Timeless Moments

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 4

Timeless Moments

The Fire and The Rose. By Arthur Bryant. Collins. 307 pp. Index.

Sir Arthur Bryant needs no introduction as a master of the historical narrative. In this collection of extracts adapted from six of his earlier works on English history he has sought to capture nine of what T. S. Eliot called the “timeless moments”— when the history of a nation, and sometimes of mankind itself, turns on what, in a few hours, men make of the time given them. As the author says, “through all the chronicles runs a common thread —of the greatness of the human spirit and its capacity to transcend disaster.” Because victors and vanquished are now folded in a single party, that of the grave and history, the author has taken his title from Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”: AU manner of things shall be well When ... the fire and the rose are one.

Each of the incidents he narrates is magnificently exciting in itself, such as Sir John Moore’s stand at Corunna in the Peninsular War, and each has also been set clearly and succinctly in the wider context of its times. Some are well known—the miraculous victory of an outnumbered army at Crecy, or Nelson’s triumph and death at Trafalgar of which Joseph Conrad said it “revolutionised not the strategy or tactics of sea warfare but the very conception of victory itself.” Others are less familiar, at least in the detail which Sir Arthur Bryant brings to them. Here are the duel between Thomas A’ Becket and King Henry 11, and the mutinies in the British fleet in 1797 at a time when only the Royal Navy stood between England and revolutionary France.

Three of the tales concern rebellions —Wat Tyler’s rising in 1381, the naval mutinies and the English Civil War. In this last Sir Arthur Bryant has produced a tale of high adventure from the escape of the young King Charles II after the Royalist defeat at Worcester. The collection spans seven centuries, from Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 to Waterloo in 1815. Even its most familiar tales are rewarding to reread as the author brings a new tension to the events he describes so ably. Perhaps the best of all is that of the life and death of Becket. Here the protagonists each become something more than themselves as the struggle between two great legal codes—the Common Law of England and the ecclesiastical law of Christendom—is worked out to its tragic ending and Becket’s martyrdom. In each tale love

of country and pride of ancestry emerge in every paragraph, yet even more admirable are Sir Arthur Bryant’s imaginative sympathy with the people he describes and his critical fairmindedness in assessing their motives and intentions.