Sauce, Secrecy, and Subversion in Worcester

Every outcome in life is the culmination of innumerable small decisions, the good and bad or right and wrong of which bear themselves out over time. We can report the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of any event up to the minute, but the ‘why’ can take some time to decipher – a day, a week, a year, sometimes centuries – and with ever-changing attitudes and fashions, opinions on any matter can sway to and fro with the seasons or prevailing zeitgeist. Moreover, every single one of those instances, with its multitude of factors behind it, is itself just another stepping stone toward a near-infinite number of seemingly unrelated consequences yet to come. Why it was that I should grow up in a small suburb of Montreal was well beyond my control, but an unthinkable number of calculations and decisions dating back beyond the historical record contributed to that happening – but was it good? I went to Worcester, a decision well within my control, for no more reasons than it would take me northward, was easily accessible by rail, and was in close proximity to an affordable and well-outfitted accommodation that I had chosen a few days earlier for the similar aforementioned reasons.

Most will have heard of Worcester for its being the largest city of the county of Worcestershire (pronounced WOOSS’ti’shur) famous for its sauce bearing the county name and most famously produced by the Lea & Perrin’s company. The legend goes that a nobleman, for whom there is no record of their existence at the time, a Lord Sandy who had been the governor of Bengal, returned from his travels on the Indian sub-continent with the legendary sauce and brought it to a small apothecary in Worcester run by monsieurs Lea and Perrins with the request that they replicate the recipe. The resulting concoction was formidably malodourous and not fit for human consumption – at least not for anyone wishing to indeed enjoy their meal – and was promptly withdrawn to the cellar where it remained for some time. Upon its rediscovery, it was revealed that the period of maturation that the sauce had undergone was the real secret to its wonderful flavour and the rest, as they say, is history. Where the plot really thickens is in the enormous amount of secrecy and misinformation that has spread about the sauce since its inception. As manufacturing ramped up to meet the demand for the sauce it became more and more difficult for monsieurs Lea and Perrins to keep their recipe the tightly knit secret that it had originally been. It has been reported that they made no effort to clarify who Lord Sandy was or exactly where he had, in fact, come to procure the original vial of sauce and this author would like to posit that the story, like their sauce, was their own invention. Perhaps the sauce was nothing more than a mixture of locally sourced herbs and fruits cobbled together and allowed to mature into the sauce we now know, and perhaps its ties to India were conceived of for no nobler purpose than savvy marketing – suggesting that the sauce was a blend of alien ingredients that would have been limited in their accessibility would no doubt have given the sauce a certain exotic caché. There may well have been no Lord Sandy at all, no vials of undoctored sauce from Bengal, and the whole story may well be a fraud passed down from generation to generation. Over the years, great efforts have been made by the Lea and Perrins company to keep their recipe a secret from separating assembly line employees from various stages of production to giving several of the ingredients code names. To this day, only a handful of people know the recipe from start to finish, and they’re not talking, and so the recipe for Worcestershire sauce remains a mystery to the common man – not bad for something that is sold the world over and has been around for almost 200 years.

The truth is you can keep just about anything a secret if you’re determined enough. A fact is just a moment in time the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of which you can report on up to the minute, but the ‘why’ of which can metamorphose over time for once the moment of fact is gone it descends into the purgatory of rumour. On Earth, souls never really descend into hell or rise up to heaven, instead we the living debate their whereabouts anchoring our argument for either destination on whichever one might derive an outcome that services our most immediate needs. We now live in the era of “alternative facts” which has itself bred the common retort, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts”. In a time where every single one of us is under constant surveillance, willingly or unwillingly, the news would have us believe that what is, and what is not the truth is more difficult to suss out now than at any point in our history, and what once constituted proof no longer holds any authority over the weight of persuasion. Although only effectively coined in the last decade “alternative facts” are as old as time and long predate the tall origin tale of Worcestershire’s sauce.

Evidence of the malleability of a fact lost to purgatory came to my attention when I dug a little bit deeper into Worcester’s history. It turns out, that beyond its tangy sauce, the place is a pretty big deal. A visit to the city’s Brobdingnagian cathedral that was built in the 11th century unearthed one particularly interesting little treasure which was the tomb of King John. Now many might have heard of this particular King John from old folk tales about a bandit who wreaked havoc in the forests of Sherwood up near Nottingham county, often referred to in pop culture as Robin Hood. Conventional retellings of the tale have it that Robin Hood and his band of merry men robbed from the rich and gave to the poor and was a nasty thorn in the side of the oppressive kingship of John. Modern historians prefer to deliver a more down to earth approach to telling the tale by pointing out that the Robin Hood of the age was more likely a free landholding individual of the yeoman class who was unhappy about, and refused to pay, the taxes levied upon him by the King. Footnoted in this tale are the facts that King John was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who can lay claim to having been Queen Consort to both France and England, who lived to the ripe old age of, it is presumed, 82, giving birth to 10 children included therein, depending on who you ask, 2 future kings, 2 queens, a few counts and/or countesses and a few dukes and/or duchesses, and of course King John himself. What never seems to escape the telling of any of these tales is the idea that King John was a pretty nasty guy who was consumed by greed as evidenced by his harsh taxation which led to the uprising of a powerful pack of landholding barons. When referring to his predecessor at the position, his older brother Richard earned himself the moniker ‘Lion Heart’ referencing his courage in battle during his crusade which brought relics from the Holy Land and glory to England. Rarely is it mentioned that crusades, wars in general really, tend to be costly affairs which can bring fame and glory to those paying historians to write about them, but which undoubtedly bring trouble and hardship on those that inevitably have to pay for those wars – the tax-paying commoners – a situation which John, not on crusade, in all likelihood inherited from his older brother. But then older brothers do have the tendency to leave a mess to their younger siblings whilst ever winning the esteem from all those who surround them, but I’m digressing from my original argument. Still, messes need cleaning, and though he wasn’t sending young men to war, King John was asking them to fill the kingly coffers once again and the barons were having none of it. In the common telling of the tale, as a result of the uprising, King John reluctantly signed one of the most important documents in legal history, which still gets cited to this day, the Magna Carta. The net effect of the Magna Carta, so the story goes, was that in a time where once monarchs reigned supreme, in England at least, the law was elevated above kingly rule where all in the country were bound by the law and no one was above the law, even the king. It is where we get ideas like, even the wholly rotten get a lawyer to argue on their behalf and an accused individual is deemed innocent before the law until it can be proven that they are guilty. The tenets outlined in the Magna Carta didn’t really take at the time and King John’s strife with the barons continued until his mysterious death at age 49 leaving the throne to his son Henry whose reign would last 56 years, which made him, at the time as well as 300 years hence, England’s longest-serving monarch. It was King John’s wish that upon his death he be interred at Worcester and so there he remains.

According to other historical tales, King John is not the only English monarch whose fate would be linked with Worcester as, more than 400 years later, Worcester would play a key role in one of the most pivotal periods of the country’s history. This one is even more perplexing, and the accounts even more muddy, and involve two key characters: King Charles II and Oliver Cromwell. The undisputed facts of the matter are, and I’ll be as brief as I can on the details, that during King Charles’ reign the country was divided into two factions: The Royalists who supported the King and the Parliamentarians with Cromwell as their de facto leader. This decade of conflict between these opposing factions is known as the English Civil War. Now why they were fighting is another one of these purgatorial facts that keeps evolving over time, but once again it seems to have a lot to do with, like the barons 400 years earlier, a lot of people being unhappy about paying taxes (taxation seems to be a key ingredient in a lot of revolutionary stories). The story goes that Charles II’s old man, Charles I, didn’t care for parliament all that much, which, to be fair, during the period acted merely as an advisory committee to the King and had no real powers and, as such, Charles I decided he didn’t need it altogether and had it dissolved. It seems that parliament did however play an important role in raising finances for the crown and without one Charles I had quite a difficult time procuring the finances necessary to pay for his opulent lifestyle leading him to resort to other means of taxing the population. People are rarely thrilled about the idea of new taxes and resentment toward the crown began to spread. Eventually, things began to boil, mostly over religious matters, and a rebellion broke out in Scotland – it seems the Scots weren’t all too thrilled about Charles I imposing his Anglican church on them (religion, like taxation, is another tried and tested reason for much bloodshed). Requiring aid in suppressing the revolt, Charles I reconvened his parliament. Flexing their muscles, parliament lobbied for a greater role in running the government which brought them at constant odds with the monarch who sought to use them to raise armies and quell the rebellion while limiting their role in actual governance.  There was widespread mistrust leading to a widening divide in the public and various counties choosing sides between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. To say who started it would be an exercise in futility, but by 1642 the two sides were embroiled in a fully armed conflict. Charles I was eventually taken prisoner and tried for treason. Believing he had the divine right of kings and was above the law it was decided, hearkening back to that old document the Magna Carta, that the position of king was no more than an office whose occupants had limited powers entrusted to them with the purpose of governing in accordance with the laws of the land. As a result, Charles I was sentenced to death and executed by beheading. This is where Charles II, who was but 19 years old at the time comes in. Royalists still wanted a king and Charles II would have been the logical successor. He formed an army, mostly of loyal Scots (which is somewhat ironic given that a lot of the troubles began with Charles I imposing his Anglican church there), and invaded England with the idea of defeating the Parliamentarians and restoring the monarchy. Charles II was an inept military tactician, owing in large part to his inexperience, and his advance did not last long. After a series of victories, Oliver Cromwell had Charles II’s army on the run culminating in one final battle at Worcester on the 3rd of September 1651. Despite a valiant defence of the city, the Royalists were overwhelmed by Cromwell’s army. Charles II realizing his fate retreated to his secret lodgings before fleeing under the cover of darkness into exile in France where he remained until Cromwell’s death 10 years later.

Officially, under Cromwell England became a republic. Depending on who you ask, the decade England spent under parliamentary rule can equally be regarded as a military dictatorship. It seems, based on everything I have read that there is no consensus over whether or not people were better or worse off under the monarchy or under Cromwell’s parliament and, at the end of the day, your position on who ruled it best comes down to what form of government you figure does a better job of governing.

Charles II won in the end just by waiting it out and returning to England to restore the monarchy where he reigned for another 25 years.  It is estimated that out of the population of 5 million at the time, some 200,000 people were killed in battle or died because of war-related causes during the English Civil War. Charles II never needed to wield a weapon and he never took the field or won a battle. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, pretty much never lost a battle and saw more of them than I like to think about and eventually died of an illness and not from the sword. His progeny did not have the talent or command the respect of the army the way he did which opened the door for Charles II’s return and England has remained a monarchy ever since. Just to stamp it as official, Charles II had Cromwell beheaded posthumously which seems like more of a self-inflicted insult than anything else.

The threads that tie Worcestershire sauce, King John and the English Civil War together all connect in Worcester and the transition of facts into purgatorial rumour and what is at the root of subverting the status quo. All three examples in this tale were at the junction of some kind of paradigm shift whether it be in law, governance, or sauce. But what I am keen to make most clear to the reader is that the modern-day aura of misinformation in which we live is nothing new, but is instead an extension of some of these key events of the past. It is often quoted that “those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it”. I will maintain, however, that our perceived folly of the present is not due to any failure to learn from the past but arises as a result of a competing view point attempting to wend its way back into the popular consciousness. Ideas are like Charles II in exile waiting out their time to return. We can debate all we like about the rightness or the wrongness of any given viewpoint but the truth of the matter is we’re really just on one particular side of the fence with the hope that we are in the majority. When we see the winds changing and forcing us against the tide we curse the sky, draw our whips, send our sailors below deck to hoist the oars, and force them to row into the wind. We gather evidence and construct well thought out arguments to support our thesis not realizing that nature does not know about such methods. If the winds grow too strong we bring up arms to fight mother nature with all our fury prepared to die rather than adjust our heading. In all of my reading of history, I have never heard of a prevailing idea being beaten outright by argument, or by force of arms – not in any definitive way, anyway. The incremental changes brought about by demonstration and peaceful protest are slow and subject to eventual repeal and the costs often far outweigh the benefit. Everyone who ascends into authority believes their ideas will stand the test of time but they really only hang on until the next authority. Whether by democratic election or force of arms, every leader, wisely or unwisely, wields monarchical power and only history, depending on your side, bears out the faults and merits of their reign. The only way to truly subvert the system and overturn the current model is to rob the monarch of his funds. When the king has no money he can not protect his subjects and thus relies on his subjects for protection. When the king is poor, the poor are king.