HISTORIANS UNDER FIRE

Hugh Ross Williamson eXUM hoes seven doubtful eases
By Sir DESMOND MORTON
ENIGMAS OF HISTORY, by Hugh Ross Williamson (Michael Joseph, 18s.).
MR. Williamson is wellknown to the right people, such as readers of THE CATHOLIC HERALD, as a nice man who gleefully expends energy tilting successfully at historical windbags, to the delight of those naughty, disohedient, sceptical spirits sometimes tempted to wonder whether everything taught them at school was unfailingly and utterly accurate.
A cheerful foreword points his special dislike of that type of dessicated historian-unfortunately not yet wholly extinctwho proliferated much pompous and harmful nonsense in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But, even if all modern historians, recalling Emerson's wise remark that " there is properly no history, only biography." admitted that history was anything but an exact science, Mr. Williamson's private eye would not he forced out of the detective business.
THIS book tells the story of seven of his "cases" which either suggest that[ commonly accepted views rest on insecure foundations or propose a solution for what has hitherto been abandoned as insoluble.
Mr. Williamson produces evidence and argues upon it,
leaving the reader to act as jury. Four of these essays, previously broadcast, swelled the postbag of the B.B.C.
The first suggests why George IV behaved as he did towards his two wives, Mrs. Fitzherbert, his Catholic and true wife, and "Queen " Caroline, his doubtful wife in the eyes of British law.
The second gives reason for doubting the paternity of Elizabeth I; the third argues that Buckingham was actually guilty of poisoning James 1, though contemporaneously tried and acquitted; the fourth proposes the identity of the man who actually cut off King Charles's head; the fifth offers evidence that Sir John Fenwick, executed for attempting to assassinate William Ill, was judically murdered; the sixth and seventh deal respectively with the mysteries of the man in the iron mask and of the diamond necklace through which ill-starred Marie Antoinette of France was accused of horrible malpractices.
THE bare skeleton of history
would not be altered were Mr. Williamson's cases proved to the hilt; but that is the whole point ! Is history a bare skeleton?
All seven cases are wellargued, interesting and good fun ---to anyone save the type of historian whose heart and mind are closed by prejudice.