels not executed were sentenced to transportation for their crimes.  The conditions of their sentence were that they were to be sold as slaves, that they were not to be emancipated for ten years, and that they were to be shipped, not to North America, but to the West Indies.  The exiles were shipped over in the same manner as African slaves: packed below decks in extremely close quarters, never allowed on deck, and fed on small rations of water and ship-biscuit.  Many of the prisoners died during the voyage of disease and starvation.  Jeffreys distributed the rights to profit from their sale to members of James' court, and James' wife got the right to one hundred of the newly-enslaved rebels, and reportedly profited to the tune of at least a thousand guineas.

According to the law, the property of a man convicted of treason was forfeit, and the government of James II enforced this law, according to Macaulay, “with a rigour at once cruel and ludicrous. The brokenhearted widows and destitute orphans of the labouring men whose corpses hung at the cross roads were called upon by the agents of the Treasury to explain what had become of a basket, of a goose, of a flitch of bacon, of a keg of cider, of a sack of beans, of a truss of hay.”  Meanwhile, Jeffreys and his cronies also connived to profit from the better-off among the accused by doing a brisk trade in pardons and bribes.  He himself received fifteen thousand pounds (an immense fortune in those days) from one Edmund Prideaux, who it was certain had never taken up arms against the king, and against whom some prisoners had been convinced to bear evidence in exchange for mercy, and used it to purchase an estate, which the locals called, in reference to the field Judas Iscariot is supposed to have bought with his thirty silver pieces, Aceldama.  In addition, some of the most central figures of the Monmouth rebellion who would have been more fit to be punished according to the law than most of the ill-armed peasants whose heads and quarters were moldering all over the West Country, escaped retribution entirely, usually because they were financially worth more to James alive than dead.

When Jeffreys returned to London, he was rewarded by James with the political post of Lord Chancellor, was elevated to a peerage, becoming 1st Baron Jeffreys of Wem, and given a seat on the Privy Council.  But with his new honors came a decrease, despite his best efforts, in his usefulness to James: as a newly-created peer, he now sat in the House of Lords, no longer surrounded by toadies who owed him their jobs and defendants who owed him their necks, but by nobles who owed him nothing, and who were well aware that he was a coarse, brutal man, a dedicated hatchet-man for an increasingly unpopular king, and an asshole.

During the night of December 10, 1688, as William's troops approached London, James and his wife fled, and Jeffreys remained behind as the highest legal authority, but rioting broke out in the city, and Jeffreys attempted to flee and follow James.  On December 12 he was spotted in a public house in Wapping by a man who had been in his court, been scared out of his wits and never forgot that asshole's face, even though he was now dressed as a sailor with his eyebrows shaved and his clothing covered in coal-dust.  The public house was soon surrounded by an angry populace armed with cudgels, and Jeffreys was dragged by an armed guard first to the Lord Mayor, then, on his earnest pleading, to the Tower, where he could be safe from the mob.

Jeffreys had long suffered from painful kidney and bladder ailments, probably aggravated by his heavy drinking (it has been long speculated that his savage temper was probably aggravated both by the pain of his illnesses and his alcoholism), and he died of his kidney ailments while still in custody in the Tower, on April 18, 1689, aged 43.  His remains were first interred in the chapel at the Tower, and then moved three years later, to the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury.  All traces of Jeffreys' tomb were destroyed when the church was gutted by a German air raid during the Blitz (the remains of the church itself were later re-erected in, of all places, Fulton, Missouri, in the United States).

News of the Bloody Assizes horrified the public and did much damage to what was left of James' reputation among his subjects.  James ended up fleeing to France, where Louis XIV settled a pension on him and set him up in one of his palaces at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he lived to a ripe old age.  Predictably, James protested that Jeffreys went far further than he had intended, while Jeffreys said in the Tower that he actually didn't go nearly as far as James wanted.  James' son, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688-1766), went on to lead an unsuccessful uprising in Scotland in 1715, and his grandson Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), remembered as "Bonnie Prince Charlie", led a similarly unsuccessful rising in 1745.  The last legitimate heir to James was Charlie's brother Henry Benedict Stuart (1725-1807), who publicly claimed the throne of James but made no effort to seize it, preferring instead to live in the Papal States and pursue a career in the Catholic Church, becoming Dean of the College of Cardinals and the longest-serving cardinal in the Church's history.  After his death, the relatives of the Stuart family sort of let all the claims to the throne go.

While Jeffreys' reputation and his deeds live on in history and legend, his male line and his peerage both became extinct within a generation: he had one son, John, who acceded to his father's title, but John Jeffreys and his wife had no male children, though there were descendants through the female line.  According to Macaulay, one of these, the Duchess of Pomfret, Jeffreys' granddaughter, found that she could not travel through the West Country where the elder Jeffreys had held the Bloody Assizes without insults and physical danger from the populace.

Judge Jeffreys' reputation as an asshole lives on in fiction and literature, where he, characters inspired by him, or references to him, abound in novels and short stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Victor Hugo, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Peter S. Beagle, and Neal Stephenson, among others.

The History of England from the Accession of James II can be found in full here at Project Gutenberg, in plain-text, HTML, EPUB and other electronic formats, all freely downloadable and in the public domain.

Being an atheist is okay: affirming your atheism is also okay

In which Plastic Exploding comes out to his blog readers as an atheist (horrors!) and stands up for being forthright and frank rather than silent on the subjects of religion and atheism

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

The above graphic was posted to my personal Facebook page last weekend by a close friend, who got it from a mutual acquaintance I know less well.  I slept on the message within for several days, and concluded that something about it stuck in my craw, and that I should respond to it.

Talking about atheism has never been the primary emphasis of this blog, but it seemed best that I respond to it here rather than on Facebook.  For one thing, I only go online a few times a week, and therefore turning this into a threaded discussion of some kind is neither practical for me, nor, I feel, particularly necessary.  For that reason, and out of respect for my Facebook friends, I am not assuming either endorsement or agreement with the substance of the graphic, nor that it originated with either of them.  I am responding just to the ideas expressed above, without reference to anything they have expressed in the past, as though they passed it along to me in the spirit of "hmm, look what I found: your thoughts?"

Well here are my thoughts, and they come mainly from the first two lines of the graphic:

Being an atheist is okay.
Being an atheist and shaming religions and spirituality as silly and not real is not okay.

Okay, there are some assumptions behind this statement that I have problems with.  The people: One is that atheists are motivated by malice and like to mock and belittle believers just because they are believers.  This is a negative stereotype no less than the notion that all Muslims are terrorists.  No atheist that I know, or know of in the greater atheist community, bullies people on account of their beliefs.  None.

The message: Another assumption is that the atheist-humanist message is about shaming or making people feel bad.  You could, I suppose, summarize the atheist-humanist perspective as "religion is silly and not real," but this would be a gross oversimplification and also, again, attribute motivations to us that are not there.

The subject: Still another assumption is that anything touching on religion is so personal that religion must always be exempted from critical evaluation, lest someone be offended.

The take-away from all this is that it's fine to be an atheist, but not okay to discuss atheism in public.  You can say, "I'm an atheist", but not express why you are an atheist.

There are many reasons why atheists should not be silent, even if what they have to say is something you don't want to hear.  For the last several years, organizations like American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, the United Coalition of Reason, the Center for Inquiry, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with their local affiliates and allies, have worked together to raise the visibility of secular Americans, urging closeted non-believers to come out as non-believers to their families, friends, co-workers and community  In a diverse urban community such as the one I live in, it's not too difficult to be an out atheist.  But in many, if not most areas of the country, where open declarations of piety and faith are virtually required and one of the first questions people are asked is "What church do you attend?", atheists live in isolation and fear of shunning, mistrust and sometimes threats.  Their invisibility is part of what perpetuates the misconceptions that atheists are bad people, that church-state separation is some sort of evil plot to take religion away from believers.

People can be shamed, ideas cannot.  Anyone who derides anyone else because of their beliefs is simply being a dick, and no group has a monopoly on dickishness.  If you follow the atheist blogosphere for any length of time, you will find a wealth of dicks saying dickish things, preachers, pundits, and politicians impugning the character and motives of people who fight for church-state separation and freedom of thought and conscience.  Most of the dickishness comes not from atheists toward believers but from believers toward other believers, and it's more toxic and hateful than any honest inquiry about the existence of gods or the rationality of religion-derived thinking.

But one thing needs to be made clear: being an atheist and holding religious ideas up to critical evaluation is okay.  Just as an example, as an atheist and a proponent of freedom of thought and conscience, I support the rights of American Muslims, who are currently encountering the brunt of believer-on-believer dickery in this country, to practice their religion, to freely associate, and to live free of harassment, discrimination or intimidation.  This does not oblige me to refrain from criticizing the tenets and practices of Islam, or from supporting the rights of Muslims who are questioning their faith to leave their religion without fear of retribution or retaliation.  If I have critical things to say about Islam (which I would rather leave to such prominent ex-Muslims as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, Maryam Namazie, or Taslima Nasrin, who are much more qualified), they will stand or fall on their own merits, and to anyone who can distinguish between criticizing ideas and shaming people, it will be obvious whether or not I am saying something valid or just being a dick.  I have no reason or desire to flag down a passing Muslim and give him a hard time, or to have discussions he does not wish to have, but if I think I have something to say, I am going to say it, and I cannot worry about people being too sensitive to hear dissenting views.  The same goes for any other religious group.  Cogent and rational criticism is not bigotry, it is the quest for truth.

I hope I have clearly made my point as to why the above graphic sort of didn't set well with me, and why people like you should not be afraid of people like me.

Back to your regularly scheduled blog.

Reason's Greetings, everyone.

Tom Brown's School Days (1940)

Dr. Thomas Arnold (Cedric Hardwicke) is working as a private tutor when he is appointed by the board of governors of Rugby School to serve as headmaster.  There he takes a hard line on disruptive behavior, expelling many students who will not respond to any other measures.  His new approach appalls the masters, the public and most of the school's governors, but one of these, Squire Brown, assures him of his unqualified support, and as proof, sends his own son, Tom (Jimmy Lydon) to Rugby as a student.  At Rugby, Tom quickly learns the ropes from fellow student East (Freddie Bartholomew).  He also learns to look up to sixth-former Brooke, the decent and upright head of the house, to revere the strict but benevolent Doctor, and to dread the cruel bully Flashman (Billy Halop), who treats him to a tossing in a blanket and also to a "roasting" -- exposing his backside before the fire.  Brown recovers from the roasting but honors the students' code of silence by not telling on Flashman, and with East leads a rebellion against bullying by the other students, culminating in a fist-fight that brings both Brown and Flashman up to the Doctor's study.  Both are disciplined for fighting, but Flashman is expelled for the roasting, and the other students believe mistakenly that Brown is the one who tattled, and he is ostracized by the students, most of all his close friend East.

Tom Brown's School Days was published in 1857 by lawyer, parliamentarian and social reformer Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), inspired by his own experience at Rugby during Thomas Arnold's headmastership, and the novel had a profound and long-lived influence on juvenile literature and popular fiction.  The success of the novel inspired a whole genre of fiction set in boarding schools, from novels such as Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. to the very popular "school stories" serialized in boys' penny papers in the 20th century (George Orwell writes about them in his essay "Boys' Weeklies") to American prep-school novels such as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye and John Knowles' A Separate Peace.  Hughes' warm, sympathetic voice and the loose, episodic structure of his story broke with the heavy-handed moralizing of most literature aimed at young people while subtly showing his young hero's development into a young man with a sense of moral responsibility and duty.  In the introduction to his follow-up, Tom Brown At Oxford (1861), Hughes steadfastly denied that the Tom Brown character was autobiographical, but like Tom in the novel and like others of his generation who attended Rugby during Arnold's tenure, he had been deeply impressed with Arnold's gravity and moral uprightness and held him in awe all his life.  So influenced was he by his period at Rugby that his most grandiose social reform project -- a utopian settlement in the American state of Tennessee -- was named Rugby.  Flashman, the bully who is expelled for his behavior, went on to have an interesting career in a series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser relating his roguish adventures in the far-flung corners of the British Empire.

Thomas Arnold himself (1795-1842) is known to modern readers not only through his reverent depiction in Hughes' book but also through a more sardonic portrait in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  A historian, an Anglican churchman, and a man of religious zeal and staunch conservatism, father to poet and critic Matthew Arnold and great-grandfather to biologist Julian Huxley and novelist Aldous Huxley, he became renowned as an educational reformer for his changes to the system at Rugby and their subsequent influence on schooling in nineteenth-century Britain.  By our standards, his changes to the curriculum were slight: to the Greek and Latin classics that formed the basis of the syllabus, he added history, modern languages and mathematics (but not the physical sciences).  In fact few if any of his reforms were institutional or systemic in nature, and if they were effective at all, it was mainly due to the force of Arnold's own personality.  His main interest was in character-building and in instilling the Christian values he felt were missing from society at large.  He did not disturb the practice of corporal punishment for which English schools were notorious; in fact he considered it beneficial and Biblical and delegated its use to the sixth form, that class of oldest and most advanced students which he designated as an intermediate authority.  Nor did he abolish the peculiar instititution known as "fagging", in which junior students were employed by sixth formers as servants for tasks such as cleaning and errands.

Under Arnold's influence, the English public school (the term is a misnomer -- these were, and are, private, élite, fee-charging institutions catering to the sons of Britain's wealthy and high-born) became a sort of character-factory, impressing young men of wealth and privilege with the values needed to ensure the power and prestige of Britain at the height of its imperial age: loyalty to sovereign and country, adherence to the established religion, and a standard of personal rectitude commensurate with social expectations -- "brave, truth-telling English gentlemen", as Squire Brown says in the novel (and in that day and age, the word "gentleman" still carried a connotation of class status -- a working-class man was, by definition, not a gentleman).  In practice this meant that public-school boys learned, in the school environment, the necessity of social hierarchy, the importance of fitting into that hierarchy, and the responsibilities that came with class privilege.  In spite of the classical basis of the curriculum, the public school was not primarily intended to cultivate the intellect or to advance scholarship, still less was it meant to foster the arts and sciences or to provide occupational skills, but to provide the empire with its owners, statesmen, churchmen and officers.  The system quickly came to be closely associated with other things as well: corporal punishment, bullying, abuse of authority, situational homosexuality and sexual abuse, wealth and class snobbery, and neglect of health and safety.

As the empire declined and dissolved and the public-school system grew more anachronistic, these and other criticisms began to appear in English culture, illustrated by some random examples.  Orwell, who as a boy attended a small preparatory academy called St. Cyprian's in order to qualify for a scholarship to Eton, wrote in the 1940s the essay, "Such, Such Were The Joys", that described his experiences at that school: a context-free, cram-school approach to learning, bullying by students and by teachers, neglect, underfeeding, preferential treatment for the wealthier boys, and a gradually-internalized sense of inadequacy and helplessness characterized his account of the school, which he renamed "Crossgates" in the piece.  Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If... allegorically attacked Britain's class system and empty traditions as a group of underclassmen, fed up with their treatment at the hands of the sixth-formers, find a cache of arms and open fire at a Founders' Day gathering, in a dreamlike fantasy of revenge and rebellion (and a clear reference to Jean Vigo's 1933 Zéro de Conduite).  In the 1970s, the debut episode of Michael Palin and Terry Jones' comedy series Ripping Yarns, called "Tomkinson's Schooldays", was more a Monty Python-style lampoon of the clichés of the school-story than social criticism, but even here the brutality, the indifference to the well-being of students, the empty and mindless traditions, and the experience of the school as a molder of conformity rather than a means of physical, intellectual and emotional development, generated the typically surreal and irreverent treatment (a foppish, elegant School Bully who even intimidates the headmaster, the "school leopard" that catches boys who try to escape, junior boys chained to stakes to watch a football match, and the compulsory fight with the grizzly bear).

Today, period films, due to their expense, are almost always considered "prestige" films: Tom Brown's School Days is a relic of the time when in-period and costume films were a staple of the American film-goer's diet.  They were more vivid than realistic, and attenuated as far as any qualities, attitudes or language which might alienate or mystify the American filmgoer.  Dialects were often inconsistent or simply not used at all, unless they were used by actors to whom the accents came naturally.  The only exterior shooting notable in this film is a football match, the rest being done on soundstages in that highly stylized but effective use of artifice that was the trademark of the golden-age Hollywood period film, with sets and costumes which could have served as well in a Dickens adaptation (and at some point probably did).  A quartet of screenwriters, including producer Gene Towne, with additional dialogue by director Robert Stevenson, supplied dialogue that betrayed a very American sense of quick timing and wit under a thin veneer of Englishness.  In fact, only Cedric Hardwicke and co-star Freddie Bartholomew, whose career as a child actor consisted mainly of roles that exploited his delicate features and (carefully cultivated) English diction, seem quite at home in an 1830s English school; while sandy-haired, snub-nosed Jimmy Lydon seems more like an American farm boy finding himself unaccountably a scion of English country gentry, and Billy Halop is quite unable to shake his Dead End Kids inner-city image.  The plotline is considerably tightened in comparison to the novel, with a development of conflict between Brown and East that is missing from the original, but which plays well in the film.

Director Robert Stevenson (1905-1986) began to direct in British film in 1932 after two years as a screenwriter.  He came to Hollywood in 1939, where he directed at various studios while under contract to David O. Selznick, then contracted to RKO in the late forties.  The lion's share of his career was spent at Disney, where he directed many of the studio's live-action features, such as Old Yeller (1957), Son of Flubber (1964), Mary Poppins (1965), The Love Bug (1968), Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971), and The Shaggy D. A. (1976).

Cedric Hardwicke (1893-1964) distiguished himself on the English stage and was given a knighthood in 1934 by George V.  He began to appear in American stage productions and films after 1936 and permanently emigrated to the United States in 1948.  His voice and polished demeanor made him a favorite character actor in films such as Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) and in the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956).

Jimmy Lydon (b. 1923) first distinguished himself as a juvenile actor in the 1930s on the Broadway stage, moving on to films for Paramount and RKO, becoming best known for his work in the Henry Aldrich series, based on the popular radio comedy.  He moved on to television in the early 1950s and finally to a career in television and film production.  He was especially memorable in Strange Illusion (1944), a Poverty Row noir drected by Edgar Ulmer (Detour) with a plot derived from Hamlet.

Born in Dublin and raised in England by an aunt, Freddie Bartholomew (1924-1992), had had London stage experience and appeared in two British films before accepting a role in MGM's David Copperfield (1935).  His earnest mien, English accent and dimpled good looks soon made him the second highest-paid child star in Hollywood after Shirley Temple and he appeared in such films as Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and Captains Courageous (1937).  As an adult he worked mainly in advertising, the wealth he had accrued in his childhood having been spent in lawsuits, particularly one highly publicized fight between his aunt and his birth mother over the right to his earnings.  The experience embittered him and he gave no interviews about his early career until shortly before his death.

Billy Halop (1920-1976) began his acting career in radio and then on the stage.  His appearance in the Broadway play Dead End paved his way to Hollywood when Samuel Goldwyn brought the play to the screen, and he worked on many installments of the ensemble-oriented Dead End Kids/East Side Kids films for Paramount and Monogram.  He was less successful as a solo actor and eventually worked in the 1950s as a salesman and in the sixties as a registered nurse.  He did have a recurring role in television's All In The Family where he played Munson, the owner of the cab company where Archie Bunker worked part-time.

I viewed Tom Brown's School Days on a DVD release from Alpha Video Distributors, whose large selection of budget-priced video releases of classic black-and-white "late show" film offerings have unfortunately disappeared from most existing retail video outlets in my area over the past several years, along with many of the outlets themselves.  As with most of Alpha's releases, this does not include anything in the way of supplementary material and is not a "remastered" version, but made from a 16mm print of the type you used to see in late-night television screenings of old films.