Glynn Young

How I Learned About the Coronation

May 3, 2023 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

There I was, doing what I do best in gift shops connected to major tourist sites, in this case the Tower of London. It was 2013, and I was looking through the books for sale.

One caught my eye: Crown, Orb & Sceptre: The True Stories of English Coronations by David Hilliam. And the reason it caught my eye was that I’d begun to think about the third novel in my Dancing Priest series, my alternative history of the British royal family. And this would be the novel in which Michael Kent-Hughes would be crowned.

But I didn’t know much about the specifics of the ceremony, other than it took place in Westminster Abbey and every monarch since Edward I had been crowned there. I bought the book at the gift shop, and it accompanied me home to the States. It was another six months before I read it. It had become part of the research for Dancing King.

It’s full of facts about coronations as well as gossipy tidbits. Charles I, the one who lost his head, was all of four feet, seven inches tall. His coronation was marred by several mishaps, seen later as omens. The worst might have neem an earthquake occurring just as the ceremony ended.

Richard III was crowned barefoot. Oliver Cromwell melted down most of the crown jewels. When George I was crowned in 1714, he couldn’t speak a lick of English (he was German with a British royal connection). Two kings were never crowned; can you name them? (Answer below.) Elizabeth II was advised over and over again not to televise the coronation ceremony; she didn’t listen. Instead, she followed the advice of her husband, who urged her to televise.

For centuries, the coronation procession began at the Tower of London and ended at Westminster Abbey (with a couple of exceptions for plague years). That was eventually discontinued in the 17^th century. I fastened on that fact, and I had Michael Kent-Hughes decide to bring that procession back, linking his own reign to that of the originals – and to allow more people to see the procession (it’s a longer route than the Buckingham Palace to the Abbey stretch) and to give a nod to the business community (the route goes through the City of London) and the theater community (it passes near the West End).

But it was the coronation itself that was the most important information the book provided. When you see the old clips of Elizabeth II’s coronation, you’re struck by the pageantry, the spectacle, and all the visual details. This may have been why her advisors (including Winston Churchill) argued against television – a televised program can easily miss the point. Above all else, the coronation of the British monarch is a religious ceremony, filled with symbols throughout the rite.

King Edward’s throne with the Stone of Scone.

That’s where Crown, Orb & Sceptre really helped my research. It included the step-by-step ceremony for Elizabeth II’s coronation and explained what each part of the program and each of the symbols meant. The religious and specifically Christian elements fit perfectly with the faith of Michael Kent-Hughes in my story, and I followed the general outline laid out by the book.

Some years back, the prince of Wales who will be crowned Charles III this weekend said in an interview that he would like to be known as the “defender of the faiths,” as opposed to the traditional title of the monarch as “defender of the faith.” He was making a bow in the direction of the diversity of religions in Britain, but he was also unintentionally appointing himself as head of all of the faiths in the country, including Islam. More than a few people pointed that out, and the idea was forgotten.

Except in the case of Michael Kent-Hughes. In Dancing King, and before his coronation, he meets with a group of protestors, who (among other things) demand he demand that he recognize himself as “defender of the faiths.” He succinctly explains exactly what that would mean, much to the shock of the protestors.

If you happen to watch the coronation ceremony this Saturday, remember that each step, and each symbol, is filled with religious importance. Above all else, a British coronation is a religious ceremony.

And the answer to what two kings were never crowned? The boy king likely murdered with his younger brother in the Tower of London on orders of Richard III, and Edward VIII, who gave up his throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

Dancing King Stories: The Coronation at Westminster Abbey.

My review of Crown, Orb & Sceptre by David Hilliam.

Ritual, not pageantry: Understanding the coronation – Francis Young at The Critic Magazine.

Top photograph: Westminster Abbey, where every British monarch since Edward I has been crowned.

A Reflection on “Winesburg, Ohio”

April 26, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve always been attracted to the works of the American Realist and Modernism periods. In fiction, that meant Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and moving into Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, among others. In poetry, that meant Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teadsale, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot, among quite a few others.

This attraction likely relates to my middle school and high school English teachers, almost all of whom graduated from college in the 1940s and 1950s. They would have defined the Realist and early Modernism writers as the ones they were most influenced by, and they tended to wax eloquent on these particular writers and poets in particular. As a high school junior, taking American literature, I read Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Cather’s My Antonia, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land, and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. It was a challenging year for all my subjects, but what I read in English was wonderful.

What I don’t recall reading at all was anything by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), not even a short story. And yet Anderson, during the period itself, was considered a major figure in literature. He had a significant influence on both Hemingway and Faulkner, and especially Hemingway, who would eventually write an “anti-Anderson” novel to prove he had broken free and become his own writer.

I recently read Winesburg, Ohio and reviewed it over at Faith, Fiction, Friends. I knew little about it, other than it was a collection of connected short stories that had established Anderson as a significant writer. This edition has an introduction by the writer and literary critic Irving Howe, and it was Howe who helped me understand what had happened to Anderson and even perhaps why he was little mentioned by my English teachers.

What happened was that, in 1941, the year Anderson died, critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) wrote an essay that became hugely influential. It was an essay about Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio, and it dismissed the work as something less than great. Howe wrote that the Trilling essay relegated Anderson to something less than the first rank of American writers. It’s not a surprise that my teachers, in college during the period when Trilling’s essay was making its waves, might possibly have discounted Anderson in general and Winesburg, Ohio in particular and instead focused on more lauded writers.

The collection was published in 1919. As I read it, I was surprised by how contemporary it sounded. It’s a clean, simple prose, very straightforward and matter of fact. It’s also almost entirely devoid of dialogue. Its ease of reading is deceptive; you have to read carefully and closely to understand all of what’s going on in the stories.

The characters are all what Anderson called “grotesques,” what Flannery O’Connor in a later generation might have labeled “misfits.” In fact, I wondered if O’Connor must have read Winesburg, Ohio, just like Anderson himself must have read Spoon River Anthology, published four years earlier than Anderson’s collection. I could see how Anderson had influenced Faulkner, and how Hemingway adopted and adapted at least some of Anderson’s bare bones writing style.

The fictional Winesburg is loosely based on the small town of Clyde, Ohio, southeast of Toledo. The stories are all set in the late 1890s, or around the turn of the century, about the time Anderson enlisted in the army and fought in the Spanish-American War. It’s a town still experiencing the lingering effects of the American Civil War and the burgeoning influence of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the stories are about farmers and their family members, storekeepers, bankers, the newspaper reporter, and other community pillars. While the characters are generally drawn in an unflattering portrait, you do come to known them and even like them, flaws and all.

To this day, Clyde proudly proclaims itself as the Winesburg of Anderson’s stories. The author put the small town on the literary map, and the town never forgot it. I suspect the town also didn’t think much of Trilling’s assessment of its most famous son.

Top photograph: Sherwood Anderson in 1898, about the time in which Winesburg, Ohio, is set.

“Bear in the Wilderness” by Donald Waldemer

April 19, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

One of the many features of the Missouri Civil War Museum is the gift shop, which has artifacts, souvenirs, refreshments, t-shirts and jackets, and books. Lots of books. Lots of new and used books all about the Civil War. (I wrote about the museum here.)

I found more than a few things of interest, but I didn’t overdo it. I walked away with an old copy of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic book-length poem John Brown’s Body, the novel Shiloh by Shelby Foote, and a few others. One, as it turned out, had a strong St. Louis connection.

Donald Waldemer (1925-2021) was about totally St Louis as you can get. He was born here. He received two degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for Union Electric (now Ameren, the main electric utility) for 34 years. He and his wife raised a family in Brentwood, a close-in St. Louis suburb, and he’s buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Kirkwood, the suburb where I live.

Waldermer was also an avid student of the Civil War. He published Triumph at the James: The Checkmate of Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1998 and Bear in the Wilderness: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5,6,7 1864 in 2001. It was the book on the Battle of the Wilderness that I found at the Missouri Civil War Museum.

It’s not a battle we heard much about in school, yet, in its own way, it was just as important as Gettysburg or Vicksburg. It was the last battle for which Robert E. Lee went on the offensive. It was the first battle matching lee and Ulysses S. Grant as commanders. And it was the battle in which Grant determined how he was going to defeat the Confederacy – by wearing Lee’s army down, no matter what the cost to the Union side. And the cost here was terrible.

Seven years before Waldemer published his Wilderness book, Gordon Rhea had published The Battle of the Wilderness, which is still considered the definitive account of the battle. Waldemer took a different tack. He used the official letters, orders, and reports and knitted them together with brief contextual information, allowing the official reports to tell the story of the battle.

What results is something lopsided – it’s a story told almost entirely from the Union side. And it was for a very simple reason – there was little to no similar records on the Confederate side. Lee and his generals wrote very little down. It’ also something of a lopsided account because it is a top-down view. If you want to see what Abraham Lincoln, Grant, and Grant’s generals were thinking and planning, this is a solid account. You won’t get much of the perspective of the soldiers doing the actual fighting.

That doesn’t make Bear in the Wilderness unimportant. Waldemer had a gift for context, taking a wide array of texts of all kinds and assembling them in an order that makes sense and helps in understanding how the battle unfolded. If you want to know Grant’s thoughts, fears, strategies, and tactics, and how Lincoln responded with his own, this is an account that’s easy to follow.

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon.

Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski.

Top photograph: A photograph of the Wilderness, showing the kind of terrain where much of the three-day battle was fought. Photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Virginia.

“A Season of Slaughter” by Chris Mackowski & Kristopher White

April 12, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

From May 5 to May 7, 1864, the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, battled with the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. In what was known as the Battle of the Wilderness. The terrain was horrific for a battle – hundreds of acres of dense scrub, trees, and thick woods. Dry conditions, not to mention shelling by artillery, were conducive for fires. It was also notable for being the first engagement between the two commanding generals.

With only a day passing, the two armies moved from the Wilderness area to the region around Spotsylvania Court House and soon found themselves engaged again. Except this time, it was more of a push-me / pull-you series of engagements, with the Confederate lines generally holding (with one major exception) and with continuous punching of those lines by Union forces. Instead of three days, the action went on for two weeks, from May 8 to May 21.

Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White detail the action day by day in A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864. And they do more. Each chapter (general covering each day) includes directions on how to visit the various battle and engagement sites and explaining what visitors today would see that the actual participants would not have (or vice versa). The book serves as both an essential day-by-day history of the battle and a field guidebook (with photographs). Also included are numerous photographs of many of the officers, generals, and soldiers involved in the battle.

The book is not written for expert or academic readers but for the general reader who might be interested in the battle, the Civil War, and American history. And for those interested in touring the battlefields. For that general reader, it is an excellent and helpful resource.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania. He serves as editor at Emerging Civil War.

White is the deputy director of education at the American Battlefield Trust. He received a B.A. degree in history from the California University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. degree in military history from Norwich University. For five years, he served as a ranger-historian at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He is also a co-founder and chief historian for Emerging Civil War, and has published, co-authored, and edited nearly 24 books.

A Season of Slaughter stresses the importance of the month of May. The two commanding generals were not only testing their armies but also each other, each gaining the measure of what he was dealing with. It was also the month when the strategy of the overall Union army changed, a change driven by Grant: the goal became not the capture of Richmond, the Confederate capital, but the destruction of Lee’s army. If Grant had to do that by wearing down the Confederates, Grant would do that, even at the cost of horrific loss of Union soldiers.

Top illustration: Battle of Spotsylvania by Thure de Thulstrop.

“If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: Vol. 1” by Scott Mingus & Eric Wittenberg

April 5, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

When you get the compressed view of history in school – too much to cover and not enough time – you tend to think events like battles just happened. Two armies showed up and fought. But as Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenberg demonstrate in If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac March to Gettysburg, battles like Gettysburg have lead-ups, clashes and conflicts, and after-events.

In other words, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia didn’t just show up in Gettysburg and fight George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In the month leading up to the battle, Lee’s army moved in three substantive routes toward Pennsylvania. The approval to take the war into the North was given by the Confederate government in late May, and Lee wasted no time. By June 1, his army began to move.

Along the way, the Northern generals tried to figure out what Lee was up to. They knew a large part of his army was moving north, but was the objective West Virginia, Pennsylvania’s state capital of Harrisburg, a turn back toward Baltimore and Washington, D.C., or perhaps even Philadelphia? Lee’s ultimate target was unknown.

Volume 1 of this work covers the period from June 1 to June 21, 1863, from leaving Fredericksburg, Virginia and arriving near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, some 25 miles from Gettysburg. and the authors are meticulous about explaining what was happening from the perspective of soldiers, officers, generals, and civilians. Drawing upon books, memoirs, letters, official histories, Mingus and Wittenberg document Lee’s daily progress north in detail.

Small battles, skirmishes, and limited engagements marked Lee’s progress north. A few of the engagements were intense. Generally, the Union troops got the worst of it, including the Confederates’ recapture of Winchester, Virginia, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, which had chafed under Union occupation.

The authors do a masterful job of reconstructing three weeks of movements by both armies. Gettysburg didn’t just happen one day; that battle has a history, and Mingus and Wittenburg have fully documented it.

Mingus, an author and speaker, has written or co-authored some two dozen books on the American Civil War and Underground Railroad. He was previously a new product development director in the global paper industry, He lives in Pennsylvania. Wittenberg, a practicing attorney, is a Civil War historian, author, lecturer, tour guide, and battlefield preservationist. He’s written numerous books and articles on the Civil War and lives in Ohio.

Vol. 2 in this series covers June 22-30, 1863, and will be published June 30 of this year.

“Grant vs. Lee,” edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch

March 29, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Emerging Civil War (ECW) is one of my favorite blogs to follow for stories, news, and articles about the Civil War. It has quite a roster of editors and writers, all of whom have backgrounds (and often jobs) in history, national parks, and publishing. They publish a weekly newsletter, sponsor an annual conference, and have a series of books published with the publishing firm Savas Beatie.

What I particularly enjoy is how their posts and publications are in understandable (i.e., non-academic) English. They’re writing to be read and understood by people like me, the general public. (In case you’re interested, they also produce and manage a sister site on the American Revolution, Emerging Revolutionary War Era.)

Last year, ECW published several works to celebrate their tenth anniversary. One of those is Grant vs. Lee: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War. Edited by ECW Editor-in-Chief Chris Mackowski and contributor Dan Welch, it’s a collection of 46 articles by 22 authors posted on the site from the preceding 10 years.

The Civil War period covered is less than a year – Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee did face each other in battle until the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864). And even then, their armies fought over terrain unconducive to battle – dense scrub and forest that had as much to do with the engagement’s outcome as anything the armies or the generals did. In one essay, Mackowski argues that it was this battler, rather than Gettysburg, that should be considered the turning point in the war. What Lee learned was that Grant would through wave after wave of men and weaponry at him, and only counting the fearsome cost afterward. (“Was Grant a butcher?” he asks in another essay.)

Other battles and engagements are covered, including Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, North Anna, Petersburg, the fall of Richmond, and Appomattox. And the collection not only addresses battles but also the regiments and individuals involved, including author and poet Herman Melville’s perspective on the Fall of Richmond.

In short, Grant vs. Lee is a solid introduction to the last year of the Civil War.

Welch is an educator in a public school district in Ohio and serves as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and associate editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He’s written two books in the Emerging Civil War Series and co-edited several volumes.

The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi by Chris Mackowski.

ECW Podcast: Grant vs. Lee.

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