David Prashker's Book Of Days: October 2

322 BCE, 1718, 1800, 1831 CE

The first date records the death of Aristotle, at the age of 62. Himelf a student of Plato, though he came to disagree with his master on most subjects, he became the teacher of Alexander of Macedon (see October 1), that ultimate model for all would-be empire-builders, political, religious and corporate. Amongst this latter group must be included

Saladin (that's Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb), who captured Jerusalem today in 1187, and

Richard Crookback (so-called though he almost certainly wasn't; Richard III definitely), who was born today in 1452

I do not regard failure, not even the failure to build so small an empire as that of Little England, as a reason to exclude a man; art may be a verdict, but empire is always first and last an ambition; the list must also, therefore, include

Peter II of Russia, born into Empire this day in 1715;

Francis Hopkinson, the US lawyer and writer who designed imperialism's modern logo, the Stars and Stripes, and who was born this day in 1737;

add further Paul von Hindenburg (born on this day 1847), the President of Kaiser Wilhelm's modern Germany;

Ferdinand Foch (born this day 1851), the generalissimo of the Allied armies in the 1st world war;

Marthinus Steyn (born this day 1857), the President of the Orange Free State;

Mahatma Gandhi (born this day 1869), who did what Nat Turner did, but peacefully, and with considerably more success, which was to help in the overthrow of empire. No doubt there were many others, from both sides of empire's trenches, but these are the names which history has taken the trouble to record.

Aristotle, incidentally, died of indigestion. This fact would no doubt have amused Groucho Marx, who built a very different sort of empire, that of global laughter, and was born this day in 1890.

And did you ask: who on Earth was Nat Turner? And then: why wasn't I taught about him at school? Born in Virginia on this day in 1800, he it was who, at the age of 31, sought the defeat of empire by staging the most significant act of slave rebellion since Spartacus (alas, they both failed).

I would take great delight in telling Nat Turner's story in full, but I'm not sure this is a song a white man from England should be singing, however sympathetic he may be, however much he may regard himself as a Brother in Babylon. And Reef The Lost Cauze tells it so much better than I could anyway.

Lyrics below. Link to the audio here:

"This song," - Reef's words, taken from here - "is based on Nat Turner. An African-American slave who led a slave rebellion of slaves and freed blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted in 60 white deaths":-

Here I stand, a man not free
Whip markers on my back, shackles on both feet
Picking cotton in the stone heat
Played along my soul keep for one day he came and told me
In the year of 1831 I awoke at dawn
To see his vision in the sun
It seemed that the clouds parted tippling off his tongue
And he said "My son, the revolution has begun"
And with that, I knew the message was clear
We'll kill the suppressor who kept us in prison for years
Raped our women in laughter and tears
Made us build their meal while they sit back in their chairs
Late night, I chat with my peers, we build weapons
No guns, we must slice them from neck to the ears
With spears, so they can hear
The pain of the people who are God's creation, not theirs[Refrain]x2
I'm the one that they don't teach you in class about
I'm the one who ran up in the master's house
Put a knife to his neck and then gagged his mouth
Charged him for black murder, I'm Nat Turner

Through the darkness, we march like hellions
They called it a massacre, I call a rebellion
We moved quickly, with no time to spare
Blood loss, leave no life to spare
Women and children neither
After we freed our brothers we burned down the house to ensure no survivors
A horseback we rode, blood dripping from the hooves
Head out 'till dawn, resist in the woods
Then we attack again, ravish them
The braids slashed against the master's plastic skin
The murder was so passionate
Screaming to the heavens, we would never ever go back again
Word began to spread, up the violent mall
That wolf walked the wicked into the side of God
This was where the demise begins
It was written in my tan, we all need to come to a violent end

After two days of non-stop action we rested
In the back-roads of a [?], you got hit by the night crescent
It was here I began to fight my confessions
Before I knew it was only a matter of time 'fore they catch us
A house nigga got scared, ran to the county building
Told them our whereabouts, then they beat him 'till they killed him
In the starry night I saw the flames from the distance
Attacked us while we slept, but this time we're different
We fought back
But the slaves told me the revolution would only stop if they caught Nat
So again on horseback I rode, negate the chase
Caught up with me eventually, had to face fate
They hung me, kept my head as a souvenir
Beat slaves to death as they were consumed with fear
You got the uprising of blacks on happening, and attack further
Because of the name Nat Turner

But one more date simply demands the remembering, that of Elizabeth Montagu, maiden name Robinson, born October 2, 1718 in York, fifth child of a fairly ordinary family, nicknamed "Fidget" as a child, but fortunate to have a step-grandfather, Conyers Middleton, who was the librarian for Cambridge University, and did what intelligent grandfathers do: keep Fidget fidgeting, and make her write down everything worthwhile that it led her to observe: she died still doing it.

He was also Librarian to Edward Harley of Wimpole Hall, which led to a lifelong friendship with Margaret Cavendish Harley, later Bentinck, later Duchess of Portland, which estate at Bulstrode also became a centre for knowledge sharing and collecting and therefore demands a mention: all of these sad ladies, suffering, if I may paraphrase my favourite Voltaire quote, from being “great men whose only fault lay in being female”.

"Queen of the blue-stockings" was Samuel Johnson's description of her championship of women’s writing, though she was known better as a Shakespeare critic and a hostess of serious literary salons, counting amongst her regular Swanns Joshua Reynolds, George (Lord) Lyttelton, David and Eva Garrick, William Pulteney (Earl of Bath), Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter and Samuel Johnson, with Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More and Fanny Burney joining the Algonquins later on.

For a Yorkshire lass to have a London salon requires a noble marriage. Hers was in 1742, to Edward Montagu, grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich, a fifty-year old bachelor, prone to solitude and with scholarly interests in mathematics (sounds like a source for Dorothea and Edward Casaubon!). One child, John, nicknamed "Punch", and mum so devastated when he died aged only 16 months she poured all her grief-fidget into the management of her husband’s coal mines in Newcastle, and then turned still more grief-fidget into ritalin by overseeing the running of all his estates when he too died young; she quickly turned "Montagu Main" into the second most expensive coal on the market, and had her bank account at Hoare & Co. transferred to the category reserved only for the very richest members of the aristocracy. "I am a Critick, a Coal owner, a Land Steward , a Sociable Creature ... one must write" was her summary of her life, in a letter to her sister, in 1767.

I am paraphrasing much of this from a page I found about her on the Swansea university website, but this next I shall simply quote in full:

"Montagu's most profound legacy was to advance the cause of female writing and education, both as a powerful patron and as a role model who defied contemporary expectations of her sex. For most women, education was confined to the realms of 'accomplishment'. If women did express intellectual interests they were usually encouraged to hide them for fear of provoking disapproval from polite society and threatening their chances on the marriage market. As Montagu wrote to her friend the Earl of Bath: 'Distinguish'd talents expose Women to a great deal of envy, & seldom assist them in making their fortunes. It is hard to say whether Women remarkable for their understanding suffer most from the envy of their own sex or the malice of the other, but their life is one continual warfare.'

"Despite her awareness of the potential difficulties that faced learned women, Montagu believed strongly that women should have an equal right to participate in intellectual culture. Her addiction to letter-writing was matched by more formal literary ambitions. In 1769 she published An Essay on the writings and Genius of Shakespear, compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire, cleverly timed to coincide with Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee ...

(and the reason why I found a way to squeeze in a deliberate misrepresentation of Voltaire earlier! - he said what he said to defend his physics-partner, one of the great science-intellectuals of her, indeed of any day, Gabrielle Émilie de Breteuil, the Marquise du Châtelet)...

"...Montagu defended the role of mystery and religion in literature, as well as showing a particular appreciation of Shakespeare's use of the vernacular language or 'mother tongue', which drew upon her status as female critic, who, like Shakespeare, had not been formally educated in the classical languages. She praised the psychological complexity and realism of Shakespeare's characters in contrast to the rigid formalism of French neoclassical drama; the Essay catapulted her to literary fame and she became a national heroine."

She died on 25th August 1800 and is remembered rather more for the streets in Marylebone named in her honour than for any of her rather greater achievements.

More Amber pages (several of the names listed above have to be counted as Amber too, though Émilie de Breteuil, the Marquise du Châtelet, can be found on June 12, and all the named women appear somewhere in "Woman-Blindness"):

Graham Greene, novelist, born today in 1904

Jan (James) Morris, travel writer, born today in 1926