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READING
RADIO 4
A Programme-by-Programme
Analysis of Britain’s Most
Important Radio Station

Macdonald Daly
Reading Radio 4
 Macdonald Daly

Reading Radio 4
A Programme-by-Programme Analysis of Britain’s
Most Important Radio Station
Macdonald Daly

ISBN 978-1-137-57656-9    ISBN 978-1-137-57657-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57657-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959958

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image © Derek Croucher / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
For Sean Matthews
 Foreword

This is a scholarly book, but it has also been written with the non-­academic
reader expressly in mind. The intellectual context for such a study, as
well as its problematics and methodology, is discussed in the lengthy
Introduction which immediately follows, but the reader who is not overly
concerned with academic questions, and wishes mainly to explore the
account given of individual Radio 4 programmes, is encouraged to skip
immediately to the first chapter.

vii
 Table of Contents

Introduction   1

05.20 Shipping Forecast  35

05.30 News Briefing  49

05.43 Prayer for the Day  53

05.45 Farming Today  59

05.58 Tweet of the Day  67

06.00 Today  73

09.00 Round-Table Discussions and One-to-­One Interviews  99

09.45 Book of the Week 127

10.00 Woman’s Hour 131

ix
x Table of Contents

10.55 The Listening Project 143

11.00 Morning Documentaries 147

11.30 Morning Comedies 167

12.00 Home Front/A History of Ideas 177

12.15 You and Yours 181

13.00 The World at One 189

13.45 Fifteen-Minute Feature 201

14.15 Afternoon Drama 207

15.00–17.00 Miscellaneous Afternoon Programmes 213

17.00 PM 223

18.00 Six O’Clock News 229

18.30 Evening Comedies 231

19.00 The Archers 237

19.15 Front Row 243

20.00–22.00 Miscellaneous Evening Programmes 249

22.45 Book at Bedtime 257

 Table of Contents  xi

23.00 Miscellaneous Late Night Programmes 261

23.30 Today in Parliament 263

The Weekend 269

Afterword 289

Index 291
 List of Tables

Table 1  ‘Shipping Forecast’, 13 January 2010, 05.22 42

Table 2  ‘Today’, 23 September 2013, 06.00 74
Table 3  Guests on ‘The Life Scientific’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’,
27 July 2014, 09.00 110
Table 4  ‘The Life Scientific’, 8 October 2013, 09.00, and
‘Desert Island Discs’, 27 July 2014, 09.00 111
Table 5  ‘Book of the Week’, January–June 2014 127
Table 6  ‘Woman’s Hour’, 10 November 2014, 10.00 134
Table 7  ‘Crimea: Paradise Regained’, 7 August 2014, 11.00 150
Table 8  Morning Comedies, January–June 2015 168
Table 9  ‘The World at One’, 28 July 2015, 13.00 192
Table 10 Drama on Radios 3 and 4, 22 February–1 March 2015 208
Table 11 Miscellaneus Evening Programmes, 28 September–
2 October 2015 250
Table 12 ‘Book at Bedtime’, October–December 2015 257
Table 13 Radio 4 published schedule, 16–17 January 2016 270
Table 14 Weekend-specific programmes 272

xiii
 Introduction

I
Radio has in general been reasonably served by those few who, in aca-
demic or quasi-scholarly manner, have set out to describe it. Its finished
productions, its ‘output’, its programmes, on the other hand, have hardly
been objects of intellectual analysis at all. This book is an attempt to rem-
edy that lack, and in writing it, consequently, I have had a strong sense of
its approach being more easily defined negatively—by indicating what it
is not—than positively. The fact is that there is hardly a precursor one can
point to which exemplifies a similarly dominant concern with the perspec-
tive of the listener. In this Introduction I shall explain how, in the pages
that follow it, I have been almost entirely guided by that concern.
Thus, the present book is not a sociological study of the contemporary
media institutions which produce radio. Such studies, in fact, focus on the
opposite end of the communication spectrum proposed by Stuart Hall
in his still-influential ‘encoding/decoding’ model (Ryan 2008: 907–16).
For example, the light shed on the institutional structures and relation-
ships, the journalistic values, and the financial and regulatory frameworks
of the BBC in a serious sociological study such as that by Georgina Born
(2005) is not an illumination which extends, despite her book’s laudable
scope and empirical grounding, to the corporation’s programmes them-
selves.1 At best the media sociologist, acting as participant-observer or in a
similar rôle, helps us understand as fully as possible the processes at work

© The Author(s) 2016 1

M. Daly, Reading Radio 4, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57657-6_1
2 M. DALY

in the production (or encoding) of media output, but an explanation as to

how those programmes are further processed (or decoded) by members or
a member of an audience is hardly something that a methodological focus
on the media institution can offer with any degree of insight.2
As Hall’s classic paper firmly establishes that there is no determinant
connection between the processes of encoding and those of decoding,
institutional studies, though valuable, have been supplemented by audi-
ence studies, which tend to be fewer in number and, again, are seldom
centrally interested in radio (see, for example, Morley 1992). My own
approach is not to conduct an audience study of Radio 4 in the man-
ner of David Morley’s sociological investigation of the audience of the
BBC television programme ‘Nationwide’ (Morley 1980), because it is not
with ascertaining aggregate or average responses that I am concerned.
Rather, I am interested to see what is yielded by a relatively intellectual, as
opposed to consumerist or leisure-dictated or populist, engagement with
the medium. This is fundamental among several reasons why the object
of my study should be Radio 4: it is one of the few radio stations in the
world, the majority of which are devoted to presenting little other than
popular music, with which a rich intellectual engagement is possible.
That sociological approaches to communications media should have
such sway within Cultural Studies is something of an historical accident, as
we shall see. It is still not so within the discipline of Literary Studies. The
‘sociology of literature’, as it was then called, had a passing vogue among
Marxist-inclined literary theorists in the 1970s, but it never caught on.
Empirical facts about book sales, regulatory frameworks (such as censor-
ship and obscenity laws), means of distribution (such as libraries and book
clubs), editorial and publishing house practices, and the economics of the
publishing business all continue, by and large, to be considered matters
extraneous to the primary business of the discipline, which remains the
explication and interpretation of literary texts (among other things the
‘output’ of the publishing institutions) at a relatively high level of intellec-
tual and aesthetic competence. Literary critics are usually concerned with
‘aggregate or average responses’ to literary texts only insofar as they need
to be ‘corrected’ or exposed as vulgar or misinformed.
In short, although Literary Studies could be reformed as the study of a
mass medium (publishers, taken together, create audiences for books, some
of which are quite as large as those reached by many media products), it is
in practice concerned more with the decoding end of Hall’s spectrum, and
even then only with what it deems intellectually or aesthetically competent
 INTRODUCTION 3

decodings, rather than with how ‘the common reader’ might deal with a
novel, a poem, or a play. It is no surprise, for example, that even literary
critics who might designate themselves as adherents of reader-response or
reception theories seldom trouble to garner the responses of ‘real’ readers
the way Morley engaged with the ‘real’ audience of ‘Nationwide’: they
tend to posit instead a theoretically imagined ‘ideal’ reader. Likewise, lit-
erary critics hardly ever pay any attention to ‘encoding’ other than that
presumed to have arisen within authorial intention, which in itself is con-
sensually accepted to be something of which our knowledge is in any case
necessarily insecure, thus usually in practice ignorable. Encoding as it is
influenced by non-authorial means, such as when a publisher censors a
novelist before publishing the fiction, in fact tends to be seen straightfor-
wardly as ‘interference’ rather than a constitutive part of the encoding pro-
cess. The end result is that the author’s ‘intended’ text, preferably purged
of non-authorial interference, is generally the main focus of analysis.
To anyone trained in Literary Studies, like the present author, the energy
expended by media sociologists in institutional and audience studies can
often seem enormously misdirected quite simply because they decentre,
ignore, or arguably abandon the only thing truly available and accessible
to the reader, viewer or listener, namely the text or programme itself. They
pay more attention to what goes on in the institution which produces the
text, to what ‘ordinary viewers’ make of the text at the point at which they
consume it, than they do to the content, form, style or method of the
text itself as discoverable by a reader whose abilities are appropriate to the
intellectual task of analysing it.3 I say ‘enormously misdirected’ rather than
‘valueless’. Such sociological studies are clearly of value to media corpora-
tions wishing to consider the appropriateness of their production meth-
ods or audience reach. They are also important to politicians wishing to
understand and perhaps govern a particular cultural industry or regulate
the distribution of its products, and to media professionals, or those who
would like to become such workers, operating within the frameworks of
such an industry. Historians should find them priceless. And it is undeni-
ably necessary that the contemporary public remain informed, by impar-
tial independent investigators, of the working practices and conception of
its audience of corporations which, in the case of the BBC, for example,
are publicly financed.
Nonetheless, media sociologists often ignore the pivotal element in
Hall’s model, what he calls the ‘programme as “meaningful” discourse’
(Ryan 2008: 909). I would not wish to overlook the fact, or the irony,
4 M. DALY

that since the 1960s there has been a general trend among theorists to
complain about precisely the opposite problem in traditional Literary
Studies, namely its fetishisation of the text and its failure to account for
the fact that texts have meaning which is relational rather than absolute,
that they circulate socially, often impacting on social and political pro-
cesses, and are not simply to be conceived as the interaction between a
singular contemplative reader and an intrinsically ‘meaningful’ discourse.
But this is simply the obverse of a complaint that can easily be made in
the opposite direction, and several decades of debate have not resulted
in any impressive synthesis. It may indeed be that the contrast between
the ‘private’ and silently concentrated manner in which literary and other
written texts are read, as opposed to the often collective manner in which
non-written texts are watched and/or listened to (leaving potential for
the simultaneous performance of other tasks or for conversation between
viewers or listeners sharing them), is a fundamental material difference
which explains why a literary critic pays almost exclusive attention to the
text in itself, conceived of as a unity whose meaning awaits enlightened
discovery, whereas the media sociologist sees the text as merely one point
in a continuum of production and consumption, in which meaning is a
variable interpretation arrived at or determined by the conjunction of a
number of contingencies.
I repeat, I know of no methodology or individual study which satisfac-
torily manages to combine these contradictory ways of conceiving of the
media text, and it is arguably impossible to do so.4 Likewise, this book is
not an attempt to do so. Rather, it is an attempt to redress the balance in
discussions of radio away from an attention to encoding to a concern with
decoding, but decoding understood as the product of concentrated listen-
ing (listening, one might say, performed in the manner in which one might
read a book) rather than listening understood as a casual, fleeting form of
‘tuning in’ while simultaneously occupied with other matters (which is,
we all know, the manner in which most radio gets listened to). I am very
aware—some of the analyses in the following pages self-demonstrate it
amply—that this is an unusual method to apply to the medium, and one
which it takes uncommon pains to practise. I am similarly aware that the
proposed procedure may appear, to several generations of Cultural Studies
scholars, an ill-considered return down a path of textual reading from
which the discipline has, over the years, struggled successfully to escape.5
I do not believe it is any kind of return and would hope for some deferral
of such judgement while I attempt to establish a course which may raise
 INTRODUCTION 5

to a more intellectually respectable and complex status a medium which,

in popular and academic estimates for more than half a century, it has not
enjoyed.
The dilemma might be better expressed as follows. It is not true to say
that close reading does not, even today, constitute a significant proportion
of work in Film and TV Studies. Any perusal of contemporary academic
books in both fields would demonstrate that. But a similar examination of
the many fewer works on radio would reveal that they hardly ever involve
themselves with such fine textual detail: rather, their default mode is what
Franco Moretti (2013) calls ‘distant reading’. In Moretti’s hands, ‘distant
reading’ is a tool for understanding literary history in a way that close
reading of individual texts does not permit. Thus, for example, he reads
the titles of published English novels over extended time spans as large
as a century rather than read all the novels themselves (which would be
humanly impossible): under computational analysis, this exercise does
prove fruitful as an index of how the literary marketplace changes over
time. Similarly, he will skim-read texts in a particular genre looking for a
single plot device or element whose inclusion (he has hypothesised) might
explain why some texts in the genre enjoy a lasting readership whereas
others do not. In short, without moving outside the text entirely, he
removes himself as far as possible from engaging with the rich specificity
of particular texts in order to say something more general about literary
trends over time.
Historians of radio are unlike Moretti because they rely on many sources
which are extra-textual. But when they do engage with radio broadcasts
themselves, they usually do so ‘distantly’, in precisely Moretti’s terms. For
example, Chignell (2011) largely reads the scripts of radio programmes
rather than analysing the programmes themselves. This procedure is borne
out of necessity because many of the recordings do not survive, but it
already puts him at one remove from the actual object of scrutiny, which
is in an auditory, not a written, medium. His main aim is not, however,
to analyse specific programmes except as illustrative of some wider prin-
ciple or historical development. When he tells us (2011: 161) that the
Radio 4 programme ‘File on Four’ produced more than 100 editions on
international issues in the 1980s, 22 on health, 19 on prisons and law and
order, 15 on Ireland and 13 on education, he is doing rather what Moretti
does with book titles: describing trends over time with what one might
these days call ‘metadata’. This is valuable and useful information, but it
can be gleaned without listening to any of the actual programmes. Even
6 M. DALY

when a non-historical approach is taken and the emphasis is on listening

to the medium itself, the engagement with particular programmes is often
incidental. Andrew Crisell (1994) throws up his semiotic examples from
actual radio listening in much the same way that Moretti combs texts
superficially for devices: it is the functioning of these radiophonic devices
that he largely helps the reader to understand, not their experience of
distinct radio programmes.6 The study of radio has not escaped from close
textual reading and I am not proposing that it should return to it: I am,
in fact, hopeful that the present book will show the value of turning to it.

II
By contrast, the little discussion of radio that there is does little to demon-
strate its intellectual value or possibilities. Semiotics-influenced approaches,
which have certainly helped to develop an understanding of how radio
produces significations (or meanings), often seem to be little more than a
codification of the medium’s engrained trivialities or simplicities. We can
be helped by them to understand how a jingle works, or be able to identify
a segue, or become aware of the relation between atmospheric noise and
accompanying language, but such knowledge itself is little more intellec-
tually demanding than distinguishing the title of a book chapter from its
sub-titles. There may be little to wonder at if, after completing a semioti-
cally inclined study such as Crisell’s (1994), the reader feels that what she
has been given is little more than a larger vocabulary for the naming of the
obvious and the relatively unimportant. A more positive view of Crisell’s
endeavour is that it acts as a primer helping to form the kind of listener I
envisage, one who is literate in the medium, interrogative with respect to
not only its contents but also its specific semiotic codes and codifications,
aware above all of its constructed nature. Like that by Martin Shingler and
Cindy Wieringa (1998), his book might best be viewed as a general train-
ing preliminary to the critical analysis of individual programmes, if not an
exemplar of such analysis.
Then there are personal narratives by ‘insiders’,7 such as the memoirs by
two Radio 4 presenters, Sue MacGregor (2002) and Libby Purves (2003).
Both certainly convey an undeniable enthusiasm for and (sometimes
admirably moral) commitment to the medium. But in such accounts little
is articulated about its charm other than its much-vaunted stimulation of
the imagination, which is thought by some to raise it above television aes-
thetically and is attributed to radio’s lack of visual stimulus (and thus has
 INTRODUCTION 7

the secondary virtue of also being cheap). Little is learned about it other
than the facts of random and subjective testimony by an historical witness
to certain institutional events, characters and relationships. Such memoirs
tend to be anecdotal, lacking in anything more analytic or judgemental
than (usually) warm praise and (seldom) tepid criticism for the work of
the author’s colleagues, and, if she is still working within the industry, take
shelter in generally kind discretion.
Where the insider, or ex-insider, writes about the BBC more broadly,
however, it is possible to find a more critical, indeed even axe-grinding,
approach. Robin Aitken, a BBC journalist who worked for a consider-
able time on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, published a book after leav-
ing the corporation, Can We Trust the BBC? (2007), revised and reissued
as Can We Still Trust the BBC? (2013), which is essentially an extended
single-issue polemic to the effect that the BBC’s theoretical commitment
to ‘impartiality’ has not been honoured in practice. Aitken, who makes no
bones about his conservative sympathies, argues that he was very much
out of kilter at the modern BBC, whose institutional mentality is essen-
tially left-of-centre. A considerable portion of his criticism is aimed at the
Radio 4 programme he once worked on, as well as its personnel. The cen-
tral problem in processing Aitken’s claims, however, is not their declared
tendentiousness but is rather more evidential, as he himself acknowledges:
‘The subject relies on impressionistic judgements which will always be
open to dispute; the reader may object that personal judgement, anec-
dote and hearsay are a poor substitute for facts and figures. I agree but
unfortunately it is, mostly, all that are available’ (Aitken 2013: xii). In
fact, the real difficulty for the reader is not the author’s judgement, which
is an inevitable and welcome part of all serious writing, but the largely
undocumented bases on which it rests. This is where Aitken’s journalistic
discourse (which anonymises most of the sources of personal opinion he
quotes, deals with even published material rather cavalierly, and strikes
rhetorical poses which are bound up with his own purely personal history
of dissatisfaction within the organisation) differs fundamentally from that
of academic writing.8 Although there is much more to be said about BBC
news besides issues of its proclaimed ‘impartiality’, Aitken is correct: it is
indeed extremely difficult to understand the workings of any organisation
such as the BBC from the outside, with reference to published sources
alone. But it is also difficult to take very seriously any account of the cor-
poration’s culture, like his, which seems unable to escape the perspective
of a particular individual’s experience.
8 M. DALY

Insider accounts are understandably important to historians of radio, but

it is doubtful whether even a more systematised and objective historical nar-
rative helps us to understand radio any better at the level of the individual
programme. A scholarly history of Radio 4 such as Hendy’s (2007) enor-
mously, if belatedly, enlarges one’s understanding of the technical issues for
the station, of the political and social pressures on it, of its relations to other
media, of the financial constraints within which it works, of the effects on
it of fluctuations in general BBC policy, of the vagaries of scheduling and
(both external and internal) competition, of the influence of strong-minded
or well-positioned individuals at particular points in time, and how the
interaction of all of these elements and others has made it what it is today.
But such knowledge is rather like being well versed in the ins and outs of
the institutional history of Penguin Books. Those facts will not help you
understand the narrative strategies of a Penguin translation of a new novel
by Günter Grass. When that novel is reviewed and otherwise commented
upon, furthermore, the rôle of Penguin Books in constructing its ‘meaning-
ful’ discourse is unlikely to be considered a fertile area of enquiry.
To those who puzzle as to why Literary Studies is seldom institution-
ally incorporated into Cultural Studies (literature is very obviously cul-
tural, after all), I would point to more than the private and intense nature
of reading the written word versus the potentially social, multi-tasking-
capable and more sensually diffuse experience of consuming audio-visual
texts. These, I suspect, are fundamental material differences which con-
tinue to explain why literary critical discourse and the discourse of cultural
analysis approach their respective texts in such different ways. But there
is a more contingent historical explanation also. Literary Studies, in the
period in which it established itself in British universities (1880–1920),
was, ideologically speaking, a product of European liberalism, with all
its stress on individuality and personal freedom. When Cultural Studies
gained an increasingly secure academic foothold in universities in the
period 1960–2000, it defined itself consistently in opposition to the tradi-
tional disciplines of Literary Studies, Art History and Music by taking in
its purview potentially everything they neglected to consider aesthetically
notable. Where they held possession of the culturally hierarchicalised past,
it laid claim to the popular, evaluatively undifferentiated present. Where
they considered the mission of the Arts to be the positive nurturing of
individualised sensibilities, it considered the purpose of culture to be the
shaping of mass consciousness, usually so that it conforms to dominant
ideology or a hegemonic worldview.
 INTRODUCTION 9

The ‘democratic’ and sometimes ‘revolutionary’ impulses which this

growing discipline expressed as it developed, like its open embrace of
political aims in cultural analysis, such as overtly attempting to alter the
mass consciousness it assumes culture to have the social effect of produc-
ing, signalled clearly that it was, theoretically at least, an academic product
of Western Marxism. Yet the implicit understanding of Marxist theory in
play in much cultural analysis often seems to be rather crude and simple.
As media and cultural texts are secondary and ‘superstructural’ phenom-
ena (in a vulgar version of Marxist theory) but the economics of produc-
tion and consumption are primary and thus belong to the determining
‘base’ of society, discovering the mechanisms at work in the production
and consumption of media texts, rather than anything inherent in the
texts themselves, can by a certain logic be said to be the route to their
‘meaning’, ‘meaning’ here understood as how they function ideologically
for mass audiences rather than aesthetically for individual consumers. It is
in their collective ideological effects that Cultural Studies sees the power
of texts, not in anything integral to texts themselves. Nor does any sin-
gle reader’s engagement with these texts appear to Cultural Studies to
be more important than that of another. At best, well informed and/or
highly educated processing of textual material represents merely one unit
of contribution to a mass response and is numerically equivalent to the
understanding of the merely time-killing individual consumer.
Of course, had they shared a similar preoccupation with literature as
a mass capitalist commodity (which, from one point of view, it decid-
edly is) rather than as an ethically imbued medium which can promote
the growth of individualised aesthetic sensibilities (which, from another
point of view, it may well be), traditional liberal literary academics might
in response have joined forces with Cultural Studies: which is to say,
they could instantly have thrown over their close textual readings in
favour of grant-stimulating projects charting the professional working
practices of publishing houses, lending libraries, bookshops and school
teachers of reading, as well as the reading habits, representative opinions,
sub-cultural affinities and susceptibility to the emotional influence of texts
of novel swallowers, poetry gluttons and drama guzzlers or, indeed, those
force-fed the same fare, such as schoolchildren. Very few have done so.
Consequently, a Cultural Studies student tends to need to know things
like who owns News International and how such ownership putatively
influences the ‘meanings’ of its media products; in Literary Studies, mean-
while, a student’s knowledge of who owns Penguin Books would be seen
10 M. DALY

as an irrelevance to their reading of a Penguin poetry anthology. Thus, a

fundamental ideological difference between Literary and Cultural Studies
leads to differing objects of enquiry, different theoretical assumptions,
and predictably diverging conclusions about how cultural texts are to be
viewed, analysed and categorised. For these reasons, I suspect, there are
few stellar exemplars of Marxist literary criticism, yet until recently nearly
every thesis or monograph in Cultural Studies either has been strongly
influenced by or sees a need expressly to qualify its relations to Marxist
theory.9
This is also why most scholarly enquiry on radio has concentrated on
understanding the institutional framework that is part of the encoding,
past and present, of radio programmes, but has shown little concern to
turn its gaze upon the inherent qualities of particular programmes other
than those which produce discernible ‘effects’ in a sufficient mass of lis-
teners. These effects need imply nothing about the aesthetic worth of
the programme ‘determining’ them. A student of any given media text
would not be deterred by a literary critic’s lament that an object of study,
such as advertising or social media, was morally or aesthetically or socially
meretricious, an extra-textual judgement which might indeed suggest that
study of it is all the more socially imperative. The fact remains, however,
that radio has been paid scant scholarly attention by cultural analysts if
we compare film and television. These are now the object of considerable
academic sub-disciplines named Film and Television Studies, but there is
in effect no acknowledged sub-discipline called Radio Studies.
This is probably another accident of historical timing. Cultural Studies,
and the study of the media which takes place under that interdisciplin-
ary umbrella term, was institutionally born in the 1960s, when television
had usurped radio and film as the dominant mass medium as defined by
audience figures.10 Here again, a constitutive difference between Cultural
Studies, concerned almost exclusively with contemporary culture, and
Literary Studies, concerned almost exclusively with texts from previous
epochs, has partly determined the relative neglect of radio within the
former discipline. By the time an academic consensus had arisen which
created the conditions under which a study of radio became a scholarly
possibility, the medium itself was no longer viewed as ‘contemporary’
but suspected to be passé. Hendy (2000: 7) points out, for example, that
this was decidedly the view of Marshall McLuhan, the most influential
media theorist of the 1960s. Just as the compositional, distributive, com-
municative and consumptive specificities of ancient papyrus manuscripts
 INTRODUCTION 11

would seem an unusual object of study within the discipline, because the
medium is redundant nowadays, so too, to many, in its own way, seemed
the study of radio. There is, of course, a deliberate flaw in my compari-
son. Given the remorseless rise of television by the 1960s and the same
decade’s virtual surrender of the radio waves to an ever-rising tide of pop-
ular music, exponentially multiplied but also fragmented by the many new
radio stations brought into existence by progressive deregulation of the
marketplace in the 1970s, radio undoubtedly must have seemed a means
of communication with little serious future, likely to be overshadowed
entirely by the much more sensuously full and technically sophisticated
‘radio with pictures’, television. But, in fact, as is now obvious, radio did
not go the way of papyrus and is unlikely to do so. A principal reason it did
not do so is that twenty-four-hour television is a relatively recent devel-
opment. In the 1960s there was little daytime TV and the audience for
some Home Service programmes actually rose: the audience for ‘Today’,
for example, ‘grew from 3.35 million in 1961 to 4.3 million in 1967’
(Chignell 2011: 85). Chignell’s broader argument (2011: 80–100) is that
radio re-invented itself in the decade, particularly with new (and abiding)
programme formats, the expansion of radiophonic techniques (especially
in news gathering), innovations in working practices (such as involving
presenters of programmes in their writing and research), a greater pro-
pensity to tackle controversial social and political issues, the move away
from ‘mixed programming’ by the generic streamlining of stations (for
example, into Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4), and the introduction of local radio.
Other definable reasons for the continued survival of radio in the face of
televisual competition include the fact that wall-to-wall TV remains very
mixed in quality, that it is difficult to combine TV viewing with other
activities, and that TV, even today, is not very mobile. A credible argument
has even been made that the intrinsic properties of radio make it better for
delivering higher intellectual content (Crisell 2006: 3–19).

III
Cultural Studies has been sluggish in recognising the sustained presence
of radio, even if its influence can never be the same as the singular power it
wielded for much of the first half of the twentieth century. That said, there
has been something akin to work of the kind I propose, which has shown
some preparedness to concentrate more specifically on the discourse of
individual radio productions. This is an especial merit of the handful of
12 M. DALY

existent studies of radio drama, a form of programming which Radio 4

has always broadcast in large quantities, although more ‘high’ drama is
produced, much less frequently, for BBC Radio 3. There have been stud-
ies of BBC radio drama, though hardly all of it originating with Radio 4,
by John Drakakis (1981), Peter Lewis (1981), Ian Rodger (1981), Tim
Crook (1999) and Dermot Rattigan (2002). But in these volumes we
persistently encounter another of the seeming obstacles to radio study.
Although recordings of many old broadcasts of radio drama do exist in
the BBC sound archive, and therefore the performances have theoretically
been reproducible on CD or now via the World Wide Web, and those
recordings are likely to be of an appreciably high artistic and technical
standard, there would seem to be no market demand for them of the kind
that can be seen for many BBC television series in the High Street avail-
ability of DVDs. The world-wide community of radio recording enthusi-
asts with a liking for drama does not seem to be large enough to sustain
even a minor underground samizdat-type trade in the thing. Few radio
dramas are available to the illegal BitTorrent downloader, rich as he can
very quickly become in pirated television series, movies and music. One
can, it is true, find many of Alan Bennett’s radio plays on BBC CDs, and
plenty of BBC Shakespeare broadcasts of various eras, and some modern
BBC radio dramatisations, such as those of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
But one will struggle to obtain audio copies of its adaptations of plays
written by Edward Bond.
Thus, the analyst of radio drama, rather like the analyst of any one-off
artistic performance, cannot expect his or her readers to have or be able
easily to acquire direct knowledge of many or most of the radio plays he or
she discusses. Inevitably, therefore, discussions of radio drama, facilitated
as they are by relatively privileged or ‘insider’ access to an appropriate
archive,11 have a tendency to be wordy on relating historically how an
individual drama got to be made or on describing its audio-performative
qualities and the technical means by which they were achieved, both ten-
dencies which threaten to return us to the encoding end of the spectrum.
Alternatively—and this is what I find most interesting about them—they
veer into decoding territory where they resort to conventional literary
critical discussion of the thematics or characterisation or dramatic action of
the play, all of which can be abstracted from their presentation by means of
radio and can more easily be conveyed and discussed by academic writing
than can a soundscape.
 INTRODUCTION 13

Indeed, one would commonsensically assume that most listeners to

radio drama are not prepossessed by questions which centre on how, tech-
nically, sound has been engineered to dramatic effect or what the budget
for the production is, who is directing it, or how the editing process may
have affected its content. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of witnesses
to drama in the theatre, on television and in the cinema. They are more
likely to be asking questions about the plot, speculating about the con-
vincingness of the characters or the acting, or enjoying the playwright’s
use of language. But to concentrate on these aspects risks abandoning
a somewhat precious notion which radio drama commentators tend to
wish to establish, namely that ‘radio drama’ is in some fundamental way
distinct from ‘television drama’, ‘film drama’, or, though the term sounds
odder than the others, ‘theatre drama’. In fact, I would argue, there is
only ‘drama’. A small number of individual productions are by their nature
realisable only by audio means. Where these are broadcast by radio we
might call them ‘radio dramas’ in a quite specific sense. A good example
would be Orson Welles’s American radio adaptation (1938) of The War of
the Worlds, which could not have had the convincing effect on audiences
it reputedly did if its ‘action’ had been visually simulated for television.
Likewise, some drama is only realisable on celluloid or video—such as
plasticine-character-based animation, as used in the Wallace and Gromit
adventures, which could hardly succeed on radio—and might properly
be called film or TV drama. These depend on visual ostension because
their content must be ‘shown to the audience rather than merely described,
explained or defined’ (Crisell 1994: 144).
But Crisell (1994: 148) also commendably points out what is often
ignored about ostension in theatre, TV or cinematic drama, namely that
it is not just visual, but almost always auditory as well. In fact, as he states,
all drama is ostensive in terms of sound or vision or both. In some fora
(like the theatre or the cinema) it combines visible and audible ostension,
in some modes (like mime) it is solely visual, and on radio it is exclusively
auditory. Crisell concludes rightly that ‘the difference between conven-
tional drama and radio drama is merely one of degree: in the former there
is likely to be a greater proportion of ostension and in the latter a greater
proportion of description’ (151). As he consequently (161) argues, along
with other writers on radio drama (Drakakis 1981: 28; Lewis 1981: 8,
81), the form is in this respect closer to imaginative literature than is con-
ventional drama.
14 M. DALY

Nonetheless, the basic truth is that most drama is realisable, with

appropriate technical adaptations (or in semiotic parlance, media-specific
codifications), in the theatre, on TV, in the cinema, or on radio. Indeed,
dramatisations of ‘literary classics’, written originally to be read, as well as
nearly all ‘classic’ drama, originally written for performance in the theatre,
can be found in every performative medium—on stage, small screen, big
screen, and on the airwaves, in live physical performance, on video tape, on
celluloid and on audio tape. There is, then, little that is specifically radio-
phonic about most drama. It follows that most discussion of radio drama
would benefit from the same kinds of approaches one might witness in
literary critical discourse on drama, especially as the printed texts of many
plays originally written for radio are easily available, unlike the recordings
of their original radio performance. This seems to be exactly the intuition
behind the rightful neglect of production processes in Elissa Guralnik’s
(1996) study of the radio plays of a variety of modern dramatists. It is
most likely why Rattigan’s (2009) Ph.D. thesis was entitled Radio Drama
as Aural Literature. Indeed, Shingler and Wieringa (1998: 73–93) make
the case that the processing of radio language in general (and not just
in radio drama) is closer to the processing of literary language than it is
to that of any other discursive form because of the entire dependence of
both on ‘the mind’s eye’ for the reader’s/listener’s imagined visualisation,
given the almost exclusively linguistic constraint the two media share in
generating meanings.
It is difficult, certainly, to think that the methods of a media sociolo-
gist or a radio historian could appreciably enhance listeners’ enjoyment
or understanding of a specific radio drama. Listeners’ curiosity to know
what went into the technical production of a radio drama, or the insti-
tutional practices which affected it, when they themselves cannot even
hear the original recording, is likely to be low. Indeed, I cannot imagine
that even listeners who have access to the originals would be more than
trivially interested in their institutional or technical preconditions, just as
the ‘bonus’ discs which come with many DVDs, and habitually include
a video programme on ‘the making of’ the main feature, regularly go
unwatched. The play itself, or more specifically its linguistic text and its
oral delivery, rather than the hardly permeable penumbra of its complex
encoding for radio, would seem to be the thing wherein we catch the main
attention of the listener.
It is in discourse analysis as applied to broadcasting that I have found the
approach closest to my own preferred method, at least in its predilection
 INTRODUCTION 15

for the decoding end of the communication spectrum, if not in its par-
ticular practices of decoding. I should say from the outset, to avoid any
wrongful supposition, that the present study is not an exercise in discourse
analysis. Discourse analysis and the related procedures known as prag-
matics are forms of enquiry within the field of linguistics, where they are
sometimes embodied in a quite forbidding specialist jargon and notation,
which I have largely eschewed in this study for the sake of the reader
unversed in its ways. Nor is my focus in this study narrowly to do with lan-
guage or primarily to taxonomise the dynamics of linguistic performance
and exchange within a specific medium, although of necessity the object of
my scrutiny takes a mainly linguistic form. But insofar as broadcasting can
be conceived of as a species of ‘talk’, discourse analysis does apply schol-
arly and intellectual procedures to specific broadcast phenomena rather
than recounting history about or investigating the shaping influence of
their institutional setting. It does so in pursuit of a principle about the
media’s use of language which Steven E. Clayman puts as follows: ‘While
the domain of discourse is no doubt responsive to prior bureaucratic and
ideological processes, it is not wholly reducible to such factors; it has its
own intrinsic organizational integrity’ (Scannell 1991: 71).
I agree completely with Clayman here. However, the growing body of
media discourse analysis seldom distinguishes very strongly between radio
language and the language of other media. Since the publication of one
of the earliest volume-length studies, Broadcast Talk, now more than two
decades old, one often finds discourse analysis pursued in such a way that
‘no methodological distinction is drawn between radio talk and television
talk – both are treated under the rubric of broadcasting’ (Scannell 1991:
11). To be sure, Paddy Scannell is far too sophisticated not to qualify the
seemingly blithe assumption allegedly underpinning his collection, namely
that ‘Television is radio with vision added’ (Scannell 1991: 11). Elsewhere
in his Introduction, for example, he notes, ‘TV camera angles and move-
ments clearly generate implicatures – about, for instance, the status of the
relationship between speaker(s) in the studio and viewers in their homes.
The camera monitors the faces of speakers and hearers in displayed televi-
sion talk for corroborative evidence of participants’ personality, state of
mind and alignment (or otherwise) with what’s going on’ (Scannell 1991:
6).12 But none of this ‘monitoring’ is possible on radio, and it would seem
to suggest that ‘vision added’ is not simply a straightforward supplement
to auditory talk. In fact, vision adds whole new realms of meaning to
what can be heard, so much so, in fact, that it is possible, on television, at
16 M. DALY

points where the visual alone ‘tells its own story’, to have something radio
cannot countenance, namely the absence of talk for relatively extended
periods. Compare, for example, the linguistic commentary of any televised
sporting event with the discourse of its ever more linguistically dense live
commentary on radio. Imagine, along the same lines, the impossibility of
covering on radio certain sports (snooker, say) which are such a chromatic
or kinetic delight to their televisual audiences. My own consequent view
is that television talk can hardly be treated as anything more than roughly
analogous to radio talk. It can hardly be treated as the same. Its conjunc-
tion with vision renders the species of talk in each medium much more
distinct than Scannell, for his purposes, seems prepared to admit. The real
reason, of course, that discourse analysts write about ‘broadcast talk’, and
lump radio together with television, is that it maximises the educational
market for their publications: books on TV studies have a much larger
potential audience than books about radio.13
But that is not the only deficiency. To conceive of the language of radio
as ‘talk’, even one whose style and manner are driven performatively ‘to
approximate to the norms not of public forms of talk, but to those of
ordinary, informal conversation’ (Scannell 1991: 3), is to underestimate
significantly how much of this talk, even after more than half a century
of accommodation to the domestic conditions of most radio listening,
is in fact scripted. Radio 4 news headlines are spoken announcements of
written text, and fuller news reports are also often read out, no matter
how skilfully they may be performed to seem orally spontaneous or be
integrated with unscripted interview material which is not accompanied
by written prompts. The same can be said of nearly all the station’s docu-
mentary, drama, weather and shipping forecasts,14 trails, and a great deal
of its quizzes, game shows and comedy. Monologic talks and readings
from texts are expressly understood as, and could hardly be mistaken for
being anything other than, oral performances of written texts. Indeed, it
is only in live interview segments or round-table discussions, which form
the minority of the station’s output, that the Radio 4 listener can enjoy
the illusion of overhearing conversation.15 Many interview segments are in
fact not even live, and some broadcast discussions are recorded and thus
are subject to editing of the kind that no true conversation could suffer.16
Where recorded material is offered as brief soundbites, as in news bulle-
tins, selected and torn from their original discursive context, all illusion of
spontaneous linguistic exchange is lost. A great deal of the station’s output
is self-evidently not what Erwin Goffman (1981) called ‘fresh talk’. Radio
 INTRODUCTION 17

4 is in fact seldom referred to as ‘talk radio’, perhaps because it is largely

not talk at all. For the most part, it is orally performed text or ‘spoken
word’. In what follows, then, when I discuss the discourse of Radio 4
output, it is not under the misapprehension that most of it is spontaneous
or even seeming-spontaneous talk.17

IV
If the serious study of radio programmes is long overdue, it is of course
also the case that such study has hitherto faced material obstacles which
have only truly disappeared in the digital age. Until the advent of the
twenty-first century, the broadcast quality and hence listenability of radio
were subject to all kinds of local and regional vicissitudes. I first heard
Radio 4 as a teenager growing up in the west of Scotland where, in early
1980s, it could be heard only in mono, with substantial atmospheric inter-
ference, on the long wave (LW) band. I later lived in England, where I
could pick it up more clearly on FM but, until I had an FM aerial on the
roof of my home, a static-free stereo signal remained impossible even on
the best hi-fidelity equipment (one had to switch to mono to eliminate
white noise), and in a sequence of workplace offices (six in all, I recall)
I was entirely unable to get a sustainable FM signal, even with an FM
aerial built into the receiver. All of this changed with DAB (digital audio
broadcasting), by means of which crystal-clear stereo audio is streamed as
data (not as a signal) to an appropriate set, which itself now usually comes,
unlike many old analogue radio sets, with an audio-out jack which permits
closed circuit recording if connected to a suitable recording device.
The recording devices themselves have also been revolutionised. For the
individual home listener of the past, the possible extent of uninterrupted
recording of radio was one hour, the maximum duration of one side of
commercially available cassette tapes. Recording for up to seven or eight
hours was possible if one had access to an old fashioned reel-to-reel tape
machine, but these were exorbitantly expensive to buy, heavy and cumber-
some to use, and the tape was also increasingly expensive and difficult to
store. I personally know no one who ever recorded radio at home by this
means. I discovered that it was technically possible (although you needed
to be a little mechanically knowledgeable to take this route) to record up
to eight hours of continuous radio at a time by connecting a radio to the
audio-in channel of a conventional VCR, using a four-hour VHS cassette
set to tape at half speed. But the storage of these large cassettes remained
18 M. DALY

a problem and they dictated, most inelegantly, that playback had to be

through a television set, which is for some reason rather analogous to
cooking a microwave meal in a conventional oven—it is possible, but it
just feels wrong.
But from the early 1990s relatively cheap personal computers, if they
had sufficient hardware resources, could be used to make digital record-
ings which were of extremely high quality. In the present century, once
coupled with audio compression software and hard disk storage of poten-
tially limitless capacity, even the least powerful of domestic PCs enable
recordings also to be of extremely long and uninterrupted duration and
susceptible to easy editing. Moreover, with a radio source permanently
switched on and connected to the PC, recording and archiving can be
automated by means of software which regulates the commencement and
cessation of recording and the saving of the recording to a compressed
audio file which takes up relatively little disk space. One can even use the
PC for other routine tasks while it performs these hitherto unimaginable
feats of audio capture. Indeed, the PC itself can be the sound source as well
as the recorder if the digital radio data are streamed live via the Internet,
which means that the entire procedure can take place virtually anywhere
on the globe, even well beyond the traditional broadcast territory of the
station being recorded. For the present study, I used a variety of cheap
laptops (even for an extended period a small low-powered netbook) and
freely available audio software to capture whole days of Radio 4 broad-
casts, in the UK but also in countries as dispersed as Malaysia, China and
the USA. These recordings I usually captured at commercial CD-audio
standard, that is, two-channel 16-bit encoding at 44.1 kHz (kilohertz)
sampling rate per channel, which then were compressed to an MP3 file at
128 kB/s (kilobytes per second). Via these procedures, the 19 hours and
40 minutes of each Radio 4 broadcasting day can be stored, in a format
which offers very high stereo sound quality, on a single data file of about
1.1 GB (gigabytes). With many external hard drives currently available
offering 3 TB (terabytes) capacity, this effectively means that one can store
over 2,700 days (almost six and a half years) of the station’s output on a
device no larger or heavier than a paperback book, all accessible within a
few seconds from a standard PC interface. If one compresses the original
files still further, which is possible by lowering the kB/s or bitrate, one
can store proportionately more material, though at a poorer audio quality.
Moreover, in recent years, the BBC itself has made many of its radio
programmes freely accessible and archivable in MP3 format via the pod-
cast services on its website. For instance, at the time of writing (March
 INTRODUCTION 19

2014), the 102-part series A History of the World in 100 Objects, originally
broadcast between 11 January 2010 and 18 May 2011, can be down-
loaded free and entire, and archived locally and in perpetuity, by anyone
with an internet connection, pretty much anywhere in the world. Radio 4
currently offers approximately one hundred of its programmes (includ-
ing past editions) as indefinitely available podcasts. In addition, all BBC
broadcasts are now supplemented by a stunning and ever-growing wealth
of supplementary material accessible via the BBC website. The material
preconditions for the study of radio output, for so long insurmountable
other than to insiders with privileged knowledge and archival access, have
surely now been met.

V
What follows, then, is the result of somewhat intensive listening and re-
listening to Radio 4 over a period of five years, with an intellectual purpose
as embodied in the present volume in mind. I recognise that this practice
is alien to the everyday experience of ‘ordinary’ radio usage, but academic
scrutiny is not everyday consumption, and mine seems to me no more
unusual than the scrupulous attention paid to their respective texts by
literary scholars, film analysts or television critics.
Having so far only negatively differentiated my approach from estab-
lished methods, however, I should try to indicate more positively how I
have tackled my task. I have acknowledged that sociologists have much
to tell us about broadcast production but virtually nothing to say about
the processes of reception, with the exception of audience studies, which
tell us something of commonplace collective consumption but do not
concern themselves with independent intellectual interpretation. I have
learned much from historians of radio about how Radio 4 came to be
what it is, but they give little guidance on how to read its output in the
present. I have expressed a sense of how I value studies of radio drama,
but I also doubt that all but a small amount of drama is in any definable
sense particularly radiophonic; as shall also become clear, I consider most
Radio 4 drama to be aesthetically mediocre and some of it risible. I have
learned much from discourse analysts, but their linguistic focus is far too
narrow for my purposes. There will be points in what follows, nonetheless,
at which I evidence some debt to all of these approaches.
I do not counter them with a unified, coherent method of my own,
partly because I do not consider that any one method would be appropri-
ate to the varied nature of Radio 4. If there is a spirit which moves me,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Ed infatti vi passa un gran divanò fra l’indispensabile
riconoscimento che far dee la S. Sede della Real Casa
Stuarda, ad esclusione di quella di Hanover da quel
chepassa nel riconoscimento almeno implicito, che fa la
medesima S. Sede di altri Principi Eretici. Per modo di
esempio; il Papa certamente nè tratta nè ha
corrispondenza alcuna coi Rè di Svezia e di Danimarca,
ma ciò unicamente per essere Eglino Eretici, non già
perche loro impugno neghi la legittima successione
dell’essere di Rè; Quindi nei Diarj stessi stampati coll’
approvazione della Corte di Roma, non si fa difficultà di
enunciarli per Rè di Svezia, per Rè di Danimarca; ma nel
caso nostro non solo può il sommo Pontefice trattare
direttamente colla casa di Hanover per essere Eretica, ma
neppur può in alcun modo nè anche tacitamente
riconoscere il Capo di quella per legittimo successore del
Regno d’lnghilterra; Poiche verrebbe in tal guisa a
canonizzare, ed ammettere direttamente per valido e
sussistente il sudetto inique Decreto.
Di tutti questi fatti e principj si è Veduto dal mondo
intero a qual segno era persuasa ed imbevuta la S. Mem.
di Clemente undecimo il quale nell’atto di ricevere, e di
abbracciare con paterno amore la Maestà di Giacomo
terzo, allorchi per suo unico rifugio in virtù dei Frattati di
Pace, ai quali tutti gli altri Principi Cattolici, esclusone il
sommo Pontefice, astretti furono di acconsentire, si portò
nello stato Ecclesiastico, e successivamente a Roma:
Persuaso, dico, il S. Padre ed imbevuto delle sudette
massime e sentimenti non si contentò di riconoscere, e di
trattare la Real Persona di Giacomo terzo per unico e
legittimo Rè d’lnghilterra, ma intendendo di volere nella di
lui Persona riconoscere tutta la Regia sua Prosapia, non
lasciò nè mezzi nè industrie per carcarne la propagazione
ed in consequenza procurargli un legittimo successore:
Epperò effettuato, che fù il matrimonio di Giacomo terzo
colla Principessa Sobieskj; facilitato non poco da qualche
Lettera del Papa scritta all’ Imperadore: Frà pochi mesi
divenne gravida la Regina e circa gli ultimi giorni dell’
anno 1720 trovossi prossima al parto; ed allora il S. Padre
conoscendo da una parte la necessità di dover rendere
incontastabile la legitimazione del Parto, e dall’ altra
intendendo l’obligo preciso, in cui ritrovasi la S. Sede, per
non contradire a se stessa, e per vie più sempre fare atti
protestativi contro l’accennato ingiusto Decreto, di
riconoscere la futura prole qual Erede Presuntivo, e
legittimo successore del Regno d’Inghilterra si accensa a
fare questo atto colla maggiore solennità possibile;
Perlocchi volle il S. Padre, che fossero chiamate per
essere presenti al parto, il Sagro Collegio, il Senato
Romano, i primi Prelati e Principi Romani, e la primaria
Nobilità di Roma; E Siccome la Maestà della Regina
stento a partorire per lo spazio di tre giorni in circa in tutto
questo tempo farono ripiene le Anticamere di Sua Maestà
dei riferti rispettabilissimi Personaggi, i quali
vicendevolmente surrogavansi gli uni agli altri, con avervi
ancora pernottato alcuni dei Signori Cardinali. In mezzo
adunque di consesso così rispettabile nacque ai 31 di
Dicembre dell’anno Sudetto Carlo Odoardo Principe di
Galles riconosciuto per tale e consequentamente per
Erede presuntivo della Corona dal Medesimo sommo
Pontefice, il quale non tardo punto a farlo annunziare a
tutto il Popolo per mezzo dello Sparo del Cannone di
Castello. E qui sia lecito riflettere che se il Rè Giacomo
terzo stato fosse in pacifico possesso del suo Trono, non
poteva il sudetto nato Principe ricevere maggiori onori, ed
atti più declaratorj del suo dritto successivo alla corona. La
sola formalità, che per parte della S. Sede rimanere
poteva al compimento di questi atti si era la tradizione
delle Fascie Benedette solite mandarsi ai soli Eredi
necessarj delle Teste Coronate, non già Elettive, ma
unicamenta successive: Ma perchi cessò di vivere la S.
Memoria di Clemente undecimo, prima che fossero del
tutto terminate le dette Fascie, toccò al di lui successore
Innocenzo tredecimo compire questo ultimo atto, com’ Egli
fece colla maggior Solennità possibile mandando a questo
effetto preciso un obligato con tutte le formalità e
ceremonie solite pratticarsi colle oltre Corti.
Da tutto questo racconto non si può negare che
appariscono nel suo pieno le obligazioni che ha la Real
Casa Stuarda alla S. Mem. di Clemente undecimo, ma
appariscono altrettanto quanto stava a cuore di quel
sommo Pontefice il decoro della S. Sede e come ben
intendeva l’indispensabile necessità da cui era astretta a
Sostenere inviolabili i Dritti della Casa Reale Sudetta:
Videva benissimo il S. Padre, che tutti questi replicati atti
di riconoscimento dovevano necessariamente inasperire il
Governo d’Inghilterra massimamente contro i Cattolici ed
in conseguenza essere in qualche maniera di Ostacolo al
buon successo delle missioni; Capiva altrasi che egli solo
era l’unico Principe Cattolico, che faceva questi atti di
riconoscimento: con tutto ciò tenendo avanti gli Occhi la
giustizia della causa che diveniva punto di Religione,
l’abborrimento che non mai abbastanza poteva rimostrare
la S. Sede al Sopracitato Decreto, e per fine l’obbligo
preciso de’ suoi Successori in non dipartirsi giammai da
quanto Egli faceva a prò di una Famiglia si bene merita
della S. Sede, non esitò punto di eseguirli con tante
Solennità, per mezzo delle quali toglieva a Suoi Medesimi
Successori qualunque ragione di dubbio circa il
trattamento dovuto al Principe di Galles, seguita la morte
del di lui Padre; Giacche sapeva benissimo il sommo
Pontefice che riconosciutosi una volta dalla S. Sede per
Erede presuntivo di un Regno un Figlio, non può mettere
in dubbio alla morte del di lui Padre, che gli Succeda in
tutto, ed in conseguenza nella sua dignita e ne’suoi onori;
In quella guisa appunto, che nell’ Impero (non ostante che
sia stato elettivo) riconosciutosi una volta dalla S. Sede
alcuno Rè de’ Romani non può Ella dispensarsi, Seguita
la morte dell’ Imperadore, dal riconoscerlo per di lui
Successore.
 Pieno pertanto il glorioso Clemente undecimo di questi
giustissimi sentimenti nell’ atto stesso di morire, volle
manifestare a tutto il sagro collegio qual si fosse la sua
premura perchè costantemente si mantenesse quanto Egli
aveva fatto verso la Real Casa, facendogli sù di ciò una
speciale raccomandazione. Fedelissimi e zelosissimi
Esecutori delle Operazioni e del Testamento di un tanto
Papa sono Stati tutti i Pontefici successori principiando da
Innocenzo Tredecimo fino a Clemente Tredecimo
felicemente regnante, tutti hanno trattato e risguardato il
Figlio Primogenito di Giacomo terzo come Principe di
Galles; cioè Successore del Regno d’Inghilterra. Quindi
dacchi il Principe cominciò ad essere ammesso all’
udienza dei Sommi Pontefici non vi è stata mai la minima
difficoltà circa il trattamento, anzi non mettendosi in
dubbio, che trà le altre distinzioni competer gli dovesse
una sedia a braccio simile a quella del Rè suo Padre; (il
che è lo stile della S. Sede verso gli Eredi presuntivi di un
Regno). A questa sola particolarità pregò la Maestà del
Re, che si dovesse derogare in sua presenza a solo ed
unico fine mantenere lo stile del Regno d’Inghilterra, che
porta non possa ne anche il Figlio Primogenito sedere in
ugual sedia col Padre presente, e per aderire a queste
brame della Maestà sua gli è stata sempre data una sedia
Camerale di appoggio, ma bensì senza bracci.
Rimane ora ad esaminare le contradizzioni, ed assurdi,
che ne seguirebbero ogni qual volta la S. Sede negasse di
riconoscere il Principe di Galles per legittimo successore
del Rè suo Padre alla morte di medesimo; Sarebbero
questi fuor di dubbio senza numero, nè si facile sarebbe
l’accennarli tutti; pure ne scorreremo alcuni. E
Primieramente siccome il Principe di Galles per lo spazio
ornai di 45 anni e stato in possesso del titolo e delle
prerogative di Principe di Galles, non si gli passono ora
negare, o sia egli presente o sia assente, senza derogare
e contradire espressamente agli atti più solenni di sei Papi
consecutivi. In Secondo luogo ne seguirebbe, che quella
medesima, Persona, alla quale la S. Sede oggi dà
trattamento e risguarda come Principe di Galles (che vale
a dire successore naturale del Regno d’Inghilterra, come
lo e il Delfino in Francia, ed il Principe di Asturias in
Spagna) domani verrendo a morte del Padre, se si ricusa,
quando Ella ne da parte, di riconoscerla come succeduta
al Padre medesimo nella dignità ed onori col fatto si nega,
che sia stato Principe di Galles. In terzo luogo qual
trattamento potrà darsi, morto il Padre, al Sudetto
Principe? Forse di Principe di Galles? Ma si avverta ch’
Egli non lo è più. Dunque o gli compete lo stesso
trattamento ch’ aveva il Padre a cui è succeduto, o
converrà dire che non gli competeva per tanti anni il titolo,
e le prerogative di Successore. Quarto, Affinche il Papa
faccia una innovazione di questa natura contradittoria ed
opposto allo Stabilimento di suoi Antecessori vi vuol
qualche causa quale certamente non vi è ni vi può essere;
poichè se alcuno di Principi Cattolici sono stati costretti a
retrocedere dal riconoscere la Real Casa Stuarda per
legittimo Erede e Successore del Regno d’Inghilterra; è
avvenuto in consequenza dei diversi trattati di Pace col
presente Governo d’Inghilterra che li metteva in necessità
di riconoscere la Successione Eretica com’ era stata
stabilita dal famoso Decreto del Parlamento: Ma tal causa
ogn’ un ben vede che non può addursi dal S. Padre in
alcun modo: Egli non ha mai fatto, nè puo fore trattati di
alcuna sorta co’ Principi Eretici; Egli neppure ha aderito in
questa parte ai sudetti trattati di Pace di altri Principi:
Sopra tutto Egli non hà potuto mai nè può riconoscere per
valido, o sussistente il famoso riferito Decreto contro del
quale, come si è accennato di Sopra, serve
d’incontrastabile protesta il continuato riconoscimento
della Casa Reale Stuarda. Anzi da qui verrebbe il quinto
assurdo di gravissimo pregiudizio alla S. Sede, e con
ammirazione di tutti i buoni, mentre cessando di
riconoscere il Principe di Galles come successore del Rè
suo Padre, verrebbe il Papa in certa maniera a rivocare
tutte le proteste fatte da’ suoi Antecessori, e se ne
inferirebbe una pregiudizievolissima consequenza; Cioè
che quando in un stato Eretico il Principe si faccia
Cattolico sia in facoltà di Sudditi per questo solo motivo di
escluderlo dal Principato. Sesto, che non vede l’assurdo
gravissimo, che ne succederebbe ne’ pubblichi Diarj
stampati fin’ ora coll’ autorità della S. Seda sempre per lo
spazio di tanti anni in una stessa Maniera? Sotto il Titolo
d’Inghilterra dovrà forse Scriversi Giorgio Terzo? Ma
questo non si può, mentre non vi ha mai avuto luogo, ne
può l’essere riconosciuto per Rè dal Papa. Dovrà dunque
lasciarsi sotto il sudetto titolo Carlo Odoardo Principe di
Galles—Enrico Benedetto Duce di York. Ma il Padre dov
è? Se egli è morto, non vi è più Principe di Galles. Dunque
questo Titolo non gli compete. Sicchè o bisogna indicarlo
per Rè o bisogna cassarlo, è cassare anzi per sempre il
titolo d’Inghilterra, come se più non vi fosse.
Rimane finalmente ad esaminare, se nelle circostanze
presente della S. Sede riconoscendo il Papa in caso di
morte del Rè Giacomo Terzo il di lui figlio già per tanti anni
in possesso del titolo e delle prerogative di Principe di
Galles per di lui successore nelle dignità ed onori, possa a
giusta ragione ciò chiamarsi novità. Chi scrive si appella al
mondo tutto, ai nemici medesimi della casa Reale, ma già
da questi stessi sente replicarsi ad una voce, che sarebbe
anzi novità per la S. Sede fare il contrario, sarebbe
contradizione a se stessa, sarebbe approvare ciò che non
può approvare, e per fine si usarebbe una grandissima
ostilità alla casa Reale in benemerenza di avere sagrificati
trè Regni per la S. Fede, privandola col fatto del solo asilo,
in cui possa risedere con decoro, e di cui è stata in
possesso per il decorso di tanti anni. Ne vi è certamente
Principe Cattolico che non conosca per tutti i motivi
sopradetti l’indispensabile necessità in cui trovasi la S.
Sede di non fare altrimenti, e capiscono tutti benissimo
che niun Principe è tenuto a render conto all’altro delle
Operazioni, che Egli fa, particolarmente quando sono
conseguenze, e principj del proprio Stato: Ed in effete non
ostante che tutti i Principi Cattolici in corpo abbiano
ultimamente ricusato di riconoscere il Rè di Polonia, ed il
solo Papa con due Principi Eretici lo abbiano riconosciuto:
Quale però de’ Principi Cattolici ha fatto mai querela sù di
ciò al S. Padre, o facendola non fosse per contentarsi di
una si giusta risposta, qual sarebbe, che il Papa non è
obligato a render ragione delle sue operazione in alcune
circostanze; che in questo non ha fatto altro, che seguire
le massime, ed i principj della S. Sede: e finalmente, che a
lui basta, che gli costi della validità dell’ Elezione, e delle
dovute convenienze usate al suo nunzio, e per
conseguenza alla sua Persona?
Ma nel caso nostro sempre cresce l’argomento, poichè
il riconoscimento di un Rè di Polonia potrebbe ammettere
qualch’ esame, o discussione, ma qual discussione o
esame può mai richiedersi nel riconoscere la legittima
successione di un Figlio al Padre dopo la sua morte nelle
di lui prerogative ed onori? Non è già questo
riconoscimento come quello in realtà, atto nuovo ma bensì
una sola necessaria conseguenza di quello, che già fù
stabilito da tanti anni dai sommi Pontefici, allorchì
riconobbero il Figlio di Giacomo Terzo. E tutti gli
argomenti, che addurre si potrebbero, acciochè la S. Sede
facesse una simil novità di dispensarsi dal riconoscere il
Principe di Galles alla morte del di lui Genitore per suo
legittimo successore, potevano addursi, ed avevano anzi
maggior forza per impedire il riconoscimento del
medesimo, in qualità di Principe di Galles dalla S. Mem. di
Clemente undecimo con tutte quelle circostanze e
solennità già riferite, mentre in quei tempi il Papa fù il Solo
Principe Cattolico, che riconobbe il Figlio di Giacomo
Terzo per Principe di Galles. E quantunque la casa di
Hanover si avvedesse che questo atto fosse un impegno
preso dalla S. Sede (come certamente lo era) di doverlo in
appresso riconoscere per legittimo successore del Padre
dopo la di lui morte, ciò non ostante non apportò alcuno di
quei cattivi effetti, forse ideati, o tenuti da alcuna Persone
poco informate e prattiche dello stato delle cose in quel
Regno.
Chi ha scritto questa memoria in ultimo si dichiara, che
non ha avuto altro scopo, che togliere i scrupoli di alcuni
poco intesi delle cose del mondo, e ribattere le difficoltà
che forse suscitar si potrebbe dai nemici non meno della
Casa Reale, che della S. Sede. Del resto i protesti
veramente tenuti alle continue dimostrazioni di Paterno
amore, e clemenze usate dalla Santità di nostro Signore
felicemente regnante verso tutta la sudetta casa Reale,
che non può neppur sospettare, che mancando a suoi
tempi il Rè Giacomo Terzo voglia punto deviare dalle
savissime traccie indicatigli da suoi gloriosi Antecessori.
Nota:—Siccome dopo stesa la presente memoria, pur
troppo non ha mancato più di uno di mettere in dubbio i
sentimenti della santità di nostro signore felicemente
Regnante verso la Real Casa, quasi che fossero
totalmente diversi da quella de’suoi antecessori, ed in
conseguenza potersi supporre essere un semplice
complimento verso la Santità sua quel tanto che con
fiducia si viva presuppone l’Estensore nell’ ultimo della
memoria perciò lo stesso ha creduto uno preciso dovere
di giustizia, ed insiemi di gratitudine rispettosa verso li S.
Padre d’inserire in fine questa stessa memoria tutte le
lettere, che possono aver rapporto alla presente
risoluzione presa dal Real Principe di Galles di ritornare in
questa Capitale; e siccome apparisce più chiaro della luce
del sole, quali siano i sentimenti precisi del S. Padre verso
la Real Casa, e la Persona del Real Principe di Galles
sudetto tanto autenticamente manifestati, così lo stesso
Estensore crede non esservi bisogno di glossa per far
conoscere quanto siano insussistenti, e false le precorse
assertive, e con quanta ragione e fondamento abbia
rimostrato l’Estensore tutta la fiducia e sicurezza nei
sentimenti della Santità sua e quanto li abbia ben
compresi il Real Principe di Galles, giacchè unicamente in
virtù de’ medesimi si è accinto alla risoluziona di restituirsi
a Roma.

Translation[645]
Concerning the indispensable necessity of recognition,
by the Holy See, of the Royal House of Stuart, as the sole
and legitimate successors to the Kingdom of England, and
concerning the inconsistencies and incongruities which
would ensue, should she follow the contrary course, being
one which would little become the dignity of the Holy See.
He who presents this Memorial wishes to state the
case briefly, basing his reasonings on public and well-
known facts. No one in the world is ignorant of the fact
that King James II. was hunted from his throne in odium
Religionis. The very people who were scheming for his
expulsion would have been the last to deny two infallible
principles. The first—that the Kingdom of England was, of
its nature, an hereditary one; the second, that the Royal
Person of James II. was the lawful successor. Wishing
therefore to find an adequate pretext for deposing him,
without destroying the right of succession, which is, by
law, unalterable, they, to serve their own ends, brought
forward the question of the establishment in the kingdom,
already made by law, of the Anglican Religion; and making
as their chief complaint, that the fact of the king being a
Catholic placed that law in constant and imminent peril of
destruction and subversion, they made an Act of
Parliament in which, while claiming to explain the spirit of
the laws of succession, they declared at the same time
that it was not fitting that any one whosoever should
succeed who was of the Catholic Religion, or who did not
conform to the dominant religion.
By virtue of this Act, then, were James II. and his
Catholic offspring deprived of the throne, and his nearest
Protestant relative was called to succeed to it, whose line
has continued to do so even to our own days, not only in
the persons of James ii.’s two daughters, who were
Protestants, but also in those of the Princes of the House
of Hanover, these being the nearest Protestant heirs; in
proof of this, any one who has knowledge of the history of
the princes of this century knows that the Princess Anne,
called by them Queen, wishing to show favour to her
brother James III., to the exclusion of the House of
Hanover, sent accredited persons to try to persuade him
to declare himself a Protestant, and to remove, in this
manner, the only obstacle that stood in the way of his
possession of his kingdom: but that special grace of God,
which gave strength to his father, James II., to sacrifice
three kingdoms for the Holy Faith, likewise gave strength
to his son to refuse courageously any such means of
regaining them.
This, one may take for granted, is an undoubted fact,
that then, as now, the Holy See is bound by no Treaty of
Peace, in the arranging of which, by means of her
Ministers, she has had no voice, and how much less does
she approve of any act that can, either directly or
indirectly, infringe on her rights and those of Holy Church,
the head of whom is the Supreme Pontiff, the Vicar of
Christ: rather should such arise she would make fitting
protests.
Now can it be questioned that any public decree could
be more directly contrary to our Holy Faith, and
consequently could infringe more seriously on the rights of
Holy Mother Church, than that of which we are treating, by
means of which the rights of Succession are denied to any
one happy enough to be one of her sons? Hence it is that
the Supreme Pontiffs, beginning with Innocent xi. of pious
memory, did not deem it necessary to make any explicit
protest against such an iniquitous decree, contenting
themselves instead with the continued recognition which
the Holy See has always accorded to the Royal House of
Stuart, as the sole and legitimate successors to the
throne, so that the Holy See came to regard this Decree
(to which, had she refused to recognise the legitimate
Catholic successors, she would have been indirectly and
tacitly agreeing,) as null.
And indeed, there is a great comparison to be drawn
between the recognition given by the Holy See to the
Royal House of Stuart, to the exclusion of the House of
Hanover, and that which this same Holy See accords to
other heretical princes; as, for example, the Pope certainly
is in no treaty, and has no correspondence with the Kings
of Sweden and Denmark, but this is solely because they
are heretics, not because he denies in any way their
legitimate right to their succession. Thus, in the papers
printed with the approbation of the Court of Rome, no
difficulty is raised as to speaking of them as King of
Sweden and King of Denmark; but in the case in point, the
Most High Pontiff treats directly with this heretical House
of Hanover, though he cannot by any means recognise its
head as the legitimate successor to the Kingdom of
England, so that in this manner he is ratifying the
aforesaid iniquitous decree, and directly admitting it as
valid and real.
It is plainly seen by the whole world how deeply
imbued with these facts and principles was Clement xi. of
blessed memory, who, when His Majesty King James III.
turned to him as his only refuge (on account of the Treaty
of Peace, to which all the Catholic princes, with the
exception of His Holiness, were constrained to consent),
carried him away to the Papal States, and afterwards to
Rome: the Holy Father, I say, fully imbued with and
convinced of the aforesaid sentiments and truth, did not
content himself with simply recognising and treating the
royal person of James III. as the sole and legitimate King
of England, but, wishing to recognise also all his royal
progeny, he spared no trouble to ensure that the
propagation of the line should be carried on, in order to
procure him a legitimate successor. This was effected by
the marriage of James III. with the Princess Sobieski;
which was not a little facilitated by letters written by the
Pope to the Emperor. In a few months it became known
that the hopes for an heir were to be realised, and towards
the last days of the year 1720, as the time of his birth
approached, the Holy Father knowing on the one side the
necessity of rendering the legitimacy of the birth
indisputable, and on the other, realising that the Holy See
must in nowise contradict herself, but must act in such a
manner as to show most decidedly her protest against the
unjust Decree, by recognising the future offspring as heir-
apparent and legitimate successor to the throne of
England, he took upon himself to see that this event
should take place with the greatest possible solemnity;
and therefore, by the wish of the Holy Father, there were
called to be present at the birth, the Sacred College, the
Roman Senate, the highest Roman Princes and Prelates,
and the foremost nobility of Rome; and although there was
a delay of three days before the birth took place, during
the whole of this time the ante-rooms of Her Majesty were
filled with these most venerable personages, who relieved
one another by turns, while some of the Cardinals sat up
each night. Thus, in the midst of so honourable an
assembly was born on December 31st of the aforesaid
year, Charles Edward, Prince of Wales, acknowledged as
such, and consequently as heir-apparent to the Crown, by
the Supreme Pontiff himself, who without delay had the
birth announced to all the people by means of a salute
from the cannon of the castle. And here it is allowable to
reflect that even had King James III. been in peaceful
possession of his throne the aforesaid newly-born Prince
could not have received greater honours, nor could his
right to succeed to the Crown have been proclaimed more
unquestionably. The only formality which could have put a
finishing touch to the rest was the traditional Delivery of
the Swaddling Clothes, which it was the custom to send
only to the heirs of crowned heads (and then only to those
reigning by succession, not by election): but, as Clement
xi. of pious memory died before this matter was
concluded, it fell to his successor, Innocent xiii., to
complete it, which he did with all possible solemnity,
sending an ambassador, with all the formality and
ceremonies observed with other Courts.
From all this, it cannot be denied that the obligations
under which the Royal House of Stuart lay to Clement xi.
of blessed memory are very plainly shown, but it is also
shown just as plainly how much His Holiness had at heart
the dignity of the Holy See, and how well he realised the
absolute necessity by which he was bound to sustain the
rights of the aforesaid Royal House inviolable. The Holy
Father saw plainly that all these repeated acts of
recognition must necessarily greatly embitter the English
Government against the Catholics, and, in consequence,
must, in a manner, be an obstacle to the success of the
missions. He also understood that he alone was the one
Catholic prince who had made this act of recognition. With
all this, keeping before his eyes the justice of the cause
(which was quite apart from the question of religion), the
abhorrence that the Holy See could never sufficiently
show to the aforementioned decree, and, finally, the strict
obligation of his successors never to depart from the line
he had taken towards a family which deserved so much
from the Holy See, he did not hesitate for a moment to
pursue this course with great solemnity, thereby robbing
his successors of any reason of doubt concerning the
treatment owed to the Prince of Wales on the death of his
father; since His Holiness knew well, that once a son was
recognised as heir-apparent by the Holy See, no doubt
could be raised that at the death of his father he should
succeed to everything, and therefore to his dignity and
honours: in the same way that, in the Empire
(notwithstanding its being an Elective State), once the
Holy See recognised any one as King of the Romans, she
could not afterwards, on the death of the Emperor, free
herself from recognising his successor. The mind of the
glorious Clement xi. was so full of these just sentiments,
at the moment of his death, that he wished to show plainly
to all the Sacred College how great was his anxiety that
what he had done towards the Royal House should be
permanently maintained, laying on them a special charge
to that effect. All the succeeding Popes, beginning with
Innocent xiii. down to Clement xiii., now by the grace of
God reigning, have been most faithful and zealous
executors of this trust, and all have treated and regarded
the first-born son of James III. as Prince of Wales;
therefore as successor to the King of England. Hence,
ever since the Prince has been admitted to audiences with
His Supreme Holiness, there has never been the slightest
difficulty as to his treatment, or rather, there has been no
doubt, that among other fitting distinctions, he should
have, as did the king, his father, an armchair (which it is
customary for the Holy See to offer to the heirs-apparent
to a throne). But, in this one particular, His Majesty asked
that a slight modification might be made in his presence,
for the one and only reason of maintaining the custom of
the Kingdom of England, where even the eldest son in the
presence of his father is not allowed to sit in a seat equal
to his: and to comply with His Majesty’s wish, the prince
has always been given an easy chair, but without arms.
There now remains to examine the contradictions and
inconsistencies which would arise each time that the Holy
See refused to recognise the Prince of Wales as legitimate
successor to the king, his father, at the death of the latter.
These would be without doubt innumerable; it would not
be easy to foresee them all, nevertheless we can mention
some. Firstly, that as the Prince of Wales has for the
space of forty-five years been in possession of the title
and prerogatives of Prince of Wales, they cannot now be
denied him, whether present or absent, without derogating
and expressly contradicting the solemn line of action
followed by six successive Popes. In the second place, it
must follow that if the Holy See to-day treats and looks on
this same person as Prince of Wales (that is to say, as
natural successor to the throne of England, as is the
Dauphin to that of France, and the Prince of the Asturias
to that of Spain), and to-morrow hearing of the death of his
father draw back from recognising him as succeeding to
that father in dignity and honours, she thus denies that he
ever was Prince of Wales. In the third place, how could
she then recognise the aforesaid Prince after his father’s
death? Perhaps still as Prince of Wales? But it is averred
that he is that no longer. Plainly then, either he is entitled
to the same treatment as that given to his father, whom he
has succeeded, or, it is only right to say that he has not
been entitled all these years to the prerogatives and rights
of heir. Fourthly, before the Pope could make an
innovation of this nature, so entirely at variance with the
course adopted by his predecessors, it would be
necessary to have some very strong reason, which neither
exists now, nor ever can exist. For, if any of the Catholic
princes have been constrained to draw back from the
recognition of the Royal House of Stuart, as legitimate
successors and heirs to the throne of England, it has only
been in consequence of their entering on different treaties
of peace with the present Government of England, which
has put them under the necessity of recognising the
heretical succession, as established by the famous Act of
Parliament. But no such cause can possibly affect the
Holy Father in any way. He has never made nor can he
make treaties of any sort with heretical Princes: neither
has he ever taken part in the aforesaid treaties of peace of
other princes. Above all, he never has recognised, nor can
he ever recognise, as valid or real, this same famous
Decree, against which, as has been shown above, the
continued recognition of the Royal House of Stuart serves
as an indisputable protest. And from this we come to the
fifth serious inconsistency, which might be most prejudicial
to the Holy See; for if the Pope should cease to recognise
the Prince of Wales as successor to the king, his father, it
is evident, even to his most humble admirers, that he
would be, in a way, revoking all the protests made by his
predecessors, and a very dangerous consequence might
ensue: namely, that should the prince of any heretical
state become a Catholic, it would be within the power of
his subjects, for this one reason only, to deprive him of his
rights and inheritances.
Sixthly, is it not easy to see the serious inconsistency
that would arise in the Public Records, which, up till now,
have, with the authority of the Holy See, been printed for
so many years in the same manner? Under the heading of
England should there then be inscribed the name of
George III? But this is not possible, since he has never
been, nor can be recognised by the Pope as king. Should
there not rather be entered under the above heading—
Charles Edward, Prince of Wales—Henry Benedict, Duke
of York? But where is the father? If he is dead there is no
longer a Prince of Wales, then this title does not belong to
him. Either the title should be that of king, or it should be
abolished, with that of England, as if it no longer existed.
It only remains then to examine whether in the
circumstances in which the Holy See is now placed, the
Papal recognition (as in the occasion of the death of King
James III.) of the son who has been for so many years in
possession of the titles and prerogatives of the Prince of
Wales, as successor in dignity and honours, can, in any
justice be called an innovation. He who writes appeals to
the whole world, even to the enemies of the Royal House,
though even these he can hear declaring as with one
voice that the innovation would rather be, that the Holy
See should act to the contrary; it would be a self-
contradiction, in that it would be showing approbation of
that of which she does not approve, and further, it would
be showing great hostility to the Royal House in return for
its having sacrificed three kingdoms for the Holy Faith, in
depriving it of the only refuge to which it can rightly turn,
and in which it has trusted for so many years. And there is
no Catholic prince who does not well understand how
impossible it would be for the Pope to follow such a
course. They know well that no prince is called upon to
account for his doings to any one else, more particularly
when they concern matters or principles relating to his
own state. And indeed, notwithstanding that all the
Catholic princes in a body have lately refused to recognise
the King of Poland, and only the Pope, with two heretical
princes have done so, the Catholic princes, have, in this
action of the Holy Father found no cause of quarrel, or, if
they have found any, they have been satisfied with the just
remark, that the Pope is not obliged to give any reasons
for his actions under any circumstances, and that, in this
case, he has only followed the rules and principles of the
Holy See, and lastly that it is sufficient for him that he is
satisfied with the validity of the election, and of the
treatment accorded to his ambassador, as representing
his own person.
But in our case, this only strengthens the argument, in
that the recognition of the King of Poland admitted of
some inquiries and discussion, but what discussion or
inquiry can be necessary in recognising the legitimate
succession of a son to a father, after the death of the
latter? In reality there is no comparison between the two
cases, this last recognition being nothing new, but rather
the necessary consequence of the understanding that was
established years ago by the supreme Pontiffs, that they
should recognise the son of James III.
And all the arguments that could be cited, in order that
the Holy See should give herself a dispensation from now
recognising the Prince of Wales as legitimate successor
on the death of his father, might have been brought
forward just as reasonably, and with greater force, to
hinder Clement xi. of pious memory from recognising him
as Prince of Wales, as he did with all ceremony, as has
already been stated, being at that time the only Catholic
prince who did so recognise him. And although the House
of Hanover saw that this act constituted a promise from
the Holy See, which it certainly did, to recognise the prince
as legitimate successor of his father, after the death of the
latter, this, notwithstanding, brought none of those evil
effects (perhaps chimerical) which were feared by some
people who were but ill-informed or little conversant with
the state of affairs in the kingdom.
He who has written this Memorial would have it
understood in conclusion, that he has no other aim in view
than to remove scruples felt by some who know little of the
affairs of the world, and to combat the difficulties that
perhaps might be raised by enemies, not only of the Royal
House, but of the Holy See. For the rest, there has ever
been such continual clemency and fatherly love shown by
His Holiness, now by the grace of God reigning, towards
the whole of the aforesaid Royal House that it is
impossible to believe, on the death of King James iii., that
His Holiness will in any way depart from the most wise
example set by his predecessors of glorious memory.
Note:—As, after the completion of this Memorial there
were not lacking those who cast doubts on the sentiments
of His Holiness, now by the grace of God reigning,
towards the Royal House, suspecting that they differed
from those of his predecessors, and who, therefore, might
consider the lively confidence evinced by the writer in the
latter part of this Memorial simply as an empty compliment
towards His Holiness, this same writer has therefore
considered it a strict act of justice, as well as a tribute of
gratitude and respect, towards the Holy Father, to insert at
the end of this Memorial any letters that bear upon the
present resolution of the Royal Prince of Wales to return to
this capital. And as the exact sentiments of the Holy
Father towards the Royal House and the person of the
said Prince of Wales have been shown more
unquestionably clearly than the light of the sun, so the
writer considers any further comments and explanations
unnecessary, to show how unfounded and false these
suspicions are, and with how much reason and foundation
the writer has relied so surely on the sentiments of the
Holy Father, and how well the Royal Prince of Wales has
understood them, in that it is solely on the strength of the
same, that he continues in his resolve to return to Rome.
 APPENDIX VI
THE MACDONALDS

John, Lord of the Isles (died 1387), fourth in succession from

Donald progenitor of the clan, had two wives: (1) Amy MacRuari; (2)
the Princess Margaret, daughter of Robert ii., to marry whom he
repudiated or divorced Amy. The lordship of the Isles went to the
descendants of the Princess. The hereditary clan chiefship, which
ordinarily descends to the senior heir-male, did not necessarily follow
the title. The lordship of the Isles was taken from the Macdonalds
and annexed to the Crown in 1494, and the question who is supreme
hereditary chief of Clan Donald has ever since been a matter of
strife. Glengarry and Clanranald descend from Amy MacRuari, the
first wife, and are therefore senior in blood, but it is doubtful which of
these two families is the elder; last century the general preference
was for Glengarry, but the new Scots Peerage and the Clan Donald
historian favour Clanranald. Sleat and Keppoch descend from the
Princess Margaret, Sleat coming from Hugh, third son of Alexander,
Lord of the Isles (died 1449), grandson of John, and son of Donald of
Harlaw, while Keppoch comes from the fourth son of John and
Princess Margaret, and could only have a claim if there were a flaw
in the pedigree of Sleat. Doubts have been expressed of the
legitimacy of Hugh of Sleat, but these have been set aside.
Glencoe’s progenitor was Ian, son of Angus Og (died 1330), Bruce’s
friend who fought at Bannockburn, the father of John, Lord of the
Isles, mentioned above, but the Seannachies have pronounced him
illegitimate. From this Ian the Glencoe clan has been known as
MacIan for centuries.
It is interesting to know that in the summer of 1911, the three
hereditary heads of the families having serious claims on the
supreme chiefship of the clan, Glengarry, Clanranald, and Sleat (Sir
Alexander of the Isles), signed an indenture mutually agreeing to