The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Against popular protests and demonstrations, satiric pasquinate, insults scribbled on walls and the non-cooperation of officials, Adrian found the system too entrenched for him to dislodge.

The conclave, taking no chances, elected another Medici, Cardinal Giulio, who perversely chose the name of the murderous, if able, first Anti-Pope of the Schism, Clement VII. The new Clement’s reign proved to be a pyramid of catastrophes.

Economic gain from disendowing Church properties and eliminating papal taxes interested them as much as doctrine, while doctrinal feuds, reflecting the quarrel of Zwingli and Luther, riddled the movement from the moment it was born.

In 1527 Henry VIII, in the act of so much consequence, asked the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who inconveniently for Clement was the aunt of Charles V. Otherwise the Pope might usefully have decided, like his predecessors, that in such cases expedience was the better part of principle. But Charles V, double monarch of the Empire and Spain, loomed larger than Henry VIII, causing the Pope consistently to refuse the divorce on grounds, as he claimed, of his respect for canonical law. He made the wrong choice, and lost England.

Supreme office, like sudden disaster, often reveals the man, and revealed Clement as less adequate than expected. Knowledgeable and effective as a subordinate, Guicciardini writes, he fell victim when in charge to timidity, perplexity and habitual irresolution.

The rivalry of France and the Hapsburg-Spanish combination was now working itself out in Italy. Trying to play off one against the other after the Italian habit, Clement managed only to gain the mistrust of both and lose a dependable alliance with either.

In the following year at the decisive and climactic battle of Pavia, the Spanish-Imperialists defeated and took prisoner the King of France. Upon this disaster for his ally, Clement reached a new agreement with the Emperor while retaining the secret hope that it would not be long before France would re-establish the balance of power, allowing him to regain his power of maneuver between the two.

A year later, Charles released Francis from prison on condition of his pledge, incorporated in a treaty, to renounce French claim to Milan, Genoa, Naples and everything else in Italy, besides ceding Burgundy. It was not a pledge the proud King of France, once back on his own ground, was likely to obey, nor did he.

By 1527, hardly a part of Italy had escaped violence to life and land, plunder, destruction, misery and famines. Regions that were spared profited from the distress of others.

Clement’s misjudgments having prepared the way, Rome itself was now to be engulfed by war. Imperial forces made up of German Landsknechte and Spanish companies, with a French renegade, the Constable de Bourbon, in command, crossed the Alps to combat the Holy League and take control of Rome and the Papacy, forestalling any similar intent by the French.

Decked in the papal robes, some of Colonna’s men strutted in mockery in the piazza of St. Peter’s. Terms were agreed upon and the raiders withdrawn, following which the Pope, doubtless absolving himself, violated the agreements and assembled sufficient forces to lay waste Colonna properties.

Charles V, bred in Spanish orthodoxy and reluctant to attack the Holy See, agreed to an eight-month armistice in return for payment of 60,000 ducats to his troops. Enraged by this postponement of plunder, the troops mutinied and marched for Rome. Their way south was actively aided by food and free passage provided by the dukes of Ferrara and Urbino in revenge for wrongs each had suffered at the hands of Medici popes.

Rome was demoralized; among its several thousands of armed men, not 500 could be rallied into bands to defend or even to blow up the bridges. Clement seems to have counted on Rome’s sacred status as its shield of defense, or else was paralyzed by irresolution.

On 6 May 1527, the Spanish-German invaders breached the walls and poured into the city. The orgy of human barbarity that followed in the See of St. Peter’s, the capital of Christendom for 1200 years, was a measure of how far the image of Rome had been demeaned by its rulers. Massacre, plunder, fire and rape raged out of control; commanders were helpless and their chief, the Constable de Bourbon, was dead, having been killed the first day by a shot from the Roman walls.

The soldiers looted house by house, killing anyone who offered resistance. Women were violated regardless of age. Screams and groans filled every quarter; the Tiber floated with dead bodies. Pope, cardinals, Curia and lay officials piled into Sant’ Angelo in such haste and crush that one cardinal was drawn up in a basket after the portcullis was dropped.

Lutherans of the feared Landsknechte delighted in the scene, parodied the papal rites, paraded through the streets in the rich vestments of prelates and the red robes and hats of cardinals, with a leader playing the part of Pope riding on an ass.

For weeks Rome smoked and stank of unburied corpses gnawed by dogs. The occupation lasted nine months, inflicting irreparable damage. Two thousand bodies were estimated to have been thrown into the Tiber, 9800 buried, loot and ransoms estimated at between three and four million ducats.

The Vandals who perpetrated the sack of A.D. 455 were aliens and so-called barbarians, but these were fellow-Christians, propelled, so it seemed, by an extra lust in defiling the tarnished lords of the Church. Troy too had once believed in a sacred veil of protection; when the moment came, Rome counted on its sacred status but it was found to have vanished.

A sadder insight was articulated by Cardinal Cajetan, General of the Dominicans, reform spokesman at the Lateran, Papal Legate in Germany in the dealings with Luther: “For we who should have been the salt of the earth have decayed until we are good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials.”

Clement’s humiliation was twofold. He had to accept terms imposed by the victors and remain their prisoner in Sant’ Angelo until he found funds for his ransom, while at news of his helplessness, Florence promptly expelled the agents of Medici rule and re-established a republic. Elsewhere a shift of opinion against the scandal of an imprisoned Pope caused the Emperor to open the doors of Sant’ Angelo, whence, disguised as a merchant, Clement was escorted to a shabby refuge in Orvieto, where he remained, still hoping that France would come to redress the balance.

In one thing the Pope had his way: as Pope he still retained authority to refuse the General Council for reform that Charles wanted. His underlying objection was personal: a fear that his illegitimate birth, rather casually overcome by Leo, might be invoked to invalidate his title.

The problems of Medici succession, now resting on two dubious Medici bastards, one a mulatto, distracted him from the problem of the Protestant advance or any serious consideration of how the Church should meet it.

They dragged his corpse from its grave and left it hacked and mutilated, with a sword thrust through the heart.

What principles of folly emerge from the record of the Renaissance six? First, it must be recognized that their attitudes to power and their resultant behavior were shaped to an unusual degree by the mores and conditions of their time and surroundings.

The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent.

fixed in refusal to change, almost stupidly stubborn in maintaining a corrupt existing system. They could not change it because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.

Their grotesque extravagance and fixation on personal gain was a second and equal governing factor. Once, when reproved for putting the temporal power of the Papacy before “the welfare of the True Church which consists of the peace of Christendom,” Clement VII had replied that if he had so acted he would have been plundered to his last farthing, “unable to recover anything of my own.”

When private interest is placed before public interests, and private ambition, greed and the bewitchment of exercising power determine policy, the public interest necessarily loses, never more conspicuously than under the continuing madness from Sixtus to Clement.

Each of the six handed on his conception of the Papacy unchanged. To each—with some larger view in the case of Julius—the vehicle of Church government, Saint Peter’s See, was the supreme pork barrel.

Illusion of permanence, of the inviolability of their power and status, was a third folly. The incumbents assumed that the Papacy was forever; that challenges could always be suppressed as they had been for centuries by Inquisition, excommunication and the stake; that the only real danger was the threat of superior authority in the form of a Council, which needed only to be fended off or controlled to leave them secure.

BRITAIN’S SELF-INTEREST as regards her empire on the American continent in the 18th century was clearly to maintain her sovereignty, and for every reason of trade, peace and profit to maintain it with the goodwill and by the voluntary desire of the colonies. Yet, through the fifteen years of deteriorating relations that led up to the shot heard round the world, successive British ministries, in the face of constant warnings by men and events, repeatedly took measures that injured the relationship.

Since force could only mean enmity, the cost of the effort, even if successful, was clearly greater than the possible gain. In the end Britain made rebels where there had been none.

The mother country claimed the right and the colonists denied it. Whether this “right” did or did not constitutionally exist defies, even now, a definitive answer, and for purposes of this inquiry is essentially irrelevant. What was at stake was a vast territorial empire planted by a vigorous productive people of British blood.

As a contemporary Laocoon, the unavoidable Edmund Burke, perceived and said, “The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the Constitution.”

With the cession by France of Canada and its hinterlands, Britain became possessed of the great trans-Allegheny plains in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi populated by unruly Indian tribes and some 8000 or 9000 French-Canadian Catholics.

"Unruly?"

Administration and defense of the new area would mean increased expense for the British over and above interest payments on the national debt, which the costs of the war had almost doubled from £72 to £130 million. At the same time, supply bills (the budget) had risen tenfold from £14.5 to £145 million.

The immediate necessity of victory was to establish an armed force, projected at 10,000 men, in North America for defense against Indian troubles and French resurgence and, at the same time, to raise revenue from the colonies to pay for it—for their own defense, as the British saw it.

While this thought was certainly not absent from some British minds, it does not seem to have been as primary or determining as the jumpy Americans believed. The attitude of the home government was not so much fear of colonial rebellion as a sense that colonial fractiousness and failure to give adequate support to defense must not be allowed to continue and that measures were needed to require the colonies to assume their share of the burden.

The prospect of taxation excited in the colonies even more pugnacity than the prospect of a standing army. Until now funds for local government in the several colonies had been voted and appropriated by their own assemblies. Except in the form of customs duties, which regulated trade for the benefit of Britain, America had not been subject to metropolitan taxation, and the fact that this had not been exercised gradually created the assumption that the “right” was lacking.

While acknowledging allegiance to the Crown, the colonies considered themselves independent of Parliament and their assemblies coequal with it. Rights and obligations of the relationship, however, were unformulated, and by dint of avoiding definition, the parties on either side of the ocean had managed to rumble along, though not always smoothly, without anyone being sure of the rules, but as soon as it was suggested, prospective taxation, like the standing army, was denounced in the colonies as a breach of their liberties, a creeping encroachment of tyranny.

The Americans overreacted, blundered, quarreled, but were acting, if not always admirably, in their own interest and did not lose sight of it. If the folly we are concerned with is the contradiction of self-interest, we must in this case follow the British.

The first thing to be said about the British relation to America was that while the colonies were considered of vital importance to the prosperity and world status of Britain, very little thought or attention was paid to them. The American problem, even while it grew progressively more acute, was never, except during a brief turmoil over repeal of the Stamp Act, a primary concern of British politics until the actual outbreak of hostilities.

The all-pervading, all-important problem that absorbed major attention was the game of faction, the obtaining of office, the manipulating of connections, the making and breaking of political alliances—in sum, the business, more urgent, mor...

The second interest was trade. Trade was felt to be the bloodstream of British prosperity. To an island nation it represented the wealth of the world, the factor that made the difference between rich and poor nations. The economic philosophy of the time (later to be termed mercantilism) held that the colonial role in trade was to serve as the source of raw materials and the market for British manufacture, and never to usurp the manufacturing function.

Enjoined under the Navigation Acts from exporting so much as a horseshoe nail as a manufacture and from trading with the enemy during Britain’s unending wars in the first half of the century, colonial merchants and ship captains resorted routinely to smuggling and privateering.

To enforce the collection of customs duties, Britain issued Writs of Assistance, or search warrants, permitting customs officers to enter homes, shops and warehouses to search for smuggled goods. The merchants of Boston, who, like all of the eastern seaboard, lived by trade that evaded customs, challenged the Writs in court with James Otis as their advocate. His plea in a “torrent of impetuous eloquence” enunciated the basic colonial principle that “taxation without representation is tyranny.”

Colonial governors—if not their principals at home, who did not suppose that provincials had or should have political opinions—knew well enough the strength of the American aversion to any taxes not imposed by themselves, and reported as far back as 1732 that “Parliament would find it no easy matter to put such an Act in Execution.”

Proposed taxes grew more frequent during the Seven Years’ War in reaction to the stinginess of the colonies in providing men and funds to support the war, but none was adopted because the home government at that time could not risk alienating the testy provincials.

England took the first in what was to be her long train of counter-productive measures when the Attorney General in London ruled that the Writs of Assistance were legal to enforce the Navigation Acts. The resulting cost in alienation far outweighed the revenue collected from the ensuing duties and fines.

Under the celebrated thunders of his scorn, the House of Commons shook and ministers blanched, but nevertheless voted for the Peace Treaty by a majority of five to one, chiefly out of desire to return to peacetime expenditures and a reduced land tax. That proved illusory. Instead, Lord Bute, George III’s choice to replace Pitt, who had haughtily removed himself when overruled on the war issue, levied an excise tax in Britain on cider with calamitous effect. Like the Writs in America, the act empowered inspectors to visit premises, even live with owners of cider mills to keep count of the number of gallons produced. So loud was the English cry of tyranny at this invasion and so violent the protest that troops had to be called out in apple country,