And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)
Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark
Links to all previous essays in this series may be found below.
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- Succession
As we have seen, the character of Dr. Haynes invokes the evangelical reformers of the English Reformation. This Reformation was a revolution from above; a top-down change of official ideology in the service of expanding the power and property of the national state and the crown. It took the form of an ‘enclosing’ of church property, wealth, land, and ideological hegemony by new owners, by the crown, the crown’s state bureaucracy, those sectors of the aristocracy allied with the crown’s project, and those sectors of the rising middle class allied with both.
It is easy to look at Dr Haynes and declare that he had no business ascending to the role of archdeacon because he did so via murder. But is this correct? His expectation was that he would be given the post upon the death of Dr Pulteney, and he was right. All he did was hasten the event. He achieved his post but the post was always and already his. How can a world which prizes enterprise and ruthlessness, competition and victory, declare out of the other side of its mouth that it is wrong for him to take the post by force? By the values of such a civilisation, surely his crimes make him more deserving? Yes, the church publicly espouses contrary values, publicly despises ambition and cruelty, but then so does Dr Haynes publicly advocate the same worldview. Is he to be declared unfit for office because he lives by both the ideological claims and the material reality of his institution, his society?
Haynes and his story invoke the spectre of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
It is by no means clear that Macbeth is actually an illegitimate king because he came by his crown by murder. He is destined to be king. We know this because the weird sisters see his kingship and its consequences in the future, already written. And if he achieves the crown of Scotland by deadly competition, so too does Duncan before him, so too does Malcolm after him. As Richard II says in his own play “they well deserve who know the surest, safest way to get”.
Much as Macbeth is haunted by three witches or weird sisters, so is Haynes haunted by three figures: the carved cat, the carved monk/Death, and the carved Devil. He does not encounter the Devil explicitly but the Devil character on the stalls is described as having fearsomely long and sharp talons, and Haynes’ facial injuries at his demise are ambiguous: they could be the work of the cat or the clawed Devil – or, in some obscure way, both. And surely his own crimes would be seen, from within the confines of his own belief system, as diabolical. Again like Macbeth he is also haunted by women in the sense that Jane Lee’s threat of exposure and blackmail dogs him, his sister’s absence leaves him at the mercy of the supernatural forces in the house, and the entities lurking in the house are repeatedly mistaken for maids moving around.
Haynes, like Macbeth, can be seen as having been predestined to do what he did, and also to be responsible for it. But there is also counterpoint in the comparison. Unlike Macbeth, Haynes inherits what he would have inherited anyway. Duncan explicitly names his son Malcolm as his successor, which Macbeth manages to “o’er-leap” after murdering Duncan. Haynes, by contrast, was always going to inherit the position of archdeacon upon the death of Pulteney. Where Macbeth’s intervention creates his opportunity, Haynes’ only hastens his.
It is worth pondering the differences in how these two successions work. Neither are a straightforward matter of primogeniture, not even the naming of Malcolm.
To quote Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason’s Introduction to the Arden edition of Macbeth (3rd Series):
In medieval Scotland the monarchy had been elective and largely governed according to the process of tanistry, whereby royal successors were named from a collateral rather than a direct branch of the family, kingship passing not from father to son but from brother to brother, uncle to nephew or cousin to cousin. During the period of Duncan’s reign this system was being replaced by succession according to the early modern European dynastic norm, namely primogeniture. James [King James I of England, VI of Scotland] believed strongly in the divine right of kings and in succession by primogeniture, and his views leave their mark on the play.
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But the shadow of the older system of elective monarchy lingers. When Duncan gathers his men around him to announce the conferring of a title on his elder son, his action has more than one layer of meaning. He is creating Malcolm Prince of Cumberland, the title given to the heir apparent, but he is also alerting Macbeth and those ‘whose places are the nearest’ that he may be preparing for a dynastic succession. This is a big moment; Duncan does not honour his son alone, but confers titles more generally (as James did after his accession to the throne of England.
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Macbeth, who had been encouraged to regard the conferring of the title of Thane of Cawdor as ‘an earnest of a greater honour’ (1.3.105), is taken by surprise…
As always, Shakespeare is dramatizing the contradictions of two historical epochs and their social systems overlaid upon each other and conflicting.
In Macbeth, the lead character is caught in the contradictions between an old society in which obligations and entitlements flow upward and downward over a pyramidal system of extreme rigidity, and a new system which is unstable by design, always in flux, subject to social mobility, and organised as competition. These two opposites interpenetrate, such is the complexity of a society in a state of transition. For instance, Macbeth is winning the competition for royal favour in the court of the king who represents the old system of fixed loyalties. Macbeth’s rise to being within an inch of the throne is the work of Duncan himself, who promotes him for his success in defending Duncan’s absolute right against competition. The old system of inborn loyalties nevertheless has a semi-elective system of kingship in which the king may choose who to name as his successor, though this choice is subject to family connections and often – though this is absent from the play – ratification by councils of nobles. It is just such a ratification which, off stage, leads to Macbeth taking the throne. Shakespeare dramatizes the disappearance of this system by having it occur, but occur outside the drama. Kingship is said to “fall on” Macbeth as a matter of likelihood, as if someone is rolling dice, or everyone is just passively accepting an obscurely formed consensus. Duncan, the representative of the old system, is himself instituting the new system of primogeniture, which expresses the new society of free competition through a paradoxically rigid system of inheritance.
The key to that paradox is the issue of property. Whereas the feudal system relied upon landholding granted by the crown, and was regulated at the level of manorial rights by a system of combat and conquest, the new capitalist system relied upon the concentration and centralisation of property, and thus upon the stable transmission of property, and also upon a stronger-than-ever central state authority which survived by allying itself with, and enforcing the rights of, the new property owning classes. It is ultimately Macbeth’s failure to do just this, his inability to turn his bourgeois competitive drive for the crown into a bourgeois style of rulership in which he protects the property rights of his nobles, which leads to his downfall. A man living in a jumbled mess of history, Macbeth, having ascended to the apex of power through the violation of feudal loyalties in favour of market competition, then tries to rule his semi-feudal system like an aggressive competitor who, instead of protecting the system of property, sets about raiding it. Like Richard II and Richard III, similarly doomed monarchs from earlier in Shakespeare’s career, Macbeth seizes the property of the members of the class whose property rights he is meant to be protecting. These feudal monarchs depicted by Shakespeare are actually experiencing the contradictions of the Early Modern period in which Shakespeare lived, and so the aspects of their lives, cloaked in the aesthetics and nomenclature of feudalism, actually signify the competing forces of early capitalism.
Even Macbeth’s great act of primal bourgeois overreach, his launching of a campaign of violent competition and acquisition, his violation of all feudal right and degree, the murder of Duncan itself and his theft of the throne, is not entirely clearly a modern, bourgeois act. After all, he does it because he is told – albeit equivocally – that he is going to. The weird sisters predict that he will rise through the social hierarchy to the very top. They already know that he will do it. As the play goes on it becomes clear that they already know everything that he will do and that will happen to him. Like a play script, it is all already written and just waiting for him to come and act it out. He is repeatedly shown to be ‘taking his cue’ for his actions from their predictions. He even does this unwittingly, fulfilling their predictions by trying to flout them. But it cannot be said that he is clearly and simply fulfilling an alien destiny. When the sisters first suggest the idea that he will be king, he reacts in such a way as to strongly suggest that he has already given the idea of murdering Duncan some consideration. He is surprised by being confronted by his own thoughts. It is the sisters’ prediction of his actions that prompts him to take them, but he has already contemplated them. The sisters’ predictions are based upon his actions as much as his actions are based upon their predictions. Like all subjects of all social systems so far, he is trapped within a mechanism which he himself produces and reproduces day after day. It is capitalist civilisation which makes this truth most brutally clear to those who live in it. And there is a sense that it is Macbeth’s foreknowledge of what he will do that dooms him to do it. The predictions of the sisters increasingly come true because he tries to act to counter them. Is Macbeth a transgressive market competitor? Or is he actually trapped in a pre-decided destiny?
The solution to this paradox lies in the fact that the idea of predestined future is not actually a feudal idea, at least not a hegemonic or socially dominant ideology. The feudal ideologies tend to stress the predestination of place and role, not of future, not of end, not of action. As we have seen, ideas like that are modern, they come with modernity, they find their hegemonic position within the new and rising ideology of Protestantism, Calvinism, Arminianism.
Macbeth’s damnation works very much like the dreary predestinarianism of Protestant theology, complete with the internal contradictions between its warring versions. His works, i.e. his actions, good or bad, have no impact upon his destiny. His destiny, already known by the sisters, the representations of the crack in history created by the disjunction between clashing historical epochs, is to fail in the marketplace. His is a free market actor, a self-interested utility maximiser, whose market freedom is illusory because his ultimate failure to compete is already written. And how do we know? Because he fails. His failure is not the moral punishment for his crimes. Rather his crimes and failure are the expression of his predetermined lack of election, of salvation.
In this, Haynes echoes Macbeth closely. Haynes is not prompted to his competitive murder by “supernatural soliciting”, but he is prompted by the foreknowledge of his accession to power upon the death of the current incumbent. Everybody knows that Haynes is the heir apparent, the obvious next choice. Further to our earlier discussion of patronage and political appointment in the late 19th century Anglican Church, we can see that Haynes’ accession to the post of archdeacon will be a matter of either High Church patronage or Low Church political appointment. It is not entirely clear which. The story makes it clear that he has had a patron, but also seems to position him in the same centre where Trollope’s sympathetic clerics reside. In Barchester Towers, Dr Grantly expects to inherit his father’s position as Bishop but is thwarted by a new Whig government appointing the Low Church Dr Proudie instead. We are looking at a form of inheritance not unlike the muddled and uncertain rules in Macbeth’s Scotland. Duncan can choose his successor and is not limited to primogeniture, and yet chooses the primogeniture option. Duncan’s choice is ambiguous in that it represents both continuity and discontinuity with the old order. It is an expression of inborn loyalties and stabilities, but also an identification with the approved ideology of the new, modern system, namely: absolute royal authority by divine right. Macbeth’s interruption of this process is an intrusion of the values of the new form of society – violent market competition – into the functioning of the old. The story is thus not just the values of the old system and the new system in conflict, it is also the contradictory values of the new system in conflict with each other. When Macbeth – or the Proudies and Mr Slope, i.e. the Low Church and Nonconformity via the new power of liberalism and industrial capital – interrupt the process of inheritance, they are not actually representing one system in contradiction of another, but rather the contradictory aspects of one system conflicting with each other. They are like the Arminian remonstrance to Calvinism – remember that we saw that this remonstrance found expression in Nonconformity.
Haynes’ appointment echoes all this. He inherits his new position as right. But his right is based on worth, calculated through patronage and achievement, through the intertwined aspects of upwards social mobility within the middle class and ruling class in his society. Like Macbeth, he also inherits his position through murder, the ultimate expression of the values of ruthless market competition simultaneously enshrined and disavowed by his culture.
If this seems like a reach, let me raise the issue of Haynes’ literary achievements. He is the author of “Discourses upon the Several Events in the Life of Joshua, delivered in his Cathedral”. Joshua is the Biblical figure who led the Israelite destruction of Jericho and then commanded the conquest of Canaan. These events occur simultaneously as a result of the fulfilment of God’s promise and as a result of the actions of the Israelites. God’s promise is destiny – precisely because it is God’s will – but must be realised by men, by action, by conquest. So does it happen because of the ruthless competition and successful action of human beings or because of the natural right decreed by God? The two are inextricable. The Israelites inherit their ordained property and position through their own violent intervention. The intertwining of the contradictory ideas is an expression of the ideas as ideological artefacts, as expressions of a power and property relation.
We’re seeing the repeated idea of predestination combined with worth or value expressed through market competition, with all the built-in contradictions and paradoxes which accompany the combination. The implication of the theme of inheritance versus politics within the Church of England from Trollope’s Barchester Towers. The echoes of Macbeth; the man who both has right and no right to the throne, who takes it through his own ruthless competition but also because of a predestined moral and political status which both raises and destroys him. The invocation of the Old Testament conquests of the Israelites as both fulfilment and achievement of God’s promised inheritances. And the contested orthodoxy within Anglicanism of Calvinist or Arminian predestination and election, so elemental to the entire Protestant project as a rejection of the Catholic idea of salvation.
As we’ve seen, this unofficial orthodoxy expresses the elitism and royal prerogatives built into the entire Anglican Church project from the very beginning, expressing its nature as a top-down revolution; based upon the political needs, dictats, and material interests of the crown; dependent upon the idea of absolute royal authority even over the incipiently revolutionary religious doctrines used to further that royal authority. We saw previously that Haynes directly invokes a figure, a namesake, from the Evangelical Reformist Protestant contingent in Henrician England who was intimately involved in the long and top-down revolution in both government and ruling ideology. We saw how this figure, Simon Haynes, ultimately – like Cranmer and so many other theological radicals – subjected himself to royal authority. And we saw how the entire English Reformation rested on a series of political transfers of power and ideology based on both inheritance by primogeniture and extraordinary acts of state, always violent or based on force, to depose or install rulers. At every stage, both inheritance and coups were justified with reference to law, were legally codified, but were instances of Schmitt’s ‘exception’, with the sovereignty of he who decides upon the exception oscillating back and forth between crown and parliament.
Haynes’ murder of Pulteney, and his subsequent accession to the role of archdeacon, is signified as a cameo of the entire Reformation. His ambiguous relation to Evangelicalism, the ambiguities of Evangelicalism itself, the poles of High and Low within the Anglican church, and thus to Nonconformity and Whiggism, and thus to the different wings of property in bourgeois society, makes him a kind of universal figure within his context, but a figure of universalised contradiction. Like the lovable ecclesiastical centrists of Trollope, he expresses the concept of the Anglican Church as a series of ideological compromises. But whereas Trollope puts an implicitly positive spin on this positionality, for James it is inherently untrustworthy; not necessarily because of the ideological content – as we’ve seen, Haynes is both ideologically contradictory and post-ideological – but rather for the very freighting of history he brings with him.
The history in question is inherently the history of the ideological expressions of the power politics imperatives of the new bourgeoisie and their royal allies in the Early Modern period onward, whether James knows this or not. But he clearly does know it on some level because he chooses to create this very ambiguous figure, this jumbled and conflicted Dr Haynes, as the perpetrator of a murder for clerical advancement, thus echoing the bloody and grubby history of insurrection, coup, inheritance, and usurpation, that is the entire history of the Reformation, and thus of bourgeois history in England.
That he also contains, via his Evangelical semiotic connections, the ideological seed of Calvinism, itself an ideological expression of the new realities of the bourgeois epoch, only goes to illustrate the point further. He is himself a gigantic Calvinist puzzle, without or awaiting the ideological recuperation of Arminianism. He is the Church of England, simultaneously with and without its ideological re-packaging. He is among the Elect, thus he has been saved. We can tell because of his success. But, he being a homicide, this salvific benefit is not derived from any moral worth, unless it be the moral worth of pursuing the material and economic prerogatives of the property-owning and landlord Church with a proper Protestant worth ethic. Nor does his salvation actually save him, because his career crunches up against a haunting which lurks within the very fabric of the institution he has killed in order to rule. He is open to this haunting owing to his own internal contradictions, most particularly the lurking remnants of ‘enthusiasm’, of ritual and icon-worship, which come with the fragments of High Church Anglicanism within him which also come through in his devotion to pursuing rents from landed property. The suspicion of these elements doubtless comes from James’ own class origins, and his lurking remnants of Evangelicalism, which he imparts to Haynes negatively. And these remnants encounter the haunting, within the fabric of the Reformed Protestant English church, of the pre-Reformation, embodied – very materially, but also as a curse – in the lingering influences of a Catholic (and thus pre-capitalist) past.
Much as Macbeth is haunted by the withcraft of the pre-modern, which expresses the uncanny instabilities of the modern, so is Haynes haunted by a curse of History. In the post-Reformation imagination, this curse is intertwined with even the pre-Catholic, the pre-Christian, the pagan, the cunning folk ways of the common people, and even the cosmic.
As we shall see.
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Previous parts of this series:
Here is Part 1 of And Once Again the Truth is Found
Part 2 of And Once Again the Truth is Found
Capitalism and the Protestant Reformation
January 29, 2025 @ 9:55 am
A fascinating read as always. I don’t always take the time to comment, but I await each of your posts fervently and read them with great pleasure !