The October Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman THE LAST KINGDOM -- How England Was Made

"If you were alive in 880, the word 'England' would mean nothing," says Bernard Cornwell, author of "The Last Kingdom," his chronicles of Saxon history and the basis for the TV series from BBC now streaming on Netflix. After Rome fell, England splintered into unaffiliated fiefdoms; King Arthur, his Knights, and Tristan and Isolde made it out alive in our imaginations from the dark of ancient Briton. Various Germanic tribes called Saxons invaded in the 5th century. By the 9th, when the story of Uhtred the warrior (above) and King Alfred begins, the Viking Danes had moved in on the Saxon kingdoms and were picking them off -- all except Alfred's in Wessex, where brawn would be outmaneuvered by brains.

Early in that war the Danes had Alfred pinned down in several square miles of swamp until 878 when he called up swords from all over England and inflicted a decisive defeat on joint Danish armies. Alfred's descendants regained the 3 Northern kingdoms of Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria, fulfilling his dream of uniting England under one king (and one God -- Alfred was pious). His foresight and strategic win in 878 (Season 1's conclusion) led historians of the 1500's to call him "the Great". Without Alfred, England might now be Daneland and Danish our mother tongue.

Cornwell (shown below) uses his Saxon adventures to tell the "incredibly untaught " story of how England was won, and he spins good hero in the vein of Horatio Hornblower or loose-cannon Richard Sharpe. (His many historical novels include the Napoleonic era Sharpe tales starring Sean Bean in a lengthy PBS film series.) Cornwell's Saxon chronicles are masterful water and land battle epics -- though you have to dig out from under sword and shield to piece together historical narrative or gain context. Still, it's for exposure to King Alfred and his constructs of civilian order that the TV series has food value, unless gritty battlefield action and strategy is your thing. Then the novels and TV series are total feasts. Season 2 of "The Last Kingdom" is filming now (Series 1 filmed in Wales, Denmark, and Hungary). It contains characters who were real contemporaries of Alfred -- a game of thrones anchored more in history than white-walkers and dragons.

Cornwell's birth father, William Oughtred, dated his lineage back to Northumbria, whence comes our fictional hero Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon, American Horror Story alum), a swaggering, insolent hero born Saxon, bred Dane, accepted nowhere. Through Uhtred the warrior we come to know Alfred's life and his descendants' effort to unite England. Uhtred is a Saxon nobleman's young boy when the Danes capture his homeland of Northumbria; Uhtred Sr. is killed by Dane Earl Ragnar and the boy is taken and raised happily by Ragnar (Peter Gantzler, below, with young Uhtred). Uhtred asks Ragnar why the Danes keep coming to Britain. Ragnar explains that Denmark is wet, harsh, and the ground is so flat and sandy you can't grow a fart. We are here to grow. If you want land and wealth, you have to take it.

As he nears maturity, Uhtred sees his Danish home upended by the murder of Ragnar's family, leaving him and Brida (Emily Cox), a Saxon girl also raised with Uhtred, on the run from Danes who blame him for the murders. The pair make their way to Ubba, a menacing Viking wild man (Norwegian Rune Temte, below) to find that Uhtred's rumored infamy had reached Ubba's ears, making him their mortal enemy. They stay on the run.

Uhtred and Brida head south to Wessex, the only kingdom that remains in Saxon hands. Uhtred wants to recoup his Northumbrian ancestral home and title from the invaders but as a youth he is, in his own words, arrogant and stupid, incapable of ingratiating himself with Alfred (the competent David Dawson, below). Alfred, however, sees a resource in him to learn the ways of the Danes -- they intend to use each other.

When Uhtred and Brida meet the soft-spoken but ruthless leader, we and they get our first glimpse of Alfred's power -- his use of the written word. ("When a man dies, if nothing is written, he is soon forgotten.") His inner sanctum (below) is filled top to bottom with handwritten scrolls describing his actions, findings, translations, and scholarship. (Later Guthrum, a Danish occupier, brandishes one of Alfred's scrolls: "This magic is words without sound -- voices without people; I am going to learn how to use this magic.") Alfred is driven by the order he finds in ancient scholarship, the church, and the law. Uhtred could care less; he thinks Alfred is a pious weakling. But by watching the relationship develop between the paganized Saxon action man and the devout, intellectual king until Uhtred becomes strategist and military leader, you gain the essence of the story.

Cornwell is described by peers as a brilliant writer of battles with "an unflinching approach to bloodshed" (Daily Mail), but domestic relations is not his thing. The TV series succeeds better than Cornwell's first two books in investing the saga with relationships that make you halfway care, while providing tension between Christian and pagan. Aelswith, Alfred's whiny Queen (Eliza Butterworth, below) never stops whispering to Alfred that Uhtred must die because of his heathen ways.

Uhtred has two lovers and a wife in the first season and his women make their mark. Awesome Brida is a brazen warrior and prickly fem; Charlie Murphy's Iseult (below) mesmerizes Uhtred and the camera with a quiet intensity that she also brings to Rebellion, a 4-parter about the Irish Easter Uprising in 1916 (also streaming on Netflix).

The BBC series is executive-produced by two familiars --Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant of Downton Abbey. A third carry-over is composer John Lunn whose score for Kingdom is unimaginably different from DA; Faroese musician Eivor adds unearthly vocals that get one's pagan up. (She hales from the Danish Faroe Islands which have old folk traditions.)

Although Cornwell's novels and the series introduce King Alfred as the foil to the warrior's ambition to recover his birthright, it is Dreymon's handsome Uhtred whose life-force drives the action. We are due for a full-on treatment of Alfred because his achievements were so foundational to modern civics. Alfred created defense and tax systems, borough organization, representative rule, a legal code; his center of scholarship in Oxford became Oxford University. Many millennia and despotic kings later, his organizational achievements became touchstones during the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Victorian era and onward to the present. Perhaps Alfred's good governing will make it into the TV series if renewals are forthcoming, but for now one hopes that Uhtred gets his land back and hangs up his sword.

Note: the Scandinavian seafaring pirates were called Vikings but were referred to as Danes when living in England.

The above post was written by Lee Liberman, 

our greatly valued, monthly correspondent

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9th Century Britain, Bernard Cornwell, British history films, British TV series, historical epics, THE LAST KINGDOM,

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Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman tackles ADMIRAL -- and the epic Dutch naval warrior Michiel de Ruyter

"Our enemies think 

we are too rich and too free" 

Naval hero Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676) is the subject of an unusually big film (for the comparatively small Dutch film industry), ADMIRAL, now streaming on Netflix. Made in 2015 by Roel Reiné, L.A.-based Dutch director (Death Race 2, The Condemned 2), it was second only in cost to Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, although modern CGI helped make it more epic. The largeness is not misplaced, as de Ruyter was, according to one writer, "one of the most amazing seaborne murder machines to ever pound his enemies to death," with seven wars, 40 engagements, and 15 massive full-scale battles under his belt in 55-plus years at sea. He waged and won so much that he became as mythic as Braveheart's hero. He went to sea as a child and grew up into a combat genius. He died in battle at 69, cut down by an enemy cannon ball after having been sent on a suicide mission by political enemies -- or so this film tells us. (On the poster above, shown left to right, are William III, de Ruyter and his wife Anna; below, a portrait of de Ruyter.)

A Dutch maritime and political historian, Gijs Rommeise, denounced the many inventions used to bring de Ruyter's story to life but he does conclude "that the viewer is treated to spectacular battle scenes...and a lavish view of the social, economic and religious life of the Dutch Golden Age." Much of the specialness of Admiral is the wide-angle look at the world of little Netherlands out of sight on the North Sea and out of mind of our own Anglo-American history. Since the film hurls you into an ocean filled with great sea warships and cannon fire debris without much historical context, here is some.

While America was covered in forest and populated by Indians, the Netherlands were appended to Spain by Catholic King Phillip ll until the Protestants of the lowlands revolted in 1572; seven Southern provinces declared themselves independent in 1581 under the leadership of William l, Prince of Orange. The period encompassed by the film (mid-to-late 1600's) was during the Dutch Golden Age. The Netherlands was the only republic in the world and possessed an empire that included New Amsterdam in America (Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrendered it to a British naval blockade in 1664 and the city became New York). Holland was the richest and most urban county in the world. It had the first stock exchange (1602), Rembrandt and Vermeer were part of its flourishing art scene, and its merchant class was prosperous and high in status. (Below is shown the Rembrandt painting of wealthy burghers).

The Dutch economy was based on sea trade, its navy tasked with guarding shipping routes and foiling invasion. They were free-traders, transporting goods around the world minus the trade duties imposed by other nations, costing the coffers and insulting the egos of the monarchs -- England's Charles ll, for instance -- of its larger rivals abroad.

Most significant to Americans, the young Republic was a federation of provinces with a representative federal government seated in the Hague (below). It had two major parties -- Orangists and Republicans. The former were conservative loyalists to King William III (played by Egbert Jan Weeber, above), wanting monarchy restored, while the Republicans were patrons of freedom of speech, religion, and legislative autonomy. Our framers were heavily influenced by the constitution of the Republic of the Dutch United Provinces.

The film meets up with Michiel de Ruyter in middle age. He had already served on whaling ships, progressed to command of vessels hunting raiders and aided in war against Spain. He bought his own ship and got rich as a trader before being redrafted into service, protecting merchant traffic from Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean and battling the English.

A series of wars by the English sought to strangle Dutch trade. De Ruyter (Frank Lammers, shown on poster, top, and three photos below) is 46 when the film opens at the battle of Scheveningen in 1653. Republican Johan de Witt (Barry Atsma) has just been elected prime minister; and as he put it, 'Our enemies think we are too rich and too free' (that's de Witt addressing the assembly, two photos above). The film makes it seem the Anglo-Dutch wars were one long battle during which de Ruyter and his family don't age or change, though from 1653 until his death (see funeral sketch below) 23 years had passed. But what does that matter in the making of a movie hero?

During his political and professional maturity, we see his collaboration with de Witt to modernize the navy and infuse military strategy into naval battles, each more effective than the last. His most daring feat in 1667, in which he invented and deployed his newly trained corps of sea soldiers or "marines", was to sail his war ships up the Thames where they torched half the British fleet and stole flagship, HMS Royal Charles, towing it home as a trophy. King Charles ll was humiliated and met Dutch terms for peace. (Charles Dance, shown below, who plays the British monarch, is only half-seriously said to have been cast to leverage some of Dance's Game of Thrones fame.)

Sanne Langelaar (below, left), as Anna de Ruyter, is not a minor figure eclipsed by her husband's fame. To this production's credit, we see Michiel's life through her eyes, as she yearns for him to stay home yet begs him to rejoin the Anglo war being waged off shore. If he doesn't go, she says, there will be no life to come back to.

Anna's character, the political wrangling at the Hague, and the ongoing naval battles are capped by de Ruyter's majestic funeral. And there you have it. The film lacks a suspenseful Braveheart-like story arc, although the horrific murder of the democratic de Witt brothers was a match to William Wallace's demise. Admiral won't be the best epic you've ever seen, but it will be as entertaining, revelatory, and satisfying to join the Netherlanders in opposing our mutual British enemy in the 1600s, as much as we Americans fought them off in the 1700s.

The above post is written by our 

monthly correspondent Lee Liberman

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ADMIRAL, Dutch film, historical epics, Roel Reiné, sea battles, sea movies, the 1600s, The Netherlands on film,

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