Oxford scholars and the ironies of history

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/31/oxford-scholars-and-the-ironies-of-history

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In light of the debate over the Oriel College statue of Cecil Rhodes (Editorial, 23 December) it is worth drawing attention to the inscription at the foot of Christopher Wren’s London Monument to the Great Fire of 1666. (Originally, this alerted its readers to the continuing threat of the Roman Catholic Church in instigating a similar atrocity, as the Catholic poet Alexander Pope complained in his 1733 Epistle to Bathurst: “Where London’s column, pointing at the skies, / Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lyes.”) Immediately after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, approved by the Tory administration headed by the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington, the text was erased, though the original wording is still accessible (as is the image of the dangerous subversive blowing the destructive wind in the bottom righthand corner of the illustrative frieze of the covert Catholic Charles II’s triumph over the disaster). It seems that those old-style imperialists had quite a complex response to the contradictions and ironies of the history, anticipating in interesting ways the perspective of that bearded Victorian exile, Karl Marx. History and politics are indeed driven by morality, but also by necessity. The point is, however, to understand the relations between the two and reach an intelligent understanding.Simon EdwardsSenior lecturer, Roehampton University

• Dr Robin Russell-Jones (Letters, 31 December) cannot have been paying attention when he was in Cambridge in the 1960s if his impression was that “Oxford provided numerous politicians, almost all Conservative”. He presumably never came across Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins, Richard Crossman, Antony Crosland, Denis Healey, Tony Benn, Michael Stewart, Barbara Castle, Frank Soskice, Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams, Michael Foot, Patrick Gordon-Walker, Anthony Greenwood, Christopher Mayhew, Ivor Richard, Dick Taverne et al, all Labour ministers in the 1960s and all from Oxford. It rather devalues his other musings about Oxford in the current debate on Rhodes. Rhys DavidRedbourn, Herfordshire

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