Hugh Walpole

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting and vivid plots, as well as his high profile as a lecturer, brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been largely neglected since his death.

After his first novel, The Wooden Horse, in 1909, Walpole wrote prolifically, producing at least one book every year. He was a spontaneous story-teller, writing quickly to get all his ideas on paper, seldom revising. His first novel to achieve major success was his third, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, a tragicomic story of a fatal clash between two schoolmasters. During the First World War he served in the Red Cross on the Russian-Austrian front, and worked in British propaganda in Petrograd and London. In the 1920s and 1930s Walpole was much in demand not only as a novelist but also as a lecturer on literature, making four exceptionally well-paid tours of North America.

As a gay man at a time when homosexual practices were illegal for men in Britain, Walpole conducted a succession of intense but discreet relationships with other men, and was for much of his life in search of what he saw as "the perfect friend". He eventually found one, a married policeman, with whom he settled in the English Lake District. Having as a young man eagerly sought the support of established authors, he was in his later years a generous sponsor of many younger writers. He was a patron of the visual arts and bequeathed a substantial legacy of paintings to the Tate Gallery and other British institutions.

Walpole's output was large and varied. Between 1909 and 1941 he wrote thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two original plays and three volumes of memoirs. His range included disturbing studies of the macabre, children's stories and historical fiction, most notably his Herries Chronicle series, set in the Lake District. He worked in Hollywood writing scenarios for two Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films in the 1930s, and played a cameo in the 1935 version of David Copperfield.

## Biography

### Early years

Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of the Rev Somerset Walpole and his wife, Mildred Helen, née Barham (1854–1925). Somerset Walpole had been an assistant to the Bishop of Truro, Edward White Benson, from 1877 until 1882, when he was offered the incumbency of St Mary's Cathedral, Auckland; on Benson's advice he accepted.

Mildred Walpole found it hard to settle in New Zealand, and something of her restlessness and insecurity affected the character of her eldest child. In 1889, two years after the birth of the couple's daughter, Dorothea ("Dorothy"), Somerset Walpole accepted a prominent and well-paid academic post at the General Theological Seminary, New York. Robert ("Robin"), the third of the couple's children, was born in New York in 1892. Hugh and Dorothy were taught by a governess until the middle of 1893, when the parents decided that he needed an English education.

Walpole was sent to England, where according to his biographer Rupert Hart-Davis the next ten years were the unhappiest time of Walpole's life. He first attended a preparatory school in Truro. Though he missed his family and felt lonely he was reasonably happy, but he moved to Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow in 1895, where he was bullied, frightened and miserable. He later said, "The food was inadequate, the morality was 'twisted', and Terror – sheer, stark unblinking Terror – stared down every one of its passages ... The excessive desire to be loved that has always played so enormous a part in my life was bred largely, I think, from the neglect I suffered there".

In 1896 Somerset Walpole discovered his son's horror of the Marlow school and he moved him to the King's School, Canterbury. For two years he was a fairly content, though undistinguished, pupil there. In 1897 Walpole senior was appointed principal of Bede College, Durham, and Hugh was moved again, to be a day boy for four years at Durham School. He found that day boys were looked down on by boarders, and that Bede College was the subject of snobbery within the university. His sense of isolation increased. He continually took refuge in the local library, where he read all the novels of Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Scott and Dickens and many of the works of Trollope, Wilkie Collins and Henry Kingsley. Walpole wrote in 1924:

> I grew up ... discontented, ugly, abnormally sensitive, and excessively conceited. No one liked me – not masters, boys, friends of the family, nor relations who came to stay; and I do not in the least wonder at it. I was untidy, uncleanly, excessively gauche. I believed that I was profoundly misunderstood, that people took my pale and pimpled countenance for the mirror of my soul, that I had marvellous things of interest in me that would one day be discovered.

Though Walpole was no admirer of the schools he had attended there, the cathedral cities of Truro, Canterbury and Durham made a strong impression on him. He drew on aspects of them for his fictional cathedral city of Polchester in Glebeshire, the setting of many of his later books. Walpole's memories of his time at Canterbury grew mellower over the years; it was the only school he mentioned in his Who's Who entry.

### Cambridge, Liverpool and teaching

From 1903 to 1906 Walpole studied history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. While there he had his first work published, the critical essay "Two Meredithian Heroes", which was printed in the college magazine in autumn 1905. As an undergraduate he met and fell under the spell of A. C. Benson, formerly a greatly loved master at Eton, and by this time a don at Magdalene College. Walpole's religious beliefs, hitherto an unquestioned part of his life, were fading, and Benson helped him through that personal crisis. Walpole was also attempting to cope with his homosexual feelings, which for a while focused on Benson, who recorded in his diary in 1906 an unexpected outburst by his young admirer: "[H]e broke out rather eagerly into protestations – He cared for me more than anyone in the world. I could not believe it ... It is extraordinarily touching. ... It is quite right that he should believe all this passionately; it is quite right that I should know that it will not last ... I tried to say this as tenderly as I could ..."

Benson gently declined Walpole's advances. They remained friends, but Walpole, rebuffed in his "excessive desire to be loved", turned the full force of his enthusiasms elsewhere, and the relationship with Benson became less important to him. Less than two years later Benson's diary entry on Walpole's subsequent social career reveals his thoughts on his protégé's progress:

> He seems to have conquered Gosse completely. He spends his Sundays in long walks with H G Wells. He dines every week with Max Beerbohm and R Ross ... and this has befallen a not very clever young man of 23. Am I a little jealous? – no, I don't think so. But I am a little bewildered ... I do not see any sign of intellectual power or perception or grasp or subtlety in his work or himself. ... I should call him curiously unperceptive. He does not, for instance, see what may vex or hurt or annoy people. I think he is rather tactless – though he is himself very sensitive. The strong points about him are his curiosity, his vitality, his eagerness, and the emotional fervour of his affections. But he seems to me in no way likely to be great as an artist.

With Benson's help, Walpole had come to terms with the loss of his faith. Somerset Walpole, himself the son of an Anglican priest, hoped that his eldest son would follow him into the ministry. Walpole was too concerned for his father's feelings to tell him he was no longer a believer, and on graduation from Cambridge in 1906 he took a post as a lay missioner at the Mersey Mission to Seamen in Liverpool. He described that as one of the "greatest failures of my life ... The Mission to Seamen was, and is, a splendid institution ... but it needs men of a certain type to carry it through and I was not of that type." The head of the mission reprimanded him for lack of commitment to his work, and Walpole resigned after six months.

From April to July 1907 Walpole was in Germany, tutoring the children of the popular author Elizabeth von Arnim. In 1908 he taught French at Epsom College. His brief experience of teaching is reflected in his third novel, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill. As well as the clerical forebears, Walpole had notable authors in his family tree: on his father's side, the novelist and letter writer Horace Walpole, and on his mother's Richard Harris Barham, author of The Ingoldsby Legends. It was as an author that Walpole felt impelled to make his career. He moved to London and found work as a book reviewer for The Standard, writing fiction in his spare time. He had by this time recognised unreservedly that he was homosexual. His encounters were necessarily discreet, as such activities were illegal in Britain, and remained so throughout his lifetime. He was constantly searching for "the perfect friend"; an early candidate was the stage designer Percy Anderson, to whom he was intimately attached for some time from 1910 onwards.

### Early literary career

A. C. Benson was a friend of Henry James, to whom Walpole wrote a fan letter late in 1908, with Benson's encouragement. A correspondence ensued and in February 1909 James invited Walpole to lunch at the Reform Club in London. They developed a close friendship, described by James's biographer Leon Edel as resembling a father and son relationship in some, but not all, respects. James was greatly taken with the young Walpole, though clear-eyed about the deficiencies in the artistry and craftsmanship of his protégé's early efforts. According to Somerset Maugham, Walpole made a sexual proposition to James, who was too inhibited to respond. Nevertheless, in their correspondence the older man's devotion was couched in extravagant terms.

Walpole published his first novel, The Wooden Horse, in 1909. It told of a staid and snobbish English family shaken up by the return of one of its members from a less hidebound life in New Zealand. The book received good reviews but barely repaid the cost of having it typed. His first commercial success was Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, published in 1911. The novelist and biographer Michael Sadleir writes that though some of the six novels Walpole wrote between 1909 and 1914 are of interest as examples of the author's developing style, it is Mr Perrin and Mr Traill that deserves to be remembered for its own sake. The book, subtitled "a tragi-comedy", is a psychological study of a deadly clash between two schoolmasters, one an ageing failure and the other a young, attractive idealist. In the view of Hart-Davis, Walpole only once recaptured "the fresh, clear cut realism" of this book, and Walpole himself, looking back on his work in the 1930s, felt that of all his books to date, it was the truest. The Observer gave the book a favourable review: "The slow growth of the poison within [Perrin] is traced with wonderful skill and sympathy ... one feels throughout these pages a sense of intolerable tension, of impending disaster"; The Manchester Guardian was less enthusiastic, praising the scene-setting but calling the story "an unconscientious melodrama". The San Francisco Chronicle praised its "technical excellence, imagination and beauty – Walpole at his best." Arnold Bennett, a well-established novelist seventeen years Walpole's senior, admired the book, and befriended the young author, regularly chiding, encouraging, sometimes mocking him into improving his prose, characters and narratives.

The Guardian reviewer observed that the setting of Mr Perrin and Mr Traill – a second-rate public school – was clearly drawn from life, as indeed it was. The boys of Epsom College were delighted with the thinly disguised version of their school, but the college authorities were not, and Walpole was persona non grata at Epsom for many years. This was of no practical consequence, as he had no intention of returning to the teaching profession, but it was an early illustration of his capacity, noted by Benson, for unthinkingly giving offence, though being hypersensitive to criticism himself.

In early 1914 James wrote an article for The Times Literary Supplement surveying the younger generation of British novelists and comparing them with their eminent elder contemporaries. In the latter category James put Bennett, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Maurice Hewlett and H G Wells. The four new authors on whom he focused were Walpole, Gilbert Cannan, Compton Mackenzie and D H Lawrence. It was a very lengthy article, to the extent that it had to be spread across two issues of the Supplement in March and April 1914. James said that agreeing to write it had been "an insensate step", but from Walpole's point of view it was highly satisfactory: one of the greatest living authors had publicly ranked him among the finest young British novelists.

### First World War

As war approached, Walpole realised that his poor eyesight would disqualify him from serving in the armed forces. He volunteered to join the police, but was turned down; he then accepted a journalistic appointment based in Moscow, reporting for The Saturday Review and The Daily Mail. He was allowed to visit the front in Poland, but his dispatches from Moscow (and later from Petrograd, which he preferred) were not enough to stop hostile comments at home that he was not doing his bit for the war effort. Henry James was so incensed at one such remark by a prominent London hostess that he stormed out of her house and wrote to Walpole suggesting that he should return to England. Walpole replied in great excitement that he had just been appointed as a Russian officer, in the Sanitar:

> The "Sanitar" is the part of the Red Cross that does the rough work at the front, carrying men out of the trenches, helping at the base hospitals in every sort of way, doing every kind of rough job. They are an absolutely official body and I shall be one of the few (half-dozen) Englishmen in the world wearing Russian uniform.

While in training for the Sanitar, Walpole devoted his leisure hours to gaining a reasonable fluency in the Russian language, and to his first full-length work of non-fiction, a literary biography of Joseph Conrad. In the summer of 1915 he worked on the Austrian-Russian front, assisting at operations in field hospitals and retrieving the dead and wounded from the battlefield. Occasionally he found time to write brief letters home; he told Bennett, "A battle is an amazing mixture of hell and a family picnic – not as frightening as the dentist, but absorbing, sometimes thrilling like football, sometimes dull like church, and sometimes simply physically sickening like bad fish. Burying dead afterwards is worst of all." When disheartened he comforted himself with the thought, "This is not so bad as it was at Marlow".

During an engagement early in June 1915 Walpole single-handedly rescued a wounded soldier; his Russian comrades refused to help and Walpole carried one end of a stretcher and dragged the man to safety. For this he was awarded the Cross of Saint George; General Lechitsky presented him with the medal in August. After his tour of duty he returned to Petrograd. Among the city's attractions for him was the presence of Konstantin Somov, a painter with whom he had formed an intimate relationship. Throughout his time in Petrograd and Moscow he kept a diary of the books he read and the plays and operas he attended, a habit that continued throughout his life. He met Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Lykiardopoulos, Nikita Baliev and immersed himself in the Moscow art scene which influenced the Symbolism in his work. He remained in Russia until October 1915, when he returned to England. He visited his family, stayed with Percy Anderson in London, telephoned Henry James in Rye, and retreated to a cottage he had bought in Cornwall. In January 1916 he was asked by the Foreign Office to return to Petrograd. Russians were being subjected to highly effective German propaganda. The writer Arthur Ransome, Petrograd correspondent of The Daily News, had successfully lobbied for the establishment of a bureau to counter the German efforts, and the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, wanted Walpole to take charge.

Before he left for Petrograd, Walpole's novel The Dark Forest was published. It drew on his experiences in Russia, and was more sombre than much of his earlier fiction. Reviews were highly favourable; The Daily Telegraph commented on "a high level of imaginative vision ... reveals capacity and powers in the author which we had hardly suspected before."

Walpole returned to Petrograd in February 1916. He moved into Somov's flat, and his Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau began work. The following month he suffered a personal blow: he recorded in his diary for 13 March 1916, "Thirty two to-day! Should have been a happy day but was completely clouded for me by reading in the papers of Henry James' death. This was a terrible shock to me." Walpole remained at the bureau for the rest of 1916 and most of 1917, witnessing the February Revolution. He wrote an official report on events for the Foreign Office, and also absorbed ideas for his fiction. In addition to the first of his popular "Jeremy" novels, written in his spare time from the bureau, he began work on the second of his Russian-themed books, The Secret City. Sadleir writes that this novel and The Dark Forest "take a high place among his works, on account of their intuitive understanding of an alien mentality and the vigour of their narrative power." The book won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

By late 1917 it was clear to Walpole and to the British authorities that there was little advantage in keeping him in Russia. On 7 November he left, missing the Bolshevik Revolution, which began on that day. He was appointed to a post at the Foreign Office in its Department of Information, headed by John Buchan. Soon after returning he volunteered for the British army, but, as expected, failed the necessary medical examination because of his poor sight. He continued to work in British propaganda when the department was reconstituted under Lord Beaverbrook in April 1918, and remained there for the rest of the war and beyond, resigning in February 1919. Little is known about what he wrote for the department, as most of its records were destroyed after the war, but he noted in his diary that he had written the department's official report to the War Cabinet: "a beastly job – the worst I've ever attempted". For his wartime work he was awarded the CBE in 1918.

### Post-war and 1920s

Walpole remained prolific in the post-war years, and began a parallel and highly remunerative career as a lecturer in literature. At the instigation of his American publisher, George Doran, he made his first lecture tour of the US in 1919, receiving an enthusiastic welcome wherever he went. What Sadleir describes as Walpole's "genial and attractive appearance, his complete lack of aloofness, his exciting fluency as a speaker [and] his obvious and genuine liking for his hosts" combined to win him a large American following. The success of his talks led to increases in his lecturing fees, greatly enhanced sales of his books, and large sums from American publishers anxious to print his latest fiction. He was a prodigiously quick writer who seldom revised, but pressed on, keen to get his ideas down on paper. His main British publishers, Macmillan, found it expedient to appoint a senior member of staff to edit his manuscripts, correcting spelling, punctuation, inconsistencies and errors of historical fact. His fluency enabled him to fulfil between tours a contract from The Pictorial Review for ten short stories at the remarkable sum of \$1,350 apiece.

One of Walpole's major novels of the early post-war period was The Cathedral, which unlike much of his fiction was not dashed off but worked on across four years, beginning in 1918. The story of an arrogant 19th-century archdeacon in conflict with other clergy and laity was certain to bring comparisons with Trollope's Barchester Towers (The Manchester Guardian's review was headed "Polchester Towers"), but unlike the earlier work, The Cathedral is wholly uncomic. The hubristic Archdeacon Brandon is driven to domestic despair, professional defeat and sudden death. The reviewer Ivor Brown commented that Walpole had earlier charmed many with his cheerful tales of Mayfair, but that in this novel he showed a greater side to his art: "This is a book with little happiness about it, but its stark strength is undeniable. The Cathedral is realism, profound in its philosophy and delicate in its thread." The Illustrated London News said, "No former novelist has seized quite so powerfully upon the cathedral fabric and made it a living character in the drama, an obsessing individuality at once benign and forbidding. ...The Cathedral is a great book."

Walpole was a keen music lover and when in 1920 he heard a new tenor at the Proms he was much impressed and sought him out. Lauritz Melchior became one of the most important friendships of his life, and Walpole did much to foster the singer's budding career. Wagner's son Siegfried engaged Melchior for the Bayreuth Festival in 1924 and succeeding years. Walpole attended, and met Adolf Hitler, then recently released from prison after an attempted putsch. Hitler was a protégé of Siegfried's wife Winifred, and was known in Bayreuth as "one of Winnie's lame ducks." Walpole later admitted that he had both despised and liked him – "both emotions that time has proved I was wrong to indulge". This and future visits to Bayreuth were complicated by the fact that Winifred Wagner fell in love with Walpole, and attached herself so firmly to him that rumours began to spread.

In 1924 Walpole moved into a house near Keswick in the Lake District. His large income enabled him to maintain his London flat in Piccadilly, but Brackenburn, on the slopes of Catbells overlooking Derwentwater, was his main home for the rest of his life. He was quickly made welcome by local residents, and the scenery and atmosphere of the Lake District often found their way into his fiction. The critic James Agate commented that one might think from some of Walpole's stories that their author had created the English Lakes, but that he was probably only consulted about them. At the end of 1924 Walpole met Harold Cheevers, who soon became his friend and companion and remained so for the rest of Walpole's life. In Hart-Davis's words, he came nearer than any other human being to Walpole's long-sought conception of a perfect friend. Cheevers, a policeman, with a wife and two children, left the police force and entered Walpole's service as his chauffeur. Walpole trusted him completely, and gave him extensive control over his affairs. Whether Walpole was at Brackenburn or Piccadilly, Cheevers was almost always with him, and often accompanied him on overseas trips. Walpole provided a house in Hampstead for Cheevers and his family.

During the mid-twenties Walpole produced two of his best-known novels in the macabre vein that he drew on from time to time, exploring the fascination of fear and cruelty. The Old Ladies (1924) is a study of a timid elderly spinster exploited and eventually frightened to death by a predatory widow. Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (1925) depicts the malign influence of a manipulative, insane father on his family and others. Walpole described it to his fellow author Frank Swinnerton as "a simple shocker which it has amused me like anything to write, and won't bore you to read." In contrast he continued a series of stories for children, begun in 1919 with Jeremy, taking the young hero's story forward with Jeremy and Hamlet (the latter being the boy's dog) in 1923, and Jeremy at Crale in 1927. Sadleir, writing in the 1950s, suggests that "the most real Walpole of all – because the most unselfconscious, kindly, and understanding friend – is the Walpole of the Jeremy trilogy." Of his other novels of the 1920s Wintersmoon (1928), his first attempt at a full-length love story, portrays a clash between traditionalism and modernism: his own sympathies, though not spelled out, were clearly with the traditionalists.

### 1930–1941

By the 1930s, though his public success remained considerable, many literary critics saw Walpole as outdated. His reputation in literary circles took a blow from a malicious caricature in Somerset Maugham's 1930 novel Cakes and Ale: the character Alroy Kear, a superficial novelist of more pushy ambition than literary talent, was widely taken to be based on Walpole. In the same year Walpole wrote possibly his best-known work, Rogue Herries, a historical novel set in the Lake District. It was well-received: The Daily Mail considered it "not only a profound study of human character, but a subtle and intimate biography of a place." He followed it with three sequels; all four novels were published in a single volume as The Herries Chronicle.

In 1934 Walpole accepted an invitation from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios to go to Hollywood to write the scenario for a film adaptation of David Copperfield. He enjoyed many aspects of life in Hollywood, but as one who rarely revised any of his own work he found it tedious to produce sixth and seventh drafts at the behest of the studio. He enjoyed his brief change of role from writer to bit-part player: in the film he played the Vicar of Blunderstone delivering a boring sermon that sends David to sleep. Agate was doubtful of the wisdom of this: "Does not Hugh see that to bring a well-known character from real life into an imaginary sequence of events is to destroy the reality of that imaginary sequence?" Nevertheless, Walpole's performance was a success. He improvised the sermon; the producer, David O Selznick, mischievously called for retake after retake to try to make him dry up, but Walpole fluently delivered a different extempore address each time.

The critical and commercial success of the film of David Copperfield led to an invitation to return to Hollywood in 1936. When he got there he found that the studio executives had no idea which films they wanted him to work on, and he had eight weeks of highly paid leisure, during which he wrote a short story and worked on a novel. He was eventually asked to write the scenario for Little Lord Fauntleroy, which he enjoyed doing. He spent most of his fees on paintings, forgetting to keep enough money to pay US tax on his earnings. He replenished his American funds with a lecture tour – his last – in late 1936.

In 1937 Walpole was offered a knighthood. He accepted, though confiding to his diary that he could not think of a good novelist since Walter Scott who had done so. "Kipling, Hardy, Galsworthy all refused. But I'm not of their class, and range with Doyle, Anthony Hope and such. ... Besides I shall like being a knight."

Walpole's taste for adventure did not diminish in his last years. In 1939 he was commissioned to report for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers on the funeral in Rome of Pope Pius XI, the conclave to elect his successor, and the subsequent coronation. A fellow correspondent was Tom Driberg, whose memoirs tell of a lunch à deux at which Walpole arrived flushed with excitement from a sexual encounter that morning with an attendant in the Borghese Palace. In the weeks between the funeral and Pius XII's election Walpole, with his customary fluency, wrote much of his book Roman Fountain, a mixture of fact and fiction about the city. This was his last overseas visit.

After the outbreak of the Second World War Walpole remained in England, dividing his time between London and Keswick, and continuing to write with his usual rapidity. He completed a fifth novel in the Herries series and began work on a sixth. His health was undermined by diabetes. He overexerted himself at the opening of Keswick's fund-raising "War Weapons Week" in May 1941, making a speech after taking part in a lengthy march, and died of a heart attack at Brackenburn, aged 57. He is buried in St John's churchyard in Keswick.

### Legacy

Walpole was a keen and discerning collector of art. Sir Kenneth Clark called him "one of the three or four real patrons of art in this country, and of that small body he was perhaps the most generous and the most discriminating." He left fourteen works to the Tate Gallery and Fitzwilliam Museum, including paintings by Cézanne, Manet, Augustus John, Tissot and Renoir.

`Other artists represented in Walpole's collection were Epstein, Picasso, Gauguin, Sickert and Utrillo. After his death the finest works in his collection, other than those bequeathed, were exhibited in London during April and May 1945; the exhibition also included works by Constable, Turner and Rodin.`

Sadleir notes how Walpole's considerable income enabled him to indulge not only his love of art and of old books and manuscripts, but also philanthropy, particularly towards younger writers. Although Walpole enjoyed the limelight, he was secretive about his many acts of generosity to younger writers, with both encouragement and financial help. After his death some idea of the scale of his generosity was discovered. Osbert Sitwell commented, "I don't think there was any younger writer of any worth who has not at one time or another received kindness of an active kind, and at a crucial moment, from Hugh". Hart-Davis lists thirty-eight authors from whom letters of gratitude were found among Walpole's correspondence; Sadleir writes of Walpole's "generous kindness to literary aspirants and to writers fallen on evil days ... by immediate financial assistance, by prefaces freely supplied or by collaboration volunteered, by introductions and recommendations to likely publishers, Walpole relieved the distresses of authorship to a degree which will never be fully known." Agate, though himself the recipient of Walpole's generosity on occasion, thought it sometimes went too far: "Mr Walpole's large-heartedness gets him into all kinds of trouble. He is an inveterate patter. He pats on the back young men whom sterner critics would knock down, because even in fantastic incompetence he perceives the good intention. No art or artist is safe from Mr Walpole's benevolence".

In his adopted home of Keswick a section of the town museum was dedicated to Walpole's memory in 1949, with manuscripts, correspondence, paintings and sculpture from Brackenburn, donated by his sister and brother.

## Works

Walpole's books cover a wide range. His fiction includes short stories, bildungsromane (Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, 1911, and the Jeremy trilogy) that delve into the psychology of boyhood; gothic horror novels (Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, 1925, and The Killer and the Slain, 1942); ghost stories (All Souls' Night, 1933); a period family saga (the Herries chronicle) and even detective fiction (Behind the Screen). He wrote literary biographies (Conrad, 1916; James Branch Cabell, 1920; and Trollope, 1928); plays; and screenplays including David Copperfield, 1935.

### Influences

Walpole's debt to Henry James is discernible in The Duchess of Wrexe (1914) and The Green Mirror (1917), but in the view of J B Priestley the two most potent influences on Walpole were the highly contrasting ones of Trollope and Dostoyevsky. Other critics noted the Trollopian influence; in 1923 Arthur St John Adcock commented:

> The Trenchards [in The Green Mirror] are a kind of family Trollope might have created had he been living now; The Cathedral is a kind of story he might have told, with its realistic melodrama and its clerical atmosphere, but Walpole tells it with a subtler art in the writing and the construction, with a conciseness and charm of style that are outside the range of the earlier novelist.

Walpole, though he was devoted to the works of Trollope, and published a study of him, thought that there was no real comparison between the two of them: "I am far too twisted and fantastic a novelist ever to succeed in catching Trollope's marvellous normality." Priestley was less impressed by the supposed Trollopian side of Walpole's work, finding some of it formulaic. He was more taken with a darker, Dostoyevskian, side that he found in the writing: "suddenly it will transform the pleasant easy scene he is giving us into transparency behind which are bright stars and red hellfire ... No matter how jolly and zestful he may appear to be, the fact remains that he possesses an unusually sharp sense of evil."

Possibly the most pervasive influence on Walpole was Walter Scott, whose romanticism is reflected in much of the later writer's fiction. Such was Walpole's love of Scott that he liked to think of himself as the latter's reincarnation. He amassed the largest collection in Britain of Scott manuscripts and early editions, and constantly reread the novels. With the Herries stories Walpole restored the popularity of the historical novel, a form for which Scott was famous but which had been out of fashion for decades. The Herries series begins in the 18th century and follows a Lakeland family through the generations up to modern times.

### Reputation

Walpole sought critical as well as financial success, and longed to write works that equalled those of Trollope, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. In his early days, he received frequent and generally approving scrutiny from major literary figures. He was a good friend of Virginia Woolf, and rated her as an influence; she praised his gift for seizing on telling detail: "it is no disparagement to a writer to say that his gift is for the small things rather than for the large ... If you are faithful with the details the large effects will grow inevitably out of those very details". Joseph Conrad said of him, "We see Mr. Walpole grappling with the truth of things spiritual and material with his characteristic earnestness, and we can discern the characteristics of this acute and sympathetic explorer of human nature." In 1928 Priestley observed,

> When I first remember seeing Hugh Walpole's name he had no public at all, but the ferocious young reviewers – the "highbrows" as we have since learned to call them – delighted in him. Now he has an enormous public, both in England and America, and the young "highbrows" – who are saddened by the thought of a large public – are not particularly fond of him.

Priestley contended that Walpole had fulfilled his early potential, unlike Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan and other promising young novelists of his generation. This view was not universal among critics: Walpole sometimes divided opinion. Writing of Walpole's Russian novels the contemporary critic and novelist Douglas Goldring commented, "Russia has been the grave of many reputations; and our Napoleon of the drawing-room novel has fared no better than other would-be conquerors of that disconcerting land." Goldring's complaint was that Walpole's Russian (and English) characters were clichéd stereotypes. The reviewer in Punch, by contrast, wrote, "I consulted a Russian, who is very much alive, and received the opinion that, if Mr. Walpole has not succeeded in drawing the real average Russian, he has given us a type whose faults and virtues sound the keynote of the situation as it is to-day." The Observer rated The Dark Forest as "one of the finest novels of our generation".

In 1924 Ernest Hemingway wrote into a short story a comparison of G. K. Chesterton and Walpole, concluding that the former was the better man, the latter a better writer and both were classics. Walpole could be sensitive about his literary reputation and often took adverse criticism badly. When Hilaire Belloc praised P. G. Wodehouse as the best English writer of their day, Walpole took it amiss, to the amusement of Wodehouse who regarded Belloc's plaudit as "a gag, to get a rise out of serious-minded authors whom he disliked". Wodehouse was not a great admirer of Walpole; his own scrupulous craftsmanship, with drafts polished over and over again, was the opposite of Walpole's hastily written and seldom-revised prose. He also viewed Walpole's sensitivity to criticism as absurd. Walpole was not always as oversensitive as Wodehouse supposed. The critic James Agate was a friend despite his regular rude remarks about Walpole's prose, and when Walpole discovered that Agate had written a spoof of the Herries "Lakeland" style, he made him promise to print it in the next published volume of his diaries.

During his career contemporaries saw both negative and positive sides to Walpole's outgoing nature and desire to be in the public eye. Wodehouse commented, "I always think Hugh Walpole's reputation was two thirds publicity. He was always endorsing books and speaking at lunches and so on." On the other hand, Walpole stood out as one of the few literary figures willing to go into court and give evidence for the defence at the obscenity trial after the 1928 lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, was published.

By the time of his death The Times's estimation of Walpole was no higher than, "he had a versatile imagination; he could tell a workmanlike story in good workmanlike English; and he was a man of immense industry, conscientious and painstaking". The belittling tone of the obituary brought forth strong rebuttals from T S Eliot, Kenneth Clark and Priestley, among others. Within a few years of his death, Walpole was seen as old-fashioned, and his works were largely neglected. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Elizabeth Steele summed up: "His psychology was not deep enough for the polemicist, his diction not free enough for those returning from war, and his zest disastrous to a public wary of personal commitment".

Walpole's works have not been completely neglected in recent years. The Herries stories have seldom been out of print, and in 2014 WorldCat listed a dozen recent reissues of Walpole's works, including The Wooden Horse, The Dark Forest, The Secret City, Jeremy, and The Cathedral. In 2011 the BBC broadcast a reappraisal of Walpole, The Walpole Chronicle, presented by Eric Robson. In 2013 a new stage version of Rogue Herries was presented by the Theatre by the Lake company in Walpole's adopted home of Keswick. The BBC speculated that this could mark a revival in interest in his works.

### Biographies

Two full-length studies of Walpole were published after his death. The first, in 1952, was written by Rupert Hart-Davis, who had known Walpole personally. It was regarded at the time as "among the half dozen best biographies of the century" and has been reissued several times since its first publication. Writing when homosexual acts between men were still outlawed in England, Hart-Davis avoided direct mention of his subject's sexuality, so respecting Walpole's habitual discretion and the wishes of his brother and sister. He left readers to read between the lines if they wished, in, for example, references to Turkish baths "providing informal opportunities of meeting interesting strangers". Hart-Davis dedicated the book to "Dorothy, Robin and Harold", Walpole's sister, brother, and long-term companion.

In 1972 Elizabeth Steele's study of Walpole was published. Much shorter than Hart-Davis's biography, at 178 pages to his 503, it dealt mainly with the novels, and aimed "to show the sources of Hugh Walpole's success as a writer during the thirty-five years and fifty books of his busy career". Steele concentrated on half a dozen of Walpole's best books, each illustrating aspects of his writing, under the headings "Acolyte", "Artist", "Witness", "Evangelist", "Critic" and "Romanticist". Steele also wrote a study of Walpole's North American lecture tours (2006) and the article on Walpole in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), which treats his private life briefly but candidly.

English writer

James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients

New Zealand LGBT dramatists and playwrights

New Zealand emigrants to the United Kingdom

People educated at Sir William Borlase's Grammar School

People educated at The King's School, Canterbury


Al-Mu'tadid

Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Ṭalḥa al-Muwaffaq (Arabic: أبو العباس أحمد بن طلحة الموفق), 853/4 or 860/1 – 5 April 902, better known by his regnal name al-Muʿtaḍid bi-llāh (Arabic: المعتضد بالله, "Seeking Support in God"), was the caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate from 892 until his death in 902.

Al-Mu'tadid was the son of al-Muwaffaq, who was the regent and effective ruler of the Abbasid state during the reign of his brother, Caliph al-Mu'tamid. As a prince, the future al-Mu'tadid served under his father during various military campaigns, most notably in the suppression of the Zanj Rebellion, in which he played a major role. When al-Muwaffaq died in June 891 al-Mu'tadid succeeded him as regent. He quickly sidelined his cousin and heir-apparent al-Mufawwid; when al-Mu'tamid died in October 892, he succeeded to the throne. Like his father, al-Mu'tadid's power depended on his close relations with the army. These were first forged during the campaigns against the Zanj and were reinforced in later expeditions which the Caliph led in person: al-Mu'tadid would prove to be the most militarily active of all Abbasid caliphs. Through his energy and ability, he succeeded in restoring to the Abbasid state some of the power and provinces it had lost during the turmoil of the previous decades.

In a series of campaigns he recovered the provinces of Jazira, Thughur, and Jibal, and effected a rapprochement with the Saffarids in the east and the Tulunids in the west that secured their—albeit largely nominal—recognition of caliphal suzerainty. These successes came at the cost of gearing the economy almost exclusively towards the maintenance of the army, which resulted in the expansion and rise to power of the central fiscal bureaucracy and contributed to the Caliph's lasting reputation for avarice. Al-Mu'tadid was renowned for his cruelty when punishing criminals, and subsequent chroniclers recorded his extensive and ingenious use of torture. His reign saw the permanent move of the capital back to Baghdad, where he engaged in major building activities. A firm supporter of Sunni traditionalist orthodoxy, he nevertheless maintained good relations with the Alids, and was interested in natural sciences, renewing caliphal sponsorship of scholars and scientists.

Despite his successes, al-Mu'tadid's reign was ultimately too short to effect a lasting reversal of the Caliphate's fortunes, and the revival that he spearheaded was too dependent on the presence of capable personalities at the helm of the state. The brief reign of his less able son and heir, al-Muktafi, still saw some major gains, notably the annexation of the Tulunid domains, but his later successors lacked his energy, and new enemies appeared in the form of the Qarmatians. In addition, factionalism within the bureaucracy, which had become apparent during the later years of al-Mu'tadid's reign, would debilitate the Abbasid government for decades to come, eventually leading to the subjugation of the Caliphate by a series of military strongmen, culminating in the conquest of Baghdad by the Buyids in 946.

## Early life

Al-Mu'tadid was born Ahmad, the son of Talha, one of the sons of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–861), and a Greek slave named Dirar. The exact date of his birth is unknown; as he is variously recorded as being thirty-eight or thirty-one years old at the time of his accession, he was born around either 854 or 861. In 861, al-Mutawakkil was murdered by his Turkish guards in collusion with his oldest son al-Muntasir (r. 861–862). This began a period of internal turmoil, known as the "Anarchy at Samarra" from the site of the Caliphate's capital, which ended in 870 with the rise to the throne of Ahmad's uncle, al-Mu'tamid (r. 870–892). Real power however, had come to lie with the elite Turkish slave-soldiers (ghilmān) and with Ahmad's own father, Talha, who, as the Caliphate's main military commander, served as the chief intermediary between the caliphal government and the Turks. Assuming the honorific name al-Muwaffaq in the style of the caliphs, Talha soon became the effective ruler of the Caliphate, a position consolidated in 882 after a failed attempt by al-Mu'tamid to flee to Egypt led to his confinement in house arrest.

Caliphal authority in the provinces collapsed during the "Anarchy at Samarra", with the result that by the 870s the central government had lost effective control over most of the Caliphate outside the metropolitan region of Iraq. In the west, Egypt had fallen under the control of the Turkish slave-soldier Ahmad ibn Tulun, who also disputed control of Syria with al-Muwaffaq, while Khurasan and most of the Islamic East had been taken over by the Saffarids, a Persianate dynasty who replaced the Abbasids' loyal clients, the Tahirids. Most of the Arabian peninsula was likewise lost to local potentates, while in Tabaristan a radical Zaydi Shi'a dynasty took power. Even in Iraq, the rebellion of the Zanj, African slaves brought to work in the plantations of Lower Iraq, threatened Baghdad itself, and further south the Qarmatians were a nascent threat. Al-Muwaffaq's regency was thus a continuous struggle to save the tottering Caliphate from collapse. His attempts to recover control of Egypt and Syria from Ibn Tulun failed, with the latter even able to expand his territory and obtain recognition as a hereditary ruler, but he succeeded in preserving the core of the Caliphate in Iraq by repelling a Saffarid invasion aimed at capturing Baghdad, and by subduing the Zanj after a long struggle.

### Campaigns against the Zanj and the Tulunids

It was against the Zanj that the future al-Mu'tadid—at this time usually referred to by his kunya of Abu'l-Abbas—would acquire his first military experience and establish the close army ties that would characterize his reign. Al-Muwaffaq gave his son a military upbringing from an early age, and the young prince became an excellent rider and a solicitous commander, who showed personal attention to the state of his men and their horses.

Within a decade of the outbreak of the revolt in 869, the Zanj had seized most of lower Iraq, including the cities of Basra and Wasit, and expanded into Khuzistan. In 879 the death of the founder of the Saffarid state, Ya'qub al-Saffar, allowed the Abbasid government to fully concentrate its attention against the Zanj rebellion, and Abu'l-Abbas' appointment to command in December 879 at the head of 10,000 troops marks the turning point of the war. In the long and hard struggle that followed, which involved amphibious operations in the Mesopotamian Marshes, Abu'l-Abbas and his own ghilmān—of which the long-serving Zirak al-Turki was the most eminent—played the major role. Although the Abbasid armies eventually swelled with reinforcements, volunteers, and Zanj defectors, it was the few but elite ghilmān who formed the army's backbone, filling its leadership positions and bearing the brunt of the battle, often under the personal command of Abu'l-Abbas. After years of gradually tightening the noose around the Zanj, in August 883 the Abbasid troops stormed their capital of al-Mukhtara, putting an end to the rebellion. A detailed account of the war by a former Zanj rebel, preserved in the history written by al-Tabari, stresses the role of al-Muwaffaq and Abu'l-Abbas as the heroes who, in defence of the embattled Muslim state, suppressed the rebellion; the successful campaign would become a major tool in their propaganda effort to legitimize their de facto usurpation of the caliph's power.

Following the death of Ibn Tulun in May 884, the two caliphal generals Ishaq ibn Kundaj and Ibn Abu'l-Saj sought to take advantage of the situation and attacked the Tulunid domains in Syria, but their initial gains were rapidly reversed. In the spring of 885, Abu'l-Abbas was sent to take charge of the invasion. He soon succeeded in defeating the Tulunids and forcing them to retreat to Palestine, but after a quarrel with Ibn Kundaj and Ibn Abu'l-Saj, the latter two abandoned the campaign and withdrew their forces. In the Battle of Tawahin on 6 April, Abu'l-Abbas confronted Ibn Tulun's son and heir, Khumarawayh, in person. The Abbasid prince was initially victorious, forcing Khumarawayh to flee, but was in turn defeated and fled the battlefield, while much of his army was taken prisoner. After this victory the Tulunids expanded their control over the Jazira and the borderlands (the Thughur) with the Byzantine Empire. A peace agreement followed in 886, whereby al-Muwaffaq was forced to recognize Khumarawayh as hereditary governor over Egypt and Syria for 30 years, in exchange for an annual tribute. Over the next couple of years, Abu'l-Abbas was involved in his father's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to wrest Fars from Saffarid control.

### Imprisonment and rise to the throne

During this period, relations between Abu'l-Abbas and his father deteriorated, although the reason is unclear. Already in 884, Abu'l-Abbas' ghilmān rioted in Baghdad against al-Muwaffaq's vizier, Sa'id ibn Makhlad, possibly over unpaid wages. Eventually, in 889, Abu'l-Abbas was arrested and put in prison on his father's orders, where he remained despite the demonstrations of the ghilmān loyal to him. He apparently remained under arrest until May 891, when al-Muwaffaq returned to Baghdad after two years spent in Jibal.

Al-Muwaffaq, suffering from gout, was clearly close to death; the vizier Isma'il ibn Bulbul and the city commander of Baghdad, Abu'l-Saqr, called al-Mu'tamid and his sons, including the heir-apparent al-Mufawwad, into the city, hoping to exploit the situation for their own purposes. This attempt to sideline Abu'l-Abbas failed due to his popularity with the soldiers and the common people. He was set free to visit his father's deathbed, and was able to immediately assume power when al-Muwaffaq died on 2 June. The Baghdad mob ransacked his opponents' houses, and Ibn Bulbul was dismissed and thrown in prison, where he died from maltreatment after a few months. Similar fates awaited any of Ibn Bulbul's supporters who were caught by Abu'l-Abbas's agents.

Now "all-powerful", Abu'l-Abbas succeeded his father in all his offices, with the title of al-Mu'tadid bi-llah and a position in the line of succession after the Caliph and al-Mufawwad. Within a few months, on 30 April 892, al-Mu'tadid had his cousin removed from the succession altogether. Thus, when al-Mu'tamid died on 14 October 892, al-Mu'tadid took power as caliph.

## Reign

The Orientalist Harold Bowen described al-Mu'tadid at his accession as follows:

> in appearance upright and thin; and on his head was a white mole, which, since white moles were not admired, he used to dye black. His expression was haughty. In character he was brave—a story was told of his killing a lion with only a dagger. [...] he had inherited all his father's energy, and cultivated a reputation of prompt action.

Like his father's, al-Mu'tadid's power rested on his close relations with the military. As the historian Hugh N. Kennedy writes, he "came to the throne, essentially, as a usurper [...] not by any legal right, but because of the support of his ghilmān, who ensured not only that he became caliph, but also that their rivals in the military were humiliated and disbanded". Thus, not surprisingly, military activities consumed his interest, especially as he usually led his army in person on campaign. This secured his reputation as a warrior-caliph and champion of the Islamic faith ghazī); as the historian Michael Bonner comments, "[t]he role of 'ghazī caliph', invented by Harun al-Rashid and enhanced by al-Mu'tasim, now had its greatest performance, in al-Mu'tadid's tireless campaigning".

From the start of his reign, the new Caliph set out to reverse the fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate, a goal towards which he worked with a mixture of force and diplomacy. Although an active and enthusiastic campaigner, al-Mu'tadid was also "a skilful diplomat, always prepared to make compromises with those who were too powerful to defeat", according to Kennedy.

### Relations with the Tulunids

This policy became immediately evident in the conciliatory attitude the new Caliph adopted towards his most powerful vassal, the Tulunid regime. In spring 893, al-Mu'tadid recognized and reconfirmed Khumarawayh in his office as autonomous emir over Egypt and Syria, in exchange for an annual tribute of 300,000 dinars and a further 200,000 dinars in arrears, as well as the return to caliphal control of the two Jaziran provinces of Diyar Rabi'a and Diyar Mudar. To seal the pact, Khumarawayh offered his daughter, Qatr al-Nada ("Dew Drop") as bride to one of the Caliph's sons, but al-Mu'tadid chose to marry her himself. The Tulunid princess brought with her a million dinars as her dowry, a "wedding gift that was considered the most sumptuous in medieval Arab history" (Thierry Bianquis). Her arrival in Baghdad was marked by the luxury and extravagance of her retinue, which contrasted starkly with the impoverished caliphal court. According to a story, after a thorough search, al-Mu'tadid's chief eunuch could find only five ornate silver-and-gold candlesticks to decorate the palace, while the princess was accompanied by 150 servants each carrying such a candlestick. Thereupon al-Mu'tadid is said to have remarked "come let us go and hide ourselves, lest we be seen in our poverty".

On the other hand, the whole affair may have been deliberately plotted by al-Mu'tadid as a "financial trap", as the enormous dowry almost bankrupted the Tulunid treasury. Apart from the honour of being linked to the caliphal dynasty, the Tulunids received little in return: Qatr al-Nada died soon after the wedding, and the murder of Khumarawayh in 896 left the Tulunid state in the unsteady hands of Khumarawayh's under-age sons. Al-Mu'tadid swiftly took advantage of this and in 897 extended his control over the border emirates of the Thughur, where, in the words of Michael Bonner, "[he] assumed, after a long hiatus, the old caliphal prerogative of commanding the annual summer expedition and arranging the defence against the Byzantine Empire". In addition, to secure caliphal recognition of his position, the new Tulunid ruler Harun ibn Khumarawayh (r. 896–904) was forced into further concessions, handing back all of Syria north of Homs, and increasing the annual tribute to 450,000 dinars. Over the next few years, increasing domestic turmoil in the remaining Tulunid domains, and the escalation of Qarmatian attacks, encouraged many Tulunid followers to defect to the resurgent Caliphate.

### Jazira, Transcaucasia, and the Byzantine front

In the Jazira the new Caliph struggled against a variety of opponents: alongside an almost thirty-year-old Kharijite rebellion, there were various autonomous local magnates, chiefly the Shaybani ruler of Amid and Diyar Bakr, Ahmad ibn Isa al-Shaybani, and the Taghlibi chief Hamdan ibn Hamdun. In 893, while the Kharijites were distracted by internal quarrels, al-Mu'tadid captured Mosul from the Shayban. In 895 Hamdan ibn Hamdun was evicted from his strongholds, hunted down and captured. Finally, the Kharijite leader Harun ibn Abdallah himself was defeated and captured by Hamdan's son Husayn in 896, before being sent to Baghdad, where he was crucified. This exploit marked the beginning of an illustrious career for Husayn ibn Hamdan in the caliphal armies, and the gradual rise of the Hamdanid family to power in the Jazira. Ahmad al-Shaybani retained Amid until his death in 898, being succeeded by his son Muhammad. In the next year, al-Mu'tadid returned to the Jazira, ousted Muhammad from Amid, and reunified the entire province under central government control by installing his oldest son and heir, Ali al-Muktafi, as governor.

Al-Mu'tadid was unable, however, to restore effective caliphal control north of the Jazira in Transcaucasia, where Armenia and Adharbayjan remained in the hands of virtually independent local dynasties. Ibn Abu'l-Saj, who was now the caliphal governor of Adharbayjan, proclaimed himself independent around 898, although he soon re-recognized the Caliph's suzerainty during his conflicts with the Christian Armenian princes. When he died in 901, he was succeeded by his son Devdad, marking the consolidation of the semi-independent Sajid dynasty in the region. In 900, Ibn Abu'l-Saj was even suspected of plotting to seize Diyar Mudar province with the co-operation of the notables of Tarsus, after which the vengeful Caliph ordered the latter arrested and the city's fleet burned. This decision was a self-inflicted handicap in the centuries-long war against Byzantium; in recent decades the Tarsians and their fleet had played a major role in the raids against the Byzantine frontier provinces. While a Syrian fleet under the Byzantine convert to Islam Damian of Tarsus sacked the port of Demetrias around 900, and Arab fleets would go on to wreak havoc in the Aegean Sea over the next two decades, the Byzantines were strengthened on land by an influx of Armenian refugees, such as Melias. The Byzantines began to expand their control over the border regions, scoring victories and founding new provinces (themes) in the former no-man's land between the two empires.

### The East and the Saffarids

In the Islamic East, the Caliph was forced to acknowledge the reality of the Saffarids' domination and established a modus vivendi with them, perhaps hoping, according to Kennedy, to harness them in a partnership analogous to that which the Tahirids had enjoyed in previous decades. Consequently, the Saffarid ruler Amr ibn al-Layth was recognized in his possession of Khurasan and eastern Persia as well as Fars, while the Abbasids were to exercise direct control over western Persia, namely Jibal, Rayy and Isfahan. This policy gave the Caliph a free hand to recover the territories of the Dulafids, another semi-independent local dynasty, that were centred on Isfahan and Nihavand. When the Dulafid Ahmad ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Abi Dulaf died in 893, al-Mu'tadid moved swiftly to install his son al-Muktafi as governor in Rayy, Qazvin, Qum and Hamadan. The Dulafids were confined to their core region around Karaj and Isfahan, before being deposed outright in 896. Nevertheless, the Abbasid hold over these territories remained precarious, especially due to the proximity of the Zaydi emirate in Tabaristan, and in 897 Rayy was handed over to Saffarid control.

The Abbasid–Saffarid partnership in Iran was most clearly expressed in their joint effort against the general Rafi ibn Harthama, who had made his base in Rayy and posed a threat to both caliphal and Saffarid interests in the region. Al-Mu'tadid sent Ahmad ibn Abd al-Aziz to seize Rayy from Rafi, who fled and made common cause with the Zaydis of Tabaristan in an effort to seize Khurasan from the Saffarids. However, with Amr mobilizing the anti-Alid sentiments of the populace against him and the expected assistance from the Zaydis failing to materialize, Rafi was defeated and killed in Khwarazm in 896. Amr, now at the pinnacle of his power, sent the defeated rebel's head to Baghdad, and in 897 the Caliph transferred control of Rayy to him. The partnership finally collapsed after Mu'tadid appointed Amr as governor of Transoxiana in 898, which was ruled by his rivals, the Samanids. Al-Mu'tamid deliberately encouraged Amr to confront the Samanids, only for Amr to be crushingly defeated and taken prisoner by them in 900. The Samanid ruler, Isma'il ibn Ahmad, sent him in chains to Baghdad, where he was executed in 902, after al-Mu'tadid's death. Al-Mu'tadid in turn conferred Amr's titles and governorships on Isma'il ibn Ahmad. The Caliph also moved to regain Fars and Kirman, but the Saffarid remnant under Amr's grandson Tahir proved sufficiently resilient to thwart the Abbasid attempts to capture these provinces for several years. It was not until 910 that the Abbasids managed to regain the coveted Fars province.

### Rise of sectarianism and fragmentation in the periphery

In the course of the 9th century, a range of new movements emerged, based on Shi'ite doctrines, which replaced Kharijism as the main focus for opposition to the established regimes. They gained their first successes in the periphery of the Abbasid empire: the Zaydi takeover in Tabaristan was repeated in 897 in Yemen. Under al-Mu'tadid, a new danger appeared closer to the Caliphate's metropolitan areas: the Qarmatians. A radical Isma'ili sect founded in Kufa around 874, the Qarmatians were originally a sporadic and minor nuisance in the Sawad (Lower Iraq), but their power grew swiftly to alarming proportions after 897. Under the leadership of Abu Sa'id al-Jannabi, they seized Bahrayn in 899 and in the next year defeated a caliphal army under al-Abbas ibn Amr al-Ghanawi. In the years following al-Mu'tadid's death, the Qarmatians "were to prove the most dangerous enemies the Abbasids had faced since the time of the Zanj" (Kennedy). At the same time, a Kufan Isma'ili missionary, Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i, made contact with the Kutama Berbers during a pilgrimage to Mecca. His proselytization efforts made rapid headway among them, and in 902, he began attacks on the Aghlabid emirate of Ifriqiya, clients of the Abbasids. Its conquest was completed in 909, laying the foundations of the Fatimid Caliphate.

### Domestic government

#### Fiscal policies

The Abbasid army, following the reforms of al-Mu'tasim, was a smaller and more professional fighting force than the caliphal armies of the past. Although it proved effective militarily, it also posed a potential danger to the stability of the Abbasid regime: drawn from Turks and other peoples from the Caliphate's periphery and the lands beyond, it was alienated from the society of the Caliphate's heartlands, with the result that the soldiers were "entirely reliant on the state not just for cash but for their very survival" (Kennedy). As a result, any failure by the central government to provide their pay resulted in a military uprising and a political crisis; this had been repeatedly demonstrated during the Anarchy at Samarra. Consequently, ensuring the regular payment of the army became the prime task of the state. According to Kennedy, based on a treasury document from the time of al-Mu'tadid's accession:

> out of the total expenditure of 7915 dinars per day, some 5121 are entirely military, 1943 in areas (like riding animals and stables) which served both military and non-military and only 851 in areas like the bureaucracy and the harem which can be described as truly civilian (though even in this case, the bureaucrats’ main purpose seems to have been to arrange the payment of the army). It seems reasonable to conclude that something over 80 per cent of recorded government expenditure was devoted to maintaining the army.

At the same time, the Caliphate's fiscal basis had shrunk dramatically after so many tax-paying provinces were lost from the central government's control. The caliphal government was now increasingly reliant on the revenue of the Sawad and the other areas of lower Iraq, which were witnessing a rapid decline in agricultural productivity due to the disruption of the civil wars and neglect of the irrigation network. In the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–809) the Sawad had provided an annual revenue of 102,500,000 dirhams, more than double the revenue of Egypt and three times that of Syria; by the early 10th century it was providing less than a third of that figure. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that in the remaining provinces, semi-autonomous governors, grandees and members of the dynasty were able to establish virtual latifundia, aided by the system of muqāṭa'a, a form of tax farming in exchange for a fixed tribute, which they often failed to pay. To maximize their revenue from the territory remaining to them, the Abbasids increased the breadth and complexity of the central bureaucracy, dividing the provinces into smaller tax districts as well as increasing the number of the fiscal departments (dīwāns), which allowed for close oversight of both revenue collection and the activities of the officials themselves.

To combat this fiscal crisis, the Caliph would often personally devote himself to the supervision of revenue, acquiring a reputation, according to F. Malti-Douglas, for "a spirit of economy, verging on avarice"; he was said to "examine petty accounts that a commoner would scorn to consider" (Harold Bowen). Fines and confiscations multiplied under his rule, with the resulting revenue, along with the income from the crown domain and even a portion of the provincial taxation, flowing to the caliphal privy purse (bayt al-māl al-khāṣṣa). The latter now acquired a leading role among the fiscal departments, and it frequently held more money than the public treasury (bayt al-māl al-ʿāmma). By the end of al-Mu'tadid's reign, the once empty privy purse would contain ten million dinars. On the other hand, in a measure aimed to ease the tax burden of the farmers, in 895 the Caliph changed the start of the tax year from the Persian New Year in March to 11 June—which became known as Nayrūz al-Muʿtaḍid, 'al-Mu'tadid's New Year'—so the land tax ('kharāj) was now collected after the harvest instead of the usually unreliable estimates before.

#### Rise of the bureaucracy

During the 9th century, the Abbasid administrative system became increasingly professionalized. The provincial administration became a subject of careful study, with geographical works such as Ibn Khordadbeh providing details on the Caliphate's provinces and their road networks, while men like Ibn Qutayba developed the art of chancery writing into a highly elaborate system. Al-Mu'tadid's fiscal policies further strengthened the position of the civil bureaucracy, which now reached the apogee of its influence, and especially that of the vizier, whom even the army came to respect as the spokesman of the caliph. Al-Mu'tadid also introduced Tuesday and Friday as days of rest for government employees.

In terms of personnel, al-Mu'tadid's reign was marked by continuity among the senior leadership of the state. Ubayd Allah ibn Sulayman ibn Wahb remained vizier from the start of the reign until his death in 901, and was succeeded by his son, al-Qasim, who had from the start been deputizing for his father during the latter's absences from the capital. The freedman Badr, a veteran who had served under al-Muwaffaq and whose daughter married the Caliph's son, remained commander of the army. The fiscal departments, especially of the Sawad, were managed first by the Banu'l-Furat brothers Ahmad and Ali, and after 899 by the Banu'l-Jarrah under Muhammad ibn Dawud and his nephew, Ali ibn Isa. The original administrative team was so effective and harmonious, according to the 11th-century historian Hilal as-Sabi, it was said by subsequent generations that "there had never been such a quartet, Caliph, Vizier, Commander, and chief of the diwāns, as al-Mu'tadid, Ubayd Allah, Badr and Ahmad ibn al-Furat".

On the other hand, as Michel Bonner points out, the later reign of al-Mu'tadid "saw a growth of factionalism within this bureaucracy, observable also in the army and in urban civilian life". The intense rivalry between the two bureaucratic dynasties of the Banu'l-Furat and the Banu'l-Jarrah, with their extensive networks of clients, began at this time. Although a strong caliph and vizier could restrain this antagonism, it would dominate the Abbasid government during the following decades, with the factions alternating in office and often fining and torturing their predecessors to extract money according to the well-established practice known as muṣādara. In addition, al-Qasim ibn Ubayd Allah was of an altogether different character than his father: soon after his appointment to the vizierate, al-Qasim plotted to have al-Mu'tadid assassinated, and tried to involve Badr in his scheming. The general rejected his proposals with indignation, but al-Qasim was saved from discovery and execution by the Caliph's sudden death. The Vizier then tried to dominate al-Muktafi, moved swiftly to have Badr denounced and executed, and was involved in yet more intrigues against the Banu'l-Furat.

#### Return of the capital to Baghdad

Al-Mu'tadid also completed the return of the capital from Samarra to Baghdad, which had already served as his father's main base of operations. The city's centre, however, was relocated on the eastern bank of the Tigris and further downstream from the original Round City founded by al-Mansur (r. 754–775) a century earlier; it has there remained to this day. As the 10th-century historian al-Mas'udi wrote, the Caliph's two main passions were "women and building" ("al-nisāʿ waʿl-banāʿ"), and accordingly he engaged in major building activities in the capital: he restored and expanded the Great Mosque of al-Mansur which had fallen into disuse; enlarged the Hasani Palace; built the new palaces of Thurayya ('Pleiades') and Firdus ('Paradise'); and began work on the Taj ('Crown') Palace, which was completed under al-Muktafi. This marked the creation of a sprawling new caliphal palace complex, the Dar al-Khilafa, which would remain the residence of the Abbasid caliphs until 1258. Al-Mu'tadid also took care to restore the city's irrigation network by clearing the silted-up Dujayl Canal, paying for this with money from those landowners who stood to profit from it.

#### Theological doctrines and promotion of science

In terms of doctrine, al-Mu'tadid sided firmly with Sunni traditionalist orthodoxy from the outset of his reign, forbidding theological works and abolishing the fiscal department responsible for property in escheat, which Hanbali legal opinion regarded as illegal. At the same time he also tried to maintain good relations with the Alids, to the point of seriously considering ordering the official cursing of Mu'awiya, the founder of the Umayyad Caliphate and main opponent of Ali; he was dissuaded only at the last moment by his advisers, who feared any unforeseen consequences such an act might have. Al-Mu'tadid also maintained good relations with the breakaway Zaydi imams of Tabaristan, but his pro-Alid stance failed to prevent the establishment of a second Zaydi state in Yemen in 901.

Al-Mu'tadid also actively promoted the traditions of learning and science that had flourished under his early 9th-century predecessors al-Ma'mun (r. 813–832), al-Mu'tasim, and al-Wathiq (r. 842–847). Court patronage for scientific endeavours had declined under al-Mutawakkil, whose reign had marked a return to Sunni orthodoxy and an aversion to scientific inquiry, while his successors had lacked the luxury to engage in intellectual pursuits. Himself "keenly interested in natural sciences" and able to speak Greek, al-Mu'tadid promoted the career of one of the great translators of Greek texts and mathematicians of the era, Thabit ibn Qurra, and of the grammarians Ibn Durayd and al-Zajjaj, the latter of whom became tutor of the Caliph's children. Other notable figures associated with, and supported by, the Abbasid court at the time were the religious scholar Ibn Abi al-Dunya, who served as the Caliph's advisor and was appointed as tutor for al-Muktafi; the translator Ishaq ibn Hunayn; the physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes), who was named director of the newly established al-Mu'tadidi hospital in Baghdad; and the mathematician and astronomer al-Battani.

One of the leading intellectual figures of the period was al-Mu'tadid's own tutor, Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib al-Sarakhsi, a pupil of the great philosopher al-Kindi. Al-Sarakhsi became a close companion of the Caliph, who appointed him to the lucrative post of market supervisor of Baghdad, but was executed in 896, after angering the Caliph. According to one account, al-Qasim ibn Ubayd Allah—who is frequently featured as the villain in anecdotes of al-Mu'tadid's court—inserted al-Sarakhsi's name in a list of rebels to be executed; the Caliph signed the list, and learned of his mistake only after his old master had been executed.

#### Justice and punishment under al-Mu'tadid

In the dispensation of justice, he was characterized by what Malti-Douglas describes as "severity bordering on sadism". While tolerant of error and not above displays of sentimentality and tenderness, when his wrath was aroused he resorted to torture in the most ingenious ways, and had special torture chambers constructed underneath his palace. Chroniclers such as al-Mas'udi and the Mamluk historian al-Safadi describe in great detail the tortures inflicted by the Caliph on prisoners, as well as his practice of making an example of them by having them publicly displayed in Baghdad. Thus the Caliph is reported to have used bellows to inflate his prisoners, or buried them upside down in pits. At the same time they justify his severity as legitimate, being in the interests of the state. Malti-Douglas remarks that when al-Safadi compared al-Mu'tadid with the founder of the Abbasid state, calling him "al-Saffah the Second", this was not only to emphasize his restoration of the Caliphate's fortunes, but also a direct allusion to the meaning of al-Saffah's name, "the Blood-Shedder".

### Death and legacy

Al-Mu'tadid died at the Hasani Palace on 5 April 902, at the age of either 40 or 47. There were rumours he had been poisoned, but it is more likely that the rigours of his campaigns, coupled with his dissolute life, severely weakened his health. During his final illness, he refused to follow the advice of his physicians, and even kicked one of them to death. He left behind him four sons and several daughters. Of his sons, three—al-Muktafi, al-Muqtadir, and al-Qahir—would rule as caliphs in turn and only one, Harun, did not become caliph. Al-Mu'tadid was the first Abbasid caliph to be buried within the city of Baghdad. Like his sons after him, he was buried in the former Tahirid Palace in the western part of the city, which was now used by the caliphs as a secondary residence.

According to the Orientalist Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen, al-Mu'tadid "had inherited his father's gifts as a ruler and was distinguished alike for his economy and his military ability", becoming "one of the greatest of the Abbasids in spite of his strictness and cruelty". Al-Mu'tadid's capable reign is credited with having arrested the Abbasid Caliphate's decline for a while, but his successes were too dependent on the presence of an energetic ruler at the helm, and ultimately his reign "was too short to reverse long-term trends and re-establish Abbasid power on a long-term basis" (Kennedy).

Al-Mu'tadid had taken care to prepare his son and successor, al-Muktafi, for his role by appointing him as governor in Rayy and the Jazira. Although al-Muktafi tried to follow his father's policies, he lacked his energy. The heavily militarized system of al-Muwaffaq and al-Mu'tadid required the Caliph to actively participate in campaigns, setting a personal example and forming ties of loyalty, reinforced by patronage, between the ruler and the soldiers. Al-Muktafi, on the other hand, did not "in his character and comportment [...], being a sedentary figure, instil much loyalty, let alone inspiration, in the soldiers" (Michael Bonner). The Caliphate was still able to secure major successes over the next few years, including the reincorporation of the Tulunid domains in 904 and victories over the Qarmatians, but with al-Muktafi's death in 908, the so-called "Abbasid restoration" passed its high-water mark, and a new period of crisis began.

Power was now wielded by the senior bureaucrats, who installed the weak and pliable al-Muqtadir on the throne. Over the next decades, the expenditure of both the court and the army increased, while maladministration increased and strife between military and bureaucratic factions intensified. By 932, when al-Muqtadir was assassinated, the Caliphate was effectively bankrupt, and authority soon devolved on a series of military strongmen who competed for control of the caliph and the title of amīr al-umarāʾ. This process culminated in the capture of Baghdad in 946 by the Buyids, who put an end to caliphal independence even in name. Thereafter the caliphs remained as symbolic figureheads, but were divested of any military or political authority or independent financial resources.

16th Abbasid Caliph (r. 892–902)