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From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History

 WEST WYANDOTTE
KANSAS CITY KANSAS
PUBLIC LIBRARY
DATE:

MAY 1 1 2009
94 f
oo

THESTORYWOER BRITAIN j
The Battersea Shield, rst century Bc, found in the River Thames at Battersea.
 THE STORY
OF BRITAIN
From the Romans
to the Present:
A Narratiyve*History

REBE CGA LPRASER

D<T
W. W. Norton & Company
NEW YORK LONDON
 Copyright © 2003 by Rebecca Fraser
First published as a Norton paperback 2006

Originally published in Great Britain under the title A People’s History of Britain

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Manufacturing by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.

Production manager: Amanda Morrison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fraser, Rebecca.
[People's history of Britain]
The story of Britain : from the Romans to the present : a narrative history / Rebecca
Fraser— Ist American ed.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Great Britain under the title A People’s history of Britain"—
T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-393-06010-1
1. Great Britain—History—Anecdotes. I. Title.
DA32.8.F73 2005
941—de22
2004026049
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-32902-5 pbk.
ISBN-10: 0-393-32902-X pbk.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www. wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

29324
5 6 °8°9°0
 Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface XV

ROMAN

ANGLQ-SAXON

Ethelbert of Kent to the Viking Invasions (597-865) a)

Alfred the Great to the Battle of Hastings (865-1066) 7

NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

William I (1066-1087) ve)

William II (1087-1100) 108
Henry I (1100-1135) 114
Stephen of Blois (113 5-115 4) 120
Henry II (1154-1189) 125
Richard I (1189-1199) 146
John (1199-1216) 158

PLANTAGENET

Henry III (1216-1272) 169

Edward I (1272-1307) 176
Edward II (1307-1327) 185
Edward III (1327-1377) 189
Richard II (1377-1399) 201

LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

Henry IV (1399-1413) 209

HenryV (1413-1422) eg
Henry VI (1422-1461) pees
Edward IV (1461-1483) 230
Edward V (1483) 235
Richard III (1483-1485) 239
 CONTENTS

TuDOR

Henry VII (1485-1509) 247

Henry VIII (1509-1547) 255
Edward VI (1547-1553) 276
Mary I (1553-1558) 280
Elizabeth I (15 58-1603) 286

STUART

James I (1603-1625)
Charles I (1625-1649)
Divine Right (1625-1642) RP
POH
SION)

Civil War (1642-1649)

The Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649-1660) me
\O

Charles II (1660-1685) fe

James II (1685-1688) Wo
WW
UW
WW
W (>)

William and Mary (1689-1702) WwW

AM
on™]

Anne (1702-1714) Uo\o ON

Wd

HANOVERIAN

George I (1714-1727)
George II (1727-1760)
George III (1760-1820)
Patriot King (1760-1793)
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793
Radical Agitation (1815-1820)
George IV (1820-1830)
William IV (1830-1837)
Victoria (1837-190T)
Corn Laws and Irish Famine (1837-1854)
Palmerstonian Aggression (1854-1868)
Gladstone and Disraeli (1868-1886) J

Imperialism and Socialism (1886-1901) WI

Wa
Ha

SAXE-COBURG

Edward VII (1901-1910)

WINDSOR

George V (1910-1936)
Last Years of Peace (1910-1914)
The First World War (1914-1918) WN WW
NNWWM\O
Ws &
©
vi
 CONTENTS

Peacemaking and the Rise of Fascism (1918-1936) 669

Edward VIII (1936) 696
George VI (1936-1952) 696
The Failure of Appeasement (1936-1939) 696
The Second World War (1939-1945) 702
Reform at Home, Communism Abroad (1945-1952) Fat.
Elizabeth II (1952-) TOS
Wind of Change (1952-1964) HDS
The Sick Man of Europe (1964-1979) 744
The Thatcher Legacy (1979-2002) PSE

Further Reading 786

Genealogies 789
Prime Ministers 798
Index 801

Maps by Cartographica

Vii
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2021 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

httos://archive.org/details/storyofbritainfroO0Ofras
 List of Illustrations

The Battersea Shield rst century Bc (© Copyright The British Museum)

Stonehenge
Roman soldiers
Partial sandstone Roman building inscription near Battle, East Sussex
(Copyright Dr Gerald Brodribb)
Locker foom from Roman bathhouse, Battle, East Sussex (Copyright Dr
Gerald Brodribb)
A section of Hadrian’s Wall, 2nd century ap (The Bridgeman Art
Library)
Angle slaves in the market at Rome
St Augustine converts King Ethelbert of Kent, 597 ap
Christian Irish missionaries setting off for northern Britain
The 7th-century Bewcastle Cross, Cumbria (Copyright Peter Burton)
7th-century Anglo-Saxon helmet, from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo (©
Copyright The British Museum)
Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland
Drawing of the 8th-century Brixworth Church, Northamptonshire
Viking warships
Murder of King Edmund of East Anglia in 870 AD by the Danish Grand
Army |
gth-century grave marker with seven Viking warriors carved into the
surface, from Lindisfarne Priory (© English Heritage Photo Library)
Alfred the Great’s Isle of Athelney, Somerset
Page of text from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the 11th century (British
Library)
Tomb of King Edward the Confessor
The Bayeux Tapestry: King Harold is killed and the English turn in flight;
detail from the Bayeux Tapestry (Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux,
France/Bridgeman Art Library. With special authorization of the City of
Bayeux, Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)
Bishop Odo of Bayeux
Great Domesday Book, Volume 1, Berkshire (The National Archives)
The Chapel of St John at the Tower of London
A typical Norman keep, Rochester Castle on the Medway
William Rufus
Durham Cathedral
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Martyrdom of St Thomas 4 Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral from an

English Psalter c.1200 AD (British Library)
Pilgrim going to Canterbury to the shrine of Thomas a Becket
Richard the Lionheart
Lincoln Cathedral
The island in the middle of the Thames by Runnymede meadow where
King John put his seal to Magna Carta
Henry III supervising his masons (British Library)
Benedictine nun
Simon de Montfort
Harlech Castle begun by Edward I in 1283 (© Dave Newbould)
Edward I’s throne in Westminster Abbey
Seal of Robert the Bruce (British Library)
William of Wykeham
Geoffrey Chaucer
Richard II
John Wyclif
Richard II abdicating to Henry Bolingbroke in the Tower of London
(British Library)
The Lollard Prison, Lambeth Palace
Battle of Agincourt, 1415
Detail from Henry V’s tomb, Henry V on his charger, Westminster Abbey
(© Dean & Chapter of Westminster)
Tomb of Edward III, Westminster Abbey (© Dean & Chapter of
Westminster)
Eton College
King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
Edward V
Edward V’s uncle, Richard III
William Caxton and his printing press in the Almonry, Westminster
Tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s Lady Chapel,
Westminster Abbey (© Dean & Chapter of Westminster)
Henry VIII
Cardinal Wolsey
The Field of the Cloth of Gold, artist unknown (The Royal Collection ©
HM Queen Elizabeth II)
Martin Luther
Archbishop Cranmer
Thomas Cromwell
Sir Thomas More
Sir Thomas More’s House in Chelsea
Ruins of Tintern Abbey
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A Carthusian monk
Edward VI
Queen Mary Tudor
Bishop Ridley and Bishop Latimer (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs)
Cardinal Pole
Martyrdom of Dr Thomas Cranmer in Oxford (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs)
Marian Martyrs burning (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs)
The Martyrs’ Memorial, Oxford
Traitor’s Gate, Tower of London
Tower of London
Elizabeth I
Jean Calvin
John Knox
Archbishop Matthew Parker
Archbishop John Whitgift
Map of Drake’s voyage round the world (British Library)
Edmund Spenser
English defeat the Spanish Armada
Sir Walter Raleigh
The Indian Village of Secoton, painted by John White 1585 (© Copyright
The British Museum)
Title page of the First Folio, the collected plays of William Shakespeare,
1623 (British Library)
James I
The Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey
Puritan costumes
The Duke of Buckingham
Queen Henrietta Maria
Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud
Home of John Hampden
St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford
Destruction of Cheapside Cross, 1643
Lord Falkland
Prince Rupert
Fairfax takes possession of Colchester from its royalist defenders, 1648
A Parliamentary soldier
The Trial of Charles I, 1649
Executioner’s axe
Oliver Cromwell
Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl and rst Marquess of Argyll, by David
Scougall (© The Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

Xi
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Future Charles II hiding up an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester, 1651
General Monck who restored the monarchy in 1660
Charles Il
John Dryden
Whitehall in the 17th century
Plague pits at Finsbury
The Great Fire of London
William Penn
James Il
James, Duke of Monmouth
Archbishop William Sancroft
Declaration of Rights, February 1689 (House of Lords Record Office)
The Glorious Revolution: William III, Prince of Orange, arriving at
Brixham, Torbay, Devon, artist unknown, Dutch school, 17th century?
(The Royal Collection © HM Queen Elizabeth II)
Queen Anne
Tapestry of the Battle of Malplaquet 1709, Blenheim Palace (By kind
permission of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough)
Tory High Churchman Henry Sacheverell
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke
George |
Sir Robert Walpole, rst Earl of Orford, by John Michael Rysbrack (By
courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Bishop Joseph Butler
George Whitefield
Rev. John Wesley
Prince Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of James II
‘Butcher’ Cumberland: William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, unknown
artist (By courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)
The Taking of Quebec, 1759, Captain Hervey Smith (© National
Maritime Museum, London)
Robert Clive and Mir Jaffier after the Battle of Plassey 1757, Francis
Hayman (By courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Adam Smith
Tomb of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham, Westminster Abbey (©
Dean & Chapter of Westminster)
View of Billingsgate Market
Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger addressing the House of
Commons on the French declaration of war, 1793, by Karl Anton Hickel
(By courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)
Funeral procession of Charles James Fox in 1806
William Wilberforce

Xl
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, Robert Alexander Hillingford

(Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)
Mrs Fitzherbert
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Howlett (By courtesy of The National
Portrait Gallery, London)
House of Correction in Coldbath Fields, Islington
Print of children used underground in the mining industry which
illustrated Lord Ashley’s 1842 report to Parliament (Mary Evans Picture
Library)
Famine burial in Ireland: illustration by A. MacLure, from Narrative of a
Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen, by Lord Dufferin & G. F. Boyle,
1847 (Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)
Great Exhibition of 1851
The new Houses of Parliament, 1868
The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand
1886 Vanity Fair cartoon of MPs including W. E. Gladstone, John Bright,
Charles Stewart Parnell and Joe Chamberlain in the Lobby of the House
of Commons by Liberio Prosperi (By courtesy of The National Portrait
Gallery of London)
Punch’s view of Gladstone in 1891: ‘All round politicians. No. 1. The
G.O.M. Variety.’
Cartoon of a Scientific Centenary, Punch
Commemorative mug of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897
(Photograph by Stephen Parker)
The Boer War: one of the blockhouses built by Kitchener to guard the
railways (Copyright Philip Flower)
The Boer War: Howitzer gun at Balmoral camp (Copyright Philip Flower)
The Boer War: cricket group amongst British soldiers at Balmoral camp
(Copyright Philip Flower)
Suffragette march in Hyde Park, 23 July 1910 (By courtesy of The
National Portrait Gallery, London)
First World War, Ypres, 1917 (Imperial War Museum)
Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich, 30 September 1938 (By
courtesy of The National Portait Gallery, London)
Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, 1988 (© Sipa Press/Rex
Features)
Paul Boateng, the first black Cabinet Minister, leaves the Treasury with
Gordon Brown (Peter Macdiarmid/Reuters 2003)
Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee Celebrations, London, 3 June 2002,
crowds filling the Mall seen from Admiralty Arch (© Rex Features)

Xl
Nineteenth-century engraving of Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. Prehistoric
monument of standing stones begun by Neolithic people around 3000 Bc.
 Preface

When I was young there were various histories of Britain which seemed to
provide a clear route through our long and immensely complicated past.
They were heavily biographical, extremely colourful and full of adventures
which made them easy to remember. The most famous of them, Our Island
Story, was written in 1905 by a New Zealand lady named Henrietta
Marshall at the height of empire when Britain was, in the immortal words
of 1066 and All That, ‘Top Nation’. Needless to say, the world has moved
on and so has the point of view of Clio, the muse of history. What might
seem heroic to an earlier generation appears in a different guise today.
But it seemed to me, when I embarked on this book with three young
daughters in mind, that some kind of easy framework was still needed to
guide the average person through the confusing shoals of disputed facts, to
give a broad-brush picture of the past to those not in the van of historical
research. The national curriculum today enables many young people to
grow up used to handling esoteric historical documents yet without any
real chronological sense of the years between, say, the Stuarts and the
Victorians. Many children might be forgiven for believing that the
Egyptians and the Aztecs once lived on these islands too. The aim of this
history is to attempt to return to those old rules of ‘who, when, what,
how’.
Furthermore, if I may strike a patriotic note, there is a great deal to
celebrate about Britain that is owed to the dead Britons of the past. The
impact of some gifted individuals was so great that Britain would have
been a different place without them. Their actions produced turning points
in history. William Wilberforce was the driving force behind the abolition
of the slave trade; Florence Nightingale saved the lives of British soldiers
condemned to death by the inertia of the army bureaucracy. Despite the
cruelty of the Normans or the Tudors, one of the glories of Britain’s history
is the essentially free-spirited, not to say bloody-minded, nature of her
natives. From Boudicca onwards a heady something in the air makes
Britons resist their rulers if they go too far. That tradition of defending the
rule of law and the rights of ordinary people against despots gave the world
Parliamentary democracy.
In my view the history of a people must include the anecdotes which
have become embedded in the national psyche, because they reflect the

XV
 PREFACE

values of that people. I therefore make no apology for re-telling some of

the nation’s best-loved stories, though the facts on which they rest may be
dubious to say the least. The important thing is that they have stood the
test of time and continue to be related after hundreds of years. It is surely
illustrative of the British people that our favourite anecdotes concern the
mighty being willing to stand corrected by the ordinary man or (in Alfred’s
case) woman in the street.
Ironic, kindly, democratic, humorous, energetic, tolerant and brave,
surely these are the best qualities of the British people. If the British over
the centuries have thrown up a number of harsh rulers and policies, there
seems to have been no shortage of British men and women ready to
confront them, from John Hampden to the British missionaries who tried
to stop Cecil Rhodes seizing the lands of the Ndebele people and creating
Rhodesia. Along with Joe Chamberlain’s municipal socialism, the creation
of the National Health Service is the greatest testimonial to the best British
humanitarian ideals.
Despite considering myself a Scot with Irish roots, and being very
conscious of those nations’ and Wales’ independent histories, most of this
narrative has been driven by the story of the English kingdom. Since the
Parliament at Westminster remains the chief law-making body for all four
countries, and while the United Kingdom remains intact, I believe this is
still a valid approach.
Although the errors in this volume are all my own, this book owes more
than I can adequately describe to the generous help of the historian Alan
Palmer, whose profound and encyclopaedic knowledge of British history
has been inspiring. My editor Penelope Hoare has been extremely patient
in waiting for this book, as has my inestimable agent Ed Victor. My
children Blanche, Atalanta and Honor have put up with historical
expeditions during their school holidays, such as tramping across the
bitterly cold battlefields of Culloden at Easter, with relative good humour.
I want to thank Helen Fraser (no relation), who commissioned this book,
Alison Samuel, the publisher of Chatto and Windus, for her
encouragement, and my mother Antonia Fraser who has not only read the
manuscript at all stages but remained intensely interested in the project. I
also want to thank my stepfather Harold Pinter for reading the manuscript
in its early stages, as did my late grandfather and grandmother Frank and
Elizabeth Longford. I am also very grateful to Patrick Seale for sharing his
immense knowledge of the Middle East and to the extraordinarily learned
Daniel Johnson for many gifts of books which he thought would be of use.
Laura Lindsay of Christie’s used her command of British pictures to point
me in the right direction with the visual images. I would like to thank the
late Dr Gerald Brodribb, who took me round the Roman bathhouse he had

Xv1
 PREFACE

unearthed at Beauport Park in East Sussex. Thanks also to Philip Flower

for permission to reproduce a part of his grandfather’s unique
photographic records of the Boer War, to Robert Silver for the inspiration
provided by his childhood copy of The Pictorial History of England, and
to my brother-in-law the artist Coleman Saunders, Lily Richards and
Poppy Hampson, in particular, for their picture research. I am also most
grateful to Christopher Woodhead for his continued encouragement, to
Edward Barker for the views of a teenage history buff, and to Laure de
Gramont for a French view of Albion. Iam indebted to Dr Munro Price for
his help and to Professor Ralph Griffiths for reading the proofs. The book
would not be in the shape it is without the brilliant work of Peter James on
the manuscript.
Lastly, the greatest thanks of all must go to my husband Edward
Fitzgerald who has lived with this book and whose passion for history
remains undiminished.

XVII
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 Roman

I have chosen to begin the story of Britain in the year the Romans came,
fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, over 2,000 years ago. Before
Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire’s greatest general, led his first expedition
ashore, the country’s stormy seas isolated her from the traffic of the
European continent. Apart from her own inhabitants, no one knew very
much about the place, though there were rumours. How far did it stretch
north? Were its forests impenetrable? Was it really an island? Was its
mineral wealth extraordinary?
Since at least the fourth century before Christ, that is 250 years before
Caesar appeared, the natives had been mining highly prized gold and tin
for export at the Island of Ictis (St Michael’s Mount) on the extreme south-
western tip of Britain, and they had trading links as far afield as the
Mediterranean. As a result of this trade, in 300 Bc the Greek colony of
Massilia, or Marseilles, had sent one of its citizens named Pytheas on a
reconnaissance trip to Britain. Pytheas had noted the friendly nature of the
inhabitants. It was said that the Britons’ relations further east had some
secret method of transporting vast blue stones from a more mountainous
region. On a great plain north-east of their chief port in Dorset, they or
perhaps their gods were said to have erected the enormous circle called
Stonehenge which was used for religious ceremonies.
But Pytheas’ description is a mere fragment reported in a later work.
Since the British tribes could not read or write, they remain as mysterious
and fabled as their distant ancestors, the small, dark, long-headed
Neolithic or New Stone Age invaders who started to arrive from the
Mediterranean in 3000 Bc. That British Neolithic man hacked at the soil
with deer antlers to grow a little wheat, and that he used flint-headed
arrows to kill game for food have had to be deduced from what
archaeologists have found in their long barrow graves. It is only when we
get to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War that we are able to read
the first written description of the country known to the Romans for 400
years as Britain.
By the time of Pytheas and Caesar himself the inhabitants of ancient

p
 ROMAN

Britain were mainly what have come to be known as Iron Age Celts. Like
the Iberians in Spain and the Gauls in France, they were members of the
great military aristocracy which until the rise of the Rome city state in the
third century BC were masters of the trade routes between northern and
central Europe and the Mediterranean. The Celts were the second wave of
invaders to follow Neolithic man to Britain, but they came 2,000 years
later, around 1000 Bc. Between Neolithic man, whose great monument is
the stone-circle temple at Avebury in Wiltshire, and the Celts another wave
of invaders had arrived.
These invaders were round-headed Bronze Age people, originally from
the Rhineland, who reached Britain in about 1900 Bc. They were a
stronger, larger race than Neolithic man, though still dark and swarthy,
and they swiftly occupied England from the east coast of Yorkshire down
to Surrey. This more sophisticated race is sometimes known as the Beaker
People because of the drinking vessels found in their graves. They could
make tools from bronze; they built Stonehenge; they buried their dead in
individual round barrows. But in their turn about 1ooo Bc their way of life
was challenged by a new, more powerful civilization.
From the first millennium Bc the Celts of eastern Europe were migrating
west. The expansion of the Germanic tribes at their back encouraged them
to move into northern and western Europe, particularly into France, Spain
and Britain, bringing with them what is known as the Iron Age. Their
peoples were sophisticated enough to known the secret of mining iron ore
out of the ground — they could extract the iron ore by heating it. Then they
worked the more difficult metal by beating layers of it together. This
enabled them to achieve a major advance on bronze or flint tools, and with
their stronger iron spears they easily defeated the Bronze Age peoples. They
could also travel faster in chariots furnished with iron wheels and drawn
by horses that they loved so much they had them buried with them in their
graves.
Tall and fair skinned with red or blond hair and blue or green eyes, the
Celts were not only physically quite dissimilar to Bronze Age man, they
also spoke a different language. No one is quite sure why two kinds of
Celtic languages developed. Goidel, from which comes the word Gaelic,
was spoken in Ireland and Scotland, and Brythonic is the family from
which Welsh, Breton and Cornish derive. Unlike the cave-dwelling
Neolithic man, the Celts built their own huts with posts sunk in mud and
woven branches for the roof. Although at first they lived in hill forts
enabling them to command the countryside, they developed ploughs and
were soon farming the surrounding land in small square fields, a shape that
would continue through Roman times. Some of those who settled in south-
west England lived in lakeside villages, island-like enclaves designed for

4
 ROMAN

protection. The Celts were ruled by queens as well as kings, and might even
be led in battle by women.
By the first century Bc Britain (or Britannia, as the Romans called it) had
attracted Caesar’s hostile attention. He wished to put an end to the use of
Britannia as a sanctuary by the leaders of Gaul (a country covering roughly
the territory of modern France) rebelling against their Roman overlords.
Archaeologists have shown that in the first century AD the inhabitants of
Britain’s south coast, sailing from their chief port of Hengistbury Head in
Dorset, had a great deal of trade with Gaul. Within Caesar’s lifetime
southern Britain and northern France may have been ruled by a Gallic
overlord called Diviacus. Caesar believed that the Britons’ powerful
religious leaders, the Druids, were also helping to foment trouble. The
rebellious Belgae in north-west Gaul, what is now Belgium, had close
relations across the Channel in Britain to whom they were in the habit of
fleeing in times of trouble. These Belgae, who were now known as
Catuvellauni after their leader Cassivellaunus, had settled there from Gaul
within living memory. Making Britannia a province of the Roman Empire
would finally break the power of the Belgae, whom Caesar was determined
to destroy. It would also usefully add to his reputation as a great man by
extending the empire even to the edge of the known world. Expanding the
empire’s territories, rather than administering them, was how glory and
power were won in the uniquely militaristic society of Caesar’s Rome.
Gathering information about Britain’s harbours and landing places was
one reason why Caesar sailed across the ‘Ocean’ (the Channel) on his first
expedition in 55 Bc. He landed with some difficulty owing to a spring tide
which swamped his heavy transport ships. He noted that the houses and
inhabitants of Britain seemed very similar to those of Gaul, with the
striking difference that rich or poor the British men were shaved of all
bodily hair (except for the upper lip, where they grew long moustaches)
and painted with a blue dye called woad. Their reddish hair was also worn
very long, often with a headband. They knew how to cure hides for export
and had a good trade with the continent in iron, cattle and corn, using gold
and iron bars in a rudimentary currency system. But as Caesar approached
the shores of Kent at what is now Deal the woad-covered Britons looked
wild and primitive as they whirled in their chariots on the cliffs above him.
Because they wore skins Caesar assumed that they could have no
knowledge of cloth-weaving, which to a Roman was one of the marks of
civilization. But the ancient Britons’ appearance was misleading. They
knew how to spin wool, how to weave it into garments and how to dye it
with colours from flowers and insects. Indeed they usually wore long
woollen tunics, cloaks and robes fastened by intricate articles of jewellery
in swirling patterns which their talented smiths made out of gold, silver

5
 ROMAN

and enamel. They were half naked when they were first seen by Caesar
only because that was their battle costume. Their Celtic relations, the
Gauls across the channel, fought completely naked.
Caesar nevertheless continued to believe that, although the people of
Cantium (his translation of the name he heard them use for their country
— that is, Kent) were in fact fairly civilized and knew how to grow grain,
Britons who lived further north did not know how to cultivate crops and
lived on what they hunted. It was true that compared to Roman
civilization, with its advanced precision engineering which enabled the
Romans to build stone bridges, roads and aqueducts, its architectural
science which threw up palaces and forts, its military and political science,
the Britons seemed childlike, ignorant and superstitious. They were ruled
by the white-robed Druids, who regarded mistletoe as sacred and practised
human sacrifice, burning their victims in wicker cages. Hares, fowl and
geese were also sacred, which meant they could not be eaten — although the
Britons liked them as pets. The Britons were said to love poetry, but they
were also extremely quarrelsome.
Caesar found Britannia’s climate more temperate than that of Gaul,
though much wetter, and by his water clock he could confirm that being
further north the nights in this strange new country were shorter than on
the continent. Moving inland he came upon a great river in the east of the
country about eighty miles from the south coast which he called the
Thamium, a Latin approximation of the name the ancient Britons gave to
what we still know as the Thames. He was impressed by the bravery of the
British warriors and by their methods of chariot warfare, describing them
in considerable detail. In particular he observed their brilliant control of
their horses, which they drove fearlessly down steep slopes at full gallop
only to turn them in an instant. They would then run along the pole of the
chariot to the yoke and urge the horses onwards.
Despite the apparently lower form of civilization that prevailed in
Britain, neither of Caesar’s two expeditions reflected much glory on him.
His famous wisecrack ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered), never
applied to Britain. His first invasion ended in stalemate because the effect
of British tides was unknown to a man brought up in the tideless
Mediterranean, and he failed to land enough soldiers to secure the country.
He attempted another invasion from Boulogne a year later, in 54 BC with
a huge force of twenty-eight warships and 800 transports (built lower for
British waters) and this time was more successful. Under the ensuing peace
treaty the British tribes were meant to send tribute to Rome once a year,
but the invasion ended inconclusively when Caesar had to dash back to
Gaul to stamp out a rebellion.
Caesar might say that the Cantii of Kent, the powerful Trinovantes of

6
 ROMAN

Essex and the Iceni of Norfolk had surrendered to him, but unlike when
the real conquest of Britain took place under the Emperor Claudius ninety
years later he left no garrisons behind. Though he and his legions had
crossed the Thames it was only the defection of the Trinovantes of Essex
which saved the Romans from being driven out of the country by the sheer
weight of the British numbers. For once the squabbling British tribes had
united, under Cassivellaunus. In the face of the separate peace reached by
the Trinovantes, Cassivellaunus decided it was wiser to make terms with
Caesar. But these were hardly onerous. There was no sense that Britain
now formed the most westerly outpost of the empire. Caesar himself does
not seem to have believed that he had really conquered Britain. He never
ordered a‘Triumph, the traditional way of showing off new acquisitions by
parading the natives as slaves around Rome. The only trophy he is said to
have displayed was a corselet made of British freshwater pearls (he was
very disappointed by the lack of silver in Britain). He may have been
pleased to leave a country whose climate the first-century Roman historian
Tacitus would call ‘objectionable, with its frequent rains and mists’, where
crops were slow to ripen but quick to grow due to the ‘extreme moistness
of land and sky’.
Then Caesar’s attention was diverted by the Civil Wars back in Italy,
and his successors too had more pressing concerns than Britain. For almost
a hundred years the Britons under their kings and chiefs were free to carry
on the existence of their ancestors, but very subtly and slowly their lives
were changing. They were increasingly in contact with Rome at both
diplomatic and trade levels. Britain was now selling grain to the Roman
Empire and buying olive oil and wine from Roman traders in exchange, as
we can tell from their presence in late-first-century BC British graves.
Highly wrought artefacts of Roman workmanship — such as the silver cups
found at Hockwold in Norfolk — previously believed to have been the
property of Roman officers after the invasion are now thought to be gifts
to an important pre-conquest British chieftain from the Roman
government. Increased contact with Roman-educated Gauls escaping to
Britain — for example, Commius, who had helped Caesar with the
attempted invasion, but who became king of the Atrebates in the Sussex
area — brought more Roman habits into Britain. By the end of the first
century BC a number of kings in southern England, including Tincommius,
Commius’ son, who lived at Silchester in Hampshire, had their own mints.
They were striking their own coins inscribed in Latin and calling
themselves ‘rex’ even though they could not themselves read or write.
The most important of these kingdoms were those ruled by the
descendants of Cassivellaunus, whose tribe the Catuvellauni had massively
extended their territories since Caesar’s departure. The lands of the

i
 ROMAN

Catuvellauni stretched in a semi-circle from Cambridge and Northampton

down through Hertfordshire to Surrey, south of what became London. By
the beginning of the first century AD they were ruled by King Cunobelinus
(Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), whose coins bear the letters CUNO. The early-
second-century Roman historian Suetonius called him King of the Britons.
It was because of a row between Cunobelinus and his son Adminius that the
far-off and still mysterious country of Britain once more came to the
attention of the authorities in Rome. For Prince Adminius, who had been
banished by his father, fled to Rome and the court of the Emperor Caligula.
Now that Britain had been put on the map for the Romans by Caesar,
conquering it had remained for the Roman government a perpetual but
distant ambition: having resisted Caesar the country had acquired a certain
glamour. With the arrival of the exiled British prince Adminius, imperial
interest was once more aroused. The Emperor Caligula began preparations
for a new invasion. He built boats, gathered arms and raised money and
troops. Whether he ever really arrived at the cliffs of Dover, and was so put
off by their height that he set his disgusted soldiers to gather shells of the
seashore as ‘spoils of the ocean’ in place of ‘spoils of war’ is not clear.
Satirical jokes about the cruel Emperor Caligula were often told, so one
cannot be sure whether the report is fact or fiction.
But nine years later, in AD 43, Caligula’s preparations were taken up
when his cousin, the eccentric but energetic new emperor Claudius, needed
a military conquest to secure his shaky throne. It was under Claudius that
the subduing of Britain began in earnest, as it was turned into a Roman
province held by military garrisons in forts erected systematically across
the country. This time the Roman invaders — four legions consisting of
20,000 soldiers plus 20,000 auxiliaries - would occupy the country up to
Scotland and stay for four centuries. After his military commander Aulus
Plautius had defeated the Britons north of the Medway, Claudius arrived
with elephants to make a triumphant progress through Cunobelinus’
former capital Camulodunum, or Colchester, in Essex. Conquering Britain
brought much-needed political credit to Claudius.
By the end of the first century AD Britain had been completely integrated
into the empire as the province Britannia. Roman military tactics and
Roman armour had ensured that after only six years of fighting, 40,000
Romans had subdued hundreds of thousands of British Celts, conquering
England up to the Rivers Trent, Severn and Dee. However, despite the
formidable superiority of the Roman invaders, some hope remained
among many ancient Britons of re-establishing their independence and
throwing the Romans off their island. The extent of the British tribes’
obsession with personal liberty would impress and amaze the sober
Romans, who had to crush their many rebellions. But their spirited bravery

8
 ROMAN

was not enough. What counted most against them was the tribes’ fatal
habit of treachery. This meant that their one source of strength — their great
numbers — was never used against the Romans. Tacitus believed that
‘nothing has helped us more in war with their strongest nations’ than the
British tribes’ ‘inability to co-operate’. Their universal tendency was to
make separate treaties with Rome and then to turn on one another. Never
has there been a better example of Caesar’s maxim ‘divide and rule’ than
in first-century Britain. Had the tribes only united as they had under
Cassivellaunus, by sheer weight of numbers they might have held the
Romans at bay.
Claudius was careful to establish good relations with many British kings
and queefis. Another method of pacifying Britannia was immigration. Old
soldiers started arriving in Britain from Italy to make a new life; as a
reward for their thirty years of service to the Roman Empire they were
given grants of British land in what were called ‘veterans’ colonies’. This
was the traditional Roman way of turning a country into a Roman
province. Nevertheless, for nine long years under another of Cunobelinus’
sons, the chieftain Caractacus, a dangerous British patriotic resistance
continued in the west on the borders of Wales. These Britons refused to be
driven off their land to make way for Roman colonies, and were further
enraged by the governor Ostorius Scapula’s calls for all the British tribes to
disarm.
Caractacus’ followers were a tribe called the Silures. Swarthy and curly
haired, believed by Caesar to be of Spanish origin, they had a reputation
for extreme ferocity. Under Caractacus their fame spread as far as Italy,
where it was considered extraordinary that a barbarian chieftain could
defy the resources of imperial Rome. Caractacus waged an early kind of
guerrilla warfare, moving his men from territory to territory. But having
taken cover in Shropshire, the land of the Ordovices tribe, he made the
mistake of thinking that, given the vast numbers of Britons flocking to join
him, he could defeat the Romans in pitched battle. In words which would
win the admiration of Roman contemporaries and confirm their view of
the central importance of liberty to the British character, Caractacus told
his men that there was no point in living if all they had to look forward to
was a miserable existence spent in hiding: they must win their freedom
back or they would be enslaved for ever.
Caractacus had chosen the site of his stand well. With looming cliffs
behind them, and protected by a river and man-made ramparts, the long-
haired, moustachioed, blue-skinned tribes shook their spears at the enemy,
whooping and uttering fierce guttural yells. But brave though they were,
and though their iron shields and spears were admirably robust, they stood
little chance against the Romans’ superior battle tactics: their missiles and

9
 ROMAN

rocks shattered harmlessly against the Romans’ armour and against their
famous tortoise formation, in which they placed their shields together like
an umbrella. Moving implacably forward the Roman soldiers stormed the
ramparts. The battle was over almost before it had begun. The advance
party of auxiliaries attacked, throwing javelins, while behind them
marched the well-protected infantry in close formation, silently and
methodically cutting down all who had escaped the auxiliaries. The
surviving British tribesmen had to run for the hills.
Caractacus fled east and threw himself on the mercy of Queen
Cartimandua of the Brigantes, the powerful tribe who with the Parisi ruled
the part of northern England today called Yorkshire. But Cartimandua had
allied herself to the Romans, so Caractacus was shipped off to Rome with
his wife and children. There he continued to impress the Romans by his
unbreakable spirit. Unlike other captives who marched past the emperor
howling for mercy, Caractacus maintained a proud and resolute bearing
undiminished by his haggard appearance. Limping after his wife and
brothers and his little children, all of them bound in chains, he suddenly
stepped out of the procession, approached the emperor’s dais and
addressed him boldly. Caractacus told Claudius that only fate had given
victory to the emperor and not to him, and that the emperor should not be
surprised that Caractacus was sorry to lose. The emperor might want to
rule the world, but did it follow that everyone else would welcome
enslavement? If he had surrendered without a blow neither he nor the fact
of his capture would have become famous. ‘If you kill me they will be
forgotten,’ he said, ‘but show mercy, and I shall be an eternal reminder of
your clemency.’ Claudius was so moved by the speech of the barbarian
prince that he ordered Caractacus’ chains to be struck off, and he and his
family freed.
In Britain itself, however, the Romans’ humiliating treatment of the
conquered tribes continued to arouse resentment. A slave-owning society
themselves, the Britons considered that the Romans were treating them like
slaves. This was the fault of the first Roman governor of Britain, Ostorius
Scapula. The Roman Empire everywhere relied on the co-operation of local
chieftains if it was to be successfully administered. What made a difference
was the nature of the local ruler, whether he was a sensitive and thoughtful
man. Ostorius Scapula did not possess the same diplomatic touch as the
emperor Claudius, who had received the friendly British tribes with
ceremony and respect.
Ostorius Scapula turned a blind eye to local taxes raised illegally from the
inhabitants of Colchester in order to build an enormous statue of the
Emperor Claudius —- a monument which the religious Britons disliked as a
visible sign of the occupying power. He did nothing to prevent ex-

IO
 ROMAN

servicemen taking Essex land illegally from the Trinovantes for their
veterans’ colony; indeed he probably profited from it himself. Since the
British showed no mercy in their guerrilla attacks on the veterans, the
veterans in turn showed no mercy to the Trinovantes, throwing them out of
their homes and seizing their land. Normally Roman garrisons were
punctilious about making sure veterans’ colonies observed the terms of the
treaties, but the soldiers in Essex had their eye on British land when their
own thirty-year service was up, so they ignored the veterans’ misbehaviour.
When Ostorius died of exhaustion from battling the Silures, his militaristic
successor Suetonius Paulinus did nothing to soothe an already inflamed
situation by launching a military attack on the sacred island of Anglesey, the
home of the Druids. Paulinus believed that if he could extirpate that nest of
rebels the British resistance would die a natural death.

Roman soldiers invaded with Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 Bc, but conquered
Britain only after 43 AD, under the Emperor Claudius.

By aD 61 relations between the Romans and the British tribes were

already in a bad way. It was particularly bad north-east of London around
Colchester and in Norfolk where the Trinovantes’ neighbours the Iceni
tribe had still more to anger them. Their dying king Pratusagus had tried
to ensure that his wife Queen Boudicca was protected from the bad
i
0a
 ROMAN

treatment being meted out to the Britons by making Rome co-heir to his
kingdom with his two daughters. Instead of being satisfied by this the local
military commander had flogged the beautiful red-haired queen with rods
and raped her two teenage daughters. The Romans then destroyed her
houses and removed her household treasures — her silver flagons, engraved
mirrors and gold jewellery disappearing into the commander’s quarters.
Finally he expelled her and the Iceni from their lands, which the Romans
at once subjected to an orgy of destruction.
Paulinus, being new to his command, had no sense of the anger burning
among the British tribes and failed to see that the real threat to Rome’s
regime lay not in Wales but in East Anglia. Directly he had turned his back
on East Anglia and set off to lay waste Anglesey, across the country the
furious Iceni rose. With the queen were the Trinovantes and all the other
tribes pushed beyond endurance. While Paulinus and his soldiers were in
Wales, building boats to take them across to Anglesey, in Essex Queen
Boudicca had gathered an army of 120,000 men, three times the strength
of the Roman legions in Britain. These forces surged into the new Roman
town of Colchester, which its arrogant settlers had foolishly built without
walls. Having destroyed it, including the Temple of Claudius, and routed
the Ninth Legion, they streamed on to London (Londinium).
It was the common opinion among the Roman command that had
Suetonius Paulinus not rushed back south Britain would have been lost to
Rome. As it was, Paulinus sacrificed London to save the province of
Britain. The citizens implored him for help but, though Londinium was the
trading centre of Roman Britain, Paulinus sent no troops. He regarded
London as indefensible because it was really a collection of merchants’
settlements, being unwalled and not garrisoned. Having massacred its
citizens, the vengeful Britons put London to the torch. So great was the
heat that Roman buildings were reduced to a layer of red clay which to this
day lies thirteen feet deep below the city’s pavements. A part of it can be
seen where it has been exposed by archaeologists beside the Barbican, near
the Museum of London.
Meanwhile the British horde swept on. They are estimated to have killed
70,000 Roman settlers, but they looted indiscriminately and never thought
of destroying important military targets like forts and garrisons. Queen
Boudicca, standing in her chariot spear in hand, a heavy yellow torc round
her neck, and her red-gold hair in two long plaits held in place by a
headband, made a series of magnificent speeches as she drove around the
tribes drawn up on the battlefield. But, despite their enormous numbers,
when they met Paulinus in the Midlands the Britons once again came to
grief in pitched battle against the Romans. The assembled chiefs could not
agree on a battle plan and around 80,000 of their men were killed by
1L92,
 ROMAN

10,000 Roman soldiers. Refusing to allow her beloved girls to fall into the
hands of the Romans again, Boudicca forced them to drink poison from a
golden cup and then drank it herself. When Paulinus found her, the great
queen was dead, but she looked as peaceful as if she were asleep, clasping
her daughters in her arms.
Two thousand extra Roman troops had to be rushed over from
Germany to ensure that the victory in southern Britain was permanent.
Because there had been:no one left to look after the crops, famine
weakened the resistance of the British tribes, but nothing seemed to crush
their spirit or curb their sharp tongues. When the emperor sent an ex-slave
named Polyclitus with still more troops to advise Paulinus on the better
managenient of the province, the Romans were astonished by the way the
Britons even in their darkest hour clung to the idea of freedom and dared
to jeer at the spectacle of such a great general as Paulinus having to obey a
slave. But Wales and northern Britain remained unconquered. By the late
60s, raids by the Parisi tribe of Humberside, the Brigantes of Yorkshire
(who had turned hostile) and the Silures and Ordovices of Wales made it
necessary for further Roman onslaughts to subdue the recalcitrant British
tribes.
From aD 68 onwards, successful campaigns by a series of Roman
governors brought the rest of the island, up to southern Scotland, at least
temporarily under imperial control. Roman forts to garrison the con-
quered areas were established at York, Caerleon and Chester in the early
>70s and new northern roads carved their way across the landscape from
York to Corbridge to Newstead and as far as the River Tay. The most
famous of these first-céntury governors was Agricola, who in seven great
campaigns between 74 and 84 completed the conquest of north-west
Britain and established a sturdy system of roads and forts to defend her.
By AD 78 he had defeated the Ordovices in Shropshire, conquered
Anglesey and stationed the Twentieth Legion at Chester in a new fortress;
the next year he constructed a road from Chester to Carlisle (which he
fortified) and placed garrisons between the Solway Firth and Tyne. He
next took his legions as far as the Moray Firth in Invernesshire, and at the
Battle of Mons Graupius defeated the massed tribes of the Caledonians,
as the Romans called the northern Picts. He went on to build a series of
forts in southern Scotland between the Firth of Clyde on the west coast
and the Firth of Forth on the east, and this line formed the Roman
frontier. Agricola also established a naval base at Dover for a new British
fleet, sent an expedition to northern Scotland that rounded the north coast
and visited the Orkneys, and may even have contemplated invading
Hibernia — the Roman name for Ireland.
Agricola was in Britain for only ten years, before being recalled in ap 84

13
 ROMAN

by the jealous and cruel emperor Domitian who feared that the great
governor might be about to make a bid for the imperial throne. Agricola
did much to reconcile the Britons to their fate as a Roman province. He
kept a weather eye open for rebellion but did not humiliate the tribes. The
southern garrison towns of Roman Britain became centres of enlighten-
ment and improvement for the British. The warlike Celts were transformed
into Roman citizens who took pride in wearing the toga, as Agricola’s son-
in-law Tacitus reported with some surprise. Agricola destroyed enmity
from within. He deliberately took the sons of British chiefs and educated
them in the Roman curriculum, the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and
dialectic or logical argument) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music), the classical liberal arts. This upbringing, and the
adoption of the Roman language, created a new generation of Britons tied
to Rome by invisible but unbreakable bonds.
Agricola made a point of using members of this elite in the Roman civil
service as administrators, for he admired what he considered to be the
Britons’ naturally fearless character. Once trained he believed they made
better civil-servant material than the more servile Gauls. He thus created
what amounted to a fifth column in Britain among the wealthier classes.
The new southern Romano-Britons’ loyalty was to Rome only. They
delighted in the new Roman way of life. Agricola had a governor’s palace
and basilica built in London and during his period as governor the grand
Roman palace known as Fishbourne was built.
The Roman concept of the market place or forum encouraged trade to
flourish in the new towns Agricola built. A spate of building produced
Exeter, Lincoln, Cirencester and St Albans, with their public baths,
amphitheatres and forums after the Roman fashion. Noble stone and
marble facades enclosed splendid courts of justice where the written
Roman law was consulted and measured out. It was an entirely different
experience from being tried in a forest glade by Druids. Roman law relied
on knowledge of what had been done in the past, a much quicker and fairer
way to reach decisions.
Wealth began to flow into Britain as the Romans oversaw the export of
lead and tin, which the country had in abundance — particularly in the
south-west. Classical observers like Tacitus were dismayed by the ease with
which the ancient Britons took to a grander lifestyle, for they had admired
their primitive vigour which compared so favourably to the decadence of
imperial Rome. As the new Roman Britons of the south gloried in the
modern conveniences such as public baths, it was lucky for them that
Agricola remained alert for trouble, for the British tribes of the north and
west were a constant threat.
Agricola had had a profound effect on Britain. In the south-east the

14
 ROMAN

country became very

similar to the rest of
the Roman Empire,
with Latin as_ the
official written and
spoken language. Much
of the population learn-
ed to read and write,
as education was highly
valued by the Romans.
The landscape too was
2nd to 3rd century AD Roman partial building transformed, as dark,
inscription near Battle, East Sussex, site of what was thickly wooded oak
probably a major Roman ironworks.
forests near which
lurked the Celts’ small damp wood-and-wicker huts gave way to great
clearings and plains. Here magnificent towns were built, busy with the
commerce made easy by the laying of swift, straight roads, for the Roman
system of government was essentially municipal. In the towns or just
outside them were the elegant stone villas in which lived the wealthy
Britons who were allowed to hold public office and be magistrates or
senators. Their homes, which had running water brought to them by pipe
and aqueduct, were heated by hypocausts and their walls were decorated

Locker room from Roman bathhouse, Battle, East Sussex.

T5
 ROMAN

with coloured frescoes, of the kind that can be seen at Pompeii. These
leading Britons organized the raising of taxes to be sent back to the
imperial coffers in Rome, and slaves and freedmen worked for them in the
fields outside the cities, growing crops and tending sheep to produce the
delicate Roman wool.
It was the Romans’ policy to allow the countries they conquered to
worship their own deities, although they would not tolerate the ancient
Britons’ practice of human sacrifice. The Celts’ religion was pantheistic —
that is, they saw gods or spirits everywhere, in streams and trees and so on.
Over time their shrines came to merge with those to Roman deities. At
Bath, where the Roman baths survive as grandly as they did 2,000 years
ago, the shrine to Minerva was erected on the site of an ancient Celtic
shrine. Something similar happened with aspects of the Britons’ civic
organization. Outside the Roman towns the councils of the old Celtic
tribes like the Silures and Atrebates were adapted so that they could
continue almost like local councils of the imperial administration.
Many of the English names of the months date from the Roman
occupation. January derives from Janus, the two-faced deity who looks
backwards and forwards to the past and coming year, and who was
actually adopted by the Romans from the Egyptians. March comes from
Mars the God of War, July from Julius Caesar and August from his
nephew Augustus, another great emperor for whom the Latin poet Virgil
wrote the Aeneid. Although the later Anglo-Saxon invasions meant that
the names of Anglo-Saxon gods were applied to several days of the week,
much that is of Roman origin remains. Many British customs and sayings
derive from the Roman occupation: several wedding customs, including
the wedding cake, the ring, bridesmaids and pages and the bride’s veil are
Roman. So are a number of our funeral customs, including putting flowers
on the grave. The cypress and yew trees we plant in graveyards were the
trees of mourning in Rome. The Romans said the Latin for ‘bless you’
when somebody sneezed — even the emperors used it. They also believed
that your ears burned if somebody was talking about you; and the shriek
of the screech owl in Rome was always considered a sound of ill omen.
Despite the complete Romanization of southern Britain it was never
possible to regard the whole province as a secure Roman possession
because of the constant rebellions in the north and Scotland. The province
would always require a garrison of 50,000 soldiers to hold it — three
legions plus auxiliaries were permanently stationed there. So skilled at
warfare were the British tribes that at times ro per cent of the empire’s
entire army was employed in Britain.
All British Roman towns (the major ones being Colchester, Lincoln,
Gloucester, York and St Albans) were built with walls to keep out the

16
 ROMAN

barbarian tribes, especially in Wales. Though nominally conquered, the

British continued to attack the Roman centres. This was quite unlike Gaul,
where walled towns were the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, in
contrast to Britain, Gaul was so completely Romanized that the old Celtic
tongues died out except in Brittany, and were replaced by Latin — which
accounts for the greater number of Latin words in the French vocabulary.
In Britain the Celtic tongue lived on in Wales and Cornwall, and in the
countryside outside the Roman towns and cities.
Despite Agricola’s brilliance he never really conquered Scotland, and nor
did the Roman rulers who came after him. By AD 87 Rome had conceded
that Agricola’s plan to hold southern Scotland up to the Tay was
impracticable, so the fortress Agricola had built on that river for the
Twentieth Legion was abandoned and the Roman legions pulled back to
Agricola’s Forth—Clyde frontier. But even that was gradually regarded as
too ambitious and the slow withdrawal of the Roman legions from
Scotland continued. It was the especially dangerous attack of the combined
forces of the Brigantes and Picts on the Ninth Legion at York in ap 118
that decided the realistic Emperor Hadrian not only that the frontier of
Roman Britain had to be placed much further south, but that it had to be
of the most formidable kind. Hadrian’s solution was an immense defensive
wall, eight foot broad and twelve foot high, dotted at every Roman mile
with a fort containing Roman soldiers: it would run through Cumbria and
southern Northumberland between the Solway Firth and the Tyne.
In the following centuries three Roman emperors tramped up to
Scotland to attempt to extend Roman rule further north in the troublesome
province of Britain, in an attempt to bring credit to themselves and to
enhance their political power. But though the emperor Antoninus Pius
would build a turf and clay wall in ap 140 between Agricola’s forts (the
Antonine Wall), the real boundary of Roman Britain remained the
extraordinary feat of engineering begun on Hadrian’s orders when he
visited Britain in 122.
Unlike other emperors, Hadrian was not grandiose; he thought Rome
would do better by limiting her power rather than expanding it. For over
thirty years the great wall he had designed was slowly built — eighty miles
long, bristling with military lookout towers and, at greater intervals, large
forts with their own shops, military hospitals and temples, much of which
can still be walked along today. Until Christianity became compulsory in
the early fourth century throughout the empire, the soldiers on the wall
and in their forts at York (Eboracum), Caerleon (Isca Silurum) and Chester
(Deva) had their own religion: they worshipped an eastern deity from
Persia named Mithras in the bowels of the earth whose rites were secret.
Hadrian also built a fort at London.

17
 ROMAN

If Hadrian’s Wall is the largest and most visible of the surviving symbols
of the Roman occupation of Britain, the second must be the famous
Roman roads. They were built 2,000 years ago to link garrison with
garrison, enabling help to be brought swiftly to the legions at York,

si

Hadrian’s Wall begun in AD 122.

Caerleon and Chester. Watling Street ran from Dover (Dubrae) to London
and then via St Albans to Wroxeter (Viroconium) on the Welsh border.
Although a branch was pushed south to Caerleon just north of Newport,
and another branch carried on east to Carnarvon, the principal road
continued north to Chester and then crossed over to York. Ermine Street
was the road stretching down the eastern side of Britain from York to
Lincoln (Lindum) and then to Colchester and on to London. The Fosse
Way ran from Lincoln to Exeter (or Isca Dumniorum — the Dumnia were
the local Celtic tribe), crossing Watling Street on its way.
Thanks to the Romans, Britain grew rich as her citizens benefited from
an economy based on bronze and gold coinage. A rubbish pit uncovered
beneath the City of London’s pavement suggests a wealthy and
sophisticated populace who walked in elaborate sandals and enjoyed a
delicately coloured pottery. Merchants now reckoned their sums on wax
tablets with bone and wooden styluses, and bobbins for weaving show that
Britons now rejoiced in the art of producing fine patterned linen. Britain
also embarked on greater cultivation, aided by the crooked plough, and the
Romans drained the marshes of East Anglia. Britain became one of the best

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sources of corn in the empire, with her own special warehouses in Rome.
By the fourth century the emperor Julian had built warehouses in the rest
of his empire to receive British wheat. British tin and iron ore, which the
Iron Age Celts had done well by, became extremely profitable for the
Roman Empire. In fact there is good reason to believe that the third largest
imperial ironworks was in the eastern part of the Weald at Battle near
Hastings. To this day the shape of its vast slagheap of iron waste from the
iron industry which served the Roman fleet in Britain can be seen buried
under the grass and trees which have grown over it during the past twenty
centuries. A magnificently preserved Roman bath for naval officers has
been discovered beside it in the grounds of the Beauport Park estate, its
changing room amazingly still furnished with rare examples of ‘lockers’, of
which only four others have survived from the old Roman Empire.
For 200 years Britain was ruled strongly from Rome. But, as the third
century AD wore on, the leadership in Rome became complacent and
allowed territories to slip out of their control. Local commanders of distant
provinces given too much independence began to think of carving their
own kingdoms out of the empire. Britain’s distance from Rome made her
attractive to such adventurers. Thus in 287 a Roman admiral named
Carausius, who had been sent to clear Saxon pirates out of the English
Channel, seized power in Britain. With the support of the Roman garrisons
there he proclaimed himself emperor. Carausius had embarked on the
conquest of northern Gaul when he was assassinated in 293. His murderer
was his chief subordinate, Allectus. Allectus ruled Britain until 296 when
he in his turn was killed by Constantius I, the warrior father of the Roman
emperor Constantine the Great, who rushed from Rome to liberate a
besieged London from Allectus and his Frankish mercenaries.
Constantius I’s title was the Caesar of the West. This position had been
invented as part of the Emperor Diocletian’s reforms to bring stability back
to the empire and so see off rebellious military leaders as well as the
invading German tribes from the east. Recognizing that extensive changes
were needed if the empire was to continue, Diocletian brought in a system
of two emperors, the ‘Augusti’, and two ‘Caesars’, or junior emperors, who
automatically became emperors on the death of the Augusti. These four
rulers divided the eastern and western empires between them. Countries
within the empire were now called dioceses, ruled by vicars. Britain herself
became a diocese, consisting of four provinces, though it was only part of
a much larger unit known as the Praetorian Prefecture of the Gauls.
Constantius after duly succeeding as Augustus marched from York to
Tayside on a campaign against the Picts and Caledonians. But he died at
York, and there famously his son, the half-English Constantine, was
proclaimed emperor by the legions in 306. Constantine was one of the

19
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most important Roman emperors, whose espousal of Christianity in 313

changed the nature of the Roman Empire and of the European world.
Constantine believed that the Christian God, who had appeared to him in
a vision and told his soldiers to wear crosses on their shields, had given him
victory at the famous battle of Milvian Bridge which had reunited the
empire. Constantine shifted the empire’s capital to the “Christian Rome’,
the new city he built at Constantinople, and made Christianity the state
religion, believing it would be a unifying force in the empire. The wealth
the pagan temples had accumulated for centuries became the property of
the Christian Church, which itself became an important pillar of the
Roman Empire’s organization. In addition, Constantine gave local bishops
judicial powers above the local magistrate.
Though Constantine continued also to worship the sun, he had been
brought up a Christian by his English mother Helena. At the beginning of
the fourth century members of the small but charismatic Christian sect
who had renounced earthly power and riches in favour of heavenly ones
were being horribly persecuted by Diocletian, for he believed that the
troubles of the empire were due to neglect of the ancient gods like Jupiter
and Minerva. Britain had become a safe haven for fleeing Christians,
because its ruler Constantius was married to a Christian and had some
sympathy for their beliefs. Although Constantius demolished the British
churches, or basilicas as they were called, he did not execute their devotees.
Even so, Britain had three early Christian martyrs, St Julian, St Aaron and
St Alban. Especially well known was the wealthy Romano-British youth St
Alban from Verulamium in Hertfordshire, who was executed in 305 for
sheltering a Christian priest and refusing to sacrifice to the ancient gods.
Verulamium took the name St Albans in his honour.
By the time that Constantine was taking a personal interest in deciding
doctrine there were already enough Christians in Britain to send three
bishops to the Council of the Church in 314 at Arles. The Britons had their
home-grown version of heresy in Pelagianism: the British thinker Pelagius
had boldly disputed with the great African Church Father St Augustine of
Hippo, and had insisted that the doctrine of original sin was mistaken. The
Scots and Irish Churches sprang from the work of two Romano-British
Christian saints: St Patrick, who famously converted Ireland to
Christianity and who had created the papal see of Armagh by 450, and St
Ninian, the north-countryman who began the conversion of the
Caledonians and Picts in the early fifth century.
Yet, although the Romano-British Church produced some very great
missionaries, Roman Christianity had shallow roots in England. Celtic
deities continued to be worshipped alongside Christ. To some extent
Christianity probably depended on the personal beliefs of individual lords

20
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of the great villas characteristic of Britain in the fourth century. There are
surviving examples of the chi-rho Christian sign in mosaics, wall paintings
and silver cutlery of such wealthy villa-owners in this period, notably in
Dorset. The heathen Saxons, even now priming themselves on the other
side of the North Sea to invade Britain, would succeed in almost
completely erasing Christianity from England. Only in Cornwall and
Wales, where pockets of Christian Romano-Celts hid themselves away
from the invaders, did Christianity survive. By the seventh century, after
150 years of Saxon settlements, England herself would have to be
converted anew to Christianity by Roman, Scottish and Irish missionaries.
For by the first decade of the fifth century, most of Britain’s protectors
against the Pictish and Saxon threat, the Roman legions, had either been
withdrawn or were in the process of being withdrawn to defend Rome
against the German tribes. In 402 the Visigoths under Alaric had entered
Italy. Despite the structural reforms of Diocletian and Constantine the
Roman Empire was no longer in command of its frontiers. It had been
gravely weakened by civil war between Constantine’s sons, but the chief
danger facing it in the fourth century was a demographic phenomenon: the
barbarian migrations or folk wanderings of the land-hungry German
tribes. These aggressive military people from east of the River Danube in
central Europe — the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, the Alans, the
Suevi, the Alemanni — had begun putting unbearable pressure on the outer
Roman territories a hundred years before. In the mid-third century they
had breached the Roman Empire’s frontiers of the Rhine and the Danube
and had been thrown back only by Diocletian’s reforms.
After 375 when they were defeated in Russia by the terrifying Huns, a
savage tribe from central Asia also on the move west, the alarmed German
tribes would no longer brook the imperial government’s refusal to let them
in. In 376 the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, who lived on the eastern side of
the Danube, begged the Emperor Valens to give them sanctuary by
allowing them to cross the Danube and be federated within the Roman
Empire. In return for land and sanctuary against the Huns, they said they
would serve in the imperial armies. Though their subsequent slaughter of
Valens two years later at Adrianople was a grim portent, the imperial
government recognized that the pressure of the German tribes was such
that it was best to have some of them on its side. Treaties were made and
land was granted, some of it in north Gaul.
In 402 Rome decided to pull more soldiers out of Britain and bring them
home. They were needed in Italy to defend the imperial city against the
barbarian Visigoths under Alaric who were now encamped in the north of
the country. If many more Roman soldiers were withdrawn the Britons
would be completely at the mercy of their own enemies who were attacking
21
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with renewed vigour: the Picts from beyond the now scantily defended
Wall in the north, the Scots from Hibernia, attacking Galloway, Wales and
Cornwall, and the Saxons from across the North Sea, a northern branch of
the German tribes putting such pressure on the Roman Empire.
Since the third century the more daring members of the population of
what we now call north Germany and Denmark had been forming raiding
parties to cross the North Sea and the Channel to Britain in ever larger
numbers. By then the Roman army in Britain increasingly contained Gauls
and Germans, Spaniards and Moors, and it seems that the little groups of
Saxon ex-soldiers settling in Britain attracted by the good farmland and
clement weather reported back to their relatives that here was a country
ripe for the plucking.
By now Britain felt very remote from the imperial government, a
remoteness which was emphasized by her being part of the Gallic
Prefecture. Britain thus became a magnet for imperial pretenders, not least
Magnus Maximus, one of the Emperor Theodosius’ generals, who after a
victory over the Picts was proclaimed emperor by his legions and
successfully became ruler of the Praetorian Prefecture of Britain, Gaul
and Spain until 387. Pretenders were welcomed by the vulnerable British if
they seemed likely to protect them from their own barbarian enemies better
than their Roman overlords.
It was under the British imperial pretender Constantine III that Britain
severed her links with Rome for good. Constantine III had been elevated to
the emperorship by the army in Britain on account of widespread
dissatisfaction with the way the province was being treated by Rome. Since
402 Rome had not even paid the salaries of the imperial troops or civil
servants remaining in Britain. But by 406, the year the barbarians crossed
the Rhine, Rome had no time to think about Britain: she was concentrating
on defending her homeland. As with many of her more distant provinces,
the imperial government may no longer have been able to afford the wages,
or perhaps the chaos arising from the war against the barbarians prevented
the money being shipped to Britain. Whatever the reason, this failure
greatly angered the local magnates and the wealthier classes of Britain on
whose shoulders the fiscal burden now fell. Constantine III, who had
invaded Gaul and Spain, was at first allowed to retain his north-western
empire by the Emperor of the West, Honorius. But his yen for external
conquest meant that his soldiers were not stationed in Britain to ward off
the newly vigorous attacks by the Irish, Saxons and Picts. Infuriated by
Constantine remaining in Spain when he was needed at home, it seems that
in 409 British leaders expelled the last remnants of his purportedly imperial
administration.
But the feeling was mutual. In 410 the sack of Rome by Alaric and the

22
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Goths obliged Rome for the moment at least to wash her hands of the
distant province. Honorius sent a formal letter to the British cities telling
them that they could no longer depend on the Romans for their defence
against the Picts. Henceforth they must rely on themselves. Citizens should
now carry weapons, which hitherto had been forbidden. Local British
rulers sprang into existence to_fill the power vacuum left by the collapse of
the imperial administration.
At first this was a relief. The British magnates had loathed the
regulations requiring conscription into the Roman army, brought in
recently to make up for the lack of slaves as the empire ceased to expand
by conquest. Conscription drew on their own source of labour and robbed
their fields of men just when they were needed for the harvest. They were
delighted that they no longer had to pay the heavy Roman taxes that the
enormous bureaucracy of the top-heavy imperial government needed if it
was to maintain itself. Contemporary historians write of how the British
people threw off all Roman customs and Roman law. To begin with they
were happy to rely on Saxon mercenaries for all defensive purposes where
previously they had used the Roman legions. They would soon learn, as the
Romans had, that it was better not to place yourself in the power of the
barbarians unless you had time to train them to adopt your habits and
customs.
The Roman style of life continued among quite a few of the British
magnates and well-to-do townspeople for a couple of decades after the
withdrawal of the legions. In 429 St Germanus, on a visit to Britain with
other bishops to dispute the Pelagian controversy, encountered a wealthy
society which still had all the hallmarks of Roman civilization: its members
were richly dressed and highly educated and could speak Latin. St Patrick,
who died in 461, came from one of these landowning families.
But, despite the British people’s Roman habits, the dissolution of the
empire was changing their way of life even before they were assaulted by
the Anglo-Saxons, reliance upon whose arms was storing up a terrible fate
for them. As the empire was replaced worldwide by individual German
territories, its sophisticated global economy and long-distance trade based
on a 400-year-old Roman peace slowly came to an end. By the 420s
coinage was starting to die out in Britain. Within a generation in many
places Roman cemeteries like the one at Poundbury in Dorset had become
deserted. Roman laws requiring burial outside the town walls for health
reasons were no longer obeyed because there were no longer Roman
officials to enforce them. Furthermore the trade and employment in the
cities that the Roman legions and civil government had brought to Britain
had gone. Without large numbers of soldiers needing goods and services,
towns declined. Without a central taxation system, many of the

23
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allurements of Roman civilization, like roads, baths and government,

simply fell away. The famous pottery factories, which gave so much
employment because the Romans used pots the way we use plastic bags, as
containers and transporters for every kind of commodity, vanished — and
so did the art of making glass.
Within thirty years the combined effect of the attacks by the Saxons and
the decay of towns meant that the inhabitants of Britain were soon living
ina far more primitive fashion than their grandparents had. But the decline
of sophistication caused by the deterioration of the global economy was a
fact throughout the Roman world. In Britain and other former Roman
provinces trade became local and was reduced to barter. By 481 there
would no longer be a Roman emperor in the west. Rome had been sacked
for a second time and Rome herself would be controlled by the eastern
tribe, the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire which had ruled the whole of the
Mediterranean and had ranged from Britain in the west to Romania (hence
the name of that country and her Latin language) in the east had shrunk to
Constantinople and some surrounding lands. On the continent in the
empire’s place various tribes ruled: the Ostrogoths (east Goths) in Italy, the
Franks and Burgundians in north and middle Gaul, the Visigoths (west
Goths) in southern Gaul and Spain, the Vandals in north Africa.
It was in about 447 that the former Roman province of Britannia,
already adrift from Rome, began to experience her own concerted attack
by the Teutonic tribes of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons. Although this was
an era for which contemporary written sources do not exist (that is why it
has been called the Dark Ages), there is evidence to suggest that the
beginning of this great invasion was sparked off by an ambitious British
tyrant. After the Roman fashion he imported Germanic tribesmen in the
430s to act as mercenaries against his fellow British kings and to protect
his territory against the Picts, who had become increasingly troublesome
ever since the legions deserted their positions along the Wall. As a reward
for the Saxon mercenaries’ services this British king - whom England’s first
historian, the great eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk the Venerable Bede,
said was called Vortigern — seems to have encouraged them to settle on
land of his in Kent and near London. But a combination of rising sea levels
along the north German coast, reports of the fertile lowlands and mild
weather in England compared to their cold climate and the obvious
inability of the Britons to defend themselves meant Vortigern and his
fellow Britons got more than they bargained for. The chief deities of the
Jutes, Angles and Saxons were Woden the God of War and Thor the God
of Thunder — in other words, they were fierce warrior peoples for whom
glory was to be won by fighting, not by building towns.
Beginning round mid-century, waves of Germanic tribesmen moved over

24
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the next fifty years to Britain in such numbers that they pushed the
Romano-British out of their native lands into the west. Instead of being
content with their own small kingdom, these Saxons under their dynamic
leaders - whom legend names Hengist and Horsa — turned on their British
host when he refused to increase their holdings and murdered him. They
started seizing more areas of England for themselves, beginning with
Thanet and Kent, then. moving west to the Isle of Wight and east
Hampshire. Coastal south-east Britain would become known as Sussex,
the land of the South Saxons. By 527 a new wave of Saxons had gone east
of London and called the land they settled the country of the East Saxons
— Essex. Meanwhile the Angles, whose own country lay so nearly opposite
across the North Sea, seized what would become known as the country of
the East Angles, or East Anglia.
The British Romano-Celts took shelter in the south-west in the old
territories of the Ordovices and Silures which the Angles and Saxons called
Wales, meaning land of the foreigner. Some went north to the three British
kingdoms established above Hadrian’s Wall around 400 — Strathclyde,
Gododdin and Galloway. As early as 460, after ten years of bitter fighting,
the Anglo-Saxon force had slaughtered many of the Romano-British,
sacked the main cities and taken over much of the south and east of the
country. By 495 the first part of the English settlement was completed and
the Angio-Saxon kingdoms reached as far north as York and as far west as
Southampton.
History tends to be the story of the successful, but for two centuries the
Anglo-Saxon conquerors were incapable of recording their actions. The
fair-haired, pale-eyed Angles, Saxons and Jutes were illiterate north
German tribespeople from the neck of the harsh windswept Cimbrian
peninsula, the modern-day Denmark, Schleswig and Holstein. Unlike the
Germanic peoples taking over the territories of the former Roman Empire
in France and Italy, most of these bloodthirsty invaders of Britain had
never felt its civilizing influence: though a number of Saxons from the
German Bremerhaven coast were to be found in the Roman armies, more
of them were pirates and enemies of the empire. These peoples’ remote
northerly geographical position (Jutland is on the same parallel of latitude
as Aberdeen in northern Scotland) ensured that most of them had escaped
contact with the Roman Empire, which had educated their fellow Teutonic
tribes from further south.
Moreover, the Teutonic tribes such as the Burgundians, Visigoths,
Vandals and Franks, had been deeply affected by Roman civilization when
they had settled within the empire. As their power grew and that of the
empire weakened, the civil administration of the Roman government on
the continent tended to remain in place and was taken over wholesale by

25
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the new rulers. In Britain, on the other hand, the expulsion of the Roman
government left no proper central political or economic structures for the
Saxons to adopt. The wild Germanic tribes arriving in Britain were quite
unaffected by the already withering Roman civilization they encountered.
In addition, the transition to Anglo-Saxon rule was brutal, bloody and
sudden. Most of England would be depopulated or her inhabitants
slaughtered or subdued, so no classical influences modified the Anglo-
Saxons’ savage ways. In Britain there was no time for a considered
handover. The small individual kingdoms of Saxons established their own
unadulterated institutions.
We do not know how the Romano-British reacted to the German
peoples setting up homes at such bewildering speed on their fertile lands in
the south and east while many were even forced to live in caves in Wales
or Cornwall. The few contemporary references are mainly glancing asides
by foreign historians, like the sixth-century Byzantine writer Procopius.
For the most part, therefore, English history of this very early period has
to be deciphered from the physical evidence of settlements unearthed by
archaeology and from references to ancient practices preserved in the
Anglo-Saxon laws which began being written down in the seventh century.
It can be augmented by hearsay and folk tales handed down over the
centuries, and sought out by the Venerable Bede. It was only with the
reconversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons at the end of the sixth
century that learning returned to England, though it had meanwhile
continued in Wales and Cornwall. Anglo-Saxon monks and priests then
began writing down accounts of life in their new country which would be
collected in the late ninth century as their official record, The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle. The nearest Briton we have as an eyewitness of the horrors his
country endured at the hands of the pagan Anglo-Saxons is the mid-sixth-
century Romano-British monk Gildas, who recounted the story in his book
Of the Destruction of the British. But even he is writing a hundred years
after the first Anglo-Saxon invasion.
By about 460, the deRomanization of Britain had become very
noticeable to contemporaries abroad. Much of the country had been
entirely taken over by the Saxon tribes, and all feared the worst for its
former inhabitants. Some of the British community still considered
themselves Roman enough in the late 440s to send a plea for help to the
ruler of what remained of the Roman Empire, the great general Aetius,
who was trying to keep Attila the Hun and his horde out of Gaul. They
headed their letter to him, ‘The Groans of the British’. ‘The Barbarians
drive us to the sea,’ they wailed; ‘the sea throws us back on the Barbarians:
thus two modes of death await us; we are either slain or drowned.’ But
Aetius had too much to handle nearer home to think of Britain. It was not

26
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until 451 at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains that he was able to halt
Attila decisively and drive the Huns out of France. One Roman who did
return to help was St Germanus, who led the Britons in battle and told
them to shout ‘Alleluia!’ as they fought the enemy. But it was not enough.
Under the onslaught of the Germanic tribes the only hope for the
Romano-British was to abandon their villas and their cities. As the Saxons
set fire to their houses and murdered those who fled, some Roman Britons
buried their family silver beneath their cellars, thinking that one day when
the invaders had been expelled they would be able to come back for it.
Some of that silver may now be seen in the British Museum, having been
found centuries later, for its original owners never returned. The solid
Roman British citizens, able to dispute legal points with the best lawyers in
Rome, were forced to take refuge behind the palisades of the ancient hill
forts which their far-off primitive ancestors had built in the Iron Age 400
years before. Now they had to refortify them with timber as so few of them
knew how to work stone, thanks to the rapid decline in the art of Roman
stonemasonry.
Everywhere fanatical barbarians with their manes of long hair — a mark
of their warrior caste — fell on the British and put them to the sword.
Invoking the names of Thor and Woden, whose ravens fed on human
blood, they went on the rampage. Priests, women and children were all
horribly murdered, often before the very altars where they had sought
sanctuary. So many were killed that there were not enough people left to
bury them. Those making for the Welsh hills were butchered in heaps, and
even those who surrendered had no guarantee of mercy. Thus in the first
years of the Saxon invasion the old population of England was very nearly
destroyed.
Many fled to the British colony of Armorica in Gaul, which had been
established at the time of the pretender Magnus Maximus in the late fourth
century. They found some comfort in a country by the sea which so nearly
resembled the one they had left behind. So many Romano-British made
their home in Armorican Gaul, and so powerful were they, that to this day
their descendants speak a version of the ancient British tongue — and that
piece of France, Brittany, is still named after them. Britannia, the name of
the Roman province, disappeared from people’s lips and was replaced by
the word England, as in Angle-land, until the anglicized name Britain was
revived in 1707 to describe the union between England, Scotland and
Wales.
Writing a century after the first invasions, Gildas would note that all the
Roman cities remained abandoned: ‘our cities are still not occupied as they
were; even today they are dismal and deserted ruins’. Having become a
literate people, highly educated by the Roman curriculum and trained to

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be clerks and administrators in the Romano-British towns, accustomed to

underground central-heating systems, with glass in their windows and
pavements at their feet, the Britons had lost the hardy spirit which Roman
commentators had so admired. After 400 years of Roman occupation, the
wild Celts whose ancestors had been those fierce, half-naked charioteers
had been replaced by courteous Latin-speaking Roman settlers. As
Romano-Celts worshipping the gentle God of the Christians who abhorred
violence, they were helpless against the Angles and Saxons.
Fortunately two outstanding leaders appeared on the scene to transform
the British into an army of resistance between the first onslaught of the
Anglo-Saxons and the end of the century. The first was a high-born
Roman, perhaps an ex-general, called Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom
Gildas calls ‘a modest man who of all the Roman nation was then alone in
the confusion of this troubled period left alive’. The second, a Romano-
Celtic leader who arose in the west in the late fifth century after the Saxons
had been in Britain for a generation, and who may have been Aurelianus’
son, managed to hold the Saxon foe at bay for thirty years. He pushed the
West Saxons back out of Dorset into the middle of Wiltshire in a series of
clashes culminating in the critical Battle of Mons Badonicus (which may
now be marked by the town of Liddington) in about 500 or 516. This
leader, whose beginning and end are wreathed in fantastic mystery, and
whose tomb has never been found, is believed to have kept the west a
separate British kingdom until a new wave of Saxons in about 550 finally
completed the takeover of England. He may have been the original of the
great Celtic leader now known as King Arthur, about whom by the ninth
century very many stories were circulating, and he may have lived in the
large Iron Age fort at South Cadbury in Somerset, which was heavily
refortified during the fifth and sixth centuries (remains of its kingly hall
have been found).
What can be said for sure is that the myths and legends which have
inspired the writers and poets ever since cluster the most thickly in those
parts of Britain which became the refuge of the fleeing southern British —
that is, in Cornwall and Wales. The tales are curiously uniform in
suggesting that King Arthur is not dead but merely sleeping, perhaps in a
cave in Wales, perhaps in the fairy isles of Avalon, and would one day
awaken to help Britain in her darkest hour. Apart from their obvious
Christian symbolism, they imply that the Romano-British Celts were a
desperate but not yet despairing people who believed that they would one
day return to their homes. But it was not to be.
Thanks to the victories of the Romano-Celt ‘Arthur’ there was peace for
about fifty years from Mons Badonicus until the mid-sixth century — we
know that because Gildas was writing in a time of peace. But only ten years

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later, in about 5 50, a new invasion of the Saxons began, so that by the end
of the sixth century Saxon kingdoms were permanently established
throughout most of England up to the Scottish Lowlands. Two tribes of
Angles colonized eastern England from the Humber northwards. The
southern kingdom called Deira approximated to Yorkshire; north of it
stretched the kingdom of Bernicia, which ran from the Tees to the Firth of
Forth. By the early seventh century Bernicia and Deira had been combined
in the kingdom of Northumbria. Below spread the kingdom of the middle
English or Mercians, which ran from the northern border of Wales in the
west to the kingdom of the Angles in the east. At its foot began the
kingdomof Wessex or the West Saxons, which, thanks to the valour of its
chieftain Ceawlin, by the early seventh century reached as far as the lower
Severn. Only Wales and the west country held out against the Saxons,
Cornwall resisting until the mid-ninth century. Meanwhile in the north the
Irish tribes had taken advantage of the Roman absence to establish a
kingdom of Scots to the west of the Picts above the northern Roman
provinces. Thanks to the impact St Patrick had made upon Ireland, in 563
a monk from one of the monasteries he had founded there, St Columba,
would finish the work of St Ninian, converting the Scots and Picts to
Christianity from his island of Iona off the west Highland coast.
In Wales, Cornwall and Ireland the Christian Celtic Church preserved
some of the classical habits. Thanks to the Church and the education
perpetuated by the new monasteries, writing in Latin continued and
manuscripts were copied for wider circulation. But, burning with hatred
for their oppressors, the Romano-British kept themselves to themselves
and refused to have anything to do with converting their Anglo-Saxon
neighbours to Christianity. Its civilizing influence would have to come
from abroad. Fortunately for the future of England the Angles and Saxons
were not to remain in a state of savagery for long.
In the last years of the sixth century, it is said (this is reported as a
national tradition by Bede in the eighth century), the powerful new pope
Gregory the Great was reminded of the lost Roman Christian province of
Britannia when he saw some handsome slave children, blond and blue-
eyed, in the market at Rome. On asking who they were and being told they
were Angli or Angles, the pope is said to have remarked thoughtfully, ‘Non
Angli sed angeli’ (Not Angles but angels). What is certainly true is that in
597 Pope Gregory, who was breathing new life into the papacy,
despatched a slightly reluctant mission to convert King Ethelbert of Kent
to Christianity. The pope suspected his legate Bishop Augustine might
obtain a hearing because the king was married to a Christian Frank, the
former Princess Bertha. Thus began the reconversion of England to
Christianity and the country’s return to a higher form of civilization. It

29
 ROMAN

would bring England back into the fold of a Europe where for the next
thousand years a common religious culture called Christendom took the
place of the Roman Empire, unifying the whole.

6th-century Angle slaves in the market at Rome. To the future Pope Gregory
the Great, they looked like angels and reminded him of the need to
reconvert Britannia.

30
ANGLO-SAXON
 0° ee

Anglo-Saxon England
c. 790
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FRANKISH
 Ethelbert of Kent to the Viking Invasions
(597-865)

When the papal mission arrived on the Island of Thanet in 597, its leader
St Augustine was extremely nervous about meeting the Saxons. If King
Ethelbert of Kent resembled any of the other German barbarians such as
King Clovis of Gaul, his wife’s grandfather, he would be a fierce,
soldierly type. King Clovis had said that if he had been present at Christ’s
crucifixion he would have avenged it, which was rather missing the point.
Despite Augustine’s fears Pope Gregory was insistent in a series of letters
that the mission be accomplished. At the end of the sixth century
Ethelbert was the most important king, the bretwalda, of the Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms into which England was divided. If Ethelbert’s country
was converted to Christianity he might influence the other kingdoms to
copy him.

The Roman mission of St Augustine to King Ethelbert of Kent, in AD 597, begins

conversion of the southern English to Christianity.

22
 ANGLO-SAXON

King Ethelbert lived up to expectations. Though the small group of forty

travel-weary monks were unarmed and wearing homespun brown habits
bearing before them a silver cross of the suffering Christ, he treated them
as if they were wizards or magicians. He insisted on meeting them in the
open air where their magic would be less potent to prevent them casting
spells, and he would not allow them to leave the island. However, one of
the conditions of King Ethelbert allying himself to the powerful royal
house of the Franks had been that his wife Queen Bertha was to be allowed
to practise her religion. So, living among the worshippers of Woden and
Thor, she did not forget her faith. An old Roman church to St Martin was
still standing on the eastern side of the king’s capital of Canterbury, and
there she and her spiritual adviser Bishop Luidhard were allowed to pray.
After a while, having observed that the monks, who had brought him a
richly decorated Bible and jewels from the pope, were quiet and well
behaved, King Ethelbert allowed them off the island to worship in the
queen’s church. Soon Ethelbert would be so impressed by their preaching
of a future eternal life at a time when even a king could do little against
illness, by their reading and writing and by their care of the poor, that he
himself was baptized. By the end of the year, 10,000 of his people had been
baptized as well.
Under the influence of the Roman missionaries, who received regular
advice in letters from Pope Gregory, for the first time in the England of the
Anglo-Saxons a code of laws was written down in 616. But this time it was
in English, not Latin. Unlike the Romano-British the Anglo-Saxons could
understand only their own language. These first English laws of Ethelbert’s,
which were much influenced by the Franks, protected the new clergy and
the land the king donated to them for church-building. By the end of the
seventh century the churches would be free of taxation. Augustine built the
monastery of St Augustine (which became the burial place of the early
Anglo-Saxon kings of Kent), as well as founding the church that became
Canterbury Cathedral. In the monastery the letters from Pope Gregory
would be preserved, as well as other precious written materials. The
Roman missionaries built further monasteries, which developed into
centres of learning for the people of Kent. A fashion developed for wealthy
noblemen to have their sons taught to read and write in monasteries for
whose foundation they gave money and land. In 602 the pope created the
archbishopric of Canterbury for St Augustine.
Pope Gregory had intended there to be twin archbishoprics in England,
at Canterbury and York, because he still thought of England as the Roman
province — one of whose centres would be the important Roman city of
Eboracum, or York. But York was now part of the kingdom of Deira,
which was entirely separate from Kent even though Ethelbert’s lands

a4
 597-865
stretched as far as Deira. York and its environs would therefore have to be
converted separately, as would all the other kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon
England. Another bishopric was created in 604 at nearby Rochester,
whose ‘chester’ or ‘ceaster’ suffix denotes in the Anglo-Saxon way an old
Roman city; a further bishopric, for the East Saxons, was created the same
year at the old settlement of Londinium, known to the Saxons as
Lundenwig.
Though he knew that Ethelbert was the most important king in the
country, Pope Gregory was unaware of the extent of the changes that had
taken place in England since the departure of the Romans. As we have
seen, England had long ago lost all vestiges of her Roman national
administration. The country was now divided up into the separate lands of
small tribal peoples who themselves were in the process of being subsumed
by the more warlike kings. Thus the heads of the small tribes became
underkings or what the Anglo-Saxons called ealdormen (the word for
military leader) of the larger kingdoms. By the end of the seventh century
there were seven kingdoms altogether, known as the heptarchy; they were
Sussex, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria.
Historians have to make educated guesses about these tribal peoples
because they were not literate. But surviving references to ancient practices
in later documents, literary fragments and law codes have brought them to
the conclusion that the early Anglo-Saxons still shared many
characteristics with their Germanic ancestors of the first century AD,
characteristics which had been observed by Roman commentators.
The most important feature of the social organization of the Germanic
peoples was the family, or to use an Old English word the kin. Loyalty to
one’s kin was a key concept. The kin had an obligation to kill the murderer
of one of their own. Even by the first century, however, this had been
commuted to a money payment, the so-called wer-gild or price of a man
(literally man-gold), which had the effect of making society more peaceful.
If payment was not made, the custom was that the victim’s kin must either
kill the perpetrator or be paid not to do so. In addition a man’s kin were
expected to swear an oath to support him in court if he was accused of a
crime. By the tenth century the kin was responsible for a criminal family
member’s future behaviour. Over the centuries kings and their nobles, who
began to take charge of the village courts, would accept the evidence of the
community to balance the evidence of the kin when it came to establishing
the facts about a crime. By the ninth century kings like Alfred the Great
would be changing the law to make sure that duty to one’s lord took
precedence over duty to one’s kin. But, with these shifts of emphasis,
loyalty and the sacredness of oath-taking continued to form the bedrock of
Anglo-Saxon society.

a5
 ANGLO-SAXON

Most of the Angle and Saxon invaders settled in England in tribal groups
of free peasants under separate leaders, not under one national king; over
those separate peoples overlord kings and bigger kingdoms would arise.
This can be seen by the many place names in England that end in ‘ing’,
which means ‘people of’ — thus Hastings signifies ‘the people of Haesta’
and Woking ‘the people of Wocca’. A famous tenth-century document
drawn up for taxation purposes, the so-called Tribal Hideage, identifies
many of these peoples and the amount of land they held in ‘hides’, the Old
English unit of landholding and assessment for taxation. Depending on
which kingdom you inhabited, a hide consisted of between 40 and 120
acres.
King Ethelbert’s law code reveals that the people of Kent were used to
discussing local affairs in popular open-air assemblies under the direction
of the more learned or wealthy. Since the late sixth century there seems to
have been a tribal court for every hundred hides, about 4,000 acres or
more. They were probably the origin of the ‘hundred’ courts to which there
are documentary references by the tenth century. By then the courts of the
hundred were held on a monthly basis to sort out breaches of the
customary and Church law and to adjust taxes, reflecting the fact that all
the English kingdoms were now divided into administrative units called
hundreds. For many centuries the judges were chosen by the local people
rather than by the king. In contrast to the Roman way of life, early on
among these primitive Anglo-Saxon peoples there were genuinely
democratic customs, even though they themselves had slaves.
A small class of nobles formed the wealthiest level of Kentish society, but
the most numerous element in that kingdom at the end of the sixth century
was the free peasant or ceorl (churl), whose rights were protected by law
and whose immediate overlord was not a noble but the king himself. In
Kent the ceorl was worth a hundred golden shillings to his family: that was
the price of killing him, the wer-gild. The disruption caused by the ninth-
century Viking invasions ruined many of these people, so that they had to
labour for the local lord to pay the swingeing tax bill of Danegeld, or to
pay for the protection of the lord’s soldiers when war threatened his home
and crops. At the same time many Anglo-Saxons managed to cling to the
financial autonomy of their distant ancestors, valuing the independence of
mind it allowed.
The late-seventh-century laws of King Ine of Wessex give us further
information about the western cousins of these men. They were required
to serve in the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia which was called out against
national enemies at times of crisis; and there was a special law imposing
heavy penalties on anyone who penetrated the hedge around another’s
property when the fyrd was out. With their fellow villagers they had to
36
 597-865
support the king by paying a feorm — that is, an ancient royal food rent,
originally a certain amount of ale, oxen, honey and loaves which was later
commuted into a money rent or tax. With a contribution assessed by
hideage, it seems that from the earliest times the Anglo-Saxons were
expected to help build local bridges and walls and the king’s fortresses if
called upon. By 700 the kings of the separate kingdoms of England each
had their own council of wise men called the Witan. Members of the
Witan, who tended to be the great landowners of the kingdom, witnessed
the king’s acts of state, whether it was giving land to a noble, or declaring
that a monastery need not pay rent. They could elect a king from a royal
line if they chose, but their chief role was to advise him.
Just as they had settled England in tribes, the Anglo-Saxon peasants
tended to live in small villages. Their fields were quite different from the
rectangular ones of the Celtic Iron Age, being laid out in long curving
strips. In some kingdoms some land was farmed in common, in strips
scattered over open fields. In others, such as Kent, land was organized in a
more self-contained way. All over England woods on the outskirts of
villages tended to be held as common land where everyone could put their
pigs, sheep and cows out to pasture.
These blond, big-boned Angles and Saxons had heavier, stronger
ploughs than the ancient Britons, whose lighter ploughs had led them to
prefer high ground and lighter soil. So the Anglo-Saxons were unafraid of
the richer, heavier, alluvial valley soil of the midlands. Increasing numbers
of them therefore began to spread along the Ouse towards the Tyne and
Tees, enlarging the kingdoms of Mercia, Deira and Bernicia. By the early
seventh century the latter two would be united by the powerful King
Ethelfrith into the kingdom of Northumbria (the people north of the
Humber).
The Anglo-Saxon peoples regarded the ruins of the vast Roman buildings
they came upon with wonder. They were primitive builders themselves who
could handle only wood and brick. The skills required to build the towering
marble temples, the immense stone Roman baths, the aqueducts that littered
England were so far beyond them that they could not believe they had been
constructed by humans. ‘The work of giants’ is how their literature
repeatedly describes Roman architecture. It used to be thought that the
Anglo-Saxons avoided Roman cities because they believed superstitiously
that they contained ghosts. But the latest research suggests that, while at first
the Saxons and Angles may have preferred to carry away superior Roman
bricks to build their own settlements, by the end of the seventh century the
old Roman cities were beginning to attract a new population of Anglo-Saxon
city-dwellers. These cities, such as York and London, never contained more
than a few thousand people, as most Anglo-Saxons preferred to live in the

a7
 ANGLO-SAXON

country as farmers. However, the farmers would build a king’s hall, a royal
manor or tun, which survives in the place names Wilton, Walton and
Kingston. These edifices were impressive (if crude) wooden buildings which
functioned as administrative centres and which had to be large enough to
receive the local hundred when they brought their goods to support the king.
But the king’s hall, whether it was the home of a king’s ealdorman or the
king himself, was also a warm cheerful place where mead was passed
round in a horn from person to person at a vast log table, with a fire
burning in the enormous hearth and clean green rushes on the floor to
sweeten the air. Although most Anglo-Saxons had settled down to farm
they still retained a folk memory of their ancestors, the north German
warriors, which found expression in the vigorous songs which bards sang
for them in the great hall, recounting the exploits of Beowulf for example.
Loyalty, revenge and death were some of the favourite themes of Anglo-
Saxon literature, but perhaps most popular of all were poems about the
loyalty between the king and his men, the devoted noblemen known as
thanes. Like the bond between kin, the bond between a king and his
bodyguard was sacred. It was a disgrace for a man to allow his lord to fall
in battle without avenging him by his own death. The early history of
England is full of heroic examples of thanes who refused to change sides
even if their lord was dead, like those of the eighth-century King Cynewulf
of Wessex who avenged his slaying by laying down their own lives.
As the seventh century dawned in England, outside Kent most of the
country remained wedded to the heathen gods and pagan way of life. It
would take men of tremendous conviction to woo them from the powerful
deities after whom they had named many features of the landscape —
Thundridge in Hertfordshire meant Thunor’s or Thor’s ridge, and so on.
The Church would become one of the pillars on which the English
kingdoms were built, the essence of the civilization of the middle ages. But
the raw material the Church was battling with was rough, pagan and
insensitive. The monks seeking to convert the Saxons to Christianity often
had to adapt their prayers and stories to attract an audience which admired
strength and found it hard to admire the Christian reverence for suffering.
Nevertheless, thanks to the force and energy of Augustine’s Roman
missionaries, and of other missionaries from Ireland and Scotland, within
less than a century the Church had converted the whole of the savage
country of England to Christianity. It would go on to transform the Anglo-
Saxon people and their culture in an astonishing way. From bloodthirsty
warriors, the Anglo-Saxons became a people whose sons learned to read
and write Latin and thus had access to the knowledge of the ancients. For
150 years in England, from the 660s to the 820s, there was an
extraordinary revival of learning in the new monasteries which swept

38
 Christian Irish missionaries setting off across the Irish Sea.

rapidly over the country. It would reach its peak in seventh-century

Northumbria, as seen in the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, and a
scholarly and artistic renaissance would spread from England to the
kingdom of the Franks. Links were created between the continent and
England not seen since the early fifth century. After 300 years of
constructing simple wooden dwellings, the Anglo-Saxons started to put up
great numbers of elaborate churches and monasteries as it became socially
prestigious to erect buildings to the glory of God. Thanks to French and
Italian artists whom the late-seventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury
Theodore of Tarsus brought to England, the Anglo-Saxons would be
exposed to far more sophisticated workmanship than the wattle and daub
of their native Denmark and northern Germany.
English buildings would become splendid again under the influence of
the Christian Church with its links to a higher continental civilization.
Streets began to be paved, and the floors of kings’ halls were made out of
tiny pieces of decorative stone. Cloth of gold was the material once more
seen on their interior walls, as it had been in the days of the Caesars. Glass-
making would return to England after three centuries, thanks to the
English Church’s strong links with Gaul, for the Gauls had kept that
Roman art going. At the end of the seventh century, the warrior and
nobleman Benedict Biscop would be the first person to import Gaulish
glass-makers to the monastery he had founded at Jarrow on the Tyne.
Glass, soon to be stained glass, appeared in church windows for the first
time in Anglo-Saxon England.

a2
 ANGLO-SAXON

But early English Christianity was a very fragile plant, dependent on the
patronage of a strong ruler. After King Ethelbert of Kent died in 616, his
son and successor Eadbald was so hostile to Christianity that Kent
trembled on the edge of paganism again. Members of the Roman mission
became so dispirited that many decided to quit Kent for France. According
to tradition it was only because the Prince of Apostles, St Peter, appeared
in a vision to one of their number, Bishop Laurentius, that they returned.
In a rage St Peter set about the bishop, beating him ferociously, reminding
him all the while of the parable of the Good Shepherd and insisting that he
should not abandon his sheep to the infidel wolves. The next day Eadbald
was so alarmed by the weals St Laurentius showed him that he reformed
and the other bishops returned.
We would have little knowledge of the story of how the astonishing
changes took place in the lives of the wild Anglo-Saxons were it not for the
detective work of the eighth-century monk from the monastery at Jarrow
who is always known as the Venerable Bede. This great writer, the father
of English history and one of the most influential writers of the first
millennium in Europe, was born about 670. His tomb may still be seen at
Durham Cathedral. Bede made it his business to search out the facts as
opposed to the myths and legends about the origins of the English people.
He was hard working, scientifically rigorous and wide ranging in his
investigations. Though he consulted eyewitnesses where he could, every
piece of information he presented as a fact had to be backed up by
documentary evidence, for which he scoured ancient documents in
England as well as sending to the papal registers at Rome for information.
He also perfected the system invented by Dionysius Exiguus of
chronological dating, taking the birth of Christ as the beginning of modern
time. Bede’s books became so famous throughout eighth-century Europe
that owing to his influence the letters AD (Anno Domini, ‘in the year of Our
Lord’) were adopted for presenting dates everywhere.
The story of the transformation of England is set down in Bede’s book
The Ecclesiastical History ofthe English People. From it derives the greater
part of our knowledge of the fifth-century invasion and the sixth-, seventh-
and eighth-century kingdoms of England. The next most important
conversion of the peoples of England after Kent was that of the kingdom
of the Northumbrians. Although the new Bretwalda of England on the
death of Ethelbert was Raedwald, the King of East Anglia, it was owing to
an exiled prince of the northern kingdom of Deira (modern Yorkshire) at
Raedwald’s court, Edwin (the future founder of Northumbria), that the
most influential movement of English Christianity began.
Though most early Anglo-Saxon kings are covered in obscurity,
Raedwald is one about whom rather a lot is known. In the summer of

40
The Bewcastle Cross, Cumbria (7th or 8th century). One of the best examples of
Anglo-Saxon preaching crosses that were sometimes used instead of churches.

41
 ANGLO-SAXON

1939, just before the Second World War broke out, what is generally
acknowledged to be his tomb was found on what was formerly the Suffolk
coast at Sutton Hoo. The magnificent remains, which are thought to date
from circa 621-30 and are now on display in the British Museum, further
amplify our picture of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon rulers like Raedwald
himself and his client Edwin of Northumbria. At the top of a hundred-foot
headland, not unlike the funeral pyre of Beowulf, ‘high and broad and
visible to those journeying the ocean’, was found a burial chamber made
out of a ninety-foot longship, the kind of vessel in which Raedwald’s Angle
ancestors had famously appeared.
What is especially interesting about Raedwald’s tomb is that it shows
that there had been a revival of international trade in Europe, which for
two centuries after the fall of the western Roman Empire had decayed to
local barter. Raedwald’s helmet and armour were made in Sweden, while
his drinking bowls were the product of Middle Eastern craftsmen. The
many different kinds of foreign coin show what complicated and far-
reaching trade Raedwald was involved in, taking in Constantinople and
Alexandria.
Sutton Hoo also reveals that, despite Raedwald’s veneer of Christianity,
his deepest beliefs were as pagan as those of Tutankhamun. For he was
buried with quite as much grave furniture as any of the ancient Egyptians,
with an enormous cauldron and an immense mead horn beautifully
mounted in silver for drinking in the halls of Valhalla. Gold belt buckles
weighing more than a pound each, with intricate designs of stylized
hunting animals like falcons, indicate that there were brilliant smiths at
work in seventh-century England who had developed the art of cloisonné
to a peak it would be hard to reach today. But what is outstanding about
this man is his appearance as a warrior. His wonderful iron helmet covered
with a layer of bronze sculpted with fighting figures, with menacing slits
for the eyes and flaps to protect the ears, could only strike fear in those who
encountered him.
Edwin of Northumbria was a warrior of this kind too. In the seventh
century, when most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were in a constant state
of war, battling for territory, it could only be with the support of such a
man that Christianity could become permanently established. With
Raedwald’s help Edwin had defeated his enemy Ethelfrith, who had united
the kingdom of Deira round York with Bernicia as far as the Scottish
borders and thus became king of the whole of Northumbria. But it was his
marriage to Ethelbert of Kent’s Christian daughter Ethelburga that was the
other crucial feature of Edwin’s reign. For she brought with her to the
Northumbrian court a Roman Christian monk of intense and determined
personality named Paulinus. A potent combination of intellectual
42
 597-865
argument and magnificent
papal gifts such as a silver
looking-glass and a gilt
ivory comb of exquisite
Italian worksmanship, as
well as a shirt of extra-
ordinarily fine wool, suc-
cessfully appealed to the
king’s taste and to his
sense of his kingly rank.
King Edwin’s conver-
sion was a very serious
matter which was evident-
ly not embarked on
without discussion among
— and in effect with the
permission of — his nobles
and his leading heathen
priest. It prompted one of
the most famous passages
in the literature of the
Anglo-Saxons, written by oe

Bede, which gives usarare Early-7th-century Anglo-Saxon iron helmet from

portrait of the seventh- the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, believed
to be that of King Raedwald of East Anglia.
century Anglo-Saxon ruler’s
life. After the high priest
Coifi of Northumbria had frankly admitted that even he had not gained
from sacrificing to idols, one of the king’s chief men spoke out as
follows:
This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me in
comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting
feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter-time; the fire is
burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm,
while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a
sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly
flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm
and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of
calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again.
So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed
what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more
certain information it seems right that we should accept it.

43
 ANGLO-SAXON

Utterly convinced, the high priest borrowed a horse from the king and rode
off to destroy the shrine of the idols to whom the Northumbrians were still
sacrificing herds of cattle.
Once Edwin had converted to Christianity, his people followed. It was
as a community that on Easter Sunday 12 April 627 the nobility and a large
number of ordinary people, as well as King Edwin, received baptism at
York in a little wooden church built by Paulinus where York Minster now
stands. Paulinus then travelled up and down the country performing mass
in all the Northumbrian rivers. In fact there was such a fervour to be
christened among the Northumbrians that for thirty-six days Paulinus had
to work day and night in order to complete his task of baptizing people
who had travelled for days from the furthest-flung villages and hamlets
throughout the land. By the 630s Northumbria had become a byword for
peace among its violent neighbours.
But Edwin, who became bretwalda on the death of Raedwald, had
earned the hatred of the old Britons, that is the Welsh under their king
Cadwallon of Gwynedd, because Northumbria was increasing its territory
at their expense. Despite being a Christian, Cadwallon had chosen to
combine his army with that of Penda, the warlike heathen King of Mercia.
The bitter enmity between the Roman missionaries and the Celtic
Church meant that no Welsh bishops counselled Cadwallon to refrain
from attacking his fellow Christian King Edwin. St Augustine had assumed
that the Welsh bishops would be directed by him once his mission had
arrived in England, for he had orders to set up two archbishoprics and
twenty-four bishoprics. But the Welsh saw him as a foreign usurper who
should bow to their more ancient faith. The conference Augustine called in
order to reason with them ended with harsh words on both sides.
Augustine denounced the Welsh bishops as heretics, warning of dire
consequences if the Church was not united. These seemed to be fulfilled
when Edwin was killed at the Battle of Hatfield in 633, and the west British
swarmed all over Northumbria, burning villages and churches and almost
wiping out Christianity despite their common faith. Cadwallon’s soldiers
spared neither women nor children, so Bishop Paulinus had to gather up
Queen Ethelburga and her household, together with a large gold cross and
a wonderful chalice studded with jewels, and escort her south to her
brother’s more peaceful kingdom of Kent. From being Bishop of York
Paulinus ended his days as Bishop of Rochester, dying (for once we have a
precise death date) on 10 October 644.
The devastation came to an end only when the son of Ethelfrith of
Northumbria, Oswald, returned to his old country, drove out Penda and
Cadwallon and forced the Welsh Britons as far as their kingdom in
Cumbria to acknowledge him as their overlord. Oswald’s reign was brief,

44
 597-865
since he was murdered by Penda in 642. But it was memorable for his
association with another great early churchman, St Aidan, who
transformed the Northumbrian Church by exposing it to Irish Christianity
and its twin traditions of classical scholarship and passionate Celtic
evangelism.
St Aidan was a monk at the famous monastery of Iona off the west coast
of Scotland where King Oswald himself had been educated and which had
been founded in 563 by the Irish monk St Columba to convert the Scots.
The monastery had maintained the best traditions of classical education,
which had survived in Ireland because it had been left undisturbed by the
German migrations. Irish Christianity was a markedly scholarly movement
because itsmonasteries had been the preservers of a significant part of the
European classical heritage that had perished in Italy and France under the
onslaught of the German tribes. Classical manuscripts, many of them the
legacy of Greek civilization to the Romans, once the common reading
matter of Roman citizens, continued to be copied in Ireland by industrious
monks.
When Oswald returned to Northumbria he brought with him the Irish-
educated monks from Iona to re-establish Christianity in his shattered
kingdom. St Aidan was made the bishop of the Northumbrians. In
typically ascetic Irish and Scots fashion he chose to build his episcopal seat,
cathedral and monastery off the Northumbrian coast on the small tidal
island of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, just south of Berwick-on-Tweed.

hy Pepa
Se

Jona, an island off the west coast of Scotland where in 563 the Irish St Columba
founded the monastery whose monks brought Christianity to the Picts and
the Northumbrians.

aD)
 ANGLO-SAXON

Despite St Aidan’s importance as head of the Northumbrian Church, the

buildings on Lindisfarne had thatched roofs of reeds, after the Irish
fashion.
Under St Aidan’s influence, King Oswald’s court became known
throughout the rest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms for its higher way of life.
The nature of the Anglo-Saxon rulers and ealdormen began to change,
guided by their priests into better behaviour. Many of the nobility began
to copy St Aidan’s example of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. Instead
of an ethic based on the rule of the strong, which was the code of the
Anglo-Saxons, Oswald became notable for his care of the poor. Bede tells
many stories of the great novelty of the king’s selfless generosity, such as
giving away his Easter lunch, a silver dish full of dainties, to the poor in the
streets.
When Oswald was succeeded by his formidable brother Oswy, who
regained the bretwaldaship for Northumbria, the Christian way of life
established under St Aidan and Oswald was exported with even greater
momentum. Oswy made a point of encouraging missionaries from
Northumbria to visit other kingdoms. Thanks to the activities of the
Northumbrian monk St Ceadda or Chad, the population of Penda’s
famously heathen Mercia also began to turn Christian, including Penda’s
own son Peada. By 700 the whole of England had been converted to
Christianity. The missionaries’ origins varied: in East Anglia it was the
inspired preaching of a Burgundian which did it, while in Wessex it was a
Roman from Kent. But in the main the impulse was coming from
Northumbria, from Lindisfarne and from Iona. The Yorkshire monk
Wilfrid of Ripon converted the South Saxons, while Cedd, who was Chad’s
brother, reconverted the East Saxons.
By 698 the new monastery on Lindisfarne had produced an extra-
ordinary monument to the new Northumbrian Christian civilization in the
form of the Lindisfarne Gospels. This was a version of the Four Gospels of
the New Testament but was decorated with beautiful illuminated letters
and patterns, patterns which mingle Celtic designs and the sort of Anglo-
Saxon shapes found on the buckles of the East Anglian Raedwald.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were made by monks living in communities
which were becoming very much the rule in England by the end of the
seventh century. Irish Christianity was notable for its monks’ austere way
of life. The earliest Irish and Scottish monasteries tended to be sited in
remote places like islands or on hills, and the monks’ cells would be
beehive shaped, pleasant in summer and freezing cold in winter. But with
the spread of Christianity, as a result of intermarriage between English
rulers and of the energy of the Northumbrian and Irish missionaries,
monasteries of a more sophisticated kind were built. They grew into large,

46
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powerful institutions, with many different rooms such as the scriptorium,
where manuscripts were copied, and herb gardens outside. They provided
schooling and were increasingly important communities in themselves.
They started to have their own farms of sheep and dairy, particularly as the
wealthy bequeathed land to monasteries in return for the monks’ saying
Masses for their souls. Seventh-century women participated too. Soon
there were many communities of what were called ‘double monasteries’,
foundations where men and women lived side by side but in separate
buildings. The Old English word for monastery is minster and towns with
‘minster’ at the end suggest that they were once religious communities — for
example, Westminster, Minster Lovell and Upminster.
It was Owing to the energy of King Oswy that the English Church
achieved a much needed national unity, for there was constant quarrelling
between the different Christian sects of the Roman, Celtic and Scots and
Irish Churches. The dominant issue in their quarrel was the date of Easter,
but the real problem was that the Church in England lacked a harmonious
national organization. Although he was only a simple warrior, or perhaps
precisely because he was a warrior, Oswy decided in 664 that how to
calculate when Easter fell and a host of other matters should be determined
once and for all.
Oswy called a national Church Council at the monastery built by the
Northumbrian princess Abbess Hilda at Whitby on the windswept east
coast of Yorkshire. Hilda was a great administrator whose abbey became
a training school for Church statesmen. Her monastery produced at least
five outstanding ecclesiastics including Wilfrid of York and became a place
where kings and princes sought advice on government. Here too in the
680s lived Caedmon, a humble lay brother who would compose some of
the earliest extant Anglo-Saxon religious poetry.
Bede described the shyness of this poor lay brother attached to the abbey
who, because he was uneducated, performed all the tasks of a servant. In
the refectory or dining room at meal times (for monks and lay brothers ate
together to emphasize the brotherhood of man) the educated monks would
amuse themselves inventing elegant verse. Caedmon was always too
embarrassed to speak when he saw the harp coming round the long table
towards him. He would quickly find an excuse to leave. One night in the
stable where he slept in order to take care of the monastery’s horses he had
fallen into a melancholy sleep, all too aware of his ignorance. Suddenly
someone appeared to him in his dreams and said, ‘Caedmon sing some
song to me.’ Caedmon replied that he could not sing and that was why he
had left the hall. But the other insisted that he should sing. ‘What shall I
sing?’ asked Caedmon. ‘Sing the beginning of created things,’ said the
other. And Caedmon, in the muck of the stable, found that the most

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beautiful verses were coming out of his mouth as he sang the praises of
God the Father who had made and preserved the human race. The story
goes that when Abbess Hilda heard the exquisite poetry he was speaking
she ordered that Caedmon should no longer be a lay brother but should be
given a proper monk’s habit.
It was at this abbey that the churchmen of the many separate kingdoms
in England bowed to the power of the bretwalda Oswy and assembled in
what was the first British conference, the Synod of Whitby, attended by all
the great figures of seventh-century British Christendom in a bid to stop the
bickering between the Irish and Roman Churches. The Irish Church had
become a law unto itself during the Dark Ages when it lost contact with
Rome. By 664 it was in effect a separate and rival organization which
frequently disagreed with the papacy, whether on the date of Easter or on
the tonsure — Irish monks were tonsured (shaved) at the front from ear to
ear while Roman monks were tonsured on top. In daily life as the Church
began to occupy an increasingly central position within the Northumbrian
state this was beginning to create a number of practical problems.
With St Aidan’s death and the accession of the fiery Bishop Colman to
Lindisfarne and the bishopric of York, the issue led toa ludicrous
antagonism between the two branches of the same faith. Some people had
been converted by Irish Scots and some by Roman missionaries, so that
their disputes were beginning to take up energies better used elsewhere. At
the Synod of Whitby Wilfrid of Ripon was in favour of the Roman way of
reckoning. ‘Why’, he asked with some resonance, should a small number
in ‘the remotest of two remote islands, the Picts and Britons, be different
from the universal Church in Asia, Africa, Egypt, Greece, Italy and
France?’
It was left to King Oswy to decide. He came down in favour of the
Church founded by St Peter, in preference to what had in effect become a
detached Church founded by St Columba. But at this pronouncement
Bishop Colman, who was a strict adherent of St Columba, flew into such
a rage that he resigned his bishopric at Lindisfarne, stormed back to Iona
and eventually returned to Ireland. Oswy’s Synod had done the English
Church a great service. Christianity in England was now run by the Roman
Church, which had the virtue of being an efficient, permanently staffed,
wealthy international organization as opposed to the Irish Church’s
reliance on the enthusiasm of individuals. A few years later the country
benefited from the pope’s choice of a brilliant priest from what is present-
day Turkey named Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Despite the importance we attach today to the ancient archbishopric,
hitherto the Archbishop of Canterbury had had little actual power outside
Kent. But over the next twenty years Archbishop Theodore’s organiza-

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tional skills transformed the English Church into a rationalized whole. In
672 its first canons gave Theodore and his successors at Canterbury
authority over all the English Church, with power to create dioceses and
make new bishops, a landmark in English religious history. All the bishops
(the planned total of twenty-four had now been reached) of the different
kingdoms, Mercia, Northumbria and so on, were to be under the authority
of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Training schools were set up to ensure
that each bishop had so many monks and priests to help with his work as
well as schools for gifted children, whatever their means. As a result of
Theodore’s Greek-speaking background Greek and Latin were taught
again to the inhabitants of England as well as the ancient curriculum of the
Seven Libéral Arts: the Trivium and the Quadrivium.
The English Church gained a sense of national unity from the Church
Councils which Theodore called on a regular basis. As religious
enthusiasm swept the country with the aid of the well-to-do, a large
number of monasteries were built all over England, particularly in
Northumberland. The monks began to produce alliterative religious poetry
like the Germanic verse of their forefathers. Talented poets in their midst
were most likely responsible for the fusion of Christian values and the
Saxon warrior past, which by the eighth century had produced two of the
greatest Anglo-Saxon poems, The Dream of the Rood and Beowulf. If they
were not written by monks they were certainly copied down in manuscript
by monks in their scriptoriums and transmitted as the Anglo-Saxon version
of Christian culture to future generations. They also memorialized the lives of
those around them. They painted pictures not of the fabulous monsters
of their Nordic ancestors’ dour imaginations but of the real people they
saw around them: English ceorls working in their fields or hunting hares
with ermines, nobles on their horses flying hawks from their wrists. As the
wealthier classes’ children were educated in monasteries, their pleasures
became more cultivated. They wrote gnomic verses, simple poetry. Once
they had been taught to read and write by the Latin-speaking monks, the
cleverer might enjoy Anglo-Saxon riddles derived from Latin literature, as
well as that literature itself, including Virgil’s Aeneid (which Bede had
certainly read) and Pliny’s Natural History.
Christianity had become a power throughout the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms, as important as the kings and their lords. Other than the
monastic communities themselves, the key element in each diocese was not
the parish priest, of which there were few, but the bishop, who then had
an itinerant preaching role. At first there were very few parish churches
because they took time and money to build. In areas where there were
none, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus allowed people to worship in the
fields, which is why standing crosses were often erected instead of altars.

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 ANGLO-SAXON

Elaborately decorated with new foreign motifs like the Byzantine-style

vineleaves of Theodore’s craftsmen, they may still be seen at Bewcastle in
Cumbria and at Durham.
Some Saxon churches, like the important example at Brixworth in
Northamptonshire and the Lorna Doone church St Mary the Virgin at
Oare in Somerset, survive to this day. But the majority were either
destroyed by the Danes or rebuilt by the Normans. As the centuries went
on, parish churches tended to be erected as private buildings by wealthy
individuals. From this came the large number of lay patrons in England
who derived their right to appoint a priest from having built the church on
their own land. By the late tenth century, the tithe, a tenth of the farmer’s
crops, was legally owed to the Church to support the parish priest. A
hundred years later the English lord saw it as part of his duty to give the
Church a third of his manor lands’ income.
On the death of Oswy in 670 Northumbria began to lose her position
as the dominant kingdom in England to Mercia. Oswy’s son Egfrith had
not inherited his father’s
8th-century Brixworth practical nature and wasted
Church, his kingdom’s resources on
Northamptonshire, one
of the chief meeting
fruitless attempts to expand
places for the Mercian north into the country of
kings and their people. the elusive Picts. The eighth
century in England is gener-
ally known as the period of
the Mercian Supremacy
under two powerful kings —
Ethelbald (716-57) and Offa
(757-96).
The period was also to be
celebrated for the flowering
of the Northumbrian Church
in what has been called the
heroic age of Anglo-Saxon
Christianity as the traditions
established by the zealously
pious Northumbrian kings
and monks at Lindisfarne
came to fruition. Its Irish
roots gave it a strong
pietistic strain as well as the
profound sense of mission
of its great founders like
 597-865
St Aidan. By the late seventh century the English Church was sending
missionaries back to Germany to convert the lands of their heathen
forebears. The mission to Saxony was begun by the Bishop of York Wilfred
of Ripon, when he was wrecked off the coast of Frisia. It was continued by
his pupil St Willibrord and by Willibrord’s contemporary St Boniface.
Strong links were also established between the Northumbrian Church
and the new regime in France, where the great tradition of English
scholarship of the eighth century helped create a revival of western learning
— what is called the eighth-century Carolingian Renaissance. Among the
fruits of these contacts was the Palace School founded by the greatest of the
Carolingian kings, Charlemagne, where young Frankish nobles and
promising boys from poor families could be educated. The blond,
magnificent Charlemagne, who could neither read nor write himself, set
great store by education. The heathen German Saxons who were given a
choice of ‘Baptism or death’ by his conquering soldiers would have been
surprised to know that Charlemagne slept with a slate beneath his pillow,
hoping to learn by osmosis the magic letters he found so difficult.
In England the power of Mercia meant that for the first time King
Ethelbald began to style himself King of All South England, while Offa his
successor simply called himself King of the English. This he was certainly
in a position to do: except in Northumbria and Wessex, where the ancient
house of the West Saxons continued in very reduced circumstances, King
Offa directly ruled most of the rest of the country. A superb soldier who
introduced a magnificent struck coinage with fine silver pennies in
imitation of Roman currency, he also adopted Roman methods to keep the
Welsh British out of England, constructing his famous Dyke from sea to
sea which can still be seen today. Offa was a notable protector of the
Church, which he encouraged as a source of stability and education,
supporting it with grants of land and building many abbeys.
During the long reigns of the two strong Mercian kings which between
them covered almost the whole century, England prospered as never
before. From being the barbarians of Europe, the English had become
renowned for their orderly way of life and exemplary scholarship.
Charlemagne corresponded with Offa and called him ‘brother’, an epithet
he accorded to very few people, and Offa made the first extant European
trading treaty on behalf of the English with Charlemagne. It provides for
reciprocal rights of free passage for merchants visiting France or England
to be enforced by local officials.
In 787 with great pageantry and ceremonial King Offa’s daughter
Eadburgha was married to Beohtric, the King of the West Saxons. The
marriage brought even more of the West Saxons’ territory within Offa’s
orbit: he had already annexed all the West Saxons’ land north of the

51
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Thames. Such was Offa’s prestige that he could persuade the pope to split
the see of Canterbury in two in order to give Mercia its own archbishopric
at Lichfield in Staffordshire. However, despite King Offa’s unique position
abroad and at home it was during his reign that an external force of far
greater magnitude first began to threaten England.
Shortly after his daughter’s magnificent nuptials in Wessex, three
enormous ships appeared off the Dorset coast, each of them almost eighty
feet long and seventeen feet wide — the size of a large house or hall. The
ships, which had sailed from Denmark, put in to the harbour at Portland,
full of strange, grim men from the north. Instead of responding civilly
when one of King Beohtric’s officials asked them to accompany him so that
they could be registered in the nearest town of Dorchester, as was the
practice in those peaceful times, the foreigners turned on the customs
official and killed him. ‘These’, says The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
ominously, ‘were the first ships of the Danishmen which sought the land of
the English nation.’ There were many more to come.
Those three ships are the first mention in English history of a fearsome
Scandinavian people called the Vikings. For the next 200 years they would
destroy much of the newly erected structure of medieval Christendom by
their lightning raids. The Vikings’ name came from the old Norse word vik
meaning creek or fjord and they themselves were land-hungry young men
from the creeks of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Brilliant sailors at a
time when the nations of north-west Europe had forgotten the art of
seamanship in favour of agriculture, the Vikings were also enthusiastic

Viking warships which from 787 onwards raided the coast of England.

52
 597-865
traders and adventurers who roamed the seas, bartering hides from their
own countries with whatever took their fancy in foreign ports. But they
also had the bloodlust that Christianity had damped down in the Angles
and Saxons. The Vikings sacrificed to their cruel old gods of Thor and
Odin with death and destruction, believing that only by bloodshed would
they reach the afterlife.
For some time in the early years of the ninth century rumours had been
sweeping the Scandinavians that Charlemagne’s conquest of the Frisians,
the north German policemen of the Baltic, meant that there were no longer
any Frisian warships protecting western seas. Very rich pickings were to be
had there. At the same time there had been a rapid increase in the numbers
of Scandinavian people, something of a population explosion. The Vikings
were landless young men who took to raiding to feed themselves as there
were not enough fields to support them beside their narrow Norwegian
fjords. Self-sufficient and independent, used to ruling themselves in their
isolated hamlets and lonely forests, they were irked by the strengthened
powers of the monarchy under powerful kings in Denmark and Norway,
like Harold Fairhair, the first King of Norway. Pastures new were what
they needed, and these they sought with a vengeance. The coasts of eastern
England and the north coast of the Frankish Empire, as Charlemagne’s
sprawling lands were known, were now at the mercy of any Viking
expedition strong enough to overcome resistance at the point where they
landed. And again and again they would come, from the icy capes of the
Baltic to Britain’s fertile and warmer shores.
Fifty years earlier in 732, western Christendom had just succeeded under
Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel in defeating the Muslim
warriors who had conquered Spain, beating them in the Pyrenees and
throwing them out of France. But now Christian European civilization was
in danger again as the Viking ships harried the north European coasts.
The 300-year era when the Vikings overran Europe displays many
similarities to the earlier ‘Dark Ages’. Once again, particularly during the
ninth century, much of the learning which had been cultivated so pains-
takingly to replace the devastation of the German migrations vanished.
The light given to Europe by Christianity flickered and very nearly went
out. Today it would be as if all our public libraries and publishing houses
and schools were burned to the ground systematically, with never enough
time to rebuild them.
Unfortunately for England many of her most important monasteries
which were centres of learning like Lindisfarne were especially vulnerable
to the Norsemen, owing to their founders’ wish for solitude. Situated on
unprotected promontories jutting out to sea, or on islands far away from
the king’s soldiers, they were sitting ducks. The Vikings had no sense of

53
 ANGLO-SAXON

their sacredness but thought only of the chapels’ famous gold chalices and
jewelled ornaments.
The Norsemen’s shallow-draught boats were designed to travel swiftly
up rivers and estuaries. Their longboats with their vast striped single sails,
their snapping dragon-head prows, their shields hung out over the side and
huge chainmailed warriors became the sight on the horizon most dreaded
by coastal dwellers. The Vikings were stealthy fighters and often moved by
night. They would put down their oars, take up their broadswords,
disembark and kill the helpless monks even if they were at prayer, before
seizing all the gold and silver which the monasteries had collected over two
centuries. They would then be off, leaving buildings in flames behind them
and despair among the survivors.
Ninth-century Vikings in England and Ireland were responsible for the
loss of very nearly all of the priceless monastery libraries, built up by
monks painstakingly copying manuscripts by hand. Before printing was
invented that was the only way to make a copy of a book. Thousands and
thousands of illuminated manuscripts whose great initialled letters
occupied a whole piece of vellum and took a year for a monk to paint,
became ashes beneath the fallen masonry. Only a tiny number of early
manuscripts survived the onslaught of the Vikings, such as the Lindisfarne
Gospels and the eighth- or ninth-century Book of Kells, which was
probably made on Jona but carried over to Ireland. Both are now on
display in the British Library. Lindisfarne itself, the great centre of English
religious life for two centuries, was destroyed in a Viking raid in 793 and
the helpless monks slaughtered. It was followed a year later by Jarrow,
birthplace of Bede, and the next year by Iona.
It is hard for us to imagine today how frightening the Viking threat
seemed. But the thought of their ships lurking offshore began to prey on
the confidence of the peoples of England and France. To the terrified
inhabitants of England the burning of Lindisfarne was a sign that God was
angry with them, for Lindisfarne was an especially holy place. Why had He
let it be destroyed? The Viking plague and their barbaric ways — ‘Where we
go the ravens follow and drink our victims’ blood!’ they sang as they
disembarked in their horned helmets —- made them bogeymen to the
Christian nations. It was no wonder that the Mass each Sunday began to
include the heartfelt prayer: ‘From the fury of the Vikings, save us O Lord!’
There were three kinds of Vikings and they moved in three separate
directions. While the Swedish Vikings swept east in their thousands under
their chief Rurik to found the Kievan Rus or first Russian state, the
Norwegian Vikings sailed west and founded Greenland. Two centuries
later, about the year 1000, they would discover North America, putting in
at what is now New England, which they called Vinland. They sailed down

54
 597-865
the west coast of Scotland and across to Ireland, where they founded
Viking cities like Dublin and Cork and laid waste almost all the wealthy
monasteries in the north of the country. They descended on the Orkneys,
Caithness, Ross, Galloway, Dumfries, the Isle of Man, Cumberland,
Westmorland, Cheshire, Lancashire and the coast of South Wales.
Whirling their double-headed axes, against which there was no response,
they carried many of the inhabitants into slavery.
The third kind of Viking, known as the ‘inner line’, concentrated their
unwelcome attentions on the southern coast of England and the north
coast of continental Europe. These Vikings were Danes from Denmark,
whose ancestors had moved into the districts left empty by the Angles
when they went to England in the fifth century. At first the Danish Vikings
came only in small bands, for during the first thirty years of the ninth
century a strong Danish monarchy and the remnants of Charlemagne’s
diplomacy protected southern England and France from the worst of
danger. But the collapse of the Danish monarchy with the death of King
Horik removed the last constraint, and the mid-ninth century saw the high
tide of Danish Viking expansion, spearheaded by Ragnar Lodbrok
(Ragnar Hairy Breeches) and his myriad warrior sons.
As the Vikings became more successful, their fleet on the high seas grew
dramatically. At the height of their power in the 860s it numbered 350
ships. With one hundred fighting men on board each craft and the
experience of thirty years of warfare, the Danish Vikings were a lethal
striking force and increasingly daring and aggressive. From merely being
coastal raiders, who in a sense could be lived with, the Vikings of the mid-
ninth century started to spend the winter in the countries they raided,
showing their utter contempt for the local community.
Vikings began to anchor large fleets in the loughs and estuaries of
Ireland and build forts on her eastern shore. Their intention was not just
to raid, but to drive out the native population and settle. It was on Holy
Saturday 845, the day before Easter, that the full extent of Viking
ambitions were understood. On that Easter eve even the most notorious
Viking of the ninth century, the fearsome chief Ragnar Lodbrok, sailed up
the Seine and sacked Paris. The citizenry fled and the churches were
abandoned. Ragnar Lodbrok had successfully struck at the heart of the
kingdom which had dominated Europe so recently under Charlemagne.
Before the appalled eyes of the Frankish king Charles the Bald, Ragnar
Lodbrok hung rr1 citizens from trees and let another hundred go only
when he was paid 7,000 pounds of silver. Then, his red beard glinting in
the pale spring sun, he made a sarcastic bow to the terrified king and took
himself off to the open seas once more. But there was no doubt among the
watching crowds where power lay. It was certainly not with the king.

1)
 ANGLO-SAXON

From now on Danish Viking armies took up more or less permanent

quarters on the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire and the
Garonne. In 859 Vikings were fighting in Morocco and carrying off
prisoners to their Irish bases. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok sailed to Luna
in Italy and captured it under the illusion that they had come to Rome
itself. The Vikings now had all but encircled Europe with their raids, for in
the year 865 the Swedish Vikings who founded Russia laid siege to
Constantinople.
It was against this background in 849 that the man was born at Wantage
in Berkshire who was to save England from the Vikings. He is known to
history as Alfred the Great, and he was a prince of the royal house of
Wessex.

56
 Alfred the Great to the Battle of Hastings
(865-1066)

Wessex was the kingdom of the West Saxons. According to folk memory
its founders were chieftain Cerdic and his son Cynric in 495 when they
landed at what is now Southampton but which they called Hamwic. (The
suffix ‘wic’? comes from the Latin word vicus meaning a place, hence
Ipswich and Norwich.) The eighth-century supremacy of the Mercian
kings had put an end to Wessex occupying the valley of the lower Severn,
but this kingdom — which began in the lush and rolling pastures of
Hampshire — still ended at Bristol to the north, and incorporated all of
Dorset and Somerset. The West Saxons were not only good military
strategists. They were a reflective and organized people. One of their most
important kings was Ine, who at the end of the seventh century had issued
a code or accumulation of the West Saxon laws.
By the third decade of the ninth century the Mercian supremacy in
England had yielded to that of Wessex as, benefiting from vigorous rulers,
the kingdom continued to grow rapidly. In 825 Alfred’s grandfather Egbert
decisively defeated the Mercians at the Battle of Ellandune and thereafter
the old Mercian tributaries of Kent, Essex, Surrey and Sussex became
permanently part of the kingdom of Wessex and had no further separate
existence. Egbert, who ruled for thirty-seven years, also finally put an end
to the West Welsh or Cornish as an independent power by occupying
Devon up to the Tamar; henceforth the Cornish paid Wessex an annual
tribute. Only East Anglia, Mercia, Wales and Northumberland remained
separate from the kingdom of Wessex but acknowledged Egbert as their
overlord. And when Egbert obtained Kent he became the protector of
English Christianity because it was the seat of the Primate of all England.
The expansion of the Wessex kingdom was played out against the
background of the increasingly daring raids of the Danish Vikings. As we
have seen, they were beginning to pose a real threat to the peace and
security of the whole of England from the 830s onwards; over the next
thirty years there are records of at least twelve attacks, and there were
probably many more. But as the records were mainly chronicles kept by
monks they tend to be incomplete because so many were destroyed during

a7
 ANGLO-SAXON

the raids. In the 840s Vikings devastated East Anglia and Kent, attacked
Wrekin in Mercia and in 844 killed the king of Northumbria. But at least
they went away again, taking their booty with them.
Ten years later the situation was worse. The Vikings were moving in
greater numbers, operating in concert with one another, as opposed to the
single-ship raids of earlier years. To contemporaries they had taken on the
appearance of a ‘pagan army’. In 851 King Ethelwulf, father of Alfred the
Great, defeated a fleet of Vikings several hundred ships strong attacking
Canterbury and London which had driven King Beorhtwulf of Mercia into
exile. Another Wessex prince, Ethelbert, one of Alfred’s brothers, who
ruled Kent for his father, defeated a Danish army off the coast at Sandwich.
Despite these successes, in 855 a large Viking fleet took up permanent
winter quarters on the Isle of Sheppey, menacingly close at the end of the
Medway to the mouth of the River Thames. The Vikings began building
forts there. Many Londoners feared that, just as the Vikings had sailed
straight up the Seine to Paris, it was only a matter of time before the
Vikings sailed up the Thames and took London. As a result of his family’s
victories over the Danes, the Wessex that King Ethelwulf handed on to his
sons was the most important kingdom in England. But the whole country
continued to live in the shadow of another Viking invasion. Ten years later
what had been feared for so long came to pass. In 865 a ‘Great Army’ of
Danish Vikings landed in East Anglia with the obvious intention of
conquering and settling the whole of Anglo-Saxon England and making it
a Danish Viking kingdom.
Although there had been isolated raids on England the Viking attack on
Jarrow in 794 had not been an altogether triumphant experience as it had
resulted in the death by torture of the expedition’s leader. This may have
made the Vikings more wary of England. Certainly for much of the ninth
century they tended to concentrate their larger numbers on France and
Ireland. In about 855 Ragnar Lodbrok, who had forced the French king
Charles the Bald to hand over 7,000 pounds of silver, at last fell into the
hands of Aelle, the King of Northumbria. Ragnar Lodbrok had been
raiding Northumbria with impunity, and seeking ever greater speed
(according to legend) had built two boats so large that they proved
unmanageable. Cursing his folly, the greatest Viking of them all was
wrecked off the coast.
Ragnar Lodbrok was captured, tortured and thrown into a dungeon
where he died a lingering and painful death among poisonous snakes,
humiliated by the mocking faces of the Northumbrian court who came to
gloat over the giant red-headed Viking. But even as he wasted away on his
filthy palliasse and the Northumbrians congratulated themselves on their
capture of the man who had terrified half Europe, Ragnar Lodbrok would

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not expire quietly. From his prison deep below the castle walls the old sea
king could be heard roaring terrible songs of death and glory and
prophesying the reign of terror that would begin when his sons came for
his murderers. ‘Many fall into the jaws of the wolf,’ he sang, ‘the hawk
plucks the flesh from the wild beasts.’ But while he would soon be enjoying
feasts in the halls of Valhalla, ‘where we shall drink ale continually from
the large hollowed skulls’, his sons would soon be drinking from the
Northumbrians’ skulls. Meanwhile, as the snakes rustled beneath him, he
called on his sons to avenge him: ‘Fifty battles I have fought and won.
Never I thought that snakes would be my death. The little pigs would grunt
it they knew of the old boar’s need.”
And the little pigs did more than grunt as they grew up. Ten years later
those little pigs, Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan and Ubba arrived at the head
of the Danish Great Army and exacted a terrible price for the death of
their father. Landing on the coast of East Anglia in 865 they laid waste the
countryside until they had obtained provisions and horses from the
terrified farmers. Then they galloped north up the Roman Ermine Street,
which still ran so conveniently along the east coast of England, to York,
the capital of Northumbria. By 867 the whole of Northumbria, its
government already weakened by civil war, was in the hands of the
Danish Great Army. They had their revenge, killing both King Aelle and
his rival and eight of their military leaders or ealdormen. A puppet king
named Egbert was put in to rule the former kingdom of their father’s
executioner.
But Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan were not content just with
Northumbria. Now the Great Army, which was many thousands strong,
wheeled about, crossed the Humber and went south to take possession of
Nottingham, the capital of once powerful Mercia. Although an army came
up to help from Wessex, because the Mercian king Burghred was married
to Alfred’s sister Ethelswith, the Danes cunningly refused to come out from
their defensive earthworks. In the end the Mercians had to agree to pay
them to go away. After wintering again in York and causing misery to its
citizens, the Great Army moved back south to East Anglia. On the way the
Vikings destroyed the beautiful and ancient monastery at Medeshamstede
(Peterborough), killing the abbot and monks and burning the celebrated
library. In East Anglia the brave young King Edmund led an army against
them. But he was taken prisoner and then horribly murdered at Hoxne,
twenty-five miles east of Bury St Edmunds: he was tied to a tree where he
was used for archery practice before being beheaded. The abbey ofthe
town of Bury St Edmunds was erected in the murdered king’s honour over
his burial place. East Anglia too was now another kingdom of the Vikings.
In five years three of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, all the land north of

ny)
 ANGLO-SAXON

Murder of King Edmund of East Anglia by the Danish army in 870.

London — that is Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria — had fallen to

the Danes like ripe apples off a tree. Only Wessex remained Anglo-
Saxon. The others were now in effect a huge Danish kingdom run
according to Danish law. Thanks to poor and haphazard military
organization and no fleet to protect their coasts they had been easy meat
for any enemy with a standing army and an urge to conquer. Although
the fyrd required men to spend forty days a year fighting, it was
unpopular and its call often ignored. Of those who did respond most of
its members preferred not to fight beyond their kingdom’s boundaries.
Rather like jury service today the forty days might come at the worst
possible moment, perhaps when the peasant farmer was desperate to
bring his harvest in before it rained.
If the isolated raids earlier in the century had been terrible, the
permanent presence of the marauding Danish Great Army gave daily life
the oppressive feel of a never-ending nightmare. The Trewhiddle Hoard,
an important collection of early church silver (now in the British Museum),
was hidden in a tree by a priest who never came back for it. It is a mute
memento of the continuous slaughter that took place and the destruction
of a culture which had developed over two-and-a-half centuries. There is a
chronicle written by an eyewitness, a monk of Croyland in the Fens, which
gives a typical account of the arrival of a Viking war-party as it was

60
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experienced throughout England and

describes how the soil shook beneath
the pounding hooves of the heathen
Danes’ armoured horses as_ they
travelled from Lincolnshire to Norfolk.
The abbot of Croyland and his monks
were at their morning prayers when a
terror-stricken fugitive ran in to tell
them that the Vikings were on their
way. Some of the monks took to their
boats and rowed away from the 9th-century gravestone from
monastery praying that in the mists | Northumbria, showing Viking
and marshes of the Fens they would =" me with axes raised. From
indisfarne Priory.
not be found. But the rest were
slaughtered where they stood.
By the autumn of 870 the Danes decided to conquer the last of the
kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England which remained independent, namely
Wessex. But they had finally met their match. Although the present king of
Wessex, Ethelred, was not gifted with determination and was more
concerned with his spiritual life than with preserving the safety of the
kingdom, his younger brother and co-commander Alfred, who was soon to
succeed him, was the heir to all the best qualities of West Saxon kingship.
Alfred was the fourth and youngest son of King Ethelwulf, who had passed
on to him a strong sense of his duty to resist the destruction of
Christendom by the Vikings. Ethelwulf had also inspired Alfred with
memories of the most constructive sort of Christian kingship handed on to
him by his own father Egbert, who had spent his early life at the court of
Charlemagne. Alfred was taken to Rome by his father at least twice on
pilgrimages to invoke God’s goodwill towards Wessex and protect her
from the Viking plague. Reflecting fears among the West Saxons that
Christian civilization might die out in England because of the repeated
attacks of the Danes, Ethelwulf had designated one-tenth of his kingdom’s
revenues to be given to the Church to ensure that learning continued.
The sense of learning’s almost irreversible decline, now that so many
monks and priests had been killed, was a subject which would obsess
Alfred himself. Once king he would embark on an extraordinary
programme to re-educate the English. In later years he would remember
that during his childhood ‘there was not one priest south of the Thames
who could understand the Latin of the Mass-book and very few in the rest
of England’. As a result Alfred himself did not learn to read until the age
of twelve, and then only by his own efforts because there were no monks
left to teach even a king’s son.

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 ANGLO-SAXON

Alfred’s dictum, ‘I know nothing worse of a man than that he should not
know’, reminds us that as a result of four decades of Viking raids
knowledge could no longer be taken for granted. Latin was the language
of learning but as there was no one to teach him Latin — Alfred only learned
it when he was forty — much was lost to him, as it was to many other
English people. The Welsh monk Asser, who became bishop of Sherborne,
wrote a famous contemporary life of Alfred in which he relates that the
king told him ‘with many lamentations and sighs’ that it was one of the
greatest impediments in his life that when he was young and had the
capacity for study he could not find teachers.
Thus when the Danish army decided to turn their unwelcome attentions
on Wessex by capturing the royal city of Reading at Christmas 870 they
encountered resistance to the death, for to Alfred this was a battle to save
English civilization. But it was touch and go. Just when the actual king of
Wessex, Ethelred, ought to have been marshalling the attack on the Danes
on the Ridgeway in Berkshire, he insisted on listening to the end of the
Mass. While Alfred was lining up his part of the army in the famous Anglo-
Saxon battle formation called the shieldwall, Ethelred refused to come out
of his tent, declaring that as long as he lived he would never leave a service
before the priest had finished. Meanwhile the terrifying Danish army were
hurling their javelins at the Wessex men below their ridge and keeping up
a deafening noise by banging their shields. Ethelred continued to listen to
the incantations of the priest as the twenty-one-year-old Alfred took the
offensive and charged up the escarpment. His men fought so fiercely
around a stunted thorn tree that quite soon, despite their mail shirts, many
leading Vikings lay dead on the ridge. The rest soon fled.
Although this was far from being a conclusive engagement (it would be
many years before the tide finally turned for the English under Alfred), it
was the first time that the Danes had been beaten in open battle. When
Ethelred died in his twenties and Alfred became king in 871 he bought time
to recover from the Danes by signing a peace treaty. The Danes themselves
were glad of a temporary lull. They were exhausted by the ferocity of
Alfred’s attacks whenever they ventured out of the fortress they had built
at Reading. Fortunately the Great Army was then distracted by a revolt in
their northern possessions and, having put it down and hammered the
kingdom of Strathclyde in south-west Scotland, half of its soldiers under
their leader Halfdan decided to tangle no more with Wessex. They would
remain in the north and make it a proper Danish kingdom instead of ruling
through a native puppet. Under Halfdan as king the Danish Vikings took
over much of the old kingdom of Northumbria, corresponding approxi-
mately to Yorkshire today (as is shown by the concentration of Danish
place names in that county: the suffixes ‘-wick’, ‘-ness’, ‘-thorpe’, ‘-thwaite’

62
 865-1066

and ‘-by’ are all indications of Scandinavian settlements). Danish soldiers

became farmers. They made their capital at Yorvik and organized the land
for taxation purposes in the Danish way by wapentakes instead of by
hundreds as in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
By 874 the Danish army had further consolidated its hold on the rest of
occupied England. Most of Mercia other than the small area to the west of
Watling Street was parcelled out between Danish nobles. Thus the whole
of England from the Thames to the Humber was ruled by Danes in a
federation of settlements called the Five Boroughs: Lincoln, Stamford,
Nottingham, Derby and Leicester.
But the other half of the Danish army which had not settled in the north
still had their eye on the rich southern lands of Wessex, that is Berkshire,
Hampshire, Dorset and Devon, which were slowly recovering from the
Great Army’s depredations. After four years of inactivity the rest of that
army decided to return to the fray under its king, Guthrum. Accordingly it
moved south to Grantabridge (which we call Cambridge) and began to
harass Wessex again. It now occurred to Alfred that the only way to stop
the Vikings calling for help and reinforcement from their cousins’ fleet in
the Channel off France was to defeat the Vikings at sea before they reached
land. He therefore sent for the Vikings’ old enemies, the Frisians, and
invited them to show the English how to build their style of ships, which
had previously been a match for the Vikings. The ships which resulted were
faster and longer than those of the Vikings. Alfred can justly be said to be
the father of the Royal Navy.
While Alfred laid siege to Exeter, where the enemy was currently holing
up, sailors on the new ships were appointed to watch the coast and prevent
Guthrum’s Great Army from obtaining supplies by sea. Undaunted by
rumours about Alfred’s navy, the Danes sent messages for help to their
Viking relations in France, who under their leader Rollo were in the middle
of forcing the Franks to grant them what in 911 would become the
kingdom of Normandy (or the kingdom of the Norsemen). The new navy’s
first encounter was with a massive force of 120 French Viking ships
crossing the Channel with some 10,000 men. Fortunately poor weather
played into Alfred’s hands. For once the indomitable Vikings were tired
out by battling with storms. They were defeated by Alfred’s navy and their
fleet destroyed off Sandwich on the coast of Dorset. Guthrum and his army
were allowed to ride out of Exeter and travel to Gloucester in Danish
Mercia after they had sworn solemn oaths that they would leave Wessex
alone.
But the Danes were not men of their word. They soon broke the Treaty
of Exeter. Guthrum had drawn up a plan with Ubba, Ragnar Lodbrok’s
youngest son who was now king of Dyfed and was laying waste South

63
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Wales, whereby they would both attack Wessex. At Christmas 878,

believing that the Danes would abide by their oaths, Alfred had told all his
thanes to return to their estates. Meanwhile he was alone with his young
family in the royal palace at Chippenham, dangerously close to Gloucester.
Just after Twelfth Night a messenger brought him the news that an
enormous Danish army was ‘covering the earth like locusts’ and on its way
to Chippenham.
By midnight the Danish army had occupied Chippenham, and the king
and his family had only just escaped them by fleeing to the unnavigable
marshes of east Somerset. The submission of most of the West Saxon
nobles followed. They were exhausted by the unending war. Many left
their lands to flee abroad, ruined by the obligation to feed the occupying
army. Alfred the Great, however, would not submit. While the Danes once
more divided up Wessex between them he stayed in hiding with a few
nobles on the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. This was dry ground at the
confluence of the Tone and the Parrett, surrounded by marshes and
impassable rivers where no one could enter except by boat. In the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford may be seen a wonderful little artefact of
the most exquisite Anglo-Saxon workmanship. Made of enamel, gold and
precious stones and decorated with Christian symbols it bears the legend
‘Alfred me fecit’, which means ‘Alfred had me made’ in Latin. Alfred must
have dropped the jewel there when he was camping on the island, for 1,100
years later it was dug up on Athelney by a local farmer.
On the island Alfred and his men lived roughly with few of the
necessities of life except what they could forage openly or stealthily by

Athelney in Somerset where Alfred took refuge from the Vikings.

64
 865-1066

raids. The king himself lived in a hut belonging to one of his cowherds. To
this period belong many famous legends about him. One day the wife of
the cowherd was preparing cakes (scones probably) for the oven and
Alfred, who was still only in his twenties, was sitting at the hearth
trimming his arrows and dreaming of the day when his country would be
free. The goodwife asked the disguised king, whom, in his homespun
clothes, she took to be another shepherd cluttering up her house, to keep
an eye on the cakes while she went for some water from the spring near by.
But Alfred was so lost in thought planning the next attack that the cakes
burned quite black without his noticing — to the fury of the cowherd’s wife,
who shouted crossly at him as if he were a kitchen boy. The horrified
cowherd had not told his wife who their guest was, but he now revealed
his identity and she was covered with confusion. But King Alfred only
laughed and told her she had been right to scold and that he should have
been minding the cakes. Years later when he was restored to his kingdom
he sent for the couple and rewarded them for helping him in his hour of
need. Alfred continued to resist the Danish by guerrilla raids and built an
impregnable fort on the island where his family could be safe. It is said that
he even went into the Danish camp disguised as a harper. He wandered
from tent to tent playing and singing but also secretly noting the number
of men and the position they occupied.
Thanks to Alfred’s perseverance news spread among the West Saxons
that all was not lost and that the king was secretly gathering an army of
Wessex men on the twenty-four acres of the island. Support for Alfred
grew so rapidly that by the seventh week after Easter 878 a huge number
of West Saxon men from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire came out
of hiding to meet him at Egbert’s Stone, now Brixton Deverill in
Wiltshire.
Alfred met the enemy at Edington near the Danish camp at Chippenham.
After a siege of fourteen days he won the decisive engagement of the war.
It was said that the Danish standard, a raven with outstretched wings
which had been woven by the daughters of Ragnar Lodbrok in a single
day, drooped and did not fly before the battle. It was an omen of the defeat
to come by the White Horse of Wessex, the emblem which adorned
Alfred’s banner. So complete was the rout of the Danes that Alfred was
finally able to dictate the sort of terms which pleased him, including
forcing the Danes to accept Christianity. The Danes made a treaty, wrote
the chronicler, ‘such as they had never givento anyone before’. By the
Treaty of Wedmore in Somerset the pagan army had to vacate Wessex and
surrender southern and western Mercia to Alfred. Guthrum, the pagan
king, would have to be baptized, with Alfred standing as godfather.
Guthrum, who was given the baptismal name of Athelstan, thus became

65
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Alfred’s adopted son, and there was now a relationship between them
which would be taboo to break.
Although Alfred had won a major victory, his kingdom was still
surrounded by hostile Danish territory. And that autumn yet another
Viking force under a leader named Haesten appeared at the mouth of the
Thames aided by Guthrum, despite his treaty with Alfred, and proceeded
west up the river to make its winter headquarters at Fulham. Though it
disappeared briefly to Ghent after two years of terrorizing Fulham, the
Viking fleet then sailed back and forth between England and France laying
waste to Kent and besieging the city of Rochester in 884. Only the bravery
of Alfred’s army succeeded in frightening it off for good.
Alfred had learned a valuable lesson from the siege of Rochester. His
towns needed to be better defended and should be able to function as
fortresses. The fyrd also had to be reformed into a more reliable army with
a longer period of service. Alfred’s solution was to divide it into two, with
one half on active service, the other on home leave. He also created a
network of defences in southern England which had never been attempted
before, centred on fortified walled towns called burhs (from which derives
the word borough). These were built in a girdle round Wessex so that no
member of the kingdom would be more than twenty miles from a refuge
against the Danes. There were about thirty of them and they ranged from
Southwark in the east through Oxford, Cricklade and Malmesbury to
Pilton in north Devon and all along the south coast from Halwell in Devon
to Hastings in east Sussex.
In tandem with the invention of burhs went Alfred’s reform of local
government in Wessex. Made autocratic by the desperate nature of his
situation he increased royal power by overriding the ancient boundaries of
the hundreds, and divided the country into official shires. Each shire’s
government was centred on a burh containing a shire court, the shire and
burh being run by one of Alfred’s royal ealdormen, whose powers could
override those of the local lord. These men were responsible for
implementing royal commands to raise taxes or call out the fyrd and would
be expected to find men to garrison the burh in time of war as well as to
undertake general public works for the shire such as repairing bridges or
the walls of the burh itself. As the house of Wessex took over more of
England the shire system spread throughout the country, so that by the
beginning of the eleventh century the whole of England south of the Tees
was divided into shires.
The local bishop was as important a figure in the shire as the royal
ealdormen, who in time saw their powers transferred to the shire reeve, or
sheriff. The bishop would help preside over the shire court and would often
have partial responsibility for the money supply because, as fortified places

66
 865-1066

created by a charter from central government, the burhs usually contained

a mint.
Despite the strengthening of the monarchy under Alfred, like every
Anglo-Saxon king since the most ancient times he continued to rule and
pass laws with the approval of the institution known as the witena gemot,
the king’s council. As the Wessex kings took over more and more of the
country the witan acquired the character of a national assembly.
By 866 Alfred had become a symbol of hope for the English. He had
reconquered their most important city, London, from the Danes — burning
many of the Danish settlements there to teach the treacherous Guthrum a
lesson. London could once again be the entrepét of English national and
international trade. This was the first time that other Englishmen realized
that the Danish occupation was not necessarily a permanent state of
affairs, but might one day be reversed. Alfred gave permission for the
Danes te remain in a ghetto, the Aldwick (that is, Aldwych, com-
memorated by the church of St Clement Danes), but he rebuilt London to
emphasize its importance as a centre of English life. He founded much of
the area of today’s modern city, creating new streets between Cheapside
and the Thames and building a palace for himself at Old Minster. Instead
of leaving it as the undefended open settlement it had become under the
Mercians, running along the side of the Thames in the area now covered
by the Strand and Fleet Street, he moved the city back within the Roman
walls. He also founded Southwark to protect the river at its shallowest
point, as that was the main route into London.
The English Mercians asked Alfred to be their overlord in return for his
protection. But the king thought it best to be tactful about ruling their
territory, which had such a proud history. He therefore made a Mercian
nobleman, Ethelred, the ruler of the Mercians with rights over London,
and married him to his daughter Ethelflaed. Many of the Welsh princes
thought it wise to follow suit, so he became their overlord too. He was
described by a contemporary as ‘king over the whole kin of the English
except that part which was under the power of the Danes’. Many
authorities see this moment, when Alfred is acknowledged as a leader of
the English against the Danes, as an important stage in the advance of the
English peoples towards political unity, a unity which had been forged by
national danger. Alfred was the first person to call the English ‘Angelcynn’,
which means the ‘English folk’. However it would not be until the end of
the tenth century in the reign of Alfred’s great-grandson Edgar that the
concept of ‘Englaland’ as a political unit would be adopted.
A second treaty, known as Alfred’s and Guthrum’s Peace, between
Wessex and the cowed Danes provided a new boundary between Alfred’s
kingdom and the Danish territory, or Danelaw. West Saxon Mercia was to

67
 ANGLO-SAXON

consist of the land north of the Thames to the River Lea on the frontier of
Guthrum’s kingdom of East Anglia, up to Bedford where it followed the
old Roman road of Watling Street before ending at Chester on the Welsh
borders. The boundary of Wessex with Danish East Anglia was redrawn at
the latter’s expense. Though the area Alfred controlled was large, the
Danelaw was larger still, but such was the respect the Vikings had for the
king of Wessex that the treaty also secured the rights of English subjects
living within Guthrum’s Danelaw so that there was no discrimination
against them in law.
As the first king to defeat the Vikings Alfred’s fame spread all over the
continent. He was so highly esteemed by the pope as a Christian hero who
had driven off the heathen that the Anglo-Saxon school in Rome was not
taxed and the pope sent him what was supposedly a piece of the True Cross
on which Christ had been crucified — the greatest honour he could bestow.
Now that Alfred had secured the kingdom against further external and
internal threats the rest of his reign could be dedicated to rebuilding a
kingdom whose institutions had been almost destroyed by the Danish
wars. Half the royal taxes were donated to the Church each year to rebuild
monasteries at home and abroad and so begin the revival of learning,
while, since so few of the English people knew any Latin, the king person-
ally oversaw the translation into Anglo-Saxon of books he considered
important. Alfred himself translated Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, saying it
was ‘one of the books most necessary for all men to know’, as well as
Orosius’ history of the world. His translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s
suggestions for pastoral care in the running of a parish was distributed to
every bishop with instructions to make copies of it. Alfred also added notes
to his translations where he thought it might help the reader, for he
believed that everybody should have access to knowledge whosoever they
were. His translation of Orosius contains descriptions of the ninth
century’s idea of the geography of northern and central Europe, obtained
from adventurous Scandinavian visitors to his court, such as a Norwegian
named Ohthere who had lived inside the Arctic Circle, as well as from his
own sailors whom he urged to explore the unknown. In order that his
people should enjoy what he had sorely missed Alfred paid for scholars to
come from abroad — Frisians, Franks and the Welsh — to help him raise
educational standards. Asser remembered him remarking sadly that
‘Formerly people came hither to this land in search of wisdom and teaching
and we must now obtain them from without.’
One of his first acts as king was to build a monastery on the Isle of
Athelney, where he had been sheltered. It was the first part of his plan to
revive the monastic life, which in Asser’s words had ‘utterly decayed from
that nation’. Though some monasteries were still standing, no one directed

68
 865-1066

their rule of life in a regular way. Most English people had lost all their old
reverence for the Church. Alfred would have to mount a national
recruiting campaign to find men and women to become monks and nuns.
Even then the condition of the English clergy was at first so poor that the
abbot for the new monastery on Athelney had to be brought in from Frisia
in northern Germany. Alfred’s younger daughter Ethelgiva became a nun,
and he founded a convent for her near the eastern gate of Shaftesbury.
As part of his programme of repairing the Viking destruction of English
life, Alfred commissioned a history of England called The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle to help his people acquire some knowledge of themselves and
their history. And to make sure that every English person did read it, for
he wished ‘all English boys to know their letters, he commanded that it
should be written in the language everyone could understand, that is
Anglo-Saxon. Copies of the history were distributed to every important
church in the country. Containing a brief description of the important
events of each year since the mid-fifth century and influenced by Bede in its
use of records, the Chronicle was continued in various monasteries after
Alfred’s death up until the twelfth century. Along with Bede’s history it is
one of the most remarkable of the early histories which any European
people possesses.

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69
 ANGLO-SAXON

Alfred believed that kings should have good tools to work with. He
wrote, ‘These are the materials of a king’s work and his tools to govern
with; that he have his land fully peopled; that he should have prayer men
and army men and workmen.’ The prayermen had been taken care of.
Now Alfred turned his attention to some of the workmen, particularly the
judges. The normal machinery of English life had been badly disrupted by
the war with the Danes. The Anglo-Saxon law dispensed every month in
the local hundred courts was based on ancient custom. But as a result of
the wars many people were no longer clear what the ancient customs
consisted of. To make up for these gaps Alfred updated the West Saxon
laws for the nation, including whatever he thought helpful in the codes of
Ethelbert of Kent, Ine of Wessex and Offa of Mercia. The introductory
preface announced that he had showed them to his witan, whose members
had agreed that the laws should be observed.
Scholars believe that Alfred was personally responsible for a new
emphasis on laws to protect the weak. And he himself said that one of his
functions was to be the defender of the poor (who received a quarter of his
income), because they had no defenders. He imposed further limitations on
the destructive custom of the blood feud and emphasized the duty of a man
to his lord. Up to Alfred’s day there were no prisons but such was his desire
to reintroduce a peaceful and civil society where a man’s word really was
his bond that anyone who broke his oath was to be given forty days’
imprisonment.
Alfred’s laws had a strongly religious flavour. They opened with the Ten
Commandments and included many biblical references to persuade the
English to hold them in greater respect. His judges, the local lords, were
told that they would either have to improve their legal knowledge or
resign. Asser reports that, though most of the judges were ‘illiterate from
their cradles’, in fear and admiration of their great king they frantically set
about studying. Since so many of them could not read, most of them
adopted King Alfred’s suggestion of having the laws read out to them by a
son or slave ‘by day and night’, whenever they had the leisure. Alfred often
looked into their judgements. If he disagreed with them he summoned the
judge in question and asked why he had come to such a conclusion. ‘Was
it ignorance, malevolence or money?’ he asked frankly on one famous
occasion.
Mindful of his grandfather’s descriptions of Charlemagne’s famous
Palace School, Alfred established his own school at the royal court. This
was to educate the cleverest boys in the kingdom, regardless of their
origins, as future clerks for his civil service so that he would be able to draw
on the largest pool of talent in the country. Holy and devout, Alfred
invented the first English clock, a horn lantern with candles so that he

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could divide his day satisfactorily into three eight-hour parts, one for
praying, one for governing and one for sleeping. Upon his death in 899,
aged only fifty, he was buried in the New Minster he had built in his capital
of Winchester.
King Alfred was one of the most important English kings, whose
defence of English civilization has rightly earned him the soubriquet the
Great. He was succeeded by a worthy soldier son Edward the Elder, who
continued the fightback against the Danes that his father had begun.
Despite all Alfred’s achievements, Edward the Elder still inherited a
kingdom which confronted land occupied by the bloodthirsty Danish
armies all the way to Whitby in north Yorkshire. Moreover, when the
Danes settled they settled in armies rather than kingdoms, so that the
threat of another invasion was always present. Further danger threatened
because the Norse kingdom of Dublin in Ireland was forever casting
covetous eyes at the Danish kingdom of York, which was becoming an
important Scandinavian trading post.
As a military strategist, Edward knew that for the sake of England’s
security he would have to launch a series of pre-emptive strikes against the
Danish kingdoms which surrounded him. He should try to capture as
many as he could or at least neutralize them and show that there was no
point in building a war chest against him. With the help of his sister
Ethelflaed, who was known as the Lady of the Mercians because she ruled
them after her husband’s death, and by constant fighting Edward pursued
Alfred’s ambition of making England a single state. They strengthened the
frontier with the Welsh and Danes by making use of Alfred’s device of the
burh or fortified town, and they had reconquered the rest of the midland
part of the Danelaw, starting with the five Danish boroughs of Derby,
Stamford, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln, by the time Ethelflaed died,
worn out by the constant campaigning. Edward appointed no successor to
his sister but took over the government of both Danish and English Mercia,
roughly speaking what we call the midlands today, further unifying the
country. The midlands were followed by the reconquest of East Anglia and
then of a great deal of Northumbria after a lengthy northern campaign. In
the process a fresh line of fortresses was built eastwards from Chester
along the line of the River Mersey.
By 923 the rest of the princes of Britain accepted they could no longer
resist a great West Saxon king who was never happier than when leading
the attack in his buckskin trousers and gripping his small shield. Edward
and his descendants became overlords to the Scots and Welsh and began to
enjoy greater status abroad as a result. Edward the Elder’s son, the golden-
haired Athelstan, was féted with expensive gifts by the greatest European
rulers of the age, who made a point of intermarrying with the house of
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Wessex. The German Henry the Fowler, king of the East Franks, married
his son Otto, the future emperor, to Athelstan’s sister Edith, while another
sister married the king of France. Alfred had long favoured Athelstan
because of his beauty, graceful manners and love of poetry. He had given
his grandson a special Saxon sword to remind him to be proud of his
ancestry, and a scarlet cloak, and Edward had deliberately educated him in
his aunt’s household in Mercia to bind that kingdom closer to the West
Saxon monarchy. Athelstan’s campaigns drove out the line of Danish
princes ruling York. Although in 937 some Welsh princes, the Scots king
Constantine and Vikings from Dublin revolted against Athelstan, they
were conclusively defeated at the Battle of Brunanburgh and did not rebel
again.
Under the rule of the Wessex kings England over the next fifty years
became a unified country. The expansion of the royal house of the West
Saxons into a national monarchy was helped by the Danes’ destruction of
the old dynasties of Mercia and East Anglia, and by the fact that for
almost a hundred years there were no fresh Danish invasions. For the
great period of Viking invasion was now over — not only in England but
on the continent. In 911 Rollo and his Norsemen had been granted a
kingdom in the basin of the lower Seine which soon became known as the
Duchy of Normandy, on condition that they defend the Frankish kingdom
against attack. They were baptized and became subjects of Charles the
Simple; Rollo himself married Charles’ daughter. Throughout Europe
there seemed to be peace at last from the Vikings’ marauding ways,
though the French cleric Abbé Suger would presciently remark that ‘The
Normans, in whose fierce Dansker blood is no peace, keep peace against
their will.’ One hundred years later England would feel the force of that
statement.
Like so many of the Wessex kings Athelstan died young, aged only forty,
in 940. He was followed by his brother Edmund, who successfully quelled
Danish rebellions in Mercia and Deira and brought Scotland under King
Malcolm into a closer alliance with England in return for forcing the Welsh
to give the Scots Cumberland. Somewhat to the surprise of the English,
after half a century the Danish now settled down to being constructive
neighbours: once tamed the Vikings would enrich the blood of Europe and
England. They had always been merchants as well as pirates, as scales
found buried with battleaxes in their tombs show. With the war over, town
life in what was becoming known as Yorkshire began to revive. Rural life
was invigorated too. These fearless people, who would put to sea in any
weather, did not exterminate the local populations as their Anglo-Saxon
predecessors had done, but used their English neighbours’ knowledge of
the land to become excellent farmers. Viking ancestry may account for the

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famous hardness and cussedness of the people of Yorkshire, that nation

within England. The English as a whole would learn a great deal from
Viking military success: they borrowed the Vikings’ disciplined wedge
formation to fight on land, as well as their metal mesh shirts, which would
become the chainmail body armour of the English knight.
In 946, after only six years on the throne, King Edmund was murdered
while gallantly saving a guest from a roving band of outlaws who had
managed to get into the royal banqueting hall. Although he left two small
sons they were too young to ascend the throne, which now passed to
Edward the Elder’s youngest son Edred. Although Edred was in poor
health his chief minister was one of the great figures of the tenth century —
the monk St Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury. St Dunstan had a powerfully
ascetic nature, sleeping in a cave by the side of the church of Glastonbury,
where the ceiling was so low that he could not stand upright. Like Alfred
he was determined to encourage a monastic revival in England to rebuild
the civilization destroyed by the Danes. But as well as remodelling the
English monasteries on the lines of the Benedictine reforms at Fleury on the
Loire, Dunstan guided Edred in expanding the boundaries of his kingdom,
and by 954 Edred had decisively reconquered Northumbria from the
Danes. He was soon calling himself the Caesar of the British. More than
ever the English and Danes had been blended into one people, a process
speeded up by the conversion to Christianity of most of the inhabitants of
the Danelaw. Dunstan had the farsightedness to allow the Danes in the
northern Danelaw a certain amount of independence, enabling them to run
their county in their old manner through earls, as they called their rulers.
On the death of Edred in 955 his nephew Edwy became king, but he
quarrelled with Dunstan and drove him into exile. Dunstan had in any case
made many enemies for himself at court by his attempts to expel the
married secular canons who, owing to the dearth of English monks, had
taken over what were previously monasteries. Their relations at court
benefited from livings that passed from father to son and they influenced
the king against Dunstan.
Without Dunstan to guide him Edwy’s rule was both weak and harsh.
Mercia and Northumbria rebelled against him and insisted that his
younger brother Edgar become king of their countries. Dunstan returned
in triumph to crown the new king with the sacred oil known as chrysm, for
the first time in England’s history, to show that Edgar was the Lord’s
Anointed. That ritual is still part of the coronation ceremony today.
Although Edwy remained king of Wessex, upon his death Edgar became
king of the whole of England. He ruled from 959 until 975 and is most
famous for being rowed on the River Dee at Chester by six under-kings
who all acknowledged him as overlord: the king of Scotland, the king of

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Cumberland, the Danish king of the Isle of Man and three Welsh kings.
Advised by St Dunstan, who had been made Archbishop of Canterbury,
Edgar avoided the destructive border wars with the Scots by making the
king of Cumberland vassal to the Scots king, and by giving Scotland
Lothian, which until then had been part of the kingdom of Northumbria.
As Archbishop of Canterbury St Dunstan was now in a position to address
the low standards of behaviour in English monasteries and ensure that
there was once again a thoroughgoing obedience to the rule of ‘poverty,
chastity and obedience’ first laid down by St Benedict in the sixth century.
Many of the secular canons were replaced by monks.
Edgar’s reign was the high point of the West Saxon monarchy, before the
years of its decline under his son Ethelred, famously nicknamed the
Unready, who reigned from 978 to 1016. Ethelred inherited the throne
after his elder half-brother, King Edward the Martyr, the successor to
Edgar, was stabbed to death on the orders of Ethelred’s mother Elfrida.
To the chroniclers it seemed that the crown taken in blood brought
nothing but misfortune to the king who wore it and to the country he
governed. Contemporary observers were savage about Ethelred: one said
that he had occupied the throne for thirty-seven years rather than ruling it,
and that his career had been cruel at the beginning, wretched in the middle
and disgraceful at the end. Archbishop Dunstan was forced by Elfrida to
crown her son king to lend the coronation an air of legitimacy. But the
murderous queen mother had reckoned without Dunstan’s powerful
conscience and strong sense of justice. As the ceremony began St Dunstan
could not refrain from giving public vent to his feelings of outrage. As he
lowered the crown over the head of Ethelred he prophesied, “Thus saith the
Lord God, the sins of thy abandoned mother, and of the accomplices of her
base design, shall not be washed out but by much blood of the wretched
inhabitants of England; and such evils shall come upon the English nation
as it hath never suffered from since the time it came to England.’
Dunstan did not live to see his prophecy fulfilled. But in the fourth year
of Ethelred’s reign it seemed to come to pass when after almost a century
of absence a new Danish army arrived in England. These Vikings landed at
Southampton in 982, as piratical and cruel as their ancestors of a hundred
years before, probably inspired to invade by rumours that England was
ruled by boy-kings and priests. In the next decade the whole of the south
coast and East Anglia were continually attacked.
Ethelred had none of his great-great-grandfather Alfred’s iron will. In
991 after a Danish victory at the Battle of Maldon in Essex he notoriously
made the first payment of Danegeld in England’s history — that is, he paid
the Danes to go away. The first payment was £10,000, an enormous sum,
and was taken from everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. But

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£10,000 was not enough. Encouraged by the ease with which they had
obtained it, the Danes soon returned for more. They demanded £16,000,
then £24,000, then £32,000 — the equivalent in today’s terms of millions
of pounds. Having to find the money for the Danegeld tax led to a
dramatic increase in the number of free peasants forced to become serfs:
many had to abandon their own subsistence farming and become farm
labourers tied to the manor’s fields in order to pay back the tax money lent
them by the local landowner.
The word Danegeld has become infamous ever since in English culture
as shorthand for a cowardly and ultimately shortsighted course of action.
Ethelred tried to buy freedom when he should have fought for it, never
thinking flat the Danes would ask for more when the money ran out.
During his reign, the English lost the old fighting spirit that had defeated
the Danes before. Morale plunged. Out of the thirty-two English counties,
the Danes had soon overrun sixteen.
The whole country groaned under the assaults from the sea and the
oppressive taxation. Ethelred now became known as Ethelred the Redeless
or Unready. The meaning of this soubriquet has changed in the centuries
since it was coined, for the English were making a rude pun out of his
name. In Anglo-Saxon Ethel meant noble or good and rede meant counsel
or advice. The name Ethelred thus meant good counsel. But because his
actions always seemed the result of poor counsel Ethelred became known
as Ethelred the Redeless, or Ethelred No Counsel.
To compound the feeling of hopelessness in England, Ethelred now
married a Viking himself in order to curry favour with the Danes. He took
for wife Emma of Normandy, whose father the duke was an ally of the
aggressive Danish kings behind the new Viking raids. But Ethelred was
incapable of a consistent course of action. In 1002 he turned on his Danish
subjects living in the old Danelaw, giving secret orders that on 13
November, the feast day of St Brice, all the Danes in England should be
butchered. Neighbours were told by the shire reeve to kill neighbours,
hosts to massacre their Danish guests. It was a despicable act, violating all
laws of hospitality, as well as intensifying racial divisions.
Gunhildis, the king of Denmark’s sister, was then living in England as
the wife of an English nobleman. Unlike her brother King Sweyn
Forkbeard, Gunhildis was a Christian and had pledged to improve
relations between the Danes and the English. Though she threw herself on
her knees before Ethelred crying for mercy and reminding him of all she
had done for her adopted country, he commanded that she and her son be
beheade d
just the same.
But Ethelred had made the most disastrous miscalculation of his reign in
refusing to spare the king of Denmark’s sister and nephew. Outraged by

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these murders and those of his fellow Danes, Sweyn Forkbeard avenged
them by invading England in 1013. After ten years of softening England up
by means of coastal raids while he made preparations for a full-scale
invasion, Sweyn arrived in person at the head of an immense army.
Showing as little mercy to the English as Ethelred had showed to the
Danes, he killed all the English he encountered as he marched through East
Anglia to Northumbria. Having received the submission of most of the
country, he then besieged London — which was sheltering King Ethelred.
The citizens of London, who then as now were known for their
independence of mind, were preparing themselves to fight to the last man
to save Ethelred.
But there was no need. The minute he saw Sweyn’s tents going up round
the city walls, Ethelred, who was as indolent as he was cowardly, announced
that he could not endure the boredom of a long siege. He fled in the night to
Normandy, where he had sent his wife Emma and their two children to be
protected by her brother. Sweyn would have become ruler of England had
he not died suddenly, leaving Denmark and England to his son Cnut, a
superb military strategist. But the English still harboured fond thoughts of
their ancient West Saxon monarchy. At their invitation a reluctant Ethelred
returned to England to lead the resistance against Cnut. When Ethelred died
soon after, in 1016, the struggle was carried on by his son Edmund, offspring
of an earlier marriage to an Englishwoman, and thanks to his tremendous
physique known as Edmund Ironside. After six battles the two kings realized
that they were so evenly matched that it was better to come to a power-
sharing agreement. By the Treaty of Olney, a small island in the Severn river,
Cnut became king of Northumbria and Mercia while Edmund Ironside
remained King of Wessex. On Edmund’s death in November 1016 the
ealdormen of Wessex chose Cnut to be their king as well and England was
once again ruled by a single monarch.
To give greater legitimacy to his reign Cnut now married Ethelred’s
widow Emma of Normandy, the mother of the future king Edward the
Confessor. Although Cnut did not kill any of the old Anglo-Saxon heirs to
the throne he did the next best thing. He despatched Edmund Ironside’s
two sons to the king of Sweden with orders that they be executed. In the
event they were preserved on account of their innocent appearance before
being sent south-east to the court of the king of Hungary; their descendants
married into both the Hungarian and Scottish royal families. Meanwhile
the only other two serious claimants to the English throne, Emma’s sons
Alfred and Edward, were protected in Normandy by their uncle Duke
Richard. They were growing up more Norman than English.
England prospered under Cnut. By 1027 he had successfully invaded
Scotland, forcing the king of the Scots, Malcolm II, to do homage to him

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as his vassal or under-king. Quite soon Cnut felt sure enough of his
position in England to despatch home the remnants of the Danish army
with which his father had seized England. Unlike the old West Saxon kings,
however, he was perpetually watched over by a giant palace guard, his
3,000 Danish ‘housecarles’, and he still had a large standing navy. But
though Cnut gave a good deal of English land to fellow Danes, there was
no dispossession of the native aristocracy as there would be later under the
Normans. He relied on English advisers to help him rule.
Cnut was in many ways very similar to the old German kings. He loved
the military life, and evenings were passed relating campaigns in his great
hall. But as a simple soldier what mattered to him was the truth, and he
despised the flattery that many English courtiers used to curry favour with
him — as the best-known story about him illustrates.
The king with several Englishmen was walking by the sea. ‘Your
Majesty,’ said the boldest and most sycophantic Englishman, ‘we were
thinking that Your Majesty is so powerful that everything in our country
obeys you. Why, even the waves would obey you if you commanded them.’
At last Cnut had had enough of their absurdities. Turning on them he told
them to bring a chair down to the waves and set it a little way from where
the tide was coming in. ‘Now,’ he said, seating himself on the throne and
watching the waves wet his feet, ‘I bid the waves retreat, but they pay no
attention to me. I am not a fool, and I hope that next time you embark on
silly compliments that you expect me to swallow, you will remember this
and hold your tongues.’
The diminutive Cnut gave England an important new legal code. It
reinforced the position of the Church and restated many of the ancient
English customs as well as innovatively requiring every freeman to be part
of the hundred and the tithing (a ten-man grouping within the hundred).
By making its subjects responsible for preventing criminal activities by
their fellows the kingdom became more orderly. Cnut was anxious to
differentiate himself from other Vikings and to join the commonwealth of
Christian nations. Attracted by the splendour and ancient nature of the
Church, he went on pilgrimage to Rome to attend the coronation of
Conrad II as Holy Roman Emperor, and could not resist exploiting the
occasion to get customs relief for English pilgrims. The Danes who had
accompanied him to England were made to adopt Christianity and he sent
English bishops to Norway and Denmark to convert their populations.
Cnut’s insistence that Sunday be kept as a day of rest and his enforcement
of Church tithes soon won him the support of the Church bureaucracy, as
did his sense of his royal duty as a moral preceptor.
The Danegeld Cnut exacted from his English subjects was enormous.
Nevertheless some important Saxon families came to prominence during

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his reign. Cnut was often called away from England to rule his immense
Nordic empire overseas, which consisted of Denmark, Sweden and
Norway, as well as the Hebrides, and his English advisers had to rule in his
absence. One particular Saxon family, the Godwins, who were thanes from
Sussex, began a rise to power which would eventually lead to the throne.
They profited from Cnut’s decision to divide England for administrative
purposes into four earldoms, covering areas which followed the old Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms — East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex.
Unfortunately these earldoms had the effect of undoing much of the
political unity of England created by Alfred and his descendants. Regional
loyalties revived around them and became a source of weakness when a
national will to resist was needed against the Normans. At first the
earldom of Wessex was ruled by Cnut himself, but by 1020 the energetic
and crafty Godwin had flourished sufficiently to become earl of Wessex.
And as a result of his friendship with Cnut he was married to a Danish lady
connected to the court.
Cnut died in 1035 aged only forty, like many a campaigner worn out by
a life in the saddle, and his empire died with him. It had been held together
partly by fear of his formidable personality. But its break-up was also a
sign of changing times. For the previous 200 years the dominant force in
Europe had been Scandinavian, whether it was the landless Vikings
themselves or their kings. But for the next century European history would
be shaped by those descendants of the Vikings, the Normans, who had
settled in northern France after receiving a grant of land from the French
king and theoretically becoming his vassals. Thirty-one years after Cnut’s
death, the military genius of the Normans would conquer England, and
their Duke William would become known as William the Conqueror.
The Normans were first alerted to the possibility of England as a new
fiefdom when they heard news of the struggle for the royal succession in
that kingdom. Their informants were the Norman servants of Cnut’s
widow Emma. Was the rightful heir to the English throne Cnut’s eldest
son, the Dane Harold Harefoot, who did briefly succeed his father, or was
the better claim that of Alfred and Edward, the sons of the last Saxon king
of England, Ethelred? There were also in Hungary the sons of the heroic
Edmund Ironside, potential heirs to the royal West Saxon throne. Matters
were further complicated by Cnut’s favourite son Harthacnut, by Emma of
Normandy, whom Earl Godwin had fixed on as a suitable pawn to further
his own ambitions, though he claimed to be representing the interests of a
fatherless son.
Godwin now took Queen Emma and the considerable royal treasures
into what he called ‘safe custody’ and began to promote Harthacnut’s
cause. Thanks to the backing of the Danes and the city of London Harold

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Harefoot had taken the crown and he expelled Emma and Harthacnut to
Bruges. Only a few years later, when Harold Harefoot died in 1040,
Ethelred’s elder son Alfred ventured out of hiding in Normandy to claim
the throne in London before Harthacnut could return. But the masterful
Earl Godwin was having none of that. On his secret orders Alfred was
arrested, blinded, incarcerated and subsequently murdered in the
monastery at Ely, and Harthacnut was crowned king.
Godwin, whom the chroniclers describe as a man ‘of ready wit’,
managed to overcome the feeble Harthacnut’s protests at the death of his
half-brother by paying him some of the treasure he had accumulated over
years of plotting. But on the death of Harthacnut in 1042, which ended the
short line of Danish kings, Godwin moved rapidly to become the mentor
of Ethelred’s younger son Edward. Known to history as Edward the
Confessor, he was also living in Normandy and was now the outstanding
candidate for the throne.
But Edward, whose nickname arose out of his religious disposition, as
he was said to go to confession at least once a day, was not the natural
material of which rulers are made. It is said that, lost in uncertainty, he
threw himself on his knees before the burly Godwin and asked what he
should do. Godwin promised that if Edward would place himself entirely
in his hands, grant great offices of state to Godwin’s sons and marry
Godwin’s daughter, he would shortly see himself acclaimed king.
And so it proved. Controlled by Godwin, on Easter Sunday 1043
Edward the Confessor was crowned with tremendous pomp at his ancestor
Alfred’s capital of Winchester, specially chosen to remind the country of
his royal West Saxon blood. Edward married Edgitha or Edith, Godwin’s
beautiful and cultured daughter, but he remained more like a monk than a
husband, and indeed more like a monk than a king. Above all, the new
monarch was a Norman first and foremost. Far from being proud that he
was an Anglo-Saxon king, Edward’s passion was for everything Norman.
Norman monks had brought him up when his mother decamped to live
with Cnut; the Norman language and Norman customs were what he was
used to and what he preferred. As soon as he came to the throne, he
surrounded himself with Norman advisers, which helped protect him
against the overpowering Godwin, of whom he was always afraid given the
rumours about his role in the terrible death of his brother Alfred. As a
celebration of Norman culture Edward soon began to build a great church
in the Norman style on the north bank of the Thames which would become
Westminster Abbey.
The English royal income was prodigious by now for under the strain of
the Danish wars and then of Danegeld the raising of taxes had become
immensely efficient. Ethelred the Unready had created the rudiments of a

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civil service of clerks to raise money from the shires. These royal officials
communicated with the shire reeves so frequently that a special form of
letter from the king to the shire court called a writ had developed before
anywhere else in Europe. It was identified by the king’s seal attached to it
and had the force of law. By the eleventh century it was the shire reeve or
sheriff who oversaw the shire court and was the king's official
representative (even if that meant conflict with the local earl), in charge of
ensuring that the king received the taxation owed to him.
The colossal sums which these improved fiscal methods raised should
have been spent on maintaining England’s shore defences; instead they
were used by Edward to buy relics, or the bones of saints, in silver caskets
shaped like miniature churches. He did not keep up the small permanent
navy that had become an important guarantee of England's security. The
Confessor’s days were passed at Mass in the company of the Normans he
had imported. They were avaricious, disciplined men who watched the
king like hawks and were always looking for ways to get rid of the over-
powerful Godwin and his sons.
Quite soon two bitterly opposed parties grew up at Edward's court, the
Normans versus the English magnates headed by Godwin. The Normans,
with their almost oriental courtesy, disliked the free and frank ways of the
English, who did not stand on ceremony. They also objected to the
arrogance of the Godwin family, who seemed to place themselves on a level
with the king. The Godwins frequently ridiculed Edward's holy simplicity
— and even did so in his hearing, as shocked observers noted. Godwin’s
hold over the king enabled his sons to take huge areas of England into their
fiefdoms. Thanks to Godwin’s pressure on the king, Sweyn, Godwin’s bad-
penny son now had an earldom embracing shires from Mercia and Wessex,
while his eldest child Harold had been made earl of Essex.
For their part the Godwins, especially Godwin himself and his most able
son Harold, resented the arrival of more foreigners at court and detested
their growing influence over the king. Normans took over many of the
great offices of state, though few of them could speak English, and the
Norman monk Robert of Jumiéges was made Archbishop of Canterbury.
Norman clerks were employed in the royal secretariat, so it came to be
believed that only those who spoke Norman French had their petitions
heard. In one part of the palace Queen Edith’s father and brothers and
their supporters spoke English and wore the Anglo-Saxon long mantle. In
another part the Normans laughed openly at the Saxon earls’ beards and
moustaches. The Saxons were permanently in a fever to wipe the
supercilious smiles off the Normans’ clean-shaven faces. Shaving was an
affectation, said the angry Saxons, which made them all look like priests
anyway.

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It was a situation which could ignite at any minute, and it soon did —
with the Godwins to fan the flames — when Edward’s brother-in-law Count
Eustace of Boulogne paid England a visit in ro51. Like all Franks Count
Eustace regarded Saxons as born slaves, despite their common Teutonic
ancestry. On his way to London he spent the night at Dover. There, instead
of paying for an inn, the count told his men to dress in full armour and
demand accommodation from the townspeople at the point of a sword.
The burghers refused point blank, and were promptly attacked by Count
Eustace’s knights. Though they were mainly shopkeepers, they managed to
kill nineteen of his professional soldiers.
The incident developed into a full-scale diplomatic row. An angry
Edward turned on Earl Godwin within whose domain Dover lay and asked
him to visit the port with summary justice — that is, to execute the men
involved without holding an inquiry. But instead Godwin the over-mighty
subject raised an army from the south coast against Edward, for his lands
stretched from Cornwall to Kent, and started for London. It was only
when two of the other great earls, Leofric of Mercia (whose wife Godiva
became famous for her charitable work) and Siward of Northumbria
began moving south with superior forces to support the king that Godwin
saw that he should back off. He was forced to attend a meeting of the witan
at London, and was exiled with his sons Harold and Tostig and his wife,
while Sweyn was condemned as an outlaw. Meanwhile Edward turned on
his wife Edith, Godwin’s daughter. He renounced her, stripped her of her
jewels and had her locked up in a monastery.
At last out of Godwin’s shadow, Edward was now free to make his own
decisions about the future of the English throne. He almost certainly came
down in favour of his cousin William, the bastard son of the Duke of
Normandy, in preference to his half-nephew Edward, the son of Edmund
Ironside, whom he had never seen. The same year, 1051, most unusually
William left his country to pay Edward what was probably a state visit to
settle the succession in his favour. The Norman chroniclers of the period
all agree on this, and William the Conqueror’s many later assertions that
he planned to rule England according to the customs of the old English
kings, ‘as in the days of King Edward’ himself, suggest that he saw himself
as the legitimate heir. Nevertheless Duke William had no popular support
in England, and those who met him in 1051 found him forbidding; he was
described as a ‘stark man’. Despite the king’s own Norman leanings, the
Normans were very unpopular in the shires, where they were increasingly
being appointed as sheriffs. Since most of them could not speak English,
they appeared to have little interest in procuring justice in the shire courts.
Taking advantage of this a year later, Godwin was back on a high tide
of anti-Norman feeling. This time he had an enormous navy at his back

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and numerous enthusiastic seamen recruited from coastal towns. Having

obtained the support of the City of London, he surrounded the king's ships
at Southwark and dictated terms to the weary king, whose only enthusiasm
now was for the building of Westminster Abbey. To the mortification of
the king, whose spirit never recovered, an open-air meeting of the witan
voted to restore Godwin to his previous position. Many Normans were
expelled from England and the queen came back from her convent to
resume her rightful place at court. The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury
Robert of Jumiéges left the country and much of the archepiscopal land
was redistributed to the Godwins. The Anglo-Saxon Bishop Stigand, a
supporter of the Godwins, was appointed to Canterbury in his stead,
without papal permission. The Godwins were now in complete control of
the country. With the unusual appointment of Tostig Godwin as earl of
Northumbria on the death of the famous Siward, the family’s rule
stretched over the length and breadth of England.
The ambitious founder of this upstart house passed away soon after his
return from exile, during a banquet. Legend has it that his death occurred
just after King Edward had asked him, ‘Just tell me something, did you
really put out the eyes of my brother Alfred and kill him?’ Godwin replied,
‘May God strike me dead if I did” whereupon he choked on a piece of
meat.
Despite the death of the master plotter, Edward the Confessor’s child-
lessness meant that the succession continued to be a live issue for the
Godwins and those who received their patronage. They were determined
that the throne should not be settled on Duke William. At their insistence,
now that the Norman party had fallen from power, King Edward at last
sent for his half-nephew Edward to name him heir to the throne.
Mysteriously this rival to William the Conqueror died shortly after
arriving in England. Although Edward left a son, Edgar the Atheling,
children were almost never crowned under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and
thus once again Duke William seemed the most likely heir.
Despite the king’s own leanings toward Normandy, Duke William’s
claim was not clear cut. There was in fact no obvious natural successor to
Edward the Confessor. Meanwhile the evident weakness at the heart of the
English monarchy which Godwin’s rebellious behaviour had betrayed had
aroused considerable interest in England from abroad. In Norway the
ambitious young King Harold Hardrada now revived a claim to the throne
as Cnut’s heir. Meanwhile the friendship between Tostig Godwin, the new
earl of Northumbria, with Malcolm III of Scotland did not bode well for
the future. It might lead to a Scottish-backed invasion of England.
The last years of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy saw a struggle against
Gruftydd ap Llywelyn, the increasingly powerful king of Gwynedd and

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Powys. Gruffydd had united most of Wales under him. He had been
encouraged by the disgruntled Aelfgar of Mercia, many of whose
hereditary possessions had been given to Gyrth, the youngest Godwin, to
invade England in alliance with a fleet from Norway. At this moment of
national danger Harold Godwin began to attract attention for his daring
Welsh campaign, which crushed
Gruftydd and annexed his
provinces to the English state in
1063.
Three years later, on the
death of Edward the Confessor,
to the witan Harold as head of
the Godwins seemed the best
possible English candidate for
the throne. Apart from what
remained of Mercia the Godwin
family in effect ruled most of
England. Though Harold was
not of royal blood he was the
natural choice to defend England
from the threat of foreign in-
vaders with claims to the crown,
and as an Englishman he was far
more welcome to the witan. By
then the Godwins’ chief rival
Aelfgar, the head of the still
powerful house of Mercia, was
dead, so Harold Godwin’s elec- Tomb of King Edward the Confessor in
tion went through unopposed. Westminster Abbey which he founded.
During the tenth century so
many heirs to the throne had been minors at the time of the king’s death
that the old English monarchy had become far more elective. There was
precedence for this in the Holy Roman emperorship, but it followed a
natural tendency in a country where from its most ancient beginnings
Anglo-Saxon kings had tended to have their decisions approved by a
council of lords. By the time of the Conquest the witan was well used to
being consulted on major national issues. The assent of its members —
thanes, bishops and sheriffs from every part of the country — to new laws,
new taxes, military measures and foreign alliances was sufficiently
important to be recorded as part of the ruling process.
Edward died on 5 January 1066 and was buried in the crypt of his new
church, Westminster Abbey. The external situation was considered so

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dangerous that the very next day Harold was crowned king. Though quite
contrary to precedent, since the Godwins were without a drop of royal
blood in them, it indicated the family’s immense influence. But Harold’s
was to be a very short reign. By Christmas of the same year William the
Conqueror was being crowned in the same abbey.
For William of Normandy was convinced that he was the rightful heir to
Edward the Confessor. Not only had the former king told him so, but
according to the Norman version of events, which is all that survives, as
Edward weakened over Christmas 1065 Harold sent a message to William
on behalf of the English government declaring that the duke should be
ready to receive the crown of England as soon as Edward breathed his last.
When William, who was hunting in the forest of Rouvray outside Rouen,
received word from England that Harold Godwin had been illicitly
crowned in his stead, his rage knew no bounds.
The situation was further complicated by an unfortunate accident which
had befallen Harold some years before. In exchange for being ransomed by
William, Harold, who was prisoner of the local count after a shipwreck on
the French coast, had been forced to swear to be William’s liege man, that
is his servant. He had sworn an unbreakable oath of loyalty to William on
a reliquary containing the remains of some of Normandy’s most holy saints
and martyrs. In the period in question, when national law was rudimentary
and legal charters were in their infancy, the orderliness of society was
guaranteed by the sacred nature of the oath; oathbreaking was punishable
by forty days’ imprisonment. William thus believed that he had been
doubly insulted by Harold, who ought in any case to yield the throne to his
liege lord.
Throughout 1066 William sent threats to the new king of England to
remind him of his broken vow and to warn him that before the year had
expired he would come and claim his inheritance. But Harold refused to
take any notice, claiming that in return for vowing to be the duke of
Normandy’s man he had been betrothed to William’s daughter, and that
his oath was now void because she had since died. Unfortunately Harold
seems to have had a reputation for being a slippery character like his
father. One chronicler noted that he had a tendency not to respect the
sacredness of his word. He was said to be ‘careless’ about abstaining from
a breach of trust ‘if he might by any device whatever, elude the reasonings
of men on this matter’.
Although Harold had gained the throne he never captured the
imagination of the nation, and neither did the rest of the Godwins. His
brother Tostig was unpopular enough to have been expelled from
Northumbria after a popular uprising, and had to be replaced by Morcar,
brother of Edwin of Mercia, who had succeeded his father Aelfgar. Mercia

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 865-1066

and Northumbria were thus controlled by two members of a rival and

hostile family. The lack of countrywide support for Harold would be a
fatal element in the next nine months, as would be the air of illegitimacy
that continued to cling to the new king and his family. The Godwins’
impetuous replacement of the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury by the
Anglo-Saxon Stigand without approval from Rome would enable William
of Normandy to present his invasion as having a higher moral purpose: the
duke announced that he planned to remove the illegal archbishop and
replace him with the approved papal candidate. Archbishop Stigand had in
any case caused offence by his independent behaviour, not least refusing to
send the Church collection money called Peter’s Pence to Rome. The pope
was happy to provide a papal banner for the expedition, beautifully
decorated with pearls and jewels, to spur the duke’s men on.
William had also taken care to obtain the support of the other most
important international figure in western Christendom, the Emperor
Henry IV. Ever since 800 when the title Emperor of the West was created
for Charlemagne by the papacy as a rival to the power of the Byzantines,
the emperor had been the earthly magnate designated protector of the
Church. With both emperor and pope onside, Duke William’s soldiers
were united by a sense of the rightness of their task. Such a feeling was not
present in an increasingly fragmented England. William’s soldiers also had
a leader of great military renown who had seen off all comers from the
kingdoms bordering Normandy, including France. This enabled him to be
confident that the duchy would not be attacked in his absence, if he kept it
short — particularly given that his greatest enemy, neighbouring Anjou, was
wracked by civil war.
William of Normandy had perfected a new method of warfare which
would make the conquest of England surprisingly easy to achieve. His
Normans fought on horseback and at short intervals threw up primitive
castles made out of earthworks to hold the surrounding countryside. His
great reputation meant that the expedition, for which he began building boats
in the summer of 1066, attracted landless Norman knights of Viking origin
in large numbers. Under the sacred papal banner at the ancient town of
Lillebonne, with its old Roman amphitheatre, William assembled his force of
5,000 of the most daring men in western Europe. From Brittany, Flanders,
Sicily, central France and Normandy itself they flocked to a man who
promised them English land and English wives in exchange for their help in
conquering England — for he had no gold to offer them. They loved to fight
and saw a real prospect of gain for themselves across the Channel in England.
But so did many others. In May 1066 Harold’s brother Tostig — at the
head of a menacing Norwegian fleet sent by Harold Hardrada of Norway
~ appeared off the Isle of Wight. From there he moved northwards up the

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east coast burning ports until he was seen off by Earl Edwin and Earl
Morcar and fled north to sanctuary in Scotland.
To make matters worse, by midsummer Harold’s spies had confirmed
that there would soon be an attack from Normandy. Harold frantically
started rebuilding the neglected English navy, and kept the kingdom’s
militia on standby, for across the sea the duke of Normandy was building
more ships than had ever been seen together, perhaps a thousand in all.
Though they were not much bigger than fishing smacks they would be
more than adequate for their task. We can see them in the Bayeux
Tapestry, which was commissioned by William’s half-brother the bishop
of Bayeux to commemorate the occasion, and which shows them being
dragged to the sea by ropes and loaded with horses and armour. In order
to bind his men more tightly to him, the duke increased their pay and
promised more. By August 1066 the dusty fields of Picardy were full of
soldiers waiting for a propitious wind to carry them across the Channel
from the port of St Valéry. For a month they lay in their tents as the great
harvest moon waxed and waned and the black night sky filled with smoke
from their campfires. But still no signal came.
Towards the end of September the soldiers began to mutter nervously
that the lack of wind was a sign that God opposed the expedition. At this
the brutal Duke William caused the body of St Valéry to be exhumed and
paraded round the town while the soldiers watched. At last, a few days
later, on 27 September, William got the wind he had asked for. As the
soldiers knelt in thankful prayer William was already at anchor midway
across the Channel waiting in his crimson-sailed ship for the other vessels
to join him. Soon the invasion force was blown lightly across to England,
where they landed at Pevensey (the Anglo-Saxon name for the former
Roman port of Anderida). The remains of a Roman fort stood there, and
William in the Norman fashion immediately made of it a rough defensive
castle of ditch and earthwork to protect his troops. In fact the
superstitious Norman knights might already have been disheartened, for
William had tripped when he landed and sprawled his full length. But as
they inveighed against the ill omen the duke leaped up with earth clutched
in his fists, and exclaimed that he had only wanted to grasp his new
kingdom more closely.
But what of King Harold? Why was he not there to repel the warriors
clattering unopposed down the wooden gangplanks? Why was there no
one to stop the whole host moving off east down the coast to Hastings,
where William’s scouts had told him that the land was hillier and would be
easier to hold? Indeed why had there been no ships in the Channel to stop
the Norman fleet? By the most unfortunate of coincidences, the same wind
conditions which had prevented the Normans from sailing had allowed

86
 865-1066

Tostig and his ally the king of Norway, Harold Hardrada, to invade the
north of England. On 25 September, two days before William and his
troops arrived at Pevensey, Harold had defeated Tostig and Harold
Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York. It would take Harold
at least ten days to reach the south coast and meet Duke William. But his
men were exhausted from a battle in which so many of them had been
wounded.
Worse still, after 8 September the English fleet had had to be disbanded
because its sailors and the militia had been guarding the Channel ports
since early summer and it was feared that they might mutiny if they
continued to be left to their own devices. The militia was allowed to be
called out for only forty days, and that period had elapsed. So the Channel
had been left quite empty, with the English navy withdrawn up the Thames
to London.
With characteristic energy but rather too great impetuosity, the minute
he heard the Normans had landed Harold began to march south from
York. But he lacked the full complement of troops he needed. The men of
the earls of Northumbria and Mercia did not accompany him as they were
still recovering from Stamford Bridge and so could not provide the great
reinforcements which might have held off the Normans. Nor can the
enmity between the Godwins and Edwin and Morcar have helped. The
army which faced William consisted mainly of Harold’s own bodyguard,
the 3,000 housecarles invented by Cnut, men supplied by his brothers
Gyrth and Leofwine, and Londoners, thanes and churls living near enough
to Sussex to join the host immediately.
Harold seems to have decided not to wait for the full English militia to be
assembled before he moved on Hastings. It would have taken too long to go
through the motions of summoning it out again from more distant shires,
many of which were several days’ journey away. Perhaps in the confusion
of those September days there was little time to think clearly, with danger
facing him from north and south, and Harold was himself exhausted.
The Battle of Hastings was to be a very uneven contest, of highly trained
Norman knights against a tired and disorganized English force. Too many
of them were peasants in woollen shifts called straight from the fields. They
were untrained in warfare but forced by the institution of the fyrd to do
service perhaps with just a pitchfork, with a spear if they were lucky. They
stood little chance against warriors on horses which were trained to rear
and attack. The defeat of the English at the Battle of Hastings hinged on
the quality of William’s knights. They could follow military orders in a
disciplined manner owing to the Norman practice of educating males in
warfare from childhood onwards in the castles of the great lords. It was a
way of life which was soon to become commonplace in England.

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 ANGLO-SAXON

The Bayeux Tapestry made to celebrate the Norman Conquest in 1066. King
Harold is killed at the Battle of Hastings and the English turn in flight.

Hearing from his headquarters, a temporary wooden castle at Hastings,

that Harold was fast approaching down what is today the Az1, William
seized the day. Moving his troops forward the Duke of Normandy made
the English king halt at the highest point in the area, then called Senlac,
while he positioned his own men on a ridge opposite. Harold had to draw
up his forces round the royal standard in an uncomfortably narrow space
with little room for manoeuvre. As soon as the sun rose on 14 October
1066, after the Normans had received Holy Communion from a silver
chalice, William sent his knights down the hill towards the English while
Harold and his men struggled to get into formation after the Saxon
fashion, the king’s housecarles positioned in the centre, and all of them on
foot — already a disadvantage against the mounted Normans. The Saxons
were armed with their great battleaxes which they whirled round their
heads. Closely packed next to one another and creating a wall with their
long kite-shaped shields, they formed such an impenetrable mass that even
horses could not get near them — so long as they did not break ranks.
Harold particularly warned his men to resist the temptation to pursue the
enemy, for then they would be lost.
In the very middle of the shield wall stood King Harold and his two
brothers with the royal standard of England between them, so that no one
would dare flee the battle when the king was in the middle of it. Flanking
the shield wall on both sides were two wings of the lightly armed local
farmers from Sussex and Kent. Among them were monks from Winchester:

88
 865-1066

after the battle, as they lay dead on the field, their brown habits were
discovered concealed within their armour.
At first the advantage seemed with the Saxons, because the steepness of
the ground made frontal attack by the invaders very difficult. The
Normans fought in the style they had brought back from the east — that is
to say, making use of the Arab stirrup. This invention freed a rider’s arms
to fight while the lower part of his body was secured to the horse. Again
and again the Norman cavalry charged up the slopes of the hill where
Harold was positioned, but each time it failed to break through the Saxon
shield wall.
For six hours the battle was undecided, though victory seemed imminent
for the more technically advanced Normans. William now threw his main
energy into attacking the more lightly armed Saxon troops on the wings.
His archers sent repeated flights of arrows over their heads. This inflicted
heavy losses among the ranks of the English peasantry, who were not
protected by the chainmail of the housecarles; nevertheless they stood their
ground. Then the cunning duke gave his knights a signal. The whole
cavalry wheeled round and appeared to flee. This was too much for the
Saxons in the shield wall. With shouts and whoops they broke formation
and began to pursue the enemy down the hill, heedless of Harold’s shouted
orders to stay where they were.
As soon as the Saxons began to follow them, with a great roar the
Norman knights turned back and rode them down. Soon the valley
between the two hills was filled with the screams of dying men and horses.
Bravest of all the Saxons that day was Harold Godwin. It was only when
William realized that his troops would never get near the top of the hill,
where Harold and his housecarles still kept the shield wall packed in tight
formation, that he again ordered his archers to fire their arrows straight
into the air over their heads. One of those arrows entered Harold’s brain
through the eye and killed him.
The duke of Normandy was no less brave. His was the voice in the
thickest of the tray urging his men on. He was always the first to rush
forward and attack. Eyewitnesses said he was ‘everywhere raging,
everywhere furious’, and, as with Harold, several horses were killed under
him that day. He fought until night fell and crowned him with complete
victory. As he made his way in the misty twilight across the battlefield he
came to where the fighting had evidently been fiercest on the Saxon side,
as could be seen by the bodies strewn over the frozen ground. There among
them, covered by the now ragged and torn royal standard, lay Harold.
William was so moved by the terrible bloodshed that he decreed that
henceforth Senlac would be known as Battle, or Bataille, one of the many
Norman words which were to transform the language of England. On the

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spot where Harold lay William caused the high altar of the new Battle
Abbey to be raised as a memorial to the king, which can still be seen
today.
Although the Battle of Hastings was a watershed in English history, at
the time it was not clear whether the country would rally again either
under Edwin and Morcar in the north or under the new party for Edward
the Confessor’s great-nephew Edgar the Atheling developing in London.
For a month the Conqueror, as he would be known to later generations,
bided his time, securing the country round Dover and Canterbury. Then he
moved west out of Kent to London, encouraged by the submission of
Winchester led by Edith, Harold’s sister and widow of Edward the
Contessor.
Though the Conqueror burned Southwark - a constant feature of its
history — he could not break through the guard into the walled city at the
crossing which is now London Bridge. He therefore decided that the best
way of taking London, then as now the key to England, was to ride west. He
would lay waste the countryside round it on which the Londoners depended
for their food. Great stretches of Surrey, Berkshire and north Hampshire, the
fertile country that the people of Reada and Wocca had settled 600 years
before, were set alight by descendants of England’s old enemies, the Vikings.
When the duke crossed the Thames at Wallingford, apparently intending to
return to London again and renew the attack, at the urging of Archbishop
Stigand those leading the resistance decided to give in.
Edwin and Morear had never meanwhile moved their troops south to
rally the country. There was no real focus for a national resistance, and
William the Conqueror benefited from that. Wealthy London magnates
who had earlier declared the youthful Edgar the Atheling king, now
accompanied Edwin and Morcar to meet William at Berkhamsted in
Hertfordshire in the shadow of the Chiltern Hills just west of what today
is Hemel Hempstead. There they offered him the crown. Having sworn an
oath to be the Conqueror’s men and hostages for peace, they watched as
before their eyes William burned every grain of wheat between
Berkhamsted and London, a distance of almost thirty miles, to make sure
that there was no backsliding when he arrived in London.
On a bitterly cold Christmas Day in 1066 William the Conqueror
became King William of England in Westminster Abbey. Although he had
taken the crown by military conquest, initially he was very anxious to be
considered the legitimate heir and to have the consent of his new subjects.
At the moment of coronation he therefore ordered the Englishman Ealdred,
archbishop of York and the Norman bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, who
were jointly crowning him, to ask the people in the abbey if they accepted
him as their king. Although it was unlikely that the English would say no

90
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when the abbey was ringed with William’s knights, the shouts of
acclamation in English and Norman French alarmed those very knights. In
a panic they started setting fire to the buildings surrounding the abbey. As
the congregation rushed out, the Conqueror and the priests were left alone
at the altar. Despite the confusion without, there was deep silence within.
William was anointed king according to the Saxon tradition instituted by
St Dunstan, and took the oath of the Anglo-Saxon kings to rule his people
justly.
Although the Conqueror’s intention was to live in peace with his new
subjects he could not disguise the fact that England was a country held by
military garrison. Within three months William had built the White Tower
out of earth and timber to overawe the inhabitants of London, which today
is part of the complex known as the Tower of London. It was just one of
the series of castles thrown up all over England to prevent rebellions.
For several hundred years the elective kingship of Anglo-Saxon England
and the existence of the witan had given England consultative traditions.
But the new Norman king did not consult. He dictated. There was to be no
more asking for the approval of the witan. The role of the new curia regis,
the court of the king, was to implement, not to advise. In March 1067, six
months after the Battle of Hastings, the two remaining great magnates of
Anglo-Saxon England, Edwin and Morcar, as well as Edgar the Atheling
and Archbishop Stigand, were forced to accompany the new master of
England over the Channel to Normandy, where they were paraded in
triumph.
In charge of England in the Conqueror’s absence
were the new Norman earl of Kent, formerly Bishop
Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, and William
FitzOsbern, William’s seneschal or steward who
became earl of Hereford. And soon, as the native
English landowners began to rebel against harsh
treatment by the Normans, William would return to
extirpate the old English ruling class and replace them
with a Norman military aristocracy. Most Anglo-
Saxon buildings in brick and wood, especially the
churches, were replaced by Norman stone. The
Saxons became an underclass whose language, as we
shall see, was the despised argot of the stable. French Bishop Odo of
became the language of the new aristocracy. Bayeux, half
‘ : , brother of William
The Normans inherited a country with the |, Coadtieton He
strongest government in eleventh-century Europe, commissioned the
whose distinctive efficiency continued to be out- Bayeux Tapestry.
standing despite the weakness of the last Old English

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 ANGLO-SAXON

kings themselves. The English administrative system would form an

excellent base for the new Norman government. William was keen to be
seen as the legitimate successor of Edward the Confessor and everything
was done in the name of that king to wipe out the year of the usurper. But,
whatever the justification, the inescapable fact remained that foreigners
now ruled the land.

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NORMAN AND
ANGEVIN
 William I
(1066-1087)

Though peace had succeeded the Conquest, it was not to last. Outbreaks
of resistance continued to flare up particularly as the new rulers turned a
deaf ear to complaints from the Anglo-Saxons that Norman men-at-arms
were abusing their positions, stealing from the English and carrying off
their wives or turning humbler thanes out of their family homes. More
dangerous were the attempts of regional leaders such as Edwin, Morcar
and Edgar the Atheling and their supporters to regain control of the
country by seeking assistance abroad. At Rouen William heard rumours
that the king of Denmark and even his own cousin the count of Boulogne
had been approached by the English to help them get rid of the Normans.
In the west of England three sons of Harold who had been hiding in Ireland
started laying waste the country. In the north a widespread resistance
movement began, led by the northern earls. But once again, as at the Battle
of Hastings, the failure of all these parties to make common cause would
mean they could never succeed.
It was enough of a threat at the time, however, to oblige William to leave
his wife Matilda of Flanders to govern Normandy with his eldest son
Robert, while he returned to London. Impressing contemporaries by his
refusal to wait for campaigning weather in the milder spring, at the
beginning of January 1067 he sent one army north while he personally
marched the second west. His progress through the country to Exeter was
marked by the throwing up at regular strategic points of characteristic
Norman castles. These were towers or keeps erected on top of a man-made
mound, or in Norman French motte, and surrounded by a moat, their
purpose to control the countryside. The use of slits for windows and the
forbidding absence of decorative features proclaim their strictly military
purpose.
Having successfully besieged Exeter and built the castle of Rougemont
outside it, William hurried north to confront the greatest threat to his rule.
Early in 1069 the Saxons massacred William’s governor in Durham,
Robert de Comines, and all but two of his 500 men as they slept. The
English population of York soon followed suit, rising against its foreign

25
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

garrison and destroying it and burning York Minster. When Harold’s sons
landed again at Plymouth while the fleet of the King of Denmark sailed
unopposed up the Humber river alongside ships loyal to Edgar the
Atheling, William’s control of his new domain seemed suddenly in doubt.
But, acting with his usual decisiveness, he bought off the Danes and
persuaded them, with the English leaders, to retreat up to the Tyne. Then
he himself proceeded to York where the local Saxon leader Waltheof, Earl
of Huntingdon had been directing operations and in fact doing much of the
fighting himself.
This massive slayer of Normans so impressed William that he took him
into his service and married him to his niece Judith. But he loosed a dreadful
vengeance on the Northumbrians for their defiance. At Christmas, the
season of goodwill, the Conqueror sat in grim and solitary state in the
empty city of York planning wholesale destruction for a hundred miles
around. Every day Norman soldiers were sent out to kill every living thing
in the area: men, women, children and all their livestock. Houses and all
fruits, conserves and grain were to be burned, ploughs broken and the
country from the Humber to the Tees, from the Wear to the Tyne, to be
made a desert. Fourteen years later, in the Domesday Book — the celebrated
record of landholding in England compiled for tax purposes — all of that
country had only the terrible Latin word vasta (meaning ruined or
destroyed) to describe it. For fifty years nothing grew there. This episode
became known as the Harrying of the North. It was intended to ensure that
its inhabitants never rose again against the Norman occupying power.
Nevertheless, thanks to an indomitable Lincolnshire thane named
Hereward the Wake, one little place in England held out against William
and all his military devices until to71. That was the tiny Isle of Ely in
Cambridgeshire, which was then surrounded on every side by impassable
marshes and wild fens. It became a symbol of English national resistance.
That its leader’s name Hereward the Wake passed into semi-mythical
folklore on the level of Robin Hood and King Arthur indicates the strength
of emotion surrounding him. Unlike those characters, however, Hereward
was a real person whose existence is solidly documented. He had returned
from abroad to find his mother turned out of the family home by Norman
upstarts who were now themselves living in it. Enraged by her treatment
Hereward began harassing the Normans. After the Harrying of the North
had driven the two northern earls Edwin and Morcar out of their country
they joined him with their followers and Ely became the centre of English
resistance.
In the end William could trust only himself to defeat the wily Saxon. He
blockaded the Wash for weeks and every little inlet that led into the Fens,
trying to starve the English out. But though by then Hereward and the rest

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of the resistance were living on roots they never gave up. They were so
successful in ambushing William’s men when they tried to build a
causeway to the island that it began to be rumoured that Hereward had
magic powers. In fact the Normans might never have captured Hereward
at all had not the monks on the Isle of Ely betrayed him. Unlike Hereward
they missed their luxurious diet of fine white bread and venison and good
French wines. They sent a message to William revealing the existence of a
secret passage which ran between the island and the Normans’ camp. In
the middle of the night William and his men poured on to the island,
capturing Hereward as he lay hidden in the reeds.
This marked the real end of the English national resistance. Hereward
was treated leniently as William was impressed by his courage, and he is
believed to have died on one of the king’s campaigns in France to secure
the borders of Normandy. But since England continued to be periodically
shaken by regional rebellions, minor though they were, William retreated
from his policy of using the Anglo-Saxons to govern England for him. The
Conquest was still a very recent event and had yet to take permanent root
among the people. Owing to the interest neighbouring countries like
Denmark and Flanders continued to take in rebel conspirators’ plans, in
1074 when the earls of Hereford and Norfolk and the treacherous Earl
Waltheof tried to seize power, William’s attitude to his newly acquired
country changed.
Previously, in exchange for paying a redemptive tax or geld many Saxon
thanes had been permitted by the Normans to retain their old lands. The
shires and shire courts had continued to be largely administered by English
officials. Although there had been some land redistribution to reward
William’s followers it was on a relatively small scale. But from 1075
onwards the 4,000 thanes who had been the important landowners in
England under Harold began to be dispossessed of their ancient estates.
Their fields, pastures, meadows and forests would be consolidated into far
larger blocs and transferred to the ownership of 200 Norman barons and
their own smali armies of soldiers. William now believed that only
Normans could be trusted to control the rebellious country of England for
him, through the military landholding system called feudalism.
Under the Saxon kings land had been owned freely, despite the ancient
defensive obligation of the fyrd and the duty to maintain roads and
bridges. The Duke of Normandy introduced to England the Norman legal
customin which all landholding carried a military obligation.It was
described as being ‘held of the king’. Land was granted by William to his
followers on the specific condition that its owner served the lord above him
in war. It bound the whole of England into one military unit and could
have been achieved only in a revolution such as had just taken place in

on
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

England. For each unit of land or ‘fief? that the new Norman landowner
held in England, he was obliged to put an armed soldier or knight at
William’s disposal to fight for him for so many days a year, and he had to
take an oath to be faithful to the lord he held it of, called the oath of fidelity
or fealty. The man who took it did homage to the man above him, who was
called his liege lord.
The Norman feudal system had accounted for the ease with which
William the Conqueror had raised his invading army in 1066. He had
called on the knights’ service owed to him by the great Norman lords who
held land from him, which meant they had to be ready for war, complete
with arms and horses, at all times. The king was at the top of the system
and below him were the most powerful nobles called the tenants-in-chief,
each bound to supply him with up to 1,500 knights. Many of those 1,500
knights would be supplied from among the tenants below who owed the
lord above them knight service.
By 1085 not only had all the land been redistributed, but the official or
government class responsible for royal business in the shires was now
composed of all Norman Frenchmen rather than English. Shires had also
been renamed counties, after the Conqueror’s local representative, the
vicomte, who to begin with took over the functions of the sheriff. But,
though county remains another word for shire, the office of vicomte soon
melted away, and the title sheriff returned. Over the previous ten years the
population of England had become used to the sight of large numbers of
Norman French officials guarded by soldiers arriving from London to gather
information to facilitate the transfer of land in their area. The Normans
called up what became known as juries (from the Latin juro, I swear) — that
is, panels of inquiry which sat in the open air on the village green to
determine what the boundaries, the ancient rights and the labour obligations
were for each estate, whether belonging to a lord or a churchman.
The Normans’ claim to England was based on conquest. At the same
time they were natural lawyers and immensely businesslike. They were
obsessed with legitimacy and believed in doing everything by the book.
Even though a Norman lord might be taking over a Saxon property, they
intended services and dues to carry on as before or ‘as in the days of King
Edward’, in that phrase so resonant of legitimacy for the Normans.
William was particularly keen to sort out the large estate owners’ rights
when it came to the law of the land. The legal powers of the King of
England were far greater than those of other western European monarchs.
Although the Anglo-Saxon lord was entitled to hold his own courts to
judge disputes over land in his domain, to punish thieves and to assess
stolen goods, the English national custom had been established for
centuries that those rights were granted by the king. The king and his

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officials were considered to be responsible for keeping the peace.

Moreover, the King of England was entitled to raise taxes in every part of
the country. When his instructions or writs came to the shire court, now
called the county court, the English tradition was that they were to be
obeyed. There was no need for soldiers to enforce his writs.
At Christmas 1085, with the land transfer complete, the king held the last
of his tri-annual councils with all the most important new landholders or
tenants-in-chief. William was recorded as having ‘held very deep speech with
his council about this land — how it was peopled, and with what sort of men’.
He was now in a position to send further posses of government officials
among the newly Normanized English to set up an enlarged version of the
shire court in every county. They were to assess everyone for tax, from
cottagers to lords, and once again to obtain evidence on oath about every
item of the countryside from a gathering of the propertied locals, evidence
relating both to twenty years before, in 1066, and to the current year, 1086.
The court consisted of local lords, members of all the hundred courts within
the shire and six of the wealthier peasants, as well as the sheriff. The Norman
commissioners were to have no interests in the particular shire and the facts
were to be checked by another group of commissioners.
The survey with its descriptions of the land twenty years before in 1066,
and at the present day reveals how completely during that period the native

The Domesday Book, the detailed Norman investigation of their English subjects’
landholding begun in 1085. This is from the volume called the Great Domesday
Book, Volume 1 describing Berkshire.

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 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

aristocracy had been displaced by Norman warriors. It also demonstrates

the Normans’ powers of organization and their interest in statistics, which
were without precedent in medieval times. Indeed not until the nineteenth
century would such attention to detail be displayed again. The survey
rapidly became known to the irreverent English as the Domesday Book.
Affronted by the level of detail required by the Norman commissioners,
down to how many geese and pigs a cottager owned, one Anglo-Saxon wit
remarked that it was as close a record as the Recording Angel would make
at the crack of doom on the Day of Judgement, or Doomsday.
Although some counties are missing from the Domesday Book, it gives
us an amazingly detailed picture of England, listing all the woodland,
pasture, millponds and fishponds, towns and villages and even the names
of the inhabitants, English and Norman alike — many of which remain the
same today. Reflecting the redistribution of land among a smaller number
of Norman warriors England is treated as a country which from now on
was to be organized in terms of manors. Each manor is the basis for an
assessment of subordinate hides. The Norman commissioners divided the
majority of the population into the following main categories: villein,
cottars or cottagers, and slaves. The largest group were the villein or
villeins. Although by the thirteenth century villeins had become synony-
mous with serfs, who being the property of their landlord had no
independent legal existence, in 1086 they were free men. They ranged from
tenant farmers, who held their land in return for services to their landlords,
to small landholders, who owned the title to their land outright. Rents,
labour services and plough teams were all assessed to see whether William
could get any more money out of his new country.
Thanks to Domesday survey, which is held in the National Archives in
London, England has the most complete picture of a country in Europe at
that time. Completed in a little over a year it is a monument not only to
Norman efficiency but to the tremendous tradition of English local govern-
ment which had flourished since Alfred’s time. The already extremely well-
organized and mature institutions of Anglo-Saxon local government with
its hundred and shire courts could not have been better suited to William’s
autocratic purposes. But the sort of changes William was rushing through,
albeit in an orderly fashion, created such a volume of parchment that by
the end of his reign the king’s writing office, inherited from Edward the
Confessor, could no longer be attached to the royal household. It had to
become an independent department called the royal Chancery, staffed by
clerks trained to draft the king’s directives and send writs to the shires.
In August 1086 William considered that the process of settling England
in the Norman way had been completed. He called an assembly at
Salisbury of all the chief landowners in the country and the smaller barons

I00
 1066-1087

who held land from the tenants-in-chief. Although not every single
landowner could attend, a significant number were there, and each swore
a personal oath of allegiance to William, on his knees before his king, who
held the man’s hands between his own. This was the remarkable
innovation of William the Conqueror and demonstrated the exceptional
nature of English feudalism, that all were made aware that they owed their
loyalty to the king above their immediate liege lord.
The extraordinary scene on Salisbury Plain of all the landowners in
England kneeling before the by now extremely corpulent figure of the
Norman king represented a triumphant climax to the Norman Conquest.
The rebellions had all petered out and the Danes had finally abandoned
their claim to the throne, their last attempt at an invasion being the year
before. William had pushed back the frontier with Wales, built a castle at
Cardiff and made the Welsh princes and the Scottish king do homage to
him or risk further warfare and damage to their countries. All of this was
an indication of the strength of the Norman hold on England, and it should
also remind us that William had brought peace to England. Most of the
English might be in a disadvantaged position, but the fact was that for
almost a century England had been at the mercy of powerful foreign
invaders. By the 1070s she was the protected centrepiece of a great trans-
continental empire as widespread as Cnut’s had been. Unlike Cnut’s,
however, William’s empire tore England away from her Scandinavian and
Germanic roots. With great consequences for her future she was thrust
back into the heart of Latin civilization and the traditions of scholarship
which stretched from Roman times.
Nevertheless, for all the positive long-term effects of the Conquest,
whatever their circumstances, most Englishmen and women suffered under
the Normans. One of the most dramatic effects of Norman rule was the
gradual enserfment of the free English tenant farmers, who in 1066
consisted of almost half the population. They who for centuries had played
an important part in local government in the hundred and shire court were
by 1200 denied access to the king’s courts because they were no longer
allowed to call themselves freemen. The term villein had come to mean a
serf who was tied to his lord’s domain by the services he performed for
him, whose disputes could be judged only in the manorial court. Thus
although under the Normans the Saxon practice of slavery died out,
because Norman ecclesiastics found it offensive, for 40 per cent of
Englishmen and women their freedom was greatly curtailed. Under the
Normans the manor court slowly replaced the ancient hundred court, and
the lord of the manor alone now decided what previously had been decided
by a group of small farmers and landowners together.
Most English saints’ days were suppressed by the new Norman priests,

IOL
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

while English went into temporary abeyance as a written language.

Whereas poetry and histories like The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had been
written in Old English, books in Norman England were now written in
French, as that was the language of the court. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
itself, which had been written in monasteries since Alfred’s time, falls silent
by the mid-twelfth century. For the next hundred years English went
underground, becoming the language of the uneducated.
Even their native forests were taken away from the English, owing to
William’s passion for hunting. Until the Conquest, firewood and wild
game from the vast forests still covering the country had been a tradi-
tionally free source of fuel and food. But William introduced laws
forbidding the use of bows and arrows within them, and the presence of
hunting dogs. Anyone who cut firewood from the forest or poached deer
might be blinded, mutilated or executed. ‘He loved the tall stags as if he
were their father,’ declared The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
To make matters worse the Conqueror destroyed churches and towns in
Hampshire over a distance of thirty miles in order to create what we still
call the New Forest, though it is now 900 years old. Deer roamed while
people starved. William’s new forest laws incurred much hatred among the
English, but his love of hunting made him unwilling to proceed in his usual
cautious fashion. He turned the forests all over England into royal reserves
that only he and his friends could hunt in.
William the Conqueror’s tendency was to scatter the manors of his
chief men all over the country to prevent regional loyalties becoming a
threat. However, for the dangerous border lands with Wales and
Scotland this arrangement was modified. For many centuries they would
be in a state of perpetual warfare. On the marcher lands, so called
because they marched with the Welsh frontier, lords like Roger de
Montmorency were allowed to own huge estates concentrated in one
area. There the local landowner was responsible for what was in effect a
private army keeping the Welsh at bay. These territories were known as
the palatine earldoms, and their rulers were far more like the independent
barons of Normandy. But once again William’s subtle mind saw a way of
cutting down on the power of the palatine earls: where possible he made
churchmen palatine rulers. The most famous of these was the Prince
Bishop of Durham. By Norman law priests were forbidden to marry and
have children, so they could not become a dynastic threat to the eminence
of the king’s own family.
The last great change the Norman Conquest brought to England was the
reform of the English Church. One of the justifications for the Norman
invasion had been the Godwins’ abuses. Having obtained the papal
blessing for the Conquest William had to fall in with the wishes of the

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papacy, which under the direction of Pope Gregory VII (formerly known
as Hildebrand, archdeacon of Rome) had embarked on a hard-hitting
programme of reforms. In any case they corresponded to the Duke of
Normandy’s own austere disposition. William was a deeply religious man
and disapproved of corruption. But he waited until the country was quiet
before removing the illegitimate Stigand, who had used his influence
among the English to secure a peaceful acceptance of the Conquest.
From Normandy William imported his friend the great churchman
Lanfranc, Abbot of Caen, to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc
made a great many changes to the Church organization. In recognition of
population shifts, the residences of English bishops were transferred to
what -had become the leading towns of dioceses — with the Bishop of
Lichfield, for example, moving to Chester — and Lanfranc replaced the slack
English clergy with the better-trained Normans, thereby depriving the
English of parish priests who spoke their own language. Lanfranc was an
Italian lawyer who had attended the law school of Pavia and who very late
in life had been seized by the religious impulse. He had made the monastery
at Bec in Normandy one of the great centres of religious learning of the
eleventh century. Possessed of a subtle mind to match his master’s, he
reformed the practices of the English Church along Hildebrandine lines.
One of Gregory’s VII’s profound beliefs was that the priest should be better
behaved than other men — in view of his high calling he should adhere to a
more exacting law than ordinary people. Corrupt practices such as simony
— that is, selling pardons for sins — were no longer permitted. He insisted on
a return to the ideal of celibacy in the clergy. The priest’s wife and children,
who had been a common sight in every village, were seen no more.
The marking out of the clergy as a separate caste meant that the Norman
Conquest put an end to the seamless robe of government between king and
churchmen that had prevailed in Anglo-Saxon England — although priests
and clerks continued to serve until the sixteenth century as what were in
effect civil servants. Bishops no longer presided over the shire courts as
they had under Anglo-Saxon kings. The Church obtained her own courts
from William, with jurisdiction to try men in holy orders, disputes over
marriage, and any spiritual matters.
Two systems of law thus developed side by side in England. Canon law,
practised in the ecclesiastical or Church courts, contrasted strongly with
what became known in the thirteenth century as the common law, which
was by and large ancient English custom. Canon law derived from the
principles of Roman law, which had continued to be studied at centres of
learning such as Pavia on the continent where Lanfranc himself had been
trained. And it was canon law in which the Church clerks, who until the
sixteenth century would provide the trained minds essential for the nascent

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 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

English civil service, were educated.

In contrast English common law had always had a common-sense aspect
to it, since it had always been adjudicated by tenant farmers. It was never
particularly precise in legal terms. That imprecision was increased by the
fact that the justice meted out by the early Norman kings from what
became called the King’s Bench was at first fairly informal. It was decided
after a discussion with whatever baron happened to be attending court at
the time. Members of the royal council or Curia Regis might send clerks
into the counties and there take evidence from the sheriff about a dispute
which would be deliberated on locally or perhaps brought back to London
for a meeting of the Council.
The higher level of education enjoyed by the Church’s trained clerks was
useful to the Normans in an infinite number of ways. But one feature of the
far-reaching Hildebrandine reforms was less pleasing to William. Pope
Gregory’s belief in the superiority of the clergy to the ordinary man led him
to make repeated attempts to liberate the Church from the power of the
secular or earthly ruler, by ending their right to confer on bishops and abbots
the ring and staff which were their badges of office. He had already clashed
with the emperor Henry IV over this principle in the struggle known as the
Investiture Contest which rocked Germany and Italy for nearly fifty years.
In William Pope Gregory believed he had a captive ruler. Gregory
claimed that not only should the Duke of Normandy abandon the
episcopal investiture ceremonies but he should do homage to the pope: the
duke’s appeal to the Church Curia to support his invasion of England was
an implicit acknowledgement of the jurisdiction of the papal court. In a
typically ingenious and complicated piece of exposition the best legal
minds in Rome further sought to argue that since England had previously
paid a tax to Rome known as Peter’s Pence this proved that England had
previously been the vassal of Rome.
But William the Conqueror was far too shrewd to be caught by Pope
Gregory. Just as with the Norman barons he had every intention of limiting
the Church’s power. In a brief note to Rome he let it be known that he
would pay Peter’s Pence, which he acknowledged had been in arrears for
some time, but that the ancient custom of the English kings prevented him
doing homage as the pope’s vassal. From then on William did very much
as he pleased. He gave orders that no pope should be recognized in
England until the king himself had done so. Church councils were not to
pass laws without the king’s express permission; likewise papal bulls and
missives from the pope to the people were to be distributed only when the
king had decided that he approved of the content.
The pope generally tolerated William’s behaviour because he advanced
the cause of the Church much more than he damaged it, not least in the

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 1066-1087

way he used the clergy as clerks to handle the increasing amounts of

government business. He therefore allowed William to invest English
bishops with their badges of office even though the German emperor was
not permitted to do so. For her part the Church, as one of the most
important underlying forces which kept society together, promoted
Norman government among the English people.
Owing to the Conqueror’s alliance with the Church the Normans were
tremendous builders of churches and abbeys. Many of England’s most
famous cathedrals were begun or built just after the Conquest. During the
1070s, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt, and Lincoln Cathedral and Old
Sarum Cathedral, which lies in ruins above the town of Salisbury, begun.
Huge stone churches which looked more like fortresses, in the style called
Romanesque that the Normans introduced, sprang up all over England.
Romanesque churches, which had little or no decoration other than
chevron cross-hatching, were characterized by immensely thick pillars,
rounded arches and a very long nave. Visible a long way off, they
dominated the landscape almost as much as the Norman castles. The next
decade saw the grey stone Norman cathedrals rise at Ely, Worcester and
Gloucester. Tewkesbury Abbey was also built, and the cathedrals at St
Albans and Rochester were restored.
At the same time the Normans pushed on with their equally distinctive
programme of castle-building. In the process they knocked down
most Saxon country houses, which is why so few remain. In their place
., they erected strong
‘oe forbidding castles
ment) in =the Norman
(nan
fashion, some in

(3
1 r
ait
I ml stone. Towns and
| commerce likewise
i | flourished under
Za@| the influence
of the
‘4 energetic Normans,
SAE} who like their
| Viking ancestors
| were keen traders.
M| Jewish merchants
i tl returned to England
Bs after an absence of
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The Chapel of St John built around 1080 in the White Despite the suffer-
Tower at the Tower of London. ings of the Saxon

105
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

people, the Normans had found plenty

about England which they admired
enough to want to adapt, particularly
the Anglo-Saxon political institutions.
Within a generation mixed marriages
between Normans and _ Saxons,
especially Saxon heiresses, were
common. One of the most famous
Conquest artefacts, the Bayeux
Tapestry, is of entirely English work-
manship, even though it was com-
missioned by William’s half-brother,
the Norman Bishop Odo. It shows the
high level of artistry in tapestry-
making in England and was probably
sewn in Canterbury. Two hundred and
fifty feet long by twenty feet wide, full A typical Norman keep, Rochester
of verve and drama, it is also a subtle Castle built 1087 on the Medway.
depiction of the story of the Conquest.
As such it is one of England’s most important pieces of historical evidence.
In 1087, the year after the Domesday Book was completed, the mighty
duke returned to Normandy for what turned out to be his last campaign.
He died attempting to conquer a disputed area of land, the county of
Maine, which abuts Normandy. Twenty years before at the time of
Hastings the King of France had been weak. But by 1087 a new king, Philip
I, was on the throne. This mischief-maker was delighted to help William’s
eldest son Robert, the heir to Normandy, stir up trouble against a father
who gave him no responsibility, who kept the reins of power firmly in his
own hands, and who, to punish him, had deliberately arranged for the
kingdom of England to be inherited by his son William Rufus. Now there
was open warfare between the conqueror and the French king.
William had always been intending to attack the city of Mantes which
had previously belonged to Normandy. But legend has it that the King of
France made a cruel joke about William’s grossness which got to his ears.
The size of his stomach by now was indeed making it hard for him to keep
in his saddle and he no longer got about as he had in his younger days. At
Rouen, confined to his palace, the duke heard Philip of France’s mocking
bon mot: ‘The King of England keeps his bed like a woman after she has
had a baby.’ William sent a deceptively mild message in return. ‘Tell Philip
that when I go to Mass after the confinement, I’ll make him an offering of
100,000 candles.’ A month later he had surrounded Mantes. Then he set
fire to it— a hundred thousand candles indeed.

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 1066-1087

This gesture proved William’s undoing. His

horse stumbled on an ember and threw him so
badly that he suffered fatal internal injuries.
Watching over his deathbed was William’s
favourite son Henry, later to become Henry I.
His calculating and legalistic tendencies were
_always appreciated by a father who had
similar qualities. But meanwhile the Duke of
Normandy’s stout son William Rufus, named
for his red hair and red face, the heir to the
English throne, had immediately hightailed it
to England to make sure no Anglo-Saxon
WILLIAM RUFUS. seized the crown before he did.

107
 William I
(1087-1100)

The reign of William Rufus was a very different affair from his father’s.
Superficially he resembled him in so far as he was a fearless and victorious
warrior and strong king. He was adroit enough to make himself popular
among the English by freeing important English leaders like Morcar. He
added to his French possessions, and was even more of a threat to the
Welsh and Scottish kingdoms than the Conqueror had been. He defeated
and killed Malcolm Canmore, King of the Scots, who was constantly
invading England, and in 1092 he reconquered Cumberland, formerly an
independent principality founded by the Strathclyde Welsh. Carlisle
became an English city, and obtained its own bishop in the next reign. At
William Rufus’ cosmopolitan court the abacus was used for the first time

Durham Cathedral, begun 1093, finished 1280.

108
 1087-1100

to calculate what was owed the king. During his reign the construction of
Durham Cathedral began, the first western European building to use
tibbed vaulting for the roof.
But it soon became clear that the new king was a poor version of his
great father. He was a greedy man who had none of the sense of fairness
which had informed his father, harsh though he was. Although he built
Westminster Hall in 1097 as the place where he and his advisers could
mete out justice, William Rufus’ judgements were generally rather self-
interested. Lacking his father’s self-discipline and continence, the new king
was always in need of money to finance his extravagant lifestyle. Aided and
abetted by an equally unscrupulous minor Norman clerk named Ranulf,
who soon became his justiciar (or chief minister), a term used for the first
time in English history, William Rufus was soon causing the country to
groan under his demands. Ranulf was nicknamed Flambard, because,
reported the monk Ordericus Vitalis, ‘like a devouring flame he tormented
the people, and turned the daily chants of the Church into lamentation’. He
encouraged the king to swell his coffers by interpreting the Domesday
Book information more stringently, especially in relation to the
monasteries, to which they felt the old regime’s inspectors had been too
lenient.
Thanks to Flambard’s low but ingenious mind the two introduced new
ways of making the country yield more gold for the king than ever before.
Feudal dues that William I had demanded only where the estate could bear
them were used to enrich the king at the expense of his barons. As with
death duties today, feudal law stipulated that on the death of an important
landowner or tenant-in-chief a ‘relief? or tax was payable to the king before
the heir could inherit his father’s estate. These were now demanded
without mercy. Under William Rufus the property of minors supposedly in
the king’s safekeeping until they came of age were run to rack and ruin or
their woods cut down and sold for the king’s profit. Heiresses were
married against their will to cronies of the king.
In 1088, a year after he succeeded to the throne, William II’s strenuous
demands provoked an unsuccessful rising by his tenants-in-chief in the
name of his weaker brother Robert, who was now ruling Normandy. Led
by the king’s half-uncle Odo of Bayeux, these barons made the revolt an
excuse to terrorize the country. Alarmed at their strength William cleverly
defeated them by promising the humbler people of England that the forest
laws would be less harshly enforced and some of the more stringent taxes
lifted, with the result that those who had no wish to be at the mercy of
marauding armed horsemen supported the king. Subsequently many of the
most important tenants-in-chief lost their lands and were banished
overseas. In 1095, however, a new rebellion broke out, led by Robert de

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Mowbray, the Earl of Northumberland and directed against the king’s

tyranny. This too was unsuccessful. Even so, William failed to make de
Mowbray surrender his castle of Bamburgh, so he ruthlessly built
alongside it a new castle which became known as Malvoisin or Evil
Neighbour. When eventually de Mowbray was forced to leave the castle,
the soldiers of Malvoisin pounced and captured him. This was the last
challenge to the king during his reign.
Because of William Rufus’ strong-armed approach to his tenants-in-
chief, many of the Norman adventurers who still had that Viking zest to
conquer decided to try their luck beyond the king’s reach by invading
Wales and seizing land from the Welsh princes. Like the palatine earls they
became a law unto themselves. These marcher lordships became the
equivalent of little independent countries, run from the local castle — an
economical way of using the energies of Norman knights, whose educ-
ational training was for warfare. They also had the advantage of keeping
down the Welsh. From this period date the lordships of Montgomery,
Brecon and Pembroke.
Not only did William Rufus antagonize the great barons. He also
shocked and disgusted the English by his treatment of the Church, which
he delighted in mocking from the decadent environs of his court. On
Archbishop Lanfranc’s death the king refused for four years to appoint a
new incumbent at Canterbury. This remissness, instigated by Ranulf
Flambard, enabled him to benefit from the right of regale, by which all the
rents of the wealthy archdiocese came into the king’s hands for as long as
the see remained vacant. It was only because William became extremely ill
unexpectedly and came to believe that he was on the point of death that he
was frightened into good behaviour and agreed to appoint the best possible
candidate for the archbishopric.
This was Abbot Anselm, from Lanfranc’s old Abbey of Bec in
Normandy. The saintly Anselm did not want to come to England, because
he was sure there would be a personality clash. He was, he said, ‘a weak
old sheep, who should not be yoked to a fierce young bull like the King of
England’. But William would not be denied, and he was soon ruing his
decision. The new arch-
bishop was appalled by the
state of the English Church
under the Conqueror’s son
and by the immoral quality
of the court, where the
questions of greatest interest
seemed to be whether the
king crimped his hair and

IIo
 1087-1100

whether one should copy the new ram’s-horn shoes he had designed,
whose toes curled up so extravagantly that they were almost impossible to
walk in. Meanwhile, though Canterbury was now occupied, a great many
other sees remained empty so that their rents could go to the king.
Although Archbishop Anselm was a mild-mannered man, as head of the
Church of England he could not countenance this continued abuse of
Church lands. But the king thwarted his attempts to call a council of
bishops to censure his behaviour, and said that the abbeys were his in any
case — to which Archbishop Anselm replied that they were his only to
protect, for they belonged to God.
Unlike the case with Lanfranc and William the Conqueror, neither side
was capablé of seeing the other’s point of view. The mounting irritation
between king and archbishop reached new heights on the election of Pope
Urban II. Owing to the continuing battle for power between the papacy and
the secular ruler in the investiture contest, the German emperor had named
his own rival pope, Clement. Archbishop Anselm was determined to receive
the pallium, the badge of office, from Urban, but the red-faced Rufus flew
into a rage and forbade him to leave the country because he had recognized
neither Urban nor Clement as pope. In 1095 the king called a council of all
the tenants-in-chief and all the bishops at Rockingham Castle, to determine
whose authority over the archbishop was greater, the pope’s or the king’s.
No solution was reached. Opinion was evenly balanced, with the barons
wishing to limit the authority of William Rufus and the bishops anxious to
curry favour with him. Most importantly every encounter with William II
convinced Anselm that he should not yield to him.
Relations continued to deteriorate until 1097 when Archbishop Anselm
refused point blank to send the money and the soldiers that feudal dues
required of him for one of William Rufus’ campaigns against the Welsh.
When William threatened to take the archbishop to court, Anselm
responded that only the pope had sufficient authority to settle their
dispute. Then the archbishop fled to Rome, fearing that the king was so
incensed that he might have killed him. He remained there for the rest of
William’s reign, leaving the Church in England once more without a head
and enabling William to seize all the archbishopric’s property again.
Ambitious and energetic, for some time William Rufus had been casting
covetous eyes at his elder brother Robert’s hereditary duchy of Normandy.
Robert’s financial incompetence soon played into his hands. The sale by
the duke of some of Normandy’s most important possessions — the
Cotentin Peninsula and the Avranche — to William Rufus’ younger brother
Henry gave the English king the perfect excuse to invade Normandy.
Objecting to Henry’s hold over their common ancestral lands, he was paid
off with a large portion of eastern Normandy. And Duke Robert soon

Mee
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

surrendered the rest of Normandy into his younger brother’s hands,

temporarily at least, by mortgaging it to him in order to finance a crusade
against the Muslims in the Holy Land.
Like many of his contemporaries throughout western Europe, including
Edgar the Atheling, Duke Robert was obsessed by the idea of liberating
Jerusalem from its new Seljuk Turk overlords. Where previously Christian
pilgrims had been allowed to visit the Holy Places, the Garden of
Gethsemane, Mount Calvary and the tomb of Christ, the Turks were
making access almost impossible. Moreover, Christian pilgrims were being
killed and sold into slavery all over the east. In 1095, preaching in the
market place of Clermont to an enormous gathering of nobles, burghers
and farmers, Pope Urban II launched what became known as the First
Crusade, urgently demanding soldiers for Christ to liberate the Holy Land
from the Infidel, or Unfaithful.
All knights were to have a red cross sewn on to their surcoat over their
chainmail, representing the cross Christ had died on, to show that they were
Crusaders. In return for fighting a holy war they would be absolved of some
of the sins that would prevent them entering heaven. In an era dominated
by the Church there could be no greater appeal for the Norman military
caste whose existence was dedicated to warfare. The First Crusade was a
great success. By 1099 it had expelled the Turks and set up a Latin Kingdom
of Jerusalem under Godfrey de Bouillon. Meanwhile in his brother’s stead,
his creditor William was returning Normandy to order. He had recaptured
Le Mans, attacked France and to the French king’s alarm seemed about to
take over the sprawling lands of Aquitaine. The Duke of Aquitaine wished
like Robert to raise money for the Crusade and had decided to follow suit
and mortgage his lands to William. This would have brought within the
King of England’s control all territory down to the Spanish border.
But at the height of his power William Rufus died out hunting on 2
August 1100, the victim of an anonymous arrow in the New Forest.
Although legend accords Walter Tyrrel the role of bowman, if he fired the
arrow it seems far more likely that he was acting at the behest of the king’s
younger brother Henry, who was one of the party. The suspicious
circumstances and lack of ceremony which surrounded William Rufus’ end
suggest that his killing may have been the result of a conspiracy. For this
powerful king was left to die alone while all his courtiers and his brother
Henry abandoned him. He was found at the spot still marked Rufus Stone
today by a humble charcoal-burner, the lowest occupation in Norman
England. The charcoal-burner, whose name was Purkess, lugged the king’s
body to nearby Winchester on a crude wooden cart. But even in
Winchester there was no public mourning and William Rufus’ body was
buried without a service inside the cathedral.

Ti2
 1087-1100

The dead king’s brother Henry was already at Winchester by the time
the cart arrived. He had galloped as fast as he could to the royal Treasury,
which ever since the Wessex kings had been kept in that city, for
traditionally whoever held the Treasury could be crowned. He persuaded
local nobles to proclaim him king as was customary in the Anglo-Saxon
monarchy. Henry was only just in time, for his brother Robert’s man
arrived immediately afterwards, intent on claiming the throne on behalf of
the duke. By 5 August Henry had been crowned.

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 HenryI
(1100-1135)

Court historians later noted that as a child Henry I had enjoyed seeing his
brothers squabble among themselves because then he knew he would get
the better of them. The new king’s every action was cautious, premeditated
and calculated to serve his own ends. Though he was no scholar the
nickname Beauclerk, which was applied to him from the fourteenth
century, suggests a reputation for natural cleverness. Henry was less
impetuous than William Rufus. Although he was just as grasping, he saw
that he should proceed more shrewdly than his brother if he wished to rule
peacefully.
Henry had inherited his father’s deep respect for acting within the letter
of the law. His first action was to restore the Norman kings to popularity
in England by publishing a Charter of Liberties in which he promised to
end William Rufus’ oppressive practices and return to the days of Edward
the Confessor. As an earnest of this he threw Ranulf Flambard into his
father’s White Tower and married Princess Edith of Scotland, sister of King
Edgar and great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside. This united the
ancient West Saxon blood with that of the new Normans and was another
instance of Henry’s far-sighted calculation. The closeness thus achieved
between the two courts also had the unlooked-for effect of peacefully
opening up Scotland to Norman adventurers. Edith changed her name to
Matilda, to make herself sound more Norman, while her second brother
David (who succeeded Edgar) married the daughter of Earl Waltheof and
did homage to Henry as his overlord.
Within the year these measures designed to win popularity among
Henry’s subjects had paid off. For encouraged by the ingratiating Ranulf
Flambard, who somewhat surprisingly had succeeded in escaping from the
Tower, Duke Robert made a bid for the throne, landing at Portsmouth
with an army raised from many of the Norman barons who held land in
both countries. As a hero of the First Crusade and elder brother to Henry,
Robert could have been a most dangerous rival.
But Henry’s Charter had done its work. The Church, which had been left
alone by the new king, encouraged the English to rally to Henry, a sign of

II4
 TLOO-1135
its favour being the return of the Archbishop of Canterbury from exile in
Rome. Archbishop Anselm put himself at the head of the English people,
declaring that they were not afraid of the Normans and would fight them
if their English Henry would lead them. When Robert saw that he had no
hope of defeating the massed ranks of the English he made a truce with his
powerful brother and signed a legal document in which he abandoned his
claim to the throne. Then, in return for a pension, he gave his lands in the
Cotentin to England and meekly retired to Normandy, leaving the Anglo-
Norman barons who had supported him to face Henry’s wrath.
Because he was a thoughtless sort of fellow Duke Robert had not
understood the terrible risk his followers had taken. To set them all an
example nét to meddle with him again, Henry destroyed the massive
holdings of a great baron named Robert de Belléme, whose lands covered
much of Sussex, a great deal of Normandy and the semi-independent
palatine earldom of Shrewsbury adjoining Wales. De Belléme’s private
army, given royal permission to keep the Welsh behind their borders, was
too much of a threat to the king, and Henry now mounted a concerted
attack on him. He seized all his castles, including the one which still stands
at Arundel in West Sussex, laid siege to his newly built fortress towering
over the Severn at Bridgnorth, abolished the palatine earldom of
Shrewsbury and finally drove de Belléme himself out of the country and
back to Normandy.
Like most Norman barons, however, de Belléme was too powerful and
restless a character to remain quiet for long. Once in Normandy he began
making war on Duke Robert and taking parts of the duchy for himself.
This gave Henry the perfect excuse for interfering in Normandy, which
under his brother was dissolving into anarchy. In 1106 at Tinchebrai
Henry decisively defeated Duke Robert in battle, condemned him to thirty
years’ captivity in Cardiff Castle and formally annexed the duchy to
England. Henceforth for almost a hundred years, until 1204 when Henry
I’s great-grandson John lost the duchy to the French king, England and
Normandy were ruled by the same government.
These upsets prejudiced Henry against the feudal barons, whose heroics
his cold and rational character in any case despised. His firm actions had
convinced them not to revolt again. For the rest of his reign he would make
a point of surrounding himself with men of more modest birth, knights and
clerks chosen for their learnedness who were reliant on his patronage to
advance them, rather than on the threat of a thousand men-at-arms.
Henry’s reign saw the rise of educated men like Roger of Salisbury and the
emergence of a far more businesslike government. Roger, who became
Bishop of Salisbury, was Henry’s justiciar. But he was a very different
character from Flambard, being possessed of a superbly constructive

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 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

organizing mind. Thanks to him the early twelfth century saw the
appearance of the first national law courts, as well as the government
department called the Exchequer, the precursor of the Treasury.
The Curia Regis, or king’s court, had arisen out of the deliberations of
the king with his most intimate friends, the leading barons, in council, and
these embraced the hearing of legal disputes. William Rufus had built
Westminster Hall to allow the king’s judgement to be given in full view of
the people. But in the reign of Henry I the rapid expansion of legal training,
particularly on the continent, and of canon law in the separate Church
courts began to influence the development of the criminal law. A new
professional class of lawyers grew up, better equipped to deal with legal
problems along the lines of universal principles. Trained judges in London
started taking the place of the king in determining the legal issues of
tenants-in-chief or deciding disputes appealed from the shire or county
court. The tradition was begun, which is still carried on today, 800 years
later, of justices going on circuit round the country to dispense the king’s
justice locally. The king’s justice tended to be more impartial or
disinterested, and by the time of his death the improvements he had
introduced to the justice system ensured that Henry would be known as the
Lion of Justice.
The new government department known as the Exchequer collected tax.
It was called the Exchequer for a very simple reason. Unlike the Arab
world, the western Europeans had yet to discover the number zero. This
made even simple arithmetic a difficult exercise. The way to get round it
was to use either an abacus or, as Henry did, a chequered cloth. On this
cloth, which looked not unlike a chessboard, counters representing units of
money were moved about: this was how twelfth-century national
accounting was performed. In the new stone hall of Westminster, business
continued even when the court was travelling. Twice a year, under the
chairmanship of the king or his justiciar, officials called the barons of the
Exchequer sat at a table with counters and the chequered cloth, going
through with all the sheriffs the taxes, rents, fines and debts due to the
crown. Every penny had to be accounted for.
In every way Henry’s reign marks a greater precision in the practice of
government. Thanks to Bishop Roger of Salisbury’s methodical nature, for
the first time in English history since the Roman occupation we can
actually read the government accounts. By 1130 they were written down
on a very long piece of parchment or fine hide which was then rolled up
for easy storage. As this resembled a pipe, the accounts are known as the
Pipe Rolls. For the first time too, we have a clearer idea about life at the
royal court in the early twelfth century, because we possess a record of the
duties of the royal household written after Henry’s death. This record is

I16
 IILOO-1135

particularly important given that, on his death, England fell into chaos and
records were not kept for a while.
Unlike today, when the monarch and her chief minister live at fixed
addresses, Henry was always travelling round the country in the fashion of
his new circuit judges, staying at the royal residences such as his abbeys or
his hunting boxes. Like all the Norman kings he was addicted to the chase,
and built a walled park at Woodstock in Oxfordshire to hunt exotic
breeds. But the king would also expect to be put up by his tenants-in-chief,
sometimes for weeks at a time. To feed and house the court, which might
consist of hundreds of soldiers and courtiers, could be ruinous. Especially
in William Rufus’ time the arrival of the court would be dreaded because
its members were so badly behaved. We are told by the chroniclers that
local landowners would hide themselves in the woods until the court had
passed by after getting no answer to their request for beds for the night.
On the other hand it was a great honour to have the king to stay because
it meant that a young man of the house might become a page in the royal
household and from there rise to great heights as a minister. For, despite
the increasing specialization and professionalism, the king’s household
continued to be the centre of government. The king’s chancellor was head
of all the clerks studying to be priests, who as we have seen performed the
role of the civil service, doing much of the scribal work needed by the
king’s business. The chamberlain was the other prize position at Henry’s
court. Although his name indicates that he presided over the king’s
bedchamber the chamberlain also supervised the king’s Treasury. This
arose from the fact that in ancient times the Treasury had been kept in a
chest in the king’s bedroom. Other king’s servants were the steward, who
looked after the king’s hall, and the constable, who looked after the
outdoor servants — including, as his name suggests, the horses in the king’s
stable.
Out of these domestic positions would eventually grow the great offices
of state we know today, though over the centuries their roles have subtly
altered. The chancellor of the Exchequer now presides over the Treasury.
At the royal Opening of Parliament the bearers of these offices, some of
which like the lord chamberlain have become hereditary or have devolved
on to one particular family, can be seen today walking in the procession
behind the monarch. Great lords would actually pay the king to take their
sons into his household because of the career opportunities it offered. A
page in Henry I’s household who showed willingness and ability in putting
out the king’s clothes or even his food might find his route to high office
smoothed by being chosen to help the king’s chaplain. He would then
usually become a chaplain himself, opening his way to being part of the
king’s secretariat.

D7
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

Henry’s court was conducted with regularity and precision, even down to
noting what food was owed the courtiers. However high or low, every person
at court, whether chancellor or royal laundress, was allocated a certain
amount of money, food, wine and candles to live on. For example, the
chancellor received the following stipend: five shillings a day, a simnel cake (a
rich fruit cake decorated with marzipan), two salted simnels, a form of flour
for bread, a measure of clear and ordinary wine (because water, except from
springs, was too dirty to drink). Because he spent his life poring over letters
the chancellor was allowed the large number of forty candle ends and a thick
wax candle to light his room. In contrast the king’s watchmen who guarded
Henry’s palaces received double the chancellor’s rations for their more
physical work but few candles because they would not be concerned with
reading or auditing accounts. They were allowed a supplement of two loaves
in the morning, an extra dish in the evening and a gallon of beer to while away
the long hours as they watched for the king’s enemies.
Henry’s close alliance with the Church, which was enhanced by having
Bishop Roger as his first minister, meant that the continued struggle for
supremacy between Church and secular ruler was resolved amicably for a
while, though on less advantageous terms than William I had achieved.
During Archbishop Anselm’s exile in Rome the contemporary papal spirit
of independence had converted him to the idea of the supremacy of the
clergy over the prince. Though the archbishop had led the domestic
support for Henry against Duke Robert, in 1103 he publicly backed the
new pope Pascal II when he renewed the investiture crisis and added that
anyone in holy orders was forbidden to do homage to a lay ruler. Although
Anselm had already done homage to Henry he refused to perform the act
again, withdrawing to Rome for a second time. Once again England was
left without a head of the Church, this time for four years. Naturally Henry
could not agree to a directive that seemed to strike at his royal power. It
would have prevented a large number of the English population swearing
an oath of allegiance to him, for holy orders of course covered ordinary
clerks as well as bishops and priests.
A satisfactory compromise was reached between Anselm and Henry.
Royal authority over the Church in England was preserved at the cost of
the king losing the right to perform investitures. All ordinary clerks were
once more allowed to perform homage to the king, while bishops would
do homage to the king for what were known as their temporal possessions,
that is their Church lands, and swore as the king’s vassal to produce the
soldiers which this entailed. This compromise pleased all parties, and
indeed the European investiture contest would end along similar lines. But
there was always the possibility that under less suave representatives of
Church and state the question of whose authority was the greater might

18
 ITIOO-I135
boil up again. Thirty years later, under Henry I’s grandson Henry II, it did
just that.
Though he was not loved by the English, Henry reconciled them to
Norman kings. But on his death the peace he had enforced throughout the
island was shaken by civil war. A simple stroke of fate had upset all his
careful plans. The tragic, premature death of his only son William saw the
throne devolve to his daughter, the Empress Matilda, who had married the
Emperor Henry V. Yet the Norman barons and the Anglo-Saxons
themselves had never been ruled by a woman — Boudicca had been a Celt
and had been queen only of a south-eastern tribe — and all sides were
hostile to such an idea.
William’s death was entirely avoidable. After the formal annexation of
Normandy to the English crown in 1106 the royal household shuttled
between the two countries. Unfortunately on the way back to London after
a four-year sojourn in Normandy in the autumn of 1120 the heir to the
throne, William, was drowned in the Channel just off Barfleur with many
members of Henry’s court. When the terrible news was brought to the king
he gave a cry of agony and fell senseless to the floor. It is said that after this
tragedy he never smiled again. He took another wife soon after, Adeliza of
Louvain, in hopes of producing more male heirs, but none came. By 1126
he was therefore obliged to make his daughter, the widowed Empress
Matilda, his heir. In a formal ceremony his tenants-in-chief did homage to
the empress, as they had done to her brother William, and swore to be her
liege men. In 113.5 Henry I died in Normandy from too many lamphreys,
an indigestible form of eel which his doctor had warned him against. But
the English crown did not pass to Matilda. Instead Henry’s nephew, his
sister Adela’s son Stephen of Blois, was proclaimed king. Although Stephen
had personally sworn the oath of loyalty to his cousin Matilda, he rushed
from his home in Blois to England to claim the throne before the empress
could arrive there from Anjou.

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 Stephen of Blois
(1135-1154)

The new king had been sure that the half-Norman barons would be too
proud to allow themselves to be ruled by a woman, whatever they may
have said to her father. Moreover the Empress Matilda’s unpopularity had
been compounded after the barons had paid her homage by her second
marriage to the Count of Anjou. Although Henry I’s aim in arranging this
marriage had been to make peace between Normandy and her neighbour
Anjou, Anjou’s fierce and scheming counts were the hereditary enemies of
the Norman barons. Stephen reckoned correctly that the combination of
Matilda’s sex and her marriage to an Angevin would be more than the
great Anglo-Norman magnates could stomach.
As he had hoped, all the most important tenants-in-chief as well as the
increasingly powerful London merchants backed his claim, as did the
supremely important figure of Bishop Roger of Salisbury. By winning over
Henry’s justiciar and the organizing genius of his reign, Stephen had
secured the loyalty of Henry’s network of government officials, the clerks
and all the new judges. Stephen’s brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester,
who had enjoyed his uncle Henry’s patronage, helped garner the support
of the Church, which made his brother’s usurpation seem more legitimate.
When Stephen and his soldiers arrived at Winchester after he had been
acclaimed king in London, Bishop Henry played a crucial role in ensuring
that the new king secured the Treasury.
Stephen had obtained mastery over a country that had recovered from
the misery of war and was now enjoying unprecedented growth thanks to
the trade links with the wealthy Norman Empire. During Henry I’s lifetime
the king’s peace had been enforced on the country and the barons brought
to heel. Peace encouraged prosperity and cultural advances: towns, the
religious life and the arts had a chance to flourish. Merchant guilds and
craft guilds, for cobblers and weavers, were established for the first time to
set standards in trade. Guild members would have sold their goods at what
became the greatest cloth fair in medieval England, Bartholomew Fair,
started up in 1133. Ten years before that the London hospital we know as
St Bart’s, or St Bartholomew’s, was founded. The Empress Matilda would

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 T135-I154
probably have worn the new materials brought back by English Crusaders
or by the merchants accompanying them from the east, such as cotton
muslin. Wealthy ladies like herself would have enjoyed the increasingly
elaborate patterning embroidered on cloth that merchants imported from
Palestine. In Yorkshire the newly founded Cistercian order commissioned
the delicate pointed arches of Rievaulx Abbey which not only reveal the
influence of eastern architecture but also show that Romanesque church
fortresses were no longer quite so necessary. The English were exposed
through Norman links to Paris, where the monk Abelard was altering the
study of philosophy with his promotion of logic, and what is often known
as the twelfth-century renaissance of learning was beginning. Scholars
came to England to give lectures, and continental manuscript traditions
bore fruit in English monasteries like those at St Albans, Canterbury and
Winchester, which began to achieve new heights in the art of illuminated
books.
But under Stephen this prosperity began to falter. King David of
Scotland repeatedly invaded Northumberland on behalf of his niece
Matilda, bringing the years of peaceful coexistence between England and
Scotland to an end. The Scottish king was finally driven out of England
after his defeat at the Battle of the Standard on Cowton Moor in 1138, at
the hands of the elderly Archbishop Thurstan of York, who on his own
initiative had raised the northern fyrd. As an independent-minded
Yorkshireman Archbishop Thurston had little time for Norman innova-
tions. Not only did his army fight on foot in the old fashion which had been
discredited by the Battle of Hastings, he went into battle displaying the
banners of Stephen and three of Yorkshire’s most famous saints on a
farmer’s cart to inspire his fellow countrymen. His faith in old-fashioned
methods was rewarded, and his troops defeated the Scots cavalry by
breaking their charge.
Although Matilda’s uncle had been held at bay, later that year civil war
broke out between the empress and Stephen after the king made the
mistake of sacking Roger of Salisbury. The quarrel between Stephen and
Bishop Roger seems to have been born out of the sensitive king’s personal
insecurities. He saw Roger of Salisbury’s family monopoly of ministerial
positions — Roger’s two nephews held the bishoprics of Ely and Lincoln,
while his son was the royal chancellor — as a threat to his own power.
When they refused to give up some of their castles, Stephen, by confiscating
their great possessions, irrevocably broke with the family whose powerful
network of patronage effectively ran the government. Less than a month
after Roger had been driven from office in 1138, the Empress Matilda’s
half-brother Robert of Gloucester landed in England to stir up rebellion
against Stephen. Gloucester was a cultivated man who was the patron of

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Geoffrey of Monmouth, an historian and popularizer of the Arthurian

myths.
A year later, in September 113.9, Matilda herself arrived in the west near
Bristol. For the next ten years the English people suffered as the two parties
battled it out, winning a little territory here, a little territory there, but
neither side prevailing. Despite Stephen’s attempt to win popularity by
abandoning the new forests created by Henry I, he had never seized the
public imagination.
The only people who profited from the anarchy that ensued were the
barons. As the royal government’s control of England diminished, their
power expanded until their position was very different from what it had
been under the first three Norman kings. None of them was interested in
Stephen or Matilda winning and none of them threw his weight behind
either candidate. This prolonged the war (it was to last ten years), and
Stephen had to resort to importing Flemish mercenaries, which did nothing
for his popularity. Over the next fifteen years hundreds of castles and
fortified buildings were erected illegally. In those days, because castles were
potential instruments of war, a licence for them had to be obtained from
the king. They replaced the Norman manor houses as the predominant
form of domestic architecture, indicating that English life at that time was
lived in a state of siege. Their dungeons often concealed scenes of
unspeakable suffering. Peasants were carried off there and tortured when
they would not pay the extortionate new dues that the barons began to
demand now that the sheriff was not there to prevent them. So many
agricultural workers were imprisoned that crops began to fail all over the
country: no one knew whom the barons would seize next or whose house
would be set on fire to make the owner relinquish his hoard of silver. The
chronicles of the time are full of lamentation. ‘They took all who had any
property and put them in prison,’ reported The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
‘and some that were once rich men went about begging their bread. They
robbed churches and churchmen, and though the bishops and clergy were
ever cursing them, they cared nothing for their curses. The land was all
undone with their deeds and men said that Christ and His Saints slept.’
In return for their support some enterprising barons demanded a vast
part of the crown lands from Stephen, which his predecessors had been at
such pains to acquire. Geoffrey of Mandeville showed particular greed and
joined first Stephen and then Matilda, gaining more territory each time he
changed sides. Stalemate marked the struggle: Matilda’s supporters held
on to the west near Bristol and Gloucester because they were the territory
of her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, while Stephen’s partisans
controlled London and the south-east. At last, in rr41, the stalemate was
broken when Robert of Gloucester and his son-in-law the Earl of Chester

i222
 T1Z5-1154
captured Stephen, who was laying siege to Lincoln. When Bishop Henry of
Winchester, Stephen’s own brother, declared that this was a sign from God
that Stephen’s claim to the throne was illegitimate some of the most
important magnates elected Matilda queen. All would have been settled
had it not been for her haughty personality and the independence of
Londoners.
Londoners, who were already pro-Stephen and were less than impressed
by the empress’s lack of warmth, unexpectedly refused to agree to the
barons’ wishes. They rose up and drove Matilda out of their city in the
most humiliating way, in the middle of the night. What had appeared clear
cut was once again all confusion. Bishop Henry received further super-
natural guidance to suggest that the Almighty was perhaps coming round
to Stephen’s claim. He changed sides and led a new rebellion to try to free
the imprisoned king. Matilda remained uncrowned, and Robert of
Gloucester, her brilliant commander-in-chief, was captured during a battle
at Winchester, leaving her to command her own forces.
The empress not only lacked the common touch; without her brother she
had no sense of tactics. She was soon on the run. Narrowly evading
Stephen’s forces at Devizes in Wiltshire — disguised, it is said, as a corpse
in grave clothes — she ended up besieged in Oxford Castle. In December
1142, when it became clear that her men were going to have to surrender
because food had run out, she managed to escape again. In the early hours
of the morning, dressed in long white robes so that she would not show up
against the snow that lay thickly on the ground, she climbed out of a
window and slid down a rope suspended from one of the castle towers. By
a secret postern gate she and three knights left the castle compound and
slipped through the enemy lines without any of the soldiers realizing that
the shadowy form melting into street corners was their prey. On account
of the freezing weather there was a very thick crust of ice on the River
Thames and the empress was able to walk all the way along it to the safety
of Wallingford.
The two sides now agreed to exchange their two most important
prisoners of war, Robert of Gloucester and Stephen, and the war continued
up and down the country. But Matilda’s cause was now a rather half-
hearted one, particularly since Londoners had prevented her from being
crowned. With the death of Robert of Gloucester in 1148 much of her
support faded away, and she swept back to Normandy, never to return.
Stephen remained nominally King of England, though he controlled very
little of the country that the Norman kings had subjugated. The Welsh
were invading the lands of the marcher lords, and the north of England was
the fiefdom of King David of Scotland. So the anarchy continued even
though the war was over.

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 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

In 1153, however, the arrival of the empress’s son Henry of Anjou to

demand his mother’s throne signalled a new era for England. He captured
Malmesbury, and his cause was given an additional fillip by the support of
the Earl of Leicester, which meant that Henry held the whole of the
midlands. Although Stephen had not been defeated unequivocally, he was
by now tired of so much warfare. On the recommendation of his advisers
he agreed by the Treaty of Wallingford in that year that he would rule until
he died, but that Henry was to succeed him. Stephen’s son Eustace was
paid off with considerable lands.

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CASTILE
 Henry II
(1154-1189)

Although he was only twenty-one years old at the beginning of his reign in
1154, Henry II would be one of England’s greatest kings. He was a worthy
representative of the twelfth-century renaissance, a period of startling
innovation and growing self-confidence, when there was a sudden explo-
sion of written sources, of histories, biographies and political treatises.
Much of the framework of English national law that Henry II set up has
lasted down to the present day.
In 1154 the country was still reeling from the disorder of Stephen’s reign.
But Henry’s vigorous supervision saw to it that by the end of the decade
England was once again being run along the well-oiled lines of his
grandfather Henry I. Supporters of both his mother and Stephen, such as
Roger of Salisbury’s nephew Nigel, Bishop of Ely, were willing to sink their
differences in order for the bitterness of civil war to end. The Curia Regis
began to function again; itinerant justices dared to venture out of their
homes. Above all, Henry’s aim was to limit the power of the barons so that
the sort of destructive anarchy which the country had experienced would
never be visited on England again.
In fact Henry II was not a man any baron would wish to trifle with. Not
only was he in the fierce, energetic mould of the Norman kings and
possessed of a powerful personality, thanks to his marriage to Eleanor of
Aquitaine he also ruled the whole of western France from the Loire to the
Pyrenees on the borders of Spain, as well as Normandy and Anjou,
inherited from his mother and his father respectively. (Eleanor had brought
him Aquitaine, Poitou and Auvergne.) The new king of England was thus
the greatest monarch in western Europe. No baron was going to argue
when he ordered that the 1,115 illegal or ‘adulterine’ castles be pulled
down, given that Henry could call on an unlimited number of soldiers from
his vast continental possessions to do the job for him. Although England
was not the largest part of his possessions it was the most important
because it gave him a crown. This meant he outranked all his tenants-in-
chief on the French continent. It also made him the feudal equal of the King
of France. Though technically Louis VII was Henry’s overlord for

1s
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

Normandy and Anjou, the French king ruled an area that was not even
one-eighth the size of what the English king held in France.
Henry’s most pressing task was to restore order to England and reduce
the power of the barons to what it had been in the past. He brought the
royal power back to the level his grandfather had known by leading military
expeditions against the Celtic borderlands of the country, Wales and
Scotland. Although Gwynedd remained independent, most of the Welsh
princes once again did homage to the English king as overlord, and the
English marcher lords resumed their old territories. The ancient separation
between Welsh and English Christianity was done away with when the
Welsh bishops agreed that the Archbishop of Canterbury should head their
Church too. Henry’s first cousin Malcolm IV of Scotland, meanwhile, had
to return Northumbria to England and was made to do homage to him as
his overlord. Henry strongly impressed the official class of England by his
firm measures. All foreign soldiers, like the Flemish mercenaries Stephen
had used who were still at large in rapacious bands, were packed off to their
countries of origin, and all the crown lands Stephen had granted away were
restored to royal control. The king insisted on spending time travelling from
county court to county court ‘judging the judges’, as one chronicler put it;
this would result in a complete shake-up of the legal system.
The first twenty years of Henry II’s reign saw the considerable expansion
of the Angevin Empire — that is, the empire of Anjou — with the acquisition
of Brittany and of the overlordship of Toulouse; he also obtained the
submission of the Irish kings. Despite his Norman ancestry Henry’s
character owed just as much to his father Geoffrey, who had made the
counts of Anjou a rising power in what is now France. By 1144 Geoffrey
of Anjou had brought enough of the Duchy of Normandy under his sway
to have become its duke by conquest. But because his son Henry had a legal
claim to it through his mother, all government business tended to be done
in the name of his son. Thanks to his father’s interest in education Henry
II was one of the best-educated princes of the day, exposed to the finest
European learning. Fond of verse and reading, he was also interested in
philosophy and, though not a lawyer himself, he absorbed the advances in
the law being made at the new universities on the continent and applied
them to England. His father being the Count of Anjou, Henry II was the
first Angevin king of England, but after his son John lost Anjou Henry’s
descendants became known as the Plantagenets.
Henry II combined in his person the best and worst sides of his genetic
heritage. He had the cunning Angevin mind with its flair for diplomacy, as
well as the Angevins’ violent temper, and this was allied to the forcefulness
of the dukes of Normandy. In addition to the education his father had
provided he had also responded well to the training in statecraft he

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received from his uncles King David of Scotland and Robert of Gloucester.
In sum Henry II was one of the most formidable men ever to sit on the
English throne, a marvellous warrior and a great statesman. Physically he
took after the Angevins, being slightly thick set with famously muscled
calves because he was in the saddle so much, and he had a square, lion-like,
ruddy-complexioned face. When he was irritated, which was much of the
time, the chroniclers noted, his eyes seemed to flash lightning.
Henry’s vast inheritance from his father, the Angevin Empire, brought
its own problems. Much of his energies and those of his sons would be
inextricably bound up with a battle with the King of France for mastery of
French territory. To begin with the King of France controlled only a very
small area round Paris, but the struggle would end with the loss of the
northern empire to France at the beginning of the thirteenth century when
the Angevins found a worthy opponent in the French king Philip Augustus.
But the empire also brought great advantages to England, as it led to the
establishment of close relations between England’s southern ports, London,
Bristol and Southampton, and the equally busy Angevin entrepéts of
Bordeaux, Rouen and La Rochelle. English merchants were able to import at
advantageous rates the French wine and salt which were the preservatives and
therefore the great commodities of the middle ages. Water was too dangerous
to drink until the purification techniques developed in the nineteenth century,
so wine or beer was the drink of choice, small beer being drunk by all classes
throughout the day from breakfast onwards. Although vines were grown in
southern England during the middle ages, England’s ownership until the mid-
fifteenth century of Aquitaine and her great region of Bordeaux gave rise to a
tradition of the English drinking Bordeaux that was perpetuated until the
Napoleonic Wars (when Britain’s ally Portugal temporarily replaced France
as the main source of British alcoholic beverages).
Ruling such a great empire needed a man of tremendous energy prepared
to travel long distances, for what gave the disparate parts of the Angevin
Empire their strength and unity was the figure of the king. Fortunately,
Henry was suited to the task; he was consumed by curiosity and was
famous for his lack of pomp and his indifference to his surroundings. The
whole court might find themselves wandering lost in an unknown forest
while the king galloped ahead. ‘Frequently in the dark,’ remembered Peter
of Blois, ‘we would consider our prayers answered if we found by chance
some mean filthy hut. Often there were fierce quarrels over these hovels,
and courtiers fought with drawn swords for a lodging that it would have
disgraced pigs to fight for.’
Henry’s addiction to hunting, shared with so many Normans, meant
that much of the king’s business was done in the country, although with
the establishment of permanent law courts at Westminster London was
py
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

becoming the seat of government. The king was perpetually busy, and his
astonished courtiers observed that he never sat down except to eat, and
even then he bolted his food. He found it so hard not to be doing things
that he used to draw pictures all through the Mass which as a devout
Christian he heard every day. Priests deputed to say the royal Mass were
chosen for the speed with which they could get through the service, for
everyone dreaded Henry’s rage.
One of the king’s first appointments in England was his elevation to the
chancellorship of a talented and charismatic secretary in the household of
the Archbishop of Canterbury named Thomas a Becket, the son of a
Norman merchant in London. Becket’s natural brilliance and sharp
debating skills, which had marked him out when he was only a page, had
been honed not only by legal studies in Theobald’s household but by being
sent to study Roman and canon law at the University of Bologna in Italy.
Since then he had been entrusted by the archbishop with many important
missions abroad, having shown himself to be a clever and energetic
diplomat.
But Becket became more than just Henry’s chancellor. As a foreigner the
young king needed information about England, and this was supplied by
the articulate Thomas. They became boon companions, spending most of
their time together. Contemporaries noted how extraordinarily close they
were. For a decade the two men — Thomas was some ten years older — ruled
almost like brothers, with Thomas taking a starring role in defending the
ancient rights and lands of the crown and as chancellor supervising every
royal instruction or writ. Henry relied on Thomas for everything, to an
almost excessive extent, as they ate every meal together and romped and
wrestled more like boys than king and minister. On one occasion Henry
rode his horse into Thomas’s hall and jumped over the table to sit and dine
with him. One writer said, ‘Never in Christian times were two men more
of a mind. In Church they sat together, together they rode out.’ Unlike the
king, who was always rather plainly dressed, perhaps because he was
rarely to be seen off a horse, the ambitious Thomas a Becket was known
for his love of display and heavily embroidered cloaks. Although Henry
liked to puncture pretension in anyone else, it amused him in Thomas.
The chancellor was as full of ingenious ideas as the king. He probably
encouraged Henry to rely on the increasingly widespread custom of
scutage, or shield money (from scutum, the Latin for shield), the payment
of two marks in lieu of knight’s service by those of his tenants-in-chief and
their vassals who could not spare the time to fight. Henry was forever
having to wage wars to maintain his territories in France, where they were
threatened by the meddling activities of the French king Louis VII, who
was uncontrollably jealous of his too powerful vassal. It was much easier

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to depend on the skills of professional soldiers paid for with the shield
money. Moreover, to a ruler anxious to reassert royal authority, scutage
had the additional advantage of diminishing the military power of the
barons. Becket himself enjoyed fighting just as much as the king, and in
1159 he was on his charger at Henry’s side as his master attempted to
subjugate the county of Toulouse. Becket’s subtle mind may also have
dreamed up a marriage treaty between the daughter of the King of France
and Henry’s eldest son as a means of obtaining for England the coveted
Vexin region, midway between Rouen and Paris. Certainly it was he who
conducted the negotiations. Since the bride and groom were six months
and four years old at the time, Louis VII assumed that the event would not
take place for at least ten years, although the baby princess went to live at
the court of Henry II. But to Louis’ rage a couple of years later in 1160 the
children were married to one another, now aged six and two, and the
Vexin thus once more became part of Henry’s empire.
Thomas grew enormously wealthy as Henry granted him the revenues of
many religious foundations. When he was sent as ambassador to negotiate
the transfer of the Vexin, his equipage was so magnificent that all the
French ran out to see it. One thousand knights accompanied him, and 250
pages sang verses to his glory and waved banners. Priests rode two by two
alongside the relics from his own chapel which accompanied him; behind
them monkeys rode on the saddles of the horses bearing gold for the
French king.
In 1162 Archbishop Theobald died. The infatuated king decided that the
magnificent Thomas, whose views were so close to his own, should
controversially (since he was not an ordained priest) be appointed head of
the English Church, namely Archbishop of Canterbury. At the same time
he would remain head of the king’s Chancery. Like all rulers of the time
Henry had been dissatisfied by what seemed the increasingly aggressive
demands of the Church. Thomas a Becket might have been the Church
establishment’s candidate for the chancellorship, but during his eight years
in office he had completely identified with the king when it came to
collecting taxes imposed on the Church for royal wars. The appointment
seemed to be a master stroke which would bring the Church more tightly
under royal control.
The years of anarchy and the weakness of the crown had enhanced not
only the power of the barons but also the position of the Church. When the
king’s writs to the shire court had more or less dried up, Church courts had
taken their place. By the time of Henry II Church lawyers had been
drawing into their courts all aspects of ordinary life, and had begun to
argue that cases involving debt belonged to them. Church lawyers
appealed to Rome in ever increasing numbers about property, as opposed

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to the spiritual issues their courts were intended for. In addition these
lawyers were using their expertise to boost the revenues of the Church so
that its income was now greater than the king’s.
The success of the Church in expanding its power had been aided by the
activities of a group of Englishmen at Rome, including John of Salisbury,
the political philosopher and Becket’s future biographer, and Nicholas
Breakspear, who became Pope Adrian IV in 1154. The twelfth century was
internationally the great century for the development of law and these men
were among those leading the advance of canon law. Like Thomas a
Becket, John of Salisbury had become a member of Archbishop Theobald’s
household, and under his influence a more thorough legal training began
to be offered to clerks throughout the country.
But for Henry II the most controversial issue relating to the Church was
its expansion into the criminal law. Its argument that it reserved to itself
the right to try anyone in holy orders was allowing murderers and thieves
off scot free. Royal judges who called for clerks in holy orders to appear
before them were being insulted, and the miscreants were refusing to
accept their authority. At this period the term holy orders meant not just
priests but any person trained by the Church. Any man who could write
Latin could say he was a clerk, and thus come under the category of clergy.
So could anyone who simply had the top his head shaved in a tonsure.
Because Church courts could not hand down a death sentence, a great
number of ‘criminous clerks’, as Henry would call them, were escaping
proper punishment. They usually avoided prison too, as the Church did
not like to pay for it, arguing that its penalty of degrading a man from holy
orders was punishment enough. As part of Henry’s drive to restore
harmony and regularity to his new kingdom these anomalies had to be
addressed. By appointing Thomas a Becket archbishop he believed he
would draw the too independent and powerful Church into subjection.
However, Thomas was extremely reluctant to accept the post, partly
because he foresaw a clash of interests. Despite his great worldliness he
knew himself well enough to see that he always pursued his tasks
wholeheartedly. He is said to have told the king, ‘If I become Archbishop
of Canterbury, it will be God I serve before you.’ Thomas was in any case
unpopular within the Church hierarchy itself for his hard line on making
ecclesiastical lands pay scutage; many churchmen in addition were
appalled that a mere deacon, who therefore could not say Mass, should
become head of the Church. Those who knew Becket greeted his
appointment with scepticism, unable to believe that this proud and
arrogant chancellor could become a saintly archbishop and forswear a life
of revelry and extravagance. But, much to the world’s surprise, that is just
what he did.

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As soon as he became archbishop, having been ordained priest, his

behaviour underwent a transformation. He spent his nights in prayer and
mortification of the flesh. Beneath his gorgeous vestments he wore a
prickly shirt made of goat’s hair which swarmed with vermin so that he
would always be suffering as Christ had done. For contemporaries and for
many later observers, this metamorphosis was evidence that God and his
august position had worked a great change in him. Modern historians,
however, have been less inclined to take a view so strongly coloured by
religious faith. It has been pointed out that once he became archbishop
Thomas behaved in an extraordinarily antagonistic fashion to his patron.
Despite his notably spiritual life he used his position to interfere in the
king’s business as obstructively as he had been helpful before. It was as if
he was testing his power against the man who had appointed him, though
only months before they had been the closest friends.
Although the potential for a quarrel had been building up for some time,
it burst out in 1163 when the king informed his bishops in council at
Westminster of his intention to end the legal loophole known as ‘benefit of
clergy’. He intended to make it the law that ‘criminous clerks’ convicted in
the Church courts would be degraded from holy orders and punished by
his judges, for it was now obvious that an informal understanding that
convicted clerks be retried in the royal courts was not working. When
Becket himself refused to give permission for the retrial of a canon, Henry
struck. Claiming his right according to the ancient customs of England, in
January 1164 he drew up the Constitutions of Clarendon as a restatement
of the position of the English Church’s organization.
However, the Constitutions of Clarendon went a great deal further than
the immediate issue at hand, and a great deal further than ancient custom.
They dealt not only with criminous clerks but with Henry’s attempt to
restrict the Church’s power and define relations between Church and state:
priests were forbidden to leave the country without royal permission; nor
could excommunication be used against the king’s barons without his
permission; all disputes over land were to be decided in the king’s courts
even if they concerned the Church; disputed debts were also to be confined
to the king’s courts; appeals to Rome were to be made only if Henry
allowed them.
Although most of the bishops, led by Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of
London, were at first angered by the Constitutions, they came round to
them — persuaded by the king’s threats of violence against them. The exile
from Rome of Pope Alexander III prevented him from doing anything that
might annoy the King of England. Henry II was one of Alexander’s chief
supporters against his rival Pope Paschal, the candidate of the emperor
Frederick Barbarossa. Barbarossa, named for his red beard, had driven

ie
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

Alexander out of Italy, and Alexander would do anything to prevent the

King of England going over to the emperor’s side in the long struggle for
power that was the investiture crisis.
Becket refused to sign the Constitutions, on the ground that they
infringed the liberties of the Church. This was hugely embarrassing
because if the Constitutions were to become law they required the seal of
the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The king’s anger knew no bounds, though he was also hurt by Thomas’s
strange behaviour and wound up by his jealous rivals in the Church. He
confiscated the archbishop’s property and removed his eldest son Henry
from his guardianship. He then set about ruining him. When the king’s
Great Council met at Northampton in October 1164, Henry demanded
that all the money which had passed through Becket’s hands when he was
his chancellor should be accounted for. Thomas replied that he had spent
it all in the king’s service. He enraged the king still further by carrying a
large crucifix to indicate that the only protection he claimed was God’s.
Like everything about the archbishop, to his enemies this seemed absurdly
dramatic behaviour. But to his supporters like John of Salisbury it was
courageous and showed the astonishing miracle that God was performing
in Becket’s heart.
The king’s bullying only increased Thomas’s stubbornness. Despite pleas
from the bishops that he sign the Constitutions, Thomas insisted on
arguing with Henry face to face, and there was an angry exchange of
words. Henry exclaimed that he was appalled by Thomas’s ingratitude. He
had raised him to the pinnacle of honour in the land, yet Thomas did
nothing but oppose him. Had he forgotten all the proofs of his affection?
Thomas responded that he was not unmindful of the things which God,
bestower of all things, had seen fit to bestow on him through the king. He
did not wish to act against his wishes, so long as it was agreeable to the will
of God. Henry was indeed his liege lord, but God was lord of both of them
and to ignore God’s will in order to obey the king would benefit neither
him nor the king. For as St Peter said, ‘We ought to obey God rather than
man.’ When the king retorted that he wanted no sermons from the son of
one of his villeins, Thomas said, ‘It is true that I am not of royal lineage,
but neither was St Peter.’
As the archbishop still refused to sign, Henry’s justiciar pronounced him
a traitor. At last appreciating that with the King of England as his enemy
his life was in danger, Thomas escaped from Northampton in the middle
of the night and fled abroad to appeal to Pope Alexander III. He remained
out of the country for six years.
For Henry the situation became intolerable. It embarrassed him at home
and internationally for England to be without a head of the Church for so

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long. By 1170, however, the archbishop had returned, following

intervention by the pope. It was believed by both sides that a reconciliation
had been effected. At a meeting in France the king promised to allow the
archbishop back into the country.
Thomas returned in December, taking up residence once more in the
Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury. His occupancy lasted less than a
month. Although at their meeting Henry II had never mentioned signing
the Constitutions of Clarendon the king had assumed that this would take
place and begin the process of reform. But the archbishop was as obstinate
as ever. He refused to lift the sentence of excommunication he had imposed
on the Archbishop of York who on Whitsunday in Thomas’s absence had
crowned Henry II’s eldest son, the young Henry. This was a medieval
custom intended to ensure the loyalty of the barons in the future, but
performing the ceremony was the special right of the Archbishop of
Canterburv. In fact that December Becket re-excommunicated all those
who had been involved, seven of the most important men in England
including the justiciar and Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London, with nine
other bishops.
For a brief period there was a lull. December passed awkwardly, with
king and archbishop not on speaking terms. The king’s temper was not
improved by the pope suddenly taking Thomas’s side. A papal bull or
message arrived if not excommunicating at least suspending all the English
bishops who had taken part in the young king’s coronation, leaving the
English Church in a state of chaos.
On Christmas Day news reached Henry II, who was spending the festive
season in icy Normandy, that Thomas had struck again. He had now
excommunicated Ralph de Broc, who had been steward of the diocese of
Canterbury’s lands during his absence. Maddened by this constant thorn
in his flesh, raising his hands to heaven the always impulsive Henry said
furiously, ‘Can none of the cowards eating my bread free me of this
turbulent priest?’
No sooner were the rash words out of the king’s mouth than four
knights who had always disliked Becket, Hugh de Morville, Reginald Fitz
Urse, Richard le Breton and William de Tracy, left the hall and made for
England. Having touched down at the home of Ralph de Broc, they went
on to the Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury.
On 29 December, on a dark winter’s afternoon with the pale sun
scarcely penetrating the freezing skies, the archbishop was reading quietly
in the library when there was a great commotion at the gate. Pursued
vainly by palace servants — priests and serving boys — the knights burst into
the archbishop’s room and demanded he withdraw the excommunications.
The archbishop ignored them. Saying that he was only obeying the pope,

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he then set off for the nearby cathedral, followed by his cross-bearer
Edward Grim, who lived to tell the tale.
The knights paused to put on their armour — though why they needed
this was unclear since their only opponents would have been the unarmed
monks singing Vespers. Ahead of them now in the gloom of the cathedral
they could see Thomas’s white garments glimmering as he prepared to
listen to Mass before the high altar. ‘Where is the archbishop? Where is the
traitor?’ they shouted. ‘Here am I,’ said Becket, turning to meet his
murderers, ‘not traitor but archbishop and priest of God.’ Then he meekly
bowed his head as if for the first blow. One of the knights remembered his
Christian upbringing sufficiently to want to kill the Archbishop of
Canterbury outside consecrated ground, ground where for over 500 years
the English nation had worshipped. He tried to drag the archbishop out.
But Thomas refused to go. He clung so hard to a pillar in the north transept
just below the north aisle left of the choir that the knights decided that they
would have to kill him where he stood. The first blow missed him and hit
the cross-bearer, but then all the knights piled in. The Archbishop of
Canterbury was butchered before the High Altar.
This deed of blood perpetrated by four Christian knights apparently on
the orders of the Christian King of England became the scandal of western

The martyrdom of St Thomas

a Becket in Canterbury
Cathedral in 1170 by four
knights of Henry II.
From an English Psalter
circa I200 AD.
 IL54-1189

Europe. Although Henry II probably had no

idea that his exasperated outburst would be
seen as an order to murder (we know from
contemporary records that the king was
planning to have him tried for treason), the
world preferred to believe otherwise. The
murder of the head of the English Church at the
behest of the King of England had enormous
reverberations. The cult of St Thomas the
Christian martyr — for the pope promptly
canonized him — spread as far as Iceland.
Thomas dead was far more powerful than
Pilgrim going to Thomas alive. All his former misdeeds were
Canterbury to the shrine forgotten, and he was venerated as the Church’s
of Thomas a Becket. Sarees :
champion against injustice. The shrine erected
to the former archbishop became one of the
most popular in Europe — thus in The Canterbury Tales the Pilgrims are
seeking the ‘blissful holy martyr’. It was also the most richly adorned,
having a great reputation for miraculous cures effected by his lacerated
body. If the archbishop had been wrong to resist the punishment of the
clerks, there was some justification for him opposing such a naked
assertion of royal power against the Church. But though Thomas a Becket
passed into English folklore as a hero, the view taken of him today is less
enthusiastic. His martyrdom put back the reform of an abuse for 300
years.
For all the animosity of the previous few years Henry II was a genuinely
devout man and he was appalled by the murder. He burst into loud cries
when he heard the news, put on sackcloth, rubbed his face with ashes and,
as was noticed by the Bishop of Lisieux, behaved more like a friend than
the sovereign of the dead man — which of course he had once been. Shutting
himself up in his room for three days, he would not eat and fell into stupors
so that for a while the country feared it might lost its king as well as its
archbishop. Even though Thomas’s own erratic behaviour had to some
extent brought his fate upon him, his hideous murder cast a stain over the
rest of Henry’s reign from which he never quite recovered. The golden
reputation and some of the zest for life faded. Despite his great legislative
achievements from 1173 onwards his life was marred by rebellions
throughout his far-flung possessions, stirred up by his sons whose enmity
was used by the King of France to expand his territory at England’s
expense.
Henry II was the first English king to extend Norman power to the next-
door island of Ireland. Although Irish monks had preserved much of the

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classical corpus in their monasteries and Irish Christianity had been

substantially responsible for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom,
the great days of early Irish civilization were over. Many monasteries had
been destroyed in the ninth-century Viking raids that created the
settlements of Dublin, Cork and Limerick. The arts and letters were no
longer flourishing in a country ruled by a large number of kings who were
in effect tribal chieftains. Bloody vengeance and constant war were now
the custom of the country.
It was Dermot, King of Leinster who provided the open door to allow
the Normans into Ireland. In 1166 he was expelled from Ireland by an
alliance of his rivals, their pretext being that he had carried off Devorgil,
the beautiful wife of the chieftain of Breffny in neighbouring Connaught.
Dermot fled to Henry II’s court, which was then at Bristol, to ask for
troops to win his kingdom back. Although the king turned down his
request for aid, he gave Dermot a letter authorizing him to recruit any of
his English subjects. In return King Dermot pledged his homage to Henry
as his overlord. It soon became clear to Dermot that the place to recruit
Norman adventurers or mercenaries was among the marcher lords of
South Wales, who were on active service pushing back the frontiers of the
fierce Welsh kings’ kingdoms. In the Norman system of strict primo-
geniture landless younger sons who would do anything for money and land
were just the breed needed to reconquer Dermot’s kingdom.
Richard de Clare, the palatine Earl of Pembroke, volunteered to be
leader of the Norman expedition to Ireland. His reputation as a warrior
was so great that most people knew him by the nickname of Strongbow. In
return for his help King Dermot promised the hand in marriage of his
lovely daughter Eva and the throne of Leinster when he died. A painting
can be seen at the House of Commons today which shows the wedding
ceremony of Eva and Strongbow, marking the moment when Ireland began
to be ruled from England, as it was for the next 800 years. It was up to
Strongbow to recruit his own men, and he gathered together a very
efficient band of Norman knights as the advance guard of the expedition.
The most important of them were the family known as Fitzgerald and their
half-brothers the Fitzstephens. They were all the sons of a Welsh princess
named Nesta (daughter of Rhys ap Tudor) by Gerald of Windsor, a
Norman knight with royal connections. Accompanying these warriors to
Ireland was their youngest brother, a scholar known to history as Giraldus
Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales - Cambrensis means Welsh in Latin). He
described the expedition to Ireland in tremendous detail.
Despite the Normans’ small numbers — and even though Strongbow
himself had remained in England — their superb discipline and battle tactics
stood them in good stead against the Irish tribes and Danish kingdoms.
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Celtic individualism and traditions of tribal warfare made it just as difficult

for twelfth-century Celts to band together and forget their historic enmities
as it had been for first-century AD Celts in Britannia against the Romans.
Though the Irish matched the Normans for bravery, they were quarrel-
some and disorganized and found it so difficult to accept leadership, to
forget their endless grudges and stop warring against one another to
combine against a far more dangerous foe, that the important towns of
Wexford and Dublin quickly fell to the Norman adventurers. In 1170,
after two years of fighting led by William, Raymond and Maurice
Fitzgerald, Strongbow at last crossed the Irish Sea, took the town of
Waterford and married Eva. When Dermot died the following year,
Strongbow became King of Leinster. For all their exploits the Norman
lords’ hold on Ireland was fairly tenuous. The Norse relations of the
citizens of the Norse town of Dublin soon began to attack them, crossing
from the Isle of Man. Though the Normans drove them off, they were then
attacked by King Dermot’s Irish enemies.
Fortunately for Strongbow, in 1171 Henry became alarmed at the threat
an independent Norman kingdom in Ireland might pose to his own empire.
The continuing furore over Becket’s death may have been an additional
spur prompting him to assert his rule over the neighbouring island and its
warring inhabitants of Irish, Danish and Norman lords. The number of
soldiers available to the master of the Angevin Empire was of course far
larger than Strongbow’s forces. In consequence, little attempt was made to
stand up to the first English king to regard himself as ruler of Ireland, and
Henry soon set up an English administration in Dublin. The Irish chiefs in
fact welcomed the king as protection against the Norman adventurers,
while the Norman rulers’ submission was soon secured, and the Irish
bishops at the Synod of Cashel likewise acknowledged Henry as their liege
lord. Henry garrisoned the towns of Waterford and Wexford with his
soldiers, brought Anglo-Norman merchants, Anglo-Norman law and
Anglo-Norman monks to the country, and built a palace in Dublin. Here
he passed the winter. He would have done more had he not been forced in
1173 to deal with a rebellion which had broken out throughout the empire
in his absence, instigated by his wife and sons.
As a result the impact of the Norman invasion of Ireland, unlike that of
England, was not very far reaching. It was really limited to the conglomer-
ation of what became in effect self-contained little Norman kingdoms
around Waterford, Wexford and Dublin. The territory where the crown’s
writ ran came to be known much later as the Pale (from the Latin palum,
a stake, used to mark a boundary; this Irish usage gave rise to the
expression ‘beyond the pale’). This territory was never a very well-defined
area. In the fourteenth century it included Louth, Meath, Trim, Kilkenny

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and Kildare. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the chieftains and
their clans had made enormous inroads into the Pale, while the old
Norman families like the Fitzgeralds (whose leader was the Earl of Kildare)
became so powerful and independent that the Tudors would feel the need
to invade Ireland afresh in order to prevent the country becoming a base
for a Yorkist revival (see below).
The revolt which forced Henry Il’s return before he had accomplished
his Irish mission was part of a pattern which would dog him for the rest of
his life. It was the consequence of having a large empire, too many enemies
in Scotland and France and too many sons. In 1173 and 1174 the rebellion
against Henry stretched from the Tweed in the Borders to the Pyrenees, as
all his enemies took advantage of his unpopularity after Becket’s murder
and banded together.
By 1173 Henry’s elder sons were grown up. His passionate marriage to
Eleanor of Aquitaine, the former wife of King Louis VII of France, was
faltering despite eight children in fifteen years. Queen Eleanor was a
forceful, sophisticated woman of literary tastes whose patronage
encouraged the flourishing romantic secular literature which was a striking
new feature of the twelfth century and who had considerable political
influence owing to her personal power over Aquitaine. She was now
estranged from her husband, who had openly taken a mistress in
Rosamund Clifford, the daughter of a Welsh marcher lord.
Where his grandfather had imported wild animals, Henry had built
within the grounds of his favourite palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire a
private lodge of intricate eastern design. Known as Rosamund’s Bower, it
had a water garden and could be approached only through a maze. Round
the maze the king is believed to have planted the most ancient rose in the
world, striped in dark pink and white, which had been brought back by the
Crusaders from Damascus. He christened it the Rosamundi, as it is still
known today, the rose of the world, as a tribute to his mistress. Fair
Rosamund, as she came to be called, died young, and legend has it that
Queen Eleanor persuaded one of the king’s men to betray the secret of the
maze to her. One evening, it is said, when Fair Rosamund heard the sound
otf bugles and hoofs and went flying to the door, expecting the king’s arrival
atter hunting, she met only Queen Eleanor, who stabbed her to the heart.
What is certainly true is that Queen Eleanor took her sons’ part against
the king. Like their tather they were energetic, active and commanding
personalities in the Angevin and Norman tradition. In 1169, four years
before, Henry Il had divided up his empire between them. His eldest son,
known as the young King Henry, received England, Normandy and Anjou.
Eleanor’s own Duchy of Aquitaine went to her favourite son, the brilliant,
generous but violent warrior known to history as Richard the Lionheart (or

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Coeur de Lion). Brittany, which Henry II had conquered from its duke, went
to the third son Geoffrey. Nevertheless — rather like King Lear — despite this
apportionment Henry II had no intention of relinquishing the actual
government or income of these lands into their supposed owners’ hands.
By March 1173, encouraged by the king of France Louis VII, whose
greatest ambition was to break up the Angevin Empire, a conspiracy had
been hatched among these sons. They could call on the soldiers of
disgruntled barons, particularly in Aquitaine, such as the Count of Poitou
whose legal rights (including holding courts and minting money) had been
steadily eroded by Henry II’s reforms. That month all over the Angevin
Empire attacks were mounted against the king’s forces. When the rebellion
began Queen Eleanor had been stopped, disguised as a man, while fleeing
to the French court to join her three sons. She was thrown into prison at
Falaise in France with her companion, one of the rebel barons, Hugh of
Chester. There she remained until Henry II died. Louis VII tried to invade
Normandy, while the young King Henry set sail with a French fleet to
attempt, with an equal lack of success, an invasion of England. Barons
throughout Aquitaine attacked Henry’s garrisons, and once again
Scotsmen under William the Lion went marauding through Northumbria.
All the rebels were made more confident by the continuing reverberations
from the murder of Becket. It is astonishing to record that the king, despite
the enormity of the rebellion, defeated them all.
He achieved this with the aid of soldiers who remained loyal to him
throughout the Angevin Empire. As has been seen, Henry II was naturally
devout.In 1172, the year before the revolt broke out, he had finally
reached an agreement with the pope known as the Compromise of
Avranches. In order to be cleansed of his sins, he had accepted that appeals
to Rome would not be stopped in his lifetime and he revoked the
Constitutions of Clarendon, which Archbishop Thomas had refused to
sign. As a result, until the Reformation in the sixteenth century any man
who could read Latin could claim ‘benefit of clergy’ to save him from being
tried in the king’s courts for any crime, however heinous. To some extent
this restored the king to respectability, since England had the threat of
papal interdict lifted. The clergy - many of whom had disapproved of
Thomas a Becket — were reconciled to Henry, and this ensured that the
whole civil service of clerks and government officials remained loyal to
him. Almost none of the ordinary people of England joined the barons’
revolt, as they had little to gain and much to lose from a new anarchy.
After a year of fighting, despite holding off his enemies from abroad in
1174 and quellin g in Aquitaine, Henry II’s affairs were still
the revolt
unsettled and England continued to be in a state of uproar. On 12 July
1174, impelled by a genuine desire to atone for the sin of murder, which

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he believed was preventing God from granting him victory, the great king
went on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to do penance at Thomas’s shrine and
beg forgiveness. It was a gesture that seized the (very inflammable) popular
imagination. The king was barefoot like the poorest pilgrim and naked but
for a shirt. When he got near the shrine, to symbolize his utter
mortification Henry approached his friend’s grave on his knees. As he
shuffled forward the monarch who was the Caesar of his day, as Giraldus
Cambrensis called him, was scourged by monks wielding rods. He then
spent the whole night lying before his former friend’s shrine in constant
prayer. When amid what were now cheering crowds he reached London
the next day, he discovered to his delight that while he had been on his
knees at Canterbury the wily king of the Scots, William the Lion, had been
captured during a raid on Alnwick in Northumberland.
Henry would always be lenient to his sons, but towards Scotland he was
more hard-hearted. Ever since the days of Edward the Elder, kings of the
Scots had been forced to acknowledge the king of the English as their
overlord, though most of them secretly seized every opportunity to stir up
trouble. But by the draconian Treaty of Falaise, which forced William the
Lion to do homage to him, Henry II made sure that the overlordship meant
what it said, planting garrisons in the main castles of Scotland — at
Edinburgh, Stirling, Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh. After this success
Henry’s morale improved. With his old decisiveness he marched off to
Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, which is still standing, to besiege Hugh
Bigod, one of the most important leaders of the English barons’ rebellion.
With Bigod’s capture, the threat of disorder at home also died down.
The next decade saw a period of internal consolidation within England,
in contrast to the expansion which had marked the first part of Henry’s
reign. The Assize of Arms of 1181 (an assize was a legislative ordinance),
which revamped the laws for calling out the fyrd, was a reflection of
Henry’s trust in the ordinary Englishman who had not risen against him
during his sons’ revolt. Every freeman was ordered to keep arms in his
home to defend his country or to suppress revolts against the king. This
reform was also an attempt to shift military power away from the barons
because, as with scutage, the Assize made Henry less dependent on their
calling out their feudal levy. As a sign of the king’s new respect for his
English subjects, from 1181 he stopped using foreign mercenaries in
England, and employed them only abroad.
It was the next century which saw the development of professional
English lawyers, trained at the infant universities of Oxford and
Cambridge or at schools of higher learning based in cathedrals such as
Exeter and York. Nevertheless, following a series of legal reforms imple-
mented by Henry, England saw a rapid development in legal definition

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which by the thirteenth century would be termed the common law. In the
penultimate year of Henry’s reign, in 1188, an anonymous writer calling
himself Glanvill published a groundbreaking written summary of the laws
and customs of the English, De legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae.
This itemized what were now the standard practices throughout the
king’s courts in England. Glanvill’s importance was that he showed that
there was a law ‘common’ to the whole of England available to freemen
which could be appealed to over the separate manorial, baronial and
ecclesiastical courts. Although it was Henry I who had first instituted the
practice of travelling royal judges, under Henry II the system was
formalized, and in 1176 England was divided into the same six circuits we
have today. The king’s judges were now under a duty to visit every shire in
the country, and hold an eyre (from the corrupt Latin for iter, a journey)
or hearing in the shire, or county court so that every part of England could
have the benefit of the king’s justice. Judges travelled on circuit on a six-
monthly basis, co-ordinated by the legal bureau at the royal court at
Westminster, which by then had become differentiated into two systems.
The Court of Common Pleas dealt with land disputes and disputes between
private individuals — that is, civil matters common to the whole kingdom.
The Court of the King’s Bench tried criminal cases — which, as the name
suggests, were sometimes heard in front of the king. The eyre was replaced
in the thirteenth century by what was called the assize court or the assizes
(from the Norman French asseyer, to sit). These continued for 700 years
until 1971, when their name was changed to crown court.
Most of Henry’s laws made the country much safer for travel. The
sheriff, whose office and functions the Normans had taken over pretty well
wholesale from the Anglo-Saxons, while remaining the king’s financial
agent in the county court, had his powers of law enforcement enhanced.
To arrest a thief the sheriff could now enter anyone’s land, even if it was
within the jurisdiction of the lord of the manor — a privilege hitherto
limited to the lord or abbot. Sheriffs now resembled an early police force
who were expected to co-operate with one another even outside their shire.
Henry II also put a prison in every shire and attached a sergeant to every
sheriff with the right to arrest suspects and bring them before a court and
to break up fights in the village. Every citizen had a duty to raise the hue
and cry if he saw a crime being committed and was required to chase after
the criminal.
The reign of Henry II also saw the development of the jury trial we know
today. From 1179, by the Assize of Northampton, a trial before twelve
property owners could take the place of the Norman method of resolving
land disputes known as the ordeal by battle. By the late twelfth century the
growing numbers of trained lawyers — some of whom were being taught in
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the town of Oxford since being banned by Henry II from the University of
Paris after 1167 when Louis VII sheltered Becket — introduced a new
rationalism into the intellectual climate. The ordeal, which assumed that
the miraculous intervention of God gave victory to the rightful owner, had
begun to look absurd. After all, a man might simply be a stronger fighter.
The new system of trial by jury made allowances for the old, for the weak
and for women, and it was offered only by the king’s courts. By the
beginning of the next century opinion in the Church itself rebelled against
the old practice. In 1215 by a directive from the Lateran Council in Rome
all priests were forbidden to have anything to do with trial by ordeal, and
the custom died out soon after.
But Henry did not completely do away with all the ordeals which the
Normans had introduced — indeed he produced some of his own. The
ordeal by water for criminal trials was brought in in 1166. This required
the accused to have his legs and arms tied before he was lowered into a vat
of water blessed by the local priest. If the accused sank he was innocent, if
he floated he was guilty. Another proof was the ordeal by hot iron; here,
the accused was made to carry a piece of heated iron and if it made no
mark then he was guilty. In general, however, for most freemen the trend
was towards a more rational form of justice under the royal courts.
Henry II also gave England the new office of coroner, which still does
much the same work today. Elected in the county or old shire court, the
coroner was responsible for carrying out inquests on the bodies of those
whose death was suspicious — if it was sudden or accidental or if there was
reason to believe it had been murder. By law the coroner’s inquest had to
be constituted very soon after the death, while the evidence was still fresh
in the mind of witnesses.
At the time of the Conquest England had long had a fairly law-abiding
population accustomed to the ancient tradition of the hundred and shire
courts. Ever since the days of Cnut it had been compulsory under Anglo-
Saxon law for each man to belong to a tithing for the purpose of
maintaining good order. The process was refined when William the
Conqueror imposed the heavy murdrum fine where a Norman was
murdered and the hundred could not produce the murderer. Since the
hundred might cover a very large area this became impractical, and by the
end of the twelfth century a sort of self-policing known as the frankpledge
was being practised in the smaller area of the tithing — that is, a community
of ten men who were responsible for one another’s good conduct. The duty
of the tithing was to bring any criminal they suspected before the hundred
court. Under Henry II it also became one of the sheriff’s functions to make
sure that every man in the shire belonged to a tithing.
Although he was incapable of devolving responsibility to his sons, Henry

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was a generous-spirited man full of family feeling. He had been furious

with his elder sons for rebelling against him, but nonetheless decided to
believe their protestations of regret and restored them to their lands. His
wife, however, remained under lock and key. After he had defeated the
revolt there was no question but that Henry II was the greatest monarch of
the age. His daughters, moreover, were married to the most powerful kings
in Christendom. The system of informal royal alliances that this
inaugurated between England on the one hand and Castile (the most
important country in Spain), Germany and Flanders on the other set the
pattern of foreign alliances for several hundred years.
Similarly the enmity with France continued to be a main theme of
English policy. In 1180 the succession of Philip II, known as Philip
Augustus, to the French throne brought a far more cunning enemy of the
Angevin Empire into play. The last years of Henry II were very sad ones.
One of the reasons for the first rebellion against him had been the
favouritism he showed towards his youngest son John, to whom he had
begun making over castles which belonged to the young King Henry. Ten
years younger than his nearest brother Richard, John was a short (five feet
five) black-haired youth who was known as Jean Sans Terre or John
Lackland because he had no obvious lands to inherit, unlike his elder
brothers. He has had a very bad press down the centuries, given his odious
moral character and his liking for physical cruelty, but modern historians
are impressed by his administrative competence and his interest in justice.
Contemporary historians, however, detested him. At the time the
historian Geraldus Cambrensis did not mince his words about the mistake
John’s doting father Henry II had made in deciding that his new
possession, Ireland, might make up for John’s lack of lands. In 1185 he
sent him as lord of Ireland to govern the country, though he was aged only
eighteen, having tried and failed to persuade Richard to yield Aquitaine to
John — the death of the young King Henry meant that Richard was now
heir to Normandy and England. But he was forced to withdraw John from
Ireland within the year on account of his grotesque behaviour. Paying no
attention to older advisers and keeping company only with foolish young
men of his own age, John failedto behave to the Irish kings with the
courtesy they deserved. He pulled their long beards, which were the
fashion in Ireland (an oddity to clean-shaven Normans) and granted their
lands to his favourites. Despite all this, the infatuated king continued to
push the cause of John, at the expense of Richard the Lionheart.
Eleven years after the first revolt of Henry’s sons in 11483, another
rebellion threatened in Richard’s own Duchy of Aquitaine. The proud and
restless barons there had felt Richard’s firm hand for too long. They were
easily encouraged by the young King Henry and his next brother Geoffrey

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of Brittany to rebel against their overlord. It was a revolt which again

threatened to dissolve the Angevin Empire when Toulouse and Burgundy
sent aid. So dangerous was the situation that Henry II gave orders that all
the barons who had taken part in the first revolt should be locked up. With
the sudden death of the young King Henry from dysentery, the rebellion
died away almost as quickly as it had sprung up. But the new heir to the
throne, Richard, had an even more stormy relationship with his father.
The golden-haired, blue-eyed Richard was cast in a heroic mould.
Attractive, generous, fiery and impulsive, he did not have his father’s
brains, but he had his temper and his military flair. Though Richard was
now the heir presumptive to England, Normandy and Anjou, Henry’s
secret plan was to make these lands John’s. After failing to obtain
Aquitaine for John, for four years Henry refused to name Richard his heir.
He would not have him crowned as he had his elder brother, nor would he
make the necessary arrangements to hurry up his marriage to Princess Alice
of France, the sister of the young King Henry’s widow.
Henry’s refusal to treat Richard properly would lead to the beginning of
the end of the Angevin Empire. It not only gave the new King of France,
Philip Augustus, an excuse to begin hostilities against his over-powerful
subject, the King of England. It drove a bitter Richard permanently into
Philip’s camp. As will be recalled, the return to Henry II of the Norman
Vexin was dependent on the marriage between Philip’s sister and the young
king. This dowry was now transferred to Alice, the next sister, but Henry’s
foot-dragging meant that she was still not married to Richard. When
neither the Vexin nor his sister returned to France, Philip Augustus had a
perfect excuse for war. Though it ended in a truce, Richard was soon
responding again to the French king’s overtures.
Relations became thornier than ever between father and son on account
of Henry’s behaviour over the Third Crusade, in 1189. Richard the
Lionheart, as he soon became known, passionately wished to go on this
Crusade to rescue the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had fallen to the
brilliant new Muslim warlord the Kurd Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria.
But in such an uncertain situation he would have been foolish to depart
unless and until his father named him as heir; this Henry II continued to
refuse to do. Richard therefore not only publicly did homage to the French
king for his lands in France but simultaneously joined with the French king
to invade Henry’s Angevin holdings.
By mischance his father was in France, but did not have enough loyal
English troops with him to fight on so many fronts. He ran out of gold to
pay his mercenaries, who therefore deserted him. Henry’s tenants-in-chief
in Maine and Anjou all went over to the victorious young kings, and he
was driven out of Le Mans too. But some atavistic sentiment made him

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reluctant to leave his native land of Anjou for Normandy, where he would
have found greater loyalty. Perhaps he was too tired to make a last stand,
for he was also ill with a debilitating fever. From an old Angevin
stronghold, the castle of Chinon, perched on rocky heights above the River
Vienne, he was forced to come to a humiliating treaty with Philip and
Richard which granted their every demand. He was so unwell when he
arrived at the meeting at Colombiéres, shaking and trembling, that Philip
offered him his cloak and suggested he sit on the grass, but the old king
angrily refused.
Afterwards, back in his bed at the castle of Chinon, the king scanned the
names of the rebels whom Philip and Richard demanded should now do
homage to Richard as their liege lord instead of to himself. When at the top
of it he saw the name of his beloved son John he turned his face to the wall
and was heard by his courtiers to cry, ‘O John! John!’ Then he said dully,
‘Let things go as they will. I no longer care for anything in this world.’ He
died three days later. In his last agony he was heard by those about him to
mutter, ‘Shame, shame on a defeated king.’
In his palace at Winchester, Henry had commissioned a painting which
to him summed up the last years of his life with his sons grown up: three
young eagles were attacking their parent bird, while a fourth was standing
on his neck ready to peck out its eyes. It proved all too prescient.
When he was dead he was borne through the rolling Angevin hills to the
Abbey of Fontevrault, where you can still see his tomb. Beside him lies
Queen Eleanor. Enemies by the end of their lives, they were united in
death. But although (as one historian has said) Henry was a lion savaged
by jackals, so great were his achievements that many of the methods of
justice and government that he designed endured for eight centuries. His
superb bureaucracy ensured that England continued to flourish for some
time after his death, despite the worst efforts of his two careless sons.

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(1189-1199)

Once he had assumed the throne Richard’s behaviour underwent a marked

change. One chronicler reported that when he approached his father’s
body at the start of the funeral procession the corpse started to spew blood
from its nostrils as a sign that the murderer of the dead man was near by.
But Richard was a man transformed. He fell into paroxysms of grief,
punished all those who had rebelled with him except his mother, whom he
released from prison in Winchester, and rewarded his father’s most loyal
supporters, including William Marshall who had once challenged him to
single combat on behalf of the old king. His close relationship with Philip
Augustus would shortly become one of bitter enmity.
As far as Richard the Lionheart was concerned, the single most
important event of his day was the fall of the Christian Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem to Saladin, the new Muslim warlord ruler of Syria. A Kurd trom
Mesopotamia (today Iraq), Saladin the Great was overlord of much of the
Middle East and was in the process of expelling all the Latin or western
European settlements from Palestine.
Palestine, as the cradle of the world’s three most important monotheistic
faiths, was and is a land of great religious significance. By strange coin-
cidence the tiny city of Jerusalem was the site of many of their separate
revelations. It was the scene of Christ’s death, just as Palestine was the scene
of his life, and contained the Holy Sepulchre, site of his tomb in the rock.
On the very same spot as the Holy Sepulchre were the ruins of the destroyed
Temple of Solomon, sacred to the Jews. It was also believed that it was there
that Abraham had been narrowly saved from sacrificing Isaac by seeing a
ram in the thicket. And the same piece of ground was believed by Muslims
to have been the very spot from which Mohammed was taken to Heaven.
In honour of Mohammed, the Dome or Mosque of the Rock had been built
by Muslims — who were the country’s most recent conquerors.
The triumphant First Crusade of to9s—9, which had been launched to
liberate the Holy Land, had established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as
well as the counties of Edessa, Tripoli and Antioch under an Angevin
relation of Henry II named Count Baldwin. Since Henry was the head of

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the Angevin family, on the fall of Jerusalem the Patriarch Heraclius arrived
in England on a special mission to implore him and his many armies to
liberate the city. But Henry remained unconvinced. For all his religious
devotion, mounting a Crusade was a lengthy, dangerous and extremely
expensive business. In his view the Angevin Empire was not in sufficiently
good shape to be left without a ruler. Since 1166 there had already been a
tax for the Crusades of a penny in the pound for every freeman; in response
to the patriarch, Henry now imposed the severe Saladin tax or tithe, one-
tenth of all freemen’s personal goods to raise money for the Crusade.
This action failed to satisfy contemporary opinion, which would have
liked the king to lead a Crusade but did not wish to pay the Saladin tithe.
In the end the majority of the Crusaders would go off as private citizens. It
was what one historian has called an ‘armed pilgrimage’, in return for
which Pope Urban II promised spiritual indulgences to smooth the way to
heaven. The Crusades were the closet thing to a mass movement in the
intensely religious middle ages. At a time when Bible stories were the only
universal literary stimulus, liberating the places where Christ had passed
his life - Bethlehem, Nazareth, Canaan, Galilee, Mount Calvary — had an
almost unbearable emotional resonance.
Richard Coeur de Lion was no more immune from the lure of the great
Crusade adventure than the next man, especially as his chief calling was to
be a soldier of great strategic brilliance. He had honed his military skills in
reducing the powers of the wild southern barons of Aquitaine, and he
believed that he could be particularly useful at avenging the honour of the
Christian west after the Second Crusade, to liberate Edessa and led by the
French and German armies, had ended in disaster. Perhaps, too, like many
a Crusader he had a yen to see the world. , aE 38
The new king more than made up for his | Bel
father’s reluctance to expose his lands to the i
dangers of his absence on the Third Crusade.
In the ten years of his reign Richard I visited
England only twice — first to be crowned, and
second to raise money. He had none of his
father’s interest in good government or in
eradicating corruption. The office of sheriff
was openly put up for sale in every county; by
paying Richard 10,000 marks the Scottish
king William the Lion was allowed to annul
the Treaty of Falaise. The new justiciar of
England, William Longchamp, the Bishop of
Ely, was a long-term official of the Angevin Richard the Lionheart
civil service, but in the new climate it was

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rumoured that he had purchased his office. Richard himself joked that he
would have sold London itself if he could have found a buyer. Nevertheless
the great administrative structures set up by Henry II proved their worth:
England was governed very successfully without a king during all those
years of the Lionheart’s absence.
Despite this southern Frenchman’s cavalier treatment of precious
institutions and his evident lack of interest in the country, there has never
been a King of England who arouses quite such enthusiasm as Richard.
Somehow the gaiety and generosity of his character, his devil-may-care
spirit and his endless adventures continue to blind many to the less
attractive sides of his nature. At the beginning of his reign his easy gesture
of granting a general amnesty to all those in prison, particularly those who
had been prosecuted for the forest laws, has endeared him in popular myth
ever since, linking him indissolubly with that mythical prince of forest
thieves Robin Hood and hinting at the insubordinate native British desire
to sympathize with the rebel. But it was under this great warrior that there
began the worst persecution of the Jewish community in English history,
after a mob had attacked Jewish leaders attending Richard's coronation.
After their expulsion from Israel by the Romans towards the end of the
first century, the Jewish people dispersed round the world, an event known
as the Diaspora. In twelfth-century England, whose population was about
two and a half million, the Jews were a tiny minority of perhaps 5,000
individuals who tended to be mobile traders, merchants and moneylenders.
Their skill in finance meant that they were one of the medieval equivalents
of banks for European governments, and they were protected by the post-
Conquest Norman and Angevin monarchs who relied on them for loans
and taxed them at will. They lived in a separate quarter in towns, and
spoke Hebrew among themselves. They were noted for their different
foods, taboos and religious rituals, which were far more strictly observed
900 years ago than they are today.
Jesus Christ, the founder of the Christian Church, was the most famous
Jewish man in history, while the Apostles and Disciples whose writings
Christian scholars argued about were converted Jews. But during the
Crusades, when the papacy was preaching an armed campaign against
unbelievers of all kinds, parish priests were encouraged to attack Jews from
the pulpit. The Christian Church began to dwell on the old belief that the
Jewish population of Jerusalem more than a thousand years before had
elected to crucify Christ. The parish priest also told his congregation that
the practice of loaning money for interest was the sin of usury — even
though this was secretly engaged in by Christian moneylenders, and is of
course standard banking procedure today.
Until the Crusades the average English person had very little to do with

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the Jews, apart from those in the merchant fraternity, though there was a
Jewish presence in most important southern English towns as well as York.
But the need for money to finance a Crusade changed relations between the
two communities. For the first time landowning knights who wished to go
on crusade needed large amounts of cash. The quickest way of finding it
was to raise mortgages on their land, and the best people for cash tended
to be Jewish moneylenders, who could tap their overseas contacts to offer
extra liquidity. Inspired by religious enthusiasm the Christian knights
borrowed immense sums which they often were scarcely in a position to
repay.
Although, anti-Jewish feeling had been growing for the past century,
since the start of the Crusades, concrete manifestations of it began at
Richard the Lionheart’s coronation. Anti-Jewish prejudice was increased
by the handling of the interest on the Crusaders’ debts. Knights would
return from the Crusades to be told that the interest rate had changed in
their absence. If it unexpectedly rose to say 50 per cent on a loan or higher,
which it not infrequently did, a small landowner who could not service his
debt would find that half his land passed to his creditors. Cash poor, used
to a feudal rural life and a barter economy, the Crusaders had no under-
standing of interest and compound interest. They were aware only of the
apparently unfair use of it to make money.
And it was on the Jewish rather than the Christian moneylenders that the
Christian English knights vented their ire. As a minority the Jews became
a scapegoat for the improvidence of small landowners, who had forgotten
that if they borrowed money they would have to pay it back. Inevitably,
when the day of reckoning came, Crusaders resented having to sell land to
pay off their debts.
At Richard I’s coronation banquet the arrival uninvited of the most
important members of the Jewish community with splendid gifts seems to
have been the spark for the shameful conflagration that swept England.
The mass of London’s citizenry - many of whom were smaller merchants
in debt to Jewish moneylenders — as well as the smaller barons turned on
the Jews. They drove them out of the banqueting hall, severely injuring
many of them in the process. The king and his soldiers made an attempt to
halt them, but the mob swarmed towards the Jewish quarter, hanging its
inhabitants and burning their houses. Afterwards not enough was done by
the king to seek out and punish the rioters.
This probably encouraged people up and down the country to turn on Jews
in the towns, inventing lies about their customs. During the autumn and
winter there were massacres at Norwich, Stamford, Lincoln, Bury St
Edmund’s and elsewhere. It was at York, however, that the worst outrage
took place, when 500 Jewish men, women and children who took refuge in

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the city’s castle against a band of armed men were attacked with the aid of
the warden’s retainers. Many committed suicide, and those who did not were
slaughtered where they stood. Their murderers were motivated not only by
ethnic hatred, but more sinisterly by a desire to wipe out the great debts they
owed the Jews. Many of them were the men-at-arms of important local
families. They had been instructed to go straight to the Minster, where the
Jews had deposited the bonds which Crusading families had given them for
debt, and burn them all. They did so in a large bonfire in the Minster. At a
stroke huge debts were wiped off many of the Crusaders’ estates.
Although the perpetrators of the massacre at York were sternly punished
by William Longchamp, the justiciar, the Jewish communities never
recovered their former confidence, or indeed their wealth. They remained
in England for another hundred years, continuing to be protected as
moneylenders by the crown until, in another fit of Christian religious
enthusiasm, Richard’s great-nephew Edward I expelled them in 1290.
Though England had been left with excellent regents in William
Longchamp and the king’s mother Queen Eleanor, the long absence of

Lincoln Cathedral, founded 1092, rebuilt in the Gothic style from 1192 onwards
by Bishop Hugh of Lincoln.

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Richard in Palestine meant that the good order of the country was soon
threatened. The opposition was headed by his brother John and the great
barons themselves. They resented the power of the justiciar Longchamp.
Like many of those who served the Angevins, Longchamp was a man of
natural ability who had not sprung from the baronial classes. In the
treacherous and scheming John the barons found a perfect foil for their
plans. A struggle against the royal administration involving parts of the
country in civil war began shortly after Richard the Lionheart left the
country. Despite John’s nickname of Lackland, the king’s brother now
ruled much of south-west England. He had been left in charge of it by
Richard, who had a low opinion of John’s military abilities and no interest
in his compensating cunning.
Richard was careless in most things and, though his legacy to England
was a series of useful alliances encircling the Angevin Empire, he generally
believed force to be the superior of diplomacy. As the French and English
armies travelled east to the Holy Land he chose to ignore a new hostility in
his old comrade, the French king Philip Augustus, who resented his new
position as head of the Angevin Empire. Far from conciliating him, the
English king had not only failed to marry Princess Alice but insulted the
French by substituting an alliance with the kingdom of Navarre in
northern Spain to protect the empire’s southern tip. At Messina in Sicily,
where the French and Angevin imperial troops were gathering on the last
leg of their journey to Palestine Richard publicly repudiated Princess Alice
and married the beautiful Princess Berengaria of Navarre, yet continued to
hold on to the Vexin.
In the Holy Land, Richard’s outstanding qualities as a military tactician
aroused the envy of his fellow monarchs. For over two years they had been
besieging without success the Latin citadel of Acre, formidable on its
promontory. On the plain below its towering yellow battlements stretched
the armies of Christendom and row after row of tents. On the heights
above them were Saladin’s armies, whose presence was causing the
Crusaders’ supply of food to dwindle: the besiegers were besieged.
In contrast to the European heavy armour which gave many Crusaders
sunstroke in the intensely hot weather, the Syrians’, or Saracens’,
headpieces were not hot metal but turbans in bright colours which
protected them from the sun. The Christian west’s military advantage over
the Muslim east lay in the crossbow — but it availed them very little on the
Third Crusade: Saladin was on home territory, and his men were used to
desert conditions. They had supply lines to the interior, better horses (the
swift Arab breed then unknown to Europe) and a lighter sword, the curved
scimitar, which could find its target more quickly than the unwieldy three-
foot-long weapon used by the Crusaders. In contrast to Saladin’s armies,

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most of the Crusaders were in very poor health. An epidemic had raged
through their poorly situated camp with its bad drainage, killing many,
including such important figures as the Archbishop of Canterbury and
Ranulf Glanvill.
Nevertheless with Richard present manoeuvres took on a new
momentum. Superior management of siege engines beat down the
Saracens’ resistance. Unlike the other European kings, Richard the
Lionheart led from the front, exhibiting the personal valour that made his
men worship him. He fought hand to hand and used his crossbow with
perfect accuracy, picking Saracens off against the skyline. Under the
Lionheart Acre was captured from Saladin.
But the first significant victory against the Muslims for fifty years only
added to the tensions already troubling relations between the different
national camps of the vast, sickly and bored European armies. The French
and English kings quarrelled over their opposing candidates for the crown
of Jerusalem. Morale was poor among the German soldiers, whose
emperor had been drowned on the journey to Palestine. The Austrians had
played little part in relieving Acre but were anxious to share in the glory of
liberating it. They were especially annoyed, after they had hung Austrian
flags over the citadel’s battlements, to find that English soldiers tore them
down and threatened to throw the Austrians over the battlements if they
put up any more. When their leader Duke Leopold complained to Richard,
he did nothing to discipline his men: once again he was not concerned with
diplomatic relations. Though the English king had fallen victim to the
camp’s terrible shivering fever which had decimated the Christian army, he
insisted on pushing on to Jerusalem. By August 1191 the short and dark
Philip Augustus had had enough of standing in the charismatic Richard’s
glorious shadow and decided that Coeur de Lion’s obsession with the
Crusade made it the perfect moment to stir up trouble in England’s
continental dominions. Pleading illness, he left abruptly for France.
Weak from camp fever, though in high spirits now that it was on the
move again, the bedraggled army started tailing its painful way south along
the coast before turning up to the rocky heights where stood Jerusalem. As
they marched the Crusaders chanted their battle cry: ‘Help, help, help for
the Holy Sepulchre!’ By the camp fires each night, one man would start the
call and then it would spread throughout the tents, rousing the soldiers to
forget their suffering and fulfil their mission to free the Holy Places.
At the Battle of Arsuf, exploiting his still formidable infantry and
brilliant crossbowmen, Richard the Lionheart snatched victory from
Saladin, who had never previously been defeated in the open field. This
event sent waves of hope across Europe and raised, Richard’s stock even
higher among the men. But in the end, though the Lionheart twice led his
I§2
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troops within twelve miles of the Holy City, he was stymied by the failure
of his supply lines and the exhaustion of his men. Saladin’s army remained
largely unbroken.
Forced to retreat, because he had decided it would be madness to besiege
Jerusalem, Richard achieved a treaty in 1192 whose terms Saladin would
have granted to no one else — a mark of the great eastern warrior’s respect
for his generalship. Christians were once again allowed to visit the Holy
Sepulchre and to do business all over the city, and Joppa and its district
became Christian. But when the courteous Saladin invited Richard to visit
the Holy City himself, the king refused. He would not enter the city which
God had not permitted him to deliver.
Although Richard had fought Saladin to a standstill over Jerusalem, the
Third Crusade like its predecessor was a consummate failure. It did not
achieve its immediate objective, which was to bring the Holy Places under
Christian control; and in the course of it the previously allied French and
English kings became the deadliest of enemies. On the other hand the social
intercourse with the Arab world which the Crusades encouraged
transformed western Christendom. In a great many respects the Arab
culture was far in advance of the Christian. The transfer of superior
technology from the west to the east which was to be such a feature of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries was then in the opposite direction.
Western Europe benefited enormously from contact with scientific Arab
medicine, which very slowly undermined the superstitious practices of the
west. Arab science and mathematics introduced the zero and the decimal
point, while the Arab use of spices showed the west how to preserve food.
In European architecture the ogee or narrow twisting arch so characteristic
of the thirteenth century was a direct transmission from Arab architecture.
With the end of the Third Crusade, Richard began to make his way back
as fast as possible to England and to an empire threatened by the plots of
his younger brother. Word had reached him that it was no longer safe to
travel through France because of the French king’s hostility. He therefore
had to take the long route north through Germany. At home John was
making common cause with Philip Augustus. Just as Philip had drawn
Richard into his schemes when he was the heir to the throne, the French
king now offered John the spurned hand of his sister Princess Alice. In
return his overlord proposed that John should have the English continental
possessions, though this was hardly a straightforward proposition. In
Richard’s absence the French king had been exhorting the barons of
Normandy to become his liege men and throw off English rule.
England meanwhile was racked by sieges and rebellions led by John and
the barons, who had found support in the country owing to the ever higher
rate of taxation demanded to finance the Crusade. By 1191 the opposition

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was sufficiently powerful to bring about the justiciar Longchamp’s downfall.

Fortunately, just at this moment one of Richard’s most trusted advisers,
Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, arrived back from the Crusades to be
appointed the new justiciar, as Richard had directed, before one of John’s
men could take his place. Nevertheless, events seemed to be moving in John’s
favour. For at the beginning of 1193, King Richard fell into the clutches of
his envious fellow Crusader, the Duke of Austria, who then sold him on to
the emperor Henry VI.
The story of Richard’s captivity, his charm, his bravery, his carelessness
— attempting to cross Austria in disguise, he forgot to remove his beautiful
royal gloves — sparked a thousand legends. Most famous is the story of
Blondel, his minstrel. For three months it seemed that the Lionheart had
vanished into thin air. Warned by Philip Augustus, John had begun
circulating the rumour that the great Crusader was dead. Blondel set out
to search the whole of Europe for the friend whose death he refused to
accept. In Aquitaine they had spent long hours together writing verses in
celebration of the virtues of the Christian knight. According to legend, as
Blondel walked through the mountains overlooking the Danube Plain he
was by chance singing one of the troubadour ballads he and the king had
composed together. To his astonishment, floating over the trees from
where the forbidding castle of Durnstein loomed above him he heard a
great bass voice singing the next verse.
Whether or not it was Blondel who brought the news of the king’s
whereabouts back to England, the emperor Henry VI demanded the
immense sum of 100,000 marks for his release — a formidable imposition
on a country already reeling from taxes levied to pay for the Crusade.
Nevertheless, under the leadership of the masterful Queen Eleanor, most
of it would be found a year later, in 1194. Chalices and crucifixes in every
church were melted down for their silver, while every freeman paid the
colossal amount of one-quarter of his earnings to the government. The
Cistercian monasteries pioneering the farming of sheep in Yorkshire were
forced to yield up their entire takings from that year’s sheep sales.
There was no question of the ransom not being paid. Henry VI was
threatening that, if it was not met, he would hand Richard over to the King
of France, which would mean the end of the Angevin Empire. Much of that
was anyway tottering under Philip Augustus’ incursions. His attempts to
detach Normandy from England had been unsuccessful while Richard was
free: as a Crusader, the Lionheart commanded a good deal of loyalty. But
the minute Richard was captured the situation became more nebulous.
Philip Augustus succeeded in overrunning the Vexin, which guarded the
southern entrance to Normandy, and even got as far as its capital Rouen
before being thrown back.

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There was thus in 1193 a distinct window of opportunity for the two
plotters. John was convinced that the moment to usurp the throne had
come — Richard was still in captivity and, despite the harsh measures taken
to raise the ransom, the English government had not yet completed the
task. John now showed his hand. He crossed the Channel to meet Philip in
Paris and did homage for England’s French possessions, and possibly for
England too. Then he put into effect their joint plan. John mounted his
own rebellion in England against his brother’s government, while the
French king began stockpiling boats to invade across the Channel.
England was saved by the emperor’s fear of France’s ambitions. An
alliance was arranged: in order to secure his freedom, Richard had to do
homage for England to the emperor and hold it as the emperor’s fief. In
practice this amounted to very little. Richard was released from this
obligation on the emperor’s death and the ransom was never paid in its
entirety. The important fact was that the empire and England were now
allied against France, and it was in France that Richard spent the last five
years of his life, attempting to regain the advantage from Philip Augustus.
With the news that Richard was returning, the French invasion of
England and John’s rebellion collapsed. John received a brief note from
the well-informed Philip that said succinctly, ‘Look to yourself, the Devil
is loose’; shortly afterwards John left for Normandy. The takeover had
never been a foregone conclusion. Queen Eleanor had shown courage and
decision in rallying the English people to her eldest son and putting the
country’s defences into a state of alert. English ships vigilantly patrolled
the Channel. But no sooner had Richard returned to England than he left
it, though not before raising more taxes and undergoing a second
coronation ceremony to remind the people who was king. He never saw
the country again.
In charge of the government the king left his efficient justiciar, Hubert
Walter, whom he had also made Archbishop of Canterbury. The nephew
of Ranulf Glanvill, Walter had been part of Henry II’s administration at
the end of the great king’s life. Trained in the law, he was the perfect
administrative instrument to devise higher taxes for the rising numbers of
professional soldiers required for the French campaigns, for building
defensive castles, and for paying the princes of the Low Countries and
north Germany to remain allied to England against France. But a spirit of
revolt was growing among the English, whose wealth in many cases had
been seriously depleted by the king’s ransom. For the next four years
England was groaning with the cost of the war to win back Angevin
territory from France.
In 1198, the year before the Lionheart died, the barons were again
provoked into revolt by a demand that they provide more soldiers for

T$5
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

Richard under their feudal obligations. In question among the tenants-in-

chief was how much service they were required to give the king by the
feudal levy which had developed from the old fyrd. Defending their native
land from attack was one thing, but endless foreign service seemed
another, Moreover, they were being asked to provide more than forty days
per year, They were joined by many more disinterested characters like the
saintly churchman and administrator Bishop Hugh of Lincoln. Hugh of
Lincoln protested at the strain these demands were imposing on the tenants
of his own episcopal lands and refused to insist upon them. It was therefore
a triumph for him when Hubert Walter was dismissed as justiciar and
replaced by Geottrey Fitz Peter, the Earl of Essex.
But Richard was not really interested in the anger of the English. His
campaign to push the French armies of Philip Augustus back into their own
country was working, and he had regained most of his territories east of
the Seine, as well as the Norman Vexin. To protect Normandy from
further invasion by Philip Augustus, he built a great castle high on a cliff
overlooking the Seine near the town of Les Andelys, whose noble ruins you
can still see today. The frontier castle is another testament to the king's
outstanding engineering skills, and was built extremely swiftly, in just
under a year. The king gazed at the finished building with immense pride
and said, ‘Is this not a saucy babe that at twelve months can keep the King
of France at bay?’ The French tor saucy was guillard, and it was known
ever atter as Chateau Gaillard.
Kor all Richard the Lionheart’s military genius, his violent temperament
and natural inclination towards war sometimes led him into launching
attacks on vassal barons in disputes that were not worth the cost of the
campaign, In the course of one such escapade in April rr99 Richard I met
his death. A vassal of his at Chalus, deep in the Limousin in the centre of
the Aquitainian territory, had found an enormous silver treasure trove
buried in the earth, When he refused to surrender it to Richard as his
overlord, the king went to war against him, While he watched the siege on
horseback, a bolt from a crossbow, that weapon he himself had made so
famous, flew out from one of the castle's slit windows and buried itself in
his chest, Attempts to remove it by an incompetent surgeon were
unsuccesstul, and the wound became infected because of the king’s own
impatient efforts to wrench it out. As the Lionheart lay dying, his men
captured the castle, which had been detended by only seven knights and
eight serving men, Generous as ever, Richard insisted on pardoning his
assailant, though once he had died his men were not so magnanimous.
On his deathbed Richard the Lionheart called all his most important
tenants-in-chiet to him and made them swear allegiance to John, since he
and Berengaria were childless. Richard’s nephew Arthur was his natural

1yo
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heir, as the son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey of Brittany. But the
Norman and Angevin kings had kept up the tradition of the old English
monarchy of choosing a more suitable heir as long as he had royal blood.
With the support of his mother Queen Eleanor, by the end of May 1199
John had at last achieved his heart’s desire and been crowned King of
England.
 John
(1199-1216)

Until the late nineteenth century, John’s reputation was one of the lowest.
His decadent personal habits and taste for cruelty, which was egregious
even in a brutal age (he had an appetite for ordeals and executions), cast a
long shadow. In addition, his quarrel with the papacy turned all monk
chroniclers against him. As the curator of the once formidable Angevin
Empire he was soon to be humiliated by the loss of Normandy and all his
northern French possessions. England was left only with the Channel
Islands as the last remnant of the Norman duchy, and Queen Eleanor’s
country of Aquitaine.
In some ways John was in fact a better ruler of England than his brother.
But personal habits aside, he lacked Richard's glamour as a holy warrior
in an age when war was dominant — indeed he had had a purely
ecclesiastical education in the typical way of a younger son. Partly as a
result of his unwarlike nature, he ended up spending the greater part of his
life in England, the longest period of any Norman king since William the
Conqueror. Like Henry II he became intimately concerned with every
detail of English life, and having the Angevin passion for royal admini-
stration he was forever journeying through his new realm. He also shared
his father’s fascination with justice, and was noted for exercising his right
to hear the cases of the King’s Bench. Though myth paints him as the
venomous foe of the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, in fact King John took
care to make the forest laws of his forefathers less harsh. Aged thirty-three
when he came to the throne, he had matured from the silly youth of fifteen
years before who had pulled the Irish elders” beards.
Even so, John was a tyrannical, greedy and lawless ruler. Like William
Rufus he was unscrupulous when it came to other people’s property, and
made permanent enemies of the Church and the barons by his constant
scheming to appropriate their wealth. By the end of his reign so deep was
the distrust he inspired that men said he kidnapped the heirs to great
fortunes and murdered them.
Although John’s accession to the English throne had been painless, it
was a different matter in France. In rr99 war broke out between the two

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countries when the French king Philip Augustus decided to recognize as

head of the Angevin Empire the thirteen-year-old Arthur of Brittany,
John’s nephew. This did not get Philip very far, and the following year he
had to accept John’s homage in relation to his French possessions. But the
war he desired in order to dismember his greatest rival on French territory
soon broke out again. John, who had just repudiated his childless wife
Isabella of Gloucester, hit on the idea of marrying Isabella of Angouléme,
which brought her territory into his empire and provided access to
Aquitaine. Unfortunately Isabella of Angouléme had been engaged to an
unruly and well-connected Poitevin baron named Hugh de Lusignan who
was affronted by the King of England’s seizure of what he believed to be
his property. He soon found many other turbulent Poitevin barons who
resented the erosion of their powers by John’s autocratic ways.
Headed by de Lusignan they appealed to Philip Augustus as John’s
overlord to right the wrongs being done to them by the King of England.
This gave Philip his final chance to break up the Angevin Empire and he
took it. John refused to answer the charges brought against him in the
French king’s court, and in 1202 the court declared that he had forfeited
all his lands in French territory. To ensure that the message was clear,
Philip Augustus then recognized the fifteen-year-old Arthur of Brittany as
the ruler of Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Aquitaine. With French
armies Arthur invaded those territories himself, while Philip went into
Normandy, his real objective, as capturing the duchy would give him
control of the north coast — the natural hinterland for his capital of Paris.
At this point there occurred the event which blackened John’s name
through history. Following his nephew to Poitou, where Arthur was
besieging his grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine with the help of the
Poitevin barons, John defeated him in battle — to everyone’s surprise, for
Richard’s low opinion of John’s military capabilities was universal. He
then imprisoned his nephew in his castle at Falaise, before moving him to
Rouen, the capital of Normandy. By 1203 Arthur was dead, almost
certainly murdered. Contemporaries believed that it was John himself who
had performed the deed, by night and in disguise, probably in one of his
famous Angevin rages.
Whatever the truth about Arthur’s death, it was of no benefit to his uncle
John. Philip’s forces swiftly overran Anjou, Touraine and Maine, while
Brittany came over to France out of anger about Arthur’s murder. By 1204
Normandy too belonged to the French crown. Theoretically, of all the
English possessions the duchy was the most difficult for France to seize. It
had a long connection to England, and the pro-English feeling was greatly
strengthened by the trading links between the two countries. What was
more, many of its barons were Anglo-Normans who held property on both

1$9
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

sides of the Channel. It had magnificent defences against France, the

greatest of which was Richard’s Chateau Gaillard. But the barons were
very disaffected, and Philip Augustus was a better strategist than John,
who tended to procrastinate and stayed in England when he should have
been fighting in Normandy. Although Chateau Gaillard held out for six
months until early March, John had really abandoned Normandy long
before that. When his mother Eleanor died the following month, the last
feelings of Norman loyalty towards the English crown evaporated. By
Midsummer Day 1204 all the great possessions in northern France that
King John had inherited from William the Conqueror and Geoffrey of
Anjou were lost.
The loss of Normandy was an event of central importance for England.
Although it was viewed as a disaster at the time, it forced the great Anglo-
Norman barons to choose whether their loyalties were to England or to
Normandy, for they could no longer hold land in both. The Norman
Conquest was superseded by the renewed development of the English as a
nation and a unified state under an exclusively English king. No longer
linked by the Angevin Empire, the Duchy of Aquitaine, which was all that
remained of the English crown’s French possessions, became in effect an
independent English colony.
A permanent English navy to guard the Channel became a matter of
pressing importance, as it had not been since 1066. Until 1204 much of the
coast facing southern England belonged to friendly Normandy, so most of
the ordinary business of guarding the coast in peacetime could be handled
by the towns known as the Cinque Ports — Hastings, Romney, Hythe,
Dover and Sandwich (Winchelsea and Rye became six et sep? later). By a
longstanding arrangement, in exchange for freedom from taxes and the
right to tax within their own walls, they were legally required to provide
fifty-seven ships for use by themselves and the king. But after the loss of
Normandy these measures were supplemented partly by impressment and
partly by the turning over to the royal government of any merchant ships
captured in the Channel.
If the king now had a reputation for being unlucky, after his quarrel with
the papacy he was believed to be cursed. In 1205 Hubert Walter, who had
remained Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Although technically it was the
right of the monks of the Cathedral Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral to
elect the head of the Church in England, it had been generally accepted
since William the Conqueror that the king would play a large part in the
choice. Unfortunately the monks behaved foolishly. They secretly elected
their undistinguished sub-prior Reginald without the king's permission
and sent him to Rome to receive the pallies from Pope Innocent III. But,
though Reginald had been warned not to boast about his new position

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until the pope had confirmed it, the sub-prior, being both indiscreet and
vain, insisted on travelling very slowly in tremendous pomp towards Rome
as befitted his new dignity, attended by priests and outriders. As a result,
the king soon found out what was going on and despatched his own royal
candidate to Rome instead, the Bishop of Norwich, who was equally
unworthy of this great office.
Neither of these choices satisfied the great pope of the middle ages,
Innocent III. He insisted that the monks’ chapter elect Cardinal Stephen
Langton, a distinguished English theologian living in Rome, and he then
invested him as Archbishop of Canterbury. But John did not take this lying
down, and, refused to allow the new archbishop into the country. There
was some justification for this: in all the battles between the papacy and
the English kings no pope had ever dared to appoint the head of the English
Church against England’s wishes. Nevertheless, John’s stand derived less
from principle than from his desire to have his own creature running the
Church who would help milk the tantalizingly wealthy Church lands. A
stalemate ensued, since the pope for his part would not recognize the
Bishop of Norwich. It was broken by Innocent III putting the whole
country under an interdict. All religious services were forbidden.
This was only the beginning of the pope’s campaign to use all the
weapons at his disposal to bring the King of England to heel. Although the
interdict meant very little to the irreligious John, it was a catastrophe for
ordinary people. Churches were closed. Weddings could not be celebrated.
The dead were buried in unconsecrated ground to the great distress of the
population. Only the first and last rites of baptism and extreme unction
(the sacrament of the dying), out of fear for the soul, were permitted.
Church bells, which in days without clocks marked the passing hours, were
eerily silent as if in reproach.
But the impatient king, unmoved by what to everyone else seemed a
curse, used the interdict as an opportunity to seize the property of the
wealthy abbeys and bishoprics. When in 1209 the pope went further and
excommunicated the king himself, John appropriated the lands of
England’s archbishoprics. With the income from these estates the king
raised large armies of mercenaries and settled any quarrels he had with the
Scots, Welsh and Irish to his satisfaction. He made Llywelyn Prince of
Gwynedd submit to him; then, crossing to Ireland, he divided the east into
counties on English lines and reduced their barons to order.
John had not understood quite what a formidable enemy he had made.
In 1212, incensed by the King of England’s behaviour, Pope Innocent
decided to use the final and most potent weapon in his repertoire. For some
time the Curia at Rome had claimed that, if a ruler of a Christian country
failed to obey the pope, the rest of the princes of Christendom might

I61
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

depose him. Innocent now issued the threat of deposition against John and
entrusted the mission to his greatest ally, King Philip Augustus. It was a
task the French king was more than happy to take on.
At the news that Philip was preparing an invasion, King John performed
a remarkable about-turn. He could not run the risk of an invasion which
might lose him the throne: he was unpopular among ordinary people
because of the interdict and the English barons were discontented after the
loss of their Norman lands. Though the king sent messages to the pope that
he would accept his nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop, with Philip
Augustus’ forces at his back, Innocent could make the King of England
accept sterner terms. Not only was Stephen Langton to be Archbishop of
Canterbury, but all the priests John had expelled because they had obeyed
the interdict and refused to say Mass should be allowed to return to
England. Most important of all, John was to yield up the crown of England
into the hands of the papal legate, Pandulf. In return for swearing to be the
pope's vassal he would receive the crown back but would rule England as
a fief of the papacy. England was to pay a thousand marks a year to Rome
for this privilege.
John agreed to all this. At least it meant that England was free from the
threat of invasion. John had not given up all thought of wresting back his
old patrimony of Anjou as well as Poitou. With his nephew the new Holy
Roman Emperor Otto, who had himself been deposed by the pope, he
continued with a confederacy of northern European princes to attack the
French king. But the attempt foundered on John’s military irresolution or,
as it seemed at the time, his cowardliness. He retreated south from a battle
for Anjou with Philip’s son Louis that he might have won, while the
contederacy’s armies with an English contingent were heavily defeated by
Philip himself, at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214.
The Battle of Bouvines was final confirmation that the Angevin Empire
was lost forever to England: henceforth the French monarchy would
become one of the four great powers of western Europe. It also marked a
turning point in John’s domestic fortunes. Humiliated once again, he now
had to return home and face the demands of the baronage and the Church.
In his absence abroad they had united under the inspiring leadership of the
new Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. At his suggestion, they
insisted that John issue a new charter of the laws of England like that of
Henry I to restore confidence in the increasingly tyrannical crown. When
the king refused, the barons mustered for war — with Langton’s active
support.
Two thousand of them, and the soldiers and knights holding land from
them, gathered at Stamtord in Lincolnshire and began moving south. The
vast array of armed men and horses was composed of all the groups in

162
 1199-1216

England which previously had had nothing in common — the northern and
southern barons, the marcher lords, the civil service or official nobility
created by Henry II and the tenants-in-chief. Once London had been
captured by the rebels, John realized that he would have to give in to their
demands in order to fight another day. On 15 June 1215 on the long, low
plain of Runnymede near Windsor, on an island in the middle of the
Thames, King John reluctantly fixed his seal to the remarkable document
known to history as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter.
In many ways Magna Carta is a document of its time. It was a
restatement of the existing rights and laws which the English had enjoyed
since charfers issued under Henry I and II, but it also reflected the
grievances of the barons and the erosion of their rights under the Angevin
kings. Magna Carta contained their demands for a greater share of power.
At the same time, it contained many clauses which have a timeless appeal.
Addressed ‘to all freemen of the realm and their heirs for ever’, it may be
seen as a document addressed to all classes. As such, it is generally
considered to represent the beginning of English liberties.
Superb administrators though the Norman and Angevin kings were, and
though they had made England part of a progressive European civilization,
they had ruled as despots. Magna Carta changed all that. It legally limited
the power of the king, forbidding him to ignore the law and authorizing a
council of twenty-five barons to enforce it by all possible means, including
imprisonment, if he did try to overrule it.
The leaders of the rebellion arranged that a copy of Magna Carta should
be read by the sheriff to a public meeting in each county in England. Every
¥

The island and meadow of Runnymede on the south bank of the Thames between
Staines and Windsor, where King John accepted Magna Carta in 1215.

163
 NORMAN AND ANGEVIN

important church and town in the kingdom was to have a copy, so that
everybody could know what their rights were and what they should take
for granted. Over the next eight centuries the rights proclaimed by Magna
Carta powerfully informed not only England’s national consciousness but
many cultures influenced by Britain and British emigrants, including those
of the United States, India and Australia. Magna Carta has been one of
England’s greatest contributions to political thought, an early expression
of the democratic ideal that the rule of law ensures rights for everyone by
virtue of their humanity and regardless of their wealth or poverty.
Among its many clauses, the charter guaranteed the rights and liberties
of the English Church, not only to prevent future quarrels over the
appointment of the head of the Church but also to allow chapters in
cathedrals to elect their bishops. The rules of inheritance were emphasized,
to stop John from ignoring them as was his wont; the procedure for
collecting scutage was laid down; the urgent early-thirteenth-century
problem of the indebtedness of the knightly class to Christian and Jewish
moneylenders was ameliorated; and certain weights and measures were
standardized.
The barons made no attempt to limit the jurisdiction of the king’s courts,
though they had curtailed some of their own. The Great Charter also
enunciated some fundamental principles of justice which have echoed
down the centuries, like Clause 40, ‘to no one will we sell, deny or defer,
right or justice’. But it also expressed the reverence for the rule of law
which was the spirit of the age. Clause 39 guaranteed for the first time in
English history that no freeman could be imprisoned, deprived of his
property, outlawed or molested without a trial according to the law of the
land in which he must be judged by his peers. Most importantly for future
generations, the king was prevented from raising new taxes on the people
without the permission of the council of barons.
But, though John sealed Magna Carta, slippery as ever he had no
intention of holding to it. The war between king and barons began again
when he fled to the Isle of Wight. From there he appealed for help to his
liege lord the pope, having further ingratiated himself with him by hastily
taking the Crusader oath. He begged him to free him from Magna Carta,
which he said insulted the crown and therefore the Holy See. Nothing
loath, Innocent III declared the Great Charter illegal, and suspended the
Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton for refusing to excommuni-
cate the English bishops and barons who had produced it.
With an army of foreign mercenaries John escaped from the Isle of
Wight, made his way through England and marched into Scotland to
attack King Alexander I, who had supported the rebels. Behind him he left
a large number of foreign troops to harry the barons’ estates; this they did

164
 TI99-1216

so successfully that the barons decided to ask Philip Augustus for help and
to offer his son the crown of England. Speciously asserting that John’s
murder of his nephew Arthur of Brittany required that he be deprived of
the English crown, Philip’s son Louis invaded England — claiming the
throne in the name of his wife Blanche of Castile, Henry II’s granddaughter
and John’s niece. In November 1215 some 7,000 Frenchmen sailed up the
Thames to support the barons and citizens of London.
The real possibility that England would undergo a new French conquest
was averted by the death of the already unwell king. Having led an
expedition north to capture the important city of Lincoln, in October 1216
John passed away at Newark in Nottinghamshire after a gastric upset
caused by a supper of peaches and new cider. Though his heir Henry III
was only nine years old, he had the advantage of youth and innocence to
make him a rallying point for national enthusiasm and he was endorsed by
the papal legate, Guala. To nobles like William Marshall, Earl of
Pembroke and Hubert de Burgh, he was the acceptable face of Plantagenet
legitimacy. With the support of the Church, they would rule in his name
for eleven years.
Henceforth until the end of the fourteenth century when a new dynasty
seized the throne, the kings of England were known by a different name.
They could not be called Angevins, since they no longer held the land in
France which entitled them to. Instead, because the family badge of the
Angevin counts was the yellow broom called in French plante genét
(genista to us today) they became known as the Plantagenet kings.
John was and remains England’s most unpopular king. Despite his
competence he had the reputation for being both cruel and unlucky. Not
only did he lose Normandy, so earning again the title Jean Sans Terre
which his father had affectionately given him, or John Lackland as later
generations called him when English became the spoken language instead
of French. He is also said to have lost the crown jewels of England when,
in October 1216 shortly before he died, his baggage train was sucked down
in a whirlpool formed by the incoming tide as it crossed the channel of the
Welland. At a point still known as King’s Corner between Cross Keys
Wash and Lynn, as the king supposedly watched from the northern shore,
half his army disappeared beneath the waters of the Wash and the crown
of England was never seen again. This episode would enable many
schoolchildren to joke that John had lost the crown of England in the
Wash.

165
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PLANTAGENET
 Henry II
(1216-1272)

Henry III succeeded to the throne as a small boy. Despite his immensely
long reign there always remained something weak and childlike about his
personality. He had a reputation for ‘simplicity’. This was not a
compliment in the context of a king required to rule over strong and
turbulent barons already used to a limited monarchy and to getting their
own way. The abiding passions of Henry’s life were his religious faith,
which often caused him to neglect regal duties, and his devotion to his
greedy French and Italian relations. Their demands for office, which his
father John had always happily complied with, meant that a constant
theme in England during his fifty-six-year reign was a hatred of foreigners.
Henry was thus a poor head of state. On the other hand his strong aesthetic
sense did much to advance the arts in England. The country’s churches

fiain: ‘memana Shaaat aselee

Alter ia oe ee-Echoc cal Taraurare op-
ie Se aia
i hina

Henry III, who rebuilt Westminster Abbey, panne his masons.

169
 PLANTAGENET

benefited from being adorned by the skilled continental craftsmen he so

admired, but his greatest monument is Westminster Abbey, the rebuilding
of which in the English Gothic style over twenty years was a passionate
personal project. Ultimately, however, one of the most significant
developments of his reign was that in 1265 the first prototype of the House
of Commons was convened.
William Marshall, the elderly Earl of Pembroke, who had been a wise
counsellor to Henry’s grandfather Henry II, became regent, and his
pragmatic actions did much to restore the royal fortunes. He remained
alive long enough to ensure that Louis and his French armies were expelled
from England and that his youthful charge was backed by the papacy.
Then, to end the civil war and secure the barons’ allegiance, he cleverly
reissued Magna Carta on behalf of the boy king. But, although the French
threat to the throne had evaporated, the next ten years were turbulent ones
resembling the anarchy under Stephen. When William Marshall died, his
place as chief adviser to the young king was taken by Hubert de Burgh. De
Burgh’s time was soon occupied ridding England of John’s foreign
favourites, noblemen who had been granted enormous amounts of English
land as a reward for helping John but were now riding roughshod over
English customs, imprisoning judges and ignoring the law. De Burgh
besieged many of the foreigners’ illegal castles and chased most of them out
of the country.
But in 1227 the situation changed for the worse when the pope declared
that Henry III’s minority was at an end and that he was of an age to rule.
Henry turned away from de Burgh and restored to power, as justiciar, one
of John’s most grasping ministers, Peter des Roches, who had been both
chancellor and Bishop of Winchester. Henry continued blithely to hand
out land and offices in unprecedented quantities: Peter des Roches’
nephew, for example, became sheriff for no fewer than ten counties: York,
Berkshire, Gloucester, Somerset, Northumberland, Devon, Lancashire,
Essex, Hampshire and Norfolk. In 1233 the English lost their patience.
William Marshall’s son Richard tried to force the king to dismiss Peter des
Roches. Civil war followed. Though Richard Marshall was treacherously
slain when the bishops threatened to excommunicate the king if he did not
remove des Roches, Henry eventually gave way. In 1234 he dismissed des
Roches and his Poitevin supporters and restored Hubert de Burgh to his
estates.
But the king did not learn from these encounters. Though he was far
more English in his tastes than any of his line and named his children after
English saints, he soon brought a whole new set of foreigners to power
when in 1236 he married Eleanor of Provence and adopted her Savoyard
relations as his own. Under their influence he attempted to rule without

170
 1216-1272

any kind of council of English barons. The country was also plagued by
interference from the papacy. Previously, under more resolute kings, the
increased assertion of papal power had been resisted. To Henry III,
surrounded as he was by French and Italian advisers, there seemed little
wrong in allowing the pope to supersede ancient electoral rights and
remove incumbents from their positions.
As a result a great number of French and Italian
priests became absentee bishops and abbots, taking
very little interest in their parishioners. The queen’s
uncle, the Savoyard Boniface, became a loathed
Archbishop ,of Canterbury on the death of the
saintly Edmund Rich in 1240 but hardly bothered to
visit England. The unpopularity of these foreigners
was not helped by a massive hike in taxation ordered
by Pope Gregory IX to pay for his war against the
emperor Frederick II, which Henry’s religious nature
impelled him to obey. The only important figure in
the English Church who had the courage to protest
was Robert Grossteste, the Bishop of Lincoln. But a
single voice had no impact.
Despite or perhaps because of the influence of so
many foreigners, a new sense of Englishness had
been growing in the country. The several reissues of
Magna Carta in every shire town helped convey to
English people some idea. of their rights. The new orders of mendicant or
begging friars were another unifying development, acting in effect like
newspapers carrying news of the latest events from town to town and
enabling those living in isolated villages and hamlets to feel part of the
whole. The mendicant friars were travelling brothers, usually Dominicans
and Franciscans, who breathed a new ardour for truth into the Church by
the sermons they preached at market crosses in the open air. Unconnected
to vested interests, they had more critical minds than the regular clergy.
The sense of nationhood was further encouraged by the burst of intellectual
energy at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There intelligent youths
from every region were able to exchange ideas and learn from outstanding
lecturers such as Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (who arrived in
Oxford around 1230 and set up the Franciscans there) and his fellow
Franciscan Roger Bacon. The towns too were now flourishing. A highly
profitable trade in raw wool flowed between England and Flanders, from
where it was dispersed to continental weaving towns to become cloth. And
there had been a resurgence of writing in English: the song ‘Sumer is icumen
in’ dates from this period, written in the language known as Middle English.

7i
 PLANTAGENET

Yet in the hands of careless foreigners the efficient government of

England was decaying. The Welsh princes once again began to expand
south under Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and his grandson Llywelyn ap
Gruffydd. Hitherto English kings had been able to rely on income from
crown lands, but Richard I and Henry’s father John had sold so much that
there was little left. The crown was so bankrupt that a number of the king’s
servants were even convicted of highway robbery because he had not paid
their salaries. Bad feeling against the king was becoming universal.
The discontent was fanned by a last attempt to get back the Angevin
Empire. Henry III was an exceptionally devoted son. On John’s death his
mother Isabella of Angouléme had married the son of John’s Poitevin
enemy Hugh de Lusignan. By 1242 under the French king Louis IX the
kingdom of France was continuing to expand dramatically at the expense
of the traditional rights of the Poitevin barons. In response to the pleas of
his mother and stepfather, Henry took an English army to invade Poitou.
He was defeated so conclusively at the Battle of Taillebourg that by the
next generation Poitou was directly ruled by the King of France. In 1259
by the Treaty of Paris the king accepted what had been fact since 1214, that
only the Gascon region of Aquitaine remained to England. With this defeat
yet another wave of foreigners, more of Henry III’s numerous half-brothers
and sisters, arrived in England. They too had to be accommodated like the
Savoyards, with offices and bishoprics.
When Henry III took it upon himself, as a good son of the Church, to
pay for the papal wars against the emperor, the country bent under new
taxes. Although Frederick II was dead, the papacy was still determined to
break up his empire. In return for English money, Henry’s second son
Edmund had been promised the kingdom of Sicily, while Henry’s brother
Richard of Cornwall was elected King of the Romans with papal support
in 1257. The price tag for these grandiose plans was an enormous
£135,000, which Henry had no hope of paying without raising fresh taxes.
And by virtue of Magna Carta he could not raise those taxes without
obtaining the permission of the Great Council of twenty-five barons. In
1258 he was duly forced to call a meeting of the Council.
The king’s perpetually impoverished state meant he called the Great
Council together on a regular basis to borrow from it. As these meetings
became more frequent it began to be so much the custom for barons to have
their say in the affairs of the realm that the Council began to be referred to
as a Parliament (from the French parler, to talk). By the 1250s the barons
were quite clear on their objectives. The closed court circle prevented them
obtaining any influence. If the king wished to raise more taxes he must
reconfirm the Charters and restore the offices of justiciar, chancellor and
treasurer which Henry had done without since 12.44.

gps
 T216-1272

Thus it was that early in 1258, when the king asked for that £135,000
to meet the cost of the pope’s Crusade, the barons and knights rebelled. At
the Great Council or Parliament at Westminster they declared that no more
cash would be forthcoming from them until the government of England
was reformed.
The leader of the revolt was a baron named Simon de Montfort, a
Frenchman who had inherited the earldom of Leicester through his mother.
De Montfort had begun his life in England as one of the unpopular foreign
favourites, and had at first risen high because he was married to Henry III’s
sister. A fierce and passionate character, in 1248 de Montfort had been
entrusted with restoring order to the last remnant of the Angevin Empire in
mainland France, the southernmost county of Gascony, where he was made
seneschal or governor. He was the son of the Simon de Montfort who had
terrorized the Albigensian heretics in that region of France a generation
earlier, and he used the same strong-armed techniques to subdue the
independently minded towns and tempestuous nobles. But success was
achieved at a price. The weak-minded king grew alarmed at the Gascon
complaints about the severity of de Montfort’s methods and began to take
their side. The bitter and disillusioned Simon de Montfort rapidly became a
rallying point for opposition to the king.
In June 1258 a second Parliament met at
Oxford, with the barons ready for war should
Henry III not accede to their demands. Although
the king and his cronies dubbed it the Mad
Parliament, the Parliament’s demands were coolly
rational. There was to be a new agreement to
supplement the conditions laid down in the Great
Charter. Known as the Provisions of Oxford this
stipulated that an inner circle or Council of Fifteen
was to be chosen by Henry and the barons to
administer the country with the king.
The Provisions of Oxford represented a further
advance in limiting the royal powers. Their revolt
was justified to de Montfort and others by the
longstanding Judaeo-Christian doctrine of the
righteousness of resisting tyrants, and the concept
of the commonweal or good of the community.
The Fifteen forced the king to expel all the
foreigners (including the king’s Poitevin half-
Simon de Monfort, brothers) from their official positions, appoint
leader of the barons in
the civil war against Englishmen as ministers and put an end to his
Henry III. expensive foreign adventures.

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 PLANTAGENET

The rule of the Fifteen nominally lasted from 1259 to 1263. Jealousies
among the barons saw it degenerate into a battle for leadership between de
Montfort and Richard of Gloucester and resulted in what are known as the
Barons’ Wars. Soon the Lord Edward, Henry III’s decisive eldest son, the
future King Edward I, was intriguing to create a royalist faction within the
Fifteen, where his chief accomplice was the Earl of Gloucester. With their
backing Henry revoked the Provisions of Oxford, had the pope annul his
obligations and went to war. But both sides were so evenly matched that
the French king Louis IX was appealed to for judgement. The Mise of
Amiens of 1264 was the result, which denounced the Provisions of Oxford
as illegal.
But Simon de Montfort and his supporters would not abide by the Mise
of Amiens and were determined to continue the war. At Lewes in Sussex
on 14 May 1264 the decisive battle of the campaign was fought. Earl
Simon, who was a brilliant general, captured both the king and his heir,
and by a treaty called the Mise of Lewes the king’s power was handed over
to a committee of nine. In reality England was ruled by the great earl.
However, the royalist opposition had not completely given up. With the
Welsh marcher lords gathering for the king, and the queen raising a force
on the French coast among her relations, Simon de Montfort saw that he
had to act swiftly to get the whole of the country behind him. He therefore
summoned in 1265 what is — misleadingly — known as the first English
Parliament.
Unlike the earlier Parliaments, that of 1265 was not just a council of
barons, but something which approximated more closely to the modern
Houses of Parliament. A precursor of the Commons was convoked to
discuss the government of the country with the barons and bishops (the
Lords). Not only was every shire to elect two knights to give their views at
the meeting, but a number of cities and boroughs in England were invited
to send two representatives, who by the end of the century had become
known as burgesses. The English were used to giving their views on a
regular basis to the king, whether via sheriffs who reported on the results
of a grand jury inquest or via merchants when the king wished to borrow
money. But these were informal gatherings. The Parliament of 1265 was
the first time in English history that all the estates of the realm met in the
same place. But they did not merely give their assent to taxes. During their
meeting all present contributed their views on matters of public policy.
This would rapidly become a valued tradition.
A-year later Simon de Montfort’s rule came to an end. In the course of a
de Montfort-led expedition to put down a royalist insurrection among the
Welsh marcher lords on behalf of the captive Lord Edward, the king’s son
managed to escape. Many barons now joined their soldiers to those of the

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 I216-1272

Welsh marchers and swung to the side of Henry III. De Montfort was
forced to recross the Severn and, on a blisteringly hot day in August 1265,
face Edward and the marcher lords at the Battle of Evesham. Edward, who
was soon to be famous as ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, outgeneralled de
Montfort by surrounding him on all sides. As he surveyed the scene and
saw that death was near, Simon said half admiringly, ‘By the arm of St
James they come on cunningly; God have mercy on our souls, for our
bodies are the Lord Edward’s!’
That was certainly true for Simon de Montfort, as his body was
disembowelled and his head stuck on a pike before the Tower of London.
Nevertheless his ideas lived on. The Lord Edward would himself adopt
many notions of government that he had learned from Earl Simon. Though
Henry III remained king until 1272, real power was now in the hands of
his accomplished son.
By 1267 Edward had unified the country by pardoning most of the
rebels by an agreement called the Dictum of Kenilworth. Large fines
restored them to their confiscated estates. Under the Treaty of Shrewsbury,
the new power in Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, who had allied himself to
Simon de Montfort, was apparently bound to the new regime, entitled to
call himself prince of all the country of Wales and head or overlord of the
Welsh magnates. England, which had had rebels in every shire, was now
so peaceful that the Lord Edward was able to depart for the Fourth
Crusade for four years. On word of his father’s death in 1272 he made a
very leisurely return. Appointing regents, Edward I did not reappear in
England until 1274, evidently having no fear of further revolts.

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 Edward I
(L272—1 3.07)

Edward I was thirty-three years old when he succeeded to the throne. He

is known as Edward I because he was the first Plantagenet king with that
name though there had been two Anglo-Saxon predecessors, Edward the
Elder and Edward the Confessor. He was nicknamed Longshanks for his
great height, a feature which helped save him from being wounded in battle
because his long arms gave him an advantage with a lance and opponents
could never get near enough. He was a brilliant soldier, the man who
finally broke the power of the Welsh rulers — which no one, not even the
Romans, the world’s finest soldiers, had succeeded in doing before.
Holding the country down by a ring of famous castles which still stand
today, he brought Wales permanently under English rule. In place of
Llywelyn ap Gruffydd he made his eldest son the Prince of Wales. On his
large but austere tomb of Purbeck marble in Westminster Abbey, itself a
reflection of his stern personality, an unknown fourteenth-century hand
scrawled the words ‘malleus Scotorum’, the Hammer of the Scots. But
though Edward I hammered Scotland he never completely conquered her,
and died within sight of that independent land.
The new king was named Edward because Henry III so greatly admired
Edward the Confessor. Yet no one could have been less like that mild saint.
Edward I more closely resembled his forbidding and decisive ancestor
William the Conqueror. His experiences during his father’s reign and in the
course of what was in effect an apprenticeship in politics under Simon de
Montfort had convinced him that the great earl’s broad-based Parliament
was the best way of uniting the country. The immediate challenge of
Edward’s reign came from Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, whom it took two Welsh
campaigns to destroy. But the king’s energies were chiefly bent on a series
of legal reforms designed to put the royal government on a firm footing
after the anarchy of the previous seventy-five years, and above all to limit
the power of the magnates.
Edward I was inspired by a chivalric ideal of good kingship which had
come to dominate the mindset of the age through the courtly romances of
the previous century. He took a keen interest in King Arthur, whose

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supposed bones were reburied in a special ceremony performed before him
and his queen at Glastonbury Abbey and he was famous for his Round
Table banquets. The legendary devotion that existed between him and his
wife Eleanor of Castile in an age when many marriages were dynastic
affairs reveals a man of strong feelings. She accompanied him on most of
his military campaigns, even attending him on his Crusade to the Holy
Land in 1270. The legend that she saved the life of Edward there when he
was wounded probably indicates that she had brought with her from her
native Castile some of the superior medical knowledge of its Arab doctors.
When Queen Eleanor died at Harby in Nottinghamshire in 1290, most
unusually her distraught widower followed her cortége all the way to
Westminster Abbey. He erected the celebrated series of Eleanor Crosses —
twelve in all — to mark the places where her body rested as it was carried
south. Some of them are still standing, though the best known, which gave
Charing Cross its name, is a copy.
But Edward I was not just a romantic warrior, he was also immensely
practical. He drew up new laws to encourage foreign merchants and
reformed the coinage. He had a political motive here too, because he
understood that if he promoted the mercantile interest or trade it would
balance the power of the barons. Visiting his French territories on the way
back from the Crusades, he was struck by the lawlessness of Guienne in
Gascony. He therefore made it a policy to found new towns named
bastides to encourage the growth of a law-abiding middle-class population
of merchants and lawyers. No less practically, one of his first actions was
to make sure the crown profited from England’s growing wool trade,
which had hugely expanded thanks to the Cistercian monks’ pioneering
work clearing forests to breed sheep. In 1275 he instituted a royal tax on
every sack of wool, sheepskin and leather exported to northern Europe.
Under Edward I, more than ever the area round the Tower of London
became the seat of government. He moved the mint there from Westminster
and built the medieval palace we know today next to the White Tower. The
plainness of his quarters, with the little chapel off his bedroom, at a time
when the English decorative arts were at their richest suggests the hard
purposefulness and lack of frivolity in his character which contrast so
dramatically with his father’s sensuous and artistic nature.
In 1274, the year of his coronation on his return from the Holy Land,
Edward relaunched throughout the country that old Norman admini-
strative tool, the inquest. Owing to the careless nature of his father’s
administration many of the baronial courts had taken over the jurisdiction
and rights of the royal courts to the detriment of the king’s power.
Undertaking an investigation known as Quo warranto (Latin for ‘by what
right’) royal commissioners travelled throughout the country inquiring

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into what rights each baron claimed for himself and whether they were
justified. This could mainly be achieved through the production of a
charter or piece of parchment sealed with the king’s Great Seal, though in
some places of course the right to hold a court stretched back to Anglo-
Saxon times and was treated as being based on immemorial custom.
The First Statute of Westminster of 1275 summarized the results of this
inquiry, while the Statute of Gloucester in 1278 curtailed many former
baronial jurisdictions and replaced them with royal courts. The Third
Statute of Westminster, generally known as Quia emptores, further
weakened the power of the feudal party by allowing the sale of land
without feudal obligation to the seller. Instead the buyer became the vassal
of the seller’s own lord — frequently the crown. The responsibility of the
hundreds in England to prevent crime within their boundaries was rein-
forced by the Second Statute of Westminster, which also set down new
arrangements for managing the fyrd — from now on to be known as the
militia.
Edward I also attempted to check the authority of the Church. He put
an end to the annual payment to the pope established by John as Rome's
vassal, and laid down that the Church courts should never encroach on the
jurisdiction of the common law. By the Statute of Mortmain of 1279 (from
the Latin for dead hand, mortua manu) men and women were prevented
from leaving their property to the Church without the crown’s leave. All
these measures made Edward I richer than his father had been and enabled
him to do without the wealth of the Jewish community. Edward’s
passionately Christian religious convictions stimulated an anti-Semitic
streak in him. Objecting to the high rates of interest the Jewish community
charged for loans and accusing them of using foreign coins instead of the
sterling he insisted upon, in 1290 he expelled the Jews from England. They
did not return for three and a half centuries, when Oliver Cromwell asked
them back.
In another display of force, complaints about the judiciary persuaded the
king to have every one of the royal judges tried in 1289. All but four were
dismissed from office. From 1292 advocacy was put on a more profes-
sional basis with the introduction of a rule that only lawyers trained by
judges could appear in the royal courts. And the Inns of Court, which all
barristers must belong to, date from this era as centres of legal education.
But the wars against Wales and Scotland were the dominating feature of
Edward’s reign. His campaign against the Welsh under Prince Llywelyn ap
Gruffydd began as early as 1277. Prince Llywelyn had used the Treaty of
Shrewsbury as an opportunity to enhance his powers. His aim was to
overrun the lands of the English marcher lords and double the size of his
dominion. When Edward heard that Llywelyn, who was engaged to Simon

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de Montfort’s daughter Eleanor, was claiming to be the spiritual heir of the

great rebel, he marched an army into north Wales. By the Treaty of
Conway Llywelyn lost the overlordship of Wales and was reduced to being
a petty prince once more. Most of his territory was put under English law
with no regard for Welsh custom.
Oppressing the Welsh population, with English soldiers placed in every
district, soon provoked another rebellion, led by Llywelyn and his brother
Dafydd. Once again Edward led an army into north Wales and blockaded
Prince Llywelyn in Snowdonia. But Llywelyn managed to flee through the
English lines and escape to the upper Wye. There Prince Llywelyn made his
last stand with the support of many of the ordinary people of the marches.
But on rr December he was killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge.
This time Edward was less merciful in his dealings. Llywelyn’s head was
cut from his body, mounted on a pike and crowned with willow in cruel
mockery of the way the Welsh used to crown their kings. In the tradition
of the age it was left rotting outside the Tower of London as a warning.
Though Prince Dafydd held out for a year longer, hidden in the woods and
secret valleys around his home, by 1283 he too had been executed at
Shrewsbury.
North Wales was organized along the lines of English local government.
The Marcher lands remained semi-independent feudal fiefdoms until the
sixteenth century, but most of Wales, particularly the north and coastal
regions, was reorganized on the English model. It was divided into six

Harlech Castle, part of the ring of castles begun by Edward I in 1283 to hold
down Wales after the conquest.

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 PLANTAGENET

counties (Anglesey, Carmarthen, Caernarvon, Merioneth and Cardigan,

the sixth being invented by Edward I and named Flintshire), each with its
own sheriffs. The country was fenced off by a series of impregnable white
castles, among them Caernarvon, Conway and Harlech. Edward’s
surviving eldest son, the future Edward II, was born at Caernarvon Castle
in 1284. Legend has it that Edward shouted to the crowds assembled
below, ‘I will give you a prince who speaks no English,’ and produced the
newborn babe at the window. From 1301 the title Prince of Wales has
always been given to the eldest son of the English monarch.
The conquest of Scotland, though achieved more rapidly than that of
Wales, would in fact be a short-lived affair. By the end of the thirteenth
century Scotland was a large, unified area ruled by one king and running
from the Highlands in the north, which were populated by Celtic tribes who
had intermarried with Norman settlers, down to the River Tweed in the
south. In the south west the kingdom reached down from Galloway to the
old Welsh kingdom of what is today known as Cumbria or the Lake District.
So extensive a territory might prove a haven for enemies of England. On any
reading, statecraft suggested that it might be better under English control.
The English and Scots had lived in peace for more than a hundred years
since the Treaty of Falaise in 1174. But in 1286 the situation became far
more volatile: King Alexander III, the last in the line of old Scottish kings,
whom tragedy had deprived of his two male heirs within two years of one
another, died unexpectedly. This left his seven-year-old granddaughter
Margaret, the Maid of Norway, the only heir to the throne. But when she
too died four years later, there was then no obvious heir. No fewer than
thirteen claimants to the Scottish throne registered their claim. The most
important were John Balliol and Robert Bruce, who were both descended
in the female line. Their claims were sufficiently contentious for there to be
a very real possibility of civil war. The Scottish magnates, many of whom
held land in England, decided that Edward I was best placed to name the
new king. But Edward would do so only at a price. Ever since Richard the
Lionheart had commuted the Treaty of Falaise for money, so that the
Scottish king only did homage to the English for his lands in England, the
notion of the English king as overlord of the Scots had fallen away. Edward
I agreed to judge the contest on condition that all the Scottish nobility and
the claimants themselves first performed an act of homage to him as
overlord of Scotland.
The chief claimants and the magnates were so anxious to secure
Edward’s support that they agreed. Assisted by 104 judges, Edward tried
the suit for the succession to the Scottish throne. After much deliberation
the crown was finally granted in 1292 to John Balliol, who was proclaimed
king at Berwick-on-Tweed, then a Scottish town. Almost immediately,

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however, this apparent solution was thrown into doubt when war broke
out once again between France and England over the English possessions
on the Continent. Edward I led an English army to Gascony to defend it
against the French king Philip IV, while Philip used his agents to stir up
rebellion against his English enemy in Wales and Scotland. Although the
Welsh rebellion was quickly put down, the Scots threat was far more
powerful. From 1293 dates the series of diplomatic treaties and close links
between Scotland and France against their mutual enemy England which is
known as the Auld Alliance.
A certain amount of antagonism towards Edward I had already been
aroused among the Scots barons. Legal appeals by ordinary Scotsmen from
the local fetdal courts to the royal courts of England were becoming
common, partly because of the reputation for fairer, more professional
justice in England. But the Scots were also angry at being asked to form
part of the English feudal levy against the French army in Gascony. John
Balliol was despised as a poor leader of men who was too much in the
English king’s pocket. He was now more or less supplanted as ruler of
Scotland by a committee of twelve nobles similar to the Council of Fifteen
which had ruled England for Henry III.
Threatened on all his borders, Edward I followed Earl Simon’s example
before him. By summoning in 1295 what is known as the Model Parliament
he involved the whole English nation in the looming crisis and ratcheted the
political organization of the country up another level. The Great Charter
had limited the powers of the king by law. But Edward went a step further
and stressed that in England the king’s government was by the assent of the
governed. The writ requesting the attendance of two elected representatives
from each shire, and from cities and boroughs to join with the barons and
bishops includes the celebrated phrase: ‘What touches all should be
approved of all.’ The document went on, ‘It is also very clear that common
dangers should be met by measures agreed upon in common.’
Edward had been used to calling upon Parliament since the beginning of
his reign. But this was the first time he accepted that, in return for voting
new taxes for the war, he should allow the nation to enter into the councils
of state. With the large sums of money voted him by the Model Parliament
in 1296 he embarked on bringing Scotland to heel. Faced with Edward’s
huge invading army John Balliol gave up the crown of Scotland, Edward
pronounced himself king, and the country was divided among _ his
lieutenants on English county lines. To mark the change of rule, the great
Stone of Scone or Stone of Destiny, where Scottish kings since the sixth
century had been enthroned, was carted south to lie beneath the English
king’s throne in Westminster Abbey. There it remained until 1999, when
in honour of the new Scottish Assembly, it came home after 700 years.

18
 PLANTAGENET

The king now marched south,

having apparently disposed of
both of the King of France’s
allies, to prepare for war in
Gascony. But in England he
found that his war plans were
resisted by both the clergy and the
baronage. They had _ evidently
taken Edward’s injunction that
what touches all must _ be
approved by all strongly to heart.
The Archbishop of Canterbury,
Robert Winchelsea, declared that
in accordance with Pope Boniface
VIII’s most recent bull the English
clergy would pay no more taxes
to the lay ruler. The Constable of
England, Humphrey Bohun, Earl
of Hereford, and Roger Bigod,
Earl of Norfolk and Marshal of
England, and most of the rest of
the great magnates meeting in
Edward I’s throne in Westminster Abbey, Parliament at Salisbury in 1297
built to hold the Scots’ Stone of Scone. refused to go to Gascony as
ordered. Edward stormed off there by himself. Denied money by the estates
of the realm he financed the French expedition by the illegal tax known as
the Maltolt: this entailed his soldiers confiscating all the merchants’ wool
and releasing it in return for gold.
But the English magnates were the king’s equal in decisive behaviour. As
soon as Edward was in Gascony, encouraged by the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Bohun and Bigod took his son Edward of Caernarvon
prisoner and refused to release him until the king had reissued Magna
Carta. They also insisted on the addition of new provisions: that the
Maltolt be abolished and that henceforth it be deemed illegal to raise taxes
without the permission of Parliament (in place of the twenty-five barons of
Magna Carta). This process is known as the Confirmatio Cartarum.
Edward I was in no position to refuse, and authorized the Confirmation
without further ado.
His troubles were far from over. A great popular rebellion in Scotland
brought Longshanks hurrying back from the continent. Under a Scottish
knight named Sir William Wallace (known as Braveheart) a series of risings
had broken out all over the country, and at the decisive battle of Stirling

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 1272-1307

Bridge in September 1297 Wallace dramatically defeated the king’s

representative in Scotland, Earl Warenne. By the end of the year Scotland
had expelled the English, and Wallace was burning all their border towns.
Wallace’s supporters tended to be ordinary people, rather than Scots
nobles who frequently held estates in England as well as Scotland and
therefore had every reason for not antagonizing the English king. Indeed,
most of his ragged army were so impoverished that they could not afford a
horse. But Wallace himself was a tactician of genius, and the Battle of
Falkirk the following year was a very close-run thing. Only Edward I’s
employment of archers trained in the esoteric art of the longbow, whose
superiority he had first observed during the Welsh wars, defeated Wallace’s
use of squares and pikes designed to impale the superb English cavalry.
Problems with the baronage soon required the king’s presence in the
south. It was not until 1303 that he could return to the north and make
sure of his Scottish kingdom. By now he was a sick man. Though he was
in his late sixties, an elderly man by the standards of those days, he refused
to be borne in the litter that his advisers felt would be appropriate for the
long journey north. Instead he rode at the head of the army to besiege
Stirling Castle, the key to the country’s defences. So close was the king to
the castle walls during the siege that a crossbow bolt lodged itself in his
saddle. But, though his men begged him to retire, the stiff-backed old
warrior refused, and sat on his charger day after day watching as the Scots
threw Greek fire and boiling oil at their attackers.
When Stirling at last fell, the conquest of Scotland seemed a foregone
conclusion. Wallace was captured, taken south and hanged, drawn and
quartered, and his head joined Prince Llywelyn’s above the gate at the
Tower of London. English rule was reimposed. Scotland was divided into
four areas to be governed overall by Edward I’s nephew John of Brittany,
while Edward left for the south. But no sooner had he departed than a new
revolt broke out, led by another of Scotland’s greatest heroes, Robert the
Bruce.
Bruce, grandson ofJohn Balliol’s rival, had initially been one of the Scots
nobles who supported English rule in Scotland, until the brutality with
which English soldiers treated the Scots aroused his ire (great ladies like the
Countess of Buchan had been humiliated by being kept in cages suspended
from castle walls). In 1306, during an assignation between Bruce and John
Comyn in a lonely church in Dumfries to hatch a plot against English rule,
the hot-tempered Bruce murdered Comyn. Comyn also had a claim to the
Scottish throne and Bruce seems to have been unable to prevent himself
seizing the moment to put paid to his rival. Although Bruce was rendered
an outlaw by this act, which was made more heinous by being committed
on holy ground, the ordinary people began to rallyto him, with many

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joining him at his hideout in the hills.

From there an irresistible momentum
seized the Scots. Fighting broke out
everywhere, the English were expelled
from the country, and at the end of that
year Robert the Bruce was crowned King
of Scotland at Scone.
Although Edward I was by now
almost seventy years of age and his
health was poor, his will was as strong as
ever. For the third time he set out from
the south to enforce his rule on the Seal of King Robert the Bruce,
recalcitrant Scots. But on 7 July 1307 he —_ Who defended Scottish
died at Burgh on Sands within sight of eee a
his goal. The fierce old king had demanded that his bones be boiled down
so they could be carried before the English army when they crossed the
border on their way north. His son, Edward II, was made of rather
different stuff. Despite his promise to his father to continue his campaign,
he abandoned it and retreated south to the company of a handsome
Gascon knight called Piers Gaveston.

184
 Edward II
(1307-1327)

Edward I had managed the baronage or feudal party fairly well. But the
son who inherited the throne had none of his father’s strategic skills nor
the English Justinian’s serious-mindedness. As might have been expected
with such a father, Edward II had been well educated in warfare and
kingship, but his character remained incurably frivolous. Although his
reign lasted twenty years, he reigned rather than ruled, and early on lost
the battle for power.
Edward II was twenty-three years old when he came to the throne. He
was nearly as tall and handsome a man as Longshanks, but he had
inherited nothing of his strength of character and was very easily
influenced. He admired Piers Gaveston for his ready wit and sharp tongue,
though the Gascon’s insolence was precisely what made him loathed by the
English baronage. Upon his father’s death Edward II’s first action after
abandoning the Scottish campaign was to recall Gaveston, whom his
father had banished for his decadence, back to court. He married him to
his niece and reinstated him with full honours and estates and the royal
earldom of Cornwall. But Gaveston’s relentless search for pleasure with his
boon companion the king soon had the royal government grinding to a
halt, and by 1308 the barons in Parliament were calling for his expulsion
from the kingdom.
Edward II hurriedly ensured Gaveston’s removal from the country by
appointing him to the governorship of Ireland, and offered many
concessions to Parliament if the Gascon knight were allowed back to
England. But, though Gaveston was permitted to return, by 1310 the
barons in Parliament were insisting on a new programme of reforms to be
set out by a steering committee of the baronage and bishops called the
Lords Ordainers. A year later this new committee pronounced that
Gaveston was to be exiled permanently, that all ministers were to be
appointed on their advice and that the king was not to make war or leave
the country without their permission. Though Edward ordered Gaveston
back into the country, the barons besieged the favourite in Scarborough
Castle and soon after murdered him. Edward II made a few feeble attempts

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to avenge himself on the baronage, but he was more dependent on them

than ever to push back the Scots who, under Robert the Bruce, were
threatening to occupy northern England.
According to the story, the audacious Bruce was encouraged to
persevere in his campaign under almost impossible conditions when he was
hiding out in an old croft in Galloway watching a spider spin its web. By
1314 he and his followers had conquered most of Scotland and crucially
won over the majority of the Scottish baronage to his side. All the castles
with which Edward had garrisoned the country were in his men’s hands
except for Stirling, a stronghold of enormous strategic value because it was
the gateway to the Highlands. Even the languorous Edward II saw that he
would have to lead an army north to rescue his garrison. In the meantime
Robert the Bruce, though considerably outnumbered, had prepared the
ground to draw the English army into a trap. He would defeat them before
they could relieve the siege.
The Scottish army was drawn up in a strong position on rising ground
behind the little stream or burn of the Bannock, a tributary of the River
Forth. Separating the two armies was a very marshy piece of land full of
bogs and pools which Bruce had made more treacherous by secretly
digging pits and lining them with stakes. All went according to Bruce’s
plan: the English cavalry charged and came to grief on the sharpened
stakes. Meanwhile the Scots cavalry destroyed the formidable English and
Welsh bowmen, Edward having failed to protect them with infantry.
The English army was already in a state of panic-stricken confusion
when over the horizon appeared what seemed to be fresh Scottish
reinforcements, though they were only camp followers dressed up. The
English nerve broke completely. The king himself set a poor example to his
men when his armoured figure, the distinctive gold crown encircling his
steel helmet, was seen hurrying away from the battlefield. At this his armies
also turned and ran. It was a total rout. Next day the exhausted English
garrison of Stirling Castle opened its gates to Robert the Bruce. He was
king of an independent Scotland in fact as well as name.
The humiliation of the Battle of Bannockburn put more power than ever
into the hands of the Lords Ordainer, who were now controlled by
Edward’s first cousin Thomas of Lancaster, son of Edward I’s brother
Edmund. Under Lancaster’s influence the Lords Ordainer proved just as
inadequate as the king at governing efficiently. The rule of law on which
Edward I had prided himself began to fall away, as private wars between
the king’s and Lancaster’s retainers took the place of peace. The whole of
the English administration began to collapse, and the north of England was
increasingly subject to lightning border raids by the Scots. To add to the
atmosphere of catastrophe and chaos, 1315 and 1316 were years of

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famine, with incessant rain throughout those summers preventing the corn
from ripening. Even the royal household experienced difficulties in
obtaining bread. Thousands of people died and the misery was intensified
when cattle disease broke out all over the country. The beasts were
slaughtered in their thousands to prevent it spreading further.
A moderate party now arose among the barons headed by the Earl of
Pembroke, who sought to control the king by a new council and curtail
Thomas of Lancaster’s activities. But Edward II began to favour over the
rest two barons of Pembroke’s party, brothers named Despenser, shower-
ing them with titles and lands. In 1321 a full Parliament met, led by
Thomas of Lancaster, to launch an attack on the Despensers and banish
the new favourites. Showing unexpected spirit, the king went to war
against Lancaster’s chief supporters and the Despensers’ chief enemies, two
marcher lords named Roger Mortimer and the Earl of Hereford (son of the
magnate who had resisted Edward I). He crossed the Severn, crushed
Mortimer and recalled the Despensers in triumph, while Thomas of
Lancaster fled north. But at Boroughbridge the king’s men caught up with
Lancaster, dragged him out of the church where he was claiming sanctuary
and struck off his head before his castle at Pontefract.
Edward and his new favourites now seemed secure. All the leaders of
what could have been a serious rebellion were either in the Tower, like
Mortimer, or dead. For the next four years the Despensers ruled England
in the weak king’s name. Courting popular favour for their support, at a
Parliament held at York in 1322 they annulled the ordinances imposed on
the king by the Lords Ordainer on the ground that they had been passed
by a Parliament of barons only. They declared the ‘commonality of the
realm’ — that is, shire knights and burgesses — had to be involved in such
decisions if they were to become law. This was another important step in
the development of the powers of the Commons.
Nevertheless the Despensers had many of the faults which had made Piers
Gaveston loathed. They were arrogant and greedy and just as keen to
accumulate any lands and titles in their master’s gift. In order to end the
chaos caused in the Borders by the Scots raids, Edward II made an attempt
at invading Scotland, only for it to end in humiliation. The Scots chased him
out of the country having refused to do battle, and very nearly took him
prisoner at Byland Abbey. In 1323 a truce was effected between the two
countries, a de facto admission that England recognized Robert the Bruce as
king. Meanwhile under the Despensers’ lackadaisical rule the infrastructure
of the government appeared to be rotting before the nation’s eyes. Taxes
were not paid, the courts did not pursue justice and officials were detested.
The situation needed only a leader to turn this simmering resentment into
rebellion. In 1324 such a leader emerged in the shape of the marcher lord

Loz,
 PLANTAGENET

Roger Mortimer, Lancaster’s old henchman, when he escaped from the

Tower of London to join many exiled Lancastrians in Paris. By coincidence
Edward II’s estranged wife Isabella was there with her son, the future
Edward III, visiting her brother, the French king Charles IV, so that Edward
might do homage for Gascony and Ponthieu. She and Mortimer were united
by their hatred of the Despensers: the queen because of their power over her
husband, Mortimer because they had confiscated his estates.
A natural alliance was soon supplemented by passion. Ignoring the king’s
pleas to return, Queen Isabella began to live openly with Mortimer and plot
the invasion of England to rid the country of the Despensers. But the
flagrant behaviour of the wife of the King of England with a rebel aroused
great unease at the French court, and beyond. Charles IV was only too
delighted to obey the pope and expel his sister, who was becoming known
as the ‘She-wolf of France’. Taking her thirteen-year-old son Edward with
her, Isabella went to Hainault and betrothed him to the Count of Hainault’s
daughter Philippa. Given such an alliance to the important country of
England, the count was only too glad to provide soldiers for Isabella’s and
Mortimer’s invasion of England on behalf of Prince Edward.
Proclaiming that she and Mortimer had come to liberate the nation from
the tyranny of the Despensers, in 1326 Queen Isabella landed at Orwell in
Essex and advanced to London. She was rapidly joined by all the most
important magnates of the kingdom, including Thomas of Lancaster’s
brother Henry. Meanwhile Londoners not only opened their gates to
Isabella and Mortimer but murdered one of Edward II’s envoys, the Bishop
of Exeter. Against such a united opposition, the king’s party was
powerless. Edward II and the Despensers now made for the west hoping to
reach the safety of the Despenser estates in Glamorgan, but all were
captured. The two Despensers were summarily executed, the younger
brother’s mutilated body being hung from gallows fifty feet high. Edward
was brought back in chains to London and his reign declared to be at an
end. Prince Edward, a gauche but soldierly youth apparently under his
fascinating mother’s spell, was declared Edward III.
Edward II was meanwhile transported under heavy guard from one
castle in the west to another. Before long the new government decided that
alive he offered too much of a rallying point to their enemies, and in 1327
he was put to death at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire by means of a
red-hot poker which was stuck up him. It is said that his screams as he died
were so loud that they could be heard for miles around. In order to pre-
empt claims that he had been murdered, Mortimer — who was in effect the
ruler of England — ordered Edward II’s naked corpse to be exhibited. And
indeed there was no visible mark on it. After this, the body was buried
quietly in the Abbey Church of Gloucester.

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 Edward III

(1927s
77)

Edward III would rule England for fifty years, but he is most remembered
as the great warrior who with his son the Black Prince led the English to
victory after victory in the Hundred Years War. The Battle of Agincourt
won by Edward III’s great-grandson Henry V was an apparent vindication
of this protracted attempt to claim the French throne. It enabled Henry to
marry the French king’s daughter Katharine, and his infant son Henry VI
was briefly both King of England and King of France. Moreover, Edward
III’s victories secured Aquitaine for England and thus almost a quarter of
the territory of today’s France, as well as gaining the important French
Channel port of Calais. The immense popularity the war brought him
meant that the crown’s authority was never in doubt for much of his reign,
and the barons’ energies were taken up by the French campaign. At the
king’s extended Gothic castle at Windsor countless great feasts and
tournaments took place which appealed to the spirit of the age, modelled
on the hundred-year-old cult of King Arthur, the Dark Age chieftain who
had been transformed by the courtly romances into a perfect gentle knight
and the summit of the chivalric ideal.
The booty from the Hundred Years War paid |
for an ambitious and popular royal building pro-
gramme which reinforced the sense of English-
ness reviving across the country. Edward III’s
age marks the beginning of the peculiarly
English style of late-Gothic architecture named
Perpendicular. In contrast to the flowing lines of
the contemporary Gothic style prevailing on the
continent, English building whether at Gloucester
Cathedral, St George’s Chapel Windsor or
Winchester Cathedral, is constructed on sterner,
more geometric lines. From 1362 onwards William of Wykeham, the
Enelish
8
officially
;
replaced ‘Latin as the language
she % suas
Pounder of New College,
Oxford, in 1379 and
of the English law courts. One of England’s — Winchester School, in
greatest writers, Geoffrey Chaucer, was born 1382.

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 PLANTAGENET

around 1344. A member of a well-to-do family of wine merchants,

Chaucer had a cosmopolitan upbringing and spoke at least four languages.
His fascination with French poetry and with the writings of Dante and
Boccaccio was intensified by a career as a diplomat in the royal service. So
influential were his own works, such as The Book of the Duchess (which
marks the death of John of Gaunt’s wife Blanche of Lancaster) and
ultimately The Canterbury Tales, that by the end of the fourteenth century
English had permanently replaced Latin and
French as the language of England’s litera-
ture. William Langland’s Piers Plowman
and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight also testify to the new creative
spirit abroad.
Despite the era’s military glory and the
king’s personal popularity, Edward III’s
reign was also a time of considerable social
misery. In 1348 the bubonic plague known
as the Black Death arrived to wreak havoc
on the population of England as it did in the
rest of Europe. Carried by the black rat on
Genoese ships, this curse of God (or so it
seemed to contemporary observers) had
originated in Asia, where the Republic of
Genoa’s vast trading operation had its most Geoffrey Chaucer, author of
extensive dealings. In England it killed an 1e Canterbury Tales and a
astonishing one-fifth of the population with- oy eae Pe Seaies of
in the year, ultimately being responsible for ices
the deaths of one-third of the population. In France and Italy half the
population died. The pessimism that this brought to the succeeding
European generation was similar to that experienced after the First World
War. The death of labourers able to produce food ensured that the English
population declined for almost a century. It would not be until the mid-
fifteenth century that numbers began to increase again.
The shortage of labour undermined the system of serfdom or villeinage
introduced by the Normans which forbade families to move from their
local lords’ domain. So many landowners were desperate for men to work
their fields that a ‘no questions asked’ policy towards runaway serfs was
widely operated, and by the end of the fourteenth century the institution
was in tatters. But attempts on the part of agricultural workers to better
themselves by demanding a living wage were met by swingeing government
legislation. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 kept wages down to the level
prevailing before the inflation prompted by the Black Death. Many

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 E3277-1377
landowners took the decision to turn their fields over to sheep runs because
grazing required little labour. Former serfs were grateful if they could find
any work at all. This discontent was mirrored in risings or jacqueries all
over western Europe, and is reflected in Piers Plowman.
For numerous landowners sheep-farming was a swift route to profit.
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the high point of English
wool export, and by Edward III’s reign woollen textile manufacture was
replacing raw wool as England’s chief export or staple. East Anglia did not
have the hills and rushing streams that would see the thirteenth-century
invention of water-powered mills make areas like the Yorkshire and
Lancashire Pennines, and the west country, centres of woollen
manufacture for hundreds of years. But the region’s soft water (integral to
the textile production process) and the fine wool from its native sheep
resulted in a much admired material known as worsted after the Norfolk
village of that name — a direct result of Edward encouraging Flemish
weavers in 1331 to initiate the English into the secrets of fine cloth. The
immense personal riches of individual! clothiers who controlled the wool
staple, the customs entrepots of the export wool trade, enabled them to
take over the Jewish community’s position as moneylenders to the king.
The first three years of Edward’s kingship were dominated by the regency
of his mother Isabella and Roger Mortimer. But their hold on power was
not to last. Mortimer’s greed, his open attempt to make himself the overlord
of Wales where the Mortimer estates were based and the irregularity of the
couple’s union soon made them extremely unpopular. Their failure to
prevent the French king Charles IV seizing most of Gascony added to a
feeling of disorder and betrayal. Though Bordeaux and Bayonne remained,
the important and historic English wine trade — at a time when wine was the
equivalent of clean water for drinking — was dramatically curtailed.
In 1330 Edward seized power. He had just fathered his first child, the
warrior known as the Black Prince, and was far more confident and able
to stand up for himself. While Isabella and Mortimer slept at Nottingham
Castle, the young king — accompanied by a band of armed soldiers — stole
in through an underground passage and dragged Mortimer from his bed,
closing his ears to his mother’s cries for mercy. Mortimer was hung at
Tyburn Tree, the gallows for common criminals which until the late
eighteenth century stood at the junction of Edgware Road and Marble
Arch. Queen Isabella was exiled to the manor of Castle Rising, where she
lived on for another thirty years.
Almost immediately the young king was hurled into war. On the death
of Robert the Bruce his son David had become King of Scotland, but by
1332 King David lost his throne to John Balliol’s son Edward. The
following year Edward III recaptured Berwick-on-Tweed from the Scots at

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the Battle of Halidon Hill and made the border town permanently part of
England. But on the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, once the bulk of
Edward III’s soldiers were across the Channel, David returned and was
recognized once more as king of the Scots.
In many ways the Hundred Years War was simply a continuation of
earlier wars between France and England over the remains of the Angevin
Empire on French soil, such as the conflict recently lost by Isabella and
Mortimer. Pride and the wine trade made it impossible for Edward III to put
up with the continuous attacks on the French kings on Gascony. Likewise
the French kings could not abandon their longstanding policy of uniting all
the territories on the French continent under the French crown. The
diplomatic situation was made more volatile by the threat of the French
king’s support for the Bruce cause. But a freshly complicating factor was the
struggle for mastery over France’s north-east neighbour, Flanders -
England’s biggest trading partner.
The immensely lucrative clothing trade of Flanders was run by power-
ful, independently minded merchants. They had little use for their
impoverished count, whose feudal rights over them seemed irrelevant relics
of an almost forgotten age. Their interests were with England, whose wool
had made them rich. But the Count of Flanders, who remained nominally
their overlord, was the vassal of the French king. For some time there had
been disagreements between the Flemish burghers or clothing-town leaders
and the count over their liberties and powers. When the count opted to
settle them by force with the aid of French troops, the Flemish burghers’
leader James van Artevelde declared independence and in 1338 made a
separate alliance with Edward III. The vigorous English king would give
the Flemish clothing towns and their trade the protection they needed.
The Battle of Sluys, which is said to be the first naval battle in English
history, is generally accepted as the beginning of the Hundred Years War.
In 1340 a large French fleet of over 200 men-of-war (including warships
from the Norman and Genoese navies) crowded the sea at the port of Sluys
to block all English ships reaching Flanders for the war effort. Against the
advice of his Great Council the king sailed up in person to attack it. He had
gathered a smaller fleet in the Orwell Estuary made up in a more
haphazard fashion, from every ship he could find at anchor in the southern
ports of England. The chance of ridding the country of the French naval
menace was too good to miss.
The battle secured the freedom of the Channel for the next thirty years.
It was the first occasion when the French got a taste of the longbow, the
weapon which (though developed by the Welsh) would make the English
armies invincible in pitched battle for the best part of a century. No
contemporary weapon had the same capacity for rapid fire, and in the

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 1327-1377
hands of a master it defeated the more technologically advanced crossbow.
The longbow was so difficult to use that archers had to be brought up
practising the art from boyhood to develop the muscles in the arm required
for the enormously heavy weapon. At six feet long and three feet broad
when drawn back to the ear, the longbow was taller that most Welsh and
Englishmen. Lacking the craft traditions which could transform a piece of
elm into a perfectly balanced bow, and which had made archery a national
sport in England, the French army was never able to master the longbow.
Once this became clear, in order to secure a continuous supply of
longbowmen Edward III forbade all sports other than archery on the
village green.
At Sluys the hail of English arrows drove so many Frenchmen to jump
overboard or dive for cover that all 200 ships were captured. So
embarrassing was this episode for France’s naval prestige that her
commanders did not dare tell Philip VI. It was left to his jester to inform
him. “The English are cowards,’ he told his royal master as he waited for
news of the battle; ‘they did not have the courage to jump into the sea like
the French and the Normans.’
With the Channel secured, Edward III could afford to make a truce with
the French, though he returned to England to raise more money for a new
land campaign against them. The war meanwhile had shifted into a game
with higher stakes. Through his mother Isabella, Edward III had a strong
claim to the French throne since Isabella’s brother King Charles IV had
died without male heirs. The French crown therefore passed to the head of
the more distant Valois branch of the family, who ascended the throne as
Philip VI. But it was arguable that Edward, as the former king’s nephew,
had a nearer claim.
In 1340 Edward III had revived his claim to be King of France. This was
partly to please the Flemings, who did not like being seen to rebel against
their feudal overlord. If Edward III was their overlord, their rebellion was
given legitimacy. But pride also convinced Edward that the war could not
be dropped as long as his claim existed. For the next century the English
and French were in a state of constant warfare. Indeed, it would not be
until the nineteenth century that the English crown abandoned its claim to
the throne of France. Until that date in the King of England’s coat of arms
the fleur-de-lis or lilies of France are to be seen side by side with the lions
rampant of England.
In 1346 Philip VI’s forces launched such a fierce attack on Edward’s
garrison in Gascony that the English seemed in danger of being expelled
from the continent for ever. As a diversionary tactic Edward invaded
northern France on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy. At first he was
successful. Philip abandoned the Gascon campaign to counter the English

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army, which was sweeping through Normandy under the command of the
English king. With him was his son, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales,
whose black armour earned him the nickname the Black Prince. Laying
waste to the country, they moved up the Seine until they were in sight of
the French king’s capital of Paris. But Philip VI now rallied. Edward was
forced to turn north-east towards the coast and the friendly Flemish
frontier, with the French armies in hot pursuit. Beating off the French
cavalry which guarded the ford that emerged at Blanche Taque at low tide,
Edward crossed the Somme. Then he decided he could flee no longer. He
must stand and fight. He took his stand at the little village of Crécy in his
hereditary county of Ponthieu.
The Battle of Crécy made Edward III’s reputation on the European
continent. His men were outnumbered by over two to one, yet by clever
positioning and the use of the longbow alongside the infantry the French
army was destroyed. Crécy established the superiority of English tactics to
the French cavalry charge. Thanks to this great victory, Edward was able
to secure the strategically crucial port of Calais to the east. This became a
pivotal English stronghold as both entrepét and garrison. It was not until
1558 that the town which gave England command of the Channel was
returned to its rightful owners.
Choosing where to give battle gave Edward III an extra edge at Crécy.
He elected to do so on ground that sloped up to a windmill, from where he
himself watched the battle. The Welsh and English archers were drawn up
in a pattern like a chevron so that those behind could fire over and at the
same time cover their colleagues below. The cavalry on whom the French
were relying for victory would have to charge uphill — no easy task for
watrhorses with knights in armour on their backs. Try as they might, charge
as they might, in the way that had made them famous, the French cavalry
were mown down in mid-gallop by the English archers. Fifteen times they
started out again, fifteen times they were forced back by the longbowmen
under the command of the Black Prince.
The next morning among the many thousands slain were found to be the
King of France’s brother, the Duke of Alengon, and the old blind King of
Bohemia. The latter had insisted on joining the battle and had told his
knights to lead him to the front line of the battle, ‘that I too may have a
stroke at the English’. Edward III and the Black Prince found the sightless
king’s body and the helmet surmounted with the Bohemian crest of three
ostrich feathers which had rolled a little way away. The Black Prince was so
moved by the blind king’s gallantry that he took the three ostrich feathers
for his own crest, as well as the king’s motto ‘Ich Dien’ (German for ‘I
serve’). Both crest and motto have been the Prince of Wales’s ever since.
Crécy, as Edward III said, was the day that the Black Prince won his spurs.

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 1327-1377
Though war was cruel and ruthless its perpetrators considered it to be
leavened by what is known as the spirit of chivalry. Deriving from the
French word for ‘mounted knight’ and influenced by the Arab east,
chivalry was a formal code that insisted on the protection of the weak and
the victor’s honourable treatment of his defeated enemy. Some of our more
humane instincts, such as the strict rules governing the treatment of
prisoners of war laid down iin the Geneva Convention, derive from this
code.
To the barons and knights of the fourteenth century one of the most
admired examples of the chivalric code in operation was exemplified by the
conduct of all the chief participants in the siege of Calais. Five of the town’s
leading burghers had offered their lives to Edward III if he would spare the
rest of the citizens. Edward coldly sent a message that he would receive
them only if they were naked but for their shirts and were holding the rope
halters from which they would be hanged. His wife Queen Philippa was
impressed by the nobility of the burghers, however, and begged him to
spare them. Edward complied: the courtesy of deference to the weaker sex
which was also part of the knightly code secured their lives.
On his return to England in 1348, Edward III celebrated Crécy by
creating the Order of the Garter, made up of twenty-four knights and the
king himself. Legend has it that its motto derives from the tie or garter used
to hold up ladies’ stockings. One night at a ball held at Windsor, Edward
is supposed to have wrapped round his arm a garter which had fallen from
the leg of his dancing companion. When he saw the shocked faces of his
guests the expansive king is said to have quipped, ‘Honi soit qui mal y
pense’ (‘Shame to him who evil thinks’). Whatever its origins the Garter
remains one of Britain’s highest honours, and continues to be in the
personal gift of the sovereign. Every year in June a service to commemorate
the order takes place at Windsor in the Chapel of St George, where it was
founded.
During these years many an impoverished English knight took unofficial
advantage of the English claim to the French throne by joining what were
called the Free Companies. These were armed companies of Englishmen
who roamed the continent ostensibly fighting for the English king but in
fact making their fortune from plunder. Since the ideals of chivalry were at
their height, to be a knight and relentlessly involved in warfare had the
elements of a vocation; this was only encouraged by the king’s personal
cult of the tournament.
The activities of these adventurers guaranteed that hostility between the
two countries would flare up into war again. In September 13 56 the Black
Prince had led a small army of around 1,800 men from Bordeaux up the
Garonne into central France, penetrating as far as the Loire Valley, and

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was returning to Gascony laden with his new war chest when the new King
of France, Philip VI’s daring son John, cut him off with 8,000 troops at
Poitiers. Though he was heavily outnumbered, the day was the Black
Prince’s. The French fell into the same trap of setting their cavalry against
the English longbow, and once more came to grief. In the heat of battle the
impetuous and brave warrior King John was captured and was later taken
to England in triumph to join the king of the Scots in captivity (David II
had been taken at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346). It was a
considerable humiliation for the French when their king, riding a cream
charger, was led through the bunting-decorated streets of London. Because
chivalry demanded that the French king be better horsed than the Black
Prince, John’s conqueror trotted beside him on a small pony.
With the French king in his hands Edward III had the leverage in 1360
to negotiate the extremely advantageous Treaty of Brétigny. The whole of
Aquitaine (including Poitou and the Limousin) was to be returned. Edward
was also confirmed in possession of Ponthieu and Calais, as well as being
granted a ransom in gold so enormous that it was never paid in full. In
return he abandoned his claim to the French throne.
But this was the peak of English triumph. Hatred of the English, who for
twenty years had ruined French agriculture with their wars, began to unite
the whole of France behind the new king Charles V, and the ancient
regional loyalties from which the English had benefited were further
eroded when the desperate French were devastated by a new wave of the
bubonic plague in 1362, and by the famine which followed in its wake. In
1369 Aquitaine revolted against the Black Prince.
Edward the Black Prince’s most recent adventure in Spain, to restore
Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile, had been inconclusive and very
expensive. When he attempted to pay for the expedition by new taxes on
Aquitaine the magnates outside Gascony, who had become used to
thinking of themselves as Frenchmen, seized their chance. They had not
wished to be vassals of the fierce and warlike prince, as agreed by the
Treaty of Brétigny. They called to Charles V for help. On the grounds that
the treaty had not been completely implemented and that he was still the
Aquitainians’ overlord, Charles summoned the Black Prince to answer the
charges before the Parliament of Paris. When Prince Edward responded
that he would debate with Parliament with a helmet on his head and
60,000 men the war began again.
This time, however, it was an even more pointless and destructive affair.
The Black Prince had contracted a wasting disease on the Spanish cam-
paign and was too ill to sit on a horse. Instead he was jolted in a litter from
city to city, burning and plundering in the name of his father who had
revived his claim to the French throne. In 1370 the sack of Limoges, capital

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 1327-1377
of the Limousin which had revolted against him, blackened his reputation
for ever. When he ordered every man, woman and child to be massacred
by his soldiers in front of him, it gave the lie to the notion of war as a
chivalrous pursuit.
For the rest of Edward III’s reign the French showed that they had
learned their lesson. Under Charles V and his superb Breton commander
Bertrand de Guesclin, they refused to meet the English in pitched battle and
instead allowed them to wear out their strength in fruitless local campaigns
— which just added to the bad feeling against the English. The Black Prince
returned to England to die and was replaced by his younger brother,
Edward III’s fourth surviving son John of Gaunt (for Ghent, where he was
born), Duke’of Lancaster.
But the trail of ruin John of Gaunt left as he marched in 1373 from
Calais on the north-east coast down to Bordeaux in the south-west
achieved nothing. It also killed half his soldiers, who succumbed to hunger
and exposure. When the French seized control of the Channel with the help
of the Castilian navy and prevented reinforcements reaching the English
troops, the war petered out. By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377 the
achievements of the great battles of the earlier part of his reign had been
completely undone. For all the excitement of war, other than Calais the
English possessions were less now than they had been under Isabella and
Mortimer, consisting only of the few coastal towns of Bayonne, Bordeaux,
Brest and Cherbourg.
From the early 1370s on, Edward III declined into premature senility.
The country was ruled meanwhile by the squabbling factions in the King’s
Council - the supporters of John of Gaunt versus those of his elder brother,
the dying Black Prince. Just as the main participants in the triumph of
England were dead or decaying, the country itself was in crisis. Ever since
the Black Death had killed a third of the population in the year 1348-9,
chaos had prevailed at all levels of life. A series of droughts and poor
harvests had reduced food supplies in England and Europe to dangerously
low levels in any case, and even before the plague much of the European
population had been suffering from malnutrition. So they were less able to
resist the deadly disease, which began with black boils erupting from under
the skin in the groin and armpits. In almost all cases it ended with death a
few hours later.
But 1348-9 was not the end of the plague in England. In 1362 it
returned, as it did in France and elsewhere, and again in 1369. The figures
speak for themselves. Before the Black Death the English population is
generally estimated to have been about five and half million. By the end of
the fourteenth century there were two million fewer. The optimism which
had accompanied the material prosperity of the years before 1348 was

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replaced by an anger and discontent that could not be assuaged by religion

and would soon give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt. The flow of international
trade which had been so profitable for everyone had already been faltering
under the impact of the war. Now it fell to a trickle.
The natural order of centuries was overthrown when serfs and land-
owners were carried off so fast and in such numbers that there was no one
left to remember the feudal arrangements, which had often been
maintained by oral tradition. Attitudes to authority were changed too, as
the English became less naturally deferential. When the response to the
plague of wealthy bishops and barons was to shut themselves up in their
castles or leave for the continent, they lost the instinctive respect of the
locals. Even the parish priests no longer commanded much automatic
obedience, though their behaviour during the Black Death had been
exemplary. They had persistently nursed their highly contagious flocks
after their families abandoned them, with the result that the death rate
among priests was higher than among ordinary folk.
Such is the perversity of human nature that in an age before scientific
medicine this was taken as a sign that priests were no holier than other
men. Not only had they not been spared from what was commonly
considered to be God’s vengeance on a wicked race but they were being
singled out by him. By the late fourteenth century their self-sacrifice had
produced a great shortage of priests to serve in parishes. Very few were left
to preach against the dark pessimism and obsession with death seen in the
paintings and poetry of the time.
Moreover, for some time in this country there had been a growing anti-
clerical sentiment. Ever since 1309 when a French pope removed the Papal
Court or Curia to Avignon in southern France, all the popes elected had
been French, so that for the next sixty years until 1378 the papacy had
come to be seen by the English government as an appendage of their enemy
the French king. At Edward III’s behest the Statute of Provisors and the
Statute of Praemunire asserted English independence from the pope over
Church appointments and banned appeals to foreign courts. In 1366
Parliament itself demanded the revocation of King John’s agreement to be
the pope’s vassal and put an end to the annual tax sent to Avignon instead
of Rome.
In this feverish religious vacuum and unsettled atmosphere the stress on
personal responsibility of a new group of preachers named the Lollards
offered an attractive new direction for the disillusioned. The Lollards were
followers of a radical Oxford theologian named John Wyclif, whose
teachings anticipated many elements of the Reformation. Wyclif believed
that the ultimate source of religious authority was not the priesthood but
the Bible. With his regular denunciations of the clergy, he also provided a

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 1327-1377
convenient weapon for John of Gaunt in the continued struggle for control
of the King’s Council.
Thanks to his first marriage to the hugely wealthy northern heiress
Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt was now the greatest magnate in the
country. He was anyway a swaggering figure with a private life of such epic
dimensions that it aroused the antagonism of the English bishops, who
formed part of the Black Prince’s faction. Gaunt was therefore leader of the
anti-clerical party. Using as intellectual justification Wyclif’s theory that
priests should not be involved in politics, Gaunt got Alice Perrers, Edward
IIPs mistress, to dismiss most of the bishops who, following the long-
standing English custom, filled the government offices. William of
Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and the rest of the clerical party were
now at daggers drawn with John of Gaunt’s party.
In fact the real corruption at court, the bribes in return for favours,
monopolies and offices, was the work of John of Gaunt and his
accomplices — Alice Perrers, a London merchant named Richard Lyons,
and Lord Latimer. Although he could control most of the government
appointments, Gaunt could not control what was now known as the
Commons, the elected members from the boroughs and shires, who from
the 1330s were congregating apart from the Lords. And the Commons was
hard to handle because it was there that the Black Prince’s supporters were
especially strong. At last in 1376 the bishops and Commons together in
what became known as the Good Parliament publicly attacked the court
party of John of Gaunt. The Commons then elected what they called a
Speaker (the first instance of this title being used), and the man they chose,
Sir Peter de la Mare, launched the first case of impeachment in English
history, against Gaunt’s leading accomplices. De la Mare himself acted as
prosecuting counsel for the Commons, while the House of Lords took the
part of judges — this remained the standard method of conducting a
political trial until the eighteenth century. The Lords found Latimer and
Lyons guilty of bribery and corruption, and Alice Perrers, who was also
held to be guilty, was ordered to be removed from the king’s palace as an
evil influence. Just before sentence was pronounced, the Commons’
greatest protector the Black Prince died. John of Gaunt was thus able to use
his now completely unopposed influence in the country to call a new
parliament, and abolished the acts passed by the Good Parliament.
Edward III finally expired on Midsummer’s Day 1377. For a long time
his own glorious summer had been a fading memory. As he was breathing
his last, ungrateful courtiers ran from the palace to attend to the new
powerbrokers in the land. Even Alice Perrers, who had been such a feature
of the great Edwardian tournaments where she had appeared as the Lady
of the Sun, deserted him — though not neglecting to pull the rings off his

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 PLANTAGENET

fingers first. The man who had been the greatest prince of the Europe of
his day and England’s most popular king for two centuries would have
died alone had not a priest happened to be passing. He gave the old king
the last rites before his soul departed.
 Richard II

(1377-1399)

Richard II (or Richard of Bordeaux as he was known, after the town where
he was borri)’was ten years old when, as the eldest son of the Black Prince,
he succeeded to the throne. A contemporary painting shows a slender boy-
king with pale yellow hair, but these appealing images should not blind us
to the fact that once Richard grew up it became clear that he had inherited
the violent and imperious nature of his father. Unlike his grandfather
Edward III, he had no sense of the importance of carrying the nation with
him, of ruling with the help of Parliament. Nevertheless at the first great
crisis of his reign, the Peasants’ Revolt, though
he was only fourteen years old he showed
courage and presence of mind.
Little had changed with the accession of a
new king. The country was still ruled, through
the council, by Richard’s uncle John of Gaunt,
the Duke of Lancaster, and the government
remained deeply unpopular. The truce with
France came to an end and was not renewed,
and English trade, English shipping and
English coastal towns began to suffer from
French raids. There was even a possibility that
the French might invade, though this threat
disappeared in 1380 when Charles V was
succeeded by another boy-king Charles VI.
Then in 1381 a very widespread popular rising
broke out as a protest against the new poll tax.
This is known as the Peasants’ Revolt. The
government had demanded that every male,
rich or poor, over the age of fifteen should pay King Richard II, who
the same tax per head (or per poll). At this succeeded his grandfather
Edward III because his
grotesquely unfair request the underlying father the Black Prince
frustrations of small farmers and labourers predeceased him in
who still fell within the category of villein came WAG

2OL
 PLANTAGENET

to a head. For forty years the gradual breakdown of respect for authority
had spread a sense of the outworn nature of traditional institutions. The
socially conservative Church was further undermined by the confusion
created by the papal schism of 1378, as there were now two popes in
Christendom — one at Rome and one at Avignon.
Furthermore Wyclif had now broken with John of Gaunt. Instead he and
his followers the Lollards or ‘babblers’ had turned to taking their message
to the people in the countryside, and their russet-coloured robes were
becoming a familiar sight in villages all over England. At the same time,
one of these Lollards made the first
translation of the Bible into English,
for Wyclif believed that everyone
should be allowed to read the Holy
Scriptures and make up their opinion
about their meaning.
His philosophic conclusion that
‘dominion’ was to be found in all good
people regardless of whether they were
priests had revolutionary implications.
Although there were few Lollards
among the peasants themselves,
Wyclif’s emphasis on each man’s
worth seeped into the current climate.
In 1381 all these discontents came
together in a march on London led by
a master craftsman named Wat Tyler
(or Wat the roofer). Tyler was at the The theologian John Wyclif whose
head of a large number of marchers followers became known as the
setting off from Kent, a county which aC:
since the Jutes had a reputation for more democratic traditions. Though
there was no villeinage in Kent they demanded an end to villeinage for all
Englishmen and refused to pay the poll tax. At the same time revolts broke
out all over the country. In Essex a travelling priest named John Ball had
been preaching on the theme of his well-known rhyme:

When Adam delved, and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?

In the south the uprisings had a particularly anti-clerical tinge, as most

of the participants were serfs from the properties of great abbeys and
monasteries. The majority were armed with the agricultural tools they had
been using in the fields when word started to spread about the march to

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 1377-1399
London — billhooks for pulling fruit off trees, shears and axes. The
uprisings seem to have been quite spontaneous without any political
organization behind them. They were nevertheless extremely dangerous.
The rebels swarmed across London on either side of the river, setting fire
to Southwark and convincing the city guards stationed at the Tower that
they were no match for such numbers. They then murdered the Archbishop
of Canterbury and the chancellor, and burned John of Gaunt’s Thames-
side Savoy Palace to the ground.
In the midst of the mayhem the boy-king Richard was the only member
of the government to keep his head. While his ministers dithered, with
great courage Richard agreed to meet the rebels and listen to their
grievances. At Mile End he promised charters of liberty to abolish serfdom
if the crowds would disperse. Then, accompanied by the lord mayor of
London William Walworth and only sixty horsemen, he rode out to
Smithfield to deal with Wat Tyler and the 2,000 Kentish men he had
brought with him. With Richard was his popular mother Joan, the Fair
Maid of Kent, whose association with their own county he may have felt
would make the rebels readier to listen to him.
After some time talking face to face about the people’s complaints Wat
Tyler laid a hand on the king’s bridle. He had a dagger in his other hand,
though he seems to have had no intention of using it. But at a time when
much of the city was on fire and two members of the government lay dead,
Walworth the lord mayor may be forgiven for thinking that Tyler was
about to murder the king. At any rate he reacted by plunging his sword
into the rebel leader. At this the Kentish folk surged forward and seemed
about to seize Richard, while those with bows trained their arrows on him.
But Richard’s own courage saved the day. Spurring his horse he galloped
up to Tyler’s followers crying ‘Come with me and I will be your captain.
Wat Tyler was a traitor.’
Uncertain how to proceed, since Tyler’s oratory had been instrumental
in getting them to London, the protesters followed Richard’s slender figure
into what were then the fields of Islington. But they were surrounded by a
thousand soldiers hurriedly gathered by Walworth, and many sank to their
knees to beg the king’s pardon. By nightfall every single one of London’s
unwelcome visitors had left the city walls and was heading home convinced
by the king’s apparently sympathetic manner that serfdom would be
abolished.
Eventually a general pardon would be issued to all those who took part
in the Peasants’ Revolt as part of the celebrations to mark Richard II’s
marriage in 1382 to the pious Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslaus.
But in the short term the rebels were punished and their wishes ignored.
John Ball was executed at St Albans, home of that first British martyr,

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 PLANTAGENET

while the charters abolishing serfdom were never issued because they had
been obtained under duress. Although it took another hundred years for
villeinage to die out entirely, in practice many lords gave the villeins their
freedom and commuted their service to a money payment. The continued
shortage of labour meant it was either that or having a very uncooperative
workforce.
But Richard II never regained the esteem he won in 1381. John of
Gaunt’s absence from the council pursuing the throne of Castile by right of
his wife Constance should have meant a fresh start for the country. But
Gaunt and his cronies were soon replaced by equally venial men who were
Richard’s favourites, the most important being Robert de Vere, Earl of
Oxford, whom Richard made Duke of Ireland, and the chancellor Michael
de la Pole, a merchant who became Earl of Suffolk.
Richard and the new court party were just as careless of the law and
parliament as John of Gaunt had been. Like his father the Black Prince the
king had a taste for luxury and a splendid court. To finance it, sudden and
illegal taxes were demanded without reference to Parliament. Under
Edward III’s youngest son Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a
parliamentary party began to rally against the court. In 1386 the trouble
came to a head when Parliament asked Richard to dismiss Chancellor de
la Pole for corruption. The king replied that he would not dismiss the
meanest scullion in his kitchen just to please Parliament. In response
Parliament impeached the chancellor and appointed eleven lords ordainers
to rule the country, as had been done in Edward II’s time.
Richard II was made of sterner stuff than his great-grandfather. Having
persuaded the courts to proclaim the Lords Ordainer illegal because they
interfered with the royal prerogative, he declared war on the parliamentary
party. But in February 1388 at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire
his army was scattered and he himself was forced back to London. At the
Parliament known as the Merciless Parliament, five lords including
Richard’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester and his first cousin, John of
Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster, accused the royal favourites of treason.
These lords appellant as they were known, because they launched the
Appeal of Treason, then executed many of the king’s favourites.
The lords appellant now ruled the country through the council. But the
fluidity and the personal nature of relationships at court meant that within
the year Richard was asserting himself again, and once he had gained the
support of the respectable old clerical party he was ruling on his own.
Stability was cemented by the return from Spain of his uncle John of
Gaunt, whose influence smoothed the way for less antagonistic politics,
and before long two of the five lords appellant — Gaunt’s son Henry of
Lancaster and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham — came round to the

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 1377-1399
court party. Abroad too there was peace for almost thirty years, after
Richard’s marriage in 1396 to the daughter of the French king Charles VI
— following the death of his wife Anne of Bohemia — led to a truce between
the two countries.
But the king’s sorrow at the death of his wife Anne touched off the most
violent and uncontrollable elements in his rather unstable character. He
razed to the ground the palace where he had lived with Anne, and when
the Earl of Arundel - one of the lords appellant — arrived late for the
queen’s funeral, the outraged king publicly struck him in the face.
But Richard II was a subtler character than he appeared. For almost ten
years after the Merciless Parliament he bided his time, secretly calculating
how to have’his revenge on the lords appellant. The year after Anne of
Bohemia’s death, he suddenly arrested three of them — his uncle Gloucester,
Arundel and the Earl of Warwick. Surrounded by 4,000 soldiers of the
king’s personal bodyguard, the Cheshire Archers, Parliament had no
choice but to bow to his wishes and condemned the three for treason. In a
display of summary justice, Arundel was tried, convicted and beheaded on
the same day, while Gloucester was murdered in Calais prison. Warwick
escaped death only by the payment of massive fines.
By 1399 the English had had enough of their tyrannical king, and a mass
movement to depose him was led by Henry of Lancaster, or Bolingbroke
as he is sometimes known. The two cousins met in north Wales at Flint,

ae
i

Richard II abdicating to Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) in the

Tower of London, 1399.

205
 PLANTAGENET

and when Richard saw that he had no supporters he surrendered. At a

meeting of Parliament, Henry of Lancaster stood before an empty throne
and claimed the crown. He was careful not to claim it by right of
Parliament, because what Parliament gave Parliament might take away.
Likewise he did not claim it by right of conquest, for that too might be
challenged by another conquest. But his claim was understood to be
founded on a mixture of the two. Thus the Lancastrian revolution, which
put the descendants of John of Gaunt on the throne, was achieved almost
bloodlessly.
The new king, who was crowned Henry IV, had probably not planned
to kill his predecessor. But when at Christmas that year a conspiracy to
restore Richard to the throne was uncovered, it became clear that there was
no room for two kings in one country. Richard, who was being held
prisoner in Henry’s Lancastrian stronghold Pontefract Castle, was
accordingly murdered, and it was disingenuously announced that he had
perished from self-inflicted starvation.

206
LANCASTRIAN

AND2YORKISI
 Henry IV
(1399-1413)

Despite the profound instability the Lancastrian revolution caused, in the

first twenty years of the new dynasty Parliament reached a peak of
influence to which it would not return for another 200 years. The rightful
heir was the Earl of March, grandson of the childless Richard II’s senior
uncle Lionel of Clarence, who was Edward III’s third son. The usurper
Henry IV therefore had particular need of the Lords’ and Commons’
support — so the meeting of Parliament became an annual event. Ever since
Magna Carta the tradition had grown up that the power of the king was
limited by the need to confer with the King’s Council. Now consultation
became more important than ever.
A key part of that Parliament was the House of Commons. For more
than 150 years lawyers, well-to-do townsmen, merchants and small
landowners had been responsible through the Commons for raising the
king’s taxes in the shires. Although the aristocracy with their vast estates
and private armies continued to be the crown’s advisers, the Commons’
control of taxation left the kings of England no option but to listen to the
middle classes’ petitions. Uniquely in Europe, by the early fifteenth century
it was firmly established that the Commons as well as the nobility or the
king were the initiators of new laws. By the beginning of Henry V’s reign
in 1413 it had become the accepted custom that when the House of
Commons sent a bill for the royal signature the king might throw it out but
he could not change its form to suit himself. English freedoms versus
continental royal absolutism became a matter of pride for educated
Englishmen.
Since the Commons consisted of both the country gentry and the
commercial classes, there was never in England the sense of separate castes
that prevailed abroad. Instead common interests bound together the small
landowner or country gentry and the merchant. The English class system
always surprised foreign observers by its flexibility, with people moving
swiftly up and down the scale through marriage and successful careers. In
particular, the merchant’s daughter had become an instrument for
increasing the family fortune, as the merchant class benefited from

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 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

expanding trade, improved education and better health and as the

population and the economy at last recovered from the effects of the Black
Death. The men who ran the wool trade took over the building of richly
decorated parish churches from the lords of the manor — these may be seen
in the ‘wool churches’ of East Anglia, of which the finest examples are at
Long Melford, Sudbury and Lavenham.
The wealthier merchants were also putting up large townhouses, often
of brick — a material not used since the Romans. The architecture became
domestic rather than defensive — the castle was dying out as a rich man’s
home. The broad windows in such castles as were built in this period, for
example at Herstmonceux in Sussex, indicate that the crenellations above
them were added purely for decoration.
As these fortunes were being made from England’s growing share of
international trade, which was increasingly regulated by treaty, towns
and cities became much more sophisticated and complex organisms.
Incorporated by royal consent or charter into legal entities, they had
their own governments, with powers to make their own laws and hold
their own elections, which the king had to respect. Wealth created a more
defined class system in towns, which became more oligarchical
controlled exclusively by well-to-do tradesmen, especially clothiers, who
elected one another. Trade became standardized too. The craft
organizations — the guilds — had powers to perform spot checks on
merchants’ and craftsmen’s premises to make sure that standards were
being complied with.
But the guilds’ powers were not just regulatory. Along with the town
corporations, they were patrons of a new standard of English urban
civilization. They provided charitable functions for the poor, and city
grammar schools for their own children. They arranged the processions
and music which were so constant an accompaniment to fifteenth-century
life. Everybody, whatever their circumstances, knew the Bible stories
thanks to the celebrated guild plays, of which the best known are those at
York, performed on large wagons moving around the city. In the City of
London the immense wealth of the Fishmongers’, the Goldsmiths’ and
above all the Mercers’ or clothiers’ guilds were made dramatically visible
in the magnificent halls that still stand today; the guilds continue to
manage fortunes in real estate accrued over the centuries, enabling them to
carry out generous charitable work. Like their magnate equivalents, the
heads of guilds were allowed to wear their own uniforms or livery. No less
than the individual merchants, the guilds were responsible for a further
transtormation in church architecture in the erection of chantry chapels,
tacked on to the main body of churches to house the many guild altars.
This led to an increase in the numbers of church personnel, as altar priests

210
 1399-1413
were specially engaged just to chant masses all day long to ease the afterlife
of the souls of departed members.
As more and more sons of clothiers, merchants and shopkeepers such as
butchers and bakers benefited from education, scriveners or copiers were
kept busy writing out books for their burgeoning audience — until close
English trade links with the Burgundian Netherlands brought a printer
named William Caxton to England with a printing press with movable
type. When he imported one of the presses in 1474, invented by the
German Johan Gutenberg, middle-class literacy took off as never before,
and the homes of small tradesmen soon contained as many books as those
of the upper classes.
Despite all these progressive tendencies, another strong current in
fifteenth-century England was the return of feudalism, or the rule of barons,
thanks to the weakness of the crown. The Lancastrian kings’ reliance on
Parliament increased the powers of the Lords, bringing bloody inter-
generational factionalism and the sort of anarchy not seen since Stephen.
Traditionally the two places where feudalism remained almost unadulter-
ated were the border lands guarding England from Wales and Scotland,
where independent armies and a palatinate system had prevailed since the
early Norman kings. It was from the border lords that the first challenge to
the new regime came.
As the name suggests the power base of the Lancastrian dynasty was in
the north-west, where Henry IV owned huge swathes of Lancashire and
Yorkshire. Indeed Henry of Lancaster had secured the throne with the aid
of his fellow northern magnates, above all the soldiers of the Percys of
Northumberland. It was the Percys’ loyalty during the uneasy early days of
the new regime that had kept the Scots out of England — but Henry IV had
not rewarded them as they considered their due. Full of pride in their family
— as the old saying went there was only one king in Northumberland and
that was not the king of England — they were soon nursing a grievance. In
particular, they had not become the key advisers in the King’s Council they
had been led to believe they would. Thus, when a Welsh rebellion broke out
within a year of Henry’s accession, a desire for revenge and kinship links
persuaded the Percys to join it.
In 1400 a new Welsh war for independence was touched off by a quarrel
over land resolved in the English law courts in favour of the English
marcher baron Lord Grey of Ruthin and against the Welsh landowner
Owen Glendower. Glendower’s calibre as a general and the disaffection the
Welsh felt for their overlords were a potent combination, and Glendower
became so confident that he summoned a Welsh Parliament, acknowledged
the French pope at Avignon instead of Rome and made a legal treaty allying
himself as Prince of Wales to the French king Charles VI, father-in law of

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 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

the deposed Richard II. When a French troopship arrived at Carmarthen

Bay and the Earl of Northumberland’s son Harry Percy, who had been sent
to Wales to put down the rebellion, started intriguing with the conspirators
the Welsh revolt became an attempt to overthrow the new dynasty. By 1403
its leaders were aiming not only for an independent Wales but to reinstate
the rightful heir to the throne of England, the Earl of March. Chief among
the disaffected nobles was the marcher lord Sir Edmund Mortimer. Himself
descended from Edward III through his grandfather Lionel of Clarence, he
linked the Percys and Glendower to the Earl of March: he was respectively
Harry Percy’s brother-in-law, Owen Glendower’s son-in-law, and uncle to
the Earl of March.
In July 1403 at the Battle of Shrewsbury on the Welsh borders Henry IV
intercepted the Percy armies led by Hotspur (as the Scots had admiringly
named Harry Percy) on their way to join up with the Welsh under
Glendower. Hotspur was killed by his former pupil, Henry IV’s son Henry
of Monmouth, the future Henry V. The immediate threat of a general
rising was temporarily beaten off, though Glendower escaped. But in 1405
a new rebellion broke out, this time led by Hotspur’s father the Earl of
Northumberland. Since the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, the
second most important churchman in England after the Archbishop of
Canterbury, was one of the northern leaders it had to be crushed with the
utmost severity. To considerable disquiet Scrope was executed, even
though as a churchman he was not subject to secular law.
By the deaths of Richard II and Archbishop Scrope, Henry IV had shown
he was quite capable of ruthless acts to safeguard his dynasty, but it was at
great mental cost. Henry of Lancaster was not the natural material of
which usurpers are made, being of a melancholy and religious disposition,
and he never attempted to root out the Clarence Plantagenet line by killing
March. He was said to have been struck with leprosy in 1407 at the
moment that Archbishop Scrope was executed. By all accounts the rapid
decline which ended with his death at the age of forty-six began with a
nervous breakdown that year.
As the king became steadily more incoherent and unaware of his
surroundings, power devolved to his close family circle. His son, the future
Henry V, with the help of his half-uncles, the ambitious Beaufort sons of
John of Gaunt, began to take control of the King’s Council, undermining
the influence of Henry IV’s chief adviser, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Arundel. In 1413 the king’s health finally gave out and he died in
the Jerusalem Chamber of the Palace of Westminster — thus fulfilling an old
prophecy that he would die in the Holy Land.

22
 Henry V
(1413-1422)

Though Henry V inherited his father’s strong religious convictions, in the

new king’s case they served to reinforce his sense of himself as a born ruler.
Unlike his father, he had no blood on his hands. A deep inner conviction
of the rightness of any cause he adopted, such as his grandfather’s claim to
the French throne, gave boldness to a decisive and obsessively disciplined
character. His wiry physique had been honed in the saddle since the age of
thirteen in the Welsh campaigns. Though his reputation when he became
king was that of an outstanding warrior who had got the better of
Hotspur, in the best-known portrait of him he more resembles a priest with
his cropped hair and solemn, austere look. Although numerous legends
suggest a wild youth as Prince Hal, including an incident in which he is said
to have struck his father’s chief justice Sir William Gasgoigne, many of
them seem to have been invented after his death.
What can be said for sure is that Henry V had the ability to move his
audiences to follow him anywhere. Oratorical gifts and outstanding
military abilities, which enabled him to recapture the ancient English
territory of Normandy and make his son the next King of France, inspired
feelings of profound devotion among the English. Like his father, Henry
had only a short reign, but those nine years were exceptionally glorious,
and his victories in France attracted the enthusiastic support of the House
of Commons, which raised taxes for each new war without argument. The
unique popularity of the hero-king gave the Lancastrian dynasty an
emotional sanction and legitimacy it had previously lacked.
The new Lancastrian king had succeeded to the throne without a hitch,
but his first task was to restore peace at home. To this end he mollified his
potential opponents, granting a free pardon to Owen Glendower and his
supporters, releasing the Earl of March from prison and putting up a
magnificent tomb to Richard II at Westminster Abbey. Although Henry V
had replaced his enemy Archbishop Arundel as chancellor with one of his
Beaufort relations, the king shared Arundel’s conservative views.
Under Henry V the Lollard heresy was pursued far more strenuously than
before. Even his old friend and fellow campaigner the Welsh marcher knight

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 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

The Lollard Prison, Lambeth Palace.

Sir John Oldcastle, a keen follower of Wyclif who may have been the model
for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was tried and arrested for heresy in the second
year of his reign. After attempting to lead a rising known as the Oldcastle
Plot, intending to take the king prisoner at his palace at Eltham in south
London, Oldcastle escaped to his hereditary lands in the Welsh marches.
With his subsequent recapture and execution at the Tower of London, the
Lollard threat to orthodoxy was extirpated, and the doctrines of the
Catholic Church were not to be challenged again for over a hundred years.
Henceforth Lollardy became an underground movement with a considerable
following in the West Midlands and among some better-educated artisans.
Though something of its independent spirit dripped quietly into the English
bloodstream, it no longer had a following within the establishment.
With peace at home, Henry V turned his energies abroad, convinced of
the need for a just war on behalf of his royal patrimony. In 1360 by the
Treaty of Brétigny Edward III had agreed to give up his claim to the French
throne in return for Aquitaine. Yet the treaty had never been fulfilled —
Aquitaine had never been returned, while its rump Gascony was being
reduced, so the English claim to the French throne remained in place.
Henry was determined to have the whole of Aquitaine at the very least, and
if possible Normandy as well, and now was a good moment to act.
The intermittent madness of Charles VI, which had been afflicting him
for over thirty years, had badly weakened the French administration. It
was made more ineffective still by the internecine rivalry within the royal

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 1413-1422

family, in particular between the king’s brother, the Duke of Orleans, and
the king’s cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, known as John the Fearless or
Jean Sans Peur. In 1407 Orleans was murdered at Burgundy’s behest, and
a civil war erupted. On one side were the Armagnacs, the Orleanist party
headed by the Count of Armagnac, whose home was in southern France
near Aquitaine; on the other side were the Burgundians, whose power base
lay in the north east of Paris.
Embassies came and went between England and the two French parties,
but in terms of territory returned to the English little progress was made.
By 1414 Henry V’s patience was wearing thin, and he soon concluded that
the only way to break the deadlock was to send an English invasion force
to France. There was considerable support for war. The City of London
with its Gascon trade raised large loans for Henry, and Parliament granted
extra taxes to help recover his rightful possessions from Normandy down
to Aquitaine — both Houses had been convinced by an address he gave
them that his claim to the French throne should be enforced. A new fleet
was assembled at Southampton, and the truce which had begun with
Richard II’s marriage came to an end — the Hundred Years War resumed.
By the summer of 1415 the ships and the guns, the heralds and the
trumpeters, the drummers and the minstrels, were ready, and in early
August the king and his troops sailed for Harfleur in Normandy, the
gateway to northern France. This force of 9,000 men was intended only to
open the campaign — it was not a full-scale invasion. But things did not go
according to plan, and it was not until late September that the port yielded.
Food was always hard to come by in enemy territory, and the effort of
besieging and an epidemic of dysentery had greatly weakened the men.
As a result the campaign had to be abandoned in favour of making for
the greater safety of the English port of Calais. But to reach it the English
had to march through hostile territory. Following the course that his
grandfather Edward III had taken before Crécy, Henry V and his
exhausted army made their way north. After crossing the Ternoise river at
Blangy they found their way to Calais blocked by a great French army, at
least 40,000 strong. It was drawn up at a little village named Agincourt. In
those late October days the odds were against the English. But the French
commanders made one significant mistake which would give the English
the advantage: they had chosen to fight on a very narrow plateau
surrounded by hedges which did not allow them enough room to
manoeuvre their formidable forces.
Despite Henry V’s personal austerity, he took the greatest care of his
soldiers. He introduced surgeons into the army, his archers had horses to
ride and, in imitation of Caesar, pontoons or portable bridges were always
carried so that English soldiers stayed dry and comfortable crossing rivers.

2s
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

Unlike other armies English besiegers were housed in weatherproof

wooden huts built by the siege train of engineers, carpenters and joiners.
Henry always personally oversaw the victualling, to ensure that his men
were well fed. Wherever the English army marched, on the nearest sea a
flotilla of boats groaning with provisions followed. For the king knew, as
Napoleon is said to have remarked centuries later, that an army marches
on its stomach. He also took steps to prevent his vital longbowmen
running out of arrows. Geese were specially reared on common land
throughout England in order to provide the feathered tips for the million
arrows the royal armies ordered each year. And it was forbidden by royal
decree to use ashwood for the wooden clogs that most country dwellers put
on against the mud. This was because ash provided the best wood for the
arrows’ shafts.
The night before Agincourt Henry did what he had always done ever
since he was a young commander: he slipped from group to group under
the dripping trees, quietly rallying the men. Then he made an electrifying
last speech which was talked about by old campaigners for years to come.
If the genius of Shakespeare transformed his words, much of its content
was derived from contemporary accounts. In particular, the democratic
themes that the playwright puts in Henry V’s mouth had a basis in reality.
It was a fact that the English archer was more valuable in battle than his
social superior the knight, as his skill at archery was responsible for the
storms of arrows which protected the knight and which fell so thickly that
they reminded observers of snow showers. In the French army strict
notions of caste prevailed, just as they did in France itself: the higher social
class of the knight segregated him from the peasant archers. But the English
knights dismounted before battle and sent their horses to the back. Then
they and archers fought side by side on foot. Even if Henry did not
precisely say that ‘he today that sheds his blood with me, shall be my
brother; be he ne’er so vile this day shall gentle his condition’, it was clearly
implied.
Not only was the small force of English outnumbered by nearly five to one,
they also looked outlandish and wild compared to the exquisitely caparisoned
French knights. Practicality determined the English costume. The
longbowmen had all taken off one shoe and ripped one stocking so that they
could have greater purchase in the oozing mud and grip with their naked toes.
They had also torn off one sleeve of their sword arm for greater freedom of
movement. We may imagine that half naked, they looked an unkempt and
inefficient enemy to take on the French. The French knights’ armour, on the
oher hand, shone brightly from ceaseless polishing. The English and Welsh
must have seemed almost as savage as in the days of Boudicca.
But, despite the contrast in the appearance of the two armies, the French

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knights were not fooled. The English longbowmen continued to be such a
source of dread that during battles French knights would swoop by the
archers waving their swords to try to cut off the archers’ two drawing
fingers. In return the English longbowmen would hold up two fingers, a
gesture of defiance which continues to be used today.
When battle commenced, Henry ordered the archers at the front to move
forward towards the French so that their arrows would not fall short. The
French turned to one another in delighted disbelief at the English stupidity
before advancing to ride down the longbowmen. But unknown to them
sharpened stakes had been planted in the ground in front of them, and
there was a huge pile-up of warhorses, their unseated knights thrashing
uselessly beneath them as their heavy armour caused them to sink into the
mud. At once the English archers ran forward and in their usual cold-
blooded fashion set about slitting their enemy’s throats.
Many of France’s greatest nobles were killed that day in the broken
cornfields. One of the reasons for
the enormous numbers of French
casualties — perhaps 6,000 versus
fewer than 300 English dead —
was that Henry ordered that all
the French prisoners of war
should have their throats cut,
because the rumour had gone
round that there was a danger of
attack from the rear. That was
where the royal baggage train
held the royal crown of England,
the Chancery seals without which The Battle of Agincourt, 1415, won by
no official document was com- Henry V, one of the great victories of the
ee dinkevate ‘Even Hundred Years War which led to the
gas conquest of Normandy.
though permanent government
departments had grown up at Westminster, like his predecessors Henry V
went to war accompanied by all the visible signs of his office and majesty.
His prompt if unchivalrous action in killing the prisoners caused much
grumbling in the English ranks — not on humanitarian grounds, but because
dead knights would not elicit the lucrative ransoms that made so many
English fortunes in the Hundred Years War.
The way was now open for Calais and London. The hero king was
chaired by the crowds when he landed on English soil and was accom-
panied by exulting citizens all the way to London, where Henry Beaufort,
Bishop of Winchester, celebrated Mass. Agincourt was a sign that God was
on the side of the English, and the king paid for a Mass to be said in
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 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

perpetuity on St Crispin’s Day, the day of the battle. The mood of national
ecstasy continued with Parliament surrendering to Henry V - and to him
only — their right to discuss taxation with him and granting him the
customs for life.
It was the climax of the love affair between the Lancastrian king and
Parliament. Henry became the greatest prince in Europe, so influential that
his support of the Emperor Sigismund brought to an end the papal schism
which had been plaguing Christendom for over a hundred years: the two
popes had become three and were now reduced to one, Martin V.
Meanwhile to demonstrate its commitment to orthodoxy, the General
Church Council burned at the stake the heretical Jan Hus, a follower of
Wyclif’s in Bohemia. For the next few years, buoyed by taxes and by loans,
the king concentrated on returning Normandy to the English crown. By
1419, after a series of gruelling sieges, he had achieved his objective, and
Normandy was once more under English rule. The English were back in
force on the lower Seine, as threatening to the French as their Viking
ancestors had been 500 years before.
At last the warring Burgundians and Orleanists realized the danger they
were facing. They made overtures of peace to one another, but even at this
moment of peril the feud between them took precedence. At a meeting on
the bridge at Montereau on the Yonne between the dauphin (the name
given to the eldest son of the French king), who was head of the Armagnacs
or Orleanists, and Jean Sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, the duke was
assassinated. The feud blazed into life again. But Burgundian anger at the
Orleanists was to England’s lasting advantage, for Jean Sans Peur’s son, the
new duke, Philip the Good, allied himself comprehensively with the
English. In order to prevent the Orleanist dauphin ruling France, by the
1420 Treaty of Troyes with the Duke of Burgundy Henry V was to marry
the French king Charles VI’s daughter Catherine and become regent during
his mad father-in-law’s lifetime. Last and best, under the treaty Henry and
his heirs were to be the next kings of France, though France was to remain
a distinct kingdom, maintaining her separate French laws and a French
council.
The dual monarchy promised by the Treaty of Troyes proved hard to
enforce. North of the Loire and round the Paris area, the French might hate
the Orleanists and welcome the English king presiding over a session of the
Estates General and English garrisons manning the Louvre and the Bastille;
south of the Loire, however, was a different story. There the dauphin was
viewed as France’s rightful ruler and future king. When in 1421 Henry V’s
brother, the Duke of Clarence, was killed attempting to enlarge England’s
French realm further south, Henry left his infant son and wife Catherine in
England and returned to France himself.

218
Detail of the king on his charger, from Henry V’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

219
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

A year later the hero-king was dead. The dysentery which was a hazard
of those long campaigns had killed him, and he left as heir that unlucky
thing for England, an infant. Worse still, despite his superb sire, little
Henry VI had inherited many more genes from his French side. The
madness of his grandfather Charles VI was very much to the fore.
What would have happened if Henry V had lived to be an old man is one
of the great hypotheticals of history. Those dissatisfied with the few rather
solemn paintings of the king and who wish to see some remnant of his spirit
should visit his chantry tomb in Westminster Abbey. There, high up, is a
most unsacred image of the king on his warhorse charging full tilt at
Agincourt.

220
 Henry VI
(1422-1461)

By strange coincidence the French king Charles VI died in 1422 within

months of Henry V, leaving the infant Henry VI king of both England and
France. In practice both countries were ruled by his royal uncles. Henry V’s
able soldier brother John, Duke of Bedford became regent. But he returned
to France to try to enforce the Treaty of Troyes and left the task of
governing England to his ambitious younger brother Duke Humphrey of
Gloucester in tandem with the King’s Council.
Bedford was as far-sighted as his brother Henry V and he saw that the
only way to rule France was through the goodwill of the Duke of
Burgundy, Philip the Good. His support was vital as the Burgundians
controlled most of the northern part of the country, especially around
Paris. Bedford shored up his nephew’s kingdom by establishing an Anglo-
Burgundian alliance and signing a treaty with the Duke of Brittany. This
left him free to extend the Anglo-French kingdom south of the Loire into
the Orleanist-Armagnac territory of central and southern France, where
the dauphin was acknowledged as king.
Bedford’s campaigns were constantly interrupted by the need to return
home to sort out the King’s Council, in which the jealousies and intrigues
between Duke Humphrey and the baby king’s equally ambitious great-
uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, often brought government
business to a standstill. By 1429 Duke Humphrey was demanding that
Beaufort be expelled from the Council as an agent of the pope following
his election as cardinal. Bedford therefore deemed it more sensible to
crown the seven-year-old Henry VI king than allow Duke Humphrey to
remain as protector. From then on Cardinal Beaufort’s influence in the
royal Council became paramount.
Bedford had already begun a more serious attempt at rooting out the
dauphin by laying siege to the town of Orleans, which controlled one of
the few bridges on the fast-flowing Loire river and was considered the key
to the south. Had he succeeded in taking Orleans, the Anglo-Burgundian
forces could have swarmed into central France. However, at this point the
fortunes of France were transformed by Jeanne d’Arc or, as the English call

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her, Joan of Arc, a young peasant girl from Domremi between Champagne
and Lorraine in the north-east.
Although Domremi was separated by many miles from Orleanist France
in the south, Joan of Arc made her way across enemy country to reach the
dauphin at his castle at Chinon, desperate to tell him of her vision that he
was to be crowned King of France at Rheims in the heart of English-
occupied France. Having pushed her way into his presence she proceeded
to put steel into this self-indulgent man. No greater contrast could be
imagined than that between the gorgeously dressed and cynical veteran of
the French court and the naive Joan in her wooden sabots and home-made
woollen garments. But her conviction that France’s greatest saints had
appeared to her while she was watching her father’s sheep and thinking of
the suffering of her divided country was so overwhelming that the dauphin
too was swept away by her astonishing prophecy.
In an age of symbolism and allegory Joan of Arc, clad in the suit of white
armour the dauphin had had made for her and with her hair shorn, seemed
the embodiment of a holy angel descended to earth to fight for France. She
changed the army’s mood from pessimism to inspired patriotism. On a
horse from the royal stables, Joan of Arc was allowed to lead a brigade of
French soldiers to relieve the defeatist garrison at Orleans. To the
Orleanists’ astonishment, she managed to fight her way through the
English besiegers and clambered within the battlemented walls of the city.
Soon after she drove off the English by capturing one of their siege forts.
The siege of Orleans was lifted, and the townsfolk claimed Joan as their
own, with the result that ever since she has been known as the Maid of
Orleans. Shortly after, she won a pitched battle against the English at
Patay, and a new determination was restored to the Orleanist army. It
enabled the Maid to lead the dauphin north through Anglo-Burgundian
France and have him crowned at Rheims as his ancestors had been since
time immemorial. Although the dauphin had to escape south again as soon
as the ceremony was over, something had happened to him in the echoing
cathedral. When he received the sacred oils of kingship as the Archbishop
of Rheims traced the sign of the cross on his forehead, the new king
Charles VII was transformed into the Lord’s anointed for whom no
sacrifice was too great.
Urged on by Joan, who had stayed in the north with the Orleanist
troops, even the French inhabitants of the Anglo-Burgundian regions
began openly to resist their foreign overlords. For though the Maid had
accomplished her first purpose and the dauphin was now the figurehead
for an increasingly united France, she had yet to achieve her second
objective: that was to drive the English out of France.
It was then that the Maid’s luck turned. Her great merit had been the

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strength of her faith, but she was no trained general. She became over-
confident and marched on Paris. When she utterly failed to take it, the
mutterings against her grew louder among the dauphin’s advisers, who
were already jealous of her influence. In May 1430, against military advice,
she rashly tried to relieve the town of Compiégne, a former Burgundian
possession on the dukedom’s western border which had rebelled against its
overlord and which Duke Philip of Burgundy had surrounded. Having been
wounded, she was on her way back to camp when she was captured by
Duke Philip’s men-at-arms. Her white armour had made her all too visible.
Joan was thrown into prison, while the English and Burgundians
considered ways of eradicating her with the least fuss. In her absence her
enemies prevailed over the weak dauphin. In the end it was a French
ecclesiastical court at Rouen under the Bishop of Beauvais that did the
dirty work. The heroine of France was condemned to be burned to death
for witchcraft. The dauphin did nothing to save her. Refusing to alter
anything she had said about her visions the Maid of Orleans, weak and
pale from captivity, was led out from her underground dungeon and tied
to a stake in the market square at Rouen in Normandy. Logs were piled
around her and set alight. St Joan, as she was to become, quietly muttered
prayers to herself and never cried out during her final agony. Her ashes
were thrown into the Seine.
However, the spirit of patriotism that Joan had released lived on after
her. Twenty years later the English presence in France had been reduced to
the port of Calais. Though Bedford brought Henry VI to France to be
crowned in the year of her death, anti-English feeling prevented the
ceremony being performed at Rheims. Instead he had to make do with
Paris. But the coronation had little effect — in fact, it only encouraged the
growth of French patriotism, and even the Burgundian-ruled northern
towns turned against the English.
The process was made swifter by the death of Bedford’s wife, who was
the Duke of Burgundy’s sister. Anglo-Burgundian relations had been
strengthened by their personal ties, but they never really recovered after
Bedford married Burgundy’s vassal Jacquetta of Luxembourg without his
former brother-in-law’s permission. Was England planning to control
Luxembourg too? From now on Burgundy allied himself to Charles VII,
and threw his influence behind him to establish the French king at Paris.
Though fighting continued sporadically in France, marked by longer and
longer truces, Bedford’s death in 1435 allowed a peace party to flourish in
England, led by Cardinal Beaufort, and the Truce of Tours in 1444 was
cemented by Henry VI’s marriage to the strong-willed Margaret of Anjou,
a cousin of the French royal family. However, Beaufort’s wise policy did
not jibe with the national mood, which was vehemently anti-French. When
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he died in 1447 his follower the Duke of Suffolk became a lightning rod
for public opinion. As ever Duke Humphrey — though he had been exiled
from court, disgraced by his wife’s alleged attempts to use witchcraft to
bring about Henry VI’s death — continued to exercise his populist touch
speaking out against the French marriage. His death under suspicious
circumstances after he had been arrested by Suffolk created a public
outcry.
But that was nothing to what was felt to be the national humiliation of
the loss of Normandy and Gascony three years later. By now Suffolk was
Henry VI’s chief minister. One of his principal councillors was Cardinal
Beaufort’s nephew, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who held the
position of governor of Normandy. Somerset disgraced Suffolk’s admini-
stration by failing to make sure of Normandy’s defences and by 1450 the
duchy had passed back into French hands for good. Even in Gascony the
patriotism Joan of Arc had first inspired finally prevailed. When French
soldiers invaded, none of the Gascons took up arms against them. Even
those towns with strong trade links to England, Bordeaux and Bayonne,
went over to the French.
However, the Gascons were used to a greater degree of independence
than their new masters were willing to allow, so in 1451 the elderly but
distinguished commander John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, whose war
service stretched back to the Welsh wars of Henry IV, was despatched to
aid the Gascons round Bordeaux. Unfortunately, in the half-century since
Owen Glendower’s revolt there had been a few military developments
which had passed the gallant Talbot by, and one of them was artillery.
French artillery accordingly won the Battle of Castillon in the Dordogne in
1453, the engagement which at last ended the Hundred Years War. The
once unbeatable longbow was finally outclassed. Perhaps because of his
age, Talbot made a textbook error, leading a cavalry charge uphill against
a fortified camp defended by 300 cannon. One in ten of his troops was
killed before they reached the palisades, including Talbot himself. From
that day the only English possession left in France was the staple town and
port of Calais.
But the initial loss of Normandy and Gascony, even before Castillon had
been fought, was enough in 1450 to get Suffolk impeached. There were
suspicions that he intended to engineer the succession to the throne for his
son, that he was in collusion with the French and that Somerset too was a
traitor. So furious was the public mood that Henry VI was forced to banish
Suffolk to prevent him being imprisoned. Even so, the duke was murdered
on his way to exile in Calais. His headless body was washed up days later
on the English coast.
Worse was to come. Only weeks later, Henry VI, who was said to be

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utterly at the mercy of his fierce French wife Margaret of Anjou, was forced
to flee from the capital to escape an invasion by the men of Kent, led by an
obscure Irishman named Jack Cade. Rebellion was their response to the
government’s attempts to punish them, for they were commonly believed to
have been behind the murder of Suffolk. They camped out on Blackheath
and when they had defeated the king’s soldiers sent to round them up they
went into London and exacted summary justice on royal favourites. It was
only when wilder elements began to loot the fine shops that Londoners
turned against Cade. Soon afterwards he was murdered, and the king
returned from Kenilworth where he had been hiding.
Who was behind Jack Cade? Unlike the Peasants’ Revolt, Cade’s
uprising included deeply dissatisfied burgesses and gentry, the so-called
political nation, protesting against high taxes, incompetent government
and the French débacle. Cade claimed to be a Mortimer, that Welsh
marcher family which was so closely connected to the Clarence Plantagenet
line. There are some suggestions that the revolt had been orchestrated as a
challenge to the Lancastrian line by the royal duke Richard of York.
Through his mother Anne Mortimer (who was Lionel, Duke of Clarence’s
heiress), Richard of York represented the senior branch of Edward III’s
family. Thus according to strict arguments of heredity, if inheriting
through the female line was no obstacle, York was the rightful heir to the
throne. In fact not long after Cade’s death Richard, Duke of York did
appear in London from his estates in Ireland, where he had been banished
for the previous three years by Suffolk. He now became the focus of
opposition to the Lancastrian regime.
There had been considerable enmity between Henry VI and his putative
heir for some time, and relations had not been improved by York’s attempt
through Parliament to have himself named as the then childless king’s
successor. Nevertheless, at least initially, York does not seem to have
intended to seize the throne. But in 1453 the birth of a son to Margaret and
Henry altered his position vis-a-vis the crown. Now that he was no longer
the automatic heir his feelings hardened towards Henry. Moreover, events
began to play into his hands. The kindly Henry VI lost his reason. One
chronicler reported that when the new Prince of Wales was put into his
arms he kept looking down at the ground and seemed incapable of seeing
the child.
Although the king’s madness was concealed and the King’s Council
continued to rule for him, there was a distinct mood of disenchantment in
the country. In 1454, Somerset was dismissed from government and the
popular York was elected protector of England. Months later, however,
the king’s sanity returned and he once more appointed Somerset to lead the
Council, from which York was now excluded. York’s response was to raise

22:5
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

an army against the king. At the first Battle of St Albans in Hertfordshire

in 1455 he killed Somerset and captured Henry VI. The king was not
capable of withstanding this new assault on his dignity and he lost his
mind. Once again the Duke of York was named protector.
The first Battle of St Albans is generally taken to mark the beginning of
the thirty years of sporadic civil war between the two branches of the
Plantagenet kings known as the Wars of the Roses (in Sir Walter Scott’s
phrase). A red rose was one of the badges used on their livery by the House
of Lancaster, while a white rose was worn by the House of York.

Tomb of Edward III in Westminster Abbey displaying some of the thirteen

children whose claims to the throne erupted in the Wars of the Roses.

The Duke of York had married into one of the most ambitious of the
English magnate families, the Nevilles, the tentacles of whose Yorkshire
clan twined round the power structure of northern England. The Nevilles
became completely identified with the cause of York, owing to their long-
running rivalry with their fellow northerners, the Percys, the traditional
allies of the House of Lancaster. Especially important figures among the
Nevilles were the Duke of York’s brother-in-law Richard Neville, Earl of

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Salisbury and above all his son who by marrying into the Beauchamp family
became Earl of Warwick, known to history as Warwick the Kingmaker.
The Beauchamp lands made him the wealthiest noble of the time.
Warwick and Salisbury had played key roles at the Battle of St Albans.
Warwick was rewarded by being made captain of Calais, a position he kept
despite the return of Henry VI to his senses in 1456, which meant the end
of York’s protectorship. York remained a member of the King’s Council,
which soon descended into feuding, and all over England the governmental
structure began to collapse, and with it the rule of law. Fighting for booty
in France had created an appetite among the nobility that did not die with
the lossofNormandy and Gascony.
It became the habit for great lords to support retinues of soldiers dressed
in their badges, a custom known as livery and maintenance. It would have
been a common if unwelcome sight to see such bands of forty men or more
— who pledged themselves like so many others to ride with their lord and
‘take his part against all other persons within the realm of England’, as one
oath had it — galloping across the landscape in pursuit of vengeance. In
many areas the local law courts stopped functioning, since these private
armies simply overturned judgements in the local court that they disagreed
with. As the local administration fell apart, the nobility indulged in raids
against one another and in small wars. In a period of anarchy the strong
man wins, at least temporarily. As captain of Calais, Warwick became a
popular hero for using his personal wealth to attack the French.
In 1459 war between the Yorkists and Lancastrians broke out again.
This time it was begun by the energetic queen deciding to make a pre-
emptive strike against the Yorkists, whom she had been steadily trying to
drive out of the King’s Council. Out of the blue she and her troops attacked
the Earl of Salisbury but were defeated at the Battle of Blore Heath in
Staffordshire. The action now moved to the Welsh marches and the heart
of Mortimer country where Warwick was gathered with the Duke of York
and his father the Earl of Salisbury preparatory to a fresh attack. Henry VI
now showed unexpected decisiveness and, marching at the head of his
troops, forced the unprepared conspirators to escape abroad — York to his
estates in Ireland and the Nevilles to Calais. Queen Margaret then had
Parliament declare all the Yorkist leaders attainted. That meant that they
were sentenced to death and all of their property forfeited to the crown.
This aggressive action only upped the stakes for the Yorkists — now it
was all or nothing. The following year, 1460, when Warwick and Salisbury
returned at the head of an army containing the Duke of York’s eldest son,
the future Edward IV, their aim was to make his father king instead of
protector. At the Battle of Northampton, Warwick the Kingmaker
captured Henry VI, who was wandering incoherently about the battlefield
2.7
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

and their victory seemed complete. The queen was forced to escape north
to Scotland.
York lost no time in crossing over from Ireland to demand the crown
before Parliament, but the Lords refused him. Instead he again had to be
contented with the title of protector, though he was now styled heir to the
throne and made Prince of Wales. Whatever his titles, York was the real
ruler of the country; Henry VI lived quietly in the Tower of London. But
at the end of the year the protector was forced to hurry north to put down
a revolt by Lancastrian Yorkshire magnates. At the Battle of Wakefield in

Eton College, founded by Henry VI in 1440 to give free education to

70 poor scholars.

December 1460 the Yorkists were severely defeated, and some of the most
important Yorkist nobles lost their lives — including the duke himself.
Warwick’s father Salisbury was publicly executed at the Lancastrian
stronghold of Pontefract and York’s second son, the Earl of Rutland, was
killed. York’s head was cut off after death, crowned with a paper coronet
and stuck on the city of York’s walls as a dreadful warning.
Meanwhile Queen Margaret was making her way down from Scotland
accompanied by Scottish soldiers to join up with the northern Lancastrian
army which was now heading for London. The Scots had driven a hard
bargain — in return for their aid Berwick was to be given back to Scotland.
At St Albans in Hertfordshire on the road to London, the queen
encountered Warwick who had marched north to stop her from reaching
the capital. There she won a great victory and recaptured her husband.
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 1422-1461

Ney, As a foreigner Queen Margaret

had not understood the national
feeling about Berwick and_ the
historic enmity between the Scots
and the English. As the Scots travel-
led down through England they
behaved like an invading army,
which in many ways they were. Their
looting and burning of English pro-
perty in the end proved the French
queen’s undoing, as the south began
to turn against her. Londoners
prevented the food carts bearing
provisions for the queen’s army from
reaching her, and Margaret herself
hesitated to march straight into
London for fear of the reception she
would get.
AMBEIDGE,
The nineteen-year-old Edward, the
former Earl of March — he had inherited his maternal uncle Edmund
Mortimer’s title and, since his father’s death, Duke of York — seized the
moment. Summoning an immense gathering of his retainers from the
Mortimer estates in Wales and the Welsh marches, he advanced eastwards.
Having defeated a Lancastrian army at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in
Herefordshire in February 1461 he met up with Warwick and his army and
reached London before Queen Margaret. At Westminster Hall a month
later he was acclaimed king. He became Edward IV.

229
 Edward IV
(1461-1483)

Although Edward IV had been acclaimed king, the Lancastrians had not
abandoned hope and they continued to fight. Edward was an astute
general and saw that their huge army had to be routed immediately or it
would remain a threat. At Towton near Tadcaster in Yorkshire he caught
up with the Lancastrian forces. In what was becoming a north-south
divide the Battle of Towton was fought on Palm Sunday, March 1461, in
a blinding snowstorm, the private armies of northern border lords such as
the Cliffords and the Percys clashing with retainers from Edward IV’s
Mortimer estates in Wales and Warwick’s soldiers from the midlands. The
Lancastrians were comprehensively defeated. Six of their most important
magnates were killed, leaving the cause almost leaderless, while some
37,000 of their followers were killed. Their blood stained the snowdrifts
red. Many of their bodies fell into a ravine running alongside the battlefield
and were never recovered.
It was not in Queen Margaret’s nature to give up, however. She retreated
to Scotland with the bewildered Henry VI and from there encouraged
rebellions in northern England. In 1464 Edward, at last provoked into
engaging with what remained of the Lancastrian forces, put an end to the
insurrections at the Battle of Hexham. In its aftermath Henry VI, who had
been part of the raiding party, became a fugitive and was captured
wandering in the Pennines. He was then brought to the Tower of London.
The Scots had by now abandoned him, and they made a peace treaty with
Edward IV, who began to put the country in order and restore the
government. But by the end of the decade a new threat to the Yorkist
regime had arisen. This time it came in the somewhat surprising shape of
the Earl of Warwick. The Yorkists’ former chief adviser had been crucial
to their achieving the throne and his influence throughout his own
immense estates scattered all round England was a significant factor in
ensuring the smooth transition to the Yorkist regime. Warwick had swiftly
moved his relations into positions of influence at court, one of his brothers
being made Archbishop of York and the other assuming the old earldom
of the attainted Percys. His own reward was to be recognized as an

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international statesman. It had become his conviction that an alliance with

France as opposed to the traditional links with Burgundy would now be
more useful to England.
Warwick’s vanity was flattered by the cunning new King of France Louis
XI,-Charles VII’s son. Louis was determined to limit the power of the
dangerous rival perched on his eastern borders, so an alliance with England
made perfect sense. He suggested that Edward should marry Bona of
Savoy, his wife’s sister. But by now Edward IV was older and anxious to
be less dependent on the over-controlling Warwick and the Nevilles. He
had his own political ideas. The rupture between him and his advisers
began when Warwick’s French marriage plan forced the king to reveal that
he was in fact already married to the exquisite Elizabeth Woodville, the
daughter of Lord Rivers and widow of Sir John Grey, a Lancastrian
supporter. She had triumphed where other court beauties had failed. The
fair and handsome Edward IV was a young giant who stood six feet three
in his stockinged feet, a man of great personal charm and a well-known
pursuer of the ladies.
Queen Elizabeth, despite her delicate appearance, was no ingenue but an
experienced woman of the world, older than the king and the mother of
two children by her first husband. The revelation of the secret marriage
became the signal for the wholesale filling of positions at court with her
grasping relatives, and Warwick and his brother the Archbishop of York
were soon excluded from the king’s counsels. Moreover Edward
deliberately pursued a foreign policy which was the opposite of Warwick’s.
He renewed the Anglo-Burgundian alliance by marrying his sister
Margaret of York to Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy.
For so proud a magnate as Warwick to be publicly humiliated in this
way was intolerable. He therefore determined to use the private armies of
his vast territories to revolt against the king. His scheming mind soon fixed
on a new vehicle for his vigorous ambition in the king’s younger brother,
the impressionable and greedy George, Duke of Clarence. Like everyone
Clarence disliked the Woodvilles, and was soon lured into marrying
Warwick’s elder daughter Isabella, who stood to inherit the Kingmaker’s
great estates. Thwarted by Edward IV, the Kingmaker now proposed to
make Clarence king and his own daughter queen.
In 1469 a series of rebellions began on the Warwick and Neville properties
in the midlands. At the Battle of Edgecote Edward IV himself was
temporarily taken prisoner by Warwick, though bad feeling among the
Lords forced the Kingmaker to release him. A year later Warwick
orchestrated another rising, but this time it was absolutely routed by
Edward. Clarence and Warwick were forced to flee abroad to the court of
the French king Louis XI.
ae
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

There the restless Warwick’s plans took a different form under the
influence of the equally crafty Louis XI, who was determined to hit at
Burgundy by reinstating the Lancastrian dynasty. Since France was also
home to the exiled Queen Margaret and her son Edward, Prince of Wales,
Louis managed to effect an amazing reconciliation between the bitterest of
enemies — the Lancastrian queen and the former Yorkist Warwick. Once
again, Warwick’s vanity drew him into a new plot to lead an invasion of
England to restore Henry VI to the throne. In return his second daughter
Anne Neville was to marry Queen Margaret’s son, the Prince of Wales.
Anne now became the focus of Warwick’s hopes of seeing his flesh and
blood on the throne.
In the autumn of 1470, with troops paid for by the French, Warwick and
Clarence landed in England. While Edward IV was in the north, they
released a puzzled Henry VI from the Tower of London and proclaimed
him king. Then with the French army they drove Edward IV into exile at
his brother-in-law’s court in Burgundy. The speed with which Warwick’s
expedition had reached London meant Edward had no time to rally his
defences.
Henry VI’s restoration lasted for six months between October 1470 and
May 1471, but it was really the restoration to power of Warwick the
Kingmaker and his Neville relations. Henry VI’s whirligig of fortune,
which might have upset the equilibrium of a more stolid personality, was
far too much for him and he became almost imbecilic. One chronicler
unkindly reported that he was ‘as mute as a crowned calf’. But the
Kingmaker’s day was drawing to a close. In March 1471 Edward of York
landed at Ravenspur on the Humber river, just like that earlier pretender
Henry IV, and steadily fought his way to London.
The civil wars had been going on intermittently for over fifteen years. By
and large its battles scarcely affected the ordinary citizen, despite their
killing perhaps a third of the nobility. Although Edward did not achieve
the nationwide enthusiasm which had been crucial for Henry IV’s
revolution, support for the Yorkist cause had always tended to be
concentrated in the south and east, in Kent and Sussex, and on the Welsh
marches. Edward IV had extremely warm relations with the merchants of
London owing to his keen interest in money. When the city opened its gates
to him, Henry VI went back to the Tower and Edward was acclaimed king
once more. By his side was Clarence, who had finally realized that his best
hope lay with his brother now that Warwick was promoting the cause of
Lancaster.
On Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471, the decisive Battle of Barnet was fought
in what is now north London. Edward defeated Warwick and the
Lancastrian army in no uncertain terms and Warwick himself died on the

232
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battlefield. As at the Battle of Towton, freak weather conditions prevailed,

with such low-lying mist that it was almost impossible for the soldiers to see.
Although Edward IV’s main enemy had been disposed of, there
remained the threat of the Prince of Wales and Margaret of Anjou, who
had just landed in the west. Had Queen Margaret arrived a little earlier she
might have done better for her son, but since the Yorkists had triumphed
so conclusively at the Battle of Barnet the country rallied behind Edward.
On 4 May Edward IV caught up with the queen and her son, and fought
them at the Battle of Tewkesbury. A final, brutal slaughter marked the end
of the hopes of the Lancastrians and the triumph of the white rose. Queen
Margaret was imprisoned, but the Prince of Wales was murdered in cold
blood — as were all the Lancastrian nobles, even though they had
surrendered. As for Henry VI, Edward IV at last came to the conclusion
that the threat he posed to his dynasty made him too dangerous to live. On
the day that Edward returned to London from Tewkesbury it was officially
proclaimed that Henry had died in the Tower ‘of pure displeasure and
melancholy’.
For the rest of his reign, Edward IV ruled as a strong monarch. Law and
order returned. He summoned Parliament as little as possible to avoid
enhancing the power of the nobility, but so many of their scions had died
in the wars that there was no real opposition. The king was very popular
with the commercial classes for refusing to tolerate the nobles’ habit of
private war, even though to escape Parliamentary demands he returned to
a form of the Maltolt now known as a benevolence, a forced loan paid
mainly by the merchants. His close links with their community were
cemented by his longstanding relationship with Jane Shore, the wife of a
London merchant.
Now that London was no longer the scene of warfare it benefited from
the growing volume of international trade and from cheap and mobile
labour, for villeinage had at last withered away. It also helped that the seas
round England were safer since Edward IV had stamped out piracy.
Instead of fighting suicidal wars among themselves the European king-
doms had begun to turn their energies outwards, exploring the unknown.
By 1460 the Portuguese king and grandson of John of Gaunt, Henry the
Navigator, had discovered the north-west coast of Africa. In 1481 Bristol
merchants sailing west into the Atlantic hit on what they called the isles of
Brasil, which may have been Newfoundland. And only a decade later
Christopher Columbus became the first European to set foot on the
unknown continent later called America.
Edward IV supported the printer Caxton, enabling him to set up his
press in the shadow of Westminster Abbey in 1476. This revolutionary
development meant that what people read was no longer controlled by the

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Church. There now circulated in England the uncensored literature of the

ancient Greeks and Romans, which had been frowned on since the days of
the Church Fathers as well as romances and histories. It was the beginning
of what is known as the Renaissance or rebirth of western culture. Spread
by scholars like the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus and John Colet, the
Dean of St Paul’s and founder of its School for Boys, the humanist
movement took hold in England. The study of man unmediated by religion
marked the end of the middle ages and saw the beginning of the modern
world.
In the turbulent north, to suppress the Lancastrians and keep out the
Scots Edward relied on his brother Richard of Gloucester, who as well as
being a talented commander — as he had shown at the Battle of Tewkesbury
— was also a very good administrator. The Yorkist king soon felt secure
enough to invade France in order to punish Louis XI for his part in
Warwick’s uprising, but the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was damaged
almost at once when the king’s brother-in-law Charles the Rash failed to
send enough troops to ensure success. Burgundy’s existence as an
independent country was in any case near its end. In 1477 Charles the Rash
was killed at the Battle of Nancy against the Swiss. It was the signal for
Louis to invade Burgundy and make it part of France, as it has been ever
since.
In 1483 Edward IV suddenly died of a stroke. He was only forty, still
golden haired but with a tendency to plumpness. His death was generally
put down to a life of self-indulgence which had started to verge on
debauchery. In his last years he had moved against his troublesome brother
Clarence by means of a bill of attainder. Clarence had learned little from
his adventures. He had already aroused the enmity of his brother Richard
of Gloucester, who had recently married Clarence’s sister-in-law Anne
Neville after the murder of her husband, the Prince of Wales. Despite
Gloucester’s expectations Clarence had attempted to make sure that the
immense Warwick possessions were inherited by himself alone. Eventually,
in 1478, it was given out that Clarence had drowned in a vat of Malmsey
wine. He was most likely murdered.
On the death of Edward IV the crown passed to his thirteen-year-old
son, who became Edward V. He and his brother, the eleven-year-old Duke
of York, are known to history as the ill-fated Princes in the Tower.

234
 Edward V
(1483)

Since Edward V was not of age, on his father’s death the same factional
struggle for power that had marred Henry VI’s reign erupted between the
Woodvilles and the older nobility. To Edward’s ministers, the real threat
to the government of England was not Richard of Gloucester, whom
posterity knows as the murderer of the princes, but the Woodville family.
It seemed clear that the Woodvilles were about to mount a coup d’état:
Queen Elizabeth had removed the king’s treasure into her safekeeping, her
brother Sir Edward Woodville had commandeered the Fleet, and her son
the Marquis of Dorset started rallying his troops on his estates. Ministers
lost no time in urging Richard of Gloucester, Edward IV’s representative
in the north who had been named the young king’s guardian by his dying
brother, to come south and to take up his position as protector or regent,
to which the royal Council had nominated him, as quickly as possible.
The triumph of the Woodvilles at Edward IV’s court had driven many
former courtiers out of the King’s Council and back to their estates. Chief
among their enemies was the Duke of Buckingham, brother-in-law of the
queen. When it became clear that Elizabeth had decided that the new king
should be crowned as soon as possible to prevent Gloucester assuming
power as protector, Buckingham acted on Gloucester’s behalf to prevent
the coronation. The Woodville riding party escorting the new king rapidly
into London from the west was ambushed by Gloucester and Buckingham.
These two men then proceeded with Edward V into London, which they
reached on 4 May 1483.
With 24 June being mentioned as a date for Edward’s coronation there
was a real possibility that Richard of Gloucester’s Protectorate might end
before it had begun. In considering what happened next it is hard to
achieve a completely objective view of Gloucester, his character having
been so blackened by Tudor propagandists, including Shakespeare. Even
his appearance counted against him. What seems to have been simply one
shoulder a little higher than the other has been exaggerated into a hump
back — ‘crookback Dick’ - and equated with moral deformity. Richard of
Gloucester was secretive by nature, one of life’s loners. But though he was

235
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

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236
 1483

not personable and charming like his elder brother he was admired for his
statesmanlike qualities, and in contrast to his brother Clarence he was
always devoted to his brother Edward IV’s interests. His austere religious
nature was viewed as a welcome contrast to the frivolity of the queen and
indeed of Edward IV himself. In the north, which he had governed for the
previous twelve years, he had acquired a reputation for exceptional
competence, his dutifulness, his rebuilding of the local administration after
the anarchy of war and his rooting out of corruption attracting a great deal
of personal loyalty.
Until June 1483 in fact Richard of Gloucester seems to have led an
exemplary life. Nevertheless it cannot be disputed that he was the moving
spirit in the sinister events of that summer. The facts speak for themselves.
By 6 July Gloucester had assumed the throne as Richard II] in Edward V’s
stead and been crowned in Westminster Abbey. The disinheriting of his
nephew had been carefully prepared. An influential preacher Dr Ralph
Shaw had given a public sermon at St Paul’s on the theme that ‘bastard
slips shall not take root’. Shaw’s argument was that, owing to Edward IV’s
pre-contract with another lady before he married Elizabeth Woodville, the
marriage was invalid. Edward V and his
brother the Duke of York were therefore
illegitimate. Two days later Buckingham
repeated this theory in a speech to the Mayor
of London and important citizensin the
Guildhall. Coming from the elder line,
Clarence’s son would have taken precedence
over Gloucester, but his father’s treachery
disqualified him. The real heir to the throne
therefore was Richard of Gloucester.
In the meantime any potential opposition
had been ruthlessly disposed of by Gloucester.
Most importantly, two leading Woodvilles
had been executed without trial. Next some
20,000 of Gloucester’s soldiers descended Edward V’s uncle,
from the north and began encircling London. Richard III.
Their presence and threats of violence
persuaded Queen Elizabeth to release the Duke of York from protective
sanctuary in Westminster Abbey so that he could be prepared for his
brother’s coronation. However, once the eleven-year-old duke had joined
his brotherin the Tower of London the ceremony was mysteriously
postponed until November. Richard was then invited by the Lords in
Parliament to accept the crown — they could hardly do otherwise, with his
troops surrounding London — and he took over the coronation planned for

25/7
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

his nephew. The two little boys vanished into the Tower and after the
autumn of 1483 appear never to have been seen again.
Much ink has been expended over whether Richard III had his nephews
murdered there. The rumour was first given chapter and verse in the next
reign. In the time of Henry VII, Sir James Tyrell — who had been a follower
of Richard III and was a well-known conspirator — supposedly confessed
to their murder when he was arrested on another charge. He claimed to
have been commissioned by Richard III to drug the princes’ jailers in the
White Tower and smother the children at night in their beds while they
slept. While Sir James waited outside the Tower in the moonlight the
murderers crept into their room and then disposed of their bodies by
thrusting them under the stairs into the foundations. Certainly in 1674,
almost 200 years later, workmen digging beneath the staircase of the White
Tower discovered a wooden chest containing the bones of two children,
one aged about twelve or thirteen, the other about ten. Pieces of rag and
velvet were still sticking to their bones.
It was, however, impossible to sex the bones or really date them and now
they are no longer in very good condition. In any case, where the Tower
complex stands has been a population centre for at least 2,000 years — it
was a fort even in Roman times. A laundry list itemizing children’s clothing
and dated September 1485, by which time Richard had been replaced by
his Tudor successor Henry VII, is sometimes quoted as evidence that the
boys came to their deaths at his hands. Alive the boys were just as much a
threat to the Tudor dynasty as they were to Richard III. However, the
weight of the evidence points to Richard as their murderer.

238
 Richard III
(1483-1485)

In the autumn of 1483 a series of revolts against the new king Richard III
by pockets of gentry all over the country seems to have had as one of its
objects the rescue of the rest of Edward IV’s children from Westminster
Abbey, to prevent them coming to harm. Evidently many believed
something had happened to the two princes. Most of the rebels had
previously been pillars of the Yorkist establishment and many were ex-
sheriffs. Something very heinous must have taken place that summer to
turn them against a Yorkist king. Yet Richard made no attempt to disprove
the rumours by producing the boys alive. Although the two princes may
have been alive until October 1483, round about then they seem to have
fallen out of sight. Tradesmen calling at the Tower stopped seeing them
practising at archery in the Tower Garden. Their figures were apparently
no longer glimpsed even ‘behind the bars and windows’. By then there were
definite and damaging rumours that the boys were dead. Richard was
evidently seen by many as accursed, the author of royal infanticide. Even
by the different standards of the fifteenth century, this was a crime that
made men shudder.
One of the most serious rebellions was headed by Richard’s former
associate the Duke of Buckingham. His is one of the names mentioned in
connection with the deaths of the princes because he was the Constable of
the Tower, but some time in the summer of 1483 there was a falling out
between him and Richard III — perhaps because of the murders, perhaps
because of his own distant claim to the throne. He now claimed it for
Henry Tudor, the son of the heiress Lady Margaret Beaufort. After the
deaths of Henry VI and the Prince of Wales this part-Welsh nobleman was
the last and distant hope of the Lancastrian line. His mother the
redoubtable Lady Margaret had attended Richard IIl’s coronation, but
Henry Tudor himself had been smuggled abroad to Brittany in 1471 as his
life was believed to be in danger.
Primed by Buckingham, Henry Tudor duly set out with a small fleet
from Brittany to claim the throne but had to turn back when it became
clear that the uprising had no hope of succeeding. Buckingham, however,

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 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

was captured, and executed in the market square at Salisbury. But the
disaffection aroused against the king was becoming so widespread that
the Yorkists and Lancastrians started to plot together. It was agreed
between Queen Elizabeth Woodville and Lady Margaret Beaufort that
Princess Elizabeth of York should be married to Lady Margaret’s son
Henry Tudor.
Henry Tudor’s father Edmund, Earl of Richmond, had been a member
of one of the Welsh families closely linked to Owen Glendower’s revolt.
They had emerged from obscurity when Henry Tudor’s grandfather Owen
Tudor had pursued and married the French queen Catherine after the
death of her husband Henry V. Since his father had died before Henry
Tudor was born and his mother had then remarried, he had been brought
up in Wales at Pembroke Castle by his uncle Jasper Tudor. Much of his
early life, he would later remark, had been passed in seclusion or exile.
Exchanging Brittany for France after discovering that the Bretons had
planned to betray him for a large ransom, Henry Tudor was soon joined
by an increasing number of heads of southern English families who had
taken part in rebellion. The confiscation of their property and Richard’s
plantation of his friends on their old lands meant they had nothing to lose
and everything to gain from a new king. The death of Richard III’s adored
only son in April 1484 and of his wife Anne Neville less than a year later
gave a doomed air to the regime. An ancient prophecy circulated that in the
Year of Three Kings great disaster would come upon the kingdom.
In fact it was the death of Anne Neville that spurred the Lancastrian
king-in-waiting and the Yorkist exiles into action. At the end of spring
1485, a rumour reached them that Anne Neville’s death had been no
accident. Richard III had poisoned his wife in order to underpin his
tottering regime by marrying his niece Elizabeth of York. As the daughter
of Edward IV she would lend him the legitimacy he lacked.
But, as we have seen, Elizabeth of York was also the central figure in the
plan to put Henry Tudor on the throne. Henry’s claim through his mother
Lady Margaret Beaufort had serious weaknesses. Although the Beaufort line
had been legitimized, the family had originally been barred from the royal
succession. The male line had died out when the Duke of Somerset was killed
at the Battle of Tewkesbury, and there was the usual prejudice against
descent through the female line — the basis of Henry Tudor’s claim. Marriage
to Elizabeth of York would strengthen that claim. The threat that Richard
might marry her instead roused the refugees into speeding up their plans.
The haemorrhage out of the country of the very gentry on whose
unofficial network English kings traditionally relied ensured that in a civil
war Richard III would be almost completely dependent on the great
magnates and their men-at-arms. By 1485, if he was to keep the throne he
240
 1483-1485

would need the loyal support of the three most important magnates in
England, whose armies could turn the tide either way. They were Henry
Percy, Earl of Northumberland, the Duke of Norfolk and the Cheshire
magnate Lord Stanley. In the event Norfolk fought on Richard’s side. The
other two deserted him. The Percys were in any case usually Lancastrian
supporters, and Northumberland had been angered by Richard’s decision
to use the Earl of Lincoln and the Council of the North to keep order in the
traditional Percy heartlands.
It was one of Richard III’s greatest problems that the third element, Lord
Stanley, was an unknown quantity. Stanley was Constable of England but
this appointment had only been made to bind him more closely to the
Ricardian government. For Stanley was also the third husband of Lady
Margaret Beaufort. Richard must have believed that Stanley was aware of
his wife’s constant plotting, but he was too frightened of a rebellion in the
north-west to imprison him.
Where Lord Stanley’s allegiance lay proved to be the pivot on which
Richard’s defences turned. When at the beginning of August Henry Tudor
landed at Milford Haven in the far west of Wales his path into England lay
north-east, close to the Stanley estates in Cheshire. There Lord Stanley
controlled perhaps 4,000 men who could have prevented Henry Tudor and
his 2,000 troops leaving Wales — but they allowed them through.
By 22 August Henry Tudor’s army was in Leicestershire, the heart of
England, at Market Bosworth where the last battle of the Wars of the
Roses was fought. He had successfully capitalized on his Welsh roots and
Welsh loyalties, and his cause was seen as a Welsh resurgence. As he
travelled east towards his destiny at the Battle of Bosworth Field he was
hailed by the Welsh bards as a true Prince of Wales whose coming had been
foretold by ancient prophecies. His supporters had swelled considerably in
the march through Wales and across the midlands. In contrast the allies
Richard was counting on were not there. As news spread of the invasion,
only Norfolk came up to scratch. Northumberland remained in the north.
Richard III had taken the precaution of holding Stanley’s son Lord Strange
hostage so that he would not help the rebels.
As a result, although he was plainly responsible for letting Henry Tudor
through Cheshire, Lord Stanley continued to give assurances of support to
Richard. But there was more than a hint of defeat in the wind for Richard.
The night before battle - when the usurper king, apparently haunted by
strange phantoms, was unable to sleep — many of his supporters secretly
decamped to Henry Tudor’s side. Meanwhile Stanley had positioned himself
on a hill midway between the two armies, so that it was not clear whether
his army belonged to the royal forces or to the rebels. The cunning Stanley,
caught on the horns of a difficult dilemma, would play a waiting game.

24%
 LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST

Without Northumberland’s troops morale was not good in the king’s

camp, and it was lower on the morning of battle after the defections had
been discovered. When the despairing Richard personally led a cavalry
charge against Henry Tudor, bringing his standard with the red dragon of
Wales crashing to the ground, the Stanleys at last threw their weight
behind the pretender. The day was Henry Tudor’s.
Shakespeare has Richard III coming off his charger and shouting in vain,
‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.’ This was based on fact: the
muddiness of the ground was responsible for his not being able to keep his
seat. But whatever else Richard was, he was no coward — it took a great
many Welsh soldiers piling on top of him to kill him. After the battle his
body was stripped naked and flung across a horse to remind all that he was
no longer the Lord’s Anointed. Richard had been wearing a thin gold
crown around his helmet. When it was found under a hawthorn bush,
where it had rolled, the quick-witted Lord Stanley there and then placed it
on the head of Henry Tudor and hailed him as King Henry.
Richard III’s naked body was tossed into an unmarked grave at Leicester
while the new king Henry VII marched to London. There he later married
his distant relation Elizabeth of York. Indicating the depths of suspicion
with which the former king was regarded, one chronicler wrote, ‘In the
year 1485 on 22nd August the tusks of the Boar were blunted and the red
rose, the avenger of the white, shines upon us.’ It was through the red rose
of Lancaster, through his Beaufort blood, that Henry Tudor claimed the
throne. The union of England through the two families was symbolized by
the Tudor rose — the white rose of York superimposed on the larger red
rose of Lancaster. It is still to be seen at the Tower of London on the
uniform Henry VII designed for his new bodyguard, known today as
the Beefeaters.
Henry VII gave his name to a whole new dynasty — the Tudors. For the
first time since the sixth century and King Arthur, England was proclaimed
to have a king from her most ancient race. Arthurian echoes were to the
fore, since Caxton had just published Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte
d’Arthur. Henry VII even called his eldest son Arthur after the ancient
British king. At the coronation such evocations were exploited by the new
king and his supporters. In particular, prophecies were once again cited to
establish the new king’s legitimacy. To underline the unity of the realm the
queen was carried off to give birth at Winchester, the ancient seat of the
West Saxon kings. Meanwhile, to remind everyone of his Yorkshire title as
Earl of Richmond, at the river near Sheen Henry built Richmond Palace.
It was not all romance. Henry VII had no intention of ruling as a
constitutional Lancastrian monarch limited by Parliament. He was a
monarch, and he had himself crowned before Parliament met. Thereafter,

242
 1483-1485

like Edward IV, he summoned Parliament as seldom as possible. By the

next century under his descendants the Tudor House of Commons had
become an instrument of royal power, the so-called Tudor despotism,
which saw the growth of the nation state.

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243
TUDOR
 Henry VII
(1485-1509)

The formidable, charismatic and politically gifted Tudor dynasty which

ruled England uninterruptedly for a little over a century coincided with
massive shifts in the way Europeans viewed the world and themselves. The
discovery in 1492 of the unsuspected American continent between Europe
and Asia during the reign of the first Tudor, Henry VII, is sometimes said
to be the beginning of the modern era, because it coincided with the
overthrowing of so many other orthodoxies of the middle ages. With
immense ingenuity, medieval philosophers had specialized in reconciling
all knowledge within a religious context. For example, before the dis-
coveries of the fifteenth century, European Christians believed Jerusalem
to be the geographical centre of the world. After the Portuguese had
rounded the coast of Africa and the Spanish had found the Americas it
became impossible to hold to this belief.
What is more, by the end of the fifteenth century scholars lacked the
will to perform their dizzying feats of argument. Disenchantment with the
papacy, which had started with the three popes, was accelerated by a
seismic change in the learning process prompted by the study of Greek, a
subject little taught to Latin Christians since the Dark Ages. With the fall
of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, hundreds of Byzantine scholars
went into exile and thus reintroduced western Europe to the lost world of
the ancient Greek classical philosophers. The classical revival in the arts,
the Renaissance, had been under way since the fourteenth century, but
when the study of Greek philosophy took root at the universities, it
liberated scholars from the constraints Christianity had imposed on
logical thought and set off a chain reaction. The translation of ancient
Greek texts revolutionized the way people studied. Greek scholarship
known as the New Learning revealed an early Church in the New
Testament which bore no relation to the corrupt and power-hungry
papacy. The effect of all these events together was electrifying. In a
generation the stranglehold which the Church of Rome had maintained
on Christians was thrown off. During the lifetime of the second Tudor,
Henry VIII, the awakening of thousands of individual consciences resulted

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in the Reformation and the break from Rome of various Protestant

Churches, including the Church of England.
By the end of the sixteenth century, during the long reign of the fifth
Tudor, Elizabeth I, the bitterness of the conflict between what had emerged
as Protestant and Catholic powers had become a world war. A growing
internal conviction about the rightness of Protestantism polarized Europe
and England herself into hardened ideological positions. Spain, newly
united in 1469 and expelling the last of the Moors from Granada after 700
years, became Catholicism’s champion. For all the serpentine diplomacy
and peace-loving nature of the great Queen Elizabeth, by 1588 and the
defeat of the Spanish Armada England stood revealed as a firmly
Protestant power and Catholic Spain’s most important opponent. Last but
not least, the discovery of America began the move away from the axis of
the Mediterranean that had dominated the world for 2,000 years,
revolutionizing trade routes to the advantage of those powers with an
Atlantic coastline — that is, Portugal, Spain, France and England. It was
these countries that in the next century would begin the path to empire.
But in 1485 at the end of the Wars of the Roses none of these tumultuous
changes could have been predicted nor the thrall that the Tudors would

< \ : ‘ \ S

Tombs of Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York sculpted by Torrigiano in the
Lady Chapel Henry VII built, Westminster Abbey.

248
 1485-1509

have over their adopted kingdom. The Tudors were upstarts, and Henry
VII’s most pressing task was to establish his dynasty on a firm foundation.
He succeeded admirably over the next twenty-odd years, with the result
that his son Henry VIII succeeded to the throne without a murmur of
protest. But as a usurper Henry VII inevitably spent the first part of his
reign dealing with potential threats to the crown. In fact the new king had
married the only real Yorkist claimant, the tall, exquisite and golden-
haired Elizabeth of York. The only other possible claimant, the disgraced
Clarence’s son Warwick, was in the Tower. This did not stop people
making mischief. Henry VII’s particular bétes noires were his wife’s aunt
Margaret of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV, at whose court all pretenders
found a welcome, and the Irish, headed by the Fitzgerald family, the earls
of Kildare. The Irish were traditionally Yorkist supporters because the
Yorkist Mortimers had estates in Ireland.
The first serious attempt against Henry was made in 1487 by a
discontented consortium masterminded by Margaret of Burgundy and led
by one of Richard III’s chief supporters, Francis Lovel. A young boy named
Lambert Simnel landed in Ireland claiming to be the Earl of Warwick
freshly escaped from the Tower. Despite being crowned king rather
presumptuously in Ireland, his paltry invading force (a few of Lovel’s men
and some German mercenaries) was easily defeated by Henry at the Battle
of Stoke, and Simnel himself was captured. The real Earl of Warwick was
taken out of the Tower and paraded to show that he was alive. Henry was
so unworried by Lambert Simnel that he simply put him to work in the
royal kitchens turning the spit.
Perkin Warbeck, the next pretender sent to England by Margaret of
Burgundy, proved to be a good deal more of a threat. He gave out that he
was the younger of the princes in the Tower, Richard, Duke of York, and
that he had the backing of a party of disaffected English nobles. Not only
was Warbeck’s claim recognized by the French king, as well as by
Margaret of Burgundy, but he was warmly welcomed into Scotland by
James IV. James IV even married him to his cousin Lady Catherine Gordon
and invaded England on his behalf.
In turn the large taxes raised in England for a war against the Scots
became the excuse for a rising in Cornwall in 1497. Cornishmen believed
they were too far from Scotland to have to pay for northern England’s
defence. A Cornish army camped out on Blackheath in London, and
Warbeck — who by this time had been expelled from Scotland by James IV
out of fear of an English invasion — seized this golden opportunity to land
in the west and march on London, only to be roundly defeated at Taunton.
After taking refuge in the Cistercian Priory of Beaulieu (now Lord
Montagu’s museum of car-racing fame) he was captured, brought to

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London and beheaded in 1499 along with the unfortunate Warwick, who
seems to have been innocent of anything very much except that he was the
outstanding heir to the throne.
This encounter has been called the final episode of the Wars of the
Roses. By the end of the century careful diplomatic negotiation and
judicious use of warfare had enabled Henry VII to establish the Tudor
dynasty securely on the throne. Alliances with France’s enemies, Ferdinand
of Spain and Maximilian of Austria, an invasion of France and a threat to
prevent the export of English wool to the Netherlands ensured that
Warbeck could not find a safe haven across the Channel. The 1496
Magnus Intercursus Treaty bound the Netherlands and England together,
restoring trade links and forbidding both countries to harbour the other’s
enemies. A further treaty in 1506, occasioned by Maximilian’s son the
Archduke Philip being shipwrecked on the English coast, amplified this
with advantageous terms for English merchants.
Marriage was another string to Henry’s bow. Fear of France, whose
absorption of Brittany threatened the southern English coast, persuaded
Henry to hitch England to the rising power of Spain by marrying his elder
son to Ferdinand’s daughter Catherine of Aragon. In 1501, after much
toing and froing of ambassadors and bargaining about dowries, Catherine
was married to Arthur, Prince of Wales. Only a year later, however, Arthur
died — to the great distress of his parents. Marrying a brother’s widow was
forbidden by Church law, but Henry so desired a Spanish alliance that he
asked for a special ruling by Pope Julius II so that his next son, the future
Henry VIII, could marry Catherine. With incalculable consequences the
ruling was granted, and the wedding took place of the new Prince of Wales,
the blond and lissom Henry, to the stiff, devout Spanish infanta.
Catherine of Aragon’s father, the cunning and astute Ferdinand of
Aragon, had not only unified the Spanish peninsula by his own marriage
to Isabella of Castile and by expelling the last of the Moors in 1492, but
had achieved mastery at the western end of the Mediterranean by
controlling the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the boot of Italy from Naples
southwards. Marriage into the Spanish royal family made the new Tudor
dynasty appear respectable abroad, and for forty years adherence to Spain
would be the first principle of English foreign policy. By marrying his
daughter Margaret Tudor to the Scottish king James IV, Henry VII hoped
to rupture the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland after 200 years.
It would be the great-grandson of that alliance who would inherit the
throne when Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, died childless.
But it was France, after so many centuries as a disunited collection of
feudal principalities, that was the great power of the age. In 1488 the last
piece of the French jigsaw had fallen into place when the young king
250
 1485-1509

Charles VIII married the heiress of the Duchy of Brittany, and the duchy
thus became incorporated into France. Secure at home, in 1494 Charles
outraged the Italians by capturing Naples. For half a century French policy
existed in a time warp, dictated by a notion of the European economy as it
had existed before the discovery of the Americas, when real wealth and
power lay in controlling the Italian peninsula and thus the trade routes of
the Mediterranean basin leading to the Levant. So France exhausted herself
in battles as she attempted to claim the kingdom of Naples and the Duchy
of Milan through Angevin and Visconti forebears and allowed herself to
become caught up in the ceaseless internecine struggles of the great Italian
princes and the papacy. It was a policy which would end in a century-long
battle with Spain.
Well set up abroad, at home Henry VII restored the authority of the
crown, which had decayed in all parts of his new realm during the disorder
of the later fifteenth century. Wales was anyway welcoming to a Welsh
prince, and he revived the Council of Wales which was overseen by the
Prince of Wales’s Council. In Ireland Henry attempted to bind the Irish
more tightly to England by sending Sir Edward Poynings over to replace
the Earl of Kildare as governor. In 1494 Poynings’ Law prevented the by
now semi-independent Irish Parliament passing laws without the approval
of the King’s Council in England and made all laws passed by the English
Parliament applicable to Ireland. But Poynings’ Law tended to be more
honoured in the breach than in the observance, and the Irish chieftains and
the Norman Irish continued to lead their lives of semi-autonomy. Poynings
is said to have remarked wearily that ‘All Ireland could not rule the Earl of
Kildare,’ at which Henry VII retorted, “Then let the Earl of Kildare rule all
Ireland.’ Poynings was withdrawn and matters continued much as they
always had done.
At home, despite his Lancastrian roots, Henry followed the Yorkist
method of seeing very little of Parliament and raised money by forced loans
or benevolences which were in theory illegal. But the English had had
enough of weak factional rule and liked the way he clamped down on the
power of the barons. One of Henry V’s first acts had been to outlaw the
practice of livery and maintenance of private armies, which had caused
such mayhem during the previous century. The practice nevertheless
continued. The story goes that Henry VII went to stay with the Earl of
Oxford and, as he was leaving, asked in an admiring way how many
servants he kept about him. ‘Two hundred at least,’ said Oxford proudly.
Thereupon the king asked him for 10,000 pounds in fines.
The imposition of massive fines was how Henry enforced the law — to
the great benefit of the royal coffers. The royal Council, which had always
been partly a law court, adopted a more executive role overseeing the

25%
 TUDOR

common law as the Court of the Star Chamber. (It took its name from the
stars on the ceiling of the room in the Palace of Westminster where it
convened.) But though the Star Chamber would become notorious under
the later Tudors as a way of executing summary justice, in Henry VII’s time
it intervened if it had evidence that a lord had brought undue influence to
bear on a local court. This was another part of Henry’s policy of weaken-
ing the powers of the nobility, for the practice of intimidating juries was
not ended immediately by Henry’s laws against livery and maintenance.
Another way of strengthening the crown was to increase the powers of
knights of the shires as justices of the peace; this was necessary because by
the end of the fifteenth century sheriffs tended to be the preserve of great
families and their clients.
Henry VII died in his early fifties in 1509, having succeeded in making
the crown very wealthy. But this came at the price of tremendous
unpopularity, thanks to the activities of two of his favourite advisers,
Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, who applied their ingenuity to
dreaming up new taxes. No less ingenious in this respect was Henry’s
Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton, who was also his chancellor
and was sourly remembered for the tax device known as Morton’s Fork,
which caught the unwary whichever way they turned. Morton’s view was
that if a man was extravagant, he was not paying enough taxes to the king
and had room for more. On the other hand, a man who was not flashing
his money around was probably hiding it away in a miserly fashion and
should be compelled to share it with the king.
Henry had taken a keen interest in the voyages of discovery to the New
World that were beginning so tentatively at this time. Portugal, the great
maritime innovator of the fifteenth century, had strong links to Bristol, and
it was Bristol merchants in partnership with the king who paid for the
Venetian John Cabot to sail west and so discover the coast of Labrador in
what is now Canada. But just why had such astonishing discoveries been
taking place at this time? One reason lay in the steady advance westward
through the Balkans during the fifteenth century of the Turkish or
Ottoman people. Hitherto the spice trade had been Europe’s most lucrative
pursuit, because in the days before refrigeration spices were used to
preserve food, and they had to be imported from the hot countries of the
east (predominantly India) via the Mediterranean. On this trade the Italian
republics of Genoa and Venice, so conveniently situated between east and
west, had grown rich. But once the Turks began to interrupt the traffic of
the Mediterranean it became urgently important to find a sea route to India
which would avoid the traditional overland route from the shores of the
eastern Mediterranean.
Portugal, the nation leaning into the western Atlantic and furthest from
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the Mediterranean, was convinced that she could seize this profitable trade
from the Mediterranean nations if a new route could be found to the Indies
(as India was called). Their enthusiasm was contagious, and their Spanish
neighbours became just as eager. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor,
decided that the best route to India lay to the west. Sponsored by
Ferdinand and Isabella, he set sail in 1492 and eventually discovered the
islands in the Caribbean which continue to be known as the West Indies —
though they are of course nowhere near India. He had discovered the New
World. Following a papal declaration that all of that unknown country a
hundred leagues west of the Azores belonged to Spain and Portugal, Spain
under Cortes conquered the Aztecs and created New Spain in Mexico,
while Portugal took Brazil.
Meanwhile the other great effect of the Turkish move west, the dispersal
of Greek scholars to western capitals and universities, fleeing from the
catastrophe of the fall of Constantinople, was slowly having dramatic
effects among the educated, as we have seen — most of all in their under-
standing of religion. Spread by the contemporary technological revolution
of printing, a great change occurred in the way people thought — for the
religious impulse had not died under the widespread anti-clericalism. The
combination of this devotional religious movement and the outrage
provoked by the scholarly discoveries of the New Learning led at last to an
upheaval in Germany provoked by a monk and professor of theology
named Martin Luther. Luther was already disgusted by the irreligious
nature of the Church, but in 1517 his anger boiled over when he met a
Dominican friar raising money to build the new Church of St Peter’s in
Rome by selling papal indulgences — which provided absolution from one’s
sins — from a red velvet cushion.
On 31 October that year Luther nailed his ninety-five theses or criticisms
of papal teaching to the door of the Catholic church at Wittenberg, and so
sparked off the religious revolution known as the Reformation. Though
many had been feeling the same way, it was the first time that the pope’s
power had been challenged publicly, and Luther’s action shook
Christendom to its foundations. There were peasant riots, Luther was
excommunicated and an official debate took place at a meeting called the
Diet of Worms (a diet was an imperial council; Worms was a Rhineland
town) between Luther and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was
also the King of Spain and the pope’s champion. There Luther refused to
retract his views. His belief that man’s salvation lay in his own faith and
not in the Sacraments of the Church conferred by priests remained
unshakeable. By 1530 eight of the north German princes had adopted the
Lutheran faith, or Protestantism as it became known after their
Protestation against the emperor. And in 1534 Henry VIII of England,

253
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Henry VII’s son, became the first king to break officially with Rome, the
Lutheran princes having meanwhile tried to reconcile their Church with
papal authority.

254
 Henry VIII
(1509-1547)

When the Reformation began in 1517, the English king who created the
national Church and broke from Rome, the twenty-seven-year-old Henry
VIII, was still a very devout Roman Catholic. As Henry VII’s able second
son, the fresh-faced Henry may have been educated for a career in the
Church, and his reaction to the Lutheran movement on the eve of the Diet
of Worms in 1521 had been to write his own learned attack on Luther’s
position, defending the seven Sacraments. For this the pope gave him the
title ‘Defensor Fidei’ or ‘Defender of the Faith’. (By a curious historical
anomaly the British monarch bears the title to this day — hence the letters
‘DF’ on the pound coin — even though as Supreme Governor of the
Anglican Church he or she cannot be the defender of the Roman Catholic
faith.) Two years after his accession to the throne Henry VIII eagerly joined
Pope Julius II’s Holy League and later invaded France as part of the papal
crusade to drive the French out of Italy. For his sterling work he was soon
high in the affections of Rome. He was sent a golden rose as a sign of papal
favour, and in 1515 his chief adviser, the lord chancellor and Archbishop
of York Thomas Wolsey, was made a cardinal. Moreover Henry was
married to the pious Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the very Catholic
monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.
In theory, therefore, there was no less likely candidate to lead the English
Reformation and break away from Rome than Henry VIII. That,
nevertheless, is what he did. It was the need for a male heir and his passion
for a court lady named Anne Boleyn that propelled him into a religious and
political revolution.
Henry VIII’s father was a cultured man and like all the Tudors he had
taken an unusual amount of care with his son’s education. The new king
could speak several languages, and was an accomplished musician and
even composer. One of England’s favourite folk songs, the haunting
‘Greensleeves’, was said to have been written by him. A true son of the
Renaissance, who certainly composed two five-part Masses and was a
good lutenist, Henry VIII encouraged his court to become a centre of the
New Learning. A more scientific approach to health was marked by his

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establishment of the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians, and the

rebuilding of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, while the Regius professorships
he founded at Oxford and Cambridge still remind us of his patronage.
Henry VIII was fond of exercising his wits against scholars such as his
friend Erasmus, one of the most important of all the humanists (that is,
students of the New Learning), and his court was as splendid as any in
Europe.
The gravely realistic portraits of the outstanding north German painter
Hans Holbein seized the king’s fancy, and Holbein was persuaded to move
to London as the court artist for twenty years. A large gallery of the chief
figures of the reign, now housed mainly in the National Portrait Gallery,
testifies to Henry VIII as a Renaissance patron of the arts. He brought the
celebrated Italian sculptor Torrigiano to London to build the tomb of his
mother and father in Westminster Abbey, and by the end of his reign the
monarch lived not only at Richmond Palace at Sheen but also in several
new palaces, including Hampton Court, Whitehall, St James’s and
Nonsuch, an exquisite timber palace in Surrey.
As well as the foreign artists the king encouraged to come to England,
Italian poetry began to filter into the country, brought back by the young
noblemen’s sons for whom a voyage to the sights of classical Rome was the
end of their education as a gentle-
man. The Duke of Norfolk’s poet
son, the Earl of Surrey, and Sir
Thomas Wyatt introduced the
sonnet form and blank verse —
both of which were Italian inven-
tions — to England and they
slowly spread outwards in ever
increasing circles until they met
their greatest expression in the
poetry of the Elizabethan genius
William Shakespeare. As part of
the new interest in classical
writing, Latin plays became the
fashion at the universities, and in
1545 Henry VIII appointed the
first official responsible for
playhouses — the Master of the
Revels. Henry VII had been the
most frugal and careful king
England had ever known and had
Henry VIII. succeeded in restoring the crown

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 TSO9-1547
finances after a hundred years of war. Perhaps as a reaction to his severe
father, Henry VIII was one of the most extravagant. He spent a fortune on
glittering costumes embroidered with gold thread and on superb jewellery,
as well as on the musicians and feasting that he liked to indulge himself
with at all times.
The king was also very athletic, dancing, playing tennis and hunting with
equal vigour. He presented a complete contrast to his father, taking after his
mother’s Yorkist style of golden beauty or perhaps after his grandfather
Edward IV. Standing well over six feet in his stockinged feet — as his
enormous suit of armour in the Tower of London reminds us — he had great
affability.and charm as a young man, though like his grandfather he ran to
fat as he grew older. Even on his accession, however, the new king displayed
an innate ruthlessness. One of his first acts was to execute his father’s
servants Dudley and Empson on the unspecific charge of treason — his true
motive was to make himself popular. In all things Henry VIII was as cunning
and masterful as his portraits suggest, the very model of the Renaissance
prince described by the sixteenth-century Italian writer Machiavelli.
Henry VIII had a natural feel for politics which would be inherited by
his daughter Elizabeth. Both understood the need to be loved by their
subjects; both saw that to rule successfully an English monarch must
appear to listen to the people by consulting Parliament. They recognized,
too, that to be popular they had to make themselves known to their
subjects. And known the new king was, whether he was addressing the
House of Commons with vigour, wit and élan or going about the
countryside to reinforce allegiance to what he was conscious was still a
young dynasty. Despite that youthfulness, however, Henry VII’s deter-
mined efforts had ensured that his son had inherited a secure throne. There
were no pretenders with a better claim than his. As an energetic fellow he
soon excited the national imagination, as he was easily lured by the
glamour of foreign affairs and war abroad. Though he attacked France in
the name of the Holy League, his real motive was the old English dream of
regaining Normandy and Gascony.
Henry VIII’s anxiety to play a role on the world stage prompted him to
turn his attention to England’s defences. All over the south coast round
towers and walls sprang up, for example at St Mawes in Cornwall, to show
that the English lion was well protected. Moreover Henry was the first king
since Alfred to build up the Royal Navy. In the first two years of his reign
two enormous ships were constructed to terrify the French — the Great
Harry and the Mary Rose. In 1545, however, tragedy struck: the Mary
Rose sank with the loss of all 500 hands on board when, in action against
the French and with her portholes open, she attempted too swift a turn. In
1982 she was raised fom the sea-bed, where she had lain for almost 450

257/
 TUDOR

years, and her sixteenth-century timbers can be visited at Portsmouth

today. Henry also established the royal dockyard at Woolwich and
Deptford and set up the Navy Board system to administer it.
At first Henry relied on his father’s ministers to run the government. But
the vigorous prince soon found that in the chaplain to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, a young man named Thomas Wolsey, he had the sort of
minister who was as ambitious as he was himself. Wolsey was energetic,
charming and fascinated by international diplomacy. His plans for the
aggrandizement of England, hitherto not a European power which counted
compared to France or Spain, appealed to the king. By the use of shrewd
diplomacy and by changing sides, England should guard her own interests
by never having permanent alliances,
permanently maintaining instead a
balance of power between the powerful
European states. Though the king
enjoyed winning over the House of
Commons with speeches, he was easily
bored by detail, whereas Wolsey relished
going down to Parliament and extracting
loans for Henry’s wars.
An opportunity for Henry VIII and
Wolsey to stretch their wings arose early
in the reign. In 1511 the confusing game
of international musical chairs, with
nations grouping and regrouping to
obtain possession of vulnerable Italian
states, came to an end when the pope
Julius II created a Holy League to drive Cardinal Thomas Wolsey who fell
the French out of Italy. As part of the from power because he failed to
assault on the French, Henry was to "Tange Henry VIII's divorce from
: ; , Catherine of Aragon.
distract them in 1513 by attacking
France in both the north near Calais and the south. The defeat of the French
in an engagement known as the Battle of the Spurs (because more spurs
were used than swords as the French ran away), where Wolsey himself
fought as a knight, resulted in peace with France. This was strengthened by
the marriage of Henry’s sister Mary to the aged Louis XII of France.
In that same year the Scots, whose alliance with the French required
them to attack the north of England, were dramatically defeated at the
Battle of Flodden. James IV and the flower of the Scottish nobility were
slain just inside the English border. Thus by 1514 the partnership of Henry
and Wolsey and their policy of not being bound by an alliance with Spain
seemed to be succeeding. The king was secure in his borders, with Scotland

258
 1509-1547
ruled by his sister Margaret Tudor on behalf of her son James V, and
France by his sister’s husband.
Wolsey’s theory of the balance of power would dominate England’s
approach to European politics for the following four centuries. It made
even greater sense over the next few years when a series of deaths left the
nephew of Queen Catherine, King Charles V of Spain, ruling most of
Europe and the New World. The Holy Roman Emperor - as he soon
became, despite the reluctance of the Electors to grant him the title, given
his already considerable power and wealth — was the dynastic phenomenon
of the sixteenth century. Empire indeed was the right term for the lands
Charles VY inherited. The Netherlands came to him through his grand-
mother Mary of Burgundy and the Habsburg lands in Austria through his
grandfather the Emperor Maximilian, while his mother Joanna, sister of
Catherine of Aragon, brought him not only Spain, but the Aragonese
kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In addition to his land empire, as the heir to
Spain Charles V was cash rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The discovery
of silver mines in the New Spain of Mexico and Peru meant that by the
middle of the century his income was far greater than that of the rest of the
European states put together.
As Charles was master of the Netherlands, to whom some 90 per cent of
England’s chief export wool was shipped, it was more or less obligatory for
Henry to be on good and peaceful terms with him. Nevertheless there was
potential for leverage thanks to the intense rivalry that developed between
Charles and the new king of France, Francis I. Francis was the same kind
of magnificent Renaissance prince as his fellow monarch across the
Channel, and he had designs not only to re-establish France’s Italian
territories but to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in Charles V’s stead.
Though the emperorship no longer bore any relation to the title of the
Caesars — the incumbent was customarily chosen by seven German
Electors, or heads of principalities, who now more or less always bestowed
the title on the House of Habsburg — it was still of some significance.
As Francis and Charles clashed again and again in the years 1520-9 over
Italian territory, Wolsey remained convinced of the necessity of a relation-
ship with France. The balance of power would be achieved by weighing in
on France’s side against Charles V — from being France’s sworn enemy
England would from time to time be her friend. The most notable of these
diplomatic rapprochements was a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis
I in 1520 known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Masterminded by
Wolsey, the encounter took place in a field between the English territory of
Calais and the French king’s domain, in ornate tents specially made for the
occasion and furnished with gorgeous rugs. The scene was so splendid and
grand — there were fountains running with wine — that the whole field

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 TUDOR

The Field of SAN ns eX :

the Clothof =
Gold in
France,
scene of the
meeting of
Henry VU
and Francis I
in 1520. Artist
unknown.

seemed made of cloth of gold. A famous painting commemorating the

extravaganza can be seen at Hampton Court, the palace pee: had begun
building a few miles beyond Richmond.
The two young kings, in the prime of life, behaved more like brothers
than fellow sovereigns, stealing into one another’s tents in the early
mornings and even wrestling together. Nevertheless, despite these
shenanigans, in the end the weight of the Netherlands wool trade and the
fact that the emperor was Queen Catherine’s nephew meant that nothing
much changed. England remained the enemy of France and the ally of the
Emperor.
As long as all went well for the king, Wolsey was an untouchable
favourite and enjoyed a most regal way of life. He was made Archbishop
of York and Bishop of Lincoln, and received the income of two other
bishoprics too. Carried away by his own importance, Wolsey built himself
not just Hampton Court Palace but another at York Place which became
the Palace of Whitehall. When he became a cardinal in 1515, Wolsey was
able to override the Church’s hierarchy and to have his own way in
260
 T§O9-1547

<
som

FNM

Paolo Co NGOWE FNL

everything, despite not being Archbishop of Canterbury and thus head of

the Church. In the same year Henry also made him lord chancellor. Wolsey
was therefore the most powerful official in England, since he presided over
both Church and state. He was feared and disliked for his busybody ways
and for his ruthlessness in dealing with Parliament. When Parliament
finally refused point-blank to grant any more money to the king, Wolsey
refused to recail it for seven years, depending instead on ‘gifts’ from
wealthy citizens.
Wolsey’s extravagant way of life and the airs he gave himself increased
his unpopularity — even his cook was reported to wear damask satin with
a gold chain round his neck. As for the cardinal himself, he could only wear
red robes of the finest silk trimmed with fur. All his plates were made of
gold, and every day his 500 servants sat down to dinner at three great
tables in one of his vast new houses. The cardinal’s appearances in public
were spectacles of flamboyance, as even the most informal moments
apparently necessitated an elaborate procession. The tallest and most
handsome priest would walk in front of the cardinal, bearing in his
261
 TUDOR

outstretched arms a pillar of silver on top of which was a rather small

cross. Next came the cardinal’s hat, carried on a purple cushion held by a
bare-headed nobleman and accompanied by ushers who shouted as they
came, ‘Make way for my Lord’s Grace!’ Then at last appeared the cardinal,
his face wearing a modest half-smile, his eyes cast down, perhaps admiring
feet shod in golden shoes decorated with pearls. But, for all the grandeur
of this apparition, always visible in the background would be an inelegant
mule. For, said Wolsey, since he was but a humble priest, it was fitting that
he should travel by mule rather than by horse.
But Wolsey was not only a show-off. He was also a serious intellectual, a
supporter of the New Learning who was the protector of the Cambridge
scholar William Tyndale —the first Englishman since the Lollards to translate
much of the Bible into English. Tyndale had smuggled 3,000 copies of his
translation into England with the help of Martin Luther. Despite his
arrogance, and like all men of intelligence at that time, Wolsey believed that
the Church was in need of drastic reform. Many of the monasteries,
particularly the lesser ones, were contributing little to the spiritual life of the
nation. If they were closed down, the money from selling their lands could
be used to found schools which would do much more to spread learning. So
in 1523 Wolsey sent in commissioners to investigate some of these smaller
monasteries, and the dismal way of life they found there, with little or no
religious impulse, led to the break-up or dissolution of several of them. With
the proceeds Wolsey founded a splendid new college at Oxford which he
called Cardinal College, later known as Christ Church.
The end came for Wolsey quite suddenly. In 1526 the king’s eye was
caught by a bewitching, black-eyed nineteen-year-old girl named Nan
Bullen or Anne Boleyn, whose mother was the sister of the Duke of
Norfolk. Henry had begun to despair of his union with Catherine. A papal
dispensation had been required to allow him to marry his brother’s wife.
Now the absence of any surviving children save Lady Mary, after many
miscarriages and stillbirths, convinced him that the marriage was cursed.
Henry was obsessed with obtaining a son for a dynasty that was still less
than half a century old. Anne Boleyn and her uncle were equally obsessed
with the king marrying her and not merely making her his mistress, as her
elder sister Mary had been. The answer was to get the pope, Clement VII,
to declare the original marriage invalid — which was how all divorces were
resolved in the middle ages. Unfortunately, though, the international
situation and Wolsey’s diplomatic machinations meant that Henry was
hardly in a position to influence the pope.
At the beginning of 1527, angered by the pope’s support for France,
Queen Catherine’s nephew Charles V had captured and sacked Rome,
and Clement VII became his prisoner. Two years earlier, during the

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interminable struggle with France in Italy, Charles had also managed to
capture Francis | at the Battle of Pavia. This striking event had convinced
Wolsey once more to assert his theory of the balance of power, and Henry
had agreed to make peace with Francis and become his ally instead of the
emperor’s. But in the context of what was becoming a real crisis at the
English court, with the king determined to have his way, this diplomatic
revolution could not have come at a more inconvenient time.
When the imprisoned pope failed to dissolve immediately Henry VIII’s
marriage to Catherine but instead instituted a Decretal Commission to
inquire into the situation, Henry’s anger knew no bounds. For a scapegoat
he turned on the great instigator of the pro-French alliance, Wolsey, who
had also been in charge of the diplomatic negotiations with the Vatican.
Evidently, despite his cardinal’s title, Wolsey had no sway at Rome. When
the Papal Commission moved back to Rome for further hearings after
gathering evidence in London, including the impassioned testimony of
Catherine of Aragon that her marriage to Henry’s elder brother Arthur had
never been consummated, it was the end of Wolsey.
Thwarted and showing the furious temper which was to become such an
overwhelming characteristic of his later years, Henry VIII turned on his
former favourite. He was encouraged by Anne Boleyn and her uncle the
Duke of Norfolk, who both believed that Wolsey disapproved of the Boleyn
marriage. The affection, even love, which the king had borne for his
chancellor vanished in the twinkling of an eye. All the cardinal’s property,
Hampton Court and York Place and Cardinal College, was seized by the
king, who soon occupied Hampton Court himself. Wolsey sought refuge in
his archdiocese at York, and had he not
died at Leicester in 1530 on his way
south to the Tower to be tried for
treason, he would have been executed.
As the lieutenant of the Tower waited by
his bed the cardinal told him of his fears
for England now that he sensed death
was near. Who would curb the king’s
strong will? he said. There was no one
now in the Council who would dare to.
Wolsey’s last words were ‘Had I served
God as carefully as my king, he would
not have given me over in my grey hairs.’
But events in England were moving
swiftly onward, propelled by the king’s
passion for Anne Boleyn — who, her Be ee cere
enemies whispered, had a sixth finger on

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one hand, the sure sign of a witch — and by the excitement abroad aroused
by the Reformation. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the pope,
still held captive by the Emperor Charles V, was going to find every reason
why he should not grant a divorce against the emperor’s aunt Catherine of
Aragon. The answer therefore, as far as Henry was concerned, was to show
that the pope was wrong. Henry began his campaign by canvassing learned
opinion among scholars at the universities.
This radical solution would have been unthinkable before the sixteenth
century. But just as the papacy was profoundly unpopular in Germany, it
was also profoundly unpopular in England. The Church at Rome had
always been an intrusive institution, taking a great deal of money out of
the country. But just when the English were beginning to flex their muscles
again and take pleasure in their national life and culture, its power seemed
especially irksome, particularly when the clergy were a byword for laziness
and corruption. For many centuries awe and respect for the hallowed
institution that St Peter had established had kept England within the
Church of Rome. But now in the changed atmosphere of the New Learning
among the educated — whether at the universities, the inns of court or
Parliament — a harsh daylight had been let in which had destroyed what
was left of the papacy’s magic. The climax had come with the pope’s
imprisonment by the emperor. More than ever before the papacy simply
seemed a foreign, secular institution whose peculiar law courts were places
where murderers in holy orders could still take refuge from English justice.
But scholars rarely give single-line answers, and in response to Henry’s
revolutionary consultation they gave a most inconclusive and useless reply.
The king therefore decided to put pressure on the clergy themselves. In all
his doings Henry had no intention of creating a Church doctrinally different
from the Church of Rome; his Church of England was to be Catholicism
without the pope. First Henry alarmed the clergy sitting in their national
gatherings known as Convocation of Canterbury and York, by telling them
that they had broken the ancient Statute of Praemunire by recognizing
Wolsey as papal legate. For this he was levying on them a colossal fine of
some £100,000. Next, in order to assuage his anger, the clergy had to
acknowledge that he was the supreme head of the Church of England. At
this point the king still hoped that Pope Clement or his successor Paul III
would see reason and grant the divorce, but they did not do so.
By a series of acts over the seven years from 1529 to 1536, passed by
what is known as the Reformation Parliament, Henry VIII separated the
Church in England from the pope in Rome and created his own Church,
the Church of England. By 1534, with the Act of Supremacy, Henry had
completed the separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church,
and all the incomes hitherto due to Rome were now paid to the crown. The

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Statute of Praemunire, which had existed from the fourteenth century but
which had been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, was
reinforced so that no appeals were allowed from England to Rome. It was
made treason to deny Henry’s headship.
These acts were pushed through Parliament not against its will, but with
its active participation. The members of the Reformation Parliament were
keen to assert themselves as independent Englishmen, and felt that by
casting off the pope they were carving out their uniquely English destiny.
Though Henry’s reign might slowly degenerate into tyranny and terror, the
gift he had of handling his Parliaments, his hail-fellow-well-met manner
and his larger-than-life magnificence meant that in some way he continued
to represent an ideal Englishman. This ensured his continuing popularity,
a vital matter for him. For what historians call Tudor despotism or
absolute rule, unlike the despotism of continental powers, was effected
without a standing army. Just as English kings theoretically needed
popular acclamation to ascend the throne, control over England was to be
had by the support of the local gentry whom Henry charmed in Parliament
and made his allies. They enforced his rule in their counties in their
capacities as justices of the peace.
Under Henry VIII that sense of Englishness which had been growing
since the Hundred Years War and had been given voice in the Reformation
Parliament would be reinforced by weekly attendance at Church service.
By the end of Henry’s reign the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten
Commandments were all spoken in English. Moreover from 1540 an
English Bible was placed in every parish church, with effects almost as
incalculable for the national literature as
Caxton’s return to England with a
continental printing press. It was in fact
Tyndale’s version revised by Miles
Coverdale, with a preface by Archbishop
Cranmer. Henry VIII had completed
what is known as the nation state.
With the demise of Wolsey, for the rest
of his reign Henry relied on advice in
religious matters from a sensitive and
eager-to-please Cambridge scholar named
Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, whom Henry
made chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s family,
became head of the new Church of
England in 1533 as Archbishop of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of
Canterbury. He announced that the king’s — Canterbury during Henry VIII’s
first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had English Reformation.
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been invalid. The king was therefore free to marry Anne Boleyn — who was
about to have a baby, the future Queen Elizabeth I.
Thomas Cromwell, a fuller’s son from Putney who had helped develop
the theory of Royal Supremacy, was now the king’s right-hand man in
governing the country. It soon occurred to him that the immense wealth of
the monasteries accumulated over the previous 600 years — they owned
perhaps one-third of the land in England — might be used to ensure the
loyalty of the people who counted in the
Tudor state. If he closed them down and
redistributed their land among the upper
and middle classes — the magnates, gentry,
lawyers and merchants — he would under-
pin the new Church and destroy the last
bastions of loyalty to the pope.
The majority of the monasteries had
long ago lost their power and influence.
There were fewer than 10,000 monks and
nuns to contend with, and they were un-
worldly, gentle people. In a spirit of
triumphant nationalism inspired by
Wolsey’s earlier suppression of certain
monasteries, Cromwell dissolved all the
smaller ones and embarked on an investi- ©Thomas Cromwell who piloted
gation which would result in the disso- the break with Rome through
lution of the rest. And with the dissolving BEHUEE SN:
of the monasteries and the carving up of their lands among some 40,000
people the Protestant Reformation was secured on property. Many great
English families, such as the Cavendishes and Russells, merchants, lawyers
and shire knights, acquired their fortunes in the lands once owned by the
monasteries. They made stately homes out of the ancient abbeys — for
example, the Russells, later the dukes of Bedford, received Woburn Abbey.
As far as these people were concerned, there would be no going back to
Rome if it meant the end of their country estates.
The English Reformation had been accomplished upon the sturdiest and
most durable of foundations: land. Nevertheless, despite the fear the king
inspired as an increasingly bloody tyrant, the royal revolution had not been
achieved quite as smoothly as Henry wished, particularly in his immediate
circle at court and in government. He might be a religious conservative
who disagreed as much as ever with Luther and who burned heretics for
promulgating advanced Protestant ideas, but his chancellor Thomas More
and the aged John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, could not accept the king
as substitute for the pope. Their historical sense and Catholicism refused

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to let them. So when the 1534 Act of
Royal Supremacy required the clergy and
government officials to swear an oath of
loyalty to Henry as supreme head of the
Church of England, More and Fisher
refused. They would take the Oath of
Succession — that is, they would swear
loyalty to Anne Boleyn’s children — but to
the king’s embarrassment and fury they
also declined to accept Anne Boleyn as
Henry’s lawful wife. Both men were
promptly sent to the Tower.
The spectacle of More — so recently the
equivalent of prime minister and one of
Sir Thomas More, made Lord the leading figures of English life, a
Chancellor on Wolsey’s fall, was scholar, a notably eloquent lawyer and a
executed for resisting Henry
VIII’s supremacy over the
member of Parliament internationally
Church. renowned for his learning and for his
book Utopia — being dragged in his shirt
through the streets from the Tower to his trial for treason at Westminster
increased the atmosphere of terror that began to surround the king. Until
very recently More had been a close friend of his. Henry had often been
seen walking in More’s lovely garden in Chelsea (the Chelsea Physic
Garden today) with his arm affectionately round his chancellor’s
shoulders. It had even been the king’s habit to turn up unexpectedly at
More’s house after dinner to chat and pass the time in a merry way. He had
seemed so good tempered on these occasions that More’s son-in-law
Thomas Roper had remarked that the king’s growing reputation for
ruthlessness seemed ill-founded. More had responded wryly, ‘Howbeit,

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son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my
head could win him a castle in France it should not fail to go.’ There is an
echo of this in Henry’s response to the news that the pope had made Fisher
a cardinal. When he heard this the king remarked, ‘The Pope shall soon
have his head in Rome so that he can put the cardinal’s hat on it himself.’
Henry was dreading the effect of More’s famous eloquence at his trial,
fearing that he would rally the country against his reforms. Unlike Fisher
who was too old and tired to mount a defence, which ensured a rapid
guilty verdict and his immediate execution, More showed that his
luminous intellect had been unimpaired by prison. Although he was bowed
and his hair had turned grey over the summer of his incarceration, mental
torture had robbed him of none of his natural authority. His defence was
clear and to the point. He had not offended against the law nor tried to
oppose the king’s wishes. All he had done was to remain silent, and silence
had not yet been declared treason. But nothing could avert his fate. As soon
as the sentence of death was pronounced More declared that the Oath of
Supremacy was indeed unlawful. ‘How can you argue with the whole of
England?’ one man called from the crowd, amazed at More’s courage. ‘Ah,
but I have the whole history of Christendom behind me,’ said More
smiling.
On 6 July 1535 a messenger came to More’s cell to tell him that he would
be taken out and executed. More was utterly composed, pausing only to pen
a quick farewell letter to his wife and daughter, begging them to ‘pray for
me, as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven’. Then he strolled
over to Tower Green just outside his lodgings as calmly as if he were about
to have his breakfast, and when the executioner told him that as a special
personal favour of the king he would only have his head cut off, not be
disembowelled too, as was the usual practice for traitors, More quipped,
‘God preserve my friends from all such favours.’ But the king had also issued
another order. Sir Thomas More was to be allowed no last speeches to the
crowd. Even at that last moment, Henry feared More’s power. So More
simply said that he died a faithful subject to the king and a true Catholic
before God. Then the executioner silenced his silver tongue for ever.
In 1536, a year after the execution of More and Fisher, there was a series
of risings in the north called the Pilgrimage of Grace. The northern
counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire still had a monastic
tradition which inspired respect among their inhabitants and were far
removed from the New Learning and the new ideas which had entered
England via the south-eastern seaports. Under the leadership of a
Yorkshire country gentleman named Robert Aske, a great gathering at
Doncaster demanded that Cromwell be dismissed and the country return
to the old faith. But Henry handled the crisis with his usual aplomb. The
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Duke of Norfolk, who was generally acknowledged to be the leader of the
more Catholic faction at court, was sent up to promise that the king would
listen to the rebels’ requests if they would disperse peacefully, which they
did. The momentum was lost. When the next year rioting began again, it
provided the excuse to execute Aske and the rest of the leaders. A Council
of the North staffed by Tudor officials removed most of the last vestiges of
the old Catholic families’ influence, though it did not destroy their
attachment to the ancient faith.

Ruins of Tintern Abbey, which fell into disuse after the

Dissolution of the Monasteries.

With the Dissolution of the Monasteries the Henrician Reformation shifted

into a more radical phase. It became common practice to loot shrines for their
jewels on the grounds that they encouraged superstition and idol worship and
distracted from true religion. St Thomas a Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, one
of the most famous places of medieval pilgrimage, was stripped of all its gold
and silver. Two groaning wagonloads carried this booty to the eagerly
awaiting king. Under the crude and greedy hands of Cromwell’s men village
churches were frequently ransacked for their plate and chalices. In 1545
Henry dissolved the chantries, those characteristic buildings of medieval
England often founded by guilds as well as the colleges of secular clergy. This
removed many a source of education, hence the proliferation of schools
still flourishing today which were founded in the reign of Henry’s son,
Edward VI.

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Yet despite Cranmer’s readiness to appoint

advanced Protestants to vacant sees, including
Hugh Latimer, the king himself continued to
behave like a Catholic. He remained fearful that
the pope might give the command for Catholic
countries to invade England and bring her back to
the true faith, while his superb political antennae
forced him to take note of the meaning of the
Pilgrimage of Grace. He knew that the bulk of the
nation was instinctively Catholic and _ silently
resentful. So, even though he had patronized the
translation of the Bible into English, he still asked
Charles V to pursue Tyndale its translator as a
heretic. Three years after the Pilgrimage of Grace,
by publishing the Act of the Six Articles which
punished with death anyone who did not believe
that Christ was present in the Communion wafer,
Henry showed England and the pope that in all
A Carthusian monk, essentials he was a most orthodox Catholic.
whose communities For by this time the religious debate raging in
wer a By Europe had moved on. Thinkers such as the
enry VIIL. j : ‘
Frenchman Jean Calvin and the Swiss Ulrich
Zwingli had taken Luther’s dismissal of most sacraments many steps
further. In Henry VIII’s reign the greatest controversy was the issue of the
Mass itself. Zwingli held that examination of the texts suggested that
Communion was not a sacrament but simply a commemoration of the Last
Supper: Christ’s body and blood were not present in the host and wine.
Although to the end of his days Cranmer could not decide what he
believed, Henry was quite emphatic that he believed in the Real Presence
at the Mass. At Smithfield the king burned any Protestant heretics straying
into England who purveyed the new ideas percolating through Europe.
Nevertheless the battle for the soul of the Protestant Reformation
continued for the rest of his reign and beyond. And in the king’s lifetime
the Catholic and Protestant factions within the Church of England each
gained a little advantage according to the king’s marital state.
The gilded youth who had won the nation’s hearts was rapidly
degenerating from the attractive Renaissance monarch into both a tyrant
and a serial wife-killer. No one in England, whatever their position in the
establishment, was safe. In 1538 on the grounds of conspiracy Henry
executed two close royal cousins, the Marquis of Exeter and the Countess
of Salisbury, mother of the Catholic Cardinal Pole who was in exile at
Rome. The seventy-year-old countess’s end had been especially frightful.
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Once on the scaffold the vigorous old lady ran round and round the block
declaring, ‘My head never yet committed treason, you must take it as you
can.’ The axeman had to hold her down over the block himself to chop her
head off.
But the axe also fell on Anne Boleyn just three years after her coronation.
Instead of the hoped-for male heir the queen had only produced a puny
red-headed little girl who was born alive. Henry, by now very bloated from
over-indulgence in food and drink, convinced himself that this was a sign
that this marriage too was cursed. Despite the many ornamental testaments
to his passion for Anne, the entwined initials HA he had had carved all
over Hampton Court and St James’s Palace, the king began to look for
another wife. The lively Anne, who was hated by many for her insolence
and her Protestantism, suddenly found herself arrested and accused of
adultery.
Anne was removed without ceremony from the royal palace at
Greenwich to the Tower. She went by barge and began screaming as soon
as she saw the Barbican Gate and realized where she was heading, an eerie
and horrible sound, which could be heard on the south bank of the river.
The Constable of the Tower tried to comfort her by saying that she would
be lodged not in a dungeon but in the apartments she had stayed in before
her coronation. But she gave a loud mocking laugh, and an even more
mocking one when he told her sincerely that she could be certain that every
inhabitant of King Henry’s realm could be assured justice. Anne Boleyn
then seems to have lost control of herself. The screaming, alternating with
hysterical laughter, went on for the next few weeks until she was
condemned to death for treason. As a last favour from her husband a
special sword was sent from Calais to cut off her head because she had
expressed a fear to her jailers that a blunt axe would hurt her little neck.
The very day after Anne Boleyn stepped on to the scaffold and wound
her long black hair up into a white linen coif so that the executioner might
see her neck more clearly, Henry married his new favourite, the quiet Jane
Seymour. At last the king was lawfully married and in 1537 Jane produced
the longed-for boy, a new Prince of Wales who was christened Edward. But
his mother died only twelve days after his birth. Once more there was a
vacancy at the king’s side. Out of genuine sadness and respect for his dead
wife no one filled it for two years.
Jane Seymour’s family were convinced Protestant supporters of the New
Learning, particularly her two brothers, who were close to Cranmer and
Cromwell. In the late 1530s the Protestant influence round the king
appeared to be at its height when he acquiesced in Cromwell’s suggestion
of Anne of Cleves as a new bride. Her brother was the Protestant Duke of
Cleves, on the Lower Rhine, and it looked as if England would soon be

27 i
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publicly allied to the north German princes of the Schmalkalden League

who had strenuously embraced Protestantism against the emperor.
The king was in any case beginning to tire of Cromwell and was
increasingly inclined towards the religious conservatives, Stephen
Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London.
The many real reforms that had been achieved by Cromwell such as
introducing parish registers of births, deaths and marriages, did not make
up for the government’s unpopularity. When Anne of Cleves arrived in
London, the marriage having been arranged on the basis of a flattering
portrait by Hans Holbein because the king was too busy to meet her,
Cromwell’s career began to take a downward path. For Anne of Cleves
looked nothing like her portrait, which may be seen at the Louvre in Paris.
To Henry she seemed big, raw-boned and ungainly; moreover she could
speak only a very few words of English. ‘A Flanders mare, I like her not,’
Henry is said to have hissed angrily at Cromwell when he first met her.
Meanwhile despite the grandeur of the wedding, no alliance was
forthcoming from the League of Protestant princes. Although the king
could not withdraw from the marriage Cranmer swiftly produced suitable
reasons as to why it was invalid, and Queen Anne of Cleves retired on a
pension, presumably glad to have escaped with her head.
The king soon yielded to the Catholic faction’s petitions, led by the
ambitious and unscrupulous Duke of Norfolk, to dismiss Cromwell.
Having presided over the trial of one niece Anne Boleyn, he was dangling
another, Catherine Howard, before the king as a future bride. When in the
summer of 1540 it was discovered that a Protestant preacher named Dr
Barnes was Cromwell’s confidential agent to the German Protestant
princes, it seemed good evidence that Cromwell was the agent of Protestant
heretics in England. Within weeks Cromwell too had been executed,
deserted by all his friends save Archbishop Cranmer, who begged the king
to show clemency to a man who had been such a faithful servant. It was to
no avail.
The atmosphere in England by the 1540s was one of muted terror.
Cardinal Pole would rightly ask, ‘Is England Turkey that she is governed
by the sword?’ Protestant and Catholic martyrs were dragged on the same
hurdles to Smithfield for burning, for if it was treason to recognize the
Papal Supremacy it was also treason to deny Catholic doctrine! The court
was full of the manoeuvring of the two implacably opposed religious
parties, who frequently informed against one another.
The Catholic faction were delighted when in the very month of
Cromwell’s execution the king at last took as his fifth wife the lovely little
Catherine Howard. All were hopeful the marriage would last — but it was
not to be. In Catherine Howard’s case, for once there was good reason for

egos
 T5O9-1547
the king’s suspicious mind, now as inflamed as his massive leg with its
running ulcer, to doubt her. The new queen, aged only eighteen, could not
help finding the young blades at court more attractive than her fifty-year-
old husband, as the king observed. Less than two years after Catherine had
married him, the king vanished after dinner at Hampton Court and
departed for his new palace at Whitehall. He never saw the queen again. A
few days later, one icy mid-November morning, men came for Catherine
and arrested her at Hampton Court. There, in the so-called ‘haunted
gallery’ which links the chapel with the State Apartments, a woman
dressed in white is said to haunt the long corridor, crying and moaning as
she walks the ghost of Catherine Howard.
After a period of house arrest at Syon House in Chiswick, the queen —
like her cousin Anne Boleyn — was executed for treason on the grounds of
adultery. During her captivity her jewels were ripped from all her splendid
clothing and sent back to the outraged king. All her friends had been
interrogated and she herself had secretly confessed to Archbishop
Cranmer, thinking it might help her if she made a clean breast of things and
pleaded youth and foolishness.
Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, whom he married a year later in 1543,
was Catherine Parr. She was much older than his other wives and a
pragmatist with a good sensible head firmly screwed on to her shoulders.
She managed to keep it there by outliving the king. She was also a very
good nurse, which was by far her most important quality to a king crippled
by thrombosis. By the late 1540s Henry VIII had long lost the athletic
prowess of his youth; the hunting and music-making were a thing of the
past. Though he still managed to lead his troops to the siege of Boulogne
in 1544, mostly he had to be wheeled round his palaces in a mechanical
contraption, so enormously swollen had his legs become. Too unfit even to
sign his own name, a rubber stamp had to be invented to do the job.
The new queen was kind and dutiful to her stepchildren, Mary,
Elizabeth and Edward. The two girls, having both been declared illegiti-
mate by Henry, had been brought up in penniless obscurity far from court.
To an unenthusiastic Henry, Catherine insisted that the nervous and
religious Lady Mary and the clever Lady Elizabeth, whose mother’s head
had been cut off when she was under three, should come to live with her
and the king. Catherine Parr made sure that after years of neglect they were
treated as befitted their rank as their father’s daughters.
As the king’s ill-health signalled that the end of his life was approaching,
members of the court began jockeying among themselves for power. Most
significant were the two brothers of Jane Seymour, Edward and Thomas.
As uncles of the sickly nine-year-old-heir Edward they hoped to rule the
country, with the elder uncle Edward Seymour becoming lord protector.

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Meanwhile, however, rumours had reached the king’s suspicious ears that
the Duke of Norfolk, who had now been uncle to two queens, and his son
the Earl of Surrey were openly stating that their royal blood showed that
on the king’s death Norfolk would be the best regent. Surrey indeed had
taken to wearing the arms of Edward the Confessor. For this lése-majesté
Surrey was executed on 19 January 1547 and Norfolk would have been
executed on the 28th had Henry VIII not died the day before. The king
passed away holding the gentle Cranmer’s hand. It was one of the few of
Henry’s relationships that had endured.
The succession to the English throne of a minor had always tended to be
a recipe for disaster. On the other hand the kingdom Edward VI’s father
bequeathed to him was more unified under royal government and more
closely linked to Westminster than ever before. As partly Welsh with lands
and a following in Wales, it had been a relatively easy matter for Henry by
the 1536 Statute of Wales finally to do away with the ancient marcher
jurisdictions, and the whole country was finally organized into shires along
the English model. In Ireland a Fitzgerald rising proved the perfect excuse
for Henry to send in an army to reduce the country to some semblance of
order. He extended the Reformation to Ireland on the same principles as
he had done in England, giving Irish lords the extensive lands of the
monasteries in return for their loyalty. Since Lord of Ireland had been a
papal title, Henry now called himself King of Ireland.
However, Henry’s heirs also had a great many problems on hand. The
government’s way of raising money during lean times had been to clip the
coinage or mix copper into the gold and silver. Edward Seymour, or the
Duke of Somerset as he immediately became, who had duly become the
lord protector, faced a country in revolt against a very debased coinage, for
in order to counteract the devalued coinage shopkeepers put up their
prices. The dissolution of the monasteries might have enhanced the
fortunes and secured the loyalty of thousands of well-to-do English
families, but it had also created pressing social problems. The new owners
of monastic lands had none of the kindliness of the old monks, nor their
sense of community. The hospitals and almshouses for the poor vanished,
and rents became much higher.
Above all, the enclosure system took even more ferocious root. Land
which previously had been allowed for the use of the community was
hedged round for the new owners’ private use. At the same time the high
price of wool meant unemployment for thousands as arable farming was
abandoned in favour of sheep farming. Skilled men found themselves
without homes, as that most profitable of animals, the sheep, required only
one shepherd for a large flock. As early as 1516, with the publication of
Utopia, Sir Thomas More had warned of sheep eating men. Now it was a

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 T509-1547
situation raging out of control and creating landless yeomen who
wandered from parish to parish desperate for work.
In contrast to the dead king, Somerset was a convinced radical
Protestant — as was the severe young king himself. Henry VIII’s
Reformation had been carried out in a very gingerly fashion by a monarch
conscious of the tightrope he was walking between Catholic powers
abroad and natural conservatism at home. The new rulers had none of the
old king’s instincts.

275
 Edward VI

(1547-15
53)

Despite his dislike of extreme Protestants, Henry VIII had so respected

their learning that he had left the upbringing of his precious son and heir
in the hands of distinguished Protestant divines such as Roger Ascham. The
result was a solemn little boy who had inherited a good deal of his father’s
willpower and who was dedicated to taking the new religion many steps
past where his father had intended it to end. One of Edward VI’s favourite
preachers was the former Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, the friend
of Protestant martyrs under Henry VIII, whom Henry had deprived of his
see for holding views that were too radical. Under the influence of
Protector Somerset and the boy-king, the court became a quieter, more
solemn place than it had been under the late king. Instead of the gaudy
colours and slashed velvet doublets of Henry VIII’s reign, most Protestant
men and women dressed in the dark colours which would soon be
identified with the Puritans.
Court life was dominated by the struggle between the protector himself
and members of the royal Council to control the ferociously intellectual
but sickly young king. But it was also a struggle between the protector and
his brother Thomas Seymour. The sheer force of Thomas Seymour’s
magnetic personality had thrust him to the heart of the royal establish-
ment. Six months into the new reign Seymour swept the late king’s widow
Catherine Parr off her feet and married her, living much of the time at
Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Seymour, who was by now an admiral,
thus instantly had control over a possible heiress to the throne, the Lady
Elizabeth, who had continued to live with her stepmother after her father’s
death.
Thomas Seymour was a rumbustious adventurer whose swashbuckling
manner and over-familiar treatment of the young Elizabeth led to rumours
that he even had plans to marry her himself and thereby seize the throne.
His reputation was not good. He was said to have made money by clipping
the coinage and even to have benefited from piracy by abusing his position
as an admiral. Wild stories proliferated about him. Servants claimed to
have seen him romping in Elizabeth’s bed in the early morning when both

276
 TS47-2553
were wearing only nightshirts. He was said to have cut one of her dresses
off her on the grounds that black did not suit her, and to have been seen
kissing her. When Catherine Parr died in childbirth in 1548, there were
even rumours that he had deliberately poisoned her in order to marry
Elizabeth.
In fact Seymour had bigger fish to fry: he hoped to persuade his nephew
the king to make him protector instead of his elder brother. Whatever his
intentions, he began to muster men for a rebellion. When Somerset got
wind of it Seymour was executed. On hearing of his execution the thirteen-
year-old Elizabeth remarked coolly to her governess Kate Ashley, ‘This day
died a man-with much wit and very little judgement.’
But Somerset’s position was not shored up by the execution of his
brother. Trouble was brewing, stirred up by the wholesale changes of the
previous ten years. Not only was the enclosure system beginning to bite,
but under Edward the Church of England moved dramatically away from
its old rituals, which Henry VIII had been keen to preserve for the sake of
continuity. It took on a severely logical new shape which satisfied purist
intellectuals, but took no account of popular sentiment.
Cromwell had begun the process of stripping shrines and churches,
mainly to benefit the Treasury. But the Edwardian government took the
spoliation of churches to extremes — its aim not so much pecuniary as to rid
the Church of the superstition which polluted Roman Catholicism. Thus it
was that government agents rushed into churches and whitewashed the
stained-glass windows depicting saints and miracles - many old English
churches still bear traces of this whitewash. They also dragged out elaborate
altars, rood screens and statues and attacked them with hammers. This
process, known as iconoclasm, was made lawful by an act against books
and images. Longstanding ceremonies and holidays which were an
enjoyable part of the village year, such as Candlemas on 2 February, being
smeared with ashes on Ash Wednesday, and carrying palms in memory of
Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, were abolished by law as
papal inventions. And once again priests were allowed to marry.
In 1549 the enforced use of the first new prayer book (commissioned by
Henry VIII and in preparation for several years under Cranmer) triggered
uprisings all over the south-west and in the eastern counties of England.
Though the two protests were quite distinct — the south-west calling for the
restoration of the Mass in Latin and the area round Norwich under Jack
Ket for the pulling down of the enclosures — they both signalled the great
unpopularity of the government. Managing them proved to be the
downfall of Protector Somerset. He was a kindly man and had too much
sympathy with Ket’s grievances to suppress his rebellion with the severity
the rest of the King’s Council felt it merited.

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 TUDOR

While Somerset hesitated, his rivals in the Council struck. John Dudley,
son of Henry VII’s executed minister, disposed of the eastern counties
rebellion with great despatch, hanging Jack Ket from the parapet of
Norwich Castle while his followers dangled from what they had called the
Oak of Reformation. A formidable soldier, Dudley was the coming man.
He had distinguished himself at the recent Battle of Pinkie, Somerset’s
attempt to aid the new Protestant Reformation in Scotland and at the same
time to marry Edward VI to the infant heiress, Mary of Scotland. But if
Dudley had emerged as the hero of the hour, Somerset had been
humiliated. For the Scots did not like what was complained of as a ‘rough
wooing’, and Mary was smuggled over to France to marry the dauphin
instead.
Somerset not only looked foolish, he was also visibly corrupt. Although
all of the Council enjoyed the proceeds from a further suppression of the
chantries, the protector’s share was large enough to begin building the first
Italianate mansion in England, Somerset House in the Strand, which until
recently was the national repository of our records of births, deaths and
marriages. But it was an excuse for dismissing the protector. That same
year, Somerset was ousted from the Council, and Dudley, or the Duke of
Northumberland as he became, took control.
Northumberland, even more than Somerset, was the champion of the
radical wing of the Church. England became a haven for the more
advanced Protestant divines like Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr fleeing
from the wrath of the Emperor Charles V, whose armies seemed to be on
the point of suppressing the German Reformation altogether. Despite the
popular reaction to the first prayer book, the English Church took an even
sharper turn away from Henrician Catholicism by publishing the second
prayer book in 1552 and the Forty-Two Articles of Faith a year later. In
fact, for all the outrage it had caused, the first prayer book was as Catholic
as its progenitor Henry VIII. But the second, though also written by
Cranmer, showed just how fast Protestant intellectual thought was moving
in England. The Church had swung towards. the Zwinglian idea of
Communion being a ceremony of commemoration rather than a Real
Presence, and many important Protestants of a strongly radical tendency
were appointed to key bishoprics: Nicholas Ridley, who was a convinced
Zwinglian, became Bishop of London and John Hooper became Bishop of
Gloucester and soon attracted attention by refusing to wear the vestments
of a bishop because the ancient Church would not have insisted on them.
In July 1553 Northumberland was alarmed to see that the sixteen-year-
old king’s always fragile health was going downhill rapidly. He would have
to act fast if he wished to preserve his power. By Henry VIII’s will and by
parliamentary statute the succession had been fixed on Catherine of
278
 1547-1553
Aragon’s daughter Princess Mary and then
on Princess Elizabeth. Yet if Edward was
succeeded by Princess Mary, who was well
known for having the Catholic Mass
celebrated in her own apartments, she
would endanger the whole English
Protestant Reformation. Instead, with the
backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury
Cranmer and the Bishop of London
Nicholas Ridley, Northumberland _per-
suaded Edward that the throne should go
to the strenuously Protestant Lady Jane
Grey, who as the eldest granddaughter of EDWARD THE SIXTH,
Henry VIII’s sister Mary had the next claim
to the throne. Princess Elizabeth had no Catholic leanings either, but she
lacked the unique qualification that Lady Jane possessed, as far as
Northumberland was concerned: Lady Jane was married to his son.
In his own hand, Edward VI sketched out a new will bypassing Mary
and Elizabeth. The crown was to go to Lady Jane Grey. Two days later, on
the evening of 7 July, the pale young king’s consumptive lungs gave out.
The palace guard was doubled to make sure the news did not leak out
before Northumberland could arrest Princess Mary. But somehow a
messenger galloped from London to warn Mary at Hunsdon in
Hertfordshire that her brother was dead and she must flee. Before the sun
rose the thirty-seven-year-old Mary, with a few retainers, had reached
Kenninghall in Norfolk.
In London a furious Northumberland proclaimed the gentle Lady Jane
Grey queen. But her reception was less than rapturous, and she was
anyway unwilling to be Northumberland’s puppet. After a reign of only
ten days, while men swarmed to Princess Mary’s army in the eastern
counties, Mary was welcomed by the rest of the Council into London. She
entered the city without resistance on 3 August, riding side by side with
Princess Elizabeth, and after imprisoning Lady Jane and Northumberland,
became queen.

279
 Mary I
(1553-1558)

Mary ruled for five short years before she succumbed to stomach cancer.
Though dumpy and plain, the new queen combined the steely Tudor
willpower with a profound Catholicism inherited from her Spanish
mother. Despite all the pressures brought to bear by her father and brother,
she had refused to abandon her faith, believing that it was her mission to
return England to her ancient religion. In this she was actively abetted by
the Spanish ambassador, who became one of her most important advisers.
Directly she became queen all the Protestant bishops, Hooper, Ridley and
Cranmer, were replaced by the ‘Catholic’ bishops of Henry VIII’s reign
who had meanwhile been languishing in prison.
Stephen Gardiner, who had been Bishop of Winchester since 1531,
though imprisoned for two years under Edward VI, became Mary’s lord
chancellor and chief religious adviser. The first act of the new government’s
Parliament was to return religion to the state it had been in after Henry’s
Reformation: the Six Articles were brought back; Mass was celebrated;
those members of the clergy who, like Cranmer, had married were forced
to renounce their wives; Edward’s bishops were imprisoned and Protestants
were expelled from the country. But the queen had no plans to rest there.
By the second year of her reign in November 1554, though she had at first
taken the title Supreme Head of the Church, she had repealed the
Reformation statutes and returned England to the Church of Rome.
The dissolution of the monasteries had secured the gentry’s and the
nobility’s loyalty to the Henrician Reformation. Property also explained
the ease with which Mary returned England to Rome. For she was enough
of a Tudor pragmatist to agree that the restoration of monastery lands to
the Church could be no part of the new settlement. As a result, the
transformation of the country back to Roman Catholicism was achieved
without incident — the roots of Protestantism in England did not lie deep at
mid-century. Later that year Mary’s cousin Cardinal Pole, the papal legate
who had been exiled in Rome for so long, returned to England to preside
over the dismantling of the Henrician Reformation. He became
Archbishop of Canterbury.

280
 E3558
Meanwhile Mary’s decision in 1559 to marry her princely cousin,
Charles V’s son, who was to become Philip II of Spain, aroused the most
vehement opposition in Parliament, Council and the country at large. But
she was determined, for everything Spanish aroused her unquestioning
reverence. When Ambassador Renard had suggested marriage between
herself and Philip she fell into transports of excitement without ever having
met her intended, and immediately gave her sacred promise that she would
marry none other. There were riots and a rebellion led by Sir Thomas
Wyatt, the son of the poet, whose intention was to place Princess Elizabeth
on the throne.
Only Mary’s prompt action in riding to the Guildhall in London and
telling the crowds that she would postpone the Spanish marriage until it had
been agreed by Parliament re-enlisted public support. Though Wyatt
proclaimed Elizabeth’s ignorance from the scaffold, Mary did not believe
him. Lady Jane and Northumberland were executed and an outraged and
terrified Elizabeth was taken by river to the Tower of London, from whence
her mother had never returned alive. Here she famously refused to go in
through the entrance known as Traitor’s Gate and, sitting down on the
flagstones, declined to move. ‘Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner,
as landed at these stairs,’ she said imperiously. And until the sun set and she
at last consented to go in, no one dared move her.
But no evidence could be found to convict Elizabeth. She would not have
been so foolish to plot openly. Her early life
had made her a most circumspect and
cautious personality and she had already
had to throw herself on her knees and beg
for her freedom when Mary’s advisers, such
as Bishop Gardiner, had suggested she be
arrested because she might form the focus
of a Protestant plot. Though Elizabeth
spent a couple of grim months in prison
convinced that each day would be her last -
the scaffold erected to execute Lady Jane
Grey remained in place - eventually she was
released. She went to live quietly at
Woodstock in Oxfordshire and then at
Hatfield, north of London.
The arrival in London of the grave Philip of Spain, with his flaxen beard
and cold eyes, saw not only the return of England to the old religion but
the persecution as heretics of those who refused to conform. Cardinal Pole
set up a commission to inquire into heresy and soon began burning all the
Edwardian bishops. First to go was John Rogers, the Canon of St Paul’s,
281
 TUDOR

well known for helping with the translation of the Bible that Cranmer had
sponsored. He was followed by Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, whose
conscience had stopped him wearing vestments because St Peter would
not have worn them. Taken to Smithfield in his long white shift, he was
tied to a stake and logs were piled round him until only the upper half of
his body could be seen. As the fire slowly consumed him, he never uttered
a sound,
The three other most celebrated personalities of the early English
Reformation, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were all taken to Oxford to be
examined in their faith by the new Catholic bishops. Cranmer’s trial was
postponed because, having been made archbishop by the pope, his case had
to be transferred to Rome. But Latimer and Ridley were condemned to death
for denying Transubstantiation, the transforming of the bread and wine at
Communion into the Real Body and Blood of Christ. They were trussed back
to back at a stake in the town ditch at Oxford. As the flames rose and their
agony began, the ever courageous Latimer said to his trembling fellow
martyr Ridley, ‘Play the man, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a
candle, by God’s Grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’
And he was right. Until the Marian martyrs, of whom 300 were burned
in the next three years, Protestantism had really been confined to a tiny
percentage of the country. But, influenced by the civilizing spirit of the

ay a tfho p hidley

Bishop Nicholas Ridley and Bishop Hugh Latimer depicted in the Protestant
bestseller, Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563 by John Foxe which
became known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

282
 1553-1558
Renaissance, the people of England were
more horrified by the burnings under
Mary because of the visible human
anguish it caused than they would have
been in the middle ages. Moreover, the
persecution of heretics was all part of
the unwelcome Spanish influence under
which the country had fallen since the
queen’s marriage. The methods of the
Spanish Inquisition, which gave Spain a
bad name and was soon to be described in
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, did more to
convert England to Protestantism than all
the efforts of the Protestant divines. The
Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary’s queen herself became known as Bloody
cousin, who became Archbishop Mary.
of Canterbury when Mary é
Orielig revecned the Church Cranmer too soon met his death by
i Rome burning. For all his great literary gifts, the
former archbishop had never been a very
strong character and he was now an old man. After five months of
imprisonment, his spirit was broken. He agreed to recant and at Cardinal
Pole’s suggestion put his name to papers describing himself as the author of
all the evils which had fallen on the nation since Henry VIII. But as one of the
chief architects of the Protestant Reformation Cranmer was such a major
figure that Cardinal Pole and Queen Mary required a very public
renunciation from him. It was arranged that this would take place before a
large audience in St Mary’s Church at Oxford.
To everyone’s surprise, at the pulpit Cranmer suddenly showed a
courage no one had known he possessed. In a firm voice he denounced the
pope as anti-Christ and his doctrine as false. Angry Catholics removed him
before he could finish speaking and hurried him to the stake outside. But
even then he outwitted them. For Cranmer thrust his right hand into the
fire saying loudly, ‘It was that unworthy hand which offended by writing
lies and recanting, therefore it must burn first.’
Although it was popularly believed that it was her Spanish advisers who
were chiefly responsible for the burnings, in fact Mary herself derived
enormous satisfaction from them. Never in rude health, and usually having
a poor appetite, she would eat a heartier dinner after a burning had taken
place. The emotional gratification that she took from persecuting heretics
was one of the few she obtained. Quite soon after the marriage Philip
removed himself back to his own kingdom and visited his English wife only
periodically when he needed money for the war against France.

283
 TUDOR

The Marlyrdem of FL Vrromas Cranmer af Oxtord

The Martyrdom of Dr Thomas Cranmer. Into the flames he first thrust the hand
which had signed his recantation from Protestantism.

Marian martyrs burning.

284
 1553-1558
The struggle of Valois versus
Habsburg, of Henry II of France
against Charles V and then Philip II
took many surprising shapes and
forms. Not the least of these was
when Philip forced Mary to declare
war on France, and English troops
took part in the assault which won the
Battle of St Quentin. But like every-
thing to do with Mary the affair
ended in disaster. In 1558 in a tit-for-
tat action the French high command
attacked England’s last possession in
France, the port and staple town of
Calais. Though its governor had
repeatedly warned that he did not
possess enough food or soldiers to
defend his position Mary’s govern-
The Martyrs’ Memorial, Oxford. | ment misunderstood how urgent the
situation was.
When reinforcements finally arrived, it was too late. The war was
extremely unpopular and the antipathy towards Philip and Mary herself
meant that Parliament was no longer the obedient tool of the crown. It
refused to vote supplies. The government could raise money only by forced
loans and illegal customs duties. News of the fall of Calais burst upon
England like a thunderclap; it was the coup de grace for Mary’s already poor
health. She had miscarried one child. Now she lay dying of a stomach tumour
which for many months she had pitifully believed to be a pregnancy. Loathed
by her people, her husband far from her side, shortly before she passed away
the unhappy queen uttered the immortal words: ‘When I die the word
“Calais” will be found engraved on my heart.’ A few hours later on that same
day, 17 November, died the other great defender of the ancient faith,
Cardinal Pole.
Meanwhile messengers had galloped to Hatfield, where the twenty-five-
year-old Elizabeth was living, conscious that with her sister dying childless
she was the future queen. The learned Elizabeth was reading the classics
under an oak tree when the messengers arrived and hailed her as their
sovereign. Then she said very slowly in Latin, “This is the Lord’s doing and
it is marvellous in our eyes.’ As was remarked at the time, it was a good sign
for a queen to be reading books instead of burning them, and so it proved.

285
 Elizabeth I
(1558-1603)

The clever, slender young woman who took over the English throne in
1558 had not kept her head on her shoulders through all her vicissitudes
without it having a deep effect on her character. When at the London
pageant for her coronation the figure of Old Father Time passed by, she
was heard by people standing near her to murmur with wonder, ‘And Time
has brought me hither.’ Elizabeth’s insecure and troubled early life had
created a consummate pragmatist, who had a great deal in common with
her grandfather Henry VII. Like him she was thrifty to the point of
miserliness when it came to spending money. This was fortunate as the
country she inherited had been almost bankrupted by Philip’s war. Unlike
her father she was reluctant to go to war partly because of the expense,
partly because she was so cautious that she was reluctant to commit herself
to one side or the other. She rarely moved in a straightforward fashion but
dilly-dallied on foreign policy — to the despair of her ministers.
The new queen’s experience of religious extremism in her brother’s and
sister’s reigns had left her with a great dislike of such emotions and a
natural tolerance. Soon after her accession she announced she ‘would
make no windows in men’s souls’, and for the first decade or so of her life
she was content for a secret Catholicism to go on as long as the outward
forms of Protestantism were observed.
Queen Elizabeth inherited the Tudor common touch and charm that her
brother and sister had so signally lacked, as well as the strong personality
which had kept England at the feet of her father. She had his formidable
intellect, his warmth and his striking wit. She had none of her mother’s
dark colouring, having pale Tudor skin, red hair and an imperious hooked
nose. Like Henry VIII she believed in showing herself to the country and
staying with the gentry and nobility who upheld the Tudor state, hence the
very many houses whose grandest bedrooms bear the legend ‘Queen
Elizabeth slept here’. Like Henry VIII too she held a very splendid court,
full of balls, masques and intrigues, at which the most dazzlingly dressed
figure and the most spirited dancer was herself.
She was just as capable as her father at bending Parliament to her will

286
 15 58-1603

and she never failed to get the

supplies she asked for. Though
constantly urged by her Council
and Parliament to marry and
ensure a Protestant succession
she never did. She was perhaps
finally weddedto her country.
As she said in her Golden Speech
when she had been forty-three
years on the throne, ‘Though
God has raised me high, yet this
I count the glory of my crown,
Traitor’s Gate on the Thames at the Tower that I have reigned with your
of London which Elizabeth famously loves. And though you have had,
refused to go through. Ook ic
and may have, many mightier
and wiser princes sitting in this
seat; yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.’
Queen Elizabeth the Great presided over a unique moment in English
history. Her seamen sailed round the world and kept the seas free for
Protestantism by defeating the Spanish Armada. Her playhouses saw
productions of some of the greatest drama the world has ever known, the
plays of William Shakespeare. And at a time when the wars of religion
were creating bitter civil conflicts all over Europe, the middle way she
followed helped Protestantism to take peaceful root. While so many
monarchs met deaths by assassination, Elizabeth survived.
The queen was extremely vain, a
characteristic she inherited from her
coquettish mother; from her father she |
got a love of regal splendour. To the end
of her life she delighted in court revels
and fabulously expensive dresses, whose
fashions became more and more
exaggerated as the century wore on.
Frilled ruffs, vast hairdos, jewels by the
yard, banquets and male favourites were |
the hallmarks of her reign, and she soon [434
acquired the nickname Gloriana. |;*7
Ambassadors who did not know her \xgi
regarded as frivolous her obsession with } . .*
dancing and with young men -|.
favourites like Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and The Tower of London.

237
 TUDOR

finally the Earl of Essex. They did not

see the dedicated and Machiavellian
stateswoman closeted with master
strategists like Sir Francis Walsingham
and plotting how to keep Philip of
Spain at bay. They failed to take
seriously a woman whose criteria for
selecting civil servants was so dis-
interested that she chose the great
statesman William Cecil as her chief
minister or principal secretary of state
because she believed ‘that you will not
be corrupted with any manner of gift,
and that you will be faithful to the
state, and that without respect of my
private will you will give me that
counsel you think best’. Unlike those of
her father, her ministers left her service
only if death removed them. Cecil was
at her side for forty years.
The new queen’s most pressing
problem was the English Church, now
Elizabeth I.

rejoined to Rome. As a highly accom-

plished daughter of the New Learning who
spoke fluent Latin and French and read
Greek, Elizabeth possessed religious
sympathies that were advanced Protestant,
those of the second Edwardian prayer
book. She did not believe in the Real
Presence, as she made clear soon after her
accession by leaving Mass when the
Communion wafer was elevated. But her
intention was to return the Church to
that of her father’s less controversial
Reformation, which did not offend
Catholics. But a huge problem faced her,
namely personnel. The old Henrician
Protestants were dead, the clergy in charge Calvin, the French theologian
living in Geneva who influenced
were Catholic and the men required to run many English exiles during
the Elizabethan Church could only be the Mary’s reign.

288
 1558-1603

Protestants who had fled abroad, the Marian exiles.

The Marian exiles were just the sort of religious extremists towards
whom the queen felt a natural antipathy. Far from being the polished
courtiers her feminine nature delighted in, they were rough and ready,
deliberately eschewing good manners in favour of sincerity. Many of them
had been profoundly influenced by Jean Calvin in Geneva, one of the main
centres for Protestant refugees. Calvin’s study of the Bible had convinced
him that hierarchy was wrong and he rejected much of the Church’s
supervision of religion: there should be no official prayer book, and
churches should be run by small groups of ministers or presbyters. He
rejected even the few sacraments Luther had accepted, for he had worked
out a theory of predestination —- men and women were either damned or
saved. What mattered was the moral purity of the elect (as the saved were
known). Rather than in acts of worship their religion was to be expressed
in the moral purity of their daily life, in conduct and clothing (from this
would derive their name of Puritans). With the new queen a Protestant, the
Marian exiles had returned to England full of high hopes of significantly
reforming the Church of England along Calvinist lines.
But this autonomous and democratic kind of religion could not have
appealed less to Elizabeth. As her father’s daughter she believed that the
state control of religion was necessary for an orderly country and she spent
much of her reign combating Puritanism, with only moderately successful
results. She was personally affronted by their leading spokesman, the
savage propagandist John Knox, whose
notorious pamphlet First Blast of the
Trumpet against the Monstrous
Regiment of Women attacked women
rulers. She banned him from London, so
he found his way to Scotland and
founded the Calvinist Reformation in
Scotland. Like most Puritans the
strength of Knox’s religious convictions
meant he was no respecter of persons,
even of royalty. Elizabeth found this
intolerable.
Nevertheless the Marian exiles were
all the clergy the queen had to work with.
Fortunately the Dean of Lincoln,
Matthew Parker, whom Elizabeth made
Archbishop of Canterbury, was a man
John Knox, Calvinist religious
leader of the Scottish after her own heart. The scholarly
Reformation. Parker, who had also been her mother

289
 TUDOR

Anne Boleyn’s personal chaplain, had managed to remain in England during

Mary’s reign and so had not come under any extremist influences abroad.
Like the queen he believed in the Church’s regulation of religion. He thought
it more important to please the majority of English people who were still
attached to old forms, whether in rituals of worship or vestments. Thanks to
Parker and the queen’s genius for compromise and harmonization, the 1559
Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, whereby the English Church once more
cut its links with the papacy, appeared to be all things to all men. Although
the Elizabethan settlement really took for its essentials the second prayer
book of Edward VI, its Communion seemed both to celebrate a Real
Presence and to be a commemorative act. The new Church thus offended as
few Catholics as possible, in order to unite England behind the queen.
Elizabeth declared herself more modestly to be the Church’s supreme
governor instead of supreme head, in order to leave her ecclesiastics free to
determine affairs of the Church. And to make sure the Puritan clergy toed
the line, Archbishop Parker set up the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission to
enforce the Elizabethan settlement in every parish.
In the early part of—her reign
Elizabeth’s moderation paid off. She had
little trouble from English Catholics or
the Catholic clergy, most of whom
became priests in the Church of England.
It was the former Marian exiles whose
behaviour continued to anger her.
Initially she was in too weak a position to
protest when many of them refused to
adopt signs of popish ‘superstition’ such
as wearing surplices or making the sign
of the cross. But seven years after her
accession in 1565 the queen and Parker
felt strong enough to move against the
Archbishop Matthew Parker, — Puritans. Parker’s ‘Advertisements’ were
Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of _ given to the clergy. These were guidelines
Canterbury. He had been Anne .
Boleyn chanical’ enforcing observance of the prayer book
and the wearing of surplices, which
resulted in about thirty clergymen losing their livings.
With this action the way became clearer for the Puritans. Most of them
had believed optimistically that the Elizabethan settlement was only a
beginning. Now it was clear that as far as the queen was concerned it was
intended to be the end. From then on there were constant attacks against
Church government from the Puritans, taking their stand on the New
Testament. Since there were no bishops in the New Testament, went one

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argument, there should be none in the Elizabethan Church. With the death
of Parker in 1575 the queen found herself more isolated than she had
supposed. Many MPs and many of her civil servants, especially those who
worked for Cecil’s colleague, her other royal secretary Sir Francis
Walsingham, had become increasingly attracted to the aims of the Puritan
clergy. They disapproved of the Ecclesiastical Commission which was
compared even by the faithful William Cecil, or Lord Bae ae as he had
become, to the Spanish Inquisition in its pent :
ruthless methods and lack of interest in a
fair trial.
The appalled queen suddenly found
that her new Archbishop of Canterbury
Edmund Grindal was in sympathy with
what is known as the ‘prophesyings’
movement, the increasingly popular Bible
self-help groups run by the Puritan clergy
to which the laity were invited. As they
often resulted in criticism of the Church,
Elizabeth believed they should be
suppressed. Grindal believed they should
merely be regulated. When the arch-
bishop, greatly daring, refused to suppress Archbishop John Whitgift,
them he was suspended for five years. Elizabeth’s Archbishop of
Ine'583) his place’ as Archbishop of aaa Fieger aesBEES
Canterbury was taken by John Whitgift.
The small, dark and ferocious Archbishop Whitgift was as much a
Calvinist as Grindal, but, for him, where Puritan ideas conflicted with a
settled order of doctrine the law of the land should prevail. With Whitgift
in charge, pursuit of the Puritans became much more effective. No fewer
than 200 clergymen lost their livings when all those suspected of being
Puritans were hauled up before the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission to
swear to a new Act of Six Articles emphasizing the Royal Supremacy in
religious affairs. By the end of her reign as Elizabeth became increasingly
severe in her treatment of dissenters, the death penalty or exile was the
punishment for all those who would not attend the Anglican Church.
Henry VIII’s equivocation about the Mass had kept the Catholic powers
out of England. Elizabeth’s equally careful footwork with the religious
settlement, her stern line against Calvinists and her warm reception of
France and Spain for the first twelve years of her reign also kept England
free from invasion. In fact, so mixed were the signals coming from the
queen that her widowed brother-in-law Philip II believed he could marry
her — as did various other Catholics such as Archduke Charles of Austria,

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the future Henry III of France and his younger brother the Duke of Anjou.
Thanks to Elizabeth’s caution over the settlement, during the first decade
of her reign when her title could have been in dispute, and Philip of Spain
could have invaded to aid English Catholics, no Catholic plots erupted. On
the whole Catholics paid their fines, did not attend Anglican services and
had Mass said quietly in their own homes.
But towards the end of the decade the situation changed, for a number
of reasons, and the chief enemy to the Elizabethan state became
Catholicism. For the next twenty years Elizabeth and Protestant England
found themselves under serious threat. This was the consequence of the
arrival in England of Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed, Mary Queen
of Scots, a Catholic who as Henry VIII’s great-niece had a claim to the
English throne, being next in blood.
When Elizabeth had expelled John Knox from England and he had taken
his fiery energies north to Scotland, the religious revolt he inspired among
the Scottish Protestant nobles, the Lords of the Congregation as they called
themselves, turned into a patriotic war to rid Scotland of the French
Catholic regent Mary of Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots. Though
Elizabeth disliked helping rebels, on her Council’s advice in 1560 she had
despatched troops to aid the Scots against the French government. On the
death of Mary of Guise what was in effect a Calvinist Scottish republic had
been created by the Lords of the Congregation: a new Scots Parliament
renounced the pope and a General Assembly was created, the chief council
of the Presbyterian Church. Undeterred by this Calvinist seizure of power,
a year later the daughter of James V — recently widowed by the death of
Francis II of France — landed in Scotland to claim her kingdom as Mary
Queen of Scots.
Mary Queen of Scots was a great beauty, tall and fascinating. But in
contrast to her cousin Elizabeth she possessed almost no political skill or
feel for statecraft and had a foolishly headstrong and passionate character.
At first, however, her charm won over the Protestant lords ruling Scotland.
She made no attempt to drive out the Calvinist religion now established
there or to reconvert the country. But she did insist on hearing her own
Mass in her private apartments, thereby incurring the wrath of John Knox,
who publicly preached in Edinburgh that one of the queen’s Masses was
‘more fearful to me than ten thousand armed enemies’. But Mary
emphasized to her Catholic contacts abroad, especially Philip of Spain and
her Guise uncles, that now was not the moment to invade Scotland and
attempt a reconversion. She allowed her half-brother the Earl of Moray, an
illegitimate son of James V, to continue to govern Scotland.
In fact to begin with Mary Queen of Scots’ only ill-judged action was her
bid to be declared the childless Elizabeth’s heir. But Elizabeth, who was

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irritated by reports of her cousin’s glamour, and her Council were adamant
that her claim should not be acknowledged. The pope had never
authorized Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, so to believing Catholics
Elizabeth was not the legitimate ruler of England. The true claim was that
of Mary Queen of Scots. As a Catholic, Mary might well become a rallying
point for Catholics in England — as indeed she eventually proved to be.
As long as Mary remained a widow, all went well. But in 1565 she fell
in love with Lord Darnley and determined to marry him, thus enraging
both Moray and Elizabeth, for Henry Darnley was the grandson of
Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, a relationship that would strengthen
Mary Queen of Scots’ own claim. Moreover, Darnley was one of the
leaders of the English Catholics. Elizabeth and Cecil issued a declaration
that the marriage would be ‘perilous to the amity between the queens and
both realms’, and provided a safe haven in Newcastle for Moray and the
other Protestant lords. They had revolted against the marriage and, after a
short civil war in which Mary and Darnley triumphed, were expelled from
Scotland. The marriage went ahead as planned.
Only a few months were needed for Mary to find out the quality of the
man she had married. She began to detest him, as he was weak, cruel and a
drunk. Moreover the twisted and treacherous Darnley had no intention of
merely being a consort of the queen. He decided to make a bid for the crown
himself, with the support of the queen’s enemies, Moray and the Protestant
lords in England. In a hideous plot which may have been intended to make
the pregnant queen miscarry, her private secretary, the Italian David Rizzio,
was murdered before her eyes in March 1566 at Holyrood Palace in
Edinburgh by twenty heavily armed men. These were no common assassins.
They included not only important nobles but the queen’s husband himself.
Somehow, despite her horror, Mary Queen of Scots managed to keep a cool
head and persuade Darnley to abandon his fellow plotters. Once again the
conspirators were expelled from the country. Meanwhile Mary seems to
have begun planning her revenge, having conceived a passion for the
dashing James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell.
Bothwell was an unscrupulous border lord who was to become her third
husband. There seems little doubt that Mary was involved in the explosion
at a house south of Edinburgh called Kirk O’ Field which killed Darnley,
though it was masterminded by Bothwell. Before long, however, the
Scottish lords who had been Bothwell’s allies turned on him in fury. Moray
and the Lords of the Congregation then returned from exile and at
knifepoint forced the queen to renounce the throne in favour of her
thirteen-month-old son James (whose father was Lord Darnley). In 1568,
she escaped and fled in a humble fishing boat to England, determined to
throw herself on her cousin Elizabeth’s mercy.

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Mary Queen of Scots’ arrival in England put Elizabeth and Cecil in an

extremely difficult position. If she remained in the country, she could still
be a focus for Catholic plots. On the other hand it would be foolish to
allow her to depart for France where she might raise troops to assert her
claim to the English crown. Faced with this conundrum, Elizabeth elected
to play for time. She announced an investigation into Mary’s connection
with Darnley’s murder. This allowed her to keep the queen in captivity
indefinitely.
In England the Queen of Scots indeed became a magnet for Catholic
conspiracies, particularly after a new pope, Pius V, took up her cause in
1570, excommunicating Elizabeth and calling for her to be removed from
the English throne. Twelve months after Mary’s arrival in England there
had been an ill-thought-out rising by the northern earls, the ancient houses
of Percy and Neville, on whose lands Catholicism still flourished. Even
though it ended in miserable failure, thereafter a new plot was discovered
almost every year for eighteen years until Mary’s death. Meanwhile the
fourth Duke of Norfolk, the son of the poet Earl of Surrey, was drawn into
a new conspiracy headed by an Italian banker in the pay of Philip of Spain
named Ridolfi. On every tide letters went to Spain from Norfolk, Ridolfi
and Mary herself devising ways to seize power, backed by Spanish troops
crossing from the Netherlands under the Duke of Alva.
But working with Cecil was Elizabeth’s exceptional foreign minister Sir
Francis Walsingham. A combative Puritan Walsingham was not only
waging a war against England’s enemies; he considered himself to be
fighting a global battle against Catholicism. Like a great spider he sat at the
centre of an amazingly complicated and secret espionage system which
covered the whole of Europe. His network of spies soon obtained enough
evidence to have Norfolk arrested and executed for treason in 1572.
Though the House of Commons demanded the Queen of Scots’ head as
well, Elizabeth held them off. For another fifteen years the prematurely
ageing Mary lived in Staffordshire at Tutbury Castle never quite losing
hope - especially when Moray was assassinated — that she would be
returned to her throne. It was not to be.
Mary Queen of Scots’ imprisonment in England coincided with a
resurgence of Roman Catholicism, what is known as the Counter-
Reformation. Rejecting attempts to come to an accommodation with
Protestantism, Catholicism reorganized itself. The Jesuit order was
founded expressly by St Ignatius Loyola to attack the new faith in
Protestant countries. Following his example, a Lancashire Catholic named
William Allen established a seminary at Douai in Philip II’s territories in
the Netherlands to send back priests to England to revive the Catholic
religion. They were to promote an uprising of English Catholics in

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conjunction with a Spanish invasion, which Allen and his followers saw as
the only solution.
From the 1570s onwards the priests from Douai started to flood back
secretly into. England as missionaries, hiding in special rooms called priest-
holes,- constructed for them in English country houses Although to
celebrate the Mass and thus deny the queen’s supremacy was treasonous,
until the 1570s the letter of the law tended not to be enforced. But the
arrival of the seminary priests, and the Jesuits’ success in prodding Catholic
consciences awake, suddenly posed a genuine threat to English security.
There began an unspoken hostility between England and Spain which in
episode after episode nudged both countries nearer to open conflict. Since
Elizabeth wished to avoid going to war at all costs and Philip had plans to
invade only when the time was right, England remained at peace until
1587. But if the queen refused publicly to acknowledge Spain as the enemy,
her seamen had no qualms about doing so. The English Channel and
the oceans of the New World became the two countries’ unofficial
battleground, where Englishmen enriched themselves and did their bit for
Protestantism by attacking any Spanish ship that hove into view.
By the late sixteenth century Englishmen had recovered all the zest for
maritime adventure they had lost since the time of their Viking forebears.
The discovery of the New World kindled a taste for exploration among
oo ° esse a? a ED —
/VERA TOOTING ERPEDITIONTS NAVTUCAN &
AD DVLA

Map of Drake’s voyage round the world.

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English merchants everywhere. The Company of Merchant Adventurers

headed by Sebastian Cabot, the son of the John Cabot who discovered
Labrador, had for some time been breaking into new markets in the Baltic.
But the most celebrated of all these explorers in their time were the
Elizabethan adventurers and master mariners Francis Drake and John
Hawkins, who combined their voyages of discovery with terrorizing the
Spanish Main. Nowadays Drake’s cousin Jack Hawkins is held in low
esteem as he was the founder of the English slave trade, supplying Africans
to labour in the tropical heat of the West Indies and South America — a
terrible traffic in human cargo which was to make so much money for him
and other English merchants over the next 200 years.
Francis Drake was Elizabethan England’s greatest popular hero. He was
also the English seaman most feared by the King of Spain for his bravado
and his burning commitment to Protestantism. Drake came from a strongly
Protestant Devon family and dedicated his every waking moment to
making trouble for the Spanish. Any Spanish shipping that ventured into
the Channel, even if it were carrying Spanish grandees, was considered fair
game. In 1572, granted a privateering commission (which licensed him to
make private war against the Spanish), Drake embarked on an expedition
to seize the bullion of the Spanish fleet, and landed at Panama. Having got
a glimpse from there of an unknown ocean, the Pacific, he became obsessed
with sailing into that sea. It was all part of the national campaign to beat
the Spanish at their game of controlling the New World. Five years later he
set off again from Plymouth with five ships in which the queen and much
of the court had shares.
Following Magellan’s route of fifty years before, Drake sailed down the
east coast of South America plundering Spanish shipping as he went and
braving immense storms, one of which lasted fifty-two days. He finally got
through the turbulent straits at the foot of South America which Magellan
had discovered, and then navigated northwards up the length of South and
Central America, hugging its west coast. But where Magellan had turned
west and cut through the Pacific Ocean to die in the Philippines, Drake
carried on all the way up to California and landed at San Francisco, a
Spanish settlement, which he renamed Drake’s Bay. He attacked the
Spanish treasure ship called the Cacafuego, seized jewels and silver worth
millions today and returned home in triumph, only the second seaman
since Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. He was to be knighted
ostentatiously by the queen on the deck of his own ship, the Golden Hind.
Elizabeth had no scruples about benefiting from plundered Spanish
bullion. She had enough piratical spirit in her to take shares in many of
Drake’s expeditions, to refuse to hand him over to the Spanish authorities
as they frequently demanded and in effect to treat Spain as the enemy. But

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as yet she had no wish to take on a man as wealthy and powerful as Philip
of Spain, who had the silver of the Americas at his back and who in 1580
would add Portugal to his dominions.
Thus on the official level Elizabeth was still keen to appear in a placatory
light to Philip of Spain, even when in the momentous year 1572 the cause
of Protestantism seemed to require its champions to stand up and be
counted. Shortly after the Ridolfi plot, the hatred the Netherlanders felt for
the Spanish occupying army of General Alva erupted in revolt. To the
astonishment of Europe, under the leadership of William of Orange the
seven courageous northern Protestant provinces threw off the iron hand of
Spain, their overlord since the Emperor Charles V received them as part of
his inheritance through his Burgundian grandmother. Goaded beyond
endurance by the bloody executions of their leaders, the destruction of
their ancient political liberties and the torture of the Inquisition, they called
themselves the United Provinces. Only the ten provinces of the Catholic
south — which approximates to the area of modern-day Belgium — stayed
loyal to Spain and became known as the Spanish Netherlands. In France,
by contrast, things went less well for the Protestants. On 24 August, the
Feast of St Bartholomew, all the Huguenots (Protestants) assembled in
Paris for the wedding of their leader Henry of Navarre to the French king’s
sister were murdered in their beds, possibly by order of Catherine de
Medici, the queen mother. It seemed that the aggressive Counter-
Reformation might triumph at last in France.
The plight of these beleaguered Protestants aroused the strongest
feelings in England, particularly in the royal Council. But Elizabeth would
not permit her ministers to rush to the aid of the Protestant cause in
Holland when there was a likelihood of it creating war with Spain, a Spain
strengthened by the triumph of Catholicism in France. For all her own
Protestant sympathies and enjoyment of Drake’s antics at Spain’s expense,
her innate caution would not allow England to go in for heroics. The
massacre of the Huguenots made her all the more keen to settle with Philip
and begin trading again with the Netherlands.
But Elizabeth was prepared to send aid for the Huguenots who had been
forced to take refuge in the massive fortress of La Rochelle on the Atlantic
coast. Now that there was a real likelihood of the ultra-Catholic or Guise
party triumphing in France and allying with Spain to invade England, it
made sense to distract the French by forcing them to deal with a serious
revolt at home. Elizabeth therefore secretly despatched arms and ships to
help the people at La Rochelle.
Nevertheless, though the queen was anxious to stop England being
dragged into a religious war, battle lines along a Protestant—Catholic axis
were increasingly being drawn in Europe. With the accession of a new

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ultra-Catholic king Henry III in 1574, France began edging towards an

alliance with Spain that ten years later was an accomplished fact. Only the
threat of English and German Protestant troops being sent to the
Huguenots under the Prince of Condé slowed down the process by which
France was succumbing to the Counter-Reformation.
The arrival of a more successful commander in the Netherlands, the
Duke of Parma, gave rise to fears by 1579 that the north would soon be
subdued, and to rumours that the soldiers gathering there from Spain
would be used to invade England. Fear that the Spanish presence would
impede access to Antwerp, England’s largest trading centre, made it
imperative to seek a stronger alliance with France. There was no better way
to secure it than by the queen’s marriage.
An elaborate pavane of two years’ duration ensued between the fifty-
year-old Elizabeth and the younger brother of Henry III, the Duke of
Anjou, which many hoped would result in her marrying at last. For
twenty-five years Elizabeth had held off against all the gentlemen of the
English court — such as Robert Earl of Leicester, who won her heart and
was said to have killed his wife for her — just as she had resisted the
repeated requests from the House of Commons for her to marry. Anjou,
who was twenty years younger than Elizabeth, became the queen’s ‘little
frog’ and the object of many endearments. But he was a poor soldier who
made a mess of an attempt (with English money and French troops) to aid
the seven northern provinces, which continued to hold out against Spain.
Like all the queen’s marriage projects it came to nothing, and Anjou
returned to France. But at least he was a bulwark of Protestantism in the
face of a French government growing
daily more pro-Spanish.
By 1585 the gloves were off
between England and Spain. No one,
apart from the queen, was in much
doubt that it would soon be war.
Spain was now set on invading
England by the back door, from both
Ireland and Scotland. In 1579
Spanish soldiers, Spanish money and
Spanish priests had been sent over to
Munster in Ireland to fan the embers
of a Fitzgerald rebellion and turn it
into a national conflagration. The
revolt was savagely suppressed and
the old Fitzgerald lands were
‘planted’, as the term then was, with —_Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser.

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Elizabethan adventurers like the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The

Faerie Queen. A prolonged campaign to turn Scotland Catholic was only
just averted by making her king James VI the English government’s
pensioner and ally, and reminding him that he was Elizabeth’s heir
presumptive.
Events now moved fast. In 1583 diplomatic relations between Spain and
England were cut, when the Spanish ambassador Mendoza was expelled
from London after he was revealed as the author of the Throckmorton Plot
to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. In
retaliation, Philip seized all English shipping in his ports. Drake and
Martin Frebisher, at the queen’s express command, set off with thirty ships
to take her revenge. Sailing to the West Indies they attacked the Spanish
fleet, burned the important city of San Domingo and returned with their
plunder to England. Once again the silver bullion being carried by the
Spanish fleet failed to reach the Netherlands, so once again Spanish troops
there could not be paid. Instead the silver docked in England.
In 1584, the threats against the queen’s life brought about the Bond of
Association, a document devised by Cecil and Walsingham. Aimed at
Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI, it declared that anyone on
whose behalf Elizabeth’s death was procured would themselves be put to
death. The Bond was endorsed by the entire Council, and was enthusiastic-
ally signed by thousands of Englishmen. Soon afterwards, Parliament
passed an act making it illegal for any Jesuits or seminary priests to come
to England. The international situation had already darkened with the
assassination of the Netherlands’ leader William of Orange and the
Spanish seizure of Antwerp under the generalship of the Duke of Parma. In
France Henry III’s government was now controlled by the ultra-Catholic
Guise faction, who seemed keen that their country should become little
more than an outpost of Spain.
At last the queen was persuaded to yield to Cecil’s entreaties to help the
Dutch, as there was no longer any chance of the French going to their
rescue — though she persisted in maintaining the fiction that she was not at
war with Spain. The Netherlands campaign, under the inept leadership of
the Earl of Leicester, was unmemorable, except for the gallant death of the
poet Sir Philip Sidney. At the siege of Zutphen he famously gave his last
cup of water to a dying soldier, saying, ‘Thy need is greater than mine.’
Then in 1586 came the crisis Elizabeth had dreaded. Walsingham’s spies
had found frequent links between Mary Queen of Scots and Spanish
plotters but had never been able to make out a case against her. Now a
conspiracy involving an impressionable young Catholic named Anthony
Babington from Derbyshire, who like many others had fallen under the
spell of the romantic Queen of Scots, and a seminary priest named John

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Ballard proved her undoing. Mary, believing the channel through which
the letters went was impregnable, was indiscreet enough to put in writing
what could be read as her approval of the assassination of Elizabeth. At
last Walsingham had the evidence he needed. Even Elizabeth agreed that
Mary would have to be tried for treason.
The English government was gambling that the fragility of James VI’s
hold on his throne and his allowance from the English government would
discourage him from invading England on his mother’s behalf. And indeed
the trial took place without incident at Fotheringhay Castle near
Peterborough in October 1586. Although Mary refused to respond to the
charges on the grounds that as Queen of Scotland she was not Elizabeth’s
subject, she was condemned to death for treason. She had become too
dangerous to live, but her cousin still would not sign her death warrant.
Eventually, in February 1587, Elizabeth relented. But, though she had
signed, she would not allow the death warrant to be sent to Fotheringhay.
She became completely hysterical, with the result that members of the
Council were forced to take matters into their own hands. Queen
Elizabeth’s private secretary William Davison was told to take the warrant
on their authority to Fotheringhay, and the Scottish queen was executed in
the Great Hall there, having been denied the comforts of her own religion.
Instead, while the Protestant Dean of Peterborough prayed noisily, the
queen read from her own prayer book. Then, holding a crucifix in her
hand, she mounted the scaffold, which all through the previous night she
had heard being built, and leaned her once elegant but now stout frame
across the block.
When Elizabeth was told that Mary was dead, she went into deepest
mourning for what she said was not of her making. It was put out that she
had wept in agony when she heard the news, and perhaps she had. In her
fury, the luckless Davison was made a scapegoat and dismissed from
government service. Nevertheless, every personal article of clothing which
had belonged to the late Queen of Scots was burned or destroyed so that
nothing should survive that could become a memento or holy relic for
Catholics.
The execution of the Queen of Scots was the last straw for Philip Il. Now
that Mary was dead there was no danger of France being drawn into
conflict on behalf of her former queen. England would be his alone for the
taking. William Allen, founder of the Douai seminary and by now a
cardinal, assured Philip that a Spanish invasion would be greeted with an
uprising against Elizabeth by English Catholics. In 1587 the alarming news
spread that all the wealth of Spain was going towards preparing what her
leaders called ‘the invincible Armada’ to invade England. Philip claimed
the English throne as the nearest rightful descendant of John of Gaunt.

3,00
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But things did not go quite as planned. Francis Drake led a daring raid
on the harbour of Cadiz and burned, sank or captured 10,000 tons of
shipping. What he called ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’ delayed the
Armada for a year while new ships were built. Philip’s other important
miscalculation was to assume that Cardinal Allen had been correct in his
belief that all English Catholics were waiting for the day when the Spanish
would arrive to save them. In fact, the death of Mary Queen of Scots had
assured their loyalty to Elizabeth. A Spaniard as an English king instead of
the popular Gloriana was not an attractive idea. Elizabeth herself refused
to approve the Council’s insulting plan to disarm the Catholics, and Lord
Howard of Effingham, a prominent Catholic related to Norfolk, found his
religion no bar to commanding the fleet as its lord high admiral.
For the next year England was absorbed in war preparations. Unlike
Spain, she had no standing army and had to rely on county militias whose
training was organized by each lord lieutenant, an office invented at the
time of Edward VI. But England’s military weakness meant she had to rely
on repelling the invasion at sea. That was where the main battle should take
place. The navy, which ever since Henry VIII had been run professionally,
now came into its own under the direction of Jack Hawkins. The old pirate
used his practical expertise to build ships that were technically in advance
of those of the Spanish. The new vessels were deliberately built as fighting
machines, compact and low in the water, able to swing round quickly after
knocking holes in the sides of the high Spanish ships.
By the early summer of 1588, the English horizon in the south-west was
being scanned daily for the moment when the first pinnaces of the Spanish
fleet would be seen emerging from the Bay of Biscay. But nothing happened
before mid-July, for though the Armada first set sail in May it was blown
back to Portugal by pcor weather. A further two months had to be spent
in refitting. Characteristically the queen, despite her Council’s disapproval,
had by August moved the court down to Tilbury where a training camp for
the land army had been established. It was commanded by her favourite,
Robert Leicester, despite his poor showing in the Netherlands. At Tilbury
she lived in a white tent among the troops, wearing a metal breastplate.
Here, at the height of the conflict, she would make one of her greatest and
most inspiring speeches to the assembled soldiers sitting on the ground.
Unlike politicians today with their army of speechwriters, every word was
written by Elizabeth herself.
‘Let tyrants fear!’ she said.
I have always so behaved myself, that under God, I have placed my
chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of all my
subjects; and therefore am come amongst you to live or die amongst you
all, to lay down for God and for my kingdom and my people, my honour
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and blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and
feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king
of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any prince
of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

Although for many nights English lookouts had been posted next to the
unlit beacons built on every cliff and prominent hill along the south coast
to give warning of the invasion, it was not until t9 July that they were set
alight. On that day a Scottish pirate named Fleming saw the first of the 136
ships of the Armada entering the Channel. He sailed east as fast as possible
to Plymouth to tell the fleet that there were Spanish ships off the Lizard
peninsula, near Land’s End. Drake had been playing a game of bowls with
Lord Howard when the momentous news was given to them. He now put
a restraining hand on the admiral’s arm, for Howard had been about to
give the signal to launch the fleet. ‘We have time to finish our game of
bowls,’ said Drake calmly. Howard complied. In contrast to the
commander of the Spanish fleet, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had no
knowledge of ships or sea-fighting yet was the absolute general of the
Armada, Lord Howard was happy to leave tactics to Drake and his
experienced fellow seamen.
It was not until dusk that the signal was given. The Spaniards were
rather puzzled by the English response. Instead of launching an attack from
Plymouth, Howard and Drake allowed the Armada to sweep majestically
on up the Channel. Only then did they set off in pursuit. One eyewitness
described the Armada as being like a half-moon in front, the horns
stretching out over seven miles. Drake’s plan was to force the enemy to
keep going by staying behind the Spanish Armada and firing at it. He
intended to use the wind, which was in the south-west, as a weapon against
the Spanish. So the English fleet, with Howard in the first ship, Drake in
the second, Hawkins in the third and Frobisher in the fourth, hung on to
the Armada’s tail all the way up the Channel. While they could stop or go
on at will, the Spaniards were unable to turn on their pursuers.
To the English people watching from the shore it was an alarming scene.
The Channel was filled with huge Spanish ships heading, it seemed,
inexorably for Flanders to take the Duke of Parma’s 26,000 men across to
England. But that crucial rendezvous never took place. When the Spanish
fleet paused to take on supplies and anchor at Calais Roads in the Straits
of Dover off Gravelines on the night of 7-8 August, Drake saw his chance.
With the same speed of thought he had shown at Cadiz he drove in
fireships among them in the night, so alarming the Spaniards that they
abandoned their anchorage. While the Armada was still in a state of
confusion the English attacked it in a battle which lasted nine hours. The
combination of the English fleet blocking the Channel behind them and the
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wind still blowing from the south-west meant all Medina Sidonia’s ideas of
meeting Parma and escorting his army across the Channel vanished into
the summer air. The only way for the Armada to escape the English fleet
and get home was to flee north round the coast of Scotland.
Terrible gales pursued the Spanish and blew them off course on to the

English defeat the Spanish Armada, 1588.

coast of Norway or wrecked them on the rocky shores of Scotland and

Ireland. Some 2,000 corpses were counted on the beach of Sligo Bay alone.
Out of the 136 ships of what had once been called the Invincible Armada,
only 53 limped home. Elizabeth caused a commemorative medal to be
struck. It read, ‘God blew and they were scattered.’
Parma had never rated the chances of the expedition very highly. Dutch
rebels controlled the coastal waters off Flanders, so his soldiers could never
have got past them. Later historians have believed that the odds were
against the Spanish succeeding so far from home when they had none of
the supply lines for food and ammunition that the English ships could call
on. Nevertheless the Armada seemed a very great danger at the time and
the delivery of England extremely providential. Certainly the defeat of the
Spanish Armada was a massive blow to Spain and the Counter-
Reformation. It preserved Protestant England and the Protestant United
Provinces, which by 1588 had become the Dutch Republic, thus halving
the Spanish Netherlands. By the end of the century, Catholicism — even in
France — no longer possessed the threateningly pro-Spanish dimension it

5O3
 TUDOR

once had. Under the first Bourbon king Henry IV, the former Henry of
Navarre, French Catholicism became more liberal and tolerant. Henry IV
was a Protestant who on his accession had converted to Catholicism in
order to unite the country, uttering the cynical quip, ‘Paris was worth a
Mass.’ He protected Protestantism through the Edict of Nantes and closely
allied himself with Elizabeth against Spain.
There were two more Armadas in 1596 and 1597, the first of which was
destroyed in Cadiz harbour by Lord Howard and Elizabeth’s new
favourite Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Leicester’s stepson. Neither was
on the scale of that of 1588, and both were equally unsuccessful. But by
the end of the century the English sallies into Spanish territory were not the
triumphs of yesteryear. In 1591 an expedition to the Azores became
famous in the annals of maritime history for the last stand of the Revenge
under the Cornishman Sir Richard Grenville. He was defeated by the
Spanish navy after almost twenty-four hours of battle. Like the queen
herself, her celebrated seamen Drake and Hawkins were growing old, and
they died together at sea in 1595 after a last attempt to seize Spanish
treasure.
Though many of the queen’s favourite gallants were now dead, Gloriana
herself refused to accept the passage of time. When she was nearly seventy
she conceived a last great passion, for the Earl of Essex. The thirty-three-
year-old’s exploits at Cadiz had made him the hero of the hour, and thanks
to his relationship with the queen, he had become one of the most powerful
men in the country. Elizabeth was said to be completely infatuated with
him, allowing him all kinds of liberties, including quarrelling with her,
which had never been granted to any other of her courtiers.
Essex’s ambitions were limitless. He was especially keen to dislodge
Burghley’s son Sir Robert Cecil from the cherished position to which he
had succeeded in the queen’s counsels. Essex may in fact have been aiming
to marry the queen. Whatever the truth, when she sent him to Ireland in
1599 to put down the uprising of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, there was
gossip that he intended to seize the throne by turning his Irish troops on
the queen herself. Mysterious meetings with Tyrone after a very
unsuccessful campaign added grist to the rumour mill. When Essex
abandoned his post in Ireland and suddenly appeared one morning in the
queen’s bedroom at her palace of Nonsuch before she was up, Elizabeth
herself believed it was the beginning of a coup. She was only half dressed,
and had not had time to put on the huge red wig which took years off her
age-or the white lead make-up that set her features in a youthful mask.
Wisps of her grey hair were hanging down. In a mixture of fury and fear
she banished Essex from court.
Essex began to keep wilder and wilder company, and in February 1601

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he staged a revolt in London which, though intended to remove the Cecils

from power and reinstate Essex himself at the queen’s side, seemed merely
treasonous. He was tried and executed that same month. There is a story
that Essex from the Tower despatched a great ruby ring the queen had
given him in happier times to ask her to relent. But he sent it via the
Countess of Nottingham and she never handed it on. Two years later when
the countess was dying the queen came to visit her and the countess
confessed what she had done. The queen clutched at her heart as if it would
break and ran out of the room crying, ‘God may forgive you, but I never
can.’ This may be an old fairy tale, but it is certainly true that no more than
a month affer the countess’s death the queen herself also passed away. In
any case as her friends died out Elizabeth had fallen into permanently low
spirits. She did not have the same rapport with her new ministers as she
had had with her old, not even with Cecil’s son Robert. She was
increasingly depressed as she was left alone in old age: ‘Now the wit of the
fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be
found,’ she remarked mournfully to one courtier.
Elizabeth had shown her father’s genius for charming the Commons,
and her own civil servants had Cromwell’s aptitude for managing
Parliaments: Sir Robert Cecil insisted on sitting in the House of Commons
to control it better and many new boroughs were created to return
Elizabeth’s supporters. But by the end of her life the queen no longer had
the energy to be amused as she once had been by the Commons’
outspokenness. A bitterness was growing up between her and the now
large numbers of Puritan MPs whose persecution by the Elizabethan
Church was unremitting. That old
parsimoniousness came into its own: she
spent little so as not to have to call
Parliament. Nevertheless, unlike her suc-
cessors, Elizabeth always knew when to
give in to the Commons. In 1601 she
appeared to be about to abandon the
monopolies system, after years of
complaints in the Commons. A monopoly
allowed the holder to set the price of a
particular product —- Essex had been the
holder of the sweet-wines monopoly until
it was removed from him after his disgrace.
Monopolies were an excellent way of
rewarding favourites and courtiers, but
Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabethan. they weighed very heavily on ordinary
colonist executed by JamesI. people. But when she heard one MP say

305
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The Indian Village of Secoton, painted by John White in 1585 when he visited it
with Sir Richard Grenville.

306
 1558-1603

there would soon be a monopoly in bread, with her usual sparkle she told
the Commons how much she owed them for keeping her in touch with her
kingdom and promised to abolish the system.
And a very glorious kingdom it was in many ways. The explorer Sir
Walter Raleigh had founded the first English settlement in America, which
he called Virginia in honour of the Virgin Queen. The charming and poetic
Raleigh had first come to Elizabeth’s attention when he spread his cloak
beneath her feet to save her embroidered shoes from a puddle. He soon
became one of her intimate circle, falling from favour only when she
discovered he had married without her permission. Raleigh introduced two
new plants to this country, the potato and tobacco, which were cultivated
by the redskinned men he had encountered in America. But while the
potato thrived, particularly in Ireland where because it was cheap and easy
to grow it became the poor man’s food, the English climate was too wet
and cold for tobacco. Nevertheless Sir Walter established a popular taste
for it and, as the colony of Virginia developed, tobacco became one of its
principal exports. Expanding the nation’s consciousness was not without
its risks: when Raleigh first put tobacco in a pipe and lit it as he had seen
the ‘redskins’ do, his servant threw a bucket of water over him thinking he
was on fire.
From 1576 England had its first purpose-built theatre in Halliwell
Street, Shoreditch, in London, east of the City boundary on the north bank
of the Thames. It had been opened by an actor and manager called James
Burbage. When Burbage died in 1597, his sons Cuthbert and Richard (a
famous actor and friend of Shakespeare) moved the entire building upriver
to Bankside, Southwark, where it was rebuilt as the Globe. Having a
proper theatre to work in had an electrifying effect on the volume of plays
written. A host of young men like Christopher Marlowe, whose first play
Tamburlaine the Great was performed in 1587, Ben Jonson and William
Shakespeare were inspired by the open-air theatre to make London a
capital for drama. By the mid-1590s Londoners had thrilled to such
favourites of our day as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s
Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo
and Juliet. Such was Shakespeare’s success that the son of a glover from
Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire became part of the court as a groom
of the chamber. In his many history plays Shakespeare was inspired by the
historical chronicles collected by the printer Raphael Holinshed and
perhaps by the works of the antiquarian William Camden, to become the
Tudors’ bard. Blackening the Yorkists with plays like Richard III played
an important part in Tudor propaganda. From Cranmer onwards the
English language was being fashioned into a newly expressive instrument.
The King James Bible, begun the year after Elizabeth’s death, is a

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 TUDOR

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Title page of the First Folio, the collected plays of William Shakespeare, 1623.

monument to a period which saw an astonishing literary flowering and

ended with the Metaphysical poets.
By February 1603 the great queen who had presided over almost half a
century of excitement and expansion was fading fast. She remained in her
apartments, without eating or sleeping, and refused to change her clothes
or go to bed. Day after day she sat utterly silent, with her finger in her
mouth, on cushions scattered round her bedchamber. When the diminutive
Cecil said with tears in his eyes, ‘Madam, you must to bed,’ she suddenly
stirred and said, ‘Little man! little man! Your father would have known
that “must” is not a word we use to princes.’ But a few hours later she at
last consented to be put into the carved bed, behind whose hangings she
tossed and turned during her final hours. On 23 March she could no longer
speak. As her favourite Archbishop Whitgift prayed on beside her, she
drifted into unconsciousness and died at about two o’clock the following
morning.
Elizabeth had always refused to name her heir, but Sir Robert Cecil

308
 15 58-1603

announced that she had indicated it was to be James VI; he had a chain of
horses waiting every ten miles so that his trusted messenger Sir Robert
Carey could convey the news all the way to Scotland so that the succession
might be ensured as swiftly and as safely as possible. Sixty-two hours later,
James.VI knew that he had become James I of England, and began to make
his way south. The Elizabethan age was over. A troubled era awaited
England when all the contradictions the queen had managed to reconcile
by her powerful personality would break into open warfare. Nevertheless
at the beginning of the seventeenth century England seemed in good shape:
Ireland was subdued, another Spanish attempt to invade England through
Ireland had been defeated by Lord Mountjoy at the Battle of Kinsale in
1600, and Protestantism was gaining hold in Wales after the first
translation of the Bible into Welsh by William Morgan, Bishop of Asaph.
The accession of James I and VI to the English throne achieved what
centuries of English monarchs had sought but had never achieved: the
whole island was united under a single king. More importantly in the sea
of troubles beyond England, he was a Protestant king.

309
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 JamesI
(1603-1625)

From the death of Elizabeth in 1603 until 1714, England was nominally
ruled by the Scottish dynasty, of whom James I was the first king. By the
end of that era she had become the largest trading and colonizing nation
in the world. Her dauntless countrymen, who had been great seamen in
Elizabeth’s reign, turned into colonists under the Stuarts. They settled the
greater part of the east coast of North America and most of the West
Indies, and had trading stations from west Africa to India. As this notable
expansion in trade began to enrich the non-noble or middling classes, the
financiers, the merchants, the businessmen and the lawyers, inevitably it
enhanced the House of Commons’ sense of its own power. Conscious of
the wealth they commanded, these classes desired more of a hand in
government. Yet this conflicted with the new dynasty’s profound belief
that Parliament, the law and the Church should be subservient to the
crown.
During eighty years of convulsion and upheaval, driven by religious
conviction, Englishmen struggled to decide whether the king’s will should
be supreme or Parliament’s. It took a bloody civil war, a republican
experiment after the execution of one king, then the deposition of another,
to settle the question permanently in Parliament’s favour. From William
and Mary onwards the line of succession passed into the gift of Parliament,
and Protestantism became an unconditional qualification of the English
monarchy. By the end of the seventeenth century Protestantism had
become synonymous with the rule of Parliament and liberty, while
Catholicism was identified with tyranny and royal absolutism.
But in the early days of James I’s reign there were few indications of the
conflict that awaited his descendants. The arrival of the House of Stuart on
the English throne unified the kingdom as never before. Thanks to the
recently completed Tudor conquest of Ireland, James I was king of the
western island in fact as well as in name, which his predecessors had never
been. Like Elizabeth, he benefited from the good advice of Robert Cecil
(created Earl of Salisbury in 1605), and he persisted with most of the old
queen’s policies. But there was one considerable difference: James, who

313
 STUART

liked to think of himself as a great

peacemaker, ended the war with Spain as
soon as he came to the throne.
In many ways James’s greatest problem
was that he was Scottish, and the Scots
had been the traditional English enemy
since time immemorial. He was a tactless
Scottish king at that, too ready to offer
niggling criticisms of his magnificent
predecessor though he had depended on
her pension for the previous quarter-
century. James’s sensible idea to unify
—ee “rier -—Sts«éctland and England into one kingdom —
Great Britain as he called it — by having
one Parliament and one legal system was treated with derision by the
English Parliament. Despite efforts to do so under Cromwell, it was not
achieved until a hundred years later, in the reign of Queen Anne. All that
James was able to effect in his lifetime was that every Scots man and
woman born after he ascended the throne became English citizens; he also
invented a flag for the unified country called the Union Jack — the crosses
of St George and St Andrew combined.
Despite the smooth Salisbury’s best efforts, James’s promotion of
Scottish rights got him off on the wrong foot with the court and the
country. So did the very obvious way he reserved his closest friendships for
a gaggle of Scottish favourites who made it clear that they were looking
forward to plucking the rich southern goose for all it was worth. In spite
of his erudition James’s attitude to his new country was perhaps not much
more sophisticated than that of a Scots border raider looking south and
spying the rich lands of the English. On his way south James had already
shown his lack of interest in English customs by hanging a thief without
trial by jury.
The English, who were used to Elizabeth’s commanding, glamorous and
autocratic court, were moreover embarrassed by the informal and
undignified ways of the Scottish king. Though he was the only child of the
beautiful Queen of Scots and the elegant Lord Darnley, James I was not such
a perfect physical specimen. Once-popular descriptions of his grotesque
appearance and personal habits — a tendency to dribble because his tongue
was too long, greasy hands because his skin was too delicate to wash — have
been exposed as satire. But in the seventeenth century, when a king was
supposed to be a warlike and masculine figure, his new subjects were
contemptuous of James having his doublet and breeches specially padded
against daggers because he was so fearful of being assassinated, and they were

314
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scandalized by his habit of always having good-looking young men about

him. A weakness in his legs from childhood rickets meant he liked to lean on
other men’s arms, and this only increased his reputation for effeminacy.
Although initially the English were predisposed in favour of a man as
ruler, and one with a large number of children, James I was incapable of
making the effort to endear himself to his new people. Everything he did
annoyed the English, especially his refusal to attempt to learn or
understand their customs. They also detested his self-important habit of
lecturing all and sundry — he went so far as to describe himself as ‘the great
schoolmaster of the whole land’.
Unlike the usurper Tudors, the Stuarts were highly conscious of their
hereditary right to rule, their family having already been kings of Scotland
for over two centuries. But James I combined scholarship with kingship,
and was an immensely erudite author. His particular interest in theology
drew him to many excited conclusions about the nature of royal
government, which he published at length in books and pamphlets in the
course of his reign. According to the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, a doctrine
James had deduced for himself, the fact that God had provided kings to act
as His representatives on earth entitled them to control every institution in
the kingdom from the laws to Parliament. There was no place for
Parliament in James’s scheme of things unless it was totally subservient to
the king. A king, James earnestly told the House of Commons in one of his
many lectures to that body, ‘is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings
are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but
even by God himself they are called Gods’.
James tended to dilate on this idea at every opportunity, whether at
court or to Parliament, in his irritating Scottish accent. He had it promoted
in Sunday sermons through the English Church. Unfortunately it clashed
with the reality of life in England, which the Scottish king was loath to
understand. Although the autocratic and God-like Tudors clearly believed
in something along the lines of Divine Right, they had been far too cunning
to put it into words,or to do anything without appearing to consult
Parliament. The learned James strangely lacked the Tudor shrewdness for
seeing what was under his nose. Welcome or not, the Tudors had
acknowledged that during the previous three centuries Parliament had
become something like the partner of the king. Thanks to its control of
money bills the king could not govern without it. In return MPs expected
to have their say on most matters in the kingdom —- where, as they would
tell the disbelieving James, there was a tradition of free speech. They had
grown used to debating foreign policy, which fortunately in Elizabeth’s
reign had largely jibed with their deeply Protestant patriotism, and to
running affairs in the Commons with little interference from the king.

5)
 STUART

But James refused to see their point of view. From the beginning to the
end of his reign he managed to offend and be offended every time he met
MPs. The boldness of their demands amazed him and affronted the royal
dignity which he was determined to uphold. For unlike Scotland, where he
had been at the mercy of the Kirk (the Church) and the powerful Scots
nobles who had kidnapped him twice, England had a reputation for strong
monarchs. He spent a good deal of time complaining about the House of
Commons to anyone who would listen, not least the delighted Spanish
ambassador. The highly educated James persisted in addressing MPs in a
condescending fashion as if they were his children, and his inability to see
any point of view other than his own truly merited the French king Henry
IV’s description of him as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.
James I’s reign was almost immediately marked by drama and dis-
content. There were two factions at court, one led by Robert Cecil, the
other by the great Elizabethan gallant, explorer and poet Sir Walter
Raleigh. Raleigh found himself a casualty of James’s favouring Cecil when
he was removed from his prestigious position as Captain of the Guard. In
the heady atmosphere of the new regime the impulsive and now embittered
Raleigh was drawn into a conspiracy known as the Main Plot, to abduct
Cecil.
No sooner had the Main Plot been discovered than the Bye Plot emerged.
Wilder spirits among the Catholics, who were disappointed that the son of
the martyred Mary Queen of Scots had not immediately suspended the
draconian Elizabethan penal laws against them, planned to kidnap James
and replace him on the throne with a Catholic cousin. With the uncovering
of this plot, Catholics were treated even worse than before. While Raleigh
himself was condemned to a life in the Tower for the next thirteen years
(where he wrote A History of the World and much poetry), the very
Puritan House of Commons enforced the penalties against Catholics to a
level which brought them to despair.
Henceforth if any Catholic fell behind in paying the monthly fine of
twenty pounds for not attending Protestant services, they incurred the
crippling penalty of forfeiting two-thirds of their property. As the fines
worked out at £240 a year, which was beyond the reach of men in
respectable but moderate circumstances, quite soon the ordinary Catholic
was ruined. A real element of persecution came into play, and there were
night-time searches of private houses by armed soldiers looking for priests.
The Church of England clergy became spies in their own parishes, required
to-denounce to the authorities all those who were not attending Protestant
service on Sunday in their local church. A final insult awaited Catholics
when they were refused burial in Protestant graveyards.
Even the wealthier Catholics had their lives destroyed for their faith.

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Protestant bishops were bound to excommunicate prominent Catholics in

their dioceses and then certify their names in Chancery, which prevented
Catholics from leaving money to relatives by deed or will. To add to the
Catholics’ terrors, rumours were circulating that in the next Parliament
measures would be taken to ensure the total extirpation of their faith.
Hostile statements from the king and the fierce language of the Bishop of
London in a sermon at St Paul’s Cross seemed proof to the exhausted
Catholics that the rumours were true. It also convinced the extremists
among them that something would have to be done. They decided that
their best hope was to blow up the Puritan Houses of Parliament on 5
November 1605 when the king would open Parliament for that term.
Having kidnapped the king’s daughter Princess Elizabeth, they would
proclaim her queen on condition that the Roman Catholic religion was
restored.
The leader of the plot was a Warwickshire gentleman named Robert
Catesby, but the man who laid the gunpowder trail in the cellars of the
Houses of Parliament on the night of 4 November was Guy Fawkes, a
soldier of fortune who had fought in the Netherlands. From his name
derives the tradition of giving ‘a penny for the old guy’, and it is he who is
burned in effigy every 5 November. Fawkes was discovered crouching by
the barrels of gunpowder with his dark lantern — one of the Catholic peers,
Lord Mounteagle, having warned Salisbury, his conscience stricken by the
thought of his fellow Catholic peers being blown up. It has since become
part of the tradition of the Opening of Parliament for Beefeaters to conduct
a ceremonial search of the cellars.
Appalled by the near miss, the government acted with great swiftness
and savagery. In order to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, the
authorities arrested any Catholic they had suspicions of, without troubling
to obtain proof of their involvement. Guy Fawkes himself was hideously
tortured and the Catholic community was scoured from top to bottom. In
fact the whole country, including ordinary Catholics, was thrown into a
state of shock by the sheer enormity of the assassination attempt. This was
reflected in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, written during the plot’s
aftermath and performed six months later, which reverberates with the
horror of an attack on the Lord’s Anointed. The government was
particularly keen to get its hands on the Jesuits, who ever since their
formation had been regarded as dangerous enemies of the English state.
The authorities moved to arrest three prominent Jesuits who were
important leaders of the Catholic community, Father Gerard, Father
Garnet and Father Greenway.
Although Father Gerard and Father Greenway escaped to the continent,
Father Garnet managed only to get to a house called Hindlip near

g17
 STUART

Worcester which belonged to Thomas Habington, brother-in-law of Lord

Mounteagle. There he lived in fear and trembling, sending protestations of
innocence to Cecil, hiding in one of the many priest-holes constructed a
generation before by a Catholic carpenter sworn to secrecy. Despite Mrs
Habington’s brave attempts to mislead local magistrates who had been
tipped off that he was in their vicinity, Father Garnet was found lying in a
tiny chamber carved out under the hearth of a fireplace.
As a result of the Gunpowder Plot, all Catholics had become deeply
unpopular. But with the arrest and interrogation of Father Garnet the idea
that Catholics were natural traitors took a much stronger grip on the
English imagination, and proved hard to eradicate. Loyalty to foreigners,
whether Philip of Spain or the pope, had put a question mark over the
Catholic community ever since England turned Protestant. When it
emerged that Garnet had actually known about the plan to blow up
Parliament because under the seal of the confessional another priest had
told him of Catesby’s own confession three months earlier, public opinion
turned even more dramatically against Catholics, many of whom decided
to seek a less hostile environment on the continent.
New laws forbade Catholics to appear at court or to dwell within ten
miles of the boundaries of London. They could not move more than five
miles from home without a special licence which had to be signed by four
neighbouring magistrates. A career in the professions was barred to them
— there could be no Catholic doctors, surgeons, lawyers, executors,
guardians, judges or members of any town corporation. To remain a
Catholic meant in effect renouncing society or refusing to be part of it —
hence the word ‘recusant’ used of old Catholic families (from the Latin
verb recusare, which means to refuse). And those recusant families clung
on somehow to their religion, but in the process became very poor and
unworldly and remained so for over two centuries, until the Catholic
Emancipation Act in 1829.
Enormous fines were imposed if a child was not baptized into the
Protestant faith within a month of its birth. James’s royal favourites and
the Exchequer soon got in the habit of exploiting Catholic recusant estates
as a useful source of income, eagerly enforcing sequestration of two-thirds
of their property for non-payment of fines. That worldlywise king Henry
IV warned James I from across the Channel that religion was ‘a flame
which burns with increasing fierceness in proportion to the violence used
to extinguish it’, and that such severe laws would lay him open to worse
plots. But, strange to say, it did not. Catholics, perhaps because their
religion encouraged them to turn the other cheek, sank meekly into second-
class citizenship.
In fact it was from the Puritans that James had most to fear. Extremely

318
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well represented in the unruly House of Commons, they had the boldness
to accost the new king on his journey south from Scotland to take up his
new position, presenting what is called the Millenary Petition because it
was signed by a thousand Puritans. This requested the king to end the
Elizabethan oppression of their beliefs through the enforcement of
uniformity and to make changes to the prayer book. Confident of his
ability to debate with them and pleased with his theological learning James
promised that the next year there would be a conference to debate all these
issues. But when the meeting took place at Hampton Court the Puritan
divines realized they had picked the wrong audience. Despite or perhaps
because of-his fierce Scots Presbyterian background, the new king was just
as much the enemy of all attempts to introduce the Presbyterian system
(from ‘presbyter’, the Greek for elder) to England as Elizabeth had been. In
fact James was mightily in favour of bishops as a prop of royal authority,
and had every intention of reintroducing them to Scotland. As he remarked
to the divines, ‘Scottish Presbytery agreeth as well with monarchy as God
with the devil.’ He would put it even more pithily in his summing up of the
High Church position: ‘No bishop, no king.’
The best the Puritans got out of the king was the decision to undertake
a new translation of the Bible. In 1611 the beautiful Authorized Version,
the product of forty-seven scholars, which we know as the King James
Bible became the universally preferred version in Protestant services and

JERUSALEM
CHAMBER,

The Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey where part of the King James
Authorized Version of the Bible was written.

319
 STUART

Protestant homes. Using much of William Tyndale’s wording, it is a

remarkable piece of scholarship, and remains one of the masterpieces of
English literature, its phrasing having had an incalculable effect on the
English language.
To all the Puritans’ pleas for a more solemn way of life, especially on the
Sabbath, the king made it clear that this was not what he had in mind for
England. Indeed under him the Church of England began to take on a
distinctly conservative tinge, especially when Richard Bancroft became
Archbishop of Canterbury after Whitgift’s
death. But the greatest exponent of
movement back towards the Catholicism
of Henry VIII’s time was William Laud,
who became Bishop of London, and at last
in 14633, under James’s son Charles I,
Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thanks to Laud’s influence the Church
of England revolted against the over-
whelming Calvinism of the Puritans.
Instead it adopted the ideas of a Dutch
professor named Arminius which stressed
its fellowship with the ancient Church at
Rome. Over the next twenty years as the
battle for authority was waged between
Parliament and king, Puritans tended to
gravitate towards joining the House of
PURIPAN COSTUM
Commons and pressing for their rights
there, while the Church of England became the leading supporter of royal
autocracy. Led by their bishops, parish priests preached that it was wrong
to resist a ruler who was appointed by God and above the law. Thus
religious and constitutional issues became completely interwoven as the
Stuart kings made a habit of overriding the law of the land and ruling
without Parliament.
It was really only around the time of Salisbury’s death in 1612 that
James’s autocratic tendencies came more and more to the fore and his
struggle to extend his power at the expense of Parliamentary liberties
began in earnest. There had been some acrimonious skirmishes earlier in
the reign: James was angered and amazed by Parliament’s refusal in 1607
to give Scotsmen the full rights of Englishmen or to agree to freedom of
trade between the two countries. He was affronted when the Commons
told him in no uncertain terms that his insufficiently Protestant foreign
policy and his peace with Spain dismayed them, a peace made more suspect
by his wife Anne of Denmark’s known Catholicism. James’s attempt to
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interfere in the election in Buckinghamshire of a felon named Shirley on the

ground that all privileges derived from the king was successfully resisted.
The Commons sent him such a vehement and furious petition insisting that
its ancient liberties such as the right to free election had nothing to do with
the royal power and were the longstanding birthright of the English people
that he backed off. Under Elizabeth the Commons would never have dared
address the monarch in this fashion, but James’s being a foreigner gave it
a chance to assert itself, and indeed at first it attributed his behaviour to his
ignorance of the way the country worked.
But seven years into his reign the king was no longer so foreign and he
was much, less timorous. By 1610 he had had enough of Parliament’s
hectoring him, and was determined to raise his income. Following a
decision in the courts that it was legal for the king to change the rates of
customs charges without reference to Parliament, James took the
opportunity to issue a whole new slew of taxes on his own authority. And
when there was an outcry from the Commons he simply closed Parliament
down. It would become the pattern in the reigns of both James and his son
Charles to live by raising money outside Parliament so as not to have to
deal with the Commons. In 1614 James tried to manage it through what
were called ‘Undertakers’, MPs who would attempt to influence votes on
the king’s behalf, but this ‘Addled Parliament’ was so enraged by the
Undertakers and recalcitrant in its attitudes that he dissolved it after three
weeks. For most of the next eleven years he ruled without Parliament.
Nevertheless, the king could not rule without money. At first he resorted
to bribing gentlemen to become baronets if they gave him a thousand
pounds; if they paid ro,ocoo pounds they could become lords. But his
extravagant lifestyle forced him into more desperate courses. When the
Spanish ambassador Gondomar dangled the prospect of a six-figure
marriage dowry if James’s second son Charles married a Spanish infanta,
the king became increasingly fixated on the thought of the great dowry
which would get him the income to enable him never to call Parliament
again — and he grew obsessed with developing a foreign policy to please
Spain. The death of his elder son, the talented, deeply Protestant and
popular Prince Henry, in the same year that Salisbury died, removed a last
restraining influence on the king, for the new Prince of Wales, Prince
Charles, was shy and retiring, and spoke with a stammer. Disregarding the
fervent anti-Spanish feeling in England, James allowed Gondomar to
become one of his most influential advisers.
For all his pomposity, James was also frivolous and rather lazy. He
preferred to spend most of his time hunting and, after Salisbury’s death,
left government business in the hands of a stream of inappropriate
favourites like Robert Ker, Viscount Rochester. Ker was a handsome

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aristocrat chosen like all James’s favourites for his looks rather than his
grasp of English foreign policy. Leading a hermetically sealed existence at
the court, the Earl of Somerset (as he became in 1613) saw nothing wrong
with the growth of Spanish power at court and in fact encouraged it.
Somerset and his notorious wife Frances soon involved James in scandal
when they were both tried in the House of Lords for the murder of Sir
Thomas Overbury. Though both were found guilty and condemned to
death, even greater odium was incurred when the king used his royal
powers to pardon and free them.
The sense that English standards were being unacceptably lowered and
corrupted was reinforced when in 1616 the lord chief justice of the Court
of Common Pleas, Sir Edward Coke, was dismissed for trying to prevent
the king from interfering in law cases. According to James, divine right
entitled him to suspend the law when it suited him. He was backed up by
his lord chancellor, the ambitious Sir Francis Bacon, who believed that
judges should be the supporters of the royal prerogative or will. But Coke,
who was immensely influential among lawyers and MPs both in his
lifetime and after, had arrived at the conclusion from his study of
jurisprudence that even the king should be subject to the common law.
The last nail in the coffin of James’s reputation was the execution in
1618 of the Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh on trumped-up charges
relating to the Main Plot of fifteen years before. The real reason Raleigh,
the last relic of the golden years of Elizabethan England, was executed was
to please Spain. To quench James’s thirst for gold Raleigh had been
released from the Tower to search for the treasure said to be at the bottom
of a lake in the fabled land of El Dorado, somewhere in Guiana, and the
old Elizabethan had been unable to resist burning a Spanish settlement that
was blocking his route. It was now evident that the king would do anything
to placate the Spanish. English policy seemed to be in the hands of the
Spanish ambassador.
How harmful this was was thrown into relief at the outset of the Thirty
Years War, which began in 1618. James’s son-in-law Frederick, the Elector
Palatine of the Rhine in Germany and a notable Protestant, was offered the
crown of Protestant Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic) in place of the
Catholic Habsburg overlord the emperor Ferdinand II. At the battle of the
White Mountain in 1620 Frederick and the Bohemians were defeated, and
with the Spanish having invaded the Palatinate, he and James’s daughter
Elizabeth now found themselves without a home. Their plight aroused
enormous popular interest in England. By 1622 the Commons was
formally petitioning for war with Spain, for a Protestant marriage to be
arranged for Prince Charles, and for further penal laws to be imposed on
Catholics. In spite of all these straws in the wind, James remained so

522
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anxious to ally himself with wealthy Spain and arrange the ever tantalizing
Spanish marriage for which he had sacrificed Raleigh that he continued to
negotiate with Gondomar. He believed that only by such means could the
Spanish be persuaded to withdraw from the Palatinate and restore
Frederick to his throne.
Meanwhile accurate rumours began to
circulate that the price to be paid for the
Spanish infanta was the conversion of
England by the back door: the conditions
laid down by Spain were that the marriage
was to be no hole-and-corner affair. It had
to have the approval of Parliament, and
the penal laws against Catholics had to
have been suspended for three years before
it could take place. All the children of the
marriage were to be brought up as
Catholics, and their Catholicism would
not interfere with their right to the throne.
Public feeling deepened against the king
with the rise of his new favourite, the vain
George Villiers, Duke of and frivolous Duke of Buckingham, whose
Buckingham, the unpopular —_notoriety eclipsed even that of the Somersets
favourite of both James and his
ar, eet. and ae li
whose willingness 5
to accep ann es
became a byword. By the end of James’s
reign the all-controlling Buckingham seemed to be the real ruler of England,
not least because he was coming to have just as great an influence over the
future king Charles I as over his father. Undeterred by the popular hostility to
the Spanish marriage, in 1623 Buckingham and Charles set off in disguise on
a madcap romantic adventure to speed up negotiations which had been
hovering in the balance for eight years and bring back the Spanish infanta.
But neither the glamorous Buckingham nor the small, nervous Charles had
any success in Madrid. There were just more delays while the stiff Spanish
court made it clear that it was displeased by the lack of formality of the young
Stuart and his friend and laid down further conditions for the Catholic
education of the royal children and the composition of the infanta’s personal
household: a bishop and no fewer than twenty priests were to be constantly
in attendance.
In the end the marriage came to nothing, owing to the predicament of
Charles’s sister Elizabeth (known as the Winter Queen after her brief
seasonal reign in Bohemia). Although James clearly could not quite bring
himself to sacrifice the Spanish marriage for his daughter’s happiness, his
son Charles could. When the Prince of Wales finally asked point-blank

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whether Spain would fight the emperor Ferdinand to restore the Palatinate,
and was given the answer no, Charles lost his temper. To the great relief of
the English public he sailed home without the infanta, and now that
diplomacy had failed was furiously determined on war to save his sister.
The House of Commons, which had been dreading the Spanish match
for years, fearing that it would spell the end to Protestantism both in
England and abroad, delightedly voted supplies. An alliance against Spain
was made with France, for Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief adviser,
had ambitions to see his country advance at the expense of the Habsburg
influence in Spain and Austria. Instead of the infanta the Prince of Wales
was engaged to Henrietta Maria, the French king’s sister, who like the king
was small, but gay and spirited.
Nevertheless, the attempts to send help to the Palatinate in 1624 were
unsuccessful. The expedition did not go well, even with French help under
the leadership of the German soldier of fortune Count Mansfeld. It was
poorly prepared, without proper quartermastering, so that food supplies
and clothing were inadequate and thousands of soldiers died without even
fighting. Its failure seemed of a piece with the general hopelessness of the
administration and with its poor calibre, given that government positions
were secured by bribes to Buckingham. The Commons longed to call the
gorgeous favourite before them to account for his actions, but he was
untouchable.
Instead James I’s reign drew to an end with further quarrels: the
Commons once more demanded a check to the monopoly system, which in
the licensing of public houses was becoming a serious source of income for
royal courtiers. The Commons also impeached the lord chancellor Sir
Francis Bacon for taking bribes. Bacon admitted the offences, resigned and
was imprisoned, only to be released by James — who, whatever his failings
as a king, was kind to his friends. The king died in March 1625, leaving
the Commons determined to remove Buckingham from power.
Not all was gloom, though, for the new king. The crown might be
beleaguered in Parliament but by the beginning of Charles I’s reign English
rule extended firmly over lands which had been mere spaces on
Elizabethan maps. And for the first time, under the rule of Charles Blount,
Ireland had a peace that held, aided by a series of strategically sited forts
from Sligo Bay in the north-west to Carrick Fergus on Belfast Loch. Blount,
who was rewarded with the title Earl of Mountjoy, took over from Essex
as lord deputy in Ireland in 1600 and, once Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone
and Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell had been forced to seek refuge in
France — in what is known as the Flight of the Earls — the real subjugation
of Ireland began. In 1610 Tyrone’s lands were divided among mainly Scots
Presbyterian settlers as a Protestant garrison in what is called the Ulster

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 1603-1625

Plantation, confirming Mountjoy’s thoroughgoing conquest of the

country. They were given the fertile eastern parts, while the barren and
wild north-west was all that was allowed to the native inhabitants. The
new settlers were bitterly resented by the old Irish and the Norman Irish;
relations between the new Ulstermen and the old would be the source of
much trouble right down to the present day.
Elizabeth I would have known about the East India Company now
flourishing on the west coast of India because, like the trading stations on
the west coast of Africa in Gambia and Sierra Leone, it had been founded
in her reign. In 1600 the Company had set out to take a share in the spice
trade in the East Indies or Malay Archipelago. The Dutch had arrived five
years earlier and were the area’s dominant presence, having seized most of
the old Portuguese settlements as part of their war with Spain, so the
English chose to concentrate on the mainland of India. Thanks to the good
relations achieved by the diplomat Sir Thomas Rowe with the Moghal
emperor, who ruled most of India by 1612, the East India Company had
concessions in southern India at Surat and Madras and was setting up
factories (the seventeenth-century term for trading posts). Such small
beginnings were the starting point for the British Empire in India.
But the most striking developments of all in James’s reign were the
English settlements planted in America after the disappointments of
Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke in Virginia. Urged on by the popularizing
writings of Richard Hakluyt, especially his book relating Elizabethan
voyages of discovery, Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of
the English Nation, England woke up to the possibilities of the New
World, which was already resounding to Spanish, French and Dutch
accents. Most of the English settlers in the first part of the seventeenth
century were Puritans, who founded the group of colonies several hundred
miles north of Virginia known collectively as New England, where they
could worship after their own fashion.
A group of Separatists from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire began the
settlement of New England when they set sail in the Mayflower and
founded Plymouth colony in 1620. In the decade preceding the Civil War,
perhaps as many as 5,000 Englishmen and women a year emigrated to
Plymouth’s neighbouring colony of Massachusetts, established in 1629 by
a group of Puritan lawyers led by John Winthrop as a reaction against the
increasingly ferocious measures taken by Charles I and Archbishop Laud
to wipe Puritan practice from the face of England. Other colonies along the
eastern seaboard followed during Charles’s reign, including Vermont,
Connecticut and Rhode Island. The penalties against Catholics inspired
Lord Baltimore to establish the Catholic colony of Maryland in 1632 just
north of Virginia, named in honour of Charles I’s wife Queen Henrietta

ee)
 STUART

Maria. While the northerners depended on exporting fish and skins for
their livelihood, the southerners soon depended on importing African
slaves from the English traders on the west coast to work their large
tobacco and cotton plantations, since like the Spanish they believed their
European constitutions prevented them from labouring in the humid heat.
A Virginian ship washed up on an island began the settlement of the
Bermudas in 1609 and many islands in the Caribbean followed. There too
the English settlers began to import African slaves to work their
plantations. Since the ancient Greeks, honey had been used for sweetening,
but the discovery of sugar cane and its superior taste resulted in the
Caribbean specializing in cultivating it. The slave trade begun by Jack
Hawkins developed into a longstanding and degrading institution.
Manufactures from England such as textiles were sold to west Africa in
exchange for slaves, who were then transported in the dangerously
unhealthy confines of slave ships to the West Indies and the southern
colonies such as Virginia. To pay for the slaves sugar, cotton and tobacco
were sent back to England’s most important ports, Bristol and Liverpool.
Many respectable English merchant families made their fortunes in this
convenient triangular trade.
But though all these developments were changing the lives of the English
— so that by the end of the century Englishwomen in the most obscure parts
of the country could sweeten their new drink, tea, with West Indian sugar
while their husbands and brothers smoked pipes of American tobacco — the
new king had immediate problems close at hand. Though Charles I disliked
Parliament as much as his father had done, he was at its mercy, for he
needed supplies to pay for the continuing war against Spain.

3:26
 Charles I
(1625-1649)

Divine Right (1625-1642)

Charles I was grave, slow in thought and, owing to a speech impediment,
no less slow in conversation. Though he lacked his father’s great intellect,
he had a wonderful eye and was a connoisseur of the arts. Thanks to him
the royal family began a collection of works by superb contemporary
painters such as the Dutchman Peter Paul Rubens, whom Charles
commissioned to execute the magnificent vision of James I on the ceiling of
the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. Charles also acquired old master
pictures like the Raphael and Leonardo cartoons now at Windsor and in
the National Gallery. He was the patron of the Italianate architect Inigo
Jones, who built the exquisitely simple Queen’s House at Greenwich and
many other beautiful classical buildings. Jones introduced the Palladian
style of architecture into England, with transforming effects on the country
houses of the era — Wilton, near Salisbury, with its double cube room, is
the most famous example.
Jones also designed many masques for
Henrietta Maria to act in. The French
queen, who was small and childlike,
delighted in acting for the king with her
ladies. These Renaissance inventions were
fantastic court entertainments, almost like
plays, with elaborate costumes, and with
lines usually written by the playwright Ben
Jonson. Despite growing Puritan dis-
approval of play-acting, vehemently
expressed in sermons and pamphlets,
Charles’s court was famous for its
amateur theatricals. These masques tend-
ed to have for their theme the divine
majesty of the king, which had a special Charles I’s wife, Queen
appeal to Charles as he was intensely Henrietta Maria, daughter of
religious. He became close friends with the EON INAS BUS

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rising star of the Church of England William Laud, and appointed him
Bishop of London in 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Laud
reinforced Charles’s sense of the monarch as the Lord’s Anointed, whose
views could not be questioned, and he even went down to the Houses of
Parliament to put this view across during Charles’s first Parliament.
This Parliament, no less than those of James I, was turbulent and
contentious. The antagonism between king and Commons continued into
Charles’s reign without a break. On behalf of his sister Elizabeth, Charles
had agreed to fund a new military expedition by his uncle King Christian
of Denmark against the Catholic League in Germany. But though he
expected to be granted supplies for a popular war, the Commons was in a
very belligerent mood and refused to grant the new king customs duties for
life as was traditional at the beginning of a new reign — they would be for
one year only. MPs also demanded that Buckingham be sacked, suggesting
that Charles look back to the wise behaviour of Elizabeth, who had relied
on the advice of a council rather than the rule of favourites. Though
Charles dismissed Parliament for its insulting behaviour, he soon had to
recall it because of increasing foreign difficulties. A quarrel over the
treatment of the Huguenots in France meant that Charles was also at war
with his French brother-in-law Louis XIII, who had been England’s ally
against the Habsburgs.
The atmosphere at his second Parliament was extremely frosty. At
Buckingham’s suggestion, the noisier and more critical MPs like the former
chief justice Sir Edward Coke and the Yorkshire landowner Sir Thomas
Wentworth were made sheriffs by royal command, which meant that they
could no longer attend the Commons. But gagging them made no difference
to the temper of the House; it was now led by a gifted orator, the Cornish
baronet Sir John Eliot. The Commons continued to call for Buckingham’s
impeachment, so Charles actually went down to Westminster to berate MPs
for questioning his servants, particularly one who was so close to him. Once
again Charles dismissed Parliament, warning MPs that whether it was
called at all was entirely up to him, and he further antagonized them by
temporarily imprisoning Eliot. Meanwhile Charles’s inability to manage
Parliament prevented England from committing troops to Christian of
Denmark against the German Catholics, with the result that Christian and
his army had been comprehensively defeated.
But Charles was obstinately determined not to be beaten by the
Commons. More sensible rulers would have been forced by his dire
financial and political situation to retreat from any warlike activities.
Egged on by the high-handed and arrogant Buckingham, Charles instead
cranked up the hostilities with France to a higher level by going to the
rescue of the rebellious Huguenots at western France’s port of La Rochelle.

328
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Since Parliament had been dissolved, he decided to resort to yet another

unparliamentary tax to raise money for the wars. The method he used was
a forced loan, imposed on all those liable to pay tax. Hundreds of the most
respectable citizens throughout the country, men of wealth and position,
went to prison rather than submit. Within weeks came a legal challenge
from five knights of the shire. In what is known as Darnell’s case, they
demanded to know of what crime they were accused, asking to be released
through the well-known common law writ or process of habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus forced anyone holding any prisoner to produce him in front
of a judge and describe his offence; if the judge did not accept that the
alleged offence was a crime, the prisoner had to be released. But although
the judges in Darnell’s case ruled in favour of returning the knights to
prison, the only reason given for their incarceration was that it was the
king’s command, which in itself seemed a poor reason and a tyrannical
precedent.
Nevertheless, even with the forced loans there were still insufficient
funds for the war against Louis XIII, and in 1628 Charles was once again
forced to recall Parliament. The Commons was determined to make it clear
to the king that he could not carry on in the way he had been. The more
extreme members presented the king with a very strongly worded
denunciation of his policies in a protest entitled the Petition of Right.
Masterminded by the MPs Sir Edward Coke, Sir John Eliot and the country
landowner John Pym, it is generally considered by historians to be one of
the most significant constitutional documents of English history. The
Petition of Right informed Charles just what the law was regarding ‘the
rights and liberties of the subject’, and demanded an end to what its
authors described as all the king’s illegal innovations. If the king would not
assent to the Petition, the Commons said they would impeach
Buckingham. This threat secured the royal assent, and in return Charles
got the supplies he had asked for.
These were the mere opening shots in what became constant warfare.
Buckingham, now Lord High Admiral of England, was never brought
before the Commons. Later that year, to immense popular delight, he was
murdered in Portsmouth by a Puritan madman while supervising ships to
go to the aid of La Rochelle. But the House of Commons was not done yet.
In its next session in 1629 it launched yet another assault upon the king.
This time it attacked his religious advisers, Sir John Eliot producing a bill
that condemned anyone who allowed Arminianism or any innovations in
religion (meaning Roman Catholicism), or paid customs dues without
Parliament’s permission.
Under Laud’s influence the Church of England had become completely
identified with Charles’s political policies. From every pulpit Anglican

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priests preached Divine Right and the duty of non-resistance to the king.
Moreover the thoroughgoing way in which Laud was restoring the
Church’s ceremonies to the rituals of Henry VIII's time (what is now
known as High Church), such as bowing at the name of Jesus, convinced
most Puritans that he was on the point of returning England to Rome. In
fact Laud had no such intention. But his hatred of Puritans and his
unqualified support for a king who to contemporary eyes was a tyrant
aroused the widespread conviction that the-soon-to-be-reintroduced
Roman Catholicism would be the natural handmaiden of absolutism and
oppression. These fears were exacerbated by rumours that the price of
Henrietta Maria’s marriage had been a promise to suspend the penal laws
against Catholics. This had indeed been the case, though that secret part of
the marriage treaty had not been fulfilled. Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s
habit of openly worshipping at her own Roman Catholic chapel within the
Palace of Whitehall did nothing to calm the situation.
When Charles heard that, despite his assenting to the Petition of Right,
the debates at Westminster were getting completely out of hand, and that
Laud, his new Bishop of London, was being attacked as a traitor, he sent
a message from Whitehall to order the speaker of the House of Commons
to halt the proceedings. But the Commons shut the door in the face of the
king’s messenger. Astonishingly, instead of the MPs leaving the chamber as
the speaker had been trying to get them to do, two strong young MPs
Holles and Valentine got the speaker by the arms and held him down in his
chair while the House voted through Eliot’s motions. By the time the king’s
troops arrived from Whitehall to break down the doors, it was too late.
The motion had been passed. But as a
result of this behaviour Parliament was
once again dissolved. Sir John Eliot was
imprisoned in the Tower of London
where he died three years later, his poor
treatment having fatally aggravated his
consumption.
In the fight between Parliament and
the king, the gloves were now well and
truly off. For eleven years, up to 1640,
Charles managed to rule without calling
Parliament. After his past errors he had
enough common sense to realize that he
could~ not both govern’ without
Parliament and carry on two wars
William Laud, Archbishop of
abroad. He therefore =made peace with Canterbury under Charles I before
both France and Spain and_ utterly the Civil War.

330
 1625-1649

abandoned his sister, brother-in-law and the Protestant cause on the

continent, where the immensely bloody Thirty Years War continued to
rage until 1648.
The king’s chief advisers in this period were Bishop Laud (Archbishop of
Canterbury from 1633) and Sir Thomas Wentworth. The immensely
efficient and hardworking Wentworth had been offended by what he
considered to be the revolutionary new rights the Commons was claiming
over the king. With his advice Charles began to rule through the
prerogative courts, where the conventions of the common law were not
observed, such as the Court of Star Chamber, the Council of the North
(which functioned as a sort of northern Star Chamber) and the Court of
High Commission, which Laud used vigorously to enforce uniformity in
the Church against the Puritan clergy.
Laud was determined to wipe out Puritanism. It was, he said
prophetically, ‘a wolf held by the ears’ waiting only to spring. During his
Primacy he and his supporters visited every single diocese in England to test
the parish clergy’s beliefs and their use of ritual. Where the clergy failed
they were sent before the Court of High Commission to be imprisoned and
savagely punished — and savage was the only word to describe their
treatment. William Prynne, a Puritan lawyer and the author of Histriomax,
a book that attacked play-acting as immoral — which was seen as a thinly
veiled attack on the queen — was tortured, branded with hot irons and had
his ears cut off. It was during these years that perhaps 30,000 Puritans,
confronted by such treatment and being unable to worship as they pleased,
emigrated with their families to the freedom of America.
Laud and Wentworth, who were intimate friends, both believed that
what England needed were effective reforms in every department of state.
They called their attempt to bring greater efficiency to Church and state
‘thorough’ government. Wentworth, who had tried out ‘thorough’ as
president of the Council of the North, was sent to Ireland to bring order to
the country and implement Laud’s obedience to episcopal rule there. His
strongarm tactics were just as unpopular as Laud’s, and he managed to
alienate every faction in the country.
The absence of Parliament and the oppression of the Church bred an
atmosphere of the greatest dissatisfaction in England, her inhabitants being
unused to having no voice in the nation’s affairs. English monarchs had
always needed the goodwill of the local landowners and merchants to act
as unpaid judges and magistrates and help keep order in the countryside,
but now in the 1630s the machinery of government began to break down
as many of the gentry refused to serve Charles I.
Furthermore, as the years went by, it looked as if Parliament might
remain in abeyance indefinitely. Charles proved superb at finding

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obscure laws that could be revived to provide substitute taxes, such as the
feudal relic that any man owning over a certain acreage without being
dubbed a knight could be fined. Reasons were found to return some of
the old pre-Reformation Church lands to the king, enraging not a few
landowners, as did extending the royal forest and subsuming valuable
land. Charles craftily increased the customs duties of tonnage and
poundage, though Parliament had granted him these taxes only for the
first year of his reign.
It was not until 1634 that the king revived the old ship money levy. In
theory this ancient right was levied on all maritime towns and ports to
build more ships in time of danger. Certainly the Royal Navy did need to
build more ships to protect England against the increasingly hostile Dutch
navy, but on the whole this tax was raised only during wartime, and
England was not at war. The seaport towns, their merchants and
corporations, nonetheless paid up without a murmur, but the following
year, when the king extended ship money to inland districts, it became
clear that this was tax by the back door.
A wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner named John Hampden, who
was an old friend of Sir John Eliot as well as a former MP, refused to pay
ship money, and in 1638 his case was brought before the courts. Although
the ship money was pronounced perfectly legal by the judiciary,
Hampden’s case and Hampden himself sharpened the mounting anger
against the king’s government. It was not, however, in England but in
Scotland that the discontent was to first manifest itself in revolution.

The home of John Hampden, leader of the Parliamentary opposition to Charles I.

220
»
 1625-1649

Most unwisely, though inevitably in view of ‘thorough’, Charles and

Laud had turned their attention to reforming religious practices in
Scotland and bringing them into line with England’s. They decided that the
Scots would benefit from a new prayer book, even though the Scots were
just like the English Puritans in that they preferred to invent prayers as they
went along. A storm now burst about their ears. At the first reading of the
new prayer book at St Giles in Edinburgh there was very nearly a riot when
the service began. A footstool was hurled at the Dean of St Giles by a
woman named Jenny Geddes, who became a national heroine, and the
sedate streets of Edinburgh became the scene of wild civil disorder which
spread throughout Scotland. In March 1638 most of the nation signed a
document called the National Covenant which bound all its signatories to
defend the true reformed religion based on interpretation of the Gospel and
to resist papistry.

St Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, where the Scottish < il

rebellion against Charles I began, after the reading |
of the new prayer book in 1637.

Angry messages flew back and forth across the border from a newly
created committee of prominent Scotsmen led by the Earl of Argyll and the
Earl of Montrose. Known as the Tables it became in effect the government
of Scotland, committed to protecting Scots Presbyterianism. Although
Charles now withdrew the prayer book, it was too late. A General
Assembly of the Church had met at Glasgow, abolished the bishops whom

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James had introduced and Charles had reinforced, and declared that the
king had no right to interfere in the Church of Scotland. It paid no
attention to Charles’s order from London that the Assembly was to
dissolve itself.
A more sensible king would have backed off at this point but Charles
was infuriated by the challenge to the royal authority by Scottish subjects.
To him there was no question but that he must go to war against the Scots,
and the standoff between himself and the Scots in the summer of 1639 is
called the First Bishops’ War. But since he had no army and no Parliament
to raise money for one, he could only appeal to the ancient hatred of the
English for the Scots, and the angry mood the English were in meant he
raised very few that way. He was rapidly forced to make peace, and by the
Treaty of Berwick he allowed a free parliament and General Assembly of
the Church to thrash out their discontents.
But when it became clear that the Scots still had no intention of deviating
from their course of maintaining the Covenant, abolishing the prayer book
and getting rid of the bishops, for Charles the issue meant war. He dissolved
their gatherings and recalled Wentworth (newly created Earl of Strafford)
from Ireland. Strafford nobly lent the king a great deal of money of his own
and managed to convince him that the only way he could raise enough
money to fight the Scots was by recalling Parliament. In April 1640 the first
Parliament for eleven years came together. Charles had hoped to use the
Scottish threat of invasion to make MPs do his bidding. But having been
denied free speech for so long, the Commons was not in the mood for
obedience. Strafford counselled the king to listen to its demands and, in
particular, to end ship money. But after three weeks Charles dismissed what
is known as the Short Parliament and began the Second Bishops’ War.
Without the money from Parliament to raise a proper army, the king had
to rely on borrowing more money from friends. The Second Bishops’ War
ended in a rout, with the Scots army camped in the northern English
counties as far south as Newcastle. With general disaffection throughout
England, the king was eventually forced to make a very expensive truce
with the Scots. He had to pay them the then enormous sum of £25,000,
and to summon a new Parliament to meet on 3 November 1640.
The Long Parliament as it was called would endure in various guises for
the next twenty years. Given the continued presence of the Scots army in
Northumberland and Durham - with which it is almost certain Pym was
secretly in communication — the king was powerless. Unless he made
concessions to Parliament and thus could raise money for an army to drive
out the Scots, they would advance further into England. In the first session
both the pillars of Charles’s government, Strafford and Laud, were
arrested for treason and impeached — Laud was accused of conspiring

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illegally to return the Church of England to Rome and Strafford of plotting

to overthrow Parliamentary government.
While the Lords hesitated over whether Strafford could really be said to
have committed treason when treason was a crime against the king and
Strafford was the king’s faithful minister, the Commons saw that the trial
might end in Strafford being released and the slippery king get away again.
One of the more violent Puritans, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, jumped to his feet
and demanded a Bill of Attainder against Strafford — in other words, that
he be condemned to death without trial. Although the Lords hesitated
again, the discovery of an apparent plot by the king and queen to ask the
northern army to save Strafford hastened his end. Hysteria was rising
uncontrollably in London, encouraged by Pym. He announced that Queen
Henrietta Maria had sent for French soldiers who would shortly be landing
at Portsmouth.
Throughout the proceedings against him Strafford had kept his head,
urging the king to counter-attack by
impeaching the Puritan leaders for their
treasonous letters to the Scots Covenanters.
But the king was apparently paralysed by
the awfulness of his predicament. He sat
watching Strafford’s trial, staring vacantly
into space for much of the time, his face
working nervously. Beside him was his son,
the ten-year-old Prince of Wales. As the
Cityof London trained armed bands for
the coming crisis, and Parliament passed
the Attainder against Strafford, Charles
hesitated.
He alone could have saved his devoted
servant from these trumped-up charges by
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of refusing to sign the bill. Perhaps he should
Strafford, with Laud one of — have done so, because he had constantly
Charles I’s chief supporters, assured Strafford that he should have no
who was impeached and
executedin 1641 by orderof fear, that he would never be executed
the Commons. because the king would protect him. Ever
the good servant, Strafford wrote to the
king saying that he would willingly forgive him for his death, ‘if it leads to
better times’. Secretly he never really thought it would come to it. But with
violent men patrolling the streets and fears for his wife and children,
Charles made his decision. He threw Strafford to the lions. The king had
already offered never to employ Strafford in a confidential capacity again
and had even suggested life imprisonment, but now he signed the Attainder.

33:5
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Charles never forgave himself for it and believed that his subsequent ill
luck was the result of his betrayal. He even sent the young Prince of Wales
with a message down to Westminster after he had signed the Attainder,
pleading for Strafford’s life. But it was too late. Strafford shook his head
with disbelief when he heard that he was to die. As he went out to his
execution at Tower Hill on 12 May 1641, he was heard to say, “Put not
your trust in princes.’ Imprisoned in the Tower Archbishop Laud heard the
drum roll and then the sudden thud as Strafford was beheaded in front of
200,000 people. He wrote bitterly that Charles was a prince ‘who knew
not how to be or to be made great’. But as one contemptuous Puritan
remarked brutally, ‘Stone dead hath no fellow,’ and that summed up the
reactions of the Puritans in the House of Commons.
Robbed of his two chief counsellors, the king had to rely on the bad
advice of the politically inept Queen Henrietta Maria. As a foreigner she
was incapable of appreciating that the Long Parliament was becoming the
senior partner in government throughout 1641. Now that Strafford was
dead and Laud as good as, the Commons concentrated on destroying all
the instruments of government Charles had used during what was
described as the eleven-year tyranny. The judges who in 1629 had
pronounced forced loans to be legal were committed for trial. All the king’s
methods of raising taxes without Parliament such as ship money, tonnage
and poundage were pronounced illegal and unconstitutional. All the
prerogative courts were destroyed, the Star Chamber, the Council of the
North and the hated Court of High Commission. Prynne was released,
without his ears but otherwise hale and hearty. By the Triennial Act, it was
ordered that no more than three years should elapse between Parliaments
and elections were to be held whether the king had summoned Parliament
or not.
However, when by the Root and Branch Bill the Commons set about
removing the bishops from the Church of England and substituting in their
place a Presbyterian system of Church government consisting of lay elders,
a royalist party began to emerge, led by the lawyer Edward Hyde (the
future historian Lord Clarendon) and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland.
Now that Charles’s worst abuses of power had been removed, the more
moderate members of Parliament did not want what was becoming a
revolution to be taken any further. The royalist party were offended by the
Puritans’ hatred of tradition, their joylessness and their contempt for
anything elaborate, whether it was clothes, manners, books or religion. Of
course the Puritan party numbered great poets and thinkers among them,
such as John Milton, arguably England’s greatest poet. But a considerable
proportion were also uneducated people who feared what they could not
understand. English people who valued their cultural heritage became

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 1625-1649
uneasy that much that was of value built up over many centuries could be
destroyed by destructive zealots.
But, despite the development of a royal party in Parliament, it was
rapidly becoming evident that Charles had no real interest in ruling
through Parliament and observing the rules of the game. During the
Parliamentary recess in the summer of 1641 he rushed off to Scotland,
intending to persuade the Scots and their army to come in on his side and
mount a coup in England. But he fell foul of infighting among the Scottish
nobility, and succeeded only in increasing suspicion of himself even among
the royalists. ;
Then the real crisis began. With Strafford dead, the Catholic Irish
realized that the time was ripe for a rebellion and massacred the Protestant
settlers in Northern Ireland. On 23 November 1641 the dispossessed
landowners, the Norman Irish and the ancient Celtic Irish, turned on the
English colonists, driving them off their lands and destroying the system of
‘thorough’ in Ireland. Although the numbers killed were exaggerated
thanks to anti-Catholic hysteria, the Parliamentary party interpreted the
rising as the first action of an Irish Catholic army about to invade England
on behalf of the king.
The Irish rebellion raised the stakes of the game at Westminster
considerably. An army now had to be mustered to put it down, and that
army could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands — that is, used
against the Parliamentarians by the king. Vicious rumours were sweeping
the capital: not only had the king and queen inspired the massacre, but the
foreign queen was in touch with Catholic powers abroad. She was said to
have authorized them to send armies to invade England and crush
Protestantism. In an atmosphere of acute tension and distrust Parliament,
led by Pym, agitated for further revolutionary changes. To rally his
followers against Hyde’s and Falkland’s royalist party, that same
November Pym issued the Grand Remonstrance, which listed all Charles
I’s crimes to date and accused him of a ‘malignant design to subvert the
fundamental laws and principles of government’. The document went on
to demand the power to vet the king’s ministers and to call for a
Presbyterian Church settlement.
Fortunately for Charles, like the Root and Branch Bill the Grand
Remonstrance gained him more friends. The royalist or constitutional
party now consisted of almost half of the Commons. At the end of
November 1641 the Grand Remonstrance was passed in the House of
Commons by a mere eleven votes and was probably far too revolutionary
to get through the Lords. But at the beginning of January 1642 Charles
spoilt all by trying to arrest the most prominent members of the
Parliamentary party — five MPs (Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrigg and

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Strode) and Lord Mandeville. Evidently the leopard had not changed his
spots. Charles had not really repented his bad old ways and had become
over-confident again when he saw that support for him against the
extremism of Pym was growing.
In fairness to Charles, Pym was hardly playing strictly by the con-
stitutional rule book himself. A rowdy mob was permanently in attendance
outside the Houses of Parliament menacing anyone who was not for Pym.
Pym was unwilling to restore safety to the streets because the pressure of the
mob would help him achieve his aims. Charles had been secretly warned that
Parliament was about to impeach Queen Henrietta Maria for inciting the
Irish massacre and conspiring against the people. Where there was
impeachment there might well be attainder. That is why on 3 January 1642
Charles struck first. He accused the five MPs and Lord Mandeville of high
treason. But neither House of Parliament would arrest them, claiming that
the king was encroaching on their privileges. When she heard this, Henrietta
Maria is supposed to have shouted at her husband, ‘Go, you coward, and
pull these rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ But when
Charles broke all precedent and marched to Parliament with several hundred
soldiers to arrest them, he found, as he said, that ‘all the birds were flown’.
They had escaped to the walled City of London where they were protected
by citizen train-bands and sailors from the port.
The train-bands then moved to surround Parliament, so that within a
week the five MPs had returned to their seats in the Commons. On 10
January, having learned that the Commons was about to arrest the queen
for treason, Charles and the royal family abandoned the royal palace of
Whitehall and fled like thieves in the night to Hampton Court, to Windsor,
to Canterbury and finally to the port of Dover. The king would not be seen
at Whitehall again until another January seven years later when he stepped
out from the Banqueting Hall to be executed.
From Dover on 23 February Queen Henrietta Maria left the country,
taking with her the magnificent crown jewels which she intended to pawn
in Holland to pay for an army to rescue her husband. With her was her
eldest daughter, the Princess Mary, who had been married by proxy to the
important Dutch ruler William II of Orange the year before. They were to
seek refuge with her husband. Meanwhile Charles set about rallying
support in the country, for clearly there was to be no going back.
War was declared six months later on 22 August. In the intervening
months Charles had made some attempts to achieve consensus with
Parliament — he had even signed a bill removing bishops from the House of
Lords. The Militia Bill, which was to remove royal control of the army,
and the Nineteen Propositions, which sought to restrict royal power so that
the king would be ruler in name only, were the last straw. Charles saw that

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the only way to save his throne was by war. But his attempts to seize a great
cache of arms stored at Hull and to commandeer the fleet both failed: the
fleet was thoroughly pro-Parliament, as was the governor of Hull.
Charles meanwhile retreated north to York, and in June sent out
directions to all his loyal supporters and friends across England to call out
their local militia on his behalf. In the north and west men armed
themselves as they had never done before and came out for the king. But
all over the south and east an equal number of men, such as the MP Oliver
Cromwell, a Cambridge squire who would have left England for America
had not the Grand Remonstrance passed, also called their horses in from
the plough and armed themselves to the teeth.
On 11 July the Houses of Parliament announced that Charles had begun
the war, and a month later declared that all men who served the king were
traitors. On 22 August, watched by his young sons Charles and James in
their children’s armour (Charles II’s can still be seen in the Tower of
London) the king unfurled the royal standard before the walls of
Nottingham Castle. The Civil War had begun at last.
The Dutch artist Van Dyck, who became Charles I’s court painter just as
Holbein had been Henry VIII’s, has left us with a vivid record of the major
personalities of the court. With their colourful silk clothes, their lacy
collars, their feathered hats and their charming lovelocks as their long,
curling hair was called, they cannot help making a somewhat less serious
impression than the Parliamentarians: they were not called Cavaliers for
nothing. By the time the Civil War broke out, the extremism of the Puritans
had ensured that Strafford and Laud were not the only high-minded,
hardworking men to have supported Charles. Nevertheless a sort of artistic
truth is to be found in the striking contrast between paintings of the two
sides, court and Parliainent. There is an absence of ornamentation about
the Parliamentarians’ clothing and appearance — the dark cloth, the plain
collars and the short hair cropped under a pudding basin that gave them
the name Roundheads. And there is a terrible purposefulness in the
portraits of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Ralph Hopton and General Ireton. Plain
was their appearance, plain was their talk, and unlike the Cavaliers they
had been in deadly earnest from the beginning, not just now when it was
really too late.

Civil War (1642-1649)

From the very first luck seemed to be against the king. The royal standard
with its prancing golden lions rampant blew down outside Nottingham
Castle as soon as it had been put up, to everyone’s secret dismay. But
before long the king’s men were too busy with preparations — unrolling
maps, arranging for ammunition, calculating food and supply lines — to

bee
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think about this bad omen. Nevertheless the news that the navy and the
City of London had declared for Parliament could not be anything other
than worrying. In the end those two factors would give the Puritans an
outstanding advantage: thanks to the navy, the Parliamentary forces could
move their troops far more quickly to trouble spots than the royalists
could. The king’s soldiers had to go everywhere overland. The seaports too
were an important part of the resistance to the king and prevented his
troops from using their harbours. Mastery of the City meant that
Parliament controlled the money supply from customs and trade. In the
long run it would be extremely difficult for the king to pay for extra
supplies of weapons or troops from abroad. Nevertheless just as the House
of Commons at the outbreak of war had been evenly divided between the
royalists and the Parliamentarians, so too was the country. The conflict
would be very long drawn out.
For the Civil War turned into two linked civil wars. The first, which took
place from 1642 to 1646, can be described in simple terms as the king
versus the radicals — in other words, the half of Parliament led by Pym. In
the course of the war, however, the aims of Parliament changed. The

1643: destruction of the Cheapside Cross (one of the Eleanor Crosses) during the
first part of the Civil War.

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 1625-1649

Parliamentary army itself became a separate revolutionary movement

determined to resist the return of Charles I, who by then had drawn the
Scots and most Parliamentary MPs on to his side. There was thus a second
civil war in 1648 in which the army was triumphant. Parliament would be
emasculated, the king executed, and a Commonwealth replaced the
monarchy. After military triumphs against royalist armies raised in Ireland
and Scotland, where the Presbyterians had crowned the Prince of Wales
Charles II, the army leader Oliver Cromwell became lord protector — in
effect a republican dictator. Seven years later in 1660 after the
Commonwealth had degenerated into a new sort of tyranny under which
Parliament- was as powerless as it had been during the 1630s, the
constitutional wheel came full circle: Charles II was restored to the throne
by one of the republic’s ruling generals, George Monck.
When the First Civil War began in 1642, England more or less divided
along the same geographical fault-line that it had done during the Wars of
the Roses. The north, Wales, the south-west and the more rural parts were
for the king, while London, the east, the south and the south-east, where
there was a greater concentration of towns and commercial wealth, tended
to support the Parliamentary cause. Within these categories there were of
course exceptions. Inside generally royalist areas, the clothing towns — for
example, in the West Riding of Yorkshire or in Somerset — would contain
pockets of Parliamentary supporters, for almost all people who made their
living by trade were Parliamentarians. The two universities, Oxford and
Cambridge, were for the king, and had begun melting down their college
silver to pay for arms (though Oliver Cromwell, as the local MP for
Huntingdon, put a stop to that in Cambridge).
For the first two years of the war the king’s strategic aim was to reach
London. He never got nearer than Turnham Green in Hammersmith, right
at the beginning of the war. Then the sheer size of the London train-bands
which had made such a nuisance of themselves outside Parliament under
the Puritan Earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s favourite’s son, made Charles turn
about and head for Oxford. Thanks to its enthusiasm for the still-
imprisoned Laud, Oxford was vehemently pro-royalist, and the king made
his headquarters there for the rest of the war. By and large the campaigns
of 1643 were favourable to the royalist party. The king’s dashing nephew
Prince Rupert, the son of the Elector Palatine and the Winter Queen,
captured Parliamentary Bristol. Having defeated Lord Fairfax and his son
Sir Thomas Fairfax at Adwalton Moor near Bradford, the Earl of
Newcastle held all Yorkshire for the king except for Hull. Cornwall and
Devon and the south-west up to Devizes in Wiltshire were royalist. The
king’s men were further encouraged by the early deaths of two of their
most inspiring opponents: Hampden died at Chalgrove Field in a battle

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with Prince Rupert, and Pym of cancer.

However, Plymouth, Hull and Gloucester
were all serious threats to the royalists’ ability
to maintain their position. Meanwhile one of
Pym’s last actions had been to weight the scales
of the war further in Parliament’s favour when
he added the Scottish armies to Parliament’s
cause. By an agreement of September 1643
known as the Solemn League and Covenant, in
return for establishing Presbyterianism in
England the Scots came in on Parliament’s side
and lent it 20,000 men.
Charles too was looking for outside help. By
an agreement with the Irish Catholic rebels
Lucius Carey, Lord called the Cessation, which meant he would
Falkland, who became one cease to prosecute them, he had the help of an
of the leaders of the
army from Ireland. But this also only con-
royalist constitutionalist
party in the face of firmed the king’s reputation as a man deter-
religious extremism. mined to restore papistry in England through
the hated Irish Catholics.
But the Scots army was a much more soldierly affair. After it joined the
Parliamentary side, the tide of victory started to turn in the rebels’
favour. In July 1644, once the Scots had fought their way south to join
up with the Fairfaxes in Yorkshire, one of the most important battles
of the war took place. The king’s best generals, his nephew Prince
Rupert and the Earl of Newcastle, were
conclusively defeated at the Battle of
Marston Moor. Hitherto Prince Rupert’s
great weapon, his cavalry charge, had
been irresistible. Now, however, he
came up against the Eastern Association
army, which had already covered itself
with glory at Hull. These troops, raised
from the eastern counties of Essex,
Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk,
were very strongly Puritan — many of the
emigrants to America had come from the
same region.
The Eastern Association had gained a
great reputation for their zeal and
Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
discipline. They were a new kind of Puritan Charles I’s nephew and a
soldier who sang hymns as they marched, _ superb cavalry commander.

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Sir Thomas Fairfax, the lord general of the New Model Army, takes possession of
royalist Colchester during the second part of the Civil War, 1648.

who frowned on drinking, but who were as ferocious with the pike as any
soldier fuelled on spirits. The most important figure in the Association was
the profoundly religious Oliver Cromwell, the burly MP, who quite
unexpectedly, since he had never been a soldier, was coming to the fore as
a result of his exceptional military talent. In the first year of the war he had
been so impressed by Prince Rupert’s use of cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill
that he started training his own mounted troops. By Marston Moor the
eastern counties cavalry were as proficient in the saddle as Prince Rupert’s
men, and much more disciplined. In the end, that discipline, and the
bravery of the Scots, turned the battle, and the royalists were routed.
Cromwell said afterwards that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’
From that day forward the man who is also known as Old Noll for his
large, potato-like nose would be christened Ironsides because no one could
get through the iron sides of him and his men.
Losing Marston Moor meant that the royalist cause lost control of the
north. Though the south-west continued to be held by the king’s generals,
the defeated royalist army remained stationed in the midlands for the first
half of 1645. Charles’s plan was that it should join up with royalist troops
recently raised by the Marquis of Montrose from the Highlands of
Scotland. In an extremely surprising turn of events, Montrose, who had
been one of the leading spirits of the Covenanters, turned against his

BAS
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Calvinist allies and backed the royal cause. He hoped the chastened king
could be brought to act in a more restrained and constitutional manner.
That same year Montrose swept through Scotland in a series of stunning
victories and soon controlled almost the whole country. It was a feat made
more remarkable by the fact that at the beginning of the campaign his
cavalry had consisted of only three horses, and his army had comprised
undisciplined Highland clans whose leisure time was passed by feuding
with one another. But the combination of Montrose’s noble and inspiring
personality and the clans’ traditional loathing of the Campbells, whose
chief Argyll was the head of the Covenanters, had welded them into an
unstoppably ferocious fighting force.
In the Parliamentary camp, meanwhile, the knowledge that the war was
still not won was making its leaders reconsider the way their army was
organized. Just as Parliament had been divided on the question how far they
should go in rebelling against the king, the Parliamentary leaders themselves
were also becoming divided about their cause. Despite their importance in
the earlier constitutional battle between Parliament and King, figures like
the Earl of Manchester (formerly Lord Mandeville) and Essex had become
rather afraid of making all-out war on the king. Manchester had been heard
to say that he thought the war would never be ended by the sword, only by
discussion. Furthermore, he warned, ‘If we should beat the king ninety nine
times and he beat us once we should all be hanged.’
These more moderate thinkers within the Parliamentary cause, who had
a majority in the House of Commons, became known as the Presbyterian
party when the question of what to do about the Church of England
established a fault-line through which political divisions emerged. Their
willingness to impose Presbyterianism on England through the Church,
spoke of a respect for hierarchy that was opposed by the more radical
Parliamentarians, the Puritan Independents who believed in religious
toleration and whose leader in the Commons was Oliver Cromwell.
Though the Independents were a minority party among MPs, most of the
army was of their religious persuasion. The Independents tended to be
more exaltedly religious men, belonging to the Independent religious sects
and impelled by simple religious imperatives. They despised the
Presbyterians’ softening attitude and believed that command should be
taken away from people who were not prepared to go for outright victory
over a wicked king.
After some adroit manoeuvring behind the scenes by Cromwell, in
February 1645 the Self-Denying Ordinance deprived all members of the
Houses of Parliament of their commands — only Cromwell himself was
excepted in recognition of his remarkable skills as a general. Manchester
and Essex were forced to retire and the Parliamentary forces were now

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called the New Model Army, controlled by Cromwell as lieutenant-general

of cavalry under Sir Thomas Fairfax, who became commander-in-chief. The
New Model Army was intensely religious, as the Eastern Association had
been, and hero-worshipped Cromwell. As a sign that extremists among the
Parliamentary forces were seizing power, Laud was at last executed.
Despite Montrose’s victories in Scotland, the year 1645 proved decisive
for the Parliamentary armies. In June at the Battle of Naseby in
Northamptonshire the king’s army was even more conclusively trounced
than it had been at Marston Moor. After a tremendous initial charge
whose impetus completely broke up the left wing of the New Model Army
under Henry Ireton, Prince Rupert never followed through. He indulgently
allowed his cavalry to vanish from the battlefield to pillage the
Parliamentary baggage train. In his absence Cromwell’s soldiers cleaned
up. As the royalists fled, they left behind not only most of their arms cache
but Charles I’s secret papers. These revealed that, in order to entice the
Irish Catholic army to England, the king had promised to suspend the anti-
Catholic laws; he was also plotting to pay for
foreign troops to invade England, which his son
Charles had left the country to arrange. This
only confirmed the Parliamentarians’ darkest
fears of a future England oppressed by
absolutism and sinful Catholicism.
In September 1645 the king’s last hope of aid
from the northern Scots died when Montrose
was comprehensively defeated at Selkirk by the
veteran Scots general David Leslie. Though the
personal valour of Montrose’s Highland troops
was incomparable, they did not understand the
need to remain as an army at harvest time. A Parliamentary
Around August many melted away back to their soldier.
glens. Meanwhile Montrose’s attempt to rally the
Lowlands foundered on the Lowlanders’ Presbyterian hatred for Charles’s
Irish Catholic allies. Montrose escaped to the continent, while that same
month Charles’s last army outside Cornwall was defeated at Rowton
Heath near Chester.
At the beginning of 1646 the king’s army even lost its hold on the west
when Truro, the capital of Cornwall, surrendered to its besiegers.
Thereafter the writing was on the wall. In May, as town after town fell and
the Roundheads began to approach the royalist headquarters, Charles left
Oxford and rode north to surrender to the Covenanter Scots camped at
Newark. They took him on to Newcastle. Finally, in June, Oxford was
captured by the Parliamentarians and the First Civil War was over.

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Charles had chosen to give himself up to the Scots because there was a
possibility that they might back him against the English. Tensions had not
abated between the factions into which the Parliamentary cause had
divided. Indeed the split between the Presbyterians and the army had
become so serious that the Presbyterian MPs sent their own representatives
hurrying north to negotiate separately with the king and the Scots against
the army. They suggested that the king should be returned to power under
certain conditions, the so-called Propositions of Newcastle: Presbyterianism
would become the established Church, Parliament would control the army
and the fleet for twenty years, and there would be strict enforcement of the
laws against Catholics. But these were the very conditions that Charles had
rejected before the war, and in the end he could not bring himself to accept
them. In January 1647, in return for £400,000 owed to them in army back-
pay, the king was handed over to Parliament by his Scots jailers and then
conveyed to Holmby House in Northamptonshire. The Scots now
journeyed north back to their own country, leaving the army, which
increasingly looked to Cromwell as its leader, to continue its struggle for
power with the Presbyterians.
During the first six months of 1647, while the king remained at Holmby
House, the antagonism between the army and the Presbyterians intensified.
The Independents’ or soldiers’ influence in Parliament was increasing and
the Presbyterian MPs were very alarmed at the way the army had become
a political force and saw a future for itself as part of the government. They
had expected that once the war was over it would disperse and leave them
to rule. The Presbyterians decided to strike first. If they could disband the
New Model Army, then the threat from its men would disappear. The
Presbyterians made the mistake of not paying its wages first — in the case
of the cavalry these were ten months in arrears. The army simply refused
to disband. Instead it mutinied and elected its own political council, on
which Cromwell was the leading light.
By June 1647 Cromwell with his usual tactical genius saw that he would
have to seize the most important piece on the chessboard: the king. He
despatched Cornet Joyce to Holmby House to capture Charles for the
army and take him to the old Tudor palace of Hampton Court. The army
meanwhile marched to London and expelled eleven Presbyterian MPs from
Parliament, thus proving itself just as much an enemy to Parliamentary
privilege as Charles had been. Its leaders now offered the king their own
Heads of Proposals. These were rather reasonable: Charles could return to
the throne so long as Parliament met every two years; bishops could be
restored so long as no one had to obey them; and the prayer book could be
reintroduced so long as its prayers were not compulsory.
But these straightforward men with their straightforward ideas were

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dealing with the wrong man. Convinced after the expulsion of the
Presbyterians from Parliament that internecine war was about to erupt
between the two Parliamentary sides, Charles simultaneously entered into
secret negotiations with the Scots and the English Presbyterian party,
believing he could bargain with them from a stronger position after the
army’s offer. He escaped to the Isle of Wight and, though he was captured
and held in Carisbrooke Castle, still contrived to send secret messages to
the Scots and negotiate with them.
At Carisbrooke the devious Charles managed to sign the Engagement, a
single treaty with the more moderate Covenanters under the Marquis of
Hamilton;-who had deserted Argyll. Under the Engagement, Charles
finally agreed to establish Presbyterianism in England, but to suppress all
heretical sects — which included all the sects gathered under the banner of
the Independents — as soon as a Scots army had invaded England and set
up a new Parliament. By 1648 a combination of the Presbyterians’ fear of
the extreme sectarians in the army, the king’s intrigues and the news that
a Scots army would come to their rescue had welded the English
Presbyterians, the royalists and the Presbyterian Scots together to make
common cause.
The Second Civil War began with risings in Kent and Essex in June, and
in South Wales in July. The Thirty Years War had just ended with the
Treaty of Westphalia, so the king had a hope of Catholic continental
troops coming to his aid. But Fairfax defeated the Kent rebels and
Cromwell, having crushed the rising in Wales, went on to destroy the small
and inadequate Scots army at Preston. The Essex royalists surrendered a
fortnight later, at the end of August 1648. And though the Second Civil
War was now over, the danger to the Parliamentary cause had not
evaporated. As a sign of the pro-royalist mood in the country, no fewer
than nine ships of the fleet suddenly changed sides and sailed to Holland
to join the Prince of Wales.
Ominously the new crisis made the army turn violently against the king,
in the belief that he could never be trusted again. Disgusted with the king’s
lack of plain dealing, it published a declaration stating that it was its duty
‘to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he
had shed, and the mischief he had done to his utmost against the Lord’s
cause and people in these poor nations’. It had had enough of delay and
negotiation, and events were moving towards an uncontrollable finish.
Forcibly removing Charles from the Isle of Wight, where he had had
considerable freedom of movement, the army imprisoned him under
twenty-four-hour guard in Hurst Castle in Hampshire, before transferring
him three weeks later to Windsor. Then on 6 December 1648, in what is
called Pride’s Purge, 143 Presbyterian MPs were ejected from the Commons

347
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T
Ire trial of “ h arles I, January 16 4 9.
D

tr,
 1625-1649

by troops under Colonel Thomas Pride. The remaining members, forming

the Rump Parliament, were Independents, supporters of Oliver Cromwell
and the army.
The army now insisted that the king be brought to trial. Though the
House of Lords refused to countenance such a step, a soi-ditant High
Court of Justice was created by a vote of the House of Commons. It
consisted of 135 commissioners, few of whom were lawyers, none of
whom were judges, and a lowly provincial lawyer named John Bradshaw
was elected president. On 20 January 1649 King Charles stood trial
beneath the hammer beams of Westminster Hall where his distant
ancestors’-had once dispensed justice. Beyond the little world of
Westminster the rest of England was stunned by the army’s presumption.
Though he might have lost his kingdom, Charles had not lost his wits.
In a loud voice, his stammer for once not detectable, he asked by what
authority he had been brought to the bar, for no authority existedin
England to try a king. ‘By the authority of the people of England,’
Bradshaw replied. But Charles would not answer to the charges of an
unconstitutional court and refused to say anything throughout the rest of
the trial. His son the Prince of Wales, who had wept uncontrollably in
Holland when he heard what was happening, now sent a piece of blank
paper to the Rump, declaring that he would put his signature to any
demand if his father’s life was spared. But it was to no avail.
The ‘court’ continued to hear the evidence against the king. As nothing
was said in his defence, it was shown that the king had made war on his
people, had raised troops against Parliament and had been a ‘tyrant,
traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation’. He
was therefore sentenced to death by having his head severed from his body.
The death warrant was signed by only 59 of the 135 commissioners. The
rest had slunk away, reluctant to set their names to a document of such
dubious legality. Thus Charles I was condemned to death by a minority of
the court, which had been established by a minority of the House of
Commons, indeed by an illegal remnant thereof, and without the
concurrence of the House of Lords.
Unexpectedly, in the face of death Charles I showed a strength and
dignity nobody knew he possessed. As one writer put it, ‘Nothing in his life
became him like the leaving it.’ On 30 January the king was executed
outside Banqueting House in Whitehall, which Inigo Jones had built for his
father James I. When he stepped on to the scaffold, a small figure dressed
all in black, Charles was quite composed; he had spent the last days of his
life praying with the Bishop of London, William Juxon. Because it was
such bitter weather he wore two shirts, so that a shiver of cold would not
be mistaken for one of fear. All round Whitehall, steel-helmeted men on

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horseback kept the crowds at bay. But there were hundreds and thousands
of people nevertheless. When the head with its long, black, flowing locks
was severed from the body, a terrible cry went up from the crowd like a
soul in pain.
A witness noted in his diary, ‘The blow I saw given, and can truly say
with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I
remember well, there was such a groan by the
thousands then present as I never heard before and
desire I may never hear again.’ As the masked
executioner held up the dripping head and said,
‘Behold the traitor Charles Stuart,’ there was no
shout of triumph, only the sound of smothered
weeping. Realizing that all had not gone to plan,
the army now hustled the people out of Whitehall.
The body was removed for embalming before it
was taken to Windsor. St George’s Chapel would
be its final resting place.
There is a story, which has the ring of truth, that on the night of the
king’s execution, while the body was still lying at Whitehall, a hooded
figure approached. Looking at the royal corpse, he muttered with some
regret, ‘Cruel necessity.’ It has always been believed that this was Oliver
Cromwell.
Death transformed the foolish, treacherous king into a martyr, and a
book which was said to comprise his last prayers and meditations, the
Eikon Basilike (‘The Royal Image’) became a bestseller in England and
Europe. The poet John Milton was forced to mount a very unsuccessful
public relations exercise against it, and put out a booklet showing why it
was always lawful to put tyrants to death. The poet Andrew Marvell, a
partisan of Cromwell’s, was so impressed by the way the king had died that
he immortalized it in verse:

He nothing common did, or mean,

Upon that memorable scene:
But, with his keener eye
The Axe’s edge did try:

Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless Right
But bow’d his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

a2
 The Commonwealth and Protectorate
(1649-1660)

England was now declared to be a republic or Commonwealth. Despite the

existence of the Prince of Wales the monarchy was abolished, as was the
House of Lords. Only the House of Commons remained unaltered since
Pride’s Purge. For the present, while the new order shook down, it was still
the old Rump Parliament. Its MPs selected forty-one men to be members
of a Council of State. The regicide Bradshaw was president and the poet
John Milton was Latin secretary, the equivalent of foreign secretary today,
for all diplomatic correspondence was written in Latin. Though Oliver
Cromwell was one of the new regime’s most important figures, his role
continued to be lieutenant-general of cavalry, and as yet subordinate to
Fairfax. Their military skills were needed immediately, for danger
threatened the young republic at home and overseas.
On the one hand the martyrdom of Charles I had considerably revived
royalist feeling. Abroad such was the revulsion at the spilling of royal blood
that in Holland and Spain England’s ambassadors were both assassinated.
At the same time within the army itself the widespread Leveller sect (among
the more extreme of the Independents) was not content with the political
settlement. Its members wished to go much further than keeping the old
Rump Parliament for they believed in universal male suffrage — they had
plans to allow the vote for all men regardless of their wealth, and to abolish
personal property. They therefore mutinied, threatening to attack
Parliament and force free elections. Cromwell, believing that this was the
beginning of anarchy, decided that the Levellers had to be put down. ‘Break
them in pieces. If you do not break them, they will break you,’ he said to the
Council. He and Fairfax crushed the rebellion by arresting its leaders at
dead of night in Burford, Oxfordshire.
Even more alarming to the life of the young republic was the situation in
Scotland and Ireland. Both countries had thrown off English rule. The
execution of Charles I caused more problems than it solved. It rallied the
royalist Presbyterian forces in Scotland, where the Prince of Wales was
immediately proclaimed King Charles I. In Ireland a powerful army of
Protestant royalists and Catholic lords arose under James Butler, Marquis

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of Ormonde. Ireland was the threat which

needed dealing with most urgently, for the
Prince of Wales and Prince Rupert — now
commanding the royalist fleet - were on their
way there to join Ormonde and encourage the
royalist cause.
Accordingly Cromwell, as the army’s
greatest soldier, set off for Ireland where he
proceeded to lay siege to two of the most
important royalist garrisons, Drogheda and
Wexford, in September and October 1649.
Since they would not surrender, once he had
captured the towns he put the entire garrison to the sword, an act which
was undoubtedly brutal but not illegitimate by seventeenth-century rules
of siege. He justified his conduct by saying that he hoped that thereby less
blood would be spilt in the rest of Ireland, whose inhabitants would submit
more readily if they knew he would show no mercy.
By 1650 the reconquest was complete. Once more Ireland was
reconstructed along inimical English lines; this time her land was
redistributed among Cromwellian soldiers, a new English garrison to
subdue the natives. The Irish had the choice of renouncing their Catholicism
or being resettled beyond the Shannon in the moorland of Connaught —
hence the expression ‘to hell or Connaught’. To this day the name of
Cromwell is pronounced with peculiar loathing by the southern Irish.
Cromwell was next needed in Scotland. By July 1650 the Prince of Wales
was at the head of an army of Covenanters. Although Charles was almost
powerless and Scotland continued to be ruled by the Scots nobles under
Argyll, the threat of a Stuart in that country was too great to be ignored.
Cromwell’s initial invasion was a failure as the Scots were masters of never
actually giving battle, and the weather, hunger and sickness started to eat
into the English numbers. But on 3 September Cromwell won one of his
greatest victories at the Battle of Dunbar against his former colleague
David Leslie. Soon after Edinburgh and the Lowlands were controlled by
the English occupying army. By now Cromwell was commander-in-chief of
the army, for Fairfax — who since Charles I’s trial had been uneasy about
the direction the army was taking — had resigned.
The following year the hard-pressed Covenanters crowned the Prince of
Wales Charles II of Scotland at Scone, the ancient coronation seat of the
Scottish kings. In August they invaded England, hoping that a crowned
king might rally royalists to their cause. But after less than a month’s
campaigning, on the anniversary of Dunbar, 3 September 1651, Cromwell
defeated Charles at the Battle of Worcester. Even the wily Argyll was

Be
 1649-1660

Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl and rst Marquis of Argyll, leader of the
Covenanters who crowned Charles II in Scotland. Painting by David Scougall.

forced to agree to Cromwell’s terms: Scotland became a commonwealth

like England, the Scottish Parliament was abolished, the Presbyterians lost
their Assembly. Instead freedom of worship for all Puritans was
guaranteed and so was free trade between the two commonwealths.
Charles himself managed to escape to France after a great many
astonishing adventures which have passed into folklore. After some valiant
hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Worcester, when he was heard to
shout that he had only one life to lose, he was forced to linger in the west
midlands. There he hid in the priest-holes of friendly recusant houses such as
Moseley Old Hall near Wolverhampton and Boscobel House in Shropshire,
since the army was guarding all the bridges over the Severn to prevent his
escape from Welsh ports. His most celebrated hiding place, after soldiers
began to search Boscobel House itself, was up the huge oak tree behind it,
along with another royalist on the run with him. All day long the Roundhead
soldiers tramped about beneath — it never occurred to them to look above
their heads where the two rebels clung to the oak’s leafy branches.

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 STUART

The future Charles II hiding up an oak tree after the battle of Worcester, 1651.

After Boscobel, in order to get to the coast the future king had to be
disguised as a manservant. Eventually he was smuggled out of the country
at four in the morning in a fishing boat from Shoreham in west Sussex. The
government had put up notices offering a reward of a thousand pounds to
anyone who could give information on the whereabouts of ‘Charles Stuart,
son of the Late Tyrant’. As Charles was exceptionally recognizable we
must conclude that many people did know who he was but elected to keep
his secret. It was an indication of the royalist sentiment that was beginning
to return under the new tyranny of Parliament. Nine years later it would
restore Charles to his father’s throne.
But if peace in the three former kingdoms had been established for the
moment by Cromwell’s crushing victories, the infant republic continued to
be regarded with considerable hostility abroad. In the case of Holland this
led to the First Dutch War (1652-4). There were many similarities in
outlook between what were now two Calvinist republics. Protestantism
had drawn them together against the Catholic powers in Elizabeth’s time,
but trade rivalry in the East Indies and Dutch sympathy with the royal
cause made relations unfriendly. It needed only a spark to start a war. It
was provided in 1651 when the Rump Parliament tried to transfer some of

Sa
 1649-1660

the lucrative Dutch carrying trade into English hands by means of a new
Navigation Act. It forbade the importation into England or the English
colonies of goods that were carried in any ships other than those of their
country of origin. The Dutch were infuriated that the English
Commonwealth should benefit from one of their most profitable
businesses.
The First Dutch War. took place entirely at sea. In theory the
Commonwealth was in no position to fight, let alone win, because it had
no proper navy. But a Somerset Puritan named Robert Blake, who had
captured Taunton from the royalists, turned out to be as good a ‘general
at sea’ as on land, and trounced Holland despite her maritime expertise.
The greatest English seaman until Nelson, Admiral Blake triumphed
against the leading Dutch seaman Van Tromp, whom he defeated off the
Texel in 1653. With the Treaty of Westminster the following year, English
supremacy over the North Sea was established, the Dutch promised not to
aid the royalists and the English carrying trade began its lucrative growth.
The crisis of the Dutch War failed to heal the splits that were appearing
once again in the government of the republic. For some time many in the
army had nursed a mounting hostility to the self-satisfied Rump MPs,
many of whom had held their seats for almost fifteen years. Army leaders
believed that it was time for the Rump to dissolve itself, allowing fairer
elections that would produce a House of Commons that was more
representative of the English nation. But the Rump MPs were very
comfortable as things were, and in April 1653, far from agreeing to a free
election, they began to put through an act to prolong their existence.
Cromwell took action.
Bursting into the Commons with his soldiers, Cromwell told them, ‘It is
not fit that you should sit here any longer!’ He began to throw the MPs out,
including the speaker, whom soldiers pulled down from his chair by his
gown. Then, though an MP named Thomas Harrison warned him that
what he was doing was very dangerous, he ordered his men to remove the
golden mace, symbol of the speaker, the authority of the House of
Commons. ‘Take away this bauble,’ said Cromwell bleakly.
Cromwell was now the supreme power in the land, a military dictator
who believed God had given him a superior knowledge of what was right
for the country. He had not lost faith in Parliament as an institution — after
all, he had fought for the Parliamentary cause with every atom of his being.
It was just a question of finding the right kind of Parliament. Over the next
few years he would experiment with a variety of national gatherings, for
he remained anxious not to abandon the Parliamentary principle. But he
was nearly always disappointed. His guiding principle was that England
should be ruled by a community of the righteous. In his first attempt at

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 STUART

constructing a Parliament to his liking, which became known as the Little

Parliament, Cromwell decided that a quick way of ensuring that only the
godly were elected was for the candidates to be selected by their local
Independent church. So stringent were the criteria they had to comply with
— these embraced the number of times the candidate prayed each day, for
example — that in the whole of England only 139 really God-fearing men
could be found who were worthy to be MPs.
A typical member, who gave the Parliament its nickname, the Barebones
Parliament, was an Anabaptist preacher and leatherseller called Praisegod
Barbon or Barebones. Unfortunately holiness did not guarantee
intelligence. Within eight months, by December 1653, the Little Parliament
of unworldly saints who wanted to abolish whatever they could get their
hands on — lawyers, priests, government — were seen by Cromwell to be
completely unworkable. They were dismissed.
To take its place the army’s Council of Officers instead proposed an
Instrument of Government, England’s first written constitution. It
provided for a 400-seat unicameral Parliament - a new House of
Commons to which for the first time MPs would be elected from Scotland
and Ireland. But while the House of Lords remained abolished, a lord
protector, Cromwell himself, was to rule the country with the aid of the
Council of State: As soon as Parliament met in September 1654 its
members began to make difficulties, especially the more extreme
republicans who disapproved of the king-like role of lord protector. Four
months later, in January 1655, Cromwell dissolved it as peremptorily as
any Stuart king had done.
A royalist rising in Wiltshire under Colonel Penruddock brought more
trouble, and Cromwell used it as an excuse to impose martial law, dividing
England into eleven districts run by major-generals. This, historians
believe, was perhaps the single most important factor in turning the
country’s thoughts towards a restoration of the monarchy. For, although
most people would have encountered something of the Puritan way of life,
this was their first experience of a daily existence entirely ordered on
Puritan lines, and they loathed it. Used to considering themselves a free
people, the English found the restriction of personal liberty which the
Puritan code involved unbearable. Fines were imposed for swearing, for
sporting activities, for gambling and for drunkenness. The Puritans had
already shut all the theatres, but now pubs and inns were closed down if
the local major-general considered there were too many in one district. Any
judge who attempted to query the new martial laws was removed from
office, and, though Parliament was in abeyance, taxes were raised without
its permission. Had it not been for the threat presented by the army, the
people would probably have risen in revolt.

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But Cromwell also had many admirable qualities. Just as he was a

magnificent general, he was an outstanding statesman who served English
interests well. In many ways he lacked personal ambition, and was driven
instead by his sense of God’s will. Righteousness prompted him to rebel
against Charles I, and a desire to impose further righteousness on the
people of England, since they could not work it out for themselves, turned
him into a dictator. In many respects Cromwell was wise and liberal.
Although Roman Catholics and High Anglicans remained outside the fold,
a preacher of any persuasion — from Baptist to Presbyterian to Independent
— could hold a living in the Church of England. And Cromwell, like all
Puritans, was positively philo-Semitic because of his interest in the Bible.
Although there probably had always been small unofficial Jewish
communities living in London, it was Cromwell who in 1656 invited the
Jews to return, though it was not until 1664 that Edward I’s legislation was
reversed. So it was that the Jewish community began to re-establish itself
in England, bringing immense wealth, culture and useful continental
contacts for the Cromwellian government.
The advancement of British interests and influence abroad was
vigorously pursued by Cromwell. After the Dutch War he attempted a
Protestant foreign policy of which Walsingham would have approved — not
least in his use of Louis XIV to put pressure on the Duke of Savoy to
prevent the further slaughter of the duke’s Protestant subjects, whose
bones ‘scattered on the Alpine mountains cold’ were the subject of one of
Milton’s best known sonnets. By the mid-seventeenth century, however,
Protestantism was no longer an automatic link between countries. Though
Cromwell made treaties with Sweden and Denmark, trade rather than
religious conviction was the driving force. Far more important in the
European scheme of things was the fierce rivalry between Spain and
France, directed by Cardinal Mazarin on behalf of the ambitious boy-king
Louis XIV.
By the end of the century, the France of Louis XIV would turn out to be
the great impediment to European freedom. But Cromwell was born a
hundred years earlier, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1599. His
worldview was Elizabethan: for him Spain as the champion of Catholicism
would always be the main threat to England, particularly as she was the
obstacle to further English expansion in the New World. In 1655, now
formally allied to France (an alliance which had driven Prince Charles
Stuart from the country), England declared war on Spain after Philip IV
refused to allow religious toleration to English traders in the Spanish
colonies and free trade in the West Indies.
The island of Jamaica was captured by Sir William Penn and Robert
Venables in the first year of the war, and before long had developed into

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 STUART

an important British colony. In 1657 the Spanish treasure fleet was seized
at Santa Cruz in Tenerife and brought home, covering Admiral Blake with
glory (Blake, however, died at sea on the return voyage and was buried in
Westminster Abbey). The last part of the war saw the English fighting
beside the French against Spain. One consequence of this was that, after
victory in the Battle of the Dunes, Dunkirk was occupied by the English.
Thanks to English aid, Spain was comprehensively defeated by France. In
the long run this would raise problems for England and Europe, for it was
yet another step towards France’s plans of world domination which by
1689 England was forced to form a coalition to curtail.
In 1656 Cromwell tried restoring Parliament again, bringing the rule
of the hated major-generals to an end. However, at least a hundred of the
new MPs turned out to hold extreme republican views. As a result they
were barred from entering the Commons by Cromwell's soldiers,
whereupon in protest another fifty refused to attend Parliament. Thus the
new House of Commons was less representative of the will of the people
than ever.
In 1657, after a failed assassination attempt on Cromwell by the Leveller
Colonel Saxby, the new Commons attempted to return to something
similar to the English constitution as it had been before the Civil Wars.
This they outlined in their Humble Petition and Advice, in which they
entreated Cromwell to become king and asked for the House of Lords to
be revived, though it was to be called the Other House, and consist of life
peers nominated by the lord protector. The immense disapproval this
would have brought on him from his old comrades-in-arms dissuaded
Cromwell from taking the title of king, but in all other respects he was
quite king-like. Indeed, as if he had established a hereditary monarchy his
son was to be lord protector after him. When Cromwell died of a fever on
3 September 1658, the anniversary of the victories of Dunbar and
Worcester, worn out by the strains of office, the Protectorate passed to his
elder son Richard Cromwell.
But the new Cromwell was not at all the same thing as the old, and his
Protectorate lasted only eight months. Richard Cromwell was a pleasant
country gentleman who had none of his father’s energy. He was not even
a Puritan. Immediately upon his accession all the disagreements between
extremists in the army and Parliament burst into renewed life, now that his
father was no longer there to suppress them. The army insisted that its
commander general Charles Fleetwood, who was married to Cromwell’s
daughter Bridget (Ireton having died), should have special powers
independent of the protector and the Commons. Squabbles between
Richard Cromwell and the army weakened the regime and in April 1659
the generals forced him to dissolve Parliament. Shortly afterwards, the

58
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 1649-1660

younger Cromwell resigned the Protectorate. He retired to his country

estates, leaving the army to rule alone.
A period of very unsatisfactory chaos followed: the army leaders could
agree on nothing except to bring back the Rump, the Independent MPs left
in the Commons after Pride’s Purge, who had been expelled by Cromwell
in 1653. They considered the most recent Cromwellian Parliament to be
yes-men and not radical. enough. When it became evident that the
government in London was losing control, there was a Presbyterian rising
in Cheshire which was suppressed by one of the army generals, John
Lambert. On his return to London Lambert expelled the Rump again, but
on Boxing Day the growing confusion throughout England forced the
army to recall the Rump once more.
These events were observed from Scotland with increasing impatience by
General Monck, where he was part of the occupying army. A professional
soldier who had fought for the royal cause until his capture in 1644,
Monck had come to the conclusion that a monarchy with its powers
severely curtailed was what the country needed if order was to be restored.
A famously silent man, he gave little indication of his intentions as he
began to march on London as the beginning of January 1660. But
something of his ideas began to leak out. Increasing numbers of people
joined his army as it came south, including many disenchanted
Presbyterians and Parliamentary leaders
of the First Civil War such as Sir Thomas
Fairfax. Once in London Monck
announced that he wished to summon a
free Parliament. He insisted that the Rump
recall the Presbyterian MPs who had been
removed at Pride’s Purge. This gave the
Presbyterians a majority over the Rump,
and they voted that the Long Parliament
first summoned in 1640 must finally end.
Monck, who had been’ made
commander-in-chief of the army, having
refused the office of protector, had been in
communication with Prince Charles
Stuart in exile in Holland. On Monck’s
advice Charles issued a proclamation of | General George Monck who
his future intentions on 4 April. Known as restored the monarchy in 1660.
the Declaration of Breda it promised a
general pardon to those who had acted against the crown, stated that
Parliament would decide all issues of importance and announced that
Charles wished to allow ‘liberty to tender consciences’ in matters of

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religion as long as they did not disturb the kingdom. Meanwhile the free
Parliament — known as a Convention because no royal person had
summoned it — of Lords and Commons was called, to which were returned
a great many royalists and Presbyterians. The Convention, having voted in
favour of the motion that the government of England ought to be by king,
Lords and Commons, invited Prince Charles Stuart to return as king.
On 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, the dark and charming Prince of
Wales arrived in London to be crowned King Charles II.

360
 Charles II
(1660-1685)

The return,of the handsome Prince of Wales was greeted with frank
rejoicing after the misery into which the Commonwealth had degenerated.
It was expressed in the cheering crowds that waited for his arrival and lined
his entire route from Dover to London. Nevertheless as his ship — called the
Naseby after the great Parliamentary victory, now tactfully renamed the
Royal Charles — crossed the sea, Prince Charles told Samuel Pepys the
diarist, who was one of the officials accompanying the royal family’s
return, that he could not rid his mind of his last time in England, when he
had been a wanted man with a price on his head. How unlike this return
in triumph! As he neared London Charles said, with the sardonic humour
which exile had encouraged, that it must be entirely his fault that he had
stayed away so long — he had yet to meet anyone ‘who did not protest that
he had ever wished for his return’.
And indeed since the settlement made at the Restoration dissolved all the
acts of the republican government, and Charles II’s reign was said to date
from the death of his father in 1649, it was as if the Interregnum had never
been. Nevertheless, whatever the political compromises, the new king was
a very human being who was hardly going to forget the treatment his
family had endured. Beneath Charles’s affable manner there was a steely
resolve never, as he put it, ‘to go on his travels again’. He would adopt
whatever means he could to accomplish that for himself and his relations.
Despite the celebrations, the tensions between the Presbyterians who
had brought back the king and the royalists themselves were unresolved.
Indeed they coloured the rest of the reign, for the forces represented by the
Parliamentary rebels did not vanish with the Restoration. The Puritan
Revolution might have gone too far, but the Civil War had been an
expression of an uncontainable feeling. The new monarchy was
immeasurably enhanced by Charles’s personal popularity — he had not,
however, restored himself. Those who had brought him back, the great
lords, the MPs, the merchants, the lawyers, had fought that war for
Parliamentary rights and were never going to allow a return to the times of
Charles I. When they found out that beneath his airy charm the new king

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believed just as much in royal power as his

father and grandfather had, a new struggle
began between king and Parliament. It was
spearheaded by the former Cromwellian
politician Anthony Ashley Cooper, created
Lord Ashley in 1661 and later Earl of
Shaftesbury, whose followers became
known as the Whigs.
At first, however, Charles II’s autocratic
instincts were constrained by his pre-
carious position and by his former adviser
in exile, the lawyer Edward Hyde. The
father-in-law of Charles’s brother James,
CHARLES THE SECOND,
Duke of York, who had married his
daughter Anne, Hyde was now raised to the peerage as the Earl of
Clarendon and became lord chancellor. Edward Hyde had been one of the
leaders of the opposition in Charles I’s time; as a result the Restoration
monarchy began life shorn of the worst excesses of that reign. Most of the
acts of the Long Parliament before the war which Charles I had agreed to
remained on the statute book, while the instruments of Stuart despotism —
the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North
— remained in the dustbin of history. Ship money and any taxes raised
without Parliament’s consent continued to be illegal, and the Triennial Act
stipulating that Parliament must convene every three years was reinstated.
All the ancient feudal levies to the king were finally abolished and Charles
was granted £1,200,000 a year for the rest of his life.
Pudgy, faithful and now over fifty, which was twenty years older than
most of the king’s circle, Clarendon was old-fashioned and pompous, but
he had been in exile with the royal family for years, sharing their greatest
tribulations, and Charles listened to him. They shared a desire to make the
new monarchy secure by settling it on the widest foundations, an objective
endangered most conspicuously by the monarchy’s natural supporters, the
Anglican Cavaliers. Though the first measure of the Restoration
Convention was the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which covered
everything done during the Civil War, once the Convention had given way
to the overwhelmingly Cavalier Parliament the act was to some extent
ignored. Thirteen expendable former members of the Commonwealth
government were executed. Cromwell’s corpse and those of two other
regicides, his son-in-law Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, were dug up
and hanged. The Cavaliers were also determined to scupper the king’s
efforts to include the Puritans within a broad new Church of England.
The Anglican Cavaliers loathed the Independents and Presbyterians who

>) 62,
 1660-1685
had ruled England during the Commonwealth. They might not be able to
take their revenge on the chief men of the Commonwealth, many of whom
now held important positions at the court of Charles II, but they could take
their revenge on their co-religionists. They were convinced that all Baptists,
Presbyterians and Independents were instinctive republicans, that given half
a chance their meeting places would once again be seedbeds of revolution,
as they had been before the Civil War. The Cavaliers’ one aim was to cut
the ground from under the Puritans’ feet so that they should not be allowed
to get a hold anywhere in England, whether it was in the corporations (or
boroughs) which returned members of Parliament or among the clergy.
Charles I[’s attempt to achieve a new Church settlement informed by the
Puritan leaders, whose views were canvassed for the 1662 prayer book,
foundered on a disastrous combination of Anglican obduracy and the
Puritans’ refusal to compromise over bishops. Instead, a series of acts
unfairly known as the Clarendon Code brought back the High
Anglicanism of Laud as the official national religion, to be enforced in
every branch of the English state structure. The Corporation Act of
December 1661 required all town officials to swear to renounce the
Covenant, take the Anglican Communion and obey the king. Bishops were
restored to the Church and to the House of Lords. The Fourth Act of
Uniformity in 1662 ordered all clergymen who refused to use the prayer
book, who had not been ordained by a bishop and who would not
renounce the Covenant to lose their livings. At this, a phenomenal 2,000
clergymen resigned from the Church of England.
Previously, under the Commonwealth the different Puritan sects — the
Independents, Baptists, Presbyterians and two new ones that sprang up in
the 1650s, the Quakers (so called because they quaked at the spirit within
them) and Socinians (who became known as Unitarians) — had regarded
themselves as members of the Church of England. No longer. From the
Clarendon Code dates the tradition of Dissent, or Nonconformity as it
became known in the nineteenth century. With the departure of its most
fervent ministers, much of the vigour and strength of religious feeling went
outside the Church of England, accounting for its decline in the eighteenth
century. The Methodism of Jonn Wesley would be needed to revive its
spiritual passion.
Just as the forces that had provoked the Civil War were still present in
Charles II’s government, albeit in diluted form, the more powerful ideas of
Puritanism did not disappear, they simply went underground. The
Clarendon Code had the effect of dividing England into two nations, one
official, the other unofficial. Unable to participate in public life for the next
150 years and educated at their own high-minded academies, the
Dissenters developed a mental independence that gave them a healthy lack

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of respect for the powers that be. The Puritanism which still existed within
the Dissenters became an underground spring that infused the national life
in the most curious and vital way. In the Nonconformist consciences it
continued to be a force for reform and social change.
There was an initial flurry of prosecutions of Dissenters, as the
Conventicle Act of 1664 prevented more than four people assembling to
worship without the Anglican prayer book — the writer John Bunyan, who
was minister of a flock of Baptists in Bedfordshire, spent twelve years in
prison, during which he wrote one of the masterpieces of English literature,
Pilgrim’s Progress. But as time wore on the Clarendon Code was not
always observed, as there were no church courts to ensure enforcement. In
1689 an Act of Toleration modified the laws, allowing Dissenters to
worship in peace, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 which forbade all
dissenting clergymen to come within five miles of a corporate town or their
old living soon lapsed. Meanwhile energetic men prevented from becoming
sheriffs, MPs, judges or even university students devoted themselves to
practical activities like banking and manufacturing.
Compared to the rest of Europe, England was extremely liberal,
introducing religious tolerance a century before most European countries
— in France Louis XIV would soon revoke the 1598 Edict of Nantes which
permitted Protestant worship and political freedom. This tolerance owed a
great deal to the gracious character of Charles II, who had originally
wished to grant ‘liberty to tender consciences’. He had suffered too much
at the hands of the religiously inclined (hence his celebrated quip,
‘Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman’) to like bigotry in any
form. He even gave permission to the Quakers under William Penn, son of
the Cromwellian admiral, to set up Pennsylvania in America as a
proprietary colony so that they could worship unmolested. At their first
meeting, this grave, good man would not remove his hat in Charles’s
presence because he disapproved of kings. Thereupon Charles removed his
own, saying it was the custom that one of them should be bare-headed.
The new king was immensely popular. He possessed a zest for enjoyment
— he was nicknamed the Merry Monarch - which mirrored his subjects’
yearning for a return to normality after the stern Puritan experiment. He
led the way in a riot of parties, dancing and dissipation, consorting with
actresses who were mistresses and mistresses who became duchesses.
Restoration comedy by writers like Vanbrugh express the spirit of the age:
amoral and lascivious. Throughout England games, festivals, gaiety,
maypoles and Christmas all returned, for Christmas under the
Commonwealth had been a day of fasting to atone for past sins.
Charles II made yacht racing into a national sport, pitting his skills as a
yachtsman against his brother the Duke of York. He also made horse

364
 1660-1685

racing at Newmarket into a fashionable activity, which is why it is often

called the sport of kings. He loved the company of jockeys and was
frequently observed chatting to them. Wherever he went he was followed
by the little dogs with plumed ears and tails, which have ever since been
knownas King Charles spaniels. The sentimental English were entranced
by the king’s informality. Unlike his stately father, he was always accessible
and friendly, generally being the first to wave when people recognized him
walking in Windsor Great Park.
England, with its play-acting traditions established so strongly for over
a century, had keenly missed the theatre, shut down by the Puritans. Now
the gregarious king was to be seen almost every night at playhouses such
as the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and at the new Italian musical genre
called the opera. An orange-seller and actress called Nell Gwynne became
one of his favourite mistresses. In the
new air of freedom women like Aphra
Behn became playwrights, for the
Puritans had stressed the role of
women as submissive to their
husbands. The country was swept by
mockery of the Puritans in poems like
Hudibras by Samuel Butler which
concerned the adventures of a
Presbyterian knight, and _ satirical
comedies of the sophisticated new
manners like William Wycherley’s
The Country Wife.
The poet John Dryden who had
celebrated Charles II’s return in his
poem Astraea Redux was appointed
poet laureate. Music, which had
klthay.rzge also been discouraged under the
bul? Cromwellians, was renewed in
Restoration poet laureate and churches all over England. The new
playwright John Dryden. court painter Sir Peter Lely captured
the risqué flavour of the Restoration,
in the revealing dresses of the heavy-lidded beauties like Barbara Villiers,
Lady Castlemaine, and Louise Duchess of Portsmouth who presided over
the court. Almost all of them bore bastard children by Charles II, who was
happy to recognize them as his own since his wife Catherine of Braganza
was unable to conceive. Almost all of the sons were created dukes, with the
result that many English dukes today descend from what used to be called
the wrong side of the blanket.

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 STUART

WHITEHALL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Even before the Restoration, seventeenth-century England had seen a

host of important new scientific discoveries thanks to the liberating effect
on thought of the Renaissance and Reformation. Science, which had been
dead since the classical Greeks, revived mightily and in countless ways
invisibly touched and improved the nation’s life. Farming techniques
copied from the Dutch reclaimed land in the fens and East Anglia. By the
1670s new methods improved yields so much that the English were for the
first time able to export corn. Before the Civil War Charles I’s doctor
William Harvey had demonstrated the circulation of the blood as well as
how embryos develop in the womb. By the middle of the century it had
become a tradition in London for men interested in experimental science
to have meetings together in what was called the ‘invisible college’, and in
1662 the distinguished members of this ‘invisible college’ were
incorporated into the Royal Society, helped by a grant from Charles II. The
lively and intellectually curious new king had scientific interests
throughout his life, himself performing experiments as a hobby — though
he mocked the Royal Society members for seeming to do nothing but weigh
air. In fact the weighing of air by Robert Boyle as a means of discovering
the properties of gases and his invention of an air pump was the starting
point for one of the transforming inventions of the modern world, the
steam engine, developed by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen in 1712.
Perhaps the most celebrated Fellow of the Royal Society was the
extraordinary mathematics professor Isaac Newton, born in 1642. He
revolutionized the laws of physical science, which had long rested on
Aristotelian calculations, when he worked out the rules of gravity after
observing an apple drop to the ground. Newton’s work held good for the
next 200 years. As the poet Alexander Pope would wittily put it:

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.

God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light!

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 1660-1685

English architecture, which had seen no important new public buildings

during the twenty years of the Interregnum, began to celebrate the lush
forms of the baroque: Christopher Wren, another Fellow, soon to be
famous for rebuilding St Paul’s, designed the Sheldonian Theatre in
Oxford. Meanwhile a convivial and courteous public life began to flourish
in the new coffee and chocolate houses of London and the greater
provincial cities which contrasted favourably with the boisterous character
of public houses and inns. Coffee, chocolate and tea were fashionable new
imports into England that attested to the exponential growth in English
trade from Africa to Malaysia.
Rump and Protectorate innovations considered to be of value, such as
the Navigation Act of 1651, were re-enacted by the Cavalier Parliament to
give them greater legal force, but the Cromwellian Union of England,
Scotland and Ireland was repealed and their abolished local Parliaments
were reinstated. In Scotland, however, the Covenanter movement had been
a national phenomenon which was far more universal than its Puritan
equivalent in England. Not only did widespread local rebellions greet the
return of bishops and the tightening of English control over the Kirk, but
thousands of Covenanters who refused to worship other than after their
own fashion were imprisoned or killed for their beliefs and their leader
Argyll was executed.
In contrast to Scotland, in religious matters the majority of the Irish
fared quite well, owing to Charles’s sympathy for Roman Catholicism.
Catholics had fought for him and hidden him, while his wife, his mother
and his favourite mistress were all Catholics. Under Charles’s lord
lieutenant in Ireland, the Earl of Ormonde (created duke in 1661), the
Mass was once more unofficially allowed to be heard. It was in Ireland that
one of the great problems of the Restoration, how and to whom should
confiscated estates be restored, was shown in its purest form. Despite their
huge sacrifices for Charles’s father, most of the Catholic Irish royalists
never received back a penny for the estates seized as punishment by
Cromwell and redistributed to his soldiers - who formed too convenient a
new addition to the Protestant garrison in Ireland to be disturbed.
It was with his leanings to Catholicism that Charles Il would come most
perilously into conflict with the nation he had been recalled to rule. His
sympathy for the French Catholic king and rumoured secret dealings began
to inflame the old Puritan party, who were already angered by the Anglican
settlement of the Church. Under the former Cromwellian Lord Ashley, a
Parliamentarian in the mould of Hampden and Pym, a bitter Parliamentary
opposition to Charles II was created. For, at the Restoration, Catholicism
represented to the English psyche as strongly as ever the tyranny and
absolutism that Parliament had fought two civil wars to overcome.

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Since the early days of Cromwell, English foreign policy had been to
back France against Spain in the struggle for mastery in Europe. The
Restoration government merely continued that theme, helped by the
intimacy between the two sovereigns. Charles II was not just closely related
to the French king Louis XIV — they were first cousins — he had also spent
a great deal of time at his court during the Interregnum. He saw Louis as
a real friend to whom he could turn in times of trouble. It was Louis, keen
to draw England more tightly into his net of alliances against Spain, who
had arranged the marriage of Charles to Catherine of Braganza, sister of
the King of Portugal.
This marriage was extremely fortunate for the burgeoning English trade
with India for it brought England the port of Bombay in India, as well as
Tangier in Africa. Bombay soon became the East India Company’s most
lucrative place of trade, its acquisition marking the real beginning of the
British Empire in India. Nevertheless, the Portuguese marriage had
contemporary significance because it was a hit against Spain. Portugal had
only just become independent again after three-quarters of a century under
Spanish rule, thanks to French aid and French soldiers. When Charles II
sold Dunkirk back to France to please Louis in 1662, it seemed to reflect the
unwelcome and growing influence that the French king had over his cousin.
It began to be said that England was the tool of France.
By the mid-1660s, after five short years, the honeymoon between
Charles II and Parliament had ended. An interminable and unsuccessful
Second Dutch War, the unceasingly scandalous and expensive royal
mistresses — all of whom seemed to be ladies-in-waiting to the queen — and
the corruption and extravagance of the court were proving increasingly
unpopular, their enormous costs prompting questions in the House of
Commons. The king had also begun to show tendencies that reminded
Parliament all too unhappily of his ancestors, when he attempted without
success to declare an Act of Indulgence to counteract the Act of
Uniformity. He wanted Parliament to pass the measure to ‘enable him to
exercise with a more universal satisfaction that power of dispensing which
he conceived to be inherent in him’. Since the king’s inability to suspend or
dispense with the law had been one of the rallying cries that began
Parliament’s resistance to Charles I, this was hardly promising.
In 1665 the Black Death returned to England — this time known as the
Great Plague — and killed 70,000 people. It was followed the next year by
the Great Fire of London, which in five days burned down half the city and
no fewer than eighty-nine parish churches, as well as old St Paul’s. In the
face of these great natural catastrophes, many contemporaries abandoned
their recently acquired habits of scientific reasoning and concluded that the
two events represented the judgement of God on an immoral people.

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 1660-1685

Once more, as it had during the

Black Death, the terrible cry of
‘Bring out your dead!’ was heard,
though this time medical advances
counselled isolation and _ the
marking of plague houses with a
red cross. In an effort to prevent
themselves breathing in the germs
which were believed to carry the
bubonic plague, the well-to-do
carried little bunches of flowers
in which to bury their noses.
From this custom dates the
macabre nursery rhyme (sneezing
was one of the symptoms of the
disease):

Ring a ring a roses

Pocket full of posies
Atishoo, atishoo
We all fall down.

The Great Fire of London, 2-6 September 1666.

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 STUART

As before, the Great Plague was carried by the black rat, now proliferating
thanks to the dramatic growth of the Port of London made necessary by
the inflow of produce from the colonies.
Such was the fear of papists that the Great Fire, which started in a
baker’s shop on Pudding Lane, was widely assumed to be the work of
Roman Catholics. Charles II and the Duke of York endeared themselves to
the city by taking a hands-on role in helping to extinguish the flames. It
was the duke who put an end to the blaze, using gunpowder to blow up
houses and make a gap the fire could not pass over.
But it was not enough to revive the royal popularity that had prevailed
at the time of the Restoration in 1660. The openly Catholic leanings of the
court aroused mounting suspicion, greatly aggravated by rumours that the
Duke of York, next in line to the throne, was in the process of converting.
If the Plague and the Fire seemed a judgement on a corrupt court said to
be in the pocket of the French, the final straw came in 1667. Having
blockaded the Thames, the Dutch had the effrontery to sail up the Medway
and capture some of the best English warships. As if that was not bad
enough, Louis XIV — the supposed friend of England — suddenly switched
sides and backed the Dutch. He was alarmed by the rapid growth of
English colonies when his ultimate plan was for France to replace the
Spanish Empire as a worldwide power. All was chaos and confusion, and
England now faced two formidable enemies. Some sort of scapegoat was
needed to deflect the anger rising in Parliament against the king. The
chosen figure was the architect of Charles II’s return, his faithful servant
Lord Clarendon.
Although Clarendon was the father of the Duke of York’s wife and
grandfather of the two heiresses to the throne, Princess Mary and Princess
Anne, he was unpopular at court as he disdained to hide his disapproval of
its louche behaviour. Moreover, having been the king’s tutor once he could
not break himself of the habit of treating his former pupil as if he were still
a schoolboy. Nevertheless he was a loyal servant, whose veneration for the
House of Stuart was such that he had opposed the marriage of his
daughter, as a mere commoner, to the Duke of York. But, like his father,
Charles II had a ruthless side. He did not hesitate to throw his servant to
the House of Commons. Unlike his father, though, Charles had the
goodness of heart to warn Clarendon of his impending fate so that he
should not be imprisoned or executed but could escape to France. There he
died after completing his magisterial account of the Civil War, The History
of the Great Rebellion.
The Second Dutch War had grown out of rivalry between the Dutch and
the English in North America. As well as expanding south — the large new
colony of Carolina had been established in 1663, like its capital Charleston

a7
 1660-1685

named for the king — English

settlers began to fill up the
land between Maryland and
the states of New England,
which the Dutch considered
to be their own territory.
Stalemate in the war led toa
new peace signed at Breda
which gave the old Dutch
colony of New Amsterdam
to the English, who were
commanded by the Duke of
York. It was renamed New
York in his honour, though
its largest island retained its
Dutch name, Manhattan.
Acquiring New York was
crucial for the string of
British colonies running
along the eastern coast of
America. New Amsterdam
had prevented a continuity
of national settlement
between northern New
England and the south; now
that it had changed hands,
the land began to fill up
WILLIAM PENN. with English settlers.
These colonial successes
William Penn, the Quaker founder of made Louis XIV more
Pennsylvania. anxious than ever to ensure
that England was contained
within his net of alliances. To his annoyance, the disparate collection of
new ministers who had masterminded the fall of Clarendon were united by
their distrust of French ambition. Known as the Cabal from the acronym
made by the first letters of their name Lords Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham
(the son of Charles I’s favourite), Arlington and Lauderdale, they made a
new Protestant alliance with Holland and Sweden. This Triple Alliance
temporarily halted Louis in his tracks, forcing him to withdraw from his
campaign to overrun the Spanish Netherlands on behalf of his wife, sister
of the King of Spain.
The displeased Sun King therefore changed tack. Feelers were once more

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put out to Charles via his sister Minette, the Duchess of Orléans, who was
married to Louis’ brother, known as Monsieur. By 1670, when the two
monarchs signed the Treaty of Dover, Louis XIV had lured Charles and
England back into his camp: they were now committed to go to war with
him against Holland, in return for a stretch of the Dutch coast and the
island of Walcheren, near the mouth of the Scheldt.
There was a secret clause in the treaty, however, which was to have
enormous costs. For Louis the price was the massive sum of £160,000 a
year to be paid secretly to his cousin to make Charles independent of an
increasingly restive and unbiddable Parliament. For Charles it was much
greater. He sacrificed the last shreds of confidence that the English nation
had in the Stuarts as kings. For by the secret clause, which Charles revealed
only to the Catholics Arlington and Clifford, the English king was to
declare himself a Catholic ‘as soon as the welfare of the realm would
permit’, and Louis was to earmark 6,000 French soldiers to help turn
England Catholic.
This was extraordinarily risky behaviour on the part of Charles. Lord
Shaftesbury (as Anthony Ashley Cooper became in 1672), who was the
leading political personality of the day and Charles’s current lord
chancellor, was already very doubtful about the king. As an intemperate
ex-Cromwellian, indeed a former member of the religious Barebones
Parliament, he was waiting to pounce on any tyrannous royal behaviour.
For Shaftesbury, an ambitious, passionate, ruthless character and a
vituperative orator, the king was back on sufferance.
As with many of his followers, Shaftesbury’s visceral hatred of
absolutism and Catholicism, incarnate in the figure of the continental
tyrant Louis XIV, had been forged by the great political struggles of the
previous half-century. Intellectual justification for the need for continuous
revolt was provided by his friend and personal physician, the political
philosopher John Locke, whose contract theory of civil government would
inspire the American colonies to rebel a hundred years later. Shaftesbury’s
followers, the Puritan or country party as they were known in contrast to
Charles II’s court party, had many links to Dissent and its manufacturing
interests. The Dissenters saw not only a threat to freedom of thought but
a customs threat to English trade in the stranglehold the bellicose Louis
XIV had over so many continental ports.
If Shaftesbury and others had begun to pick up rumours about the secret
clause, their suspicions were exacerbated just before the war began against
the Dutch. In 1672, as a first step in the implementation of the secret
clause, Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence. Without Parliament’s
approval he suspended all the penal laws against Roman Catholics and
Dissenters, exhibiting that old Stuart tendency to dispense with

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Parliamentary procedures which the country had fought a war to stop. The
House of Commons was so outraged that in February 1673 it refused to
vote supplies until the Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn. The
following month Charles gave in and withdrew the Indulgence. But,
though the Commons voted supplies for the war, it also quickly passed a
Test Act to root out Catholics. The Test Act required all office holders to
swear that they rejected the doctrines of the Roman Church and to prove
that they had recently received Anglican Communion. Charles angrily
prorogued Parliament, but the damage was done. For the Duke of York,
the future James II, was obliged to resign as lord high admiral. Arlington
and Clifford had to go too.
These resignations were followed a few months later by Shaftesbury’s
dismissal as lord chancellor. For the rest of Charles II’s reign the country
was racked by a long-drawn-out struggle between the cadaverous
Shaftesbury, whose opposition party stood for limiting the king’s power,
and Charles II and his court party. From the end of 1673 the king’s party
were led by the Cavalier Anglican Thomas Osborne, like Shaftesbury a
skilled Commons organizer who did not scruple to buy support when all
else failed, and was said to set aside £20,000 a year from customs receipts
to bribe MPs. Created Earl of Danby, Osborne was as determined to
uphold the royal prerogative and eradicate Dissent as Shaftesbury was to
pursue the will of Parliament and establish toleration. Thus for the first
time in English history there emerged two distinct parties in the House of
Commons, from which derive our present-day two-party system.
Under pressure from the increasingly anti-French House of Commons
Charles was forced to make peace with Holland in 1674 and the Third
Dutch War came to an end. As early as 1677 Danby, Charles II’s new chief
minister after the demise of the Cabal, was raising an English army to help
the Dutch and arranging the marriage of James’s daughter Princess Mary,
heiress presumptive to the English throne because Charles II was childless,
to Charles’s nephew William III of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands.
The marriage took place in November. Louis XIV was incandescent at the
way Charles had failed to prevent Danby returning to the principles of the
Triple Alliance, because he had been sending his cousin further enormous
secret subsidies in return for the promise that England would make no
alliance with a foreign power without France’s permission.
By now Louis had had enough — his policy of bribing Charles had got
nowhere. He decided to turn his attentions to the opposition under
Shaftesbury and bribe them instead. This of course could not have been
more dangerous to Charles II. Louis revealed to Shaftesbury the second
and third secret agreements Charles had signed to prorogue or adjourn
Parliament at the French king’s bidding for £100,000 a time to prevent

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Parliament declaring war on France. In July 1678, stymied by Danby’s

threat of an English army defending Holland, Louis made peace with the
Treaty of Nijmegen and not long afterwards revealed to Shaftesbury a
fourth secret treaty, under which Charles had been paid to withdraw from
the Dutch alliance and which had been written out in the reluctant Danby’s
hand.
From August 1678 events were anyway moving in Shaftesbury’s favour
with the discovery of the supposed Popish Plot. Titus Oates, a moonfaced
rogue clergyman, announced that there was a secret plot afoot for
Catholics with French aid to embark on a massacre of Protestants,
including the king and the Duke of York. Since the Duke of York was
already a Catholic and the king could not have been more friendly to
Roman Catholics, this was palpable nonsense. But the strange death of the
examining magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey fired the ever
smouldering embers of anti-Catholicism into furious life and it swept the
country. Innocent Catholics were tried and found guilty on no evidence at
all, and Shaftesbury saw his chance. He exploited fears that Protestantism
was under threat to get Danby impeached for his activities as the king’s
emissary to Louis, activities proven by his handwriting. In January 1679
Charles was forced to dissolve Parliament and call new elections to save
Danby and to prevent himself being attacked on his French policy.
However, the new Parliament which met in March was extremely hostile
to Catholicism and to the Duke of York. Shaftesbury began to bay for the
blood of the openly Catholic duke and for his exclusion from the throne.
Defiantly, Charles dissolved Parliament and called fresh elections again in
the hope of getting a better House, which would vote against Shaftesbury’s
Exclusion Bill. On its last day Shaftesbury got the Habeas Corpus Act
passed which prevented the crown from delaying trials and imprisoning
without cause.
Nevertheless, Charles was so alarmed by the new House of Commons
that he refused to allow it to sit. The backers of the Exclusion Bill,
Shaftesbury’s followers, petitioned the king to allow Parliament to meet.
Their country party became known as the Petitioners, and soon they got
the nickname the Whiggamores or Whigs because the Scots Covenanters
with their Petition of 1638 had been called Whiggamores. Meanwhile the
court party, formerly led by the imprisoned Danby, who expressed their
abhorrence of Shaftesbury’s attempt to interfere with the royal preroga-
tive, began to be known as Tories (from ‘Toraidhe’), which was the
nickname used of Catholic rebels in Ireland.
Parliament was champing at the bit, but the king continued to refuse to
allow it to assemble. The situation in London began to turn distinctly
nasty; there were mutterings about a new civil war. Rebellion broke out in

374
 1660-1685

both eastern and western Scotland when the Covenanters, who had been
persecuted for almost twenty years, rose up and murdered the pro-English
Archbishop Sharp near St Andrews. They were led by the son of the Argyll
who had led the first Covenanters. Shaftesbury by now had plans, which
were being widely discussed, for Charles’s illegitimate son, the showy and
shallow Duke of Monmouth, to succeed as king instead of the Catholic
James. Shaftesbury manoeuvred to get Monmouth sent north to put the
Covenanters’ rising down, so that he might cover himself in glory.
Monmouth did just that, defeating the Covenanters at the Battle of
Bothwell Bridge near Glasgow, and they were then brutally punished by
the Duke of York whom Charles had sent north to get out of harm’s way.
Argyll was exiled from Scotland.
Meanwhile Charles played a waiting game. It was not until October
1680 that Parliament was permitted to assemble, whereupon the Exclusion
Bill passed in the Commons. The succession was saved by the Lords, which
rejected the bill when Lord Halifax convinced his fellow peers that it was
better to be like him, neither a Whig nor a Tory but a Trimmer between
the two.
Nevertheless, what is known as the Exclusion Crisis had not gone away.
To prevent the emergence of a figurehead for the Whig cause Charles had
sent Monmouth out of the country. Encouraged by the feeling of
moderation in the air now that the reaction to the Popish Plot had died
down, in January 1681 he dissolved Parliament and called a new one to
meet in Oxford. There Shaftesbury would not have the sort of influence he
did in London thanks to the London mob and a gang of apprentices called
the Whiteboys. As Pym had done, he used this threat of street violence to
intimidate MPs. The king meanwhile coolly began to negotiate with Louis
once more for further income to save him from having to call Parliament
again.
When Parliament met in Oxford in late March, so defiant were the
Whigs and so belligerent was their mood that they attended with armed
soldiers — as did the king. For a moment England again trembled on the
brink of civil war. And once again the cry went up in the Oxford
Parliament to exclude the Duke of York from the throne, even though the
Royal Council was now suggesting a regency during his lifetime: Princess
Mary would rule for him followed by Anne.
When the Whigs refused to accept this, Charles cunningly dissolved
Parliament one last time — he never called a Parliament again. There was a
real possibility that, had Parliament remained sitting, a new civil war
would have begun or a Whig revolution have taken place. But the Whig
leaders had lost their chance. Without a Parliament to attend, MPs drifted
away, and the moment had passed. Two months later Shaftesbury was

375
 STUART

hauled before a Grand Jury in London for inciting revolution, but the
Londoners trying him were all Whigs and the charges were dismissed.
Amid great rejoicing, Shaftesbury was released. He fled to the Hague in
Holland with Monmouth, but died there in poor health a few weeks later.
What was called the Tory reaction then began. It was aided by the
discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683, a conspiracy by a handful of
Whig extremists, most of whom were former Cromwellian soldiers, to
assassinate Charles as he rode past an inn named Rye House on the road
between London and Newmarket. Even though the plot was the work of
fanatics, Charles used it as an excuse to overthrow the last of the Whig
leaders. On very flimsy grounds he executed two aristocrats from
distinguished families, Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, neither of whom
were probably involved with the plot but who had been among the chief
movers in the Exclusion Crisis.
Sidney, who had served on Cromwell’s Council of State, was killed for
having in his possession papers supporting tyrannicide, while Russell died
for refusing to agree that it was wrong to resist tyranny. These doctrines
were the essence of what the Civil War had been fought for, and were
considered reasonable ideas by many aristocratic Whig families who had
fought for the Puritan Parliamentary cause. Thus Charles II by the end of
his reign had considerably alienated many magnates as well as MPs. Sidney
and Russell were seen by the Whigs as martyrs to the cause of civil liberty.
As will be seen, their relations were only temporarily quiescent. They
would take their revenge in the next reign.
For the last two years of his life the king was triumphant. In the period
known as his despotism, he set out to remodel the machinery by which
Parliament was elected, in order to give the Tories a majority. He recalled
all the royal charters of town corporations, which were where the Whig
strength lay (the Tories were in the counties), and restored them only after
a new corporation of Tories had been nominated to take the place of the
old. He even invented a royal right of confirming all elections to the
corporations. No one dared gainsay him. All the plots and death threats
against him had given him a new popularity. James, Duke of York was
restored to the Privy Council and to the Admiralty in defiance of the Test
Act; Dissenters and Whigs were imprisoned, and Danby released.
In a final climax to Charles’s sweeping the board, he failed to summon
Parliament — in contravention of the Triennial Act of 1641, which laid
down that Parliament had to be called every three years. Warning bells
began to ring, even for his supporters. Halifax was especially disappointed
by the king.
However, the strain of asserting himself, and of conducting his energetic
love lite, finally told: the king was quite unexpectedly laid low by a stroke

376
 1660-1685

in February 1685, aged only fifty-eight. While he lingered, apologizing

with his usual elegant wit for being ‘an unconscionable time dying’, Father
Huddleston, a Catholic priest who had been present in one of the Catholic
houses when Charles was on the run after the Battle of Worcester, was
smuggled in up the backstairs of the Palace of Whitehall. Brought by the
Duke of York, he gave the king the Last Rites according to the Catholic
faith. From being a homeless exile Charles II had come home in triumph,
and he now died in his own splendid bed, incontrovertibly a powerful
monarch. His last words characteristically did not concern affairs of state.
‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ he said, and then expired.
Despite the arbitrary style of his last years, Charles II’s reign had seen the
beginning of the two-party system and the further development of
Parliamentary government. Danby’s impeachment had finally established
the responsibility of ministers to Parliament. By a mixture of tolerance and
laziness Charles managed to heal the terrible wounds of the Civil War, and
that was no mean feat. However, despite the growth of the colonies, his
reign was not very illustrious. Charles’s links to France meant that by her
inaction England helped the spread of a power which posed a genuine
threat to the religious and civil liberty of Europe. His reign, which had
begun in hope, ended in the triumph at home of a cynical absolutism not
unlike that practised by the Sun King himself. It would lead to a new
revolution to curb the Stuart kings’ power once and for all.
The younger Buckingham made up a verse which delighted Charles II:

We have a pretty, witty king,

Whose word no one relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one.

Three hundred years later, that still seems to be the last word.

af 7
 James I
(1685-1688)

The Tory reaction enabled James II to become king without a murmur of

protest. Parliament voted him the enormous sum of £1,900,000 a year for
life, which gives a good indication of how popular he was. But though he
was brave and hard working and led a quiet private life with his second
wife, the Catholic Mary of Modena, James was almost as disastrous a king
as his father Charles I, from whom he inherited some unfortunate
character traits, being both obstinate and extraordinarily unrealistic.
During James’s reign all the anxieties about papistry and absolutism that
had amounted to a call to arms for seventeenth-century Englishmen once
more came to the fore. He owed his accession to the support of the
Anglican Tory party. The moment he made it clear that he planned to turn
England into a Catholic country, and a Catholic country that fulfilled
everyone’s worst fears, his cause was lost.
James indicated the way he was heading right at the beginning of his
reign, but such was the feeling against the Whigs that at first it made no
difference. Though he was crowned in Westminster Abbey by the
Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft under the Protestant Rite, on
the second Sunday of the new reign the king attended Mass openly at
Whitehall, with the chapel doors pushed wide so that all could see what he
was doing. Pro-Catholic measures followed, including a warning to the
bishops that the king would not have the clergy preaching against the
dangers of papistry. And although he did not need the money, James II too
became Louis XIV’s pensioner, for the Sun King hoped to repeat his trick
of neutralizing Britain for the coming struggle.
By the summer of 1685 the Whig exiles in Holland were in despair. The
Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll decided to try and raise a
revolution before James became too entrenched. Argyll crossed to Scotland
to his own lands, while Monmouth went to the west country, where he
proclaimed himself the lawful son of Charles II and the real king of
England. Both risings failed, Monmouth being defeated and captured at
the Battle of Sedgemoor in the New Forest. Hundreds of Monmouth’s
supporters were executed (most of them hung, drawn and quartered) in the

378
 1685-1688

famously punitive Bloody Assizes, presided

over by the lord chief justice Judge Jeffreys.
Hundreds more were sentenced to
transportation to the West Indies.
James seized ~=the — opportunity
Monmouth’s rebellion offered to create a
Catholic standing army loyal only to him.
Using the excuse that the militia was not
good enough, he raised new regiments
officered by Roman Catholics to protect
him against what appeared to be incipient
revolution, and would not disband them.
By October 1685 the king’s army of
James II. 16,000 men was exercising menacingly just
outside London on Hounslow Heath. With
this large force at his disposal James was in a better position to see his
wishes carried out in Parliament. He asked for the Test Act to be abolished,
for he saw no reason why his fellow Catholics should be prevented from
holding office. But Parliament refused, believing that with a Roman
Catholic king it was more important than ever that the Test Act remained
in place. When MPs denounced his use of dispensing powers to appoint
Catholic officers, James prorogued his one and only Parliament. He also
dismissed all his Tory ministers except for
the cynical and unprincipled opportunist
Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, who
quickly converted to Catholicism.
Over the next two years matters went
from bad to worse. In July 1686 James
illegally established a Court of Ecclesiastical
Commission presided over by his new lord
chancellor Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge,
which was to suppress clerical opposition
and Romanize the Church. Henry
Compton, the outspoken Bishop of London
who protested against this, was suspended
by the king. Judges installed during the
triumph of Charles II declared that James
had the power to dispense with the law if he James Scott, Duke of
wished and appoint Roman Catholics to Monmouth, the illegitimate
son of Charles II, whose 1685
state office. In case after case the king took rebellion claimed the throne
enthusiastic advantage of this ruling, filling for himself against the
Oxford and Cambridge with Catholics and Catholic James II.

S72
 STUART

introducing four Catholic peers into the Privy Council. In April 1687 by a
Declaration of Indulgence James suspended all laws against Catholics and
Dissenters, hoping to win some of the Dissenters on to his side. But,
although the Dissenters had been persecuted by the Anglican Church, they
infinitely preferred Protestantism to Catholicism and were not wooed.
There was now a general feeling in the air that matters were approaching
a crisis. Senior Tories like Danby now united with the exiled Whigs and
conspired to find a new ruler. The obvious choice was Princess Mary, the
heir to the throne, a staunch Protestant who was married to William III of
Orange. Through a variety of means William, a valiant foe of Louis XIV,
had made his opposition to the repeal of the Test Act and to the defeat of
Protestantism quite clear. Meetings with the Dutch ambassador started
secret negotiations for the Stadholder to come and save England from
James II. The sense that Protestantism was in danger had been amplified by
the arrival in England of the French Protestants, the Huguenots, 400,000
of whom had been expelled from France by Louis XIV over the previous
two years, following his revocation of his ancestor’s Edict of Nantes. All
over England people thrilled with horror as French exiles told of their
hideous experiences at the hands of the Catholic Louis, and the spectre of
their own houses being demolished and churches burned began to hang
over the nation.
In June 1688 events started moving towards their climax. The catalyst
came with James’s second Declaration of
Indulgence. This was to be read in all
churches on the first two Sundays of
that month. At this the Archbishop of
Canterbury, William Sancroft, the saintly
and easygoing old man who had crowned
James king, could bear it no longer. With
six other bishops, he petitioned the king
not to make the clergy break the law.
Infuriated when the majority of the clergy
duly refused to read the Declaration from
the pulpit, James charged the bishops with
seditious libel and sent them to the Tower.
Scandalized, the English were convinced
that their Protestant institutions and
Archbishop of Canterbury,
William Sancroft, one of the
liberties were about to be overturned. As
: : ;
severt bishops tried for resisting the bishops approached the Tower in their
James II’s attempts to strengthen barge, crowds gathered to watch and
royal power and return England shouted for their blessing.
to Catholicism. Princess Anne wrote to her sister Mary
380
 1685-1688

in Holland that ‘things are come to that pass now, that if they go on much
longer, I believe no Protestant will be able to live’. She added, ‘I am
resolved to undergo anything rather than change my religion; nay if it come
to that, I had rather live on alms than change.’ The spectacle of such key
establishment figures as six English bishops on trial was an affront to the
English way of life. Nevertheless the country stayed reasonably calm
because James’s two daughters remained staunch Protestants. There was
no reason to doubt that in due course a Protestant queen would reverse her
father’s acts.
But now, to add urgency to their deliberations, Mary of Modena, James
II’s second wife whose previous children had died in infancy, gave birth to
a son, a new Prince of Wales. The prospect of another Catholic king to
follow his ageing father was insupportable. The almost miraculous birth
after a long gap aroused a great deal of suspicion about the origins of the
baby — a rumour went round that it had been smuggled into Mary’s
bedroom in a warming pan. (As a consequence of this damaging
uncertainty, until quite recently the home secretary has had to be in the
vicinity of the birth of the heir to the throne, in order to certify that the
infant was not a substitute.)
There was no time to lose. On 30 June, the day a London jury acquitted
the bishops to wild rejoicings, a fateful letter was taken to William of
Orange, inviting him to save England from tyranny and Roman
Catholicism. He would have to bring an army strong enough to oppose
James and secure elections to a free Parliament. It was signed by seven men
of all political persuasions and from different parts of the kingdom. They
had thousands more at their back, in the armed forces, in the shires, in the
Church, in the absent Parliament, all united by their belief that the liberties
guaranteed by English Protestantism were in danger of vanishing altogether
under James. Among the signatories were the Tory leader Danby, once the
Whigs’ most bitter enemy; Compton, the suspended Bishop of London; a
Russell and a Sidney, both of whom were closely related to the Whig
martyrs of Charles II’s reign; and the wealthy Whig magnate the Earl of
Devonshire, who was related to the Russells by marriage.
William III had dedicated his life to preserving his country from the
French — he could not ignore an invitation which would add England to the
coalition against Louis X{V. What was later described as a Protestant east
wind blew William and his fleet down the Channel past where James had
the English fleet waiting for him, so that not a shot was fired against the
future king.
William of Orange landed at Torbay in Devon on the symbolically
Protestant date of 5 November, the day the Catholic plot to blow up the
Houses of Parliament had been discovered. From Torbay the stadholder
381
 STUART

marched unopposed through the west of England towards the capital. He

had a large army with him of 15,000 men — about 4,000 of whom were
English soldiers lent to the Dutch. Fortunately almost all England, from the
lords lieutenant down to the armed services, were in agreement with his
coming, ‘to give assistance this year sufficient for a relief under these
circumstances which have now been represented’, in the words of the note
which invited him. All the western grandees came out to meet him as he
headed for London, and the crowds swelled behind him.
James rallied his army to meet William at Salisbury, but so many troops
deserted that he dared not fight, and William proceeded slowly on to
London. Even James’s most beloved soldier, John Churchill, who had been
a member of his household for twenty years, abandoned him and joined
William. So did his daughter Princess Anne. There was hardly any
resistance at all, which is why 1688 is referred to as the bloodless
revolution. The queen and the infant Prince of Wales, James Edward Stuart,
were despatched to France. Having left a letter on his dressing table,
reproaching his country for forsaking him, the king realized that the game
was up. He threw the great seal of office into the Thames to make it difficult
for the regime to sign any official documents and tried to follow his wife
and son over to France. Embarrassingly, he was brought back by two
English fishermen who had recognized him, but was then allowed to depart
in peace by William.
James’s flight cleared up a good many issues. The free election could be
held without bloodshed, as there would be no clash of troops. The City of
London, which was fast dissolving into chaos, was restored to order by
William’s troops. In January 1689 the writs were sent out summoning a
Parliament, which as at the Restoration was called a Convention, its purpose
being to draw up the new royal settlement. There was a fundamental
problem, however. Both Tories and Whigs had joined together in calling for
the assistance of William of Orange, but their ultimate objectives were very
different. The Tories still believed in the divine right of kings and wished to
establish a regency: James II could remain king in name while Mary with
William’s aid governed in fact. But the Whigs, as befitted their revolutionary
origins, wished to abolish Divine Right once and for all. Their aim was to
emphasize that the crown was subordinate to Parliamentary authority.
But a regency would make James II and his son a perpetual rallying point
for the disaffected. After much argument the Convention Parliament voted
through the motion that by leaving for France James had abdicated and the
throne was simply declared vacant. It issued a Declaration of Rights
outlining James’s illegal acts; in order not to offend the Tories or
Churchmen, no blame was attached to the king himself but was attributed
to his ministers.

382
 1685-1688

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William and Mary the throne.

383
 STUART

Meanwhile the problem of the Tories’ theoretical anxieties about who

should and who should not assume the throne were swept aside when
William of Orange declared tersely that he had not come to England ‘to be
his wife’s gentleman usher’. He would either be joint sovereign with her or
he was going home to Holland. As the last thing anyone wanted now that
William had arrived was for him to leave again, it was quickly agreed that
he and his wife should be joint sovereigns. On 23 February William and
Princess Mary accepted the throne they had been offered by Parliament
and signed the Declaration of Rights.
This was the grand finale in the great drama of the struggle between the
Stuart kings and Parliament which had taken centre stage for so much of
the seventeenth century. It laid the ground rules for the British
constitutional monarchy. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, as it was ever
after apotheosized, secured English Protestantism, which was now
identified with the rights and liberties of the people against the attacks of
a despotic Catholic king. Although two Stuarts still sat on the English
throne, the monarchy not only had been created by Parliament but was
responsible to it. The revolution marked the ultimate supremacy of
Parliament over the Stuart belief that the royal prerogative was above the
law. The king was at last no more than an official of the state who could
be dismissed by the state. Divine Right, though still hankered after by the
Tories, had been destroyed as a political concept. Parliament had
triumphed over the crown.

384
 William and Mary
(1689-1702)

William III was small, asthmatic, dark, almost hunchbacked and unpre-
possessing in the flesh. But although paintings flatter him, mainly by
depicting him on a rearing horse in the heat of battle, they truthfully
convey his heroic essence. After Louis XIV William was the single most
important individual on the late-seventeenth-century European political
stage. For thirty years his tireless activities held back the tide of French
domination. His life of struggle, and the treachery he had observed in the
highest places — including on the part of his uncle Charles II, who had
proposed dividing his nephew’s homeland between himself and Louis XIV
— made him highly secretive. He trusted no one other than his small Dutch
inner circle. Among them his only real intimate was the Dutch courtier
William Bentinck, one of the chief negotiators with the Whigs before the
Glorious Revolution. Bentinck was created Duke of Portland by William,
with whom he had been friends since boyhood. His devotion to the king
was such that when smallpox struck the royal household, killing Queen
Mary, Bentinck took upon himself all the most onerous duties of nursing
William.
Even after thirteen years in England William’s dependence on his Dutch
intimates was undiminished, so that by the end of his life there was
considerable English resentment of this foreign influence. His tendency to
keep his cards close to his chest was understandable in view of the two-faced
behaviour of many of the English. A great many of them, even the Duke of
Shrewsbury — one of the immortal seven who had invited him to succeed
James II — brazenly hedged their bets from the moment William became king
and corresponded with the king-in-exile James II at St Germain in Paris. The
truth was that, though the revolutionary settlement was destined to endure,
at its beginning no one could predict that it would. Even the heiresses to the
throne, Queen Mary and the future Queen Anne, continued to have pangs
of guilt about usurping their father and their half-brother. Throughout
William’s reign Princess Anne wrote to her father clandestinely.
Moreover, despite all they owed to William, the senior bishops in the
Church of England were very ungrateful. Now that Protestantism stood in

385
 STUART

soe os

no danger, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and the

Bishop of Bath and Wells allowed themselves the luxury of refusing to take
a new oath of allegiance to William and Mary on the ground that they were
not the rightful heirs. Since there had to be an archbishop who recognized
the new monarchs, the non-juring (or swearing) Sancroft was replaced as
the Primate of All England by the low-church John Tillotson. Though the
386
 1688-1702

The Glorious Revolution: William III, Prince of Orange, arriving at Brixham,

Torbay, Deven, 5 November 1688, to accept the English invitation to save the
country from James II’s tyranny.

Non-Jurors party of the Church proved to be small and insignificant, much

of the clergy and indeed many of the Tories remained secretly wedded to
the cause of James II. Known as Jacobites (after the Latin form of James,

387
 STUART

‘Jacobus’), they found it impossible to abandon their allegiance to the

divinely ordained Stuart line of kings, for all James’s unsatisfactory
religious beliefs.
The Anglican clergy’s behaviour was also a reaction to William III’s
Dutch Calvinism (it was much the same as Presbyterianism). From the
beginning of his reign it had been clear that the new king’s sympathies were
with establishing a broader Church through a Comprehension Act. But,
though this was defeated and the penal code against the Roman Catholics
remained, the 1689 Toleration Act officially recognized the principle that
people should be allowed to practise their religions in ways other than
those of the state Church. It permitted Protestant Dissenters to have their
own dedicated buildings so long as they believed in the Trinity. In fact, as
a result of the act, with the exception of Roman Catholicism toleration of
every religion became the custom in England. Even Unitarians worshipped
in their plain rooms undisturbed.
The English were also increasingly keen to make sure that the Dutch
king understood that he was the servant of the House of Commons. Thus
instead of Parliament granting an income for life, William and Mary
received a sum that was renewed on an annual basis. Likewise, though the
king could keep a standing army, he had to apply to Parliament each year
for it. Both these acts had the effect of ensuring that Parliament met each
year.
After Whitehall was destroyed by fire on the night of 4-5 January 1698,
William spent a good deal of time with his fair, handsome wife at the newly
built Kensington Palace, which they preferred to Hampton Court, even
though Christopher Wren had improved it for them. And as a modern
residence in the countryside near the hamlet of Kensington, it made a
pleasant contrast to the dirty old Palace of Whitehall which sprawled
everywhere and which had become such a den of iniquity under Mary’s
uncle, Charles II. Queen Mary’s unaffected manner endeared her to her
fellow countrymen, and she introduced them to the Dutch tulip, to
paintings of Dutch seascapes, to blue and white china, and to building in
brick after the Dutch fashion. Neat geometric Dutch gardens, using topiary
and water features which were so popular in Holland, became all the rage.
The royal couple’s garden may be seen at Kensington Palace beside the
orangery, another novelty which Queen Mary brought to England and
which enabled her to grow ornamental oranges in honour of William of
Orange.
Calling a halt to Louis XIV’s territorial aggrandizement had been
William III’s great mission for almost all his adult life. He was not really
interested in the English crown except as a means of bringing England’s
considerable weight on board the coalition against France. Fortunately this

388
 1688-1702

war was in England’s interests. King William’s War began in 1689 in

Ireland, where William’s father-in-law James II had landed at Kinsale with
a small French army. (It is therefore sometimes also known as the War of
the English Succession.) Being largely Catholic most of the country
supported James’s cause, but that did not mean that Ireland was pro-
English. The opposite was true. Their ultimate objective was not so much
to put James back on the throne of his forefathers as to assert Irish
independence and drive the hated Scots and English settlers out of the lands
they considered with some justice to have been stolen from them. To this
end they began to burn the settlers’ cattle and homes over their heads,
forcing them to barricade themselves into the cities of Londonderry and
Enniskillen. But no amount of brutality could break the Protestants’ nerve,
nor could a diet of only rats and cats as their food ran out. Londonderry
held firm until June 1689, when a fleet from England arrived on Lough
Foyle, and the siege, like that of Enniskillen, was raised. Thanks to these
and other successes, the north of Ireland was made secure for William.
James was forced to meet his son-in-law at the River Boyne, two miles
above Drogheda, in July 1690.
Announcing that he had not come to Ireland to let the grass grow under
his feet, William III drew up his army the other side of the River Boyne
from James. All William’s soldiers wore an orange sash, the colour of the
House of Orange. (Such sashes may be seen to this day on Protestant
Ulstermen during what is known as the marching season in July, when they
commemorate their victories under ‘King Billy’.) Though William was
gravely wounded in the shoulder by one of the cannon balls James’s troops
sent over, he remained impassive and, crossing the river, his forces soon
put James to flight.
William was very generous with his terms. By the Treaty of Limerick all
Irish soldiers could either disband, enlist under William or follow their
leader the Earl of Lucan to France. But the treaty also permitted the Roman
Catholics ‘such privileges in the exercise of their religion as were consistent
with the law or as they had enjoyed in the days of Charles I’. William
allowed no fewer than 11,000 Irishmen to depart for France. They became
the celebrated Irish soldiers known as the Wild Geese who would be the
backbone of many a royal continental regiment and stalwarts of the Stuart
cause. But the Protestant Irish who had seized control of Parliament were
less forgiving. The violent deeds of the past century were too recent to
forget, so the religious toleration the treaty guaranteed was never ratified.
In fact a new penal code was enforced against the Catholics which was
more disabling than before.
Although Ireland had been subdued the day before the Battle of the
Boyne, the French Admiral Tourville had won such a crushing victory over

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the Dutch and English fleets at Beachy Head that for two years England
was at the mercy of a French invasion. Fortunately when the fighting
between the French and English moved from Ireland to the Netherlands,
and the English armies under William began to hold down the French, the
threat never materialized. And after the English victory at the Battle of La
Hogue in 1692 English ships once again controlled the Channel.
But William and Mary’s sovereignty still had to be enforced in Scotland.
As befitted the home of Scottish kings, the cause of the Stuarts continued
to have immense emotional appeal there, particularly among the Catholic
Highlanders, and would do so for the next fifty years. As keen
Presbyterians, the Lowlanders on the other hand had every reason to
dislike James II, and a Convention of the Scottish estates formally offered
William and Mary the crown. But a breakaway group was formed when
the Scottish Kirk abolished bishops once more, and a new Church full of
exiled bishops, the Episcopalians, became a source of Jacobitism. Its
members, together with the Highland clans under John Graham, Viscount
Dundee (a cousin of the great Marquis of Montrose), rose in a pro-Stuart
rebellion at the end of 1689, only to fade away when Dundee was killed at
the Pass of Killiecrankie.
Once the rebels were back in their shielings, the government in London
decided that the Highland clans must finally be brought to heel. Their
chiefs were the key: they had complete control over their clans, which they
treated like an enormous family — in fact in Gaelic the word clan means
children. If all the chiefs were made to swear an oath of loyalty to William
and Mary it would be binding on the whole clan and put an end to further
insurrections.
The last day for taking the oath was New Year’s Day 1692. However,
on that date, one clan chief still had not made his vow, and that was the
head of the Macdonalds of Glencoe. For whatever reason, the Mac Ian as
he was known only reached the English garrison at Inverary on 6 January.
He had exceeded the deadline by just five days, and that during a
traditional holiday period when little business was transacted. But the
Lowland authorities were fed up with the wild ways of the Highlanders
and were itching to punish their lawlessness. John Dalrymple, the Master
of Stair, who was William’s vindictive and self-important minister for
Scottish affairs, wrote to London, demanding that an example be made of
the clan. He said it was necessary for ‘the vindication of public justice to
extirpate that set of thieves’. William himself signed the order commanding
the Macdonalds to be rooted out, but Dalrymple’s was the sinister hand
that added the note that the ‘affair should be secret and sudden’. The
soldiers ‘were not to trouble the government with prisoners’.
Dalrymple’s henchman Argyll put the affair into the hands of his

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clansmen, the Campbells, enabling them to use legal means to avenge

themselves on their hereditary enemies, the Macdonalds. On 1 February
120 Campbells disguised as government soldiers arrived somewhat
mysteriously in the desolate valley of Glencoe and billeted themselves on
the Macdonalds. Their orders were to secure all the exits out of the valley
and in a few days’ time to kill all its inhabitants, even the children.
Meanwhile the Campbells relied on the ancient laws of Highland
hospitality to ensure that they themselves came to no harm. On 13
February banked turf fires provided the only dim light for a cold-blooded
atrocity. As the Macdonalds slept peacefully under their green plaids, the
Campbells rose up and butchered thirty-eight of the people who had been
their hosts for almost a fortnight.
Three-quarters of the Macdonalds, mainly women, managed to escape,
warned by the Campbells’ use of the gun instead of the silent bayonet.
Nevertheless very many of them perished with their tiny children amid the
cruel February snows as they fled in their thin nightclothes. Almost
miraculously, though, those Macdonald women who did escape mostly
turned out to be pregnant with boys. Several months later many young
Macdonalds came into the world to revive their clan. This evil deed
blackened the name of the Campbells for generations and caused such a
scandal that it finished the Master of Stair’s career, forcing him to retire
from William’s government.
Once Scotland and Ireland were subdued the king could give all his
attention to the fighting in the Netherlands. In 1695 his perseverance paid
off at last when he captured the border fortress of Namur and finally put
a stop to the expansion of French territory. By 1697 Louis had accepted
that it was checkmate, at least temporarily, and the two sides signed the
Peace of Ryswick. Louis withdrew his support of James II, recognized
William as King of England and returned all of his conquests since 1678,
except for Strasbourg and Landau. With the Treaty of Ryswick William
had for the first time dented Louis’ ambitions, an achievement he owed to
England’s participation in the war.
One of the reasons for England’s success was that the country now had
very deep pockets from which to fund the war, on account of the founding
of the Bank of England in 1694. This was the brainchild of the ingenious
financier and Whig politician Charles Montagu, chancellor of the
Exchequer and another of the seven who had signed the invitation to
William of Orange to become King of England. King William’s War was
much more expensive than any other previous conflicts for the numbers it
put into the field and because of how long it lasted. The feeding and
clothing of thousands of soldiers abroad for eight years ultimately cost £40
million. The usual way of paying for wars had been through the land tax,

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a charge by the acre on those who owned land. Not only was this
immensely unpopular with Tory squires, who tended to be land rich and
cash poor, but it soon became clear that it was impossible to fund such a
large-scale war as this through taxation.
Charles Montagu hit upon the idea of a permanent loan to the
government. Previously the Treasury had relied on short-term loans from
the goldsmiths, the chief government lending agents, which had to be paid
back immediately and were extremely expensive. This time the money was
to be lent by the public, and in less than a fortnight the required sum, to be
known as the National Debt, had been raised and was to be loaned to the
government on a permanent basis. This would yield for its lenders —
wealthy City people and some ordinary merchants — an annual return of 8
per cent interest, which the government was to pay through taxation.
The Bank of England began to issue notes within a few years of its
founding and became a deposit bank. It was one of the most important
pillars of the new monarchy because it tied the propertied classes to the
revolutionary settlement. If James II were restored, it was hardly likely that
he was going to repay the money the Whig Bank owed to its investors. In
the same period, around the mid-1690s, Lloyd’s coffee house became the
best place in London to find insurance for ships and cargo. Lloyd’s
reputation would grow over the next 300 years to become the premier
insurance market in the world.
But the same year the Bank of England was founded, in the middle of the
war, Queen Mary died of the smallpox epidemic. William was heartbroken
and had to be carried fainting from her deathbed. He was prostrate with
grief for weeks afterwards, unable to prevent himself from breaking down
when he received Parliament’s message of sympathy at her loss. In his
wife’s memory he commissioned Christopher Wren to remodel Greenwich
Palace as a naval hospital, and on his own deathbed it would be discovered
that he wore a miniature painting of her next to his heart.
Her death unleashed a good many forces that had been held in check —
Mary at least had been James II’s daughter. There was a rash of
assassination attempts against the man the Jacobites considered to be an
illegitimate king, and the Commons thought it necessary to draw up a
second Bond of Association, as in Elizabeth’s day, to protect him and the
Protestant succession.
Grief drew William and his sister-in-law Princess Anne back together.
They had become estranged owing to William’s suspicions about John
Churchill’s loyalties to James II, which had got Churchill, now Earl of
Marlborough, dismissed from the army in 1692 and sent to the Tower.
Since he and his wife Sarah were Princess Anne’s closest friends, a great
coldness had grown up between the two sisters by the time of Queen

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Mary’s death. But Anne presently began to act as her brother-in-law’s

hostess, and relations became more cordial between William and
Marlborough, who would carry on the fight against France after the king’s
death.
As the century neared its end, William, whose health had never been
good, had become exhausted by military campaigning and by his constant
shuttle diplomacy. He had begun his reign with a mixed ministry of Tories
and Whigs in a bid to unite the nation, but the effect of the Jacobite plots
(whose authors were all Tories) and of the Tory dislike of the war was that
a decade later his ministers were all Whigs, a ministry that came to be
known as the Junto. The Tories objected to the expense of a long land war
and of a large permanent army, which they said was thoroughly unEnglish.
In contrast the Whigs, with their commercial interests, continued
strenuously to support the war as the only way to keep continental ports
free from the French. To the Tories William now seemed emphatically to
be a Whig king. A third Triennial Act was passed, which closed the
loopholes which Charles II had exploited, and prevented any Parliament
lasting longer than three years. His progressive ideas allowed the Licensing
Act to lapse in 1695, which meant that newspapers could no longer be
censored by the government. In combination with the Toleration Act, this
enhanced the sense that England was an extraordinarily free country
compared to the rest of western Europe. By the 1720s the political
philosopher Montesquieu would describe the English constitution as one
of the wonders of the world. The most thriving, creative and impertinent
press in the world had been given the conditions in which it could flourish,
an extra watchdog to safeguard the liberties of the English.
At the 1698 general election, however, with the country tired after nine
years of war, the Tories under Robert Harley (after whom Harley Street is
named) won a majority in the House of Commons, forcing William to
dismiss the Whigs and cut back the army to a mere 7,000 troops. This
turned out to be premature, however, for in 1700 an extremely important
event took place chat altered the balance of power in Europe: the ailing,
childless King of Spain Charles II passed away.
The question of what should happen to the vast Spanish Empire had
been hanging over Europe for decades since it had become clear that
Charles Il would never produce an heir. Until he died, in theory there were
three candidates for the throne of Spain, two of whom were unwelcome to
England and Holland. One was the dauphin or heir to the French throne,
whose mother was Charles II’s sister, the other was the Archduke Joseph,
heir to the Habsburgs, whose mother was another of Charles II’s sisters.
Should either of these men succeed they would enlarge their own territories
far beyond what was consistent with the balance of power. France or

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Austria would become significantly top-heavy if either acquired not just

Spain, but ten provinces in the Netherlands, the Duchy of Milan, Mallorca,
Mexico (which then included California and much of Texas), all of South
America except Brazil and Guiana, Cuba, Trinidad and other parts of the
West Indies and the Philippines, not to mention the silver and gold mines
of the Spanish Empire.
Ever since the Treaty of Ryswick William of Orange had been
negotiating with the emperor and Louis XIV to find an equitable way of
making sure that the enormous Spanish Empire should not be left to either
power. The upshot was a Secret Partition Treaty in 1698, by which the
main powers, the empire, France and England, agreed that on the death of
Charles II a third heir, the empress’s grandson, who was the Electoral
Prince of Bavaria, would become the new King of Spain. The unexpected
death of the electoral prince the following year scuppered that plan, and a
Second Secret Partition Treaty was drawn up in March 1700 whereby the
emperor’s second son, the Archduke Charles, would become king.
But this neat solution failed to take the ideas of Charles II into account.
When he died in October 1700, it was discovered that he had left the whole
Spanish Empire to his great-nephew, Louis XIV’s grandson Philip of
Anjou. Philip was despatched south to become Philip V of Spain, and a
new war, the War of the Spanish Succession, broke out. French troops
began to invade the Spanish Netherlands, occupying its barrier fortresses
and ports.
It was a major setback for William III. All he had battled for, in his
determination to restrict the power of Louis XIV, had been swept away.
Meanwhile in his unwieldy adopted country the Tory reaction was in full
throttle. The Tories would not vote a penny for supplies for the new war.
In their view the government should focus on the pending English
succession crisis not the Spanish, after the death in July of Princess Anne’s
only surviving child, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester. The Tory
Parliament was determined to drive home the point that England was not
the servant of the Dutch king but the other way round. Its attitude to
William became positively insulting when it asked the king to exclude all
foreigners from the Privy Council and passed a series of acts to limit his
powers still further by preventing foreigners from holding office or sitting
in Parliament. MPs even attempted to circumscribe the king’s freedom of
movement by stopping him from leaving England without the permission
of Parliament. William threatened to abdicate and return to Holland, but
he was persuaded to remain and the legislation continued. Though he had
made no attempt to interfere with the judiciary, a new statute prevented
judges being removed except by act of Parliament, and in 1701 the Act of
Settlement was passed which removed the crown from James II and his

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Catholic family, and stipulated that if William and Anne died without heirs
it should pass to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, the Protestant
granddaughter of James I, daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter
Queen, and her heirs. The act also laid down that all future kings and
queens must be members of the Church of England, a requirement that
remains valid to this day.
In the autumn of 1701, however, the ostrich-like Tories were forced to
take their heads out of the sand and wake up to the reality of Louis XIV’s
intentions. On 6 September, when James II drew his last breath at St
Germain, Louis broke the Treaty of Ryswick — by which he had
acknowledged William III as the rightful King of England — and instead
recognized James II’s son, known to history as the Old Pretender, as
James III.
Louis had made a major miscalculation. The idea that the King of France
should decide who was the King of England brought Tory and Whig
together to vote for war. To William’s relief England threw herself into a
new Grand Alliance of the English, the Dutch and the Habsburg Empire.
William recalled his Whig ministers and began to increase the army once
more. There was nothing he liked better, he said, than war. As the new year
got under way, he was eagerly anticipating the campaign. But it was not to
be. Out riding one misty morning at Hampton Court on 20 February 1702
his horse tripped over a molehill and the king fell, badly breaking his
collarbone. For anyone in a less run-down state of health than William, the
break would have been unimportant. But the stress of being his own chief
minister in Holland and England, and a life of unrelenting toil, led to his
death on 8 March. Even though the Jacobites at home and abroad toasted
‘the little gentleman in black velvet’ who had brought about his death, the
crown went not to the Pretender but to Princess Anne.

2)
 Anne

(1702-174)

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuarts to sit on the English throne. She was
a dumpy, badly educated little woman, but her Englishness and sociable
nature made a pleasant contrast to her cold and difficult brother-in-law.
Her keen interest in the Church of England ensured that many potential
Jacobites among the clergy or the Tories saved any further plotting for
after her death. The new queen was supremely unathletic, indeed
immobile, suffering from gout so badly that she is the only monarch who
has ever had to be carried to her coronation. But paradoxically it was
during Anne’s reign that the genius of her intimate friend Marlborough
made England renowned for her military prowess, as the queen presided
over victories which smashed to smithereens the hitherto unbreakable
power of Louis XIV. Thanks to Marlborough’s triumphs, England
acquired the territories which constituted her first empire and transformed
her into a formidable international presence.
Anne’s reign not only coincided with the whole of the twelve-year War
of the Spanish Succession. It was also the beginning of a century whose
most prominent characteristic was its cult of reason. England’s Glorious
Revolution, when a mystical notion of Divine Right gave way to
government by contract, had been a significant herald of this cultural
change. The European phenomenon of the Enlightenment, as infatuation
with logic was called, encouraged the belief that every problem, political,
philosophical, practical, could yield to the application of reason. Only
after the French Revolution revealed that reason could also have its dark
side when taken to extremes did the fixation on logic begin to fade.
But such issues were far above the head of Queen Anne, who did not
cultivate the company of thinkers. Simple domestic pleasures — card
games, visiting gardens and intimate friendships — were her preoccupying
interests. In 1702 her best friends were still John Marlborough and his
wife, the imperious Sarah Jennings, who had dominated her since their
schooldays. But it was extremely fortunate that Marlborough in effect
now became ruler of England, for Anne’s reign opened with the country
in serious danger. It would be Marlborough whose gifts as a military

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Vile 445 ELON Pie PAR Ol MGIREMON

strategist saved England from a French-controlled puppet king. For while

the French and the allies were roughly equal in number; Louis’ army was
the greatest fighting machine the world had seen for centuries, honed in
battle over forty years. On William’s death Marlborough not only took
over the Dutch king’s role as commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Dutch
army, but also assumed William’s all-consuming mission to destroy the
French.

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At stake was more than just the question of who dominated Europe. If
Louis were to overrun Holland, as looked more than likely since the
Spanish Netherlands to the south were now completely under French
control, an invasion of England to put his Catholic candidate James III on
the throne might be only days away. That would be the end of the
Protestant monarchy, and of all the rights and freedoms the Glorious
Revolution had enshrined.
Though England had at last produced a general in Marlborough skilful
enough to defeat the Sun King, to begin with things did not look at all
promising. Marlborough was considered to be one of the best staff officers
in the English army, but he still had a reputation for being unscrupulous,
over-ambitious and untrustworthy.
Worse still, at the start of 1704 the situation suddenly became
desperate. The Elector of Bavaria declared himself for Louis and his
grandson Philip V and allowed French troops into his country, thus
opening up to them the valley of the Danube and the road to Vienna. With
the aid of the Bavarians, the French were sweeping all before them so
completely that they were seriously threatening to take the emperor
Leopold I prisoner. If that happened Louis would have won, because the
English and Dutch could not have carried on the war without the empire’s
soldiers.
Half the emperor’s army, which should have been fighting the French,
was putting down a revolt in his possessions in Hungary. The French were
poised to capture Vienna and claim victory. From every quarter their
armies were streaming, getting ready with the Bavarians for their last push.
It seemed that nothing and nobody could prevent the fall of Vienna, for in
the days before troop trains the 250 miles separating it from the rest of the
allied army in Holland seemed insuperable: the Anglo-Dutch troops would
not be able to get there in time.
Against this background of fearful anticipation, while Louis dallied in
the great rooms of Versailles supremely confident of victory, Marlborough
decided with the unexpected flair of genius to rush his army the 250 miles
across Europe. His plan was to reach the French in Bavaria and defeat
them before they got to Austria, and that is what he did.
Marlborough had two great problems. First of all, the key element of his
plan was surprise. Not a word of where he was going could be allowed to
leak out or the French would assemble a larger army in Bavaria to meet
him. Therefore no one other than Prince Eugene of Savoy, his trusted
opposite number, commander-in-chief of the emperor’s army, was allowed
to know about it. For this reason, to escape the notice of French agents and
also the summer heat, Marlborough’s army marched during the night and
early morning, from three a.m. to nine. But Marlborough also had to keep

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his destination a secret from the Dutch, because they would have refused
to allow him to leave their frontier undefended. Both the French and Dutch
therefore believed that Marlborough was off to attack Lorraine or Alsace
— until he turned east away from the Rhine, and they realized he was
making for Bavaria.
Marlborough’s journey was a breathtaking feat of organization. At each
halt, fresh horses, food and guns met the troops whose morale was thereby
maintained at a high level, and a new pair of boots awaited every soldier
at Heidelberg. In similar fashion to Henry V, Marlborough was popular
because he always looked after his men. Unlike many generals, he always
led personally from the front, and he was well known, again unlike so
many of his more callous contemporary commanders, for loathing
unnecessary bloodshed. Moreover he never fought a battle unless he
believed he could win it.
Marlborough’s rendezvous with Prince Eugene and the Emperor Leopold’s
forces was across from the little village of Blindheim (Blenheim) on the upper
Danube in Bavaria. All at once the French had to rush their troops there,
forced to turn their attention away from capturing Vienna in order to prevent
the allies from overrunning Bavaria. As the French looked across at the
English in their distinctive red and white coats, massing more and more
thickly in the marshy ground surrounding a little stream called the Nebel, the
turn of events must have been alarming. The English were supposed to be by
the North Sea in Holland, sixty days’ march away according to conventional
calculations. Yet here they were in the heart of Bavaria menacing them with
their drums and their bloodthirsty roars.
Never had more hung on a battle for the allied commanders. For
Marlborough it was the fate of England, for Prince Eugene it was that of
his master the emperor. By 12 August the two greatest soldiers of their day,
Prince Eugene, tiny, erect and exquisitely dressed, Marlborough always
rather untidy and black with dirt from his forced march, had finished their
earnest conference in a small white tent. Surprise had been the theme of
this operation and now they decided to attack at dawn. The French still
outnumbered the allies by 8,000 men. But by the suddenness of their
onslaught and superior tactics the allies broke through the enemy lines to
the central command post, causing the Elector of Bavaria to flee. The day
was theirs. Twenty-three thousand French soldiers died and the allied
forces took 15,000 prisoners. Marshal Tallard had to surrender too. For
twenty years the French had been unconquerablein pitched battle;at
Blenheim their reputation for invincibility was destroyed.
Marlborough, with his habitual casualness, scribbled a message of
victory in pencil on the back of a restaurant bill and sent it to his wife, who
like the rest of England was waiting anxiously for news. It took eight days

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for the news to reach London, but when it became known that
Marlborough had defeated the Sun King and had prevented what everyone
considered to be the imminent invasion of England, the country went wild
with joy. Printers’ presses were besieged with orders for facsimile copies of
his note. So great a victory was it deemed to be that a special service was
held at the new St Paul’s built by Sir Christopher Wren and an enormous
sum of money (plus a dukedom) was voted to Marlborough by Parliament.
In gratitude Anne also gave him much of the land where the medieval royal
palace of Woodstock had formerly stood in Oxfordshire, and the architect
Vanbrugh was commissioned to design a palace worthy of the nation’s
saviour. It was called Blenheim.
This great victory had a beneficial effect in respect of Scotland. Anglo-
Scottish relations had been in poor shape since the disastrous attempt by
Scots to launch their own colonization programme at Darien in Panama in
the time of William and Mary. The Darien scheme had been their answer
to the English Navigation Laws which prevented Scots from trading with
English colonies, but the lives of all the settlers were lost either to disease
or to Spanish hostilities, as the Spaniards considered it to be their territory.
The failure of the English government and the English colonies to send
supplies to the ill-fated colonial experiment, or to do anything to help the
Scots against the Spanish, left a residue of extreme ill-will. The Scots had
duly taken their revenge in 1704. The external danger which England faced
from Louis XIV obliged Queen Anne to agree to the Bill of Security, under
which the Scottish crown would be given to a separate Protestant
candidate unless Anne’s successor on the English throne devolved his or
her powers to executives from the Scottish Parliament.
The idea of another king in the north made Westminster distinctly
uneasy: James III had only to convert to Protestantism and the Bill of
Security would offer an opening for his return. But in the wake of Blenheim
and the capture of Gibraltar by Admiral Rooke in 1705 the English
government felt strong enough to raise the stakes with Scotland. Unless the
Scots accepted the very beneficial proposals for Union now set out, and
abandoned their plans for a separate monarchy, every native of Scotland
settled in England or serving in the armed forces would be seized and held
in prison as an alien. After Christmas 1705, what was more, no Scottish
goods, manufactures or livestock would be allowed into England.
Just to show they were in earnest the government began massing on the
borders of Scotland troops that were no longer required to be at the ready
against Louis XIV. Ruin faced the Scots, but wealth and prosperity awaited
them if they would surrender their ancient independence. There was little
choice. An agreement was hammered out, formalized in October 1707 in
the Act of Union, providing for one united Parliament and for taxation and

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if ae 2 -

Blenheim Palace’s tapestry of the Battle of Malplaquet, 11 September 1709,

Marlborough’s bloodiest victory during the War of the Spanish Succession.

coinage to be the same in both countries. The Scots obtained forty-five

seats in the House of Commons at Westminster and sixteen seats in the
House of Lords. They were permitted to maintain their separate legal
system and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which the coronation
oath would require the monarch to defend. Henceforth the prospect of
lucrative trade with the colonies was open to all Scottish manufacturers. In
the event the inhospitable nature of their own country, their gritty national
character and their appetite for hard work meant that for the Scots the
chief attraction of the English colonies was as places to emigrate to. Scots
men and Scots women played a role out of all proportion to their numbers
in constructing the British Empire.

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From 1707 onwards, England, Scotland and Wales were known as

Great Britain, and James I’s Union Jack, composed of the combined crosses
of St George and St Andrew, finally became the national flag. Anne thus
became the first Queen of Great Britain. But the extreme distaste with
which the majority of the Scots viewed the Union is indicated by the fact
that during the next forty years Scottish Protestants did nothing to stop
two attempts by Catholic Highlanders to put Catholic Pretenders on the
English throne.
The years which followed Blenheim were marked by a string of
astonishing victories for Marlborough and Prince Eugene — Ramillies,
Oudenarde and Turin. The Sun King’s grip on Europe was steadily
weakened, almost all the Spanish Netherlands were taken over by the
allies, and the French were driven out of Italy, enabling Leopold’s son the
Archduke Charles to be established in Milan and Naples. The harrying of
Louis’ grandson Philip V continued so successfully that Barcelona was
captured, followed by Madrid, and the archduke was then proclaimed
Charles III of Spain by the allied armies — only for the Spanish to beat the
allies at the Battle of Almanza in 1707 and restore Philip to the throne. In
1711 the unexpected death of Charles’s brother, the new emperor Joseph
I, made the archduke the emperor Charles VI. The allies were now far less
eager to see Charles made King of Spain, as they had no wish for the
Habsburg Empire to combine with the Spanish. As a result the fighting
dragged on with little enthusiasm.
At the beginning of Anne’s reign a Tory government had been in office
under Marlborough, with his close friend the Cornish politician Sidney
Godolphin as lord treasurer, who was in charge of finding the money for
the war, and Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, a typical Tory High
Churchman, as secretary of state. As the conflict continued, Godolphin and
Marlborough found themselves increasingly alienated from their own party
and moving closer to the Whigs because of their deeper commitment to the
hostilities. To keep the Whigs onside, Marlborough and Godolphin found
themselves beating off High Tory attempts to end the loophole allowing
Dissenters to hold office by occasionally taking communion in the Anglican
Church. But when they prevented a Bill against Occasional Conformity
passing, Nottingham and his supporters angrily withdrew from govern-
ment. While the Tories increasingly made ‘the Church in danger’ their
rallying cry — playing on the fears of the Tory queen — Marlborough found
it much simpler to govern with Whig ministers who never criticized the war.
This earned him the undying hatred of his old party. They watched and
waited and sharpened their knives, but as yet they could do nothing.
However, while more peers from the former Whig Junto joined
Marlborough’s government, and newer Whigs like an able young squire

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 1702-1714

from Norfolk named Robert Walpole sifted documents in government

ministries, the foundations of their power were being undermined both at
home and abroad. The victory of Malplaquet in 1709, which cost the lives
of 20,000 Englishmen, aroused no enthusiasm and the war became
distinctly unpopular. Marlborough, the man commonly believed to have
saved the nation, most unfairly acquired the nickname ‘the butcher’. Still
more unfairly, the queen herself soon turned against the Marlboroughs.
Throughout her reign Anne had lavished titles, jewels and houses on her
beloved Marlboroughs, including the special honour of a lodge at
Windsor. Sarah Marlborough, given the very powerful positions of keeper
of the privy, purse and mistress of the robes, had in her arrogant way
considered them only her due. And for about six or seven years this way of
life continued much as before. The Marlboroughs in their secret code were
known as Mr and Mrs Freeman, while Anne and her husband Prince
George of Denmark were called the Morleys. But the Duchess of
Marlborough evidently began to tire of having to be continually at the beck
and call of the demanding queen, whose martyrdom to gout and dropsy
meant she could scarcely perform the simplest task for herself.
Sarah was delighted when a cousin of hers, Mrs Abigail Masham, who
had become one of the queen’s chief waiting women, did so well with Anne
that she began to accompany her everywhere. The duchess encouraged Mrs
Masham to take her place at court functions, and more importantly at the
many téte-a-tétes the queen liked to enjoy with her ladies-in-waiting.
Sarah, an impatient character, had had quite enough over the previous
twenty years of comforting and being Anne’s best friend and counsellor.
The queen would use any excuse to follow Sarah to Windsor — she had no
pride where her favourite was concerned.
But Abigail Masham was not the innocent creature she appeared. Not
only was she Sarah Marlborough’s cousin, she was also related to the Tory
leader Robert Harley, with whom she was in cahoots. Quite soon Mrs
Masham, who had specific instructions from Harley on how to poison the
queen’s mind against the Whigs, began to oust the duchess from Anne’s
affections. But when it was Mrs Masham to whom the queen turned for
comfort over the death of her beloved husband Prince George, the
duchess’s jealous rage knew no bounds. Although Prince George was the
brother of the King of Denmark, he had been looked upon with amused
contempt by his royal relations. His painstaking hobby of making model
ships in little closets all over the royal palaces was seen as no occupation
for a grown man. Charles II had set the tone for the way he was treated at
court by remarking, ‘I have tried him drunk and tried him sober, and there
is nothing in him.’ His wife, however, adored him.
Sarah now banned Abigail from the queen’s side just when she was

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prostrate with grief. Indeed she spent so

much time and ink insulting the new
favourite and quarrelling with Anne that
the queen even wrote to Marlborough
himself to beg him to ask Sarah to behave
with a little more dignity and to see that
her ‘tattling voice’ would soon make them
both the ‘jest of the town’.
Incredible as it was to seasoned court
observers, Marlborough’s own relation-
ship with the queen, thanks to his wife’s
uncontrolled behaviour, was waning fast.
Outside the royal apartments the Whigs
feared with good reason that Abigail’s
whisperings were eating away at their Tory High Churchman Henry
government as well as at Marlborough’s — Sacheverell, whose 1709
=
impeachment
: for saying the
S110
ick as : Church was in danger under the
The government actually fell as a result Whigs brought a Tory
of the Whigs’ ill-thought-out prosecution government to power.
of a Dr Sacheverell, a High Tory preacher
whose sermons had attacked Dissenters, the Whigs and the Revolution
settlement as pernicious to the Anglican Church. The queen took the
keenest possible interest in the trial. Most unusually she attended it in
person and was extremely offended by the Whig prosecuting counsel’s
speeches, which confirmed her view that the Whigs had little or no respect
for the monarchy. Nor did the country at large care for the idea of
Sacheverell being prosecuted in a country which prided itself on free speech
— it smacked of the sort of tyranny the Whigs said they were battling in the
war against Louis XIV.
By the time of the October election in 1711 Mrs Masham and Harley
had so prevailed upon the queen that she had already dismissed most of the
Whigs from government, even her old friend Godolphin, and replaced
them with Tories. Victory at the polls under the banner of ‘The Church in
danger’ confirmed that the Tories were now in power. Duchess Sarah had
already been removed from her offices, for the queen could bear her rages
and ungovernable behaviour no longer. But Anne showed herself once
again the weak character she was when that same year she sacked the
greatest servant of her reign, the Duke of Marlborough, from all his posts
pending investigation of Tory charges of peculation or embezzlement.
Though the charges were easily rebutted, Marlborough had had enough.
Scarcely on speaking terms with his wife, wounded by the way he had been
betrayed by the queen, he no longer wished to remain in England. He went

404
 1702-1714

abroad, never having lived at the magnificent palace built by the nation to
commemorate his great victory. His bitterness was completed by the
queen’s refusal to grant him a last audience.
The game was at last in the hands of the Tories, led by Harley, a clever,
dark, secretive little man. They were determined to end the war. The
Jacobite second Duke of Ormonde was appointed commander-in-chief and
in 1712 he obeyed the secret orders not to fight of the conniving Tory
secretary of state Henry St John. This disgraceful campaign resulted in the
defeat of Prince Eugene and the emperor Charles VI. All further help was
withdrawn from both the Austrian and Dutch armies to force them to the
peace table, while the essence of the English peace was separately and
dishonourably obtained with France behind their backs.
Though Louis XIV remarked that ‘The affair of displacing the Duke of
Marlborough will do all for us we desire,’ in fact with the Treaty of Utrecht
in 1713 the Tories concluded the negotiations for an extremely profitable
peace. The Whigs made a great deal of the Tories’ shabby treatment of
Britain’s former allies but there was nothing they could do. Harley had
been wounded by a would-be assassin, so the negotiating team in Paris was
led by Henry St John, who became Viscount Bolingbroke that year.
Bolingbroke, the best orator in the Commons and a completely
unprincipled politician, nevertheless laid the basis for the future British
Empire in the agreement he wrung out of the French.
By obtaining Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay territories and the
former French colony of Acadie (newly named Nova Scotia in honour of
the Scottish Union), Britain challenged France for dominance in North
America. As well as thereby gaining a very strong naval position in the
New World, Britain got Gibraltar and Minorca, which made her a
powerful new presence in the Mediterranean. These colonies and
possessions doubled her maritime trade, so that, having completely taken
over the Dutch carrying business during the past half-century of sporadic
war, she was on her way to becoming the chief trading nation in Europe.
In the southern hemisphere, she added the island of St Kitt’s to her West
Indies possessions, and obtained a share in the shameful but lucrative
slave trade with the Spanish colonies, known as the Asiento, as well as
the right to send one ship a year of manufactured goods to South
America.
The Treaty of Utrecht also tried to ensure that the crowns of France and
Spain, so close in blood, could never be united. Austria under the emperor
Charles VI received most of Spain’s former external European possessions —
the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia — while the Dutch now
had the right to garrison principal frontier towns such as Namur against the
French. The dukedom of Savoy became a kingdom and acquired Sicily, while

405
 STUART

the principality of Brandenburg became the kingdom of Prussia - her rise to

prominence in Germany as Austria’s rival would form one of the dominant
themes of the next two centuries. The treaty thus to a very large extent
dictated the balance of power in Europe until the end of the eighteenth
century. Nevertheless the era was to be dogged by international wars as
Spain attempted to get back her former territories. For her part, France in
her new race against Britain for colonies and trade would turn to what was
known as the ‘family compact’ between the two Bourbon sovereigns.
The Treaty of Utrecht forced a by now very aged Louis XIV once more
to recognize the Protestant Succession in England, which left the throne
after Anne to the Electress of Hanover’s heirs. But despite having played
such an important role in the negotiation of the treaty, the scheming
Bolingbroke had already made up his mind that he preferred the pretender
to a foreign king. It was well known that there was no future for the Tories
under George of Hanover. As one of the emperor’s best generals, George
remained extremely angry about the Tories’ betrayal of the allies and had
become closely connected to the Whigs. And it would be the Elector
George the Tories would be dealing with, because it was clear that, like
Anne, his eighty-three-year-old mother the Electress Sophia was not long
for this world. Knowing therefore that the minute Queen Anne died they
would fall from power, many other Tories were now openly leaning
towards the pretender. Even while Bolingbroke had been in Paris
negotiating the peace, he had also been in contact with Jacobite agents.
So cautious and careful were the actions of the Tory ministers that it is
very hard to establish what sort of plot was being hatched, who was in on
it, indeed whether there really was a concrete plot at all. Nevertheless,
what does seem to have happened is that messages were sent by the Tories
to the pretender in France, suggesting some kind of uprising when the
queen died. But, though the Whigs were out of power, they had not lost
their political nous. They prompted the ambassador of Hanover to apply
to the House of Lords for George, the electress’s son, to take up his seat in
the House as Duke of Cambridge. Thus he would be in England in case of
any attempts at a coup d’état. Anne, however, was so infuriated by
discussion about the future heir, because of its painful associations with the
death of her son, the Duke of Gloucester, that she sent a venomous letter
to the Electress Sophia denying George permission to come over. This was
said to have brought on the electress’s final illness. She collapsed and died
in the Herrenhausen gardens just seven weeks before Queen Anne, leaving
George in direct line of succession.
Matters were moving fast in favour of the Jacobites and the pretender,
and Anne did nothing to stop this because she could not bring herself to
come out against her half-brother. At the bottom of her heart she also

406
 1702-1714
believed in the hereditary principle. A split had developed between Harley
(now the Earl of Oxford) and Bolingbroke over the Schism Bill, which
sought to prevent Dissenters educating their children in their own schools,
Oxford himself being a Nonconformist. But the underlying cause was that
ultimately Oxford supported the Hanoverians while Bolingbroke was a
Jacobite. Mrs Masham thought she sensed a sinking ship and deserted her
cousin for Bolingbroke’s side. After a long, unseemly altercation between
the two men in front of the dying queen, Anne dismissed Oxford and made
Bolingbroke head of the government.
The Jacobites felt that victory was
practically within their grasp.
But just as Bolingbroke, now
effectively prime minister, was per-
fecting his plans for revolution, they
were ruined by the swollen, dropsical
queen. Three days later, on 30 July,
she had an apoplectic fit. It was clear
that she could die at any moment.
While Bolingbroke hesitated, for he
needed a few more weeks to be utterly
ready, the three Whig dukes of
Somerset, Argyll and Shrewsbury
seized the reins of government. As
LORD BOLINGBROKE. Bolingbroke’s supporter Jonathan
Swift put it bitterly, ‘Fortune withered
Henry St John, Viscount before she grew ripe.’ While Anne lay
Bolingbroke, Tory Jacobite plotter dying and only semi-conscious in her
who attempted to prevent the t carved bed, she was persuaded to
Hanovarian succession in 1714 on eee aie : a
the death of Queen Anne. gasp out the name of Shrewsbury as
lord treasurer.
With that authority, the minute Anne had breathed her last on 1 August
1714, the Whig dukes were able to proclaim the Elector of Hanover as
King George I, having already called out the militia in the City of London
and sealed all the ports. Bolingbroke allowed himself one rueful comment:
‘In six weeks more we should have put things in such a condition that there
would have been nothing to fear. But Oxford was removed on Tuesday;
the queen died on Sunday! What a world is this, and how does fortune
banter us!’
Thanks to the Whigs’ presence of mind, the transfer of power from the
government of Queen Anne to King George went perfectly smoothly. It
was said that ‘not a mouse had stirred against him in England, Ireland or
Scotland’. So quiet was the country that the new king, the first of the

407
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Hanoverian monarchs, did not appear in England until 18 September —

almost two months after Anne's death. With his arrival the Tories would
go into the wilderness for half a century, and England would be governed
by a Whig oligarchy under the nominal authority of German kings.
The bitter politics of the last Stuart’s reign had coincided with a new
literary flowering. The fierce pamphleteering during the Civil War and the
relaxation of censorship at the end of the seventeenth century had together
honed a wonderfully sharp instrument in English prose. Some of the most
striking invective and dazzling satire England has ever known was written
in an eminently direct and natural fashion by writers such as Jonathan
Swift and Daniel Defoe. Geniuses like Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor thrust
up the houses of the wealthy in a striking baroque, not least that of Castle
Howard, but the most memorable architecture of Queen Anne’s reign, as
befits its mild namesake, was a homely and restful doll’s-house style, much
influenced by the use of red brick in Holland. Also notable in Anne’s time
were the fifty new churches she commissioned.
Anne’s simplicity, her gentle nature, her piety and the sad history of her
seventeen children dying without reaching adolescence encouraged people
to take her to their hearts. Her Englishness, which she had stressed in her
first speech to Parliament, was a blessed relief after thirteen years of a
Dutch king. It would be looked back on nostalgically during the reigns of
the German Georges who followed her.

408
HANOVERIAN
 George I
(1714-1727)

George I was fifty-four years old when he became King of Great Britain.
Inevitably.-he was always more interested in Hanover in northern
Germany, where he had lived all his life and ruled as an absolute autocrat,
than in Britain, where he was constantly troubled by the vociferous House
of Commons. Hanover, which was smaller than Wales, had only very
recently been admitted to the first rank of German states when its ruler
became one of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. As such, it was
considered somewhere of no importance by the English, whose country for
three centuries at least had been one of the leading players on the European
stage and was now poised for imperial grandeur. But the new king was
Hanovercentric in the extreme. He saw everything from a Hanoverian
point of view and thus considered it a great honour for Great Britain to be
united to Hanover. This would also be the attitude of his son George II.
The far sighted warned that England would be dragged into continental
wars for Hanover’s aggrandizement which were none of her business, that
Hanover and her separate foreign policy might become the tail that wagged
the dog. Nevertheless these were problems which had to be set aside as
lesser evils than having a Catholic on the throne.
The English in 1714 were therefore forced to behave as if they had
buried their xenophobic tendencies. A large turnout of the aristocracy in
the Painted Hall at Greenwich welcomed the new king and his strange
retinue of Turkish body servants captured at the siege of Vienna. With him
were his very many Hanoverian ministers gabbling away in a foreign
language. Those who spoke English had made it known in their slightly
crude way that they were all looking forward to increasing their fortunes
at the wealthy English court. For their part the English courtiers made
jokes behind their hands about the very long, unpronounceable names of
the Germans, which were generally held to sound like bad fits of coughing.
Though outwardly polite, the English political classes were fairly
contemptuous of the German king - for he was a king not by Divine Right
or by the Grace of God as the old phrase had it, but most definitely by act
of Parliament and on Whig revolutionary principles. George I had been

All
 HANOVERIAN

called to the throne by Parliament; if he failed to do his job right — for the
moment at least, when he had no support in the country — he could equally
be returned to Hanover. Furthermore the new king had no personal
qualities to capture his volatile subjects’ hearts and minds. He had
inherited nothing of the Stuart charisma that had periodically shown itself
through the generations, whether in Mary Queen of Scots or Charles II. It
was hard to believe that he was the nephew of the legendary Prince Rupert
of the Rhine.
George I was a German Brunswick through and through. He was small,
pop-eyed and jowly, and his methodical German ways extended even to his
dealings with his mistresses. There were
two of them, both Hanoverian. One was
hugely fat, the other thin and super-
stitious. The English rapidly christened
them the Elephant and the Maypole. Both
passed every other night with the king, on
a strictly rotating basis. Whichever
mistress it was, the evening always passed
in exactly the same way. A frugal supper
having been consumed by just the two of
them, they would play cards and listen to
music. Then the king would begin his
interminable cutting out of little
silhouettes made of paper. The English
thought he was insufferably dull, and his
mistresses so ugly that they could see no
point in his having them.
Furthermore George I had a mon- George I, the great-grandson of
strously vindictive side. He shut up his JamesIand first Hanoverian
wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle for thirty King of Great Britain and _
: ; a : Ireland. He was the Elector of
years in virtually solitary confinement — Yanover, brought to the throne
to teach her a terrible lesson for having by the 1701 Act of Settlement
an affair with the dashing Count — which created the Protestant
K6nigsmark. It was said that he had had sone aan Succession and
Konigsmark killed and his body cut up i ssid cals AAC SIE
and buried beneath the floorboards of his wife’s dressing room for daring
to make love to her. What is known for sure is that KO6nigsmark was never
seen again after he left his mistress one morning. The next day Sophia
Dorothea found herself locked up in the castle of Ahlden, with only the
swans on the surrounding grey waters for amusement. Her terrified ladies-
in-waiting were informed that she was never to leave the castle until the
day she was carried out in a coffin. Her little son, the future George II, was

412
 1714-1727

only nine when Sophia Dorothea was wrenched from the bosom of her
family for daring to do what her husband openly did himself. When
George was older, he tried to swim the moat to see his mother, but he was
fished out by guards before he got very far. As a result the Prince of Wales
regarded his father with loathing.
The new king could not be faulted for extravagance. He spent no money
on public buildings or on living in great state, unlike his Whig ministers
who built palaces for themselves, decorated by the finest craftsmen of the
day. And though he famously said, ‘I hate all Boets and Bainters,’ he did
not hate musicians. He brought Handel to this country from Hanover,
where he was Kapellmeister, to become the royal court musician. In
London Handel wrote much of his most celebrated work, including his
Water Music, which was first performed at a concert on the Thames in
front of George I’s royal barge, and the Messiah.
George was too interested in Hanoverian affairs to address himself to
English politics. He was unable to understand much English and having to
discuss government business in Cabinet with his ministers in poor French
and worse Latin was an effort he did not care to repeat very often.
Frequently absent in the beloved homeland for up to half the year, he left
the country to be ruled by the Cabinet. As a result Cabinet government, or
government by ministers rather than by the monarch, which had been
developing very fast under Anne, rushed forward in leaps and bounds
under George I and George II. George I did not realize that into the deft
hands of the Whig chiefs, the heads of those grand landed aristocratic
families who had been accruing power since the Revolution, he was
delivering privileges which even under Anne had been the prerogative of
the monarch. Thus it was the Whigs who now determined the composition
of the ministries, who decided when the Parliamentary session should end
and who distributed the vast panoply of lucrative offices at the disposal of
the crown which ensured men’s loyalty.
It was not until the era of George I’s grandson, George III, who was born
in England, that the Hanoverians became wise to what was going on.
George III took it upon himself to claw back the crown patronage
appropriated by the Whig grandees, but for two generations, during the
reigns of his father and grandfather, they controlled everything in the name
of the king. The Whig oligarchy thus remained in power from 1714 to
1760, an astonishing forty-seven years. For all that time the Tories were in
the wilderness, heavily tainted with Jacobitism by their Stuart sympathies
and by the conduct of their leader Bolingbroke, who on George I’s
accession had fled to become the Pretender’s chief adviser.
More than ever, it was the House of Commons within Parliament which
mattered. The two great figures of this period, Sir Robert Walpole and

413
 HANOVERIAN

William Pitt, owed their prominence to their mastery of it. Walpole, a

twenty-stone Norfolk squire, controlled its members by straightforward
bribery, while the slender, sarcastic Pitt made them do his bidding by
outstanding oratory. Both of them accepted peerages and moved from the
Commons to the Upper House only when they recognized that their time
had come. For under the first two Georges, the tendency that had been
developing from Charles II onwards became a fully fledged political
principle: the country was governed by the Cabinet via the system of party
government which had been growing up over the previous two reigns. In
other words, the Cabinet, consisting of the king’s ministers with seats in
either the Lords or Commons, had to belong to the party which had a
majority in the Commons.
George I's frequent absences in Hanover led to another important
constitutional development: during his reign there first grew up what
became known as the office of prime minister. This was the chief executive
who could take decisions in the king’s absence. For twenty years, George’s
reign and that of his son George II were stamped with the imprint of the
extraordinary prime minister who carved out this office, Sir Robert
Walpole. Hated by many of his contemporaries for his greed, his cynicism
and his astonishingly widespread system of bribery and corruption,
Walpole nevertheless succeeded in his objective of establishing a climate of
peace and stability within which the fragile new Hanoverian dynasty could
grow. Convinced that the Stuarts would always seize the chance to take the
side of Britain’s enemy in wartime and achieve a restoration by the back
door, he became notorious for his refusal to go to war. He therefore
skilfully if unscrupulously skirted attempts to bring Great Britain on her
allies’ side to honour treaty commitments. He kept peace with France for
twenty years and charmed the Tory squires into becoming Whig
supporters by the low taxation that flowed from avoiding foreign wars.
Thanks to Walpole’s shrewdness and careful nurturing, the Hanoverian
dynasty pushed deep roots into British soil.
Nevertheless, in many households throughout the country there
remained an emotional attachment to the Stuarts as the rightful dynasty.
Tory squires would make secret toasts to James II's son, ‘the king over the
water, by passing their wine over a glass of water. Walpole, the
consummate realist, was anxious to ensure that that remained the limit of
their physical activity; he believed that if he tolerated this form of
Jacobitism he would slowly reconcile England to the Hanoverians.
Even so, less than a year after George I arrived in England Jacobitism
flared mto a dangerous rising known as the Fifteen. By late spring 1715,
there was an ominous mood in the country which in the summer turned
into riots, with mobs calling for ‘James II] and No Pretender’. In September

414
 1714-1727
it burst into open rebellion at Braemar in Scotland under the Earl of Mar,
when he raised the standard for James III and VII.
As well as Anglican squires who could not overcome their instinctive
dislike of a foreign king, the Stuart cause flourished among recusant
Catholic families as a result of the Stuarts’ loyalty to the ancient faith. Such
families were better able to cling to their forbidden religion in out-of-the-
way places than in central England, so Jacobitism was strong in the west
and north of England. But the greatest concentration of Jacobites was in
Scotland, where a significant number of both Lowland and Highland lords
were for once united against the Hanoverian king and yearned for the
ancient House of Stuart. To all these parties the Jacobites in France began
sending messages, concealed in gloves, sewn up in coat linings, instructing
them to be ready to fight for their rightful king when he landed on his own
soil — which they promised would be soon. It was in Scotland that the
Jacobite plotters under Bolingbroke decided the uprising should begin.
But nothing in the ill-fated rising of the Fifteen went according to plan.
Most calamitous of all, the French troops promised by Louis XIV never
materialized. With appalling timing — or what might be called the blessing
of history on the Hanoverians, like the Protestant east wind of William III
— five days before the Earl of Mar raised the Stuart standard, the Sun King
died. The French government was now headed by the pro-Hanoverian
regent, the Duke of Orleans, who put paid to all hopes for troops to back
the pretender. Mar was thus stranded in Scotland, having raised the
Highlands, but quite unsure of what he should do next. He needed military
support in England, but this grew less and less likely. In the face of the
Jacobite threat a Riot Act had been passed, enabling magistrates to arrest
any gathering of twelve or more people if they failed to disperse after a
proclamation ordering them to do so had been read out. The government
used it to the hilt to arrest many of the southern ringleaders.
But by November after the Battle of Sheriffmuir near Stirling, fought
between Mar’s 10,000 men and the government’s 35,000, it became clear
that George was in little danger. Apart from being outnumbered, Mar was
a feeble general who retreated when his soldiers believed that one last
charge would have won the day. Too late in December 1715 did the
pretender arrive, but his own person did nothing to raise his armies’ spirits,
for he was a very solemn, tall, white-faced young man with none of the
Stuart magic expected from the legendary king over the water. The refined,
French-educated pretender was in turn horrified by the appearance of his
most fervent supporters, the Highlanders. To him they were filthy savages,
with whom he could scarcely bring himself to converse.
Perhaps the pretender could have achieved something if he had marched
south, but Mar gave the order to retreat north to Perth after Sheriffmuir,

415
 HANOVERIAN

and after that the Fifteen was lost. On 16 January 1716 the rebels melted
back north, and on 4 February Mar and the prince abandoned their
romantic followers. They took a boat for France, leaving the leaders of the
northern English and southern Scottish rebellion, Lords Derwentwater,
Kenmure, Nithsdale and others, to be beheaded.
The whole episode had been so mismanaged that the government
granted a general amnesty, and the Scots were scarcely punished at all. But
the English Catholic lords like Lord Nithsdale were viewed as a potentially
serious threat, and the government and George I decided to make a proper
example of them.
There was still enough anti-Hanoverian feeling in England for many
people to feel that it was quite monstrous that Englishmen should be
executed by a German king who had only recently arrived in the country.
George increased his unpopularity when it was announced that he
intended to hold a ball on the night before the beheadings. Fortunately for
Lord Nithsdale, his wife was a woman of spirit who was not going to stand
by and see her husband executed for an affair of honour which she believed
most English people should have been involved in anyway. She had seen
the king at a dance a few nights previously, and, greatly daring, had
bearded him in a small anteroom. Unable to control her tears at the
thought of her husband in the Tower of London with only days to live, she
had fallen on her knees before the king. ‘Spare his life, Sire,’ she cried, ‘and
he will become the most loyal of your servants.’ But the king brutally
pushed her aside and ordered his guards to throw her out.
This story, which quickly made the rounds of the court, was regarded as
outrageous, that an Englishwoman and the wife of a great English
landowner should be treated so by a mere Hanoverian. There was
considerable sympathy and delight when it was heard that the enterprising
Lady Nithsdale, not a whit discomfited by her ordeal, had picked herself
up, wiped her tears away and hotfooted it to the Tower. With her ladies’
maid, and another woman, she had persuaded a guard who was softer-
hearted than the king to let her in to say her goodbyes to her husband. The
guard, made jolly with port that she had thoughtfully brought with her,
scarcely noticed that when the attractive Lady Nithsdale left, she actually
had three female companions with her rather than the two with whom she
had arrived. As dawn broke, the sleeping figure of Lord Nithsdale was
revealed to be a mere bundle of rags. Thanks to his wife’s daring, that
evening he was drinking wine in the sweet air of France, while the heads of
his unluckier companions were no longer attached to their bodies.
Though the Old Pretender remained alive he now had to find a safe berth
other than his old home, France. The regent Orleans with an ailing boy-
king Louis XV on his hands and with designs on the throne himself was

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 1714-1727

anxious to have the Hanoverian government as his ally. If Louis XV died

he would need English backing to claim the French throne, against its
nearest heir the French King of Spain, Philip V. And in fact it was in Spain
that the pretender found a warmer reception for his cause. It tallied
perfectly with the Spanish chief minister Cardinal Alberoni’s burning
desire to resurrect Spain’s former prestige as a world power which had
been destroyed by the Treaty of Utrecht. The pretender was Spain’s chance
to get her revenge on the English.
At the battle of Cape Passaro in 1718 the English had once again stymied
Spain’s plans for supremacy in the Mediterranean, where her soldiers had
seized Sardinia and Sicily, by defeating the Spanish fleet. Alberoni was so
angry about Cape Passaro that he retaliated by taking up the cause of the
pretender. He interested King Charles XII of Sweden in the plot, who was
furious with George I for buying the ex-Swedish duchies of Bremen and
Verden from Denmark. Charles XII was one of the greatest generals of the
age, and if he had appeared in the Highlands at the head of an army the
Hanoverians would really have had something to fear. But once again
destiny seemed determined to keep George on the throne, because Charles
XII died quite suddenly before this new plan got off the drawing board.
Alberoni’s last attempt to put the pretender on the throne was in 1719
when 5,000 men under the command of Ormonde sailed for Scotland, but
only 300 men reached her shores and they were soon defeated at Glenshiel.
The scare the Fifteen had produced resulted in a flurry of legislation to
stabilize matters by strengthening the government. The Septennial Act
increased the Whigs’ hold on power by providing that henceforth elections
were to be called every-seven years instead of every three; it lasted until
1911. One of George I’s principle secretaries of state, General Stanhope,
veteran of the last war, by contriving a new Quadruple Alliance of France,
England, Holland and the emperor Charles VI forced Spain to the peace
table. Removal of the troublesome Alberoni was one condition England
laid down. Without Alberoni’s patronage the pretender was once again
condemned to roam Europe, looking in his usual rather half-hearted
fashion for sponsors for his great enterprise. He at least had the
consolation of having recently fathered a little boy, Prince Charles Edward,
so the Stuart direct line would continue.
George I’s first government had originally been made up of a mixture of
old Junto Whigs like Marlborough’s son-in-law the Earl of Sunderland and
the brave and distinguished Stanhope. Stanhope, his aide John Carteret
and Sunderland were the sort of Whigs William III would have recognized,
ones who believed in the need for England to play her role in Europe. But
the government also included a new generation of Whig statesmen, of
whom the most important were Lord Townshend and his brother-in-law

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Sir Robert Walpole, who was then chancellor of the Exchequer, and they
split with Stanhope over continental involvement. In many ways these two
men were more like Tories than Whigs, given that their priority was to put
the country’s finances on a sounder basis by avoiding wars and foreign
entanglements of all kinds. After their break with Stanhope, who was now
in effect chief minister, they retreated to their estates in Norfolk to bide
their time. Any free hours they had in London were now passed at Leicester
House, the home of the Prince of Wales, as they were building an
opposition round the ‘reversionary interest’, as the party of the heir to the
throne was known. It was not to be long before they were recalled by
George I.
Whatever Stanhope’s diplomatic gifts, in many areas his government
was unsatisfactory. But it was above all in financial matters that the
administration was to come a cropper, for the bluff ex-soldier did not
exercise sufficient control over his ministers, and in 1720 the crisis of the
South Sea Bubble burst. This was a financial scandal of great magnitude, a
side-effect of ministers’ new-found enthusiasm for getting people to buy
shares in government enterprises to pay for public borrowing. Inspired by
the Whig Bank of England’s success in paying for the wars in 1711 under
Harley, the Tories founded the South Sea Company to take over £900,000
of the National Debt in return for a monopoly of all the trade to South
America granted to England at Utrecht.
The company was a joint-stock company: that is, people invested money
and received a good dividend in return. Its directors aspired to manage the
whole of the National Debt, which stood at the then enormous sum of £52
million, thanks to the cost of the French wars. With commissions it was a
lucrative business and in 1720, by bribing government ministers, the South
Sea Company was given permission by Parliament to take over half of it.
The directors of the company proceeded to enrich themselves by per-
suading government stockholders that they would do better to exchange
their state bonds for South Sea stock.
The combination of advertisements promising an opportunity to make
enormous profits in the South Sea Company compared to government
stock and of government ministers themselves backing the South Sea stock
proved irresistible. The price of the shares skyrocketed, and everyone from
dustmen, shopkeepers and chambermaids to merchants and MPs bought
some. People behaved quite crazily: many of them borrowed the value of
their house and belongings together and then bought shares with the
borrowed money. Very few resisted the temptation to make so much
apparently easy money, though the ageing Duchess of Marlborough said
publicly she believed that ‘This Bubble will soon burst.’
By the winter of 1721 South Sea shares were yielding an astonishing

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thousand-pound dividend. But the company started to issue writs against

other companies which were trying to cash in on its success, and this had
a catastrophic effect on the market. For what happened was that
confidence was lost in all ventures, especially the South Sea Company. The
market crashed, so did share prices. With the collapse of the South Sea
Bubble, people were wiped out overnight; hundreds of thousands of people
faced bankruptcy. Panic and distrust of the government swept the country,
particularly when it emerged that government ministers had accepted
bribes to promote the shares. One minister committed suicide, and the
chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie, was thrown out of the House
of Commons for corruption. Stanhope died of a heart attack from the
stress, while Sunderland was under investigation. The whole of England
was verging on hysteria.
Meanwhile, in Norfolk, the ex-chancellor Robert Walpole continued
calmly to run his estate and get on with his own business. Pleasant echoes

Sir Robert Walpole, all-powerful Whig prime minister to the new dynasty, later
rst Earl of Orford. Bust by John Michael Rysbrack.

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 HANOVERIAN

of what was becoming an increasingly deafening chorus of demands that

he should be brought back to rescue the government reached his sylvan
retreat by every mail. Every newspaper called for him to save the nation.
Walpole was the man who had spoken out about the dangers of the mania
for speculation. He had ‘bottom’; he was a sensible politician with a real
grasp of finances. Sunderland bowed to the inevitable, and on the back of
the South Sea Bubble Walpole rose to supreme power. He was asked to
take over the reins of government, and from then on he conducted himself
brilliantly.
Sir Robert, as he soon became, abandoned the court of the Prince of
Wales without a backward glance. With his brother-in-law Townshend he
restored confidence to the country and sorted out the government finances.
For the rest of George I’s reign there was peace at home and abroad. The
economy made a rapid recovery, helped by the new trading opportunities
opened up by Utrecht. One of Walpole’s greatest clevernesses was to make
it very easy as time went on for most Englishmen to become Whigs. By the
mid-century the number of Tories in the House of Commons had been
reduced to sixty. Walpole even managed to placate the die-hard Tories by
leaving the Church settlement unaltered — one of his favourite mottoes was
‘If it’s quiet, don’t disturb it.’ Though he personally believed in freedom of
religion, he saw no point in upsetting the High Church elements by
removing the Test and Corporation Acts which other Whigs had openly
pledged to abolish. Equally he saw no reason why Nonconformists should
suffer from civil disabilities, so every year he passed an Act of Indemnity
for everyone who had violated the Test Act, enabling Dissenters too to
hold office. This was a typical piece of subtle Walpolean compromise: it
didn’t quite please everyone, but it pleased everyone enough for it to work.
Under the managing influence of such a clever, worldly man, the urge to
restore the Stuarts died out quite rapidly. Though it remained a dangerous
buried coal, it would require a great deal of activity to blow it back to life.
How unvital it appeared is indicated by the fact that Francis Atterbury,
Bishop of Rochester, was not executed in the wake of an abortive Jacobite
conspiracy but merely banished. Even Bolingbroke was allowed back into
the country, though he was banned from the House of Lords.
With the kingdom in such capable hands it was much easier for George
I to spend several months each year out of the country relaxing at his old
court of Herrenhausen, which he found far more appealing than anything
London could offer. In 1727, when the first Hanoverian king died from a
massive stroke at Osnabriick in Hanover, England remained quiet and
peaceful and no Jacobite rising disturbed the straightforward and easy
transfer of power from father to son. It was the middle of the night when
Walpole brought the new king the news that his father was dead. It must

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have been a curious scene. Walpole, who was by now extremely large, had
to lower himself with some difficulty to his knees to hail his new sovereign.
George II, half asleep and pulling his breeches on, said crossly, ‘Dat is von
big lie.” He had consistently been denied any responsibility by his father,
who had always refused to make him regent in his frequent absences, and
he could not believe that he was now to be king.
Even the slick and imperturbable Walpole suffered a few days’ anxiety
that George II would dismiss him from office, as he had hated his father so
much and saw Walpole as his father’s man. In fact George offered the job
to a nonentity named Sir Spencer Compton, but his sensible wife Caroline
of Ansbach, who was a close friend of Walpole, managed to convince him
that it was jn his best interests to keep Sir Robert as prime minister. George
II was crowned with Walpole stage-managing everything in his usual
competent way.
The old king was buried in Hanover. No one mourned him very much,
except the ‘Maypole’, now Duchess of Kendal. She had been very worried
about his health ever since news had come that Sophia Dorothea, the
unfortunate prisoner at Ahlden, had died. It had been prophesied by a
fortune-teller that the king would pass away within a year of his wife, and
as a result the duchess had been terrified by every omen. But though she
was overcome with grief she was said to have a new consolation at her villa
at Isleworth. A large black raven had flown into her house shortly after the
king passed away and she became convinced that it contained his soul.
Many stories circulated of how she could be seen curtseying to the raven
and listening deferentially to its croaks — until she died not long after of a
wasting disease.

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 George I
(1727-1760)

In most ways George II was a far nicer man than his father; like George I
he was a brave soldier, but taller and better looking. He spoke better
English too, sometimes acting as his father’s interpreter with the English
ministers. The first two Georges took such a close interest in the British
army that it was the one institution that experienced some attempts at
reform in an era very careless about public services. Discipline was
improved, and the system of outfitting was overhauled. Commendably
George II did not approve of the English practice of purchasing
commissions, believing that the holding of a command should be merited.
The success of British arms during the Seven Years War of 1756-63 which
sealed the First British Empire was due in no small part to the Hanoverian
influence.
One of the first things George II did when he became king aged forty-
four was, rather touchingly, to put a portrait of his unhappy mother on
display. (No one knew he had secretly always carried a miniature of her in
his pocket, which he liked to take out and gaze at when he was alone.) The
new king’s experience of England so far had been punctuated by
humiliating rows between himself and his father. They culminated in
George I threatening to have the then Prince of Wales arrested at his first
son’s christening. Fortunately a great deal of soft pedalling by the prince’s
clever, flirtatious wife Caroline of Ansbach managed to avert this.
Caroline of Ansbach had not been at all in awe of her late father-in-law,
but she could see that she and her husband had far more to gain if he ate
his pride and was on speaking terms with his father than if he was at
daggers drawn. Blonde with a magnificent embonpoint and intellectual
tastes (she corresponded with the leading philosophers of the day for
amusement) Queen Caroline enjoyed ruling George II. She even tolerated
his apparently insatiable appetite for mistresses — English ones, she opined,
at least would teach him better English. Throughout her husband’s reign
she continued to urge him to entrust himself utterly to the suave Walpole’s
wisdom. For his part Walpole commented pleasantly, ‘I have the right sow
by the ear.’

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But, despite his own suffering at his father’s hands, George II’s atrocious
relations with his own son and heir Frederick, the new Prince of Wales,
who arrived from Hanover to live in England aged twenty-one in 1728,
were no less a source of scandal. That intimate observer of the Georgian
era Horace Walpole, Robert’s son, remarked that ‘it was something in the
blood’ which prevented the Hanoverians from getting on with their heirs.
After a quarrel with his parents, Frederick, or ‘Poor Fred’ as he was
generally known, actually carried his wife out of their palace while she was
in the middle of labour, to prevent his first child, Princess Augusta, being
born near the hated pair.
Just as before, the opposition of out-of-office Whigs and Tories soon
began to gather at the court of the new Prince of Wales at Leicester House.
By the mid-1730s Frederick, Prince of Wales was its official sponsor. This
had the beneficial effect of creating the ‘loyal opposition’ which of course
was loyal, after its fashion, to the new dynasty, though its antics drove
Walpole mad with rage. And antics they were, ranging from endless satires
to plays and cartoons that poked fun at the prime minister. The truth was
that, by unscrupulous use of spies and corruption, by both charming and
browbeating the decent, straightforward, new king and his worldly wife,
the quick-witted and cunning Walpole had absolute control of the country,
just as he had under George I. What was new and admirable about
Walpole (though there was much to appal) was that he valued peace and
the wealth and progress it created, when most other European statesmen
of the eighteenth century were interested only in the easy glory of war.
Sir Robert Walpole was one of the most talented managers of Parliament
that England has ever seen, and he was as greedy for power and wealth as
his huge girth and many houses (including the nonpareil Houghton, his
country house) suggest. His two chief henchmen were the Pelham brothers,
one of whom, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, was the most talented fixer of
elections in the history of Parliament. An apparently hesitant, scurrying
figure, who looked, one wit said, as if he had lost half an hour somewhere
and was busy looking for it for the rest of the day, the duke was a very
shrewd judge of men, unequalled in the black arts of power-broking and
using the government machinery for patronage. Like his master Walpole,
Newcastle believed that ‘Every man has his price, it is only a matter of
determining it.’
Walpole decided that the only surefire way to keep the Whigs in power
and the Stuarts out was to use bribery to secure the adherence of the
political and official class of both parties, whether it was by places in
ministries or lord lieutenantships or the bench or money itself. MPs used
to come to his office to receive handouts in gold. For all its corruption, this
system brought real tranquillity to a potentially unstable country whose

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ruling dynasty had been introduced not much more than a decade before.
And Walpole controlled it all with unprecedented efficiency. Nothing
could be done, at least at the beginning of his rule, to prevent him driving
whatever bills he wanted through the Parliament he handled so exquisitely.
But Walpole also pleased the Whigs’ natural constituency, the merchants
and financiers, with his wholesale reform of the tax system. He was not
just the hearty, hunting-mad squire who preferred to be in the saddle for
eighteen hours a day, as his supporters liked to portray him. He was a real
product of the Enlightenment. Though a coarse man, he was also a coldly
intelligent one, convinced that any problem could be solved by the
application of reason. It was practically a religion with him to get rid of the
bumbling methods of the past, the red tape stifling the new businesses, and
to apply scientific analysis to trade and industry and the reform of the tax
structure. He and his officials in the ministries, who were frequently
distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society, were obsessed by the new
science of statistics.
In order to promote England’s manufactures and foreign trade, booming
since Utrecht, Parliament was persuaded to abolish many of the import
duties on raw materials as well as almost all export duties. What the
Treasury lost at source it would gain in personal taxation. In other words,
the government would reap more revenue from the pockets of the energetic
businessmen who were causing fabulous wealth to flow into the country.
Trade was growing dramatically more than it ever had before and
changing society in the process.
The people with money were no longer the landed gentry, whose money
came from farming. In the England of the 1730s wealth was moving to the
City, to the traders, to the enterprising merchants arranging deals abroad,
as evidenced by the massive increase in shipping. But though wealth was
shifting into the hands of the merchants who were creating it, the tax
structure reflected the past: the bulk of the money raised by the Treasury
still came from the land tax, which fell heavily on the gentry, whereas
merchants tended to live in cities and have their wealth in cash. Walpole
changed all that. Though he belonged to the Whig party, his family
background was that of the naturally Tory small-landowner class - many
of his friends and many of his friends’ fathers had been ruined by the land
tax, which had quadrupled as a result of the French wars. He now shifted
the tax burden to the new wealthy. His sympathy for his fellow squires, the
Tory backwoodsmen, was another factor damping down their desire for a
Stuart on the throne again, as they saw how good Walpole was for their
interests.
Commercially and financially Hanoverian England could not have been
flourishing more vigorously. At the same time, with the amoral prime

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minister to set the tone, the country slipped

into a period remarkable for the corruption
of its public officials. The Church of
England gave no lead: it was becoming a
respectable occupation for the brother of
the local squire, and very squirelike and
unpriestlike the parson became in his
comfortable Georgian rectory. It was only
towards the middle of the eighteenth
century that Methodism revived the
religious zeal of the past. The lord
chancellor Lord Macclesfield was even
tried for selling judicial appointments.
Many justices of the peace were connected
Bishop Joseph Butler, the to the criminal underworld by a kickback
influential theologian and moral system, or were involved in the smuggling
philosopher, whose 1736
Analogy of Religion Natural
business which was sometimes arranged by
and Revealed defended revealed entire villages. At Porthgwarra near Land’s
religion against the Deists. End in Cornwall the deep tracks of a
permanent pulley system may still be seen
today where the best local families, and the worst, connived to outwit
Customs.
Because there seemed no end to this system, a system without shame, the
only recourse of the opposition was to satire. When one of George I’s
mistresses sold the right to create a new copper coinage for Ireland to a
highly unsuitable businessman named Wood,
Dean Swift responded with The Drapier’s
Letters (1724). George II’s court was clearly
the thieves’ kitchen in John Gay’s The
Beggar’s Opera, with Walpole as its chief
character MacHeath, the swaggering high-
wayman. Very sharp practice was the rule of
this infinitely hard-edged, commercial,
godless and ruthless age, so similar to our
own, where the only sin was failure, and
success was worshipped.
Without wars to fight and blessed with low
taxation, the British concentrated on
domestic trade by improving the country’s George Whitefield,
evangelical preacher who
communications. The enthusiasm for build- inspired John Wesley and
ing canals, which would see 3,000 miles cut helped begin the eighteenth-
into the country by the end of the eighteenth century religious revival.

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 HANOVERIAN

century, had started by 1720. Stone roads were laid. Travel through the
country became much faster, increasing profits for both merchants and
farmers able to sell to a bigger market. For the aspirant middle classes, the
successful tradesmen moving away from living over the shop, whose
burgeoning wealth meant their wives had servants and were freed from
household drudgery, the first circulating library was opened in Edinburgh
by Allan Ramsay in 1726. Its imitators that sprang up nationwide soon
featured that celebration of middle-class life, the novel, as it began to
emerge under Fielding and the bookseller Samuel Richardson. The middle
classes had the money to attend to their health, and at the same time
indulge their new amour propre by rubbing shoulders with national
leaders of fashion in the pump rooms of
Bath. Bath’s regular crescents and squares
were built on Enlightenment principles
with bigger windows to let in the light and
closer attention to hygiene. But despite
these material improvements for the
fortunate, even to its contemporaries the
age of Walpole appeared a sleazy period for
manners and morals. Its crudity and cruelty
were epitomized in the work of William
Hogarth, notably in The Rake’s Progress,
painted between 1733 and 1735.
Against such a background, it was
nonniwecley eine vounder or remarkable that those who were uncorrupt
Methodiene and disinterested continued to flourish at
all. For more high-minded currents did
exist in Walpole’s England. The spirit of philanthropy was represented by
the Tory James Oglethorpe who in 1732 founded Georgia as a new colony
in America for people released from debtors’ prison. The Wesley brothers
began to revitalize the Church of England in the late 1730s, in a movement
known as Methodism. Their charismatic preaching, devotional faith and
infectious enthusiasm provided comfort for many like the poor whose lives
on earth were very harsh, and who were not served well by a Church which
had lost much of its mission.
One member of the opposition determined to resist the snares of the
Walpolean system was the extraordinary young MP William Pitt, the other
dominant figure of the reign of George II. By the mid-1730s the theatrical
Pitt had made a name for himself as an exceptional speaker. Despite the
little that has survived of his speeches in an era before shorthand or
television or radio, he is considered by historians, as he was by his
contemporaries, to have been the greatest orator the House of Commons

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has ever produced. He was part of the opposition to Walpole who called
themselves Patriots and claimed the moral high ground in the face of his
cynicism. Unlike the Stuarts, Walpole never tried to avoid Parliament —
indeed the Parliamentary system developed to an unparalleled extent under
him. Nevertheless his use of bribery and corruption was believed by the
Patriots to have ushered in a new kind of tyranny.
Walpole called them contemptuously the ‘Patriot boys’, with all that that
suggests of juvenile and foolish behaviour. But by the mid-1730s they
consisted of the most impressive of the Whigs — William Pulteney, Carteret,
the diplomat and wit Lord Chesterfield, the aristocrat Grenville brothers
and their brother-in-law William Pitt himself. Pitt’s maiden speech
attacking jgbbery in the government was so striking that Walpole had his
army pension removed, in hopes that he would be muzzled. But Pitt was
not at all embarrassed by financial hardship. He drove around town in a
shabby old carriage, publicly proclaiming his poverty in pointed contrast
to the ostentation of Walpole’s wealthy placemen. He became the scourge
of Walpolean sleaze, denouncing corruption, placemen and yes-men.
Walpole’s talent for hogging the limelight ensured that for the next
decade there were constant defections of the more talented members of
government to the opposition. The prime minister ultimately preferred to
have all the glory himself. He soon drove out from the Cabinet any MP
with too independent a voice, like the talented foreign policy expert
Carteret, whose command of German was so good that there had been a
real risk he might supplant Walpole in George II’s counsels. Many others,
like Pulteney, left because they disapproved of Walpole’s foreign policy,
which was predicated on friendship with France even if that meant
ignoring treaty violations. In 1730 Townshend, who as Walpole remarked
had previously been the ‘senior partner’ in their relationship, found the
going too hard against the ambitious Walpole and retired from
government to experiment with his cattle on his country estates. “Turnip’
Townshend made his name for posterity by discovering the value of turnips
as a winter feed.
Chief among the mischief-makers of the mixed opposition of Tories and
disaffected Whigs was the ex-Jacobite Bolingbroke, whose shenanigans
continued to be tolerated by the unruffled Walpole. The minute Walpole
had allowed him back into the country Bolingbroke had begun his
scurrilous polemical magazine the Craftsman. Dedicated to insulting
Walpole, the ‘man of craft’, it called on all patriots to establish higher
standards in public life, and was intended to revive the Tory party and
make them fit for office. Bolingbroke’s booklet On the Idea of a Patriot
King was eagerly embraced by the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of
Wales, the idealistic young man with intellectual tastes who headed the

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Patriot movement. In fact Poor Fred never became king, predeceasing his
son, the future George Ill, after succumbing to pneumonia in 1751. But
that son, having absorbed all these ideas, saw himself as the Patriot king,
and from 1760 onwards would try and replace aristocratic Whig power
with the ‘King’s party’.
Balked of power, deprived of action, the opposition through the
Craftsman had their revenge on Walpole by taunting him with insults and
obscene cartoons. Though he was always trying to have the printers and
editors thrown into prison for abuse and slander, they usually managed to
find some sympathetic judge who released them. Walpole was so infuriated
by The Beggar’s Opera and a profusion of theatrical farces about him,
many by the novelist Henry Fielding, that he passed the Licensing Act in
1737. This made the lord chamberlain the censor of the British theatre,
without whose licence plays could not be performed. That role was not
abolished until 1968.
Walpole was not only the first head of the government to be called prime
minister, he was also the first prime minister to live at ro Downing Street.
Its spare, unostentatious elegance is symbolic of the power of the Whig
oligarchy: George II might wear a crown and live in a palace, but the real
power was exercised behind the facade of what looked like a quiet
gentleman’s townhouse. It resembled a large number of housing
developments being built all over Georgian London, still to be seen today
in Bloomsbury and Islington. They were lived in by a remarkably
successful upper class of Georgian gentlemen and their wives, whom
foreign observers thought remarkably caste-free. The English aristocracy
intermarried uninhibitedly with wealthy City families in a way that was
unimaginable on the continent.
The first real check to Walpole, the English Colossus (one of the many
nicknames by which the omnipotent prime minister was sourly known),
took place in 1733 when he attempted to stymie the flourishing smuggling
industry. There was no point trying to increase the customs duties paid
when goods entered Britain, as that was where the smuggling came into
play. Having no little experience of illegally imported French brandy
himself, Walpole saw that the only solution was to tax the article at retail
level and transfer tobacco and wine from Customs to Excise.
Ever since it had first been invented by the Long Parliament, Excise had
had a bad name because of the brutality of the Excisemen. It was entirely
up to them to decide what tax was to be paid, and they collected it with
menaces immediately after they had made their inspection. All over the
country angry Englishmen and women cried that it would be bread and
cheese next if the government was starting to tax wine and tobacco.
English liberty was at stake. The opposition, with its obscene and savage

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cartoons in the Craftsman, had primed its audiences well.

There was a very ugly mood in the capital not only among the poor, but
in the city itself. A mob surrounded the House of Commons to make sure
that the bill did not go through, and burned Walpole and Queen Caroline
in effigy. Walpole himself made a humiliating escape through the back
door of a coffee house. When he saw his majority sink to sixteen on the
second reading, he withdrew the bill: the consummate pragmatist had seen
the writing on the wall. He would not spill blood to get taxes, he said.
Walpole continued in power for another nine years after this, but his
monolithic state began to crumble.
The rock upon which Walpole actually foundered was the very policy
that had made him so successful: his avoidance of war. Maintaining
friendly relations with France and Spain for eighteen years despite some
provocation had made the country prosperous, won elections and kept the
Stuarts out. But by the late 1730s all the merchants and businessmen in the
City of London who had been Walpole’s greatest supporters believed that
what was needed against Spain was not peace but war.
Britain’s trading success in the South American markets — a Spanish
preserve since Cortes — opened up by Utrecht had infuriated the Spanish.
Although technically the English were allowed to send one ship a year to
trade at the great market of Porto Bello, which was the entrepét for South
America, in practice the ship was accompanied by a great many other less
official ships, which reloaded the one ship as she emptied. With the British
government turning a blind eye to its nationals’ illicit behaviour at Porto
Bello, the Spaniards’ only recourse was to carry out forced searches on all
British shipping, since every British vessel was suspected of smuggling.
The English newspapers outdid one another with lurid accounts of
Englishmen in Spanish jails suffering tortures worse than those inflicted by
the Spanish Inquisition for simply plying their trade. By the late 1730s the
Spanish coastguards’ habit of stopping and searching in an aggressive and
violent fashion had become a silent war between the two countries. British
businessmen believed that it needed to be recognized as such.
They no longer wanted adroit avoidance of hostilities —- they were
champing at the bit to use war to break into new markets, to get into South
America and import her gold and silver. The City of London and the
opposition saw the hidden hand of France behind the Spanish attacks on
English shipping; they were sure that Walpole was being bamboozled by
France, that what England was facing was not so much rivalry with Spain
as a battle for trade and colonial supremacy with France. Walpole’s foreign
policy was also alienating his master George II, because it had greatly
weakened Austria. Like his father, as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire
George II was loyal to the emperor in Vienna and believed that Austria

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must always be backed to limit the power of France. Then in 1737 Queen
Caroline died. She had been Walpole’s greatest supporter, and from her
death he had more difficulty in clinging to power. The tide was running
against him.
By contrast, Pitt in his daring, his brilliance and his arrogance
encapsulated the mood of British merchants. War against France at the
beginning of the century had won Britain the trading supremacy conferred
by Utrecht. War with Spain was necessary now. When in 1739 Walpole
would have been happy to accept Spain’s offer of compensation, put
forward in the Convention of Pardo, for rough handling of British seamen,
Pitt swayed the House of Commons against him. There could be no more
half-measures. Quivering, slender, furious and dressed in his customary
black Pitt told the House from the opposition benches that the Convention
of Pardo was ‘a surrender of the rights and trade of England to the mercy
of plenipotentiaries’. The complaints of England’s despairing merchants
were the voice of England condemning Walpole’s policy of peace at any
cost. ‘If that voice were ignored,’ he warned in a sibilant whisper, ‘it would
be at the government’s peril; it »zust and should be listened to.’
He sat down to a storm of applause, which was echoed next day in every
newspaper. The Duchess of Marlborough let it be known that she had left
Pitt a legacy in her will to point up Walpole’s pusillanimity and show that
Pitt was her husband’s natural successor. In 1739 Walpole reluctantly
opened hostilities in the war which is known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
Britain’s ostensible casus belli was that one of her nationals, a Captain
Jenkins, had had his ear cut off during a search when his ship was sailing
through Spanish waters. But that had been back in 1731. It was simply an
excuse.
Despite the great national excitement, the war did not open well.
Though Porto Bello was captured, with the loss of only seven men, the few
skirmishes were completely indecisive. In the middle of all this, a general
election fell. Walpole scraped back into office, but it was with a very small
majority. He was soon defeated on a vote of no confidence and in 1742 he
retired. Much of his administration remained, including the Pelham
brothers, but the foreign policy expert Lord Carteret, who had long
languished in opposition, returned to power for two years under Prime
Minister Spencer Compton (now Earl of Wilmington), propelled by his
knowledge of continental affairs. For Carteret’s rise and Walpole’s fall
were both the effect of a new war which had begun on the continent in
1740, the War of the Austrian Succession.
This soon superseded the War of Jenkins’ Ear. It had opened with the
upstart kingdom of Prussia’s outrageous seizure of mighty Austria’s
duchies of Silesia. Prussia was then a struggling north German state, but

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her soldiers and military traditions were shortly to become the wonder of
Europe. Austria, however, was the home of the Habsburg emperor, whose
dynasty had dominated the German-speaking lands of the continent for the
past 300 years.
The figure behind the capture of Silesia was the twenty-four-year-old
Frederick II of Prussia, whose father had died only a few months earlier.
He had taken swift advantage of the accession of the young and
inexperienced Maria Theresa to her father Charles VI’s hereditary
dominions to rush his troops into the duchies of Silesia to the south of
Prussia, claiming them as his own. He followed this up by defeating the
Austrians at the Battle of Mollwitz. It was a fantastic humiliation for
Maria Theresa and Austria, the great Habsburg power, to be defeated by
the House of Brandenburg. Though all the emperor’s allies had signed the
Pragmatic Sanction, a treaty which announced the indivisibility of all the
Austrian possessions left to Maria Theresa, Prussia had no intention of
honouring it.
Where Prussia led, other states followed. France and Bavaria, which had
much to gain from dismembering the Austrian Empire, signed an alliance
with Prussia. Maria Theresa rode to Hungary and rallied the Hungarians
to her side, but the situation looked bleak for her. The whole German
continent was in uproar, while the remnants of Austrian power in Milan
were now harassed by Spain and Sardinia. For the first time in three
centuries the electors had chosen as Holy Roman Emperor a candidate
who was not a member of the House of Habsburg, preferring the Elector
Charles of Bavaria whose armies were running amok all over Maria
Theresa’s lands.
Both George II and the foreign secretary Lord Carteret agreed that this
time treaty obligations to Austria should be fulfilled now that there was no
Walpole to prevent it. Large subsidies were paid to Austria to help her hire
troops to defend herself. A spate of negotiations by Carteret, the most
gifted diplomat of his generation, removed Prussia from the war. He
persuaded Maria Theresa to let Frederick keep Silesia. In return Frederick
guaranteed George’s precious Hanover against the French. George himself,
who was an ex-professional soldier, in person led a large army consisting
of English, Hanoverian and Hessian troops to the Low Countries to attack
the French and keep them away from the main theatre of war in the
imperial lands. Wearing a yellow sash over his armour, the colours of
Hanover, the king was victorious at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. But it
could no longer be disguised that everything that Walpole had feared had
come to pass. Britain and France were once more at war, with all the
expense and disruption which that entailed.
Dettingen did a great deal of good for George II’s reputation in England

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— though some courtiers had to stifle yawns at his hundredth retelling of

the battle. In the short term the French were frightened back across the
Rhine. But over the next two years things began to look quite shaky for the
Hanoverians. Walpole had said privately to friends when Britain exploded
with patriotic pride as the war against Spain opened, “They are ringing
their bells now, but they will soon be wringing their hands.’ He was right.
French spies had reported to their government that there was still a lot of
support for the Jacobite cause in England. Once again, as Walpole had
always predicted they would, the French prepared to invade England and
spark off a general rising to divert her from the Austrian War.
Their plans were defeated in 1744 by a great storm. Only tempestuous
winds, what Pitt called ‘those ancient and unsubsidized allies of England’,
prevented a French army landing on Britain’s coast. It was to have had the
son of the pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as the Young
Pretender, at its head. But French military success in the next year, 1745 —
the swingeing French victory over George II’s second son the Duke of
Cumberland at Fontenoy, when the Dutch ran away and the British and
Hanoverians were hopelessly outnumbered
— prompted the French to concentrate their
efforts in the Low Countries and to
abandon the plan to conquer England and
restore the Stuart line.
But their supposed puppet candidate,
the twenty-five-year-old Prince Charles
Edward, was not so easily put off. He was
as spirited and courageous as his father had
been sad and uninspiring. With Britain
distracted by war it seemed the optimum
moment to win back his ancestral lands. So
began the Forty-five rebellion. With only
seven men but 1,500 muskets, twenty
small cannon, ammunition and 1,800
broadswords clanking in the hold, the Prince Charles Edward Stuart,
prince landed at Moidart on the west coast known as ‘Bonnie Prince
of Scotland in late July 1745. He at last Charhe’ and the ‘Young
das teehee Pretender’, because he was the
exerted in his handsome person the grandson of King James II. His
extraordinary Stuart charm that always Jacobite army invaded England
cast such an ill-fated spell over its audience. 11 1745, but was turned back at
Many Highlanders doubted the wisdom PaO
of the enterprise without French backing, but the government in England
took the threat extremely seriously. There was concern at the highest levels
about whether there were enough guards to defend the royal palaces. The

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prime minister, Henry Pelham, who had taken over from Wilmington and
Carteret because of the poor progress of the war, anxiously sent word to
George II that he must return from Hanover. There seemed to be a level of
disaffection among the people which might be turned into hostility
towards German George and a welcome for the Young Pretender.
Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he was becoming known, seemed to have luck
on his side. By the end of September he had taken both Perth and
Edinburgh, and had inflicted a comprehensive defeat on the English
general Sir John Cope at the Battle of Prestonpans outside the latter city.
Until Prestonpans there had been a debate within the government whether
the situation really merited recalling the troops from the Austrian
Netherlands. Now it was deemed a first-class emergency. The British army
would have to be back in London to defend the capital before Bonnie
Prince Charlie got there.
Meanwhile many of the prince’s advisers urged him to declare Scotland’s
independence, to wait for the arrival of reinforcements from France and
reorganize his troops. But, carried away with his own success, the prince
could think only of London. Avoiding Newcastle and General George
Wade, Charles made for Carlisle. On 14 November it surrendered. Two
weeks later the Scots entered Manchester. However, all was not well. Huge
numbers of Highlanders, homesick away from their native glens, had
deserted between Edinburgh and Carlisle. The English Jacobites, such as
the Duke of Beaufort and Sir Watkin Wynn, refused to rise in the south
because there was no French invasion to back them up.
Though the rebellion was doomed, it did not seem so when the tartan
army streamed into Derby, only 127 miles from London. Even though
government forces were closing in from behind, there was now just one
army between Bonnie Prince Charlie and the capital, and the crown. So
desperate did the situation seem, with reports of the Highlanders having
their broadswords sharpened at a blacksmiths in Derby, that there was a
run on the Bank of England. George II put all his treasures on a yacht in
case he had to flee to Hanover.
It all changed at Derby. The prince was for pressing on to London. Who
knew what would happen if there was a pitched battle with George II? But
his advisers convinced him to retreat: Scots and Irish soldiers in the service
of the French king had arrived in Scotland, and they preferred to regroup
and launch another assault on England the following year. Meanwhile
Wade and the Duke of Cumberland were getting far too close behind him.
Cumberland was in Staffordshire. The rebels therefore limped back
towards the northern port of Inverness on the Moray Firth, where
reinforcements were believed to be awaiting them. But the Scottish army
was running out of steam, money and arms, while Cumberland’s men were

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having new boots and good food sent up to them from boats which landed
daily on the Scottish coast. Even the Highlanders, austere though their
lifestyle was, were completely exhausted by the time they faced
Cumberland’s men on Drumossie Moor at Culloden in April 1746. It was
a cold windswept plain above Inverness, with no natural advantages for
the defenders and a very poor place to give battle. It was Bonnie Prince
Charlie’s choice. His military advisers tried to dissuade him, but he paid no
attention.
Though the celebrated, bloodcurdling whoops of the Highlanders were
only a faint echo of the sounds which had terrified the people of Derby, the
kilted warriors still managed to break two regiments of Cumberland’s
front line. But after that it was a massacre. Culloden was a battle decided
by firepower. The well-fed, well-armed redcoats who outnumbered the
Jacobites by 3,000 men destroyed the clans. Those who were alive fled,
hobbling along secret ways across the mountains to the west coast and then
on to fishing boats to France. Back at the battlefield Cumberland gave
orders for the wounded rebels still lying on the field to be bayoneted to
death, earning himself the name of Butcher.
The prince himself made for the Western Isles and would have been
captured on South Uist had he not been rescued by a brave local lady named
Flora Macdonald. She dressed him up as her maid, and very peculiar he
looked too, because like his great-uncle Charles II he was exceptionally tall.
For five months Prince Charles Edward wandered the west of Scotland like
his followers, trying to evade the government soldiers. In an orgy of
revenge, to terrorize the locals into betraying Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hiding
place, the soldiers raped their women, took their cattle, destroyed their
humble dwelling places, burned their lands, and broke their ploughs, with
the result that many of these crofters died from exposure and famine. To the
English government’s fury, although the reward on Bonnie Prince Charlie’s
head was £30,000, not one of the Highlanders betrayed him.
At last Charles managed to find a boat willing to take him back to
France via Skye, and he bade a grateful farewell to Flora. The famous song
‘Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye, carry the
lad that’s born to be king over the sea to Skye’ refers to this moment. But
the prince, who was emphatically not born to be king, would live on for
another forty-two years until he died at last in 1788 in Rome. By then a sad
drunkard, full of fond reminiscences of his adventures, he was a curiosity
to travellers doing the Grand Tour. But in his gross, swollen features the
observer could see no trace of the youth who had fired a nation to arms.
Old age was something few of Prince Charles’s followers lived to enjoy.
This time, as far as the Hanoverian government was concerned, the
Jacobites had come far too close for comfort. Severe measures were taken

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William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, second son of George II. He was called
Butcher Cumberland for his treatment of the Jacobites after he defeated them at
the Battle of Culloden, which ended the ’45 rebellion. The print shows a dying
Highlander in the tartan, which along with all other Highland customs, were
forbidden after the 45.

to deal with them and make sure such a threat never arose again. The
Highland way of life was proscribed. The wearing of tartan to mark clan
memberships was forbidden; the chiefs’ important hereditary sheriffdoms
and jurisdictions which had made them a law unto themselves were
abolished. No Highlander was allowed to carry or own a sword, small
arms or rifle, and where there was even the remotest suspicion that they
had been Jacobites they were thrown off their land. Although some of these

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holdings were returned forty years later, that did not help those who lost
their homes and had to rely on the goodwill of relatives for their daily
bread. The leaders were all executed on Tower Hill, including the wily old
Lord Lovat. He had hedged his bets, pretending to be loyal to King George
II while sending his son to fight for the prince. Though he was eighty-three
years old, Lovat managed to escape to a mountain cave in a glen leading to
the west coast before he was betrayed.
But though the last of the Stuart threats to the Hanoverians had been
conclusively dealt with, abroad the war went on. Though the Austrian
Netherlands had been completely overrun by the French, they had not
succeeded in breaching the United Provinces defences. At the same time,
under Admirals Anson and Hawke Britain had regained supremacy of the
seas. The French lost Cape Breton, the eastern tip of Canada, and its
capital Louisburg to Britain; they had been captured by the American
colonists. By now it was clear that the two chief protagonists of the War of
the Austrian Succession were France and Britain, with Maria Theresa’s
Austria playing a poor third and minor role. In all this the war with Spain
had been forgotten. In fact the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which at last
ended the war in April 1748, did not even mention the original cause of the
War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Spanish right to search British boats.
The treaty restored most of Austria’s territories to Maria Theresa.
Nevertheless the empress was outraged by the way she had been treated.
Frederick of Prussia kept her Silesian duchies, while Sardinia took some of
the Milanese, and she had to give Parma to the King of Spain’s younger
son. Though the war had been fought on her behalf, Austria had come off
worst of all the countries.
Prime Minister Henry Pelham presided over a country growing ever
more prosperous. The Old Pretender was expelled from France, whose
rulers once again recognized the Protestant Succession. The Battle of
Culloden had truly ended the threat of the old dynasty supplanting the
new. When the Old Pretender died in 1766 even the pope did not hail the
once bonnie prince as King Charles III. By his tact Pelham held together the
old coalition of the Whigs as before. His premiership saw Britain in 1752
adopt the improved Gregorian calendar and lose eleven days in the process.
The calendar had been calculated in the sixteenth century by Pope Gregory
XIII, to correct errors in the old Julian calendar — it had taken Britain only
one and a half centuries to join the rest of western Europe.
But if the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty and thus Parliament and the
Revolutionary Settlement were at last secure — the next Hanoverian would
have an English accent and pride himself on being British — the threat from
France had not vanished. The rivalry was intensifying in two different
arenas: among the trading posts of the two great powers in India, several

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oceans away, and in the colonies of North America. In the coming world war
France and Britain would battle it out for colonial supremacy — and Britain,
though she was a quarter the size of France, would emerge the victor. By the
end of the Seven Years War she would control immense territories on two of
the seven continents, and have become an empire encircling the globe.
While Pelham’s government cut back the army for peacetime conditions,
in India the struggle continued between France and Britain to fill the power
vacuum caused by the death of Aurangzeb, the last Mogul emperor of
India, some forty years before. Previously the European settlements which
had been founded round the coast of India since the sixteenth century had
been no more than trading stations within the local rulers’ territories. The
companies, which went out to India saw themselves as merchants only.
They were not conquistadores, a role which would in any case have been
impossible under Mogul rule.
Under the auspices of the East India Company, the English settled at
Madras on the south-east coast, at Bombay and at Calcutta, which was
founded at the end of the seventeenth century as Fort William, beside a
branch of the Ganges. Interspersed with these English ‘factories’ or trading
stations were those of other nations: the French in particular had factories
at Pondicherry in the south near Madras, and in the north-east near
Calcutta they founded another one named Chandernagore. But by the
1740s the many warring Indian principalities into which the Mogul
Empire had disintegrated had become a battleground for English and
French influence. The Marquis de Dupleix, the French governor-general,
had embarked on a programme of training the local Indian peoples, who
were known as sepoys. Dupleix’s schemes for a few French leaders with
guns and money gradually to dominate India’s immense continent was
about to bear fruit. His candidate for the nawabship of the vast Karnatic
region of southern India, which contained both Madras and Pondicherry,
was poised to take the throne. Most of southern India would now be in
effect a French colony.
At the same time the enormous, unpopulated tracts of virgin land in
North America lying to the west of the eastern seaboard became another
flashpoint between France and England. From 1749 onwards the French
built forts along the Rivers Ohio and Mississippi and the Great Lakes, to
pen in the English colonists and prevent new settlers moving west into the
empty prairies beyond the Ohio Valley. When Pelham died unexpectedly
in 1754, the covert enmity between the French and English settlers in
North America had just erupted into a frontier war. The Virginians, led by
Major George Washington, a young Virginian plantation-owner, tried to
destroy Fort Duquesne. It was the opening move in their campaign to
prevent the French putting limits to their expansion.

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Over the next two years the fighting grew so furious that it became clear
that it would have to receive official recognition from the two mother
countries, and reinforcements were sent out by Britain and France, before
war was declared once more in May 1756. In India, too, the undeclared
race to control the great subcontinent was given official sanction by the
French and English governments. There British morale had been hugely
improved since 1751 by the astounding exploits of a former clerk of the
East India Company called Robert Clive. Clive had foiled Dupleix’s
attempt to control the Karnatic by capturing its capital, Arcot. He had had
no military training whatsoever, but he was a voracious reader who spent
all his spare time learning about battle tactics, and from Arcot onwards he
put his studies to amazing effect. Clive had audacity, charisma and
strategic judgement in equal quantities. With only 200 British soldiers,
many of whom were raw recruits just arrived from England, and 300
sepoys, he gave such heart to his troops that they marched fearlessly into
enemy country and captured Arcot without losing a man.
Although General Dupleix returned with massive Indian and French
reinforcements to besiege Arcot, under Clive’s indomitable leadership, the
British and their sepoy allies kept the army of 3,000 men at bay for fifty
days. In the end Dupleix had to retire, because Clive’s men simply refused
to give in. Notably heroic was the behaviour of the sepoys, who declined
to drink any of the last supplies of water, believing that Europeans had
more need of it than they. The siege of Arcot passed into legend. Dupleix
was disgraced and left for France, and Britain controlled most of the
Karnatic.
Not only was Britain at war in India and America, she had also begun
very unsuccessful hostilities in Europe. The three wars together are known
as the Seven Years War. The underlying cause of the European war was
Maria Theresa’s continued obsession with the duchies of Silesia. Outraged
at the way she had been treated by her former ally England, in order to
retrieve the duchies from Frederick II she allied herself with her old enemy
France, as well as with Russia and the Elector of Saxony. Although George
II disapproved of his aggressive nephew Frederick, he saw intense danger
in the new line-up of Catholic powers on the continent. Accordingly, in
January 1756 the king agreed to a defensive alliance between Great Britain
and Prussia.
But the dynamic Frederick the Great, as he became known, was not
going to wait to be attacked by the great powers now surrounding him. In
August 1756, he once again started a war in Europe. He invaded Saxony,
seized the war-plans detailing Prussia’s dismemberment and published
them in the newspapers as justification for his own behaviour. As Prussia,
Britain’s only ally, struggled against the invading armies of France,

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Austria, Saxony and Russia, bad news came from every part of the globe.
Though Clive in India followed up Arcot with a series of victories, the
situation seemed to be turning in favour of the French; the same was true
in America. News had just arrived of the tragedy of the Black Hole of
Calcutta, in Bengal in north-east India: the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-
Daula, one of the chief allies of the French, had overrun the English trading
post and shut up its defenders in a tiny jail. One hundred and forty-seven
prisoners had died of suffocation overnight. In America the French forts on
the St Lawrence and Ohio were holding the line against the English
colonists, and inflicting serious damage on them.
In Europe the situation was yet more alarming. Hanover had been
overrun: the king’s second son, the Duke of Cumberland, had been forced
to sign the Capitulation of Klosterzeven, handing over George II’s beloved
electorate to the French. The French fleet had triumphed over the English
navy, traditionally its superior. It had captured Minorca, the best harbour
in the Mediterranean, owing to the incompetence of Admiral Byng, who
had been sent with a fleet to relieve it. Though Byng was the son of the man
who had won the great victory of Cape Passaro, he was cast from a less
glorious mould. Flushed with success, the French were now mustering
boats at the Pas de Calais to invade England. The country was on the brink
of catastrophe, and no one seemed able to take control, as the government
had been riven by faction ever since the death of the tactful Henry Pelham
in 1754.
The new prime minister was his brother Thomas Pelham, Duke of
Newcastle. Despite his reputation for being the great fixer of elections,
Newcastle did not havé his brother Henry’s social gifts and could do
nothing to smooth relations among the Whigs. His rudderless government
drifted hopelessly from crisis to crisis, with the whole previously secure
basis for British life unravelling. The country was thrown into what can
only be described as a blind panic: the City of London and many other
cities sent deputations to the king begging him to do something about
Britain’s grave lack of defences. The government, desperate to be seen in
control and to find a scapegoat for their hopelessness, had Admiral Byng
shot on the quarterdeck of his own ship. As Voltaire said dryly, it was
‘pour encourager les autres’.
There was just one man who the nation believed could save them, and
that was the universally popular Pitt. As Dr Johnson observed, while
Walpole was ‘a minister given by the king to the people’, Pitt was the
‘minister given by the people to the king’. Pitt had been harping on for
twenty years about the need to increase the numbers and training of the
militia at home and to stop relying on German mercenaries. But he was still
only a minor minister and, as far as the king was concerned, one who had

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irredeemably blotted his copybook by his past attacks on British

involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession. Pitt’s Parliamentary
speeches decrying money spent on continental quarrels had guaranteed his
sovereign’s unrelenting hatred. ‘It is now too apparent that this great, this
powerful, this formidable kingdom is considered only as a province of a
despicable electorate,’ Pitt had memorably said, and George II could not
forget it.
Pitt never bothered to dress up his contempt for George II’s Hanoverian
commitments nor to conceal his belief that Britain should be absolved from
having any part in them. The taxpayers’ money would be much better
employed on defending the American colonists from the French. Pitt had
been furious when the war against Spain had been superseded by the War
of the Austrian Succession. Britain’s war should be on the sea, traditionally
her most successful element, and the battles fought for trade.
Despite the almost insuperable enmity of the king, it began to be clear as
the government’s reputation disintegrated that only Pitt could restore its
authority. Pitt alone, the Great Commoner, as he was nicknamed for
calling ministers to account in the House of Commons, still possessed a
reputation, as he had done since he first denounced Walpolean jobbery and
sleaze. Though cities all over the country were calling for Pitt, still the king
hesitated. He gave in only when his sensible mistress Lady Yarmouth, on
whom the sight of mobs drilling in London had a chilling effect, said that
he must choose Pitt or lose his throne. Pitt’s terms were quite unpalatable
to George — he insisted that he personally be responsible for policy — but
the resignation of Newcastle over Minorca in 1756 forced the king’s hand.
The Duke of Devonshire took over the government, but it was Pitt who in
effect became head of it.
Though Pitt’s weakness was that he did not command a sufficiently large
faction in the House of Commons, as Newcastle did, his strength was the
overwhelming personal support for him in the country at large. He had
complete confidence in himself and in his ability to breathe that confidence
back into the nation. ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one
else can,’ he said.
Unlike the rest of the government, Pitt had a comprehensive plan for the
war. For the previous eight years he had been paymaster-general under
Henry Pelham, because the king would not have him as war minister.
Traditionally this post was a way, as Walpole expressed it, of ‘putting a
little fat on your bones’: in other words, the paymaster-general made
money by creaming a percentage off each government transaction. But Pitt
had refused to take anything other than a ministerial salary. Instead he
used the office to accrue information about British trade and settlement
abroad. Everything he read over those eight obscure years consolidated his

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beliefs about the need for war with France to defend Britain’s trade.
If Walpole was the great eighteenth-century minister for peace, Pitt was
the great minister for war. In his breadth of knowledge, his daring and his
success, he is comparable only to leaders on the scale of Marlborough or
Churchill. It was Pitt’s vision that pulled a triumphant war effort out of a
country which had forgotten how to fight after years of reliance on
German mercenaries. Pitt breathed new life into services that had decayed
under Walpole’s placemen in ministries, whose neglect long after he was
gone had left Britain’s ships rotting at quaysides.
A Bill for a National Militia was passed to raise soldiers to defend the
country against the French invasion and beef up the numbers of an army
which was pitifully small compared to the French, thanks to the British fear
of a standing army in peacetime. Pitt ignored question-marks over the
Scots’ loyalty in order to take advantage of the fact that they were the best
natural soldiers in the country and raised two Highland regiments. He
believed that, if their native aggression was given an outlet against Britain’s
enemies, it would prevent a repeat of the Forty-five. These new troops
should be used to assault the coast of France to distract the French from
their fierce attacks on Prussia. Prussia herself was to be given an enormous
subsidy for troops, as well as a British army in Hanover to protect her from
the French. Under the generalship of Frederick the Great, Prussia was the
one power which could keep the French at bay and the only German state
worth subsidizing.
However, one of the army’s most senior commanders, the Duke of
Cumberland, was, like his father the king, allergic to Pitt. When told that
he was to take the orders of a man who had spent twenty years insulting
the sacred name of Hanover, he refused to serve under him. This gave
George II the excuse he needed to get rid of Pitt, whom he continued to
loathe. But when the king attempted to form a ministry without either Pitt
or Newcastle, he found that it was impossible, for the one was supported
by the voice of the people and the other by a majority in the House of
Commons. As George prevaricated for eleven weeks, from all over Britain
the most important corporations sent Pitt boxes of gold as symbols of their
support.
In the end the king bowed to the inevitable. Pitt was back in, with
Newcastle running the House of Commons for him with his patronage and
his majority. Technically Newcastle was prime minister and Pitt secretary
of state, but the real prime minister who took all the decisions (frequently
over the heads of the chiefs of staff) was the Great Commoner himself. It
was not a moment too soon for Pitt to return to the helm. Finally his plans
began to pay off. The King of Prussia rewarded Pitt’s faith in him when he
heroically defeated the assembled might of those European colossuses the

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French and the Austrians, and held off the Russians. Ferdinand of
Brunswick, meanwhile, in charge of the allied forces in Hanover, protected:
his western flank. To those who now complained about the vast expense
of the German continental campaign, Pitt replied that it was for once
justified: the French had to be tied down in Europe so that they could not
send too many troops to America and India. ‘I will conquer America for
you in Germany,’ he told the House of Commons.
Pitt believed that with sufficient encouragement Britain’s much larger
colonial population in America could even the odds vis-a-vis France, which
was four times her size and whose army was in mint condition. In order to
drive the French off the North American continent, every colony should be
organized for total war. All the state assemblies from Georgia to New
England would be encouraged to raise their own militias and send men to
fight. Tactfully Pitt gave high commands to American soldiers, though they
had had none of the professional military training of the British. A
propaganda campaign was launched at the American colonies to create a
spirit of mutual endeavour between them and the mother country, without
which Pitt knew the war would be lost — hitherto the colonies had
considered themselves to be quite unconnected to one another.
In 1758 Pitt sent out a bold new American expedition of huge
dimensions and astonishing ambition. It was a three-pronged attack on
Canada, France’s largest settlement, centring on Quebec. Pitt believed that
once Quebec was captured, Canada would fall to the English, and French
power in North America would collapse. British and American troops were
to come from New York in the south, the west and the east, the latter via
a seaborne landing. The eastern expedition was intended to recapture
Louisbourg, the strategically important capital of Cape Breton Island, and
the western operation was to take back Fort Duquesne as Braddock had
failed to do. Meanwhile, under Lord Abercromby, the British were to
advance up the Hudson river from New York and destroy all the French
forts guarding the route north.
To the surprise of many senior military staff, the task was entrusted to
the command of young officers. But they were men in whom Pitt had seen
leadership qualities —- an ability to think the unthinkable and improvise
under fire. All the officers he plucked out to command expeditions turned
out to be superb generals. And they were inspired by Pitt himself. He
imbued them with his own sense of purpose, of fighting for the Protestant
free world. Louisbourg, the gateway to the St Lawrence, was captured
that year against all the odds, chiefly because of Brigadier Wolfe’s bravery
in establishing a beachhead under fire. From then on British arms
triumphed. Fort Duquesne, the site of Braddock’s ambush, which would
have been the key link between the French colonies in the south and

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Canada, was taken by John Forbes in a single assault and renamed

Pittsburg. Meanwhile Colonel Bradstreet, a celebrated New Englander
soldier who was known for his rapport with the Indians, captured the
important Fort Frontenac. From then on the forts on Lake Ontario fell
one after another, until the capture of Fort Niagara brought the Great
Lakes under British control.
But the most astonishing feat of arms in the American campaign was the
capture of Quebec by the thirty-three-year-old Wolfe, now a general.
Letters detailing the British plans of attack for Canada had been stolen, so
the Marquis de Montcalm, the gifted French commander, had enough time
to move troops down to Quebec from Montreal further upriver. The city
was bristling with guns and soldiers when the British arrived.. Worse still,
by the time the superb sailors among Wolfe’s team had picked their way
up an often dangerously shallow river (they included James Cook, soon to
become famous for his discoveries in the South Seas), Montcalm and his
men had positioned themselves quite perfectly above them. Quebec was
built on a headland known as the Heights of Abraham, and French troops
were disposed round the citadel guarding every approach.
The only possible way into the city was therefore up the sheer cliffs rising
from the St Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. These great escarpments
of chalk loomed impregnably above the British. Even if they could be
climbed, and in any case there seemed nowhere to land from the river
below, the French would be able to pick them off as they ascended. No one
even considered the possibility of getting enough men up the cliffs to fight
a battle, certainly not the 5,000 British soldiers whose tents sprawled as far
as the eye could see on the south bank of the St Lawrence.
The rest of the summer of 1759 was spent by the British gazing at the
city as it sparkled tantalizingly above them. The situation in their camps
was made more gloomy because General Wolfe was coughing blood
incessantly into a bowl by his bed, a victim of consumption. It had become
clear to many from his emaciated looks and hacking cough that he was not
long for this world. For most of that summer, his brigadiers were near
despair, as day after day passed and Wolfe could not emerge from his tent.
The season was ticking on. Autumn would soon arrive and once the St
Lawrence froze all plans would have to be postponed until the following
year when spring melted it again. The men could not be left indefinitely
outside Quebec.
The few orders Wolfe did give seemed to make no difference. The canny
Montcalm would not be lured out of his eyrie to protect the villages
surrounding Quebec which Wolfe ordered his men to attack. The
bombardment of Quebec from below had no effect. An attempt to storm
Montcalm’s camp had been hopeless. Wolfe became so ill that he could

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SERRE SS

59. Under the command of General James Wolfe, in the

e nig itish troops scaled the cliffs leading to the Heights of
RErchens where Quebec stte Shortly atter, the French were driven out of Canada.

scarcely litt his head, and he asked his seconds-in-command to draw up

their own plans.
Then at the end of the long hot summer, when for a short time the
consumption went into remission, the old Wolfe showed himself. He had

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 1727-1760

an audacious plan, a gambler’s plan, the sort of plan that Pitt banked on
his commanders having as a last resort. On a trip along the St Lawrence,
Wolfe had noticed a tiny inlet the river had carved into the cliffs; he
believed that if his soldiers could land there at night, they could scale the
cliffs under cover of darkness and surprise the French in the morning.
At dead of night, Wolfe led the 5,000 British and American soldiers with
blackened faces silently downriver in rowing boats till they were opposite

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the Heights of Abraham. As he was borne along the treacherous river

whose rocks and shoals made it a hazard to all but Quebecois, Wolfe softly
read out his favourite poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by
Thomas Gray, published only a few years before, a copy of which his
fiancée had just sent out to him from England. His thin face, touched by
moonlight, seemed to wear a beatific expression as he murmured the
sonorous words whose Romantic, melancholic spirit echoed his own. As
the mysterious cliffs loomed up ahead and the men rested on their muffled
oars, Wolfe closed the book. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I had rather have
written that poem than take Quebec.’ But then he leaped overboard, into
the swirling St Lawrence, and ran ahead of them until his was only one of
the many tiny figures on the vast cliff face pulling themselves up by ropes.
When dawn rose over Quebec, Montcalm awoke to see on the plain
behind him, above the cliffs said to be unclimbable, row after row of
British redcoats. They were in battle array and far outnumbered the
French, whose sentries’ mangled bodies bestrewed the cliffs or floated in
the river below. It was a breathtaking, almost impossible, feat, to have put
thousands of men on top of a cliff overnight, but Wolfe had done it.
In a few hours it was all over; Quebec was taken by the British and
Americans, who had fought like devils under Wolfe’s inspired leadership.
Despite being hit by three musket balls, Wolfe allowed his wounds only to
be hastily dressed before he encouraged the line to make the final charge
that ensured victory, a victory achieved with just one cannon and no
cavalry against an enemy armed to the teeth. As the smoke of battle
cleared, and he was fainting from loss of blood, Wolfe saw that the French
retreat had been cut off as he had directed. The next minute he was dead.
Montcalm, too, died from wounds received that day.
Although the actual surrender of Canada to the British crown would not
take place for another year, by holding Quebec and thus commanding the
St Lawrence waterway, the British prevented the new French commander
from bringing his troops up to relieve Montreal. When reports of Wolfe’s
gallant death reached England, George II was so inspired by the story that
he commissioned Benjamin West to paint a narrative picture of the dying
Wolfe which may be seen today in the National Portrait Gallery.
As Pitt had vowed, with the exception of Louisiana in the south the
French had been wiped from the face of North America. Their plan of
linking Canada and Louisiana and preventing the English colonists from
expanding west was in ashes. The extraordinary effort Pitt had exhorted
from the colonists with every last drop of his being had come good when
they had fought together in the first imperial war. In what became known
as the year of victories, 1759, from all parts of the globe came nothing but
encouraging news: Britain had captured important French settlements on

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Robert Clive and Mir Jaffier after the Battle of Plassey, 1757. Plassey was one of
Clive’s most important victories. It secured British rule over Bengal, and formed
the basis for the British Empire in India. He was aided by Mir Jaffier, the
commander of the army of the Nawab of Bengal who came over to the British.

the island of Goree off west Africa and in Senegal itself. The capture of
Guadeloupe, one of the West Indian sugar islands, which had been
attacked when the British failed to take Martinique, raised Pitt’s reputation
to new heights among his fellow countrymen, as well as bringing £400,000
in income in one year alone. In India under the extraordinary Clive there
had been a series of victories, which as in North America had driven the
French off the Indian subcontinent. Most important was the Battle of
Plassey in 1757, which secured the large area of Bengal in the north-west
as a British dependency ruled on behalf of Britain by a new nawab, Mir
Jaffier. Sent there from the south, with 2,o00 British troops and 5,000
sepoys, Clive destroyed the 40,000-strong army of France’s ally Siraj-ud-
Daula.
Like Wolfe’s triumph on the Heights of Abraham, Plassey determined
the shape of the future. Adding Bengal to the Karnatic made Britain the
most powerful European presence in India; those territories became the
basis for the British Empire in India. Though Clive retired to England on

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grounds of ill-health, his work was continued by Colonel Eyre Coote, who
had been at Plassey and who had a unique relationship with the sepoys. By
1761 after decisive victories against the French at Wandewash and
Pondicherry, Coote had extirpated the last of French influence in southern
India. In Europe too the year 1759 drew to a triumphant close for Britain,
bringing nothing but victories: Ferdinand of Brunswick relieved Hanover
by drawing the French army into a successful ambush at Minden.
Even the threat of a new French invasion of Britain was foiled by the
exceptional bravery of Admiral Hawke, Pitt’s favourite admiral. Transport
ships to take French soldiers across the Channel had collected at the mouth
of the Seine. Their advance was to be covered by the Brest fleet, so the best
chance of preventing it was to destroy the fleet which was anchored below
Finisterre, on France’s Atlantic coast, in Quiberon Bay. Distance, and the
appalling November weather, would have stopped most men from putting
to sea, let alone sailing for the Bay of Biscay, but Hawke was not to be
deterred. Though driving rain rendered visibility nil, and massive waves
were breaking across the decks, he ordered his pilot to rush into the
shallow waters of Quiberon Bay. Its rocks stuck up like needles and the
long suck and swell of water presaged disaster for any ship not already at
anchor. But it was there that the Brest fleet was drawn up. And it was there
that Hawke shouted in words that became legendary, ‘Lay me alongside
the Soleil Royale!’ The valiant British navy followed Hawke straight into
the middle of the French ships and sank them, losing only forty men.
Lost in admiration at the change in Britain’s fortunes under Pitt,
Frederick the Great proclaimed that ‘England was a long time in labour,
but at last she has brought forth a man.’ The Prussian king himself was
almost as popular in England as Pitt, as may be seen from the number of
pubs still named the King of Prussia. But in the middle of all these victories
in 1760, when England’s reputation had never been higher, George II died
suddenly, aged seventy-seven. The throne now passed to his grandson
George III. By the end of his reign George II had grown quite fond of the
man who had expanded his dominions beyond recognition. Now in 1760,
despite all he had done for Britain, Pitt was vulnerable to being toppled by
a new court.

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 George III
(1760-1820)

Patriot King (1760-1793)

Unfortunately the hero that Britain had at last brought forth to the
admiration of Frederick II was not to the taste of the new king George III.
Handsome and blond, a devoted husband to Princess Charlotte
Mecklenberg-Strelitz who bore him fifteen children — all but one in
Buckingham House, which he purchased as a family home in 1761 — the
twenty-two-year-old George had his own ideas of heroics. The con-
spicuous part was to be played by himself. He was enormously influenced
by Bolingbroke’s writings on the ideal of the Patriot King, whose every
virtue he hoped to embody. The Patriot King had as one of its particular
tenets that the king should choose his ministers from the best men of all the
parties. Parties led to faction, which destroyed the nation; they should be
replaced by the lofty figure of the Patriot King from whom all goodness
would spring.
Of a pious nature, with a rather slow and limited intellectual capacity,
but with firm opinions once he had formed them, George III had a
passionate distrust of the dirty arts of politicians — especially those of the
great Pitt. He had complete faith in his own ability to cleanse the Augean
stable of Whig patronage which had run the country since 1714. In fact,
considering the formidable men ranged against him, George would be
remarkably successful over the next twelve years. Blessed with a will of
iron and considerable cunning, he clawed back the patronage of the crown
from the Whigs and substituted his supporters, known as the King’s
Friends, in the Houses of Parliament. For all his youthful ideas he soon
became as adept as Walpole at using pensions to create placemen.
But by doing so George put himself on a collision course with his fellow
countrymen. To British politicians of the 1760s the idea that the king
should control the legislature, that is Parliament, through his Friends, was
anathema. It was an article of post-revolutionary faith that there should be
checks and balances in the constitution, otherwise there was a real danger
of arbitrary power. The first twenty years of George III’s enormously long
reign (it lasted for nearly sixty years, though he was incapacitated for his

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last decade) were therefore disturbed by a new struggle between Parliament

and king which was expressed at its most extreme by the radical politician
John Wilkes. But those two decades also saw a war to the death between
the American colonies and Britain because the king refused to acknowledge
America’s own Parliamentary traditions.
The legal rights and liberties of the citizen were the outstanding universal
phenomenon of the second half of the eighteenth century. The spirit of the
time in George III’s domains was against him. Where he viewed his role as
the unifying Patriot King, on both sides of the Atlantic his reign was seen
as conflicting with the rights won a century before. The interfering king
was destroying liberty, which — like reason — was becoming the buzzword
of the age.
George III’s reign coincided with the coming to fruition of ideas
emanating from the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement in
France, a system of beliefs which spread like wildfire. These ideas were
popularized by the French philosophers of the time (for France ever since
Louis XIV had been the cultural centre of Europe) in their hugely
influential Encyclopédie, first published in 1751. Organized by the philo-
sopher Denis Diderot and containing articles by political theorists such as
Montesquieu and philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the
Encyclopédie aimed at nothing less than explaining the universe. Its
founders’ optimistic notion was that, if the Encyclopédie contained
explanations for everything, progress would result as knowledge
advanced. Newton’s discovery of the physical laws of the universe, which
he began to publish from the 1680s on, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus’
classification of the natural world into species in 1737 and the scientific
discoveries which proliferated in the first half of the eighteenth century
convinced them that the intellectual laws of the universe could be
determined by the application of human intelligence.
The most striking feature of the Enlightenment was its followers’ belief
in the benevolent power of man’s reason. If every aspect of human life —
institutions, laws, beliefs — were subjected to reason, man would be
inspired to improve it. Its next most important aspect was that the laws
which the Enlightenment philosophers, not least Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
postulated about the universe by and large moved most of them away from
conservative forms of government like monarchies towards the concepts of
human rights and equality. Many of the political ideas that inspired the
Encyclopédistes came from England. John Locke was hailed by them as
one of their own, and Montesquieu cited the separation of powers in
England as the model for rational government. Tradition was regarded as
being almost as bad as superstition, which in the Christian Churches had
been responsible for so many deaths the century before. Deism went in

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tandem with the Enlightenment, the belief that there was a God but that its
or his laws were to be known not through established religions like
Judaism or Christianity, but by discovering certain common principles. As
with a scientific experiment, every belief was to be questioned and, if it was
found wanting in the light of reason, abandoned.
For reason, it was believed, led to virtue. The effect that these ideas had
on the world are impossible to underestimate. It was only when the French
Revolution had run its course and thrown out every piece of irrational
human custom in its pursuit of rational virtue that disenchantment with
reason and experiment set in. But until 1789 the western world was awash
with all kinds of people tearing down the old in the search of the new. The
ideas the Encyclopédistes promoted, of political freedom, of social justice,
of equality, would prove so powerful that they moved men to fight wars,
to pull down palaces, to create a new world.
Nevertheless the compelling, the intoxicating brilliance of the
Encyclopédistes’ writing was such that philosophical ideas of reform — and
philosophers themselves — became the fashion even among the most
conservative monarchies of Europe. If Caroline of Ansbach had
corresponded with philosophers twenty years before, in the mid-eighteenth
century autocratic monarchs like Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick
the Great of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria were so influenced by
philosophical ideas that they wanted to put them into practice. They prided
themselves on being enlightened, as did people from all walks of life all
over the world. From such a standpoint eventually flowed the reform
movements in England at the end of the century, which demanded religious
toleration, an end to slavery, prison reform, parliamentary reform, trade
reform andconstitutional reform.
In his own way the young George III represented something of the spirit
of the age that was determined to sweep away the old and the outworn. He
believed in restoring virtue to the country. Unfortunately, when he was a
little boy his autocratic mother, who had been brought up as a princess at
the despotic court of a small German state and was horrified by the
impudence of the English Parliament, was always saying to him, ‘George,
be a king.’ He never forgot her advice. But his interpretation of kingship
not only conflicted dramatically with the English political tradition. It also
led him into conflict with the Whig leaders of his reign, the Earl of
Shelburne and the Marquis of Rockingham.
In the atmosphere of the Enlightenment they prided themselves more
than ever on being the keepers of the flame of freedom, as true heirs to the
Revolutionary Settlement. And they kept up the Whig reputation for being
in contact with advanced thought. Just as Locke had been doctor tothe
first Whig Lord Shaftesbury, the scientist and dissenter who discovered

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oxygen Joseph Priestley was Lord Shelburne’s librarian, responsible for

much advanced rationalist thought percolating into Whig ruling circles.
The stage of George III's reign was thus set for repeated confrontation.
George III remained under the influence not only of his mother Augusta,
Princess of Wales, but also of his former tutor Lord Bute, a tall, vain
Scotsman, said to be her lover, who was known for priding himself on his
good legs. Bute was loathed by most people, partly because he was Scots
(the Scots were still very unpopular) and partly because of his passion for
intrigue and secret plots. But he did have the sensible idea of getting the
new king off to a good start by emphasizing how English he was compared
to his great-grandfather and grandfather, George I and George II. George
Ill made a famous speech from the throne in the perfect English accent
derived from a childhood spent at Kew, which began, “Born and bred in
this country I glory in the name of Briton.’ Nevertheless, though he might
be regarded with sentimental enthusiasm after such a start, by the easily
moved public, to the political classes (that is, the great Whig network
spread so effectively throughout the country) George seemed a dangerous
new phenomenon.
Emotional and affectionate, the young George III put his faith in those
he loved, chief of whom was the Tory Bute, who had been his tutor ever
since his father, Poor Fred, died when George was twelve. The pompous
Bute was appointed secretary of state by the king and thrust into Pitt’s
administration. George did not appreciate that Pitt should be given free
rein, while Pitt himself, as a consummate autocrat — Horace Walpole said
that he wanted the crown and sceptre and nothing less — was furious that
the Cabinet had to have Bute on board representing the king and putting
obstacles in his path. Pitt was insulted when Bute wanted George III in his
coronation speech to call the war ‘bloody and expensive’; he insisted that
it be changed to ‘just and necessary’. Undermined in his own Cabinet and
prevented from declaring pre-emptive war on Spain, France’s ally, Pitt
resigned in October 1761. Bute was left to face renewed hostilities with
Spain in December (though it brought Britain Hanava and Manila) and to
manage the peace which all sides were wearily coming to believe was
necessary.
The Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, brought to an end the
Seven Years War, but despite Pitt’s entreaties no mention was made by
Bute of Britain’s magnificent ally Frederick the Great, who had fought so
bravely on her behalf. Bute followed up this ungrateful behaviour by
withdrawing without warning the subsidy Frederick had come to depend
on. In a sad turnaround the King of Prussia, who had helped to win the war
which had left Britain the world’s top trading nation, became her
implacable enemy.

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Pitt denounced the peace, which he said was ‘as stained as Utrecht’, but
just as at Utrecht the gains to Britain from the Seven Years War were
immense. Bute’s offensive behaviour certainly left Britain most ominously
without a friend in Europe, with Prussia feeling as betrayed as Austria had
been, but the British part of North America now extended to the Mississippi.
What had become the only French colony in North America, Louisiana, was
now worth so little to France that she soon sold it to Spain, in 1762. As a
result of giving Havana and Manila back to Spain in return for Florida, the
whole of the American eastern seaboard was now in the hands of British
colonists, as of course was the vast formerly French settlement of Canada. In
addition all the French and Spanish American possessions in the southern
part of North America to the east of the Mississippi, with the exception of
the town and island of New Orleans, became British too.
Minorca was given back to Britain. In the West Indies Britain kept
Grenada and the Grenadines, Tobago, St Vincent and Dominica, but
restored Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia to the French. In India all
the gains made since 1748 were confirmed. In west Africa the French were
handed back Goree, while Britain kept Senegal. In central America Britain
obtained the right to cut and trade in Honduras logwood, which would
eventually result in protectorate status. Though the French lost Cape
Breton by the Peace of Paris, they were still allowed to use the great
fisheries round Newfoundland which they had traditionally shared with
the British for over a hundred years.
Meanwhile, within Great Britain, the king was starting as he meant to
go on. When continuous disagreements with Bute had forced the other
pillar of the government, the chief of the great Whig connection the Duke
of Newcastle, to resign in May 1762, George III seized the opportunity to
dismiss all his followers and dependants. Not only was any Whig who had
voted against the treaty in the Houses of Parliament thrown out, so also
were Newcastle’s most modest clients such as excisemen. With a quill pen
the king personally ran through the name of the Duke of Devonshire on the
list of members of the Privy Council, while three of the greatest magnates
of the Whig party, Newcastle, Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton, were
dismissed as lords lieutenant.
This wholesale sacking of the Whigs was known to their sarcastic
contemporaries as ‘the massacre of the Pelhamite Innocents’. The Whigs
were truly amazed by the speed and venom with which the young king had
struck. As a result the great Whig connection, or ‘old corps’ Whigs, for the
first time in two generations broke up into small rival groups, of which the
most important were those headed by Pitt and Rockingham. But, just as
the king desired, some Whigs began to desert their party and move towards
the idea of becoming King’s Friends.

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The elegant Bute soon found the rough and tumble of politics too much
for him. He preferred, as he put it, to be ‘a private man at the side of the
King’, so he retired while nevertheless continuing to make trouble by
advising George informally — or from behind the curtain, as was said at the
time. Yet the country still had to be governed. Since George III was only at
the beginning of his drive to dispose of the Whigs, he was forced to call
upon the competent but unimaginative Whig George Grenville, who
headed one of the smaller Whig factions, to lead the government.
Grenville, who was Pitt’s brother-in-law (though he had quarrelled with
him), had few manners and was constantly rude to the king. He was also
immediately faced by trouble. At home, the increasingly outrageous
newspaper put out by the daring MP John Wilkes, and its insulting
criticisms of the king, had to be suppressed once and for all. In America,
when Grenville asked the colonists to help pay for the enormously
expensive war by a new levy, the stamp tax, to be imposed on every legal
document, his request was met by rioting.
Grenville saw no reason why the burden of the colonies’ defence should
fall on the English taxpayer alone. And perhaps if they had been asked to
consider the request in their assemblies the Americans would have returned
a favourable answer. The problem was the peremptory way in which the

The economist Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, 1776. His theories
of the importance of free trade dominated roth-century Britain.

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tax was demanded. The American colonists had a very proud

parliamentary tradition of their own in their assemblies. Following the
example of their English cousins in the seventeenth century, they held to
the belief that they could not be taxed without their consent. Since they
were not represented in the British Parliament as they had elected none of
its members, the British Parliament had no right to tax them. The passing
of the Stamp Act in 1765 in the Parliament at Westminster, but not in their
own parliaments and state assemblies, resulted in uproar and riots driven
by a slogan which seventeenth-century Englishmen would have under-
stood: ‘No taxation without representation’. Six of the thirteen colonies’
governments made formal protests.
As a patriotic duty Americans refused to accept the stamped paper sent
over from England, and boycotted British manufactures. British
manufacturers who relied on the vast American trade started to go bankrupt,
and amid the chaos, alarmed by such fury, Grenville resigned. The Stamp
Act was repealed in 1766 by Grenville’s successor, the Marquis of
Rockingham. Grenville had been no less thoroughly defeated at home by the
antics of the libertarian Wilkes, a member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club.
Ever since the accession of George III, Wilkes’s newspaper the North
Briton — so-called in mock-honour of Bute’s antecedents — had specialized
in attacking the king’s rule. The removal of the ‘old corps’ Whigs (with
secret encouragement from his confréres) had been portrayed as another
royal attack on liberty. Wilkes and his paper already had a reputation for
scurrility, but in issue No. 45 of April 1763, he went too far when he
alleged that the king’s speech to Parliament included a lie. Grenville, who
was a lawyer himself, was determined that the recalcitrant Wilkes should
feel the full force of the law. He had Wilkes and the printers of the North
Briton tried and imprisoned for having had anything to do with the
production of the paper, through the unspecific catch-all mechanism
known as the general warrant. But Grenville was made to look foolish by
an unsympathetic judiciary. On appeal, Chief Justice Charles Pratt released
Wilkes by ruling general warrants illegal.
The squinting, licentious Wilkes was already a popular hero among
high-spirited and sophisticated Londoners who themselves had long
enjoyed a reputation for disliking restraint of all kinds. Wilkes’s imprison-
ment was worked up into the issue of the right of the citizen to publish the
truth and Pratt’s judgement was represented as a blow for liberty. Wilkes
sued the government for his arrest and was given damages by the
ecstatically partisan London jury. The House of Commons nevertheless
expelled him, and because he risked arrest once more for an obscene poem,
he was forced to flee for France. But this was only the beginning of his
career as the self-appointed gadfly of the state. Often on the run Wilkes

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had enough of the popular vote behind him to be re-elected to Parliament,

to be made an alderman of the City of London and finally to become
mayor. He began to campaign for freedom of all kinds, but particularly for
press freedom and American rights - a campaign which for the next ten
years convulsed the colonies with violence.
For the sake of some governmental stability, George had asked Lord
Rockingham to take office as prime minister because he had assumed the
leadership of the largest Whig faction, which contained many of the ‘old
corps’ Whigs — that is, the old Newcastle or Pelhamite Whig connection.
Rockingham (whose secretary, the Irishman Edmund Burke, was to
become the supreme thinker of the Whig party) had a great deal more
common sense than Grenville. But thanks to the king’s activities behind the
scenes, and those of the King’s Friends whom he imposed upon the
ministry, the Rockingham government could not last. Though the Duke of
Newcastle was a member of the government as lord privy seal, he was too
old and unwell to be of much use, while Pitt - who was temperamentally
unsuited to playing a supporting role — refused to shore up the ministry. It
was thus to Pitt once more and his small band of followers that George III
turned to form a government in 1766, in hopes of a smoother time ahead
since Pitt himself had now professed contempt for the party system.
In theory Pitt might have ameliorated the continuing poor relations with
America. He had persuaded Rockingham to repeal the stamp tax by
pointing out how foolish it was to threaten the trade with the American
colonies, worth £2 million a year, for the peppercorn rate of stamp duty,
which might bring in one-tenth of that revenue. In his view Britain might
have a moral right to tax the colonies, but she had no legal right. However,
Pitt now fell ill and was obliged to take a prolonged leave of absence, while
refusing to resign as prime minister. This left his rash chancellor Charles
Townshend to rush into more taxation of the American colonies, since the
problem of the unresolved war debts had not gone away. Townshend
hoped he had found a way round the dispute by imposing customs duties,
which after all were indirect taxes on tea, glass, paper and other essentials,
but the Americans saw through this. Their response was more rioting.
Moreover, even before Pitt had what seems to have been some kind of a
nervous breakdown, his government was not at all the same as his old
ministry. In his pride and grandeur he had accepted the earldom of
Chatham. In effect, though, this was the equivalent of being ‘kicked
upstairs’. As he now had to sit in the House of Lords, he could no longer
employ his formidable powers of rhetoric to control the House of
Commons. And since he would not have one party, the Chatham
administration was made up of an unworkable ragbag of men of opposing
views. Edmund Burke would memorably describe it as ‘such a piece of

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y

WY.
py Te Tee

Tomb of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham, Westminster Abbey. It

celebrates his conduct of the Seven Years War which hugely expanded the
British Empire.

mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement, patriots and

courtiers, king’s friends and republicans, Whigs and Tories, that it was
indeed a curious show, but unsafe to touch and unsure to walk on’.
Chatham was far too grand to try and wield this mass of warring factions
into a workable whole, and it became beset by internal problems when
Townshend died unexpectedly. The severity of Chatham’s illness at last
compelled him to resign in October 1768.

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 HANOVERIAN

Then Wilkes returned to London from abroad to make mischief. Despite

being imprisoned once more on the outstanding charge of his obscene
poetry, he got himself elected MP for Middlesex where his depiction of the
corruption in Parliament gained him a willing audience. Chatham’s first
lord of the Treasury, the Duke of Grafton, now took over as prime minister,
and his government made the House of Commons refuse to accept Wilkes’s
election and keep him in prison. Wilkes decried this as further evidence of
a conspiracy against liberty, and rioting began outside his prison in
Southwark in 1768. The following year he was re-elected and expelled three
times. Re-elected one more time, his seat went to his defeated opponent.
By 1770 Grafton had had enough. He had battled against attacks in the
House of Lords by a revived Chatham, roused by the imprisonment of
Wilkes, which he too saw as an issue of liberty, but he was soon defeated,
resigning after two years under the stress of it all. Since all the Whig
factions were by now in a profound state of disarray and disagreement
with one another, Grafton’s ministry gave way to one consisting entirely of
the King’s Friends under Lord North. The son of the Jacobite Earl of
Guildford, North was a witty, cherubic and deceptively sleepy-looking
man with the sort of emollient skills needed to hold a government together.
At last the king had triumphed. Though North was the first Tory to hold
office in two generations, the real point about him was that he had risen to
power as a King’s Friend. For twelve years Britain got ministerial stability
under this affable man, who understood that his hold on power depended
on his accepting that the real chief minister was the king.
Unfortunately these years coincided with increasing restiveness in
America. English goods were being simultaneously boycotted by all the
colonies, while mobs roamed the streets of Massachusetts led by masked
men called the Sons of Liberty, who tarred and feathered anyone not in
agreement with them. The Massachusetts Parliament debated what form a
protest to the British government should take which would deny Britain’s
right to make laws for or to tax the colonies. This was a revolt fast
developing into revolution.
There were now 10,000 British soldiers in Massachusetts, for Grafton
had sent out 2,000 more to Boston, and every day the Boston mob spent
hours taunting the troops; tempers were at breaking point. On 2 March
1770, seven British soldiers separated from the rest of their regiment were
backed into a corner by an enraged mob advancing down one of Boston’s
boulevards, hurling abuse and stones. Fearing for their lives, the soldiers
fired into the crowd and killed five men. This was immediately seized on
by American agitators as a ‘massacre’ and they demanded nothing less than
that all British soldiers should leave the colonies.
George III could not view the colonists’ actions with tolerance; it was not

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in his nature. They were rebellious subjects whose ideas should not even be
listened to, but must be destroyed. Yet the people whose views the king had
no patience for were highly sophisticated men and women with their own
political traditions who, just as much as their cousins across the Atlantic,
had been profoundly influenced by the ideas of John Locke, especially in
his sanctioning of rebellion against unjust rulers. In the years since the
founding of the American colonies (in the case of Virginia and New
England, well over a hundred years before), their own institutions had
grown up which were completely independent of and far more real to them
than what went on 3,000 miles away at Westminster. Many of the
colonists were as practised in debating in their own assemblies as any MP.
Well educated at their excellent new universities of Harvard and Yale, they
were growing ever more impatient with the mother country. By a strange
irony of history, the supreme sacrifice Pitt had demanded of the Americans,
the propaganda he had bombarded them with in order to make the
colonies see the French as their enemy, had given the thirteen colonies
much more of a sense of common destiny than ever before.
But ever since George III had come to the throne and started taking his
kingdom in hand there had been other more immediate reasons for friction.
The mercantile system, under which the colonies were to import British
manufactures but make nothing themselves, infuriated the Americans. They
wished to build up their home manufacturing base, but were forbidden to
do so by law. Under the old Whigs the colonies had been pretty much left

View of Billingsgate Market.

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to themselves to run things, but George III had insisted on a much more
rigorous observance of the mercantile system. The illegal trade with other
parts of Europe and other colonies to which everyone had turned a blind
eye was curbed, and customs duties at colonial ports were raised.
At first North tried to be conciliatory to the colonists. He repealed all the
taxes except for the one on tea, which was only three pence per pound, and
removed the soldiers from Boston. He promised that the British
government would not try and raise any more taxes in America, but at the
same time, because the king insisted, he weakly said that the tax on tea
would nevertheless remain as a matter of principle. The 298 chests of
British tea that arrived in Boston Harbour in December 1773 provided too
good a symbol of British oppression for an increasingly important circle of
American agitators to miss. In what has become known to history as the
Boston Tea Party, a group of patriotic young Americans dressed as
Mohawk Indians climbed aboard ships in the harbour and emptied all the
tea into the water. All patriotic Americans from then on refused to drink
tea.
Lord North and George III reacted with intemperate fury. They
attempted to punish the Bostonians as if they were children by
withdrawing all responsibility from them by means of the Coercive Acts
(known to the Americans as the Intolerable Acts). In 1774 the agitators
were sent to England for trial, the Massachusetts charter of government
was suspended and the colony was henceforth to be ruled directly from
Britain. To add insult to injury the port of Boston was closed until
compensation had been paid to the tea-merchants. The British government
was so ignorant of what effect these draconian measures were going to
have on the American colonies that it never considered that the Americans
would rather fight than put up with them. The renowned Virginian orator
Patrick Henry spoke for all Americans when he said, ‘Give me liberty, or
give me death!’
At Westminster, unlike the rest of Britain which was outraged by the
impudence of the Americans, Chatham, his followers and _ the
Rockinghamite Whigs, all opposed the Coercive Acts and called on the
government to give in and save the empire. They persuaded North to offer
a get-out clause: if the colonies made a grant towards the expense of the
war they would not be taxed. But it was to no avail. Events in America
were achieving their own rolling momentum. When the British commander
General Gage, who had replaced the governor at Boston, tried to carry out
his orders to dissolve the Massachusetts Parliament, the Bostonians simply
reassembled at Concord, a few miles to the west.
Realizing that the moment had come for real defiance of the mother
country, the people of Massachusetts organized their militia into a

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company called the Minute Men, because they could be called out at one
minute’s notice. They also started to pile up guns in their clapboard houses.
When Gage sent troops to seize the rebels’ military stores in April 1775,
they were attacked at Lexington and 270 British soldiers were killed. The
shot fired then has been called one that ‘echoed round the world’, for that
was the beginning of the American Wars of Independence.
The Americans then went on the offensive. They drew themselves up on
Bunker Hill overlooking Boston Harbour and there at first they kept Gage
at bay. All the colonies joined Massachusetts and declared war on Britain,
whose legal dependants they had been only a few months before. They
appointed George Washington, the hero of the Seven Years War, their
commander;in-chief. He was sent up to Massachusetts to co-ordinate the
war effort there. In Britain the government grasped that the situation in
America was much more serious than had been thought and despatched
General Sir William Howe across the Atlantic to Boston to take over from
Gage because he was a veteran of the Seven Years War and therefore knew
the American terrain well.
Washington was an inspired choice of leader. Not only was he famous
in the colonies for his bravery, but having served with British soldiers he
understood the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and knew that the
British redcoat was vulnerable to the unexpected ambushes and sudden
skirmishes in which the colonial militia excelled. But he had a great deal to
accomplish before his citizen soldiers were ready to fight. Though the
Americans’ outstanding merit was that unlike the British they were fighting
for a cause they were prepared to die for, they would be at a disadvantage
if they met the redcoats in pitched battle. Enthusiasm and passion would
not always carry the day over formal training. Thanks to the passivity of
General Howe, who sat at Boston doing nothing all winter, Washington
was able to take advantage of those few vital months to drill his troops into
disciplined regiments. In 1776 he and his army seized Dorchester Heights,
which commanded Boston. Instead of doing battle Howe withdrew to
Brooklyn in New York, leaving Washington in possession of one of
America’s largest ports.
Once in New York Howe began recruiting as many men as he could find.
But since few Americans would fight in the British army he was driven to
using the colonists’ enemy, the Indians, and importing 18,000 Hessians to
fight against the Americans. These things further alienated the Americans,
especially as the German mercenaries’ behaviour was very brutal indeed.
On 4 July 1776, the date which America’s national holiday memorializes,
the colonists sitting in Congress in Philadelphia issued the celebrated
Declaration of Independence, calling the colonies the ‘free and independent
States of America’. Written by Washington’s fellow Virginian planter

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 1760-1820

Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration burned with the spirit of the

Enlightenment. Most ringing of all its utterances was the phrase ‘we hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. George III was denounced for
his ‘history of repeated injuries and usurpations’, and condemned as ‘unfit
to be the ruler of a free people’.
Meanwhile to the surprise of the British, a series of military successes for
the colonial Americans now ensued. Washington, who marched down
from Boston to force the British out of New York, had been defeated, and
forced to retreat to Philadelphia. But the British masterplan of an army
under General Burgoyne arriving from Canada to join Howe and drive
Washington into the south in order to separate New England from the rest
of the colonies was humiliatingly defeated. In 1777 at Saratoga on the
Hudson river, Burgoyne had to surrender with all his soldiers to the
American General Gates.
Saratoga was the turning point for the colonists. Until then the other
European powers had not thought it worth their while intervening in the
conflict. They had assumed the Americans stood no chance of success
against the victor of the Seven Years War. But not only did Saratoga
revitalize American morale. More importantly it secured French troops
and a French fleet as France officially recognized the colonists’
independence and formed an alliance with America. In 1778 the young
Marquis de Lafayette arrived as commander of the French forces which
were to fight side by side with the Americans against the British. The end
of the war effectively came when the British under General Cornwallis
surrendered at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781. They had been defeated by
a combined operation: a blockade by Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet
from the sea and a land-siege by General Greene.
But Britain was still fighting a new world war, against the Spanish now
as well as the French. In 1779 Spain had followed the lead of her Bourbon
relation and attacked the British. A year later so did Holland, brought in
by Britain’s insuiting adherence to the Law of Neutrals, by which Dutch
ships carrying (say) French goods were liable to be seized by the British.
Further hostility to Britain on similar grounds came from an alliance, the
Armed Neutrality of the North, formed by the neutral powers Russia,
Denmark and Sweden. They would not allow Britain to stop their ships
carrying goods for her enemies. During the war Britain temporarily lost
command of the sea: Minorca was seized, Gibraltar was besieged and most
of the British West Indies were occupied by the French.
Across the globe Britain’s enemies seized the opportunity offered by the
American War to attack her. In India the French attempted to return to

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their old position of superiority: the Maratha warriors were incited to war
against the English and were on the point of overwhelming Bombay, the
Sultan of Mysore, Haidar Ali,waged war all over the Karnatic and the
French temporarily seized control of the Indian Ocean.
Fortunately for Britain the old hero of the Seven Years War in India, Sir
Eyre Coote, was still alive. He completely destroyed the forces of the Sultan
of Mysore, while the governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, made a
name for himself when he showed great presence of mind in sending troops
from Bengal to relieve Bombay. Once Yorktown had fallen, the French
attempted to seize Jamaica. They were defeated near Dominica by Admiral
Rodney, who restored British naval supremacy. In Ireland a gifted barrister
turned politician named Henry Grattan raised what was in effect a substantial
army of hundreds of thousands of Protestant volunteers, supposedly to
defend Ireland. Backed up by the threat these men represented, a convention
met in 1782 at Dungannon — copying the Congress of Philadelphia —- and
unilaterally declared legislative independence from England.
After Saratoga, although the British government finally offered to repeal
all the acts passed for the American colonies since 1763, the Americans
were no longer prepared to accept any role for British Parliamentary
statutes. In early 1782 Britain at last formally accepted that the Americans
were not to be subdued by force and recognized American independence.
Soon afterwards, peace was made with the rest of Europe. In September
1783 by the Treaty of Versailles Britain retained Gibraltar, though Spain
received back Florida once more together with Minorca, and France was
given Tobago, Goree and Senegal.
In Britain events had not stood still during the war. With the issue of
liberty dominating the arguments of the day, the 1770s saw Granville
Sharp begin the anti-slavery movement, launching a campaign that led to
a legal judgement of 1772 which forbade slavery in England. Giving
reasons for his decision to free James Sommersett, a black slave brought to
London by a West Indian plantation-owner, the judge declared that ‘no
law of England allowed so high an act of dominion as slavery’. Sharp was
helped by a former African slave, Olaudah Equiano, born around 1745,
who was sold to a Royal Navy officer. After fighting in Canada and the
Mediterranean, Equiano, who was one of about 30,000 black people living
in England in the late eighteenth century and who settled in Bristol, wrote
an influential first hand description of slavery. He became much in demand
to give lecture tours for the growing number of abolition committees.
The poor progress of the war contrasted dramatically with the triumphs
achieved during the Seven Years War over the same ground and radicalized
the British public’s assessment of the government, adding to the
widespread conviction of corruption in high places. The Americans were

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not alone in believing that they were not properly represented in

Parliament. The loss of the American colonies, the failure of the war and
the temporary loss to the French of control of the high seas (an American
privateer named Paul Jones had created mayhem by attacking British
seaside towns) made many more doubt the efficacy of the prevailing
political system. Mass meetings were held throughout the country to
demand the reforms in Parliamentary representation for which Chatham
and Wilkes had been campaigning for the previous decade.
The most striking was the ‘out of doors’ petition movement begun by
highly respectable Yorkshiremen. Lawyers, farmers and gentry demanded
another hundred country seats to reflect population changes and rid
Britain of, corruption and the useless placemen round the king who they
believed were responsible for the war going so badly. The Great Yorkshire
Petition presented in 1780 was copied by twenty-four other counties. In
Parliament it was represented by Edmund Burke’s 1780 Civil List Bill
which pledged to investigate who was receiving government pensions.
Britain was undergoing tremendous change and dislocation imposed by
the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Throughout the eighteenth
century, new techniques of husbandry using drainage, new grasses, fertilizer
and crop rotation invented by among others Jethro Tull and Walpole’s
brother-in-law Townshend, and later popularized by Thomas Coke and
Arthur Young, had been transforming farming by providing hugely
improved yields. George III himself, ‘Farmer George’ as he was nicknamed,
was fascinated by his own farm at Windsor and wrote on agricultural topics
under a nom de plume. The new farming needed larger farms of 200 acres
or more if they were to succeed, and as information about these methods
spread, so the rate of enclosure of the common land quickened — a process
that reached its peak in the first half of George’s reign as some two million
acres were enclosed by countless private acts of Parliament. The English
countryside, from being mainly ribbon strips of smallholdings, became a
place of extensive fields surrounded by hedgerows.
As improvements in farming practice created regional unemployment
during these years, particularly in the midlands, textile manufacturing
piecework at home offered another way of earning money. The full
industrial revolution did not get under way until the mid-1780s when
Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, combined with James Watt’s double-
acting steam engine, transformed the British cotton industry almost
overnight. From 1764 with James Hargreaves’s invention of the Spinning
Jenny, which adapted John Kay’s Flying Shuttle of the 1730s to a multi-
spindle system, cotton manufacture was becoming a far more profitable
business. Then Richard Arkwright’s invention of the waterframe, which
used water to run the spinning machine far more speedily than the hand

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loom, not only moved work out of the home in the early 1770s into cotton
mills, it attracted the new landless labourers north to the Pennines. For
centuries the rushing waters of the Pennines had provided natural sites for
the water mills of the woollen industry, and it was there that cotton
manufacture took off.
The well-to-do could not be wholly disconnected from the anger over
enclosures that was often taking the form of riots, nor did many of them
want to. For the way the educated thought about the less fortunate was
changing, from the anti-slavery movement to the new concern for the
treatment of prisoners expressed in 1777 when John Howard wrote his
State of the Prisons in England and Wales. But they were not only
influenced by the rational thought of the Enlightenment, which in England
(propelled by Jeremy Bentham, a barrister and philosopher) was moving
towards Utilitarianism — the novel belief that government should be
directed towards the greatest happiness of the greatest number. They were
also affected by the great religious revival movement begun by the Wesley
brothers and the preacher George Whitefield, which from the late 1770s
swept the Church of England, creating the Methodist Church.
In the space of thirty years the influential Evangelical movement, as their
followers who remained within the Church of England were known, would
transform the manners and mores of Britain. The Evangelicals concluded
that the people of Britain were very nearly as much in need of missions as
those natives in foreign lands who were sent Bibles and clergymen by the
growing number of religious societies. The national mood was slowly
shifting towards a greater seriousness, the sort of mood that is thought of as
Victorian. Piety and hard work were becoming the watchwords of England.
They were the values of the inventive middle-class manufacturers, whose
factories were poised to make Britain into an industrial giant.
To George III’s anger the loss of the American colonies caused Lord
North to resign, and forced the king to bring back the ‘old corps’ Whigs he
detested under Lord Rockingham. But it was a short-lived government.
The MP John Dunning’s critical motion ‘that the influence of the Crown
has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’ was the last gasp
of a dying breed. Legislative independence for Ireland was passed by
Parliament — the Dublin Parliament was led by Henry Grattan — while
Burke’s Civil List Act responding to the out-of-doors agitation removed
some of the crown’s sinecures and pensions which the Whigs abhorred and
excluded government contractors from becoming MPs. But the political
scene was altering. The old-style Whig leaders of aristocratic birth,
progressive thought and libertarian morals ranged against the king were
out of kilter with the new mood. After France had entered the war, feeling
hardened against the Whigs as a group, their support for the Americans

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now seeming especially unpatriotic. They were epitomized by the

swashbuckling Charles James Fox, the most famous Whig of his
generation, who had helped revive the party during North’s administration
and was now one of Rockingham’s secretaries of state. But it would be
Fox’s great rival, Chatham’s son William Pitt the Younger, who caught the
respectable tone of the age and became prime minister, while Fox’s
unscrupulous behaviour brought the Whigs into further disrepute.
Ideologically Fox had a great deal in common with the young Pitt, who
was ten years his junior. They both believed in religious tolerance, the
reform of government abuses and parliamentary reform. Pitt, like Fox, was
a superb orator, with gifts he had inherited from his father, his first speech
in the House of Commons prompting Burke to remark that Pitt was not
‘merely a chip off the old block but the old block himself’. The differences
between Fox and Pitt were really temperamental, but Pitt was made for the
new age. He was far more circumspect and middle class in his attitudes,
controlled where Fox was impulsive, and pragmatic where Fox was
courageous but unrestrained.
The great-grandson of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kerouaille,
Charles James Fox was the second son of the daughter of the Duke of
Richmond. His father, the wily politician Henry Fox, had made a fortune out
of the Seven Years War as paymaster-general in the way that Chatham had
disdained. Fox was said to be losing his father’s ill-gotten gains more quickly
than they had been made, at all-night gaming, the great vice of the period,
which saw hundreds of thousands of pounds staked on a throw at the green-
baize gaming tables of clubs like White’s or on the horses. Fox’s irregular life
never stopped him making a dazzling speech in the House of Commons after
a night without any sleep. To his admirers this was true glamour.
However, Fox’s whole radical style of politics — such as stirring up the
London mob to intimidate the House of Commons, which was one of his
set pieces — was going out of fashion. Ever since the summer of 1780, when
the Gordon Riots against a new relief act for Roman Catholics had ruined
half of London in three days of uncontrollable violence, out-of-doors
agitation had been deeply discredited. The petitioning of Parliament by the
half-mad Protestant fanatic Lord George Gordon, with ‘No Popery’ as its
slogan, had made the streets literally run with blood. Catholic chapels were
burned, prisons were opened and many killed. Ministers seemed paralysed,
and it was George III who saved the day by ordering troops to fire on the
rioters. These events had frightened off the middle classes, who preferred
to remain unenfranchised — in the event, until 1832 — than be associated
with mob disorder.
On the unexpected death of Rockingam in July 1782, theintellectually
gifted but unpopular Lord Shelburne became prime minister, only for Fox,

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who had been fighting with Shelburne, to destroy the ministry by resigning
(though he was Foreign Secretary) taking the 160 Rockinghamite or ‘old
corps’ Whigs with him. Shelburne, left high and dry, was forced to govern
with the King’s Friends and his little group of Chathamite Whigs — among
whom remained the twenty-three-year-old Pitt, who became chancellor of
the Exchequer. Though he had spent the previous twelve years tormenting
Prime Minister North over the prosecution of the American War, Fox’s
only route to power again was to join forces with the Tories. Together he
and North would have enough MPs to form a government. By April 1783,
in a cynical power-play that scandalized the electorate, the Fox—North axis
forced Shelburne out before he had seen through the treaty to end the war.
Under a nominal prime minister, the Duke of Portland, Fox’s and North’s
coalition government took office. North, following an apparently amazing
conversion, announced that ‘The appearance of power is all that a king in
this country can have.’
But, just as before, George III was not to be underestimated. He now
loathed the treacherous North only slightly less than Fox, who he believed
with considerable justification was leading his son the Prince of Wales into
bad ways. One observer watching the burly Fox swagger across the floor
at Buckingham House to kiss George’s hand as a sign of taking office,
remarked that the king looked like a furious horse who ‘turned back his
ears and eyes’ as if he was about to throw the new minister. George not
only defeated Fox’s attempt to increase the prince’s allowance but
managed to get the whole administration ejected over Fox’s India Bill. This
proposed that, instead of a governor-general, India should be ruled by
seven commissioners appointed directly by Parliament.
Fox’s reputation for untrustworthiness and his large majority in the
House of Commons led to the general assumption that his aim was to
secure Indian patronage for himself and his friends. This was greatly
resented on the ground that it infringed the East India Company’s
chartered rights, while the King’s Friends considered it an attack on the
royal prerogative. The king was heard to mutter that if the India Bill passed
he would take the crown off his head and put it on Mr Fox’s untidy black
locks, while the cartoonists contented themselves with drawings of Carlo
(Charles) Khan riding into London on an elephant and taking all before
him. The hitherto impassioned belief that the crown’s influence should be
limited had passed its high-water mark. What was far more pressing was
that Fox and his followers should be restrained.
While the affable, black-browed Fox relaxed after effortlessly piloting
the bill through the Commons, George III put his own sly plan of attack
into action. He instructed a young peer named Lord Thurlow to take a
visiting card to all the members of the House of Lords dining before the

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vote, on which he had menacingly inscribed in his own handwriting the

words: ‘Whoever votes for the India Bill is not only not the King’s friend,
but would be considered by the King his enemy.’ The Lords’ role in the
eighteenth century was as the king’s advisers and, because George III had
been lavish with his creations, they were mainly supporters of his, if not
actually King’s Friends. The king’s enmity was something no eighteenth-
century peer desired. They defeated the bill.
That same night, 18 December, the king sent for Fox to demand the seals
of office. He had a new candidate ready for supreme responsibility, the
twenty-four-year-old William Pitt, the youngest prime minister in history.
Twice previously the king had secretly approached the virtuous and
hardworking Pitt, for all his youth, to see if he would take office at a time
when Shelburne could not control the House of Commons and opposition
to the American Peace Treaty was threatening its progress. On both
occasions Pitt had declined, feeling that he would not himself be able to
control the House. The determined king did not give up easily. He kept
coming back to Pitt, and eventually by taking soundings persuaded him he
should have a go at being prime minister and see whether office did not
eventually bring MPs over to him.
To jeers of derision, and the taunt ‘A kingdom entrusted to a schoolboy’s
care’, the tall slender young man took over the government. He refused to
call an election, relying for his power entirely on the support of the king,
and slowly the Tories in the House of Commons began to abandon North
for him, not least because he was unsullied by compromise. Pitt was a very
different man from Lord Chatham, cool where his father was passionate,
happy to be a member of a team where Chatham had to dominate, simple
where his father had preferred the grand style. And he was a consummate
party politician, where his father had been a statesman and virtuoso war-
leader. But it was no longer possible to talk with the same certainty of
Whigs and Tories. Many of the old Whig aristocratic families had cut their
connection with the party, which was itself continuing to decline in
popularity. In the first election Pitt dared call, in March 1784, as many as
160 of Fox’s Whigs lost their seats — Fox’s Martyrs as they were
humorously known. The Pitt government, which Fox had contemptuously
termed a ‘mince-pie administration’ because he did not believe it could
outlast the Christmas season in which it began, endured for seventeen years.
After the election Pitt was in a uniquely powerful position: he had not
only the country behind him, but the two Houses of Parliament and, most
crucially, the king. He was powerful as no one had been since the days of
Walpole. An eminently sensible and worldly man who believed that those
with wealth should be involved in politics and have a proper stake in the
country, Pitt filled the House of Lords with a new Tory aristocracy which

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became as powerful as the old Whig revolutionary families. But though he

was now at the head of the Tories, he did not forget his liberal origins as a
reforming Whig, and put an end once and for all to the dubious methods
by which government had been carried out for almost a century, by
reforming the audit of public accounts. Like his father, Pitt refused to take
the additional income from obscure sinecures, ‘perks’, which so many
other politicians in office lived off.
Despite British mastery of the seas, it was rumoured that in peacetime
things had got pretty slack with the navy, that there was not a single ship
which could set sail and not need to call in for repairs. The dockyards were
said to be slow and incompetent at their work. The sensible Admiral
Howe, a reformer after Pitt’s own heart, was made first lord of the
Admiralty. In five years the fleet was up to speed again, with ninety ships
of the line ready to sail to whatever ocean required their presence.
Though Pitt was now head of the Tory party, he continued to be a
disciple of the radical economist Adam Smith, who had formed part of
Shelburne’s team of advisers. Smith, whom Pitt would continue to consult,
had written a seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), that turned on
its head the mercantile protectionist orthodoxy to which all European
colonial powers of the time subscribed. His argument was that low duties
and freer trade between nations would dramatically increase their wealth.
Pitt’s attempts to free Irish trade from the restrictions imposed on her by
English manufacturers met with shortsighted obstructions thanks to the
clout of Lancashire businessmen, but his imaginative treaty with France
created the lowest possible duties between the two countries. He hoped
trade would encourage peace between the ancient enemies. As a
painstaking financier who believed in fiscal probity, Pitt also established a
sinking fund to pay off the National Debt, which after two world wars had
reached £250 million, and reduced the duty on a large number of items
such as tobacco, spirits and tea. It was the resulting cheapness of tea that
encouraged the British to become a nation of tea drinkers, and to favour
‘the cups that cheer but not inebriate’, as one of the period’s most
characteristic poets, the Evangelical William Cowper, would write.
To some extent Pitt’s zeal was shackled by his dependence on the
support of the king and the King’s Friends. He was a consummately
practical politician who more than most believed that politics was the art
of the possible. Although, true to his origins, he introduced a Reform Bill
on coming to power, his motion to purchase some corrupt boroughs and
redistribute their seats failed. When he saw how unpopular this measure
was.in the House of Commons, he simply abandoned it. Likewise, despite
his belief in religious toleration, he would not lend his official backing to a
series of attempts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts between 1788

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and 1791. The importance of the sugar industry to the economy and the
lobbying of the powerful West Indian interests also stalled the abolition of
the slave trade, but at least progress to that end was being made.
Pitt was fortunate that the beginning of his premiership coincided with
that astonishing moment in the industrial revolution when James Watt’s
perfected steam engine allowed mass machine production of textiles and
iron and steel. Although Britain had developed manufacturing processes
throughout the century in tools, textiles and pottery the introduction of
Watt’s steam engine in the early 1780s changed the speed of production
exponentially. In the space of a few years Britain could produce all kinds
of goods from cotton sheets to machine tools ten times more quickly and
ten times more cheaply than any other country in the world. For all Pitt’s
reforms, without the wealth created by the industrial revolution the
country would have been bankrupted by war and by the ten-year boycott
by America of English goods.
In only one area did Pitt win less than golden opinions from con-
temporaries and that was the trial of the former governor-general of India,
Warren Hastings, which arose out of Pitt’s 1784 act to regulate
Indian affairs. Pitt’s reforms, while not going so far as Fox’s, gave the
East India Company a government-run Board of Control, a new depart-
ment of state. Its president was to be a member of the British Cabinet
whose role was to supervise any political decisions of the company with
regard to the Indian territories. The British government would also have a
veto over the company’s choice of governor-general, though the company’s
commercial policy was to remain unrestricted.
In the course of investigating the East India Company’s affairs,
poisonous reports from his rivals prompted questions over Hastings’s
conduct. Hastings was an extraordinarily able and constructive admini-
strator, but his rooting out of corruption within the East India Company
itself had aroused hostility, while his high-handed ways of doing business
made him a great many enemies. Eventually he was impeached for
extorting money, for corruption and for the murder of a witness against
him. Most of the charges turned out to be untrue, and after what was then
the longest trial in history, lasting for over seven years, he was acquitted —
though he had been utterly ruined in the process. His friends blamed Pitt
for not preventing the impeachment, but Pitt felt that the British
government could not be seen to condone Hastings’s actions or stand
behind a man against whom there were so many adverse rumours. As a
result of the trial a much higher code of conduct was demanded of the
British Indian civil servant as a caste.
Thanks to Pitt’s ceaseless work, England looked as if she faced the last
decade of the centuryin tolerably good and modern shape in both her

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internal structures and her external relations. She had also added a new
colony to her empire. The continent of Australia was founded in 1788 as
a penal colony when the English government established a convict
settlement to make up for the loss of America as a home for prisoners
whose sentences had been commuted to transportation. The explorer
Captain James Cook, who had discovered New Zealand and the eastern
coast of Australia on his voyages in the 1770s, had reported that Botany
Bay would make a favourable place for a settlement. In January 1788,
when the settlement of Sydney (named after the then home secretary) was
founded, convicts were taken from their temporary prison hulks on the
Thames to start a new life a world away. By 1830, over 50,000 convicts
had arrived. Soon afterwards the state governments ended the practice, and
Australia in the 1850s was instead flooded with gold prospectors and
sheep farmers attracted by the wide open spaces. Australia’s neighbour
New Zealand was to remain unsettled by the English until 1839, when
Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company began colonization.
In foreign relations, as with everything else, Pitt was careful and sensible.
He retrieved the alliance with Prussia as well as the age-old one with
Holland lost during the American War of Independence. He was the first
European statesman to recognize the potential danger the formerly
sleeping giant Russia posed, now that she was becoming more involved in
European affairs. The sturdy network of alliances ended England’s
dangerous isolation which had been hers for far too long after the
American War. Those foreign friends would be much needed in the
turbulent years to come, as the hidden pressures boiling away under
France’s glittering surface were soon to break out like a volcano,
showering destruction far beyond its own circumference.
But in 1788, as a portent that trouble could erupt out of nowhere, George
III suddenly lost his wits and became a violent maniac. He got out of his
carriage while driving at Windsor, approached a tree, gripped its lower
branches as if shaking it by the hand, and carried on a long conversation
with it in the belief that it was the King of Prussia. His agitated wife Queen
Charlotte eventually managed to lure him back into the carriage. But the
king was so ill and strange on the night of 6 November that the two eldest
princes, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, together with his doctors
and his equerries, had to spend the night in the room next to his bedroom
for fear of what he would do next. All night long he ran up and down the
draughty corridors of Windsor Castle, gibbering, unreachable, a hopeless
lunatic. The queen was too frightened of him to share a room with him any
longer, and the king’s footmen were so exhausted by his behaviour, because
he needed so little sleep, that one named Fortnum had to leave for the sake
of his health. He started a food emporium in Piccadilly.

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It now appears likely that what looked like mental illness was actually a
manifestation of a disease called porphyria, nevertheless there was
absolute consternation in the higher echelons of government, for the way
was open to a regency in the person of the wild and extravagant Prince of
Wales, or Prinny as he was known. Campaigned for in Parliament by Fox
who at last saw his chance to become prime minister, the post fondly
predicted for him since his earliest and very precocious youth, it seemed as
if England would be turned over to the irresponsible rule of the twenty-six-
year-old heir to the throne. Like his champion Fox, the Prince of Wales was
not only a gambler, but he was a declared bankrupt. He had also con-
tracted a secret marriage, to a Roman Catholic no less, a Mrs Fitzherbert,
in defiance of George III’s 1772 Royal Marriages Act which still prevents
his descendants marrying without the monarch’s permission. While Prinny
and his brothers amused their friends and scandalized their acquaintances
performing imitations of George III’s nightly doings, in the House of
Commons Pitt duelled with Fox to prevent an automatic regency passing
immediately to the Prince of Wales.
Pitt insisted that only Parliament could appoint a regent and that
Parliament must investigate how to proceed. In a great scene in the House
of Commons, Pitt won the debate. Behaving outrageously as usual, Fox
announced to his stunned audience that since the king was ‘legally dead’
there was no need of precedents. What mattered was not what a
Parliamentary committee thought but that there was in the kingdom a
person different from everyone else in the kingdom — an heir apparent of
full age and capacity to exercise the royal power with an automatic right
to the throne. At this Pitt was heard to laugh and say, ‘By God, I’ll unWhig
that gentleman for the rest of his life.’
Fox had entirely contradicted the great founding principle of the Whig
revolution. The Whigs by offering the crown to William III had ended the
hereditary succession by Divine Right and changed it into an institution
dependent on the will of Parliament, Pitt said. Fox’s argument was
destroyed and George III remained king. While Parliament was setting up
the regency the king recovered, greatly to the nation’s relief. The fact that
he was spending hours of the day trussed up in a straitjacket to stop him
damaging himself and others was kept from the country, though there had
been alarming and widespread rumours. Hale and hearty once again,
though more than a little shaken, the king returned from Kew where he
had been kept under the not very tender ministrations of Dr Willis. This
episode, when Pitt’s loyalty and quick wits had saved the day, deepened the
relationship between prime minister and sovereign. It was another king
however, just across the Channel in France, whose fate began to influence
Britain’s future when in 1789 the French Revolution began.

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The French Revolution was one of the seminal occurrences of the last
200-odd years, and its reverberations continue to make themselves felt.
Most of the governments of the world at the outset of the twenty- -first
century reflect in some form a belief in mass democracy. The French
Revolution was the first experiment in that form of government. It began
with an attempt by the French king Louis XVI to raise money by calling a
meeting of his Parliament, the Estates-General, which had not met since the
early seventeenth century. That was the fuse which set off the long--delayed
explosion. By 1789 the French state was bankrupt, because of the wars it
had waged unceasingly for a hundred years. The only way to tap new
resources on the level required, economists realized, was to change the
bizarre tax system in France. Almost unreformed since the middle ages,
the fiscal structure contained privileged exemptions for the wealthy, the
nobility and the Church, who paid almost no taxes at all. The greatest
impositions, such as the notorious salt tax, fell on the poorest, as did the
main levy, the land tax.
Tax exemptions tied in with other gross inequalities. Unlike the English,
who for many centuries had been equal before the law, the French nobility
had legal privileges. Their monarch, even so, was an absolute one. His
word literally was the law since a letter from the king, the lettre de cachet,
was enough to send anyone to jail for the rest of their life without trial or
explanation. The French people had no recourse to Parliament to withhold
monies from the king to combat this absolute style of monarchy. Though
French philosophers had a tremendous effect on the rest of Europe, none
of their ideas were practised in their own country. Frenchmen and women
now passionately wanted to order their society along more sensible,
rational lines.
At long last the first meeting of the Estates-General since 1614 was
called at Versailles in order to raise taxes. What the king had not
appreciated was how widespread and urgent was the French people’s
desire for reform. With the force of a dam breaking, they created a new
body called the National Assembly, the French nobility themselves voted
to jettison their ancient privileges and together they proclaimed a brand
new constitution based on the Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of
Man on 26 August 1789. This was influenced by the American Declaration
of Independence, with its insistence on liberty, equality and man’s natural
rights, which had enthused the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the
revolution’s early leaders. But above all it was coloured by that classic
Enlightenment document, the Social Contract of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Like Lecke, Rousseau held that government was a contract between the
people and their rulers, though most crucial to the course of the Revolution
was his belief in what he called the General Will of the People.

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But who was to identify this was precisely the problem. From the first,
the French Revolution was accompanied by mob violence. So strong were
English feelings about ending tyranny that the storming of the Bastille
prison on 14 July 1789, notorious as a symbol of the ancien régime and the
lettres de cachet, that Fox spoke for many when he hailed it as the greatest
event ‘that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ The
young poet William Wordsworth would reflect the feelings of a host of
other young Romantics when he exclaimed that it was ‘bliss’ to be alive at
such a time in the history of the world. Most English people felt a natural
sympathy for the cause of individual freedom; they rejoiced that liberty
was flourishing in a land which since the days of Louis XIV had been a
byword for repression.
But the Declaration of the Rights of Man was followed by more extreme
behaviour when a mob forced the king and queen out of the Palace of
Versailles and took them back to Paris and to what was captivity in all but
name. Lafayette had to raise a regiment of middle-class national guards to
restore order to a Paris where the army had looked on as the mob
rampaged. When the new Constituent Assembly made Louis XVI a
constitutional monarch, Pitt and the English government remained
sympathetic to this curtailment of the tyranny of the absolutist Bourbon
dynasty. A French constitutional monarchy would give the two nations
facing one another across the Channel more in common. But what began
with noble speeches about universal rights soon degenerated into terror
and mob rule.
In October 1790 by every boat refugees of the wealthier sort began to
flee France with only the clothes they stood up in, warning that there was
no making terms with the revolutionaries. They revealed how the furious
peasants were paying no heed to what lawyers were doing in Paris —
whether it was separating powers or establishing the rule of law and the
rights of the individual. Centuries of being treated like beasts had at last
provoked them and their Parisian counterparts, the Sansculottes, into
behaving like beasts. The starving peasantry had started to go berserk: they
were burning the chateaux where their forefathers had worked since time
immemorial. They were looting castles, seizing gold, killing their masters
indiscriminately, regardless of how well they had been treated.
In Paris the constitutional monarchy with an Assembly became a
revolutionary government which was continuously reinventing itself, but
which ultimately depended on violence. Though Louis XVI remained king
in name, by 1792 he, the queen and their two children had been made
prisoners, and their friends feared the worst. As one observer related there
soon became ‘reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, might devour
in turn each of her children’.

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As the Revolution raged on, idealistically attempting to put right

centuries of wrongs, disestablishing the Church, then getting rid of God
and putting the more logical Cult of the Supreme Being in His place,
renaming the months in a more descriptive way, no leader of the Assembly
ever lasted for very long. After a few months he was always arrested for
undefined crimes against ‘the People’. The real power in Paris was in the
radical political association called the Jacobin Club. There the most
advanced revolutionary thinkers, such as Danton, Marat and Robespierre,
hammered out a Republic of Virtue which aimed to destroy all human
traditions which got in the way of logic and their interpretation of the Will
of the People. These leaders were fast becoming dictators under the cloak
of the great revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’.
Of all the English contemporaries the reaction of Edmund Burke, mentor
of the Rockingham Whigs, was both the most pessimistic and the most
accurate. He who had been such a supporter of liberty in the past turned
into a Conservative overnight. His famous book Reflections on the
Revolution in France, written only a year after the storming of the Bastille,
presciently foretold chaos. Then, he wrote, ‘Some popular general will
establish a military dictatorship in place of anarchy.’ The appalled Burke
now believed that it was not possible for mankind to tear up the past:
human institutions needed to develop slowly. So strong were his views
that, to Fox’s anguish, he publicly repudiated his old friend in the House
of Commons.
The French revolutionaries’ treatment of the royal family plunged
Europe into war. Queen Marie Antoinette was the aunt of the Habsburg
emperor and when the news got abroad that the king and queen were
prisoners Austrian and Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of
Brunswick were moved across the frontier to save them. But the mob
responded to this threat to the Revolution with the September Massacres,
a mindless slaughter of prisoners. In three days the people of Paris killed
6,000 royalist prisoners, bursting into the jails and murdering them where
they stood. The heads of ordinary criminals joined those of friends of the
royal family on pikes, to be paraded through the streets. All that autumn
of 1792 the sound of the tocsin called the city and the citizens to arms. To
shouts of ‘A la lanterne!’, which meant string them up on the streetlamps,
the citizens of Paris complied.
And then, to the horror of Europe, when the revolutionary committees
summoned every French citizen to join the army in a levée en masse, this
revolutionary army managed to defeat the Prussians. This news had an
effect similar to the British defeat at Saratoga. It had never been imagined
that raw recruits, untrained and untried in battle, though 50,000 strong
and burning with desire to protect their homeland, would defeat the

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renowned Prussian troops at the Battle of Valmy. But they had, and they
had driven them back across the French frontier.
In response to the foreigners’ invasion, the revolutionaries announced
that the monarchy no longer existed. In its place a republic was declared.
Then, in October, the Revolution which Mirabeau and Robespierre had
vowed would not be exported, crossed the frontier. Fighting battle after
battle the levée en masse streamed across the continent, seizing several
German towns, then Basel in Switzerland where they proclaimed another
republic. Finally, having inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Austrians at
the Battle of Jemappes, the French took Brussels and Antwerp. If the
ragged masses who died in droves for their country were alarming — when
one lay down another twenty patriots sprang up behind him - still more
frightening to the governments of Europe were the Decrees of November
1792, which announced that the French armies would help all people
wanting to recover their liberty. The thirty-one-year-old Madame Roland,
the wife of one of the Assembly’s deputies, executed for no apparent
reason, summed up the bewilderment of her contemporaries at what was
happening to them with the words she uttered on the scaffold: ‘Oh Liberty!
What crimes are committed in thy name!’
Only a year before, Pitt had cut taxes and reduced British expenditure
on arms because he was optimistic about the new constitutional French
monarchy. He still thought Europe had never had more reason to expect
peace. But events now followed one another so rapidly that even he was
unprepared. In January 1793 the French king had received a hasty trial by
committee, which bore no relation to a proper legal process. He was
executed by that perfect eighteenth-century invention, the logical and
efficient guillotine, which made executions faster and more humane.
News of Louis XVI’s execution was greeted with widespread revulsion
in Britain. The British government’s reaction was immediate. To their
surprise, the suave French ambassador Chauvelin and the special envoy,
the elegant Bishop Talleyrand, the future prince, were told in no uncertain
terms to leave the country within the week. In the House of Commons Pitt
publicly deplored the fate of the king as an outrage against religion, justice
and humanity. Unlike Britain, he said, where no man was too rich or too
grand to be above the reach of the laws, and no man was so poor or
unimportant as to escape their protection, the death of Louis XVI showed
that in France neither applied.
Pitt still refused to go to war immediately, as Burke urged him to. He
could not see it as part of the British government’s job to launch a moral
crusade purely on the ground that the French were ‘the enemies of God and
man’, even though he felt it to be true. But he gave the French a stern
warning. If France wanted to remain at peace with England, he told the

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William Pitt the Younger addressing the House of Commons on the French
declaration of war, 1793.
Commons, she must show that she had renounced aggression and was
going to stay within her borders, ‘without insulting other governments,
without disturbing their tranquillity, without violating their rights. And
unless she consent to these terms, whatever may be our wishes for peace,
the final issue must be war.’ Unlike his father Chatham, Pitt the Younger
believed in peace. But it had to be a peace that was real and solid,
consistent with the interests of Britain and the general security of Europe.
It had been growing fairly inevitable that Britain would go to war. The
Revolution’s foreign policy threatened monarchies all over Europe by its
mere existence. However, it was only after the revolutionaries had declared
that ‘the Laws of Nature’ meant the important Scheldt estuary was open to
all shipping that Britain was forced into the conflict. France had threatened
the neutrality of Holland, which Britain was bound by treaty to defend.
There was nothing for it. Reluctantly Pitt steeled himself to put an end to
the peace and progress that he had pursued for ten years.
But Pitt was pre-empted. The same day that he was speaking in the
House of Commons, the men battling for power within France agreed to
declare war on England and Holland. It was a war that would engulf
Europe for the next twenty-three years and would not end until the Battle
of Waterloo.

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The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

(1793-1815)
During the next two decades of almost continuous war with France, the
tolerant political climate of Great Britain underwent a dramatic change.
Pitt had originally declared that this was not to be a war against ‘armed
opinions’. It was to protect British commerce, which was threatened by
French ships on the Scheldt. However, it soon became clear that fighting
‘armed opinions’ had to be its objective, since the French government had
vowed to help all nations which rose against their rulers. Just as ‘Jacobite’
had been a catch-all phrase in England denoting an enemy of the state for
half the eighteenth century, so the revolutionary ‘Jacobin’ was to be in that
century’s last decade and the first decades of the nineteenth.
Only a few years after celebrating the Glorious Revolution’s hundredth
anniversary, for the English the word ‘revolution’ had taken on the most
fearful connotations. Apart from a short-lived ministry of 1806-7 during
which they abolished slavery, the Whigs and their ideas were as firmly out
of office and out of fashion as the Tories had been for two generations.
Political conservatism was in vogue, and more to the point was in office.
In the face of war and the threat to British institutions posed by
sympathizers with the French Revolution, the rational liberal convictions
of Pitt and of most of the political classes vanished so absolutely that it was
hard to recognize the former friend of reform in the young prime minister.
Even before the war Pitt had become alarmed by support for the
Revolution. When a pamphlet entitled The Rights of Man, written by the
radical Tom Paine and proposing an English republic, sold 200,000 copies
in 1792, all further ‘seditious writing’ was forbidden by law. Paine was
prosecuted and had to flee to France, escaping arrest by an hour thanks to
a warning from the poet William Blake, who had had a prophetic dream
about him. He was later elected to the French Convention. Once war
commenced, a regime of complete repression was instituted. Pitt closed
down the enthusiastic Corresponding Societies which had sprung up all
over the country since the Revolution as a means of obtaining information
about the great political experiment in France.In the new mood of
suspicion most political clubs were considered nests of revolutionaries. If
they would not abolish themselves, their members were imprisoned.
To make the authorities’ work easier, in May 1794, habeas corpus, the
foundation stone of English liberties, was suspended. This measure, which
allowed the government to hold citizens in prison indefinitely while they
were investigated for unspecified crimes, was opposed by only thirty-nine
votes in the House of Commons. Moreover, contact with France was
forbidden as a treasonable act punishable by death. Had it not been for the
example set by Fox’s continuing brave outspokenness, in which he was

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followed by his nephew Lord Holland, the playwright Richard Sheridan

and the young nobleman Charles Grey, it might not have been opposed at
all. Many Whigs were becoming increasingly uneasy about their leaders’
opposition to the war. By July 1794 a large number of them, headed by the
Duke of Portland and Edmund Burke, had crossed the floor to join Pitt’s
Tory patty.
The war against Revolutionary France opened with Britain as a partner
in the First Coalition, formed as a result of Pitt’s efforts in 1793 and
including Holland, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Portugal and Sardinia. Britain’s
allotted role was to concentrate on what she did best, which meant
exploiting her large fleet. She was the only European country not to have
conscription — indeed her army’s very existence had to be approved by
Parliament every year. The fleet, on the other hand, was that of a powerful
maritime nation, and was successfully used to preserve the sea routes and
seize enemy colonies. The route to India was saved when in 1795 the
British captured the Cape of Good Hope from Dutch settlers. In India itself
at Seringapatam prompt action by the governor, Marquis Wellesley,
brother of the future Duke of Wellington, prevented Tipoo Sahib
endangering the colony by stirring up trouble on behalf of the French. But
the effect of concentrating on the colonies was that Britain’s interventions
by her army in Europe were too limited to be successful. Attempts to bring
aid to the pockets of French royalist resistance in the Vendée in the west
and to Toulon in the south were failures, while an army to the Austrian
Netherlands under the Duke of York was run out of the country.
What Britain could do, however, thanks to the trade surpluses now
mounting in the Treasury, was to pay for the armies on the continent after
the fashion of Pitt the Elder. She had reached this position thanks to the
application of Watt’s steam engine, which propelled British industrial
development into a different league from other European countries. The
strength of the British fleet meant that British manufacturing exports and
imports of raw materials from the colonies were almost unaffected by the
war, while British manufactures were stimulated by the demand for
materials from uniforms to tents to cannon balls. In an already reactive and
practical industrial culture, a shortage of labour drove the ironmasters and
factory owners, who were daily pushing invention forward in their
factories, to greater heights of mechanization.
Since the Austrian armies alone consisted of perhaps 300,000 highly
professional soldiers, Britain and her allies believed that the combination
of so many countries against a rabble would prove irresistible, that France
would soon be defeated and forced to retreat behind her old frontiers. But
the French Revolutionary Wars showed that the world had reached a new
stage. Fighting a war was no longer just a question of military science.

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Beliefs too could provide a secret weapon. Wherever France’s Armies of the
Republic marched, their call for ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ found an
emotional response from those living under more repressive regimes, and
they were welcomed as liberators. Nor did the amateur leadership in the
French military matter at all. The armies under the ex-lawyer Lazare
Carnot were honed into a magnificent new fighting machine. Where they
were not magnificent, their enormous numbers as ‘the nation in arms’
made up for their defects, and they swept all before them. In 1794 the
French humiliatingly drove out the Austrians from the Netherlands and
severed the Habsburgs’ 300-year link with that country for ever.
And the efficiency of the coalition armies on the continent was
undermined by the fact that Britain’s main allies, Austria and Prussia, were
far more interested in carving up the weakened kingdom of Poland with
Russia than in eradicating the threat the French armies posed to the world
order. After two years of war Prussia made peace with France, abandoning
the coalition in order to finish off the partition of Poland (Russia, Austria
and Prussia vowing to extinguish the name of Poland), while a mere two
alarming encounters with the French armies had been enough to persuade
Spain to ally with France.In addition, Holland had becomea French
puppet-state, the Batavian Republic. But Pitt had high hopes of the
Austrian army, which still held Italy, for it was the largest in the world. Pitt
also had information that after four years of war not only were the French
armies suffering from exhaustion and lack of supplies, but the
inexperienced government in Paris was running out of money. A peace
might be arranged. But these were not conventional times. By October
1797, in an astonishing, almost miraculous campaign in Italy under a
young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte, the French had
expelled the Austrian army from Italy and changed the shape of the war.
The British had first encountered Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning
of the war in 1793 when the masterly tactics of the twenty-three-year-old
had defeated the British fleet’s attempt to help the royalist resistance in the
south of France by seizing Toulon. Napoleon was a small, thin, sallow-
skinned, shabbily dressed artillery officer affectionately known to his men
as the Little Corporal. After the Italian campaign he captured the world’s
imagination as one of history’s greatest generals. Bonaparte began to be
compared to Caesar and Alexander the Great rolled into one; and he
certainly shared their dreams of conquest. During the Italian campaign he
had thrown the Austrian defences into chaos by the swiftness of his forays,
winning a series of victories that enabled him to overrun the entire
peninsula. The portrait of a long-haired, windswept Napoleon holding a
standard at the Battle of Arcola as he turns to urge his men on is perhaps
the best-known image of him as a young man.

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By the end of the Italian campaign his men would do anything for the
leader who could apparently pluck victories from the air. Wellington,
Napoleon’s great opponent, would say in his memoirs that he had always
believed that Napoleon’s presence on the battlefield was the equivalent of
40,000 men, and military historians have agreed. The reason why
Napoleon succeeded when everything was against him was because his
personality caused the men to march and fight harder than any could have
dreamed possible.
The peace party at Paris with whom Pitt had been negotiating for the
previous two years were cast aside in favour of a war party headed by
Napoleon Bonaparte, who had no intention of allowing his conquests to
stop at Italy. By October 1797 Italy had become a series of republics set up
by Napoleon. Alarmed by the threat the French Grand Army posed to
Vienna, and to preserve the Veneto for themselves, the Austrians too made
peace with France. With the Treaty of Campo Formio they were out of the
war. Of the theoretically invincible First Coalition, Britain was left to face
Revolutionary France on her own. Italy, whose indented coast had
provided harbours for the British navy, was now out of bounds, her waters
swarming with French and Spanish ships. French armies were established
up to the left bank of the Rhine and the Alps, on what the French
government decreed to be France’s ‘natural frontiers’.
For Pitt and the British, the years of Napoleon’s most startling triumphs,
which inspired Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, were very bad years indeed.
Not only did the French seem unstoppable, but since Spain’s desertion
Britain’s independence had been seriously threatened by three fleets. The
combined forces of the Spanish and the French and the Dutch had the
potential to seize control of the Channel and launch invasions of both
Ireland and England. In 1796 French soldiers landed at Fishguard in south
Wales and there were abortive attempts at invading Britain via Ireland.
Only bad weather at Christmas that year stopped French soldiers being
received at Bantry Bay by an Irish independence movement. But there was
still the constant danger that the inherent anti-British feeling in Ireland
would always make it a landing spot for the vanguard of French invaders.
There Theobald Wolfe Tone, the leader of the United Irishmen - an
increasingly republican progressive reform movement, which included
both Catholics and Protestants —- was only waiting for propitious
conditions and French soldiers to throw off British rule.
The personal bravery of Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of
Cape St Vincent in February 1797 prevented the Spanish fleet from seizing
control of the Channel. Nevertheless for much of the ensuing year Britain
continued to be threatened by three navies, a predicament made much
more grave by a series of mutinies (against bad conditions) in her own fleet

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which left the Channel quite unguarded. Only the quick wits of Admiral
Duncan saved Britain from invasion by the Dutch when the mutinies were
at their height. Duncan was out at sea watching the Dutch fleet in the
Texel, quite alone and without a fleet apart from two little frigates. He sent
the frigates up to where they could be seen by the Dutch from the Texel
estuary; for the next few weeks the frigates signalled to an imaginary fleet
out of the Dutch line of vision, and the invasion plan was abandoned. Then
in October Duncan destroyed the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Camperdown.
There was danger of a different kind that same year. No one had
appreciated quite how expensive the war would be. Thanks to the war’s
monumental costs and the gold disbursed to the allied armies, and despite
the trade surpluses, the Treasury was empty. The Bank of England was
about to suspend payment. There was a danger of real civil disorder, as
poor harvests had brought severe social distress. Fortunately Pitt
persuaded the king to put his authority behind a Parliamentary bill which
allowed Bank of England notes to be issued as legal tender throughout the
country instead of gold. The armed forces continued to be paid in gold, but
the rest of the country used banknotes until 1819. This in turn brought its
own troubles: prices rose but wages followed far more slowly. With so
many labourers living just above subsistence level, local authorities
throughout the country started to supplement their wages out of the rates,
copying what was called the Speenhamland system of poor relief begun in
Berkshire in 1795. As a result farmers saw no reason to put up their
labourers’ wages, which thus remained static for twenty years.
By 1798 Pitt was forced to introduce a rising scale of income tax to help
pay for the war. It was based on the simple principle that taxing the rich at
a higher rate would raise more money; it proved extremely unpopular with
them, especially because the war showed no sign of ending. Pitt’s attempts
to bring the French government to the peace table, by returning France’s
captured West Indian colonies with a £400,000 bribe, had been rejected.
The French had no need of money after Bonaparte’s looting of Italy: all her
treasures whether in gold or Old Masters were being dragged on baggage
trains into France. And the French had no intention of moving out of the
Netherlands, which was Britain’s precondition for peace. Elated by
Bonaparte’s victories the French government was happily contemplating
other campaigns — invading Egypt and Syria, perhaps Turkey and India, to
make a new empire in the east.
But it was in that year, 1798, that the balance of the French
Revolutionary Wars began to tip in Britain’s favour. Nelson was in the grip
of a deep conviction that the continental alliances on which Pitt had spent
so much energy generally turned out to be useless. He believed that only
British sea-power could save Europe from French domination. Thanks to

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him it did. When he heard that Napoleon with a flotilla of ships had
managed to slip out of Toulon and capture Malta, one of the best harbours
in the eastern Mediterranean, he became intuitively convinced that the
Corsican must be heading for Egypt and possibly India. In this he was quite
right, though it was a closely guarded secret even from the French ships’
captains themselves. As the weather changed to the luxuriant warmth of
the Middle East, Nelson followed grimly behind on what he was sure was
Napoleon’s trail. Without permission from his commanding officer he
continued to sail east, severely hampered by the loss of his frigates during
a storm — because in the days before radio these scouting ships, known as
‘the eyes of the sea’, would have been miles ahead searching for
information. For the rest of the voyage Nelson was completely blind as far
as long-distance scouting was concerned.
Extraordinarily enough, Nelson and the English fleet actually overtook
the French ships during the night of 22-23 June. But because he had no
frigates he never realized what had happened; the French fleet seemed
simply to have vanished. While Nelson sailed fruitlessly round the eastern
Mediterranean, the French war plan went like clockwork. By the end of
July the loss of India loomed as Napoleon led his army south across the
desert, defeated the rulers of Egypt, the Mamelukes, in the Battle of the
Pyramids and captured Cairo. At last Nelson stumbled on a clue to where
the French fleet had hidden itself. French ships were seen off Crete steering
south-east, and on the morning of r August Nelson was back at Alexandria
once more, to find his first instinct had been right all along. The French
fleet was anchored in the crucially important Aboukir Bay, five miles east
of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile river.
Without pausing for even a moment, even though it was dusk, Nelson
sailed straight in and attacked the enemy. The French, who had first sighted
the English fleet in the far distance at two o’clock in the afternoon, were
astonished that Nelson had made no preliminary skirmishes and by his lack
of orthodoxy in choosing to give battle at six in the evening, since night-
fighting was notoriously difficult. Theoretically the French fleet under
Admiral Brueys was in a very good position at Aboukir Bay because Brueys
had mounted batteries on the shore, but their range turned out to be too
short. Brueys’ second big mistake — but he was ignorant of Nelson’s talent
for spotting a vulnerable point which to others seemed nothing of the kind
— was to have ordered his ships to be anchored far enough apart to give his
ships room to swing round. Nelson suddenly realized that, if there was
room for an enemy ship to swing, there was room enough for British ships
and their uniquely skilled sailors to anchor alongside.
After a long night illuminated by a massive explosion and by burning
ships, Nelson had captured or killed 9,000 men. But he had not only

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destroyed French naval power in the Mediterranean. Horatio Nelson’s

outstanding and unexpected victory against the French navy at the Battle
of the Nile literally changed the course of the war. French plans were
checked for the first time in five years. The British gained control of the
eastern Mediterranean while the French army, with the best general it
possessed, was left stranded in Egypt, having never received the
reinforcements it was relying on, the soldiers on board ship in Aboukir
Bay. But above all the Battle of the Nile gave heart to Britain’s former
allies, such as Austria. Up to now they had all accepted defeat. Now they
tore up their peace treaties, enabling Pitt to form the Second Coalition of
Britain, Austria, Russia, Naples and Turkey, and renew the war by land.
Egypt became France’s firm enemy as a result of her treatment by
Napoleon and Britain’s firm friend, while any ideas Napoleon had of
starting a war in India had become pipe dreams. He was now in the middle
of extremely hostile enemy territory surrounded by angry Turks and
Egyptians. Nelson summed it all up when he said laconically, ‘Their army
is in a scrape and will not get out of it.’
When the news of the destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay
reached England two months later on 2 October the country went wild
with joy. After five years of inexorable French military success the British
could scarcely believe that at last they had dealt a serious blow to the
enemy. Nelson was the hero of the hour, inspiring public prints and
cartoons as adoring as Napoleon’s in France. Lively, immensely charming
and very patriotic, Nelson displayed genius and daring in a string of
triumphs at sea between 1797 and 1805 which established the British
maritime supremacy that would last for a hundred years. He had been in
the navy since he was twelve and had often been wounded — he had only
one arm (the other had been amputated) and one good eye (the other could
only distinguish between light and dark). A small man, his clothes always
looked too big for him — the future King William IV said that he was ‘the
merest boy of a Captain that I ever saw’ — he was adored by his men.
Typically Bonaparte refused to admit that the Battle of the Nile was a
defeat. The Army of Egypt was told in one of his most grandiloquent
speeches that it must go on and accomplish great new things. But for once
he had taken on more than he bargained for. The Sultan of Turkey,
refusing to lie down under the French invasion, despatched two armies
against Napoleon, and on 22 August 1799 the Little Corporal saw that the
time was ripe for him to return to Paris before the disastrous Egypt
campaign became known. Effectively deserting his troops, he sailed
secretly from Alexandria on a small frigate to mount the coup which
overturned the French government, the Directory, and enabled him that
November to become France’s principal ruling consul, a virtual dictator. A

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year later, when Sir Ralph Abercromby landed in Egypt and defeated the
French at the Battle of Alexandria, the last wraiths of their hoped-for
eastern empire melted away.
The Austrians now drove the French out of Germany. The Russians
under the leadership of the remarkable Russian General Suvorov began to
force the French to retire up the Italian peninsula, back the way they had
come. The French were also attacked in Switzerland and Holland. But after
a good start the Second Coalition did not realize its early promise. Led by
poor commanders the English were pushed out of Holland and Pitt’s
attention was distracted by a rebellion that blew up in Ireland at the end of
1798. In Switzerland the French defeated the Russians at Zurich before
Suvoroy could get there.
The rebellion in Ireland was a revival of the one that had failed the year
before for lack of French and Dutch troops. Revolutionary ideas had
increased the already strongly anti-British tendencies in Ireland. The Irish
anyway had little regard for a British king, and when they saw the French
throwing off their monarch they were encouraged to do the same. Their
excuse was Pitt’s Catholic Relief measures, which were felt not to have gone
far enough. In 1792 and 1793 Pitt had agreed that as a concession to the
large number of Irish Roman Catholics, in Ireland Catholics should be
allowed to sit on juries and vote in elections even if they could not stand for
Parliament themselves. But eventually the hot-headed Wolfe Tone
abandoned hopes of internal reform and concluded that revolution was the
only answer. The British navy guarded the Channel and Irish Sea so
efficiently, however, that what had been intended to be an Irish uprising
backed by French military support turned into a civil war. Members of the
newly formed extreme Presbyterian Orange Lodges in Ulster, named in
remembrance of William of Orange, fought bitterly against the United
Irishmen and their largely Catholic following. Despite strong support in
Wexford the revolt failed, so that by the time French troops had managed to
sneak across to Ireland’s west coast they were too late.
The need for a proper solution to the Irish problem had become acute,
particularly now that Napoleon had escaped from Egypt and was directing
French military operations. To Lord Cornwallis, the former general of the
English army in America sent over to keep peace between the warring
factions as lord lieutenant, the Irish appeared congenitally incapable of
seeing one another’s point of view. He told Pitt that Ireland could be ruled
only by a neutral government which had none of the Irish prejudices and
hatreds. Rule from Westminster was the only way of escaping the
implacable antagonisms of Irish internal politics.
But short of main force how could Pitt get the Dublin Parliament to vote
for its own destruction? Not only was its existence a matter of national

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pride, but it was such a nest of entrenched interests. Pitt’s solution was
what he viewed as an extremely generous offer: Ireland should have one
hundred seats in the Parliament at Westminster, and would thus play a part
in decision-making way above her power and importance in the world.
Free trade was to be established between Ireland and England. But it was
the carefully designed package of bribes for the greedy and unpatriotic
Dublin borough-mongers which got them to abolish the Dublin Parliament
and their independence for the sum of £7,500 per seat. As for national
acceptance of the Union, Pitt understood that the only way to win over the
Irish and make them loyal to England was by courting the Catholics. The
Act of Union between Britain and Ireland was predicated on its being
accompanied by Catholic Emancipation for the Irish. Roman Catholics
were to be admitted to Parliament and have their disabilities removed.
What Pitt had left out of the equation was the ailing king. George III
took his coronation oath very seriously. As a Protestant monarch, he
believed that it would be dereliction of his sacred royal duty if he allowed
the remedial measures for the Catholics to go before Parliament. Despite
all the arguments put to him, he held to his idea that allowing Catholic
Emancipation would violate his promise to uphold the Protestant religion.
‘None of your Scotch metaphysics,’ he said to Pitt’s friend the Scots
politician Henry Dundas, when the latter tried to persuade him otherwise.
The Act of Union of 1800 thoroughly tied Ireland to Great Britain,
temporarily at least. The first United Parliament sat in February 1801 and
contained within it one hundred Irish members of Parliament, twenty-eight
Irish peers and four Irish bishops. But it had a dramatic consequence: it
caused Pitt’s resignation. Pitt felt he could not stay in office as the failure
to introduce Emancipation made it look as if he had deceived the Irish
Catholics to get their support. Since any mention of the Catholics wound
the king’s nerves up to an alarming pitch, it was better if his prime minister
resigned. Addington, the inconspicuous Speaker of the House of
Commons, took his place.
Throughout the year 1800 the Second Coalition was on the retreat.
Russia and her huge armies had already pulled out of the alliance; the new
tsar Paul wished to be the chief arbiter in making peace with Britain and
thereby gain Napoleon’s gratitude. Tsar Paul, exploiting resentment of
British naval policy on enemy goods, began to create an armed Northern
League of former neutral countries, whose Danish navy posed a real
danger to British defences. Then, in a typical feat of daring, Napoleon took
his army straight over the Alps through the snow to attack the Austrians,
crossing the Great St Bernard Pass to fall on the Austrians’ rear where they
were besieging Genoa. By December the Austrians had been driven back
down the Danube. Terrified that Vienna would be Bonaparte’s next target,

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in February 1801 they signed the peace treaty of Lunéville and withdrew
from the coalition. Once more the British were left to face the French
alone, and they had to do so under Addington, who had little executive
sense.
Nevertheless by 1801 the tsar’s plans to create a dangerous Northern
League had been thwarted by Nelson. The slaughter at the Battle of
Copenhagen in April when the British sank the Danish fleet was so terrible
and the two navies so evenly matched that Admiral Parker started
signalling to Nelson to ‘leave off action’. But Nelson believing, accurately
as it turned out, that he could bring the Danes to their knees, put his
telescope to his blinded eye so that he could not see his commander’s
signal. He continued fighting until the Danes accepted his offer of a truce.
The Northern League’s most fearsome weapon, the Danish navy, was now
out of the picture, and the League was soon broken up by the assassination
of Tsar Paul.
Thus by 1802 Great Britain and France were level pegging, and a peace
between the two nations was successfully negotiated: Great Britain could
not hurt France by land, and France could not hurt Britain by sea. Both
nations were utterly weary of war and in March that year the Treaty of
Amiens was signed, which accepted the stalemate between the two
countries. Britain agreed to recognize the French Republic and to give back
all the colonies she had taken from France, apart from Trinidad and
Ceylon. Malta was to be returned to the Knights of St John, who were to
be under the protection of the tsar.
But the Peace of Amiens was not a peace so much as a truce, which
Napoleon made use of to regroup his forces. He illegally annexed
Piedmont and Elba to France, moved troops into Switzerland and was still
occupying Holland. When in response the British refused to surrender
Malta to a Russian protectorate, because of the growing rapprochement
between France and Russia, hostilities resumed. But the nature of the
conflict had changed. Not only are the wars which raged once more from
1803 to 1815 called the Napoleonic Wars, but the spirit of them was
different.
The French revolutionary armies had invaded monarchist countries as
an act of self-defence to prevent their enemies crushing the Revolution and
restoring the royal family. But, though Napoleon’s armies still claimed that
they were recovering the liberty of the people from medieval laws, the
Napoleonic Wars were old-fashioned wars of conquest. Bonaparte had
drawn the Revolution in France firmly to a close. Not content to merely be
military dictator as the first consul for life, in 1804 Napoleon crowned
himself emperor in the presence of the pope, and six months later made
himself King of Italy.

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Britain was the most substantial threat to France’s new ruler. Just as she
had resisted the French revolutionary armies, Britain steadfastly resisted
the extension of the Napoleonic Empire. Bonaparte or ‘Boney’ was
contemptuously regarded as a new embodiment of the French tyranny and
absolutism the British were used to combating. In the coming war Britain
would not only be Napoleon’s chief opponent, but often his only
opponent. For his part Napoleon had become obsessed with the idea of
humbling the British. During the peace his consular agents had been
involved in unobtrusive espionage, taking country walks whose subsidiary
intention was to spy out good landing places.
But now the gloves were off. Much of the original attraction of the French
Revolution for radical thinkers in this country had died out when Bonaparte
had abandoned its republican forms and made a Concordat with the pope.
But even if some, like Fox, continued to be attracted by the great ideals of
the Revolution, all arguments were irrelevant from June 1803. For Napoleon
had begun massing an enormous army of 150,000 soldiers to invade
England. While he stirred up revolts simultaneously in Ireland and India (the
latter being put down by a superior young officer named Sir Arthur
Wellesley) the camp at Boulogne on the north-east coast of France had
already accumulated 90,000 Frenchmen and the flat-bottomed boats
required for the operation. The emperor was waiting for the moment when
the tides and winds would converge to carry what was known as the Army
of England over the Channel to conquer the recalcitrant islanders. Napoleon
had even had a medal made bearing the legend ‘Struck in England 1804’.
When news of this build-up of troops across the Channel, with soldiers
practising disembarkation techniques, reached England, the people became
seriously alarmed. An invasion might only be days away, for even in the
early nineteenth century the Channel took just hours to cross. At this crisis
the British longed for the return of Pitt’s safe pair of hands, or as the
politician George Canning called him in a piece of light verse, ‘the Pilot
that weathered the storm’. Not only was the new prime minister
Addington a complete nonentity but he had a poor grasp of foreign affairs
and had even begun reducing the navy to save money. As another of
Canning’s jingles put it:

Pitt is to Addington
As London is to Paddington.

By May 1804 not even George III could keep Addington in power. Pitt
returned having promised never again to mention Catholic Emancipation
to the king for fear that it would bring on his madness. Once more it was
up to Pitt to plan the new war against Napoleon and hope that somehow

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he could persuade another coalition to materialize. Unlike Addington,

during the peace Pitt had not been won over by Napoleon’s protestations
of friendship. Convinced that war would recur soon, he had thrown
himself into organizing the drilling on the south coast of the enthusiastic
volunteer movement which was to provide 300,000 soldiers for the British
army. He also supervised the building of those huge, round, windowless
Martello towers you can still see today that were to serve as coastal
defences. But after a year of the Grand Army sitting on the coast waiting
for the best moment to cross the Channel, Napoleon realized that he might
be waiting until Doomsday. The Channel was too well guarded by the
British fleet. It would have to be overwhelmed by superior force. Napoleon
therefore forced Charles IV of Spain to enlarge his fleet and join with the
French to overcome the British once and for all. When British secret service
agents reported this, Pitt declared war on Spain in December 1804.
Despite the overwhelming numbers against them, the British had one
advantage on their side. The French navy after the Revolution was never
up to the standard of the pre-revolutionary service; in a technical
profession lack of technique counted badly against it. This also meant that
Nelson could take risks he might not necessarily have got away with under
the French ancien régime, for one of his characteristics was his ability to
react to situations without scouring the rule book. But he also had
extraordinary captains. Unlike the British army, where until the late
nineteenth century officers could buy their rank, the king’s ships were
considered far too valuable to be trusted to amateurs. Learning how to sail
a ship to the exacting standards of the Royal Navy took a long time.
Commanders at sea could not be anything other than excellent seamen,
and there was a very strict order of training. Officers started as a
midshipman, as Nelson did aged twelve on a battleship, and worked their
way up.
Napoleon’s plan depended on the French navy joining up with the
Spanish in a union of the fleets. But for the first half of 1805 the French
naval ports of Toulon on the Mediterranean and Brest on the Atlantic were
so closely barricaded in by British ships that the French fleets could not get
out. But then in the summer the French had a bit of luck. A storm allowed
Admiral Villeneuve and the Mediterranean fleet to escape from Toulon
where Nelson was blockading him and join up with the Spanish fleet at
Cadiz. The first part of the union of the fleets had been accomplished. The
French and Spanish navies raced for the safety of the West Indies with
Nelson in hot pursuit. But, to Nelson’s frustration, the minute that
Villeneuve heard of his arrival in American waters, he rushed back to
Europe hoping to free the French navy at Brest.
On 22 July the combined fleets of France and Spain arrived off Cape

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Finisterre at the north-west corner of Spain. It was the watching brief of Sir
Robert Calder, who was patrolling the harbour of Ferrol. Calder had only
fifteen ships of the line, while the French and Spanish had twenty-five.
Nevertheless, knowing what the enemy vessels portended, the daring
Calder attacked the combined fleet and captured two of their ships. But the
overall consequence was better than that. For Villeneuve was so unnerved
by the English ferocity that he whisked the Spanish ships out of Ferrol,
made south for the safety of Cadiz, and ruined Napoleon’s plans. If the
combined fleets had instead sailed north they might have seized control of
the Channel there and then, and overseen the safe crossing to England of
the immense French army. But they did not, and England was safe for the
time being.
Pitt had meanwhile managed to conjure up a new alliance against
Napoleon, the Third Coalition, consisting of Austria, Russia and Sweden,
which had become more wary of the Little Corporal’s intentions. After
Villeneuve’s failure Napoleon had decided to cut his losses. The troops
from the Channel ports were hurried to south Germany to fight Austria
before she could get ready. But Napoleon’s plan to control the Channel
had not gone away. It could easily be resurrected. In the late summer of
1805 Pitt believed that destroying the combined enemy fleet sheltering
down at Cadiz remained the most crucial task of the war. The situation
was desperate, and it required desperate solutions. Admiral St Vincent had
written after the Battle of Copenhagen, ‘All agree there is but one Nelson.’
It was Nelson that Pitt called in to see him at Downing Street to entrust him
with an extraordinarily important task.
For this courageous man held the fate of Britain and the free world in
his hand. On land in 1805 Napoleon was unbeatable; if the threatening
allied fleet were not destroyed, he might be unbeatable on sea as well.
Then the invasion of England would be assured. This was Britain’s very
last chance to continue to survive against Napoleon. As Nelson left
Portsmouth on 14 September on board the Victory people knelt on the
shore and prayed.
Although Nelson reached Cadiz at the end of the month, it took three
weeks to lure Admiral Villeneuve out to give battle at Cape Trafalgar. On
21 October Nelson went up on to the Victory’s poop having visited every
deck to boost morale. He was wearing the dress uniform of a vice-admiral
of the White Squadron ofthe Fleet,to which he had been appointed in
1804. In the view of his friend and flag-captain Thomas Hardy this made
him too conspicuous, but Nelson felt that it was important that his men
should be able to see him. Looking out over the dark sea, which was a mass
of fluttering white sails, he said, ‘I'll amuse the fleet with a signal,’ and
asked for the message ‘England confides [meaning ‘trusts’] that every man

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will do his duty’ to be run up. But since a flag for ‘confides’ did not exist,
the word ‘expects’ was used instead. Then the battle began.
Nelson had twenty-seven ships to Villeneuve’s thirty-three. His plan was
to use his three biggest ships, the Victory, Neptune and Temeraire, ‘like a
spear to break the enemy line’, the great Nelsonian innovation. He and
Vice-Admiral Collingwood were leading two lines of fourteen and thirteen
ships spaced about a mile apart. They would bear down at right angles on
the two enemy lines and cut them in three, to create maximum confusion.
This they proceeded to do at considerable cost to themselves.
Two hours after the battle began, a French sniper perched in the rigging
of the Redoubtable picked Nelson off from about forty feet away. As he
fell to the deck bleeding fatally all over his white uniform, Nelson cried,
‘They have done for me at last, Hardy. My backbone is shot through.’
Hardy carried the greatest seaman of the age, perhaps of any age, down to
the surgeon’s cabin, while Nelson concealed his face with a handkerchief
so the men would not see the agony he was in. For four hours the admiral
lay dying amid the din and smoke of battle. But by 4.30 in the afternoon
his strategy had worked and the battle had been won. Of the thirty-three
enemy ships, only eleven returned to Cadiz. As his ship’s log reported,
when the victory had been reported to Lord Nelson, ‘He then died of his
wound.’ His last words, as a weeping Hardy held the little body in his
arms, were ‘Kiss me, Hardy. Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I have done
my duty.’
At one o'clock in the morning of 6 November 1805 the Admiralty
received the news of Trafalgar, and by two in the morning Pitt knew. That
restrained man was so stirred up that he, who could always put his head
on the pillow and sleep, for once could not do so. Throughout Britain,
people wept when they heard the news of Nelson’s death. Even the London
mob, who usually celebrated victories with fires along the Thames and
frenzied toasts, were silent from grief.
And the British could not have been in direr need of victory, especially
one that secured control of the seas. Only three days before, Napoleon,
moving faster than had been thought possible, with a Grand Army of
190,000 men, had forced the Austrian army to surrender at Ulm. Three
days after the news of Trafalgar had roused the nation from gloom, Pitt
attended the annual banquet at the Guildhall. His popularity in the country
was such, after the great victory against Boney, that his carriage was
unhitched from its horses and drawn to the dinner by cheering crowds. At
the end of the evening the lord mayor proposed the health of ‘the Saviour
of Europe’. Pitt responded with one of his most quoted and briefest
speeches: ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but
Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by

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her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’ The young
soldier who had done so well in the fight against the powerful Maratha
chiefs in India was present. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of
Wellington, said of Pitt’s speech, ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet
nothing could be more perfect.’
But though Pitt was in good form that night, in reality his health was
breaking under the strain of overwork and the increasingly depressing
news from the continent. Little more than a month later, amid the snow of
Austerlitz, on 2 December Napoleon utterly routed the Austrians and
Russians. The resulting Peace of Pressburg gave France back control over
Italy and most of Germany. So many of the hereditary Habsburg lands
were redistributed to the smaller German principalities that the Holy
Roman Empire became an archaic concept and the last Holy Roman
Emperor Francis abdicated on 6 August 1806. The new German states
were organized into the Confederation of the Rhine, headed by Napoleon
himself. Not only was he formally recognized as King of Italy, but he made
all his brothers kings. The Bourbons were evicted from Naples in favour of
Joseph Bonaparte, Louis was placed on the throne of Holland and Jér6me
became King of Westphalia, at whose heart were George III’s hereditary
Hanoverian lands.
Except for England, almost the whole of Europe from the south of Spain
to the borders of Russia was now controlled by Napoleon, and within the
year Prussia and Russia would be entirely defeated. Pitt himself, passing a
map of Europe in the company of his niece Lady Hester Stanhope,
gloomily told her to roll it up, because it would not be wanted for the next
ten years. Pitt himself would not live to see them. His doctors sent him to
Bath for the waters, but it did no good for a constitution shattered by
exhaustion and poisoned by the port which doctors then prescribed as a
cure-all. Instead of relaxing he was feverishly working at new
permutations of alliances — would Prussia help? — but without success. He
gave the dreaded order to withdraw the British army from northern
Europe. Then the dying man sank into a fever of delirium. He called ‘Hear!
hear!’ to imaginary debates in the House of Commons, and kept
summoning his messenger to ask how the wind blew. If the wind was in the
east the news travelled faster. Then just before he died on 23 January 1806,
Pitt suddenly shouted in a voice of agony that his cousin watching by the
bed could never forget, ‘Oh, my country! how I leave my country!’ He was
only forty-six.
In England there was a sense of loss almost as if the sun had fallen from
the sky. For more than twenty years Pitt had presided over the British
government. For most of that time he had been considered an inspiring
figure, whether as the personification of virtue when he was a young

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reformer, or more recently as the man whose prompt actions had saved
Britain from revolution and French invasion. To millions of people the
solitary figure of Pitt, the ‘watchman on the lonely tower’ as Sir Walter
Scott called him after his death, often seemed to be all that stood between
them and Napoleon. Every morning in Downing Street, he had been at his
post in his severe black coat, methodically plotting the course of
Napoleon’s latest troop movements and the latest engagements in all the
different countries of Europe. He had been consumed by a patriotism
which left no time for any other life than the late hours at the House of
Commons. A sickly frame could not endure it for ever. And perhaps, as
was said at the time, the news of Austerlitz was a blow from which he never
recovered. Fox, who was himself to die later in the year, turned pale when
he heard the news, and exclaimed that there was ‘something missing in the
world’.
Meanwhile, just as Pitt had predicted, the map of Europe continued to
be redrawn by Napoleon. On 14 October 1806 at Jena he destroyed even
Prussia’s crack troops in a resounding victory and went on to occupy
Berlin. Of the Third Coalition, only Britain and Russia now remained in
the field. And by June 1807 it was only Britain. For after Russian troops
had been beaten by Napoleon on their own borders at the Battle of
Friedland, Russia decided to submit to France. At the Treaty of Tilsit of
1807 on a raft in the middle of the River Niemen, the Russian emperor
agreed to Napoleon’s plan to parcel out Europe between them into zones
of eastern and western influence. Russia was at liberty to help herself to
Finland, Sweden and Turkey as long as she recognized that the rest of
Europe was Napoleon’s, including the French-controlled Grand Duchy of
Warsaw. Russia also agreed to join the Continental System, a compre-
hensive blockade which Napoleon had imposed against all English goods
to try and starve Britain into surrender.
Under this policy, Britain was forbidden to export any of her goods to any
of the ports of Napoleon’s satellites, and by now that meant all the ports on
the continent. All British shipping of whatever kind was to be seized, as was
the shipping of any country which had used British ports. Defiantly, Lord
Grenville — the new Whig prime minister, who took office because there was
no natural Tory successor to Pitt — had retaliated by issuing Orders in
Council which denied the freedom of the seas to any of Napoleon’s allies.
Thanks to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar it was really the French who were in
a state of blockade. And in order to prevent the Danish fleet being pressed
into service against her, Britain simply seized it. Nevertheless, these were
desperate days. If help did not come soon from somewhere on the continent,
to start a fightback against Napoleon, the British Isles might be starved into
leading the half-life of a Napoleonic satellite.

494
 = = y Se . , lhe rs j
the Lancia | POCHAMON Of the Right /ten pie LY On lhe ¢ nd of te Lradicce:F

den Pbk Bedcestus botMerete Nev's Boedy Rub inninn Padorerweter Bon

Funeral procession of Pitt’s rival, Charles James Fox.

This was anyway not a glorious era for the country. The dying Charles
James Fox’s efforts got a bill passed in 1807 which made Britain the
earliest European country to outlaw the slave trade, but Britons themselves
were experiencing a different kind of slavery in the early factories. The
unrelenting war effort and fear of revolution meant that there was neither
the time nor the political will for social reforms. One year after the Whigs
had formed a government they were turned out by George III for trying to
give English Catholic officers rights equal to their Irish comrades.
Henceforth the king would have only Tory governments, in which after
Pitt’s death the reactionary or Ultra wing of the party predominated. MPs
like Sir Francis Burdett, Sir Samuel Romilly, Samuel Whitbread and Henry
Brougham, known as Radicals, were lone voices in Parliament drawing
attention to the need for less savage laws, better treatment of the poor, and
shorter and more representative Parliaments. They were a new generation
of brave and unpopular politicians following in the footsteps of Fox and
his nephew Lord Holland. The difference was that they were not connected
to the great Whig aristocratic families. The Radical movement’s supporters
were found in the large towns and among intellectuals who had been

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members of the Corresponding

Societies until they were made
illegal.
But there was one area of the
Tory government’s policy that was
dazzlingly successful. The decision
to send a small army to the Iberian
Peninsula in 1808 and support the
resistance against the French there
turned the tide against Napoleon
and led eventually to his downfall.
The theoretically straightforward
little war in the peninsula, which
the emperor dismissed as the
Spanish Ulcer, became a cancer that
destroyed the Napoleonic Empire.
Until 1808 Bonaparte had been
content to leave his southern neigh-
William Wilberforce, Evangelical MP bours as cowed allies. But the
whose campaigns to abolish the slave — obstinate Portuguese refused to join
trade triumphed in 1807, though he . : :
died before slavery throughout Britain in the Continental System against
and the empire was outlawed in 1833. the British, with whom they had a
long history of favoured trading
status. Though the Spanish king Charles IV helped Napoleon capture
Portugal, while the British evacuated the Portuguese government in
warships, the emperor soon perceived that the warring Spanish Bourbon
dynasty might be neatly replaced by his own brother Joseph, currently the
King of Naples. In so doing Napoleon created his own Achilles’ heel.
Passionately proud of their history, scornful of the French peoples living
north of them, the Spanish were not having any Frenchman on their
throne. Like all other European nations the Spaniards were defeated in
pitched battle by Napoleon. But, unlike the other peoples of Europe who
were crushed by Napoleon, Spain refused to accept the French occupation.
A series of spontaneous risings swept the peninsula. Though it was
occupied by the cream of the French armies under General Junot, the bare
rocky country would not be subdued. Spanish guerrilla armies hidden all
over the hills breathed defiance at Napoleon. The new King of Spain,
Joseph Bonaparte, was forced humiliatingly to abandon the Spanish
capital, Madrid, and to retreat with the French army to Bayonne, on the
other side of the Spanish border. Meanwhile a self-appointed provisional
government hidden in the Asturian Mountains of northern Spain sent a
message to London asking for help. From this tiny foothold began the

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climb-back which would result in victory on the battlefield of Waterloo. In

1808, however, that was a happy outcome which could scarcely have been
predicted.
The man put in charge of the peninsular expedition, Sir Arthur
Wellesley, was a lieutenant-general in the British army, fresh from glory in
India. Pitt had admired him for the way he ‘states every difficulty before he
undertakes any service, but none after he has undertaken it’. Wellesley was
now landed with a small. force in Portugal and kicked off the Peninsular
Wars with a flourish at Vimeiro when he defeated General Junot, whose
troops outnumbered his by three to one. But the incompetence and
shortsightedness of two more senior British generals who arrived
immediately after the battle enabled Junot apparently to recover, and
despite Wellesley’s victory an armistice was agreed in the form of the
infamous Convention of Cintra. This allowed the French to evacuate
Portugal with all their troops and arms and the gold they had looted from
Portuguese churches, all of which were conveyed to France courtesy of the
British navy at considerable expense. All those evacuated troops could of
course be used against Britain in the near future.
The stupidity of these arrangements created a scandal in Britain, and
Wellesley was the only commander to escape with his reputation. On the
other hand, at least Cintra left Portugal free of all French soldiers, and thus
made it a very good starting point for British operations against Napoleon
in Spain. For there, at the end of 1808, the emperor himself arrived in his
magnificent travelling Berlin carriage with his solid-gold campaigning
dinner service. He was stung to the quick that the backward Spanish
peasantry were defying the master of Europe. By 4 December he had
defeated the Spanish forces and the French tricolore was once more flying
over occupied Madrid.
As Wellesley was still in London giving evidence into the inquiry into the
Cintra débacle, the new commander of the British forces in Portugal was
the affable and popular General Sir John Moore. He had just crossed into
Spain to join up with the Spanish armies when he heard the news of their
defeat. He was then at Salamanca, horribly near Napoleon and with
insufficient troops to fight him. He courageously decided to draw the
emperor north by threatening his communications with France. This
would keep him away from the Spanish army, which was fleeing south to
recover its strength.
Moore’s tactics worked. Napoleon went north towards Burgos, leaving
the Spanish to regroup in the south, but Moore had to beat a rapid retreat
over the bleak mountains of the Asturias in the raw Spanish winter,
pursued by the furious emperor’s forces. He managed to get his men to
Corunna in the north-west corner of Spain, where he had been promised

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that transport ships would be waiting to take him and his men back to
England. But to their dismay there was nothing at the fortified town except
sullen grey waves, while at their heels was Marshal Soult, one of
Napoleon’s most gifted generals. It was then that Moore managed to rally
his exhausted, mutinous, demoralized men to make a stand. Though the
transports finally arrived and the British sent Soult packing, Moore himself
died in the mélée, and was buried hastily at dead of night outside
Corunna’s walls with bayonets for spades. Moore’s legendary courage and
daring inspired the famous poem ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at
Corunna’, which begins so evocatively:

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

The arrival from Corunna of the piteous, emaciated British soldiers, who
had almost perished as a result of administrative bungling, as well as the
shame of Cintra, increased the unpopularity of the government at home.
Headed by the Duke of Portland, one of the former Whigs sufficiently
alarmed at the beginning of the French Revolution to join Pitt as a Tory,
the administration was proving hopelessly incompetent, as disaster after
disaster piled on Portland’s head. George III’s second son the Duke of
York, who had shown himself an able administrator as commander-in-
chief of the army, was forced to resign when his ex-mistress Mary Ann
Clark (an ancestress of the writer Daphne du Maurier) revealed that she
had used her favours to get commissions for wealthy friends.
Next came further military catastrophe at Walcheren, where the British
had sent an invasion force to capture Antwerp in a bid to distract
Napoleon and help Austria, which had once more declared war against
France. For a moment in 1809, the Spanish risings had engendered the idea
that the rest of occupied Europe would manage to throw off the
Napoleonic yoke. The emperor had abandoned his pursuit of Moore to
rush off to fight Austria, and it looked as if some of the German
principalities would join her. But thanks to lack of co-ordination between
the naval and military arms and poor reconnaissance the British forces
never got nearer than Flushing and had to return home without striking a
blow. Four thousand men died of fever that July at Walcheren, a small
island in Zeeland above Antwerp. Meanwhile Austria had been shown by
Napoleon’s decisive victory over her at Wagram in the same month how
unwise it was to raise a finger against her overlord. She made peace and
provided Napoleon with a second wife, the youthful Archduchess Marie

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Louise. By a strange turn of the wheel of historical fortune, she was the
great-niece of Marie Antoinette.
Military failure, reports of improper use of influence during the election,
a scandalous duel between Canning, now foreign secretary, and the war
and colonial secretary Viscount Castlereagh, and his own poor health
brought about Portland’s resignation as premier. He was replaced by the
former chancellor of the Exchequer, the right-wing Tory Spencer Perceval,
who proved as unmemorable as Portland, and the trade slump continued.
The Whig opposition, who had close links to manufacturers keen for the
war to end, continued to attack the government for wasting money on the
Peninsular War. But the one good thing about the Tory government was
that it refused to abandon the peninsula. Indeed the only bright spot amid
widespread gloom were Wellesley’s sustained military successes in
Portugal.
At his own insistence Wellesley had been back on the peninsula since
April 1809, having impressed upon his fellow Anglo-Irishman Castlereagh
the urgency of his mission there. He was convinced that Portugal could still
be defended with only 20,000 British troops and 4,000 cavalry alongside
a newly recruited Portuguese army, while the Spanish guerrillas tied down
the French in their own country. He believed that the peninsula was
especially important as a theatre of war because it showed the other
European nations that their French oppressor was not invincible. Vimeiro
had emphasized that the Napoleonic column, that massive and alarming
spectacle of moving soldiery and glinting metal, sixty men deep, which had
evolved out of the overwhelming numbers of the untrained French citizen-
army, could be outmanoeuvred. In terms of firepower most of the men
were actually useless while in column formation, because those in the
middle were never able to fire for fear of hitting their comrades. The
Napoleonic column that had spread fear through Europe could be defeated
if a thin line of infantry — thin because it was only two men deep to enable
every man to fire — directed musket fire at it. This would be the pattern over
and over again in encounters between Napoleon’s armies and
Wellington’s.
Wellesley believed that it was essential to maintain the friendship of the
Portuguese people. On landing he issued the strictest orders to his soldiers.
It was absolutely forbidden to requisition anything from the locals or to lay
hands on the female population. The Protestant British, who tended to
deride what to them seemed the more superstitious elements of Roman
Catholicism, were to be respectful of the Portuguese people’s religion.
Anyone who laid a finger on a woman or stole a chicken was to be hanged.
Wellesley’s measures were harsh but effective. The Portuguese, who
scarcely had enough food for themselves, were particularly grateful for his

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orders. The disciplined behaviour of the British troops was a pleasing

change from the pillage and looting of the French soldiers.
Wellesley forged the 20,000 men he had brought to the peninsula into
a superior military instrument. But Portugal was once again threatened
with invasion by the French from two directions. The odds were greatly
against the English, and Wellesley chose to give battle only when he knew
he could win, because, he said, ‘As this is the last army England has got
we must take care of it.” Though there were terrible losses of life,
Wellesley pursued the French out of Portugal to Talavera, halfway across
Spain, but after inflicting a crushing defeat there on Soult with the help of
30,000 Spanish troops, he decided that the British army's position in
Spain was untenable and retreated back to Portugal. His men now had to
be even more carefully preserved because the French had put 200,000
soldiers into the peninsula. To this end Wellesley, now created Viscount
Wellington of Talavera, constructed the strategical masterpiece known as
the Lines of Torres Vedras. It was to be a lair in which Wellington’s army
— the British troops and 25,000 Portuguese soldiers — would hole up over
the winter.
The Lines of Torres Vedras — ‘old towers’ in Portuguese — were actually
a series of more than a hundred forts complete with redoubts, ditches and
earthworks north of the city of Lisbon. Wellington’s army would be able
to keep a steady holding pattern until hunger supplemented by ambushes
drove the French out of Portugal. The fortifications were thrown up in
such secrecy that the French had absolutely no idea of their existence. It
was not until what was intended to be the French army of occupation
under General Masséna got to within two days’ march of the Lines in the
autumn of 181o that they realized they could go no further. The whole
Brtsh army had vanished into the hillside. Wellington had meanwhile
given orders to the reluctant but nobly self-sacrificing Portuguese farmers
to lay waste all the country around Torres Vedras and bring all their
provisions and livestock within the Lines. He intended to hold out there
indefinitely until starvation forced the French army to go away.
The Boush supply boats that he had waiting offshore permitted
Wellington to sit out the winter of 1810-11 with his men. Outside Torres
Vedras the French army under General Masséna prowled and ultimately
starved, thanks to their policy of depending on the local produce. In the
end, after waiting from October to March, in the course of which 30,000
French troops died, Masséna and his men were forced to abandon
Portugal. In 1811 Wellington began his campaign to drive the French out
of Spain. In that same year the Prince of Wales at last became regent, his
father George III having been diagnosed as incurably mad. Although he
had allied himself with the Whigs since his youth, the new prince regent

soo
 1760-1820

was obliged to accept a Tory government, and the Peninsular War

therefore continued unimpeded.
By April 1812 all four of the most important fortresses of Spain —
Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida in the north, and Badajos and Elvas to the
south — had fallen into British hands. But they had only done so after a
series of sieges whose huge fatalities required gallant self-sacrifice on the
part of the British soldiers. At Badajos Wellington wept at the appalling
waste of life when the storming of an incomplete breech required his men
to use the bodies of dead colleagues as bridges. Nevertheless his object had
been attained: the road to Spain lay open, and, beginning with a
magnificent victory at Salamanca, he began to achieve his aim of forcing
the French out of the south of Spain and keeping them out.
Wellington’s influence in the corridors of power over the war’s strategy
was now unexpectedly helped by the tragic death in May of the prime
minister Spencer Perceval. After Perceval had been shot by a crazed
businessman named Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons,
the new prime minister Lord Liverpool made Wellington’s old ally
Castlereagh foreign secretary. Meanwhile events in another part of
Europe were aiding the allies. It was in 1812 that Napoleon finally
overplayed his hand. He had parted company with the Russians over
who should have Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and, believing that
they were about to ally themselves with Britain as they were allowing
British goods into their ports, in June he made the outstanding error of
invading Russia.
His best soldiers were withdrawn from Spain to fight the new Russian
foe, and were replaced ’by raw recruits. But not only was Napoleon badly
overstretched. On its home territory the awakening colossus straddling the
continents of Europe and Asia, which stretched from Poland in the west to
China in the east, was too gigantic an enemy even for Napoleon. The
600,000 French soldiers he poured into Russia counted for nothing in its
vast empty spaces. Like France herself, Russia was the nation in arms; and
just as the French nation in arms in 1793 had proved too much for Europe,
the Russian nation in arms was too much for Napoleon.
By 19 October Napoleon decided to abandon his attempt to conquer
Russia, whose patriotic inhabitants were so determined to defeat him that
they had burned their own capital, Moscow. It was far more important to
return to his own empire, which he had been out of contact with for too
long. The long and dreadful retreat from Moscow began. The ravenous
once Grand Army broke up under the combined onslaught of hunger, the
Cossacks and what Napoleon’s renowned general Marshal Ney called
General Winter. Thousands of Frenchmen were abandoned to their fate.
They died where they lay. Too weak to move they were buried alive in the

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snow or became the food of wolves. Those who did not die — and the dead
numbered a staggering 170,000 — made their way home often barefoot and
without overcoats.
Unlike Wellington who provided for his men with meticulous care and
invented the rubber boot which bears his name, Napoleon did not look
after his soldiers. As Wellington said, ‘No man ever lost more armies than
he did.’ Wherever he was, and in whatever circumstances, even if his men
were starving, his aides were under orders to make sure that the ultimate
luxury of white bread was available for the emperor.
Meanwhile, encouraged by the humiliation of Napoleon’s retreat from
Moscow, the Prussians, Swedes and Austrians once more declared war on
Napoleon, their soldiers paid for by British subsidies. Now that their ranks
no longer consisted solely of patriotic Frenchmen, the emperor’s armies had
lost some of the vigour and esprit de corps which had won the breathtaking
campaigns of the past. Soldiers from Italy and the German Confederation
of the Rhine made up much of their numbers. The Napoleonic Empire was
beginning to pull apart under its own contradictions.
Against the inferior recruits in the French army in Spain, Wellington’s
already triumphant campaign turned into a rout. By 1813 after a superb
set of flanking movements he controlled the whole of the peninsula, and
had pressed the French right back to the Pyrenees. Then in October of that
year in central Europe the allies won a decisive victory. At the Battle of
Leipzig the troops of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Sweden threw Napoleon
and 190,000 French soldiers back across the Rhine. By January 1814 all
the German states had risen against Napoleon, impelled by a proud new
sense of German nationalism. Having defeated Soult, Wellington crossed
the Pyrenees to join the invasion of France as allied soldiers advanced from
all directions. By the end of March Tsar Alexander I was in Paris along
with leaders of the other victorious nations, while Napoleon himself was
forced to abdicate and retire to the Italian island of Elba.
The more far-sighted pointed out that Napoleon was far too near Italy
for safety, and that the people of France should be consulted on the
question of what sort of ruler they wished for. But the victors were too
frightened of another French Revolution rocking their own thrones to do
anything but immediately reimpose the Bourbon monarchy in the shape of
Louis XVIII, younger brother of Louis XVI. Deliberations about the future
shape of Europe were referred to a Congress at Vienna. But into the
peacemaking — conducted in a self-conscious return to the style of the pre-
war era by aristocratic diplomats in between glittering balls — broke
hideous news. There was no point in continuing: Napoleon had escaped
from Elba. The Hundred Days of his last campaign had begun.
He was on his way from the south back up to Paris with an army of his

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veterans which was snowballing by the hour. Marshal Ney, who had been
sent to capture Napoleon and had vowed to bring him back in a cage,
instead had joined his old comrade once more. The fat and unpopular
Louis XVIII made no attempt to rally the French people. They scarcely
knew him, as he had spent the war in England. All too mindful of his elder
brother’s dreadful fate, he quickly got out of the country in an undignified
scramble. Europe was back at war again.
It was decided that each great power should provide 150,000 men
against Napoleon. The British forces under Wellington, who was by now
not only a duke but commander-in-chief, were deputed with the
Prussians under Field Marshal Bliicher to defend the southern
Netherlands north-east of the French border. It was there that Napoleon
decided he should strike. He needed a conclusive engagement to defeat
that section of the allied armies to enable him to link up with his
followers at Antwerp before Russia and Austria had time to invade from
the east. The Battle of Waterloo turned out to be conclusive in another
way. It was the final end of the man Wellington called ‘the great disturber
of Europe’. But the situation was not straightforward. The victory of
Waterloo was far from predictable. As Wellington, the Iron Duke, would
himself say later, it was ‘a damned nice thing — the closest-run thing you
ever saw in your life’.
Wellington’s best, most highly disciplined peninsular veterans were far
away in America. They had been sent there for a new Anglo-American war
which had broken out in June 1812 over the carrying trade. What he was
left with was a force he described as ‘an infamous army’ — 27,000 raw
recruits most of whom had never held a gun in their lives. ‘I don’t know
what effect these men will have on the enemy,’ he remarked, ‘but by God
they frighten me.’ Moreover it was the emperor himself who was
advancing out from France on 12 June 1815 with his most devoted
partisans, veterans of twenty-two years’ campaigning.
Wellington himself had come to the conclusion that Napoleon would
need to strike quickly before the Prussian and British armies could work
out their strategy, but he had no idea just how soon that would be.
Absolute success and the complete defeat of Napoleon would depend on
the arrival of 30,000 Prussians under Bliicher, to bring the combined
Anglo-Dutch forces up to about 65,000, still 5,000 lighter than the French.
But the two armies were a considerable distance from one another.
Wellington and the Anglo-Dutch army were in the main path of the
emperor’s advance, and in the event the Prussians very nearly never turned
up to help them. For Napoleon’s intelligence was excellent as usual. He
decided that the Prussians must be attacked first at Ligny and put out of
action before he dealt with the Anglo-Dutch forces.

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As a result of Napoleon’s secrecy and swiftness it was not until the

afternoon of 15 June that Wellington discovered that his opponent had
crossed the French border and was at Charleroi with 70,000 men. ‘Napoleon
has humbugged me,’ said the furious duke. Not only were the Prussians
being attacked at Ligny, but 1,500 French skirmishers had attacked an
outlying Dutch division at Quatre Bras. This meant that the French were
advancing up the highway to Brussels and were only twenty miles away.
Wellington now ordered his army forward to concentrate at the cross-
roads of Quatre Bras in order to divert Ney from Blicher and the Prussians
at Ligny. Though there was an inconclusive draw between the two sides at
Quatre Bras, by the end of the day Wellington had succeeded in his limited
objective: the British had prevented the French getting any nearer Brussels.
Meanwhile the Prussians had retreated eighteen miles from Ligny to
Wavre, which was due east of Waterloo.
When the Prussian retreat became known, Wellington decided that
Waterloo was where he should fall back to. He would make his stand there
and hope that the Prussians would somehow come to his aid. The area
crossed the highroad between Napoleon’s troops at Charleroi and allied
headquarters at Brussels. It was bordered by the little village of Waterloo
in the north, now on the outskirts of modern Brussels, and the Chateau de
Hougoumont to the south with the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte in the
middle. Wellington had had his engineers survey the ground for the past
week for the maximum advantage. Every building, every peculiar feature
of the landscape, had to be adapted for defensive purposes.
In the middle of the night Wellington got word from the seventy-two-
year-old Bliicher, who had been seriously wounded at Ligny, that even if
the old general had to be tied to his horse he would personally lead out his
troops against Napoleon’s right wing the next day. As 18 June dawned,
there was a terrific downpour, so often the prelude to victory for
Wellington. The soldiers awoke to find themselves in a sea of mud, but
were soon up and about preparing for battle in their red coats. Everywhere
rode the duke in his cocked hat and civilian clothes, which he found more
comfortable than regimentals, raising everyone’s morale by his phlegmatic
and indefatigable presence.
Napoleon, for his part, rose late. He shared none of his generals” fears
about the British infantry or the battle itself, for he believed that the
Prussians had been too badly mauled by Ligny to be able to join up with
the British. Nor did he rate his opposite number. Rather curiously,
considering the havoc Wellington had inflicted on his armies, Napoleon
dismissed him as a ‘bad general’. He took his time waiting for the ground
to dry out for better use of his cavalry. That was another mistake, for every
hour that passed gave the Prussians more time to come to the aid of the

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Anglo-Dutch, hours during which Wellington was seen surreptitiously

looking at his watch and wondering where they were.
The Battle of Waterloo began with an attack by the French on the
Chateau de Hougoumont. Though it was set on fire, the British held it all
day, protecting Wellington’s right as well as preventing the French advance
up the highway to Brussels. The French fruitlessly used up troops trying to

Brussels, 18 June 1815.

capture it, but they never did. Meanwhile the battle raged as again and
again the French columns assailed the British positions without success.
The British were very carefully arranged in squares by Wellington. Drilled
in preceding months by their sergeant majors, the novice infantrymen had
quickly learned the ‘steadiness’ under fire that according to the duke made
the British the best soldiers in the world. They could not have had more
need of it. For against their squares came first the fearsome French infantry
columns and then for two hours the French cavalry. ‘This is hard
pounding, gentlemen,’ said Wellington at one point, ‘try who can pound
the longest.’
But each British soldier, as taught, continued calmly to take aim and
fire, and then kneel and let the man behind him, whose gun was cocked,
take aim and fire in his turn, as the first lot cleaned their guns and loaded
once more. The French cavalry with their glittering cuirasses and high
plumed helmets, galloped round and round the squares trying to put an
end to the steady firing by breaking them up and finding a way through

m5
 HANOVERIAN

the troops. But nothing could shake the steady British line, though they
could scarcely see in the smoke and scarcely hear in the din. All the while
the beautiful French horses and their superb riders crashed one by one
into the mud — looking, as Wellington later remembered, like so many
up-ended turtles. But the squares held. Later when he examined the
battlefield with its awful debris the duke found a whole square of men
who had died in formation rather than let the French pass. When
Wellington had been asked if he could defeat Napoleon, he had pointed
at a redcoated infantryman and said, ‘It all depends on him.’ His
confidence had been well placed.
Nevertheless, it had not been until mid-afternoon that Wellington got
sight of tiny flickering troop movements in the woods in the far distance to
the east. These were the first signs of the Prussians whose horses and guns
he had been anxiously watching for since daybreak. At six o’clock in the
evening La Haye Sainte, the farmhouse holding the centre, fell to the
French. It was then that Napoleon tried to drive in Wellington’s line
between the farmhouse and Hougoumont. But the French were held off by
the 52nd Regiment, whose attack on the left flank of the French ended in
the use of bayonets. Just before sundown Napoleon sent in his elite
Imperial Guard. But even they were beaten off by the allied infantry. For
the first time ever the most legendary warriors in Europe broke ranks and
abandoned the battlefield.
And then, just before eight o’clock with only about half an hour of
daylight remaining, the Prussians at last arrived. Bliicher was more dead
than alive, but he had not failed his allies. Here he was, his long white
moustache black with dust, but as energetic as ever, able to deploy his
army to chase the French back into France. From beneath his tree,
mounted on his chestnut mare Copenhagen, veteran of so many battles,
Wellington waved his hat three times towards the French. The British
could go forward at last. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’ he shouted. Up
to the ridge came line after line of scarlet-clad infantrymen, charging on to
pursue the terrified French. It was the end. Napoleon fled for Paris, where
he immediately abdicated in favour of his son, the King of Rome, hoping
that the child could become King of France in his stead. A short time later
he was safely isolated in mid-Atlantic on the island of St Helena, borne
there by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Bellerophon. He had thrown himself
on the mercy of the prince regent and the English, who, he said, were the
most generous of the allies. He died on St Helena six years later.

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 1760-1820

Radical Agitation (1815-1820)

The Battle of Waterloo rid the world of the menace to peace that Napoleon
represented so long as he was free. But the widespread support his
Hundred Days had received in France ensured that the peace settlement
made in 1815 was far more punitive than had been first envisaged.
Although France’s borders reverted to those of the pre-revolutionary
period, a humiliating army of occupation was put into northern France for
five years, paid for by the French and commanded by Wellington, who also
became Britain’s ambassador to Paris. To underline the fact that Napoleon
was no longer the master of Europe, all the treasures he and his soldiers
had looted from round the world, such as the four horses of St Mark’s in
Venice aid sumptuous paintings from the Vatican, were returned to their
rightful owners. So furious were the Parisians at this, for they now
considered that the loot belonged to them, that the works of art were taken
away at dead of night to avoid rioting.
All round France, which had terrorized Europe for a generation, her
neighbours were strengthened to prevent her breaking out again. The
former Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) were joined to Holland under a
prince of the House of Orange to give France a more formidable presence
on her north-east frontier. Further south her eastern border was more
strongly defined by consolidating the 300 pre-war principalities into a
German Confederation of thirty-nine states. Within the Confederation
Prussia was reinforced by the addition of two-fifths of the former kingdom
of Saxony and territory in the Rhineland. Such an entity would make the
French think twice before they tried to expand their borders again.
For similar reasons the mountain kingdom of Piedmont was also
enlarged. Norway was taken away from the Danes, who had been allies of
Napoleon until very recently, and combined in one kingdom with Sweden.
South of the Alps, though most of her princes were restored to the status
quo ante, Italy was back firmly under the protection of Austria. Russia, the
new player in European power politics whose giant armies overshadowed
the Congress, used the peace settlement to expand westward. The
conference agreed to her demand to include the so-called independent
kingdom of Poland in her empire; it was the price to be paid for Russian
aid in the war.
The political thrust of the post-1815 settlement was thus strongly
conservative, and where it did not interfere with the imperial ambitions of
the great powers, it was legitimist — that is, it restored the ruling families
who had been in power before the French Revolutionary Wars. As Lord
Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary in charge of the peace nego-
tiations put it, ‘We want disciplined force under sovereigns we can trust.’
The problem was that the conservative statesmen running the Congress,

5°97,
 HANOVERIAN

particularly the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich, were so determined

to bury the dangerous ideas which the French Revolution had set free in the
world that they completely ignored the wishes of the native populations.
For all the conservative aims of the peace, the history of the next
hundred years was to be the working out of the effects of the French
Revolution as the Poles, the Italians and the Germans revolted against the
settlement. The French Revolutionary ideals resurfaced in powerful
offspring, liberalism and nationalism, that were not confined to Europe.
Further wars and revolutionary convulsions produced a unified Italy, a
unified Germany and conflagration in the decaying Ottoman Empire.
England herself, whose Parliament already had a version of democracy in
place, by expanding the suffrage over the next hundred years did just
enough to prevent her own revolutions. There were sufficient far-sighted
members of both Houses to see what had to be changed to fit the post-
revolutionary age. Parliament itself could provide the safety valve so
lacking on the continent. Nevertheless it was a bumpy ride.
Though Britain’s conference negotiators were the Ultra or extreme Tory
Anglo-Irish aristocrats Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, their
sense of what a Parliamentary democracy would not tolerate made Britain
a leavening liberal presence among the repressive eastern European
powers. Britain refused to join a new international organization to police
Europe, an anti-democratic straitjacket called the Holy Alliance and
proposed by the excitable Tsar Alexander I. It would permit the great
powers to intervene in one another’s affairs if they thought that
Christianity, peace or justice were threatened, or, more bluntly, if the
government became too liberal for their liking. Given her representative
system of government Castlereagh and Wellington knew that Britain
would never countenance the powers interfering by force in a country’s
internal affairs. On Holy Alliance principles, one of the first places to be
invaded might be Britain.
What Britain could agree to was practical and pragmatic. In order to
keep the peace in Europe and prevent another Napoleon ever arising, the
victorious great powers, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia, formed a
Quadruple Alliance to stop by armed intervention any aggression by
France which would alter the Congress of Vienna settlement. Castlereagh
had been sufficiently impressed by the recent co-operation between the
powers to believe that a permanent system of conferences, like the
Congress of Vienna, which he called the Concert of Europe, was a good
way of hammering out issues before anyone resorted to war. By the second
Congress in 1818, France had finished paying her war indemnity early, so
Castlereagh got her occupying army withdrawn and France herself
welcomed back into the fold of great powers. He believed that this would

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ensure Europe’s future stability, for if France continued to be a European

pariah it would make her disruptive and dangerous.
However, the Congress system which Castlereagh had such hopes for
was hijacked by the Holy Alliance and Britain pretty well withdrew from
it. The next few years were dogged by uprisings and demands for more
liberal rule in Spain, Portugal, Naples and Piedmont. By 1820 the
Congresses were issuing claims that they had the right to put down
revolutions in foreign countries as well as clamping down on the press and
on liberal teachers in the German universities. As a result Britain no longer
attended in an official capacity, sending observers to Congress meetings
rather than ambassadors. Britain, said Castlereagh, whose own king was
the produét of a revolution, could not logically ‘deny to other countries the
same right of changing their government’ by similar revolutions. Thus by
the 1820s Britain was once more the friend of constitutional change
abroad, as she had been before the French Revolution.
As befitted the nation over which shone the glory of Waterloo and the
honour of removing the menace of Napoleon, and which had financed a
great deal of the war, Britain did extremely well out of the peace. After
Trafalgar she had seized the opportunity to rid herself of any rivals at sea,
and she remained the dominant country in the carrying trade. She now
usefully expanded her trading bases throughout the world, adding Malta,
the Ionian Islands, the small island of Heligoland off the coast of Hanover
and some important former French West Indian islands — St Lucia, Tobago
and Mauritius — to her colonial possessions. The route to India was
safeguarded by her continuing to hold the Cape of Good Hope, which she
had captured from the Dutch, as well as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), at the
foot of India. Britain’s naval and commercial supremacy was confirmed.
Thanks to the British delegation the 1815 Peace Treaty contained within
it a clause condemning slavery, in the face of Spanish and Portuguese
protests. The efficient mobilization of British public opinion by the Anti-
Slavery Society made it impossible for Castlereagh to draw up a treaty
determining the shape of post-war Europe without registering a protest at
the continued reliance of European economies on slave labour. By 1817, in
return for £70,000, Portugal and Spain had both abolished their slave
trade. The Netherlands had outlawed it the year before, and it continued
to be outlawed in all French territories, as it had been by the French
revolutionary government in 1793.
What has been called Britain’s second Hundred Years War ended with
France most conclusively beaten. In the new century Russia was the power
whose activities Britain regarded with the most suspicion. But now that
peace was established the government’s most pressing problem was the
domestic situation. The severe hardship and dislocation caused by twenty

5°9
 HANOVERIAN

years of war combined with the industrial revolution was tearing the
country apart. What was happening at home needed urgent attention and
bold surgery. But surgery in the shape of Parliamentary reform, which the
starving working class and the disfranchised middle classes were united in
calling for, the Tories were most reluctant to grant.
The British government’s sympathy for liberal movements abroad did
not extend to democratic campaigns at home. The end of the war had given
these campaigns new impetus for it exacerbated the already miserable
living conditions of the working classes. Even during the war the Radical
and democratic electoral movements had grown hugely because the
galloping pace of increased mechanization had caused a steady stream of
people to be laid off from their jobs. Social distress convinced them they
required a voice in Parliament to make the government more responsive to
their needs. In Parliament reform was called for by Radical MPs such as
Henry Brougham the legal reformer and Sir Francis Burdett and their allies,
the greatly reduced Whigs, including Lord John Russell and Lord Grey.
From 1811, the year the Prince of Wales became regent, there was
rioting among labourers in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Nottingham in
protest against the use of improved textile machinery in place of hand
labour. At times hardship had been so acute that the poor had to sell their
household furniture for food. Many of them, like the Luddites, skilled
stocking-makers in Nottingham under the leadership of Ned Ludd,
smashed the machinery that was making them redundant, for Pitt’s
Combination Acts had prevented any bargaining with their masters. In
1813 seventeen of them had been executed for their protests.
In 1815 their situation was made worse by 200,000 ex-soldiers flooding
home to seek jobs, as well as the abrupt closing of the factories that during
the war had produced uniforms, tents and armaments. British textile
industries were badly affected by the swift post-war revival of
manufacturing on the continent. As for farming, agricultural wages were
still being kept low by the impact of the Speenhamland system of support
from the rates. Even outside agriculture wages had remained unchanged
since the war began. Prices, however, had risen 200 per cent, more in the
case of bread due to a recent run of poor harvests and the high cost of
cultivating moorland during the war. In the days before enclosures when
factory workers had been subsistence farmers, the price of bread would
never have affected them, but now they were no longer in a position to
grow their own food. What was needed was cheaper food.
For manufacturers the solution was simple. They imported cheap
foreign wheat to feed their workers. But the landowners believed that was
ruining British farmers. Without thought for interests other than their
own, and with astonishing insensitivity, in 1815 their Tory representatives

510
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in the Commons and Lords passed a new Corn Law. Henceforth foreign
corn could be imported only if the price of wheat rose to a certain level,
eighty shillings a bushel. In 1815 when the Corn Law Bill was passing
through Parliament there were furious riots round the Houses of
Parliament as starving workers tried to use physical force to get MPs to
vote against the bill, which they had no other means of resisting.
Lord Liverpool’s government, in particular the alarmist home secretary
Addington (the former prime minister, who was now Lord Sidmouth),
didn’t see that the hungry people smashing machinery or taking to the
streets had no other means of redress. They believed that these outbreaks
marked the beginning of Britain’s own long-deferred revolution. The
period between 1815 and 1822 was unprecedented for protests against the
government and the savagery of official reaction. One of the chief
hindrances to dealing intelligently with the post-war social and economic
dislocation was the government’s identification of any demands by the
working man with the Jacobinism which had destroyed the property-
owning classes in France.
The government panicked. Laws were passed which punished machine-
breaking with the death sentence. As the Romantic poet Lord Byron said
in an angry speech to his fellow peers in the House of Lords, a life was now
valued at less than a stocking frame. Since no police force existed,
Sidmouth used spies to try and round up the ringleaders. Instead these spies
acted as agents provocateurs, deliberately inciting isolated pockets of the
most disaffected workers to overthrow the government and encourage
mob violence when what most of the protesters actually wanted was
specific reforms within the system. For the miracle was that despite the
widespread misery there was no real uprising by the British people. Most
people believed in the ability of Parliament to right their wrongs. They
marched and attended meetings to discuss Parliamentary reform addressed
by Radicals like the most famous journalist of his generation, William
Cobbett, and by speakers like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. Though the govern-
ment might see Hunt as a dangerous agitator, like Cobbett he agitated for
reforms through Parliament.
Unfortunately in December 1816 at a vast Parliamentary-reform
gathering at Spa Fields in Clerkenwell organized by the Radicals, the
machinations of Sidmouth’s agents and extremist elements ensured that all
the worse suspicions of the government were confirmed. The meeting was
taken over by the Spenceans, the revolutionary followers of Thomas
Spence who believed all land should be nationalized. What had been
intended as a peaceful demonstration turned into a riot. Some of the
demonstrators were flying the tricolore and wearing the Caps of Liberty
which had been so prominent during the massacres in Revolutionary

Ce
 HANOVERIAN

France. Calling for a Committee of Public Safety they began to march east
to seize the Tower of London, but were broken up at the Royal Exchange
in the City.
Similar disturbances, none of them serious, continued throughout 1817.
Then, for a year, good harvests and cheaper bread calmed the country. But
in 1819 the combination of bad harvests, which once again meant that
people couldn’t feed themselves, and the failure of the Radical Sir Francis
Burdett’s bill in favour of universal manhood suffrage, caused violent
episodes to start up again. Still the government refused to see the agitation
for Parliamentary reform for what it was. Tragically when an enormous
and peaceful demonstration in favour of reform took place on the outskirts
of Manchester at St Peter’s Fields, in August 1819, it was treated as the
beginning of the uprising.
Because the Radicals abhorred violence and wanted to distance
themselves from people like the Spenceans, no one was allowed to carry
anything which might possibly be interpreted as a weapon. The authorities
were to have no excuse to claim provocation. The presence of women,
children and indeed babies in the crowd was intended to show once and
for all that these were demonstrators who believed in peaceful ways. As
they came on with hand-painted banners waving above them to ask for the
reform of the Corn Laws, votes for everyone and the representation of their
areas in Parliament the only danger they posed was in their numbers. They
were 40,000 strong. Nevertheless the atmosphere was friendly and orderly;
the mothers had provisions for their families in their covered baskets.
The meeting had been approved by local magistrates, but they had since
lost their nerve. At St Peter’s Fields, therefore, were drawn up large
numbers of yeomen cavalry, some of whom had been at Waterloo. Their
behaviour now was far from distinguished. When the Radical speaker
Henry Hunt got to the platform, he saw that magistrates were there
waiting for him. In order to prevent any trouble he said that he was quite
willing to be arrested. But the magistrates insisted that he speak. Halfway
through his address, however, they sent soldiers in to arrest him. Not
unnaturally the crowd disliked this. As with indignant cries they tried to
stop Hunt being dragged off, the magistrates told the waiting cavalry to
charge into the crowd.
Into the mass of wives and babies and banners rode the soldiers. Hewing
and hacking with their sabres, their horses’ enormous hooves tossing
children into the air, they killed eleven people, including a child, and badly
injured 400 more. The disgusted nation gave the event the sarcastic
nickname ‘Peterloo’. From every section of society a torrent of indignation
poured out against the oppressive Tory government. The son of the MP for
Horsham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a powerful poem The Mask of

512
 1760-1820

Anarchy, advising the victims of the government to shake off their chains.
“You are many, they are few,’ he told them.
The Tory government followed Peterloo with the repressive Six Acts.
These made it almost impossible to hold outdoor meetings, tried to destroy
the Radical press by extending stamp duties to all kinds of journals which
put most of them beyond the reach of the working man, widened
magistrates’ powers to search private property for seditious literature and
got rid of jury trials in certain cases. Thwarted by such methods Radical
agitation died down. Only the discovery of the Cato Street Conspiracy in
1820, a plot to assassinate the Cabinet organized by a Spencean named
Thistlewood who intended to set up a provisional government, did a little
to convintee public opinion that perhaps behind the reformers a hideous
revolutionary conspiracy really had been lurking.
The Radical movement’s imagination was soon caught by the plight of
the prince regent’s wife, Caroline of Brunswick. For in 1820 George III
died. The virtuous young king of golden hair and iron will had long ago
declined into a hopeless lunatic at Windsor, his hair long and white.
Despite his condition the nation genuinely mourned a man who had been
such a familiar figure for so long — he had reigned for fifty-nine years — and
was known for his unassuming and simple ways and his exemplarily
uxorious relationship with Queen Charlotte. The sybaritic and
sophisticated prince regent at last became king as George IV after a regency
of nine years.

o75
 George IV
(1820-1830)

George IV was renowned for his exquisite and exotic taste, his knowledge
of the arts and a set which was as fast-living and grand as his father’s court
had been homely. On his accession to the throne in 1820 he toured his
dominions, winning huge acclaim in Scotland. The visit was masterminded
by the highly influential novelist Sir Walter Scott, whose popular historical
works like Rob Roy had completely rehabilitated the treacherous Scots as
noble and magnificent savages. George IV was cast into ecstasies by tartan.
Tartan everything — trews, curtain material and little boxes — became all
the rage, with the wild romantic Highlands replacing the Lake District as
a popular destination for the feeling and artistic. As prince regent, George
and his architect John Nash had made the little seaside village of
Brighthelmstone in East Sussex into the smart resort of Brighton. Even
today Nash’s rich neo-classical style determines much of London’s
character — he designed Regent Street, Carlton House Terrace, Trafalgar
Square, Marble Arch, St James’s Park, and, by doubling Buckingham
House in size, Buckingham Palace. But Nash abandoned that style to build
Prinny a fabulous palace, the fairytale Brighton Pavilion whose onion
domes seem stolen from the shores of the Bosphorus.
The prince recent had lived at Brighton until his father’s death with his
highly respectable Roman Catholic mistress Mrs Fitzherbert. As we have
seen, to assuage her principles when he was Prince of Wales he had taken
part in a marriage ceremony with her, though as he had not asked his
father’s permission it was invalidated by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772,
and there was therefore no danger of a Catholic heir succeeding to the
throne.
In 1795 the extravagant prince was forced to marry his first cousin
Caroline of Brunswick on the understanding that Parliament would
exonerate his colossal debts and increase his Civil List income. But he
found her so unattractive that he left her three days after his only child
Princess Charlotte was born. He took mistresses, and even for a period
resumed living with Mrs Fitzherbert, all the while showing great hostility
to his wife. As a result the Princess of Wales indulged her taste for louche

514
 1820-1830
ge ES ert Fe
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Mrs Fitzherbert, mistress of the Prince Regent. He secretly and illicitly

married her in 1785.

company, a taste which eventually led to rumours that she had had a child
out of wedlock. By 1806 the prince had forced the government of the day

715
 HANOVERIAN

to launch an investigation into her behaviour in order to get rid of her. This
was called the Delicate Investigation. Her husband said that her house at
Blackheath had become the centre of much scurrilous rumour, though no
more scurrilous than that surrounding the Prince of Wales himself. But
nothing much could be found to justify divorce proceedings, and the
princess eventually went abroad, wandering from watering hole to
watering hole with a further series of not very distinguished admirers.
The death of his father persuaded George IV, who had quite lost his
handsome looks and had become extremely obese despite miracles of
corseting, that it was the moment to rid himself of Queen Caroline once
and for all. But his wife had other plans. As soon as her father-in-law died,
she came rushing back to England to demand that she be crowned beside
her husband and that her name be reinstated in the list of members of the
royal family who were prayed for in church every Sunday (the king had
had it removed). But George would not be dissuaded from a divorce. To
achieve this there had to be a trial of the queen before Parliament. The
feeble behaviour of the government, which did nothing to stop the trial for
fear of the king replacing it with a Whig administration, added to the
people’s contempt for the Tories. The ill-treated queen, who seemed a
symbol of their own repression, became immensely popular.
A Bill of Pains and Penalties, which was in effect a divorce bill, was
brought before the House of Lords. The queen’s alleged lovers and
members of her retinue, who were mainly Italian, were cross-examined in
public about her private life. Caroline was defended by the most brilliant
lawyer of his time, Henry Brougham, the Radical MP who was a fervent
supporter of all the great causes of the day — legal and parliamentary
reform and religious emancipation. Thanks to his advocacy the trial of
Queen Caroline ended in fiasco for the government, making them more
loathed than ever. The divorce bill was only just carried through the Lords,
but was passed by so few votes (nine) that it was never introduced into the
House of Commons.
Though she had been informed that she was to play no part in the
ceremony, the poor queen insisted on attending George IV’s coronation at
Westminster Abbey in July 1821. After being refused admittance to the
Abbey, she moved on to Westminster Hall, where the royal party was
gathered, and beat her fists on the doors until she had to be removed. It
was no way to treat anyone, let alone a granddaughter of George II and the
estranged wife of a king. Less than three weeks later Queen Caroline died
at Hammersmith, perhaps of a stomach disorder, her condition probably
aggravated by the humiliating way she had been treated.
Although the government under Lord Liverpool was afterwards
notorious for being the most repressive for a century, within it were the

516
 1820-1830

seeds of change. The Cato Street Conspiracy proved to be the point when
fear of revolution in Britain reached its climax. After it, a new more
progressive era in Britain began, heralded by the death in 1822 of Viscount
Castlereagh, the inspiration of the more conservative section of the party.
Without Castlereagh, the only way Lord Liverpool could survive as leader
was by giving office to the more liberal section of the Tory party, who were
more influenced by manufacturers than by landowners. Indeed one of
them, the new home secretary Robert Peel, sprang from the recently
established manufacturing aristocracy. He was the grandson of a
Lancashire weaver who had made a fortune.
The leader of the liberal Tories, George Canning, who was in favour of
Catholic Emancipation, became foreign secretary, while at the Board of
Trade was William Huskisson, another disciple of Pitt who was convinced
that free trade was the answer to the world’s ills. Amore humane influence
could now be felt at the heart of government, though Parliamentary reform
continued to be evaded. Canning believed that prosperity would be the
salvation of Britain and would do away with the need for it. And
prosperity he, Huskisson and Frederick Robinson, the chancellor of the
Exchequer, believed would come if Britain could be freed from as much
protectionism as the country would bear.
The energetic voices of the manufacturers of Birmingham and
Manchester, with whom the Canningite Tories were in close touch,
convinced Huskisson to reduce the duty on a great number of raw
materials, making it much cheaper to manufacture goods, while the duty
on manufactured goods themselves was also reduced. Huskisson ended the
mercantile system and the disputes over the carrying trade which had been
the cause of such trouble between Britain and other countries, most
recently the United States (the Anglo-American War of 1812-15 had ended
in compromise, though not before British forces had captured Washington
DC and set fire to the White House). Britain was now such a successful
trading nation that she could do away with these remnants of a bygone
age. Under the new system of ‘reciprocity’ Huskisson’s legislation
permitted treaties with foreign countries in the carrying trade which would
allow their ships to use British harbours and vice versa.
But perhaps the most important figure in Liverpool’s government was
the home secretary Robert Peel, the shy, stiff redhead who had taken over
from Sidmouth in 1822. Britain’s social fabric was damaged almost to the
point of no return, and many abuses needed radical redress. Peel was a man
of conservative views, but an active conscience allied to a strong sense of
justice meant that under his leadership the Home Office became an agency
for social reform. Like most reformers of the first half of the nineteenth
century, Peel was heavily influenced by the Utilitarian ideas of the English

517
 HANOVERIAN

Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Encapsulated in the

proposition that the aim of government should be to achieve ‘the greatest
happiness of the greatest number’, Bentham’s thinking had a revolutionary
effect on the British.
The very fact that the hours worked in the new mills had been
questioned since the first Factory Act in 1802 was a sign of a more
humanitarian mood — no one had previously tried to limit the hours men
worked. A new Factory Act in 1819 which prevented children under nine
years old working in cotton mills showed that there continued to be
widespread support for state intervention in certain social issues. Then,
from 1822, within Britain that spirit of progressive reform knocked off
course by the French Revolution reasserted itself at government level.
Advised by the pioneers of criminal law and prison reform Sir James
Mackintosh, the Quaker Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, Peel did much
to improve prison conditions. With the employment of trained staff,
prisoners were treated better and the idea of rehabilitating them to fit them
for a new life outside jail began to take hold. The use of iron fetters, so
much in evidence even today in twenty-first-century American prisons, was
forbidden unless it had the consent of a judge.
A harsh penal code had been the eighteenth century’s legacy to the
nineteenth. Above all there were 200 felonies for which the penalty was
death. Although execution for pickpocketing had been abolished in 1808,
shoplifting continued to be a capital offence. But since so many
unimportant crimes received the death penalty most London juries on
principle refused ever to convict. In 1823, hoping that juries would enforce
the law if the sentences were more appropriate, Peel halved the number of
such crimes and reduced legal material which had been accumulating since
the thirteenth century to a few comprehensible statutes.
Next it was the turn of the working man to be treated as a human being.
In 1824, after pressure from the Radicals, Peel took the great step forward
of repealing the Combination Acts and restoring trade unions. Now
employees could act collectively to raise their wages or to petition for
shorter hours. Peel had none of the Tory Ultras’ fear of the workers
because he knew them from his father’s textile mills. He believed that they
had rights. ‘Men who have no property except their manual skill and
strength’, he said, ‘ought to be allowed to confer together, if they think fit,
for the purpose of determining at what rate they will sell their property.’
Behind the figures and research which convinced Peel and Huskisson
that trade unions would not wreck trade was a tailor with a shop in the
Charing Cross Road named Francis Place. But Place was no ordinary
tailor. He was a Parliamentary lobbyist who was passionate about the
extension of the franchise and whose shop became a research library and

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meeting place for the Radical movement. Like William Cobbett, he was
convinced that the way to salvation for the working classes was through
Parliament rather than revolution.
In 1826 when a new trade depression swept across England, Peel —
against the wishes of many Tories — passed an emergency law allowing
some cheap foreign wheat to come on to the market. He was accused of
bowing to the mob, but he believed it was more important to assuage
distress temporarily, so that the poor were not also starving as they
contended with unemployment. His forethought prevented a famine as
there was a bad harvest that autumn to add to everyone’s problems. Peel
refused to view outbreaks of violence as an attempt to overthrow
government. He was sympathetic to what he saw as a problem which was
‘fundamentally one of human suffering’.
In 1829 Peel established the first Metropolitan Police Force, set up by
Parliament with a commissioner at Scotland Yard directly responsible to
the Home Office. He had been convinced by James Mackintosh, and by his
own experience with a policing experiment as a young chief secretary in
Ireland, that punishment was not a deterrent. A proper organization
dedicated to preventing crime was the way forward. The success of the
Metropolitan Police Force soon encouraged its imitation across the
country, for crime figures were rising in the new industrial towns.
Previously maintaining law and order in England had depended on the
amateur talents of nightwatchmen, parish constables and the threat of
coming up against the magistrate. But what worked in small villages where
everybody knew one another was no longer feasible in crowded
conurbations with shifting populations. By not arming the police, Peel
silenced the old objections to a professional police force becoming the
instruments of tyranny they were held to be abroad. The police were
forbidden to act as spies like Sidmouth’s old network of agents
provocateurs who had caused so much misery in the past. The new
constables became so popular that they got the nickname they retained
until very recently of Peelers and Bobbies, after their creator Robert Peel.
And abroad George Canning, the new foreign secretary, reclaimed
Britain’s old role as the foe of absolutism among the nations striving to be
free. The son of an actress, Canning had a gift for the dramatic gesture
which had been lacking in the austere Castlereagh. Britain stopped sending
even observers to Congress meetings because, Canning said, the British
people did not like ‘their representative communing in secret with despotic
powers’. In 1826, the British fleet frightened off the Congress powers in the
shape of Spain and France as they set about invading Portugal to stop King
John granting his country a liberal constitution. Ever since the Peninsular
War, Spain had been in awe of British military power, and as soon as

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Canning showed he meant business by sending 4,500 troops to Lisbon

conveyed by a large British fleet the Spanish retreated. Portugal was
allowed to have her constitution.
In 1823 in defiance of the rest of the powers Canning recognized the
independence of the South American colonies which had revolted against
Spain. Not only did he threaten to use the Royal Navy, which was
undefeated since Trafalgar, against any power that tried to recapture them
for Spain, he enlisted the aid of the youthful United States of America,
prodding President Monroe into declaring that South America was a
sphere of interest to be treated as her own backyard. The so-called Monroe
Doctrine stated that the United States would treat any European attempt
to colonize the American continent or interfere with any of its countries or
regimes as an act of war. In a memorable phrase Canning proclaimed, ‘I
called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’
Recognizing the independence of the new republics of Buenos Aires,
Colombia and Mexico made George IV so angry that he refused to read
out the news to Parliament, pretending that he had lost his false teeth.
Underlying Canning’s heroics was trade. For 300 years British merchants
had tried to penetrate the old Spanish stamping ground of South America.
Now they had independence the ex-Spanish colonies were enjoying a
lucrative trade with British merchants which Canning was determined to
preserve.
Although the Concert of Europe was almost dead as a system of political
co-operation, it lasted just long enough for Canning to achieve
independence for Greece from the Ottoman Empire. It was with the Greek
revolt against Turkish rule in 1821 that the first manifestation arose of
what would be one of the great problems of the nineteenth century. Known
to British diplomats as the Eastern Question, the issue was how far Russia
should be allowed to expand into the power vacuum left by the declining
Ottoman or Turkish Empire which stretched from the Balkans to Persia
(Iran). Since the late eighteenth century the British had been alarmed by
Russian ambitions to expand southwards, whether west into the Balkans
or east into Persia, which directly threatened the route to India. Despite
disapproval of Turkish rule which had given the country a bad name for
centuries, the British Foreign Office believed that the Ottoman Empire was
a bulwark against Russia. It had to be defended in its entirety because
otherwise it would disintegrate.
The Greek Wars of Independence offered just the chance to move south
that Russia desired, for Greece had warm-water ports and an outlet on to
the trading lake of the Mediterranean. By treaty with Turkey Russia had
some notional rights to defend the Christian populations of the Muslim
Ottoman Empire. Russian interest in the fate of the Greeks had been

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quickened by the personality of the new tsar Nicholas I, who acceded to

the throne in the autumn of 1825. He was keenly religious, and the Greeks
who belonged to the Orthodox Church were not only useful potential
empire material but his co-religionists. Posing as the champions of their
Orthodox co-religionists the Russians might take over the Greek
peninsula. This Canning was determined to prevent.
But though Britain’s official aim was to prop up the ailing Turkish
Empire, as it would be for the next fifty years, in the case of the Greek Wars
British public opinion and Canning were fervently on the side of the
Greeks. Every cultivated Englishman in the early nineteenth century was
classically educated, and Latin and Greek philosophy and literature were
the main “subjects at university. When the Greek war broke out, it
immediately attracted a host of British volunteer fighters paid for by
Philhellenic societies which had sprung up everywhere. Among them was
the living embodiment of Romanticism, Lord Byron.
In 1827 after five years of war the Ottoman forces were joined by
Egyptian troops and began to overrun Greece. Although Britain was
officially neutral, British public opinion — outraged by Turkish massacres
of Greeks — demanded in no uncertain terms that the government do
something. As a responsive and modern politician Canning saw that he
could not ignore this upsurge of feeling. He came to the conclusion that, if
Russia was going to intervene, in this instance the best hope for the future
was to work alongside her, in the old Concert of Europe. With the backing
of France and Russia, he negotiated a deal that in reality obtained freedom
for Greece from the murderous Turks while it nominally prevented the
dismantling of an important section of the Ottoman Empire. Remaining in
theory a part of the empire and having to pay Turkish taxes, Greece would
in practice have self-government.
In 1827 Lord Liverpool had a stroke, and Canning took over as prime
minister. However, the enlightened Canning believed in Catholic
Emancipation and this prompted all members of the government who were
against it — led by Wellington and Peel — to resign, because they believed it
would be the end of the Union with Ireland. Canning was in any case never
popular among many of the Tories, who tended to think he was too clever
by half, and in order to carry on in government he was forced to bring into
his Cabinet some Whigs, who had been a negligible force in politics for
twenty years, headed by the youthful Lord John Russell. The price of their
support was a bill that repealed the Test and Corporation Acts against
Nonconformists.
But by 1828 the gifted Canning was dead, after a long period of very
poor health. His place as prime minister was briefly taken by Frederick
Robinson, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, now Lord Goderich.

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But in January 1828 Goderich had to resign because his Cabinet could not
agree over the navy’s sinking of the Egyptian and Turkish fleet at the Battle
of Navarino in support of the Greeks, Vice-Admiral Codnngton having
acted on his own initiative. George IV offered the premiership to the Duke
of Wellington, who violently disapproved of this destruction of Turkish
ships that could be useful in the future against the Russians. Welligton
created a government of some liberal followers of Cannimg’s, such as
Viscount Palmerston and Huskisson, and brought back the Tones who
had resigned over Catholic Emancipation, including Peel.
Exceptional soldier though he was, Wellington was no diplomat and he
quickly undid Canning’s delicate foorwork im the east. Canning’s aim had
been to contain the Russians by forcing them to act in concert, but when
Wellington apologizedto the Turks for the Battle of Navarino
the Russians
were disgusted that the allies had not finished off the job and mvaded
Turkey in 1828. The conservative Wellington’s fear of revolution made
him the enemy of any kind of independence struggles. But he now saw that
it was better to make sure that Greek independence was real independence
with international guarantees, otherwise Russia would make Greece part
of her own empire. He therefore led the way to a tripartite agreement
between Britain, France and Russia which enabled Greece to become free
in 1829. It was the first blow in the dismembering of what was to be called
the Sick Man of Europe, but there was nothing else for it.
Meanwhile at home the liberal wing of the Tory party found the Iron
duke too reactionary for them to stomach. He treated them like subalterns
whose role was to get on with obeying his orders. Soon after the repeal of
the Test and Corporation Acts all the liberals such as Huskisson, William
Lamb (the future Lord Melbourne) and Palmerston resigned. Wellington
was left to govern with Peel and the Ultra Tories. The repeal of the Test
and Corporation Acts had been a sign of a growing desire to end religious
discrimination, even if thanks to Walpole the Test Acts were honoured in
the breach. Within the year a daring election campaign in Ireland forced
Wellington to bring in Catholic Emancipation.
For some time a number of politicians had believed that Catholic
Emancipation would have to take place. But the several bills introduced to
give the Catholics the vote had been rejected by the House of Lords, a
number of whose members had Irish estates. As there were very few
Catholics in Britain by now, its importance lay in its application to Ireland.
Pitt had given Insh Catholics the vote at the end of the eighteenth century,
but as George III had prevented total Emancipation Catholics still could
not hold any official positions. They might no longer be penalized for
practising their religion, but they could not be magistrates, judges, county
sheriffs or members of Parliament.

7 ev tv
 1820-1830

Politicians like Canning had believed that the only way to bring order to
a country with a stupendous murder rate was to give the Catholics more of
a stake in running it. With proper responsibilities, the Catholic community
might give their backing to law-enforcement, but, excluded from power,
they saw the magistracy as part of an alien system administered by the
Protestant ascendancy. The problem was that most Irish Catholics were
against the Union and were increasingly in favour of repealing it so that
they could govern themselves.
By the late 1820s the Catholics in Ireland had become much more
militant. This was partly the effect of a new kind of patriotic priest turned
out at Maynooth in Kildare ever since the Napoleonic Wars had cut off the
Irish from their usual seminaries on the continent. The anger and
resentment which in the past had been damped down by an apolitical
clergy were also being stirred up by a well-off barrister named Daniel
O’Connell. A speaker of genius in a country renowned for persuasive
tongues, he soon became, in the old cliché, the uncrowned King of Ireland.
O’Connell set out to create a situation in which it would be impossible
to refuse the Catholics the vote. His organization, the Catholic Board, was
publicized from every Catholic pulpit, becoming an extremely powerful
pressure group which was funded by a ‘Catholic rent’ of a penny each
month and orchestrated continuous agitation for Catholic Emancipation.
When the Catholic Board was banned, as it had all the hallmarks of a
political organization, O’Connell and his friends simply revived it under a
different name, the Catholic Association.
Thanks to the work of the priests and O’Connell, at the next election in
1828 the forty-shilling Roman Catholic freeholders in the counties (the
property qualification entitling them to vote) had the courage to rebel
against their powerful Protestant landlords. They voted instead for
Catholic candidates fielded by the Catholic Association. It had always been
theoretically possible for Catholics to stand for Parliament, as long as they
took the oath of supremacy when elected. Of course in practice it never
happened because swearing in that way would mean denying their faith
and acknowledging that the British monarch was head of the Church. But,
argued O’Connell, who was to know whether the elected MP would or
would not take the oath? He was gambling on the expectation that, once
a Catholic had been elected to Parliament, it would be extremely
embarrassing for the English if they were to prevent him taking his seat.
After all, Parliament’s refusal to allow the legally elected John Wilkes to
take his seat had created an uproar sixty years before.
To the government’s consternation O’Connell was returned as the MP
for Clare, by an overwhelming majority. The Catholic Association warned
that at the next election it would send back not just one but sixty Roman

§23
 HANOVERIAN

Catholic MPs. The system was in deadlock. Wellington was certain that
Ireland would erupt in civil war if O’Connell was not allowed to take his
seat at Westminster. Although only a year before the duke and Peel had
both resigned office rather than serve under the pro-Emancipation
Canning, Wellington now accepted that he had been outwitted — he had to
support Catholic Emancipation and bow to force majeure. Wellington’s
prestige as an upholder of the Protestant establishment and as an Irish
Protestant grandee convinced the king that Emancipation had to be
granted. Extremely reluctantly, for like his father he believed that his
coronation vows bound him to uphold the Protestant religion, George IV
agreed. O’Connell’s effrontery had won the day.
From 1829 onwards Roman Catholics could sit in Parliament, though
they still could not become lord chancellor or prime minister. Wellington
would not allow O’Connell to take his seat in the House of Commons this
time round, however, as the Catholic Relief Act had not been passed when
he was elected. To get his revenge Wellington also dramatically increased
the property qualifications for freeholders to £10 a year, putting the vote
out of reach of many of the peasants and small farmers who had returned
O°’Connell. Nevertheless quite enough supporters remained to get
O’Connell returned as MP at the next election.
But not only did Catholic Emancipation mark the beginning of the end
of the old establishment, it marked the end of Tory rule. The Ultra Tories
were furious with Wellington because of what they considered his betrayal,
and in 1830 they stabbed him in the back by voting with the Whigs to
remove him and Peel from government. Their actions brought a Whig
government to power for the first time since 1807.

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 William IV
(1830-1837)

The gathering sense in England in 1830 of the old order passing away was
enhanced 9n 26 June by the death of George IV. The First Gentleman of
Europe, as he was known, had epitomized the glittering rule of the
aristocracy. A few months later the opening of the first long-distance steam
railway line between Manchester and Liverpool was another indication
that a clean break was about to be made with the past. The railway project
was considered so exciting that the opening ceremony was attended by
most of the Cabinet, including the prime minister the Duke of Wellington.
They watched George Stevenson’s celebrated steam engine, the Rocket,
inaugurate the line.
But England was not only about to be transformed by the different pace
of rail travel. Her population in the next decades would have gadgets their
ancestors could not have dreamed of. They would soon be using the
electric telegraph, invented by the Englishmen Charles Wheatstone and
William Cooke, and enjoying what its English pioneers William Fox-
Talbot and J. B. Reade called the photograph, but which was known in
France as the daguerreotype. In the first steamships they would be crossing
the Atlantic in ten days rather than the three months it took by sail. They
began to have the sort of plumbing not seen in England since the Romans,
to the great benefit of their health. They read by the gas light created by
William Murdock at Watt’s steam-engine factory in the late eighteenth
century which had become commonplace in towns. And, now that they
didn’t have to strain their eyes by candlelight, they devoured vast three-
decker novels by popular writers such as Charles Dickens, who would
become the figures of the age, as well as its harshest critics.
With all these changes went a dramatic alteration in the governing of
Britain. The dynamic commercial classes responsible for her newfound
wealth would no longer be denied a share in guiding her destiny. In 1832,
despite opposition from Wellington and much of the aristocracy, the
Reform Bill delayed for forty years was passed. It had been accompanied
by unprecedented middle-class demonstrations directed by Radical
political activists and the reanimated spectre of revolution. What’s more,

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the greatest Victorian engineers. He built

Paddington station, the Clifton suspension bridge at Bristol and railways in India.

there would be two more Reform Bills later in the century which extended
the franchise further than that of any other European country. Only ninety
years later every adult male, regardless of what he owned, would have the
vote.
It was the beginning of a seismic shift in political consciousness. The
population was no longer divided into gentry, lawyers, merchants, a few
educators and farmers, as it had been for hundreds of years. There were

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many thousands of professionals participating in the new occupations

thrust up by the ever increasing permutations of the industrial revolution.
They were boiler makers, machine-tool makers and, as the steam age took
hold, engineers of every description, from mining to civil. They might not
have had what was considered to be a gentleman’s education based on the
classics, but they were full of self-confidence, and highly opinionated.
There were too many without a vote in the giant new conurbations of
Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds to find it amusing that the rotten
borough of Old Sarum had seven electors who between them returned two
members of Parliament — though the ‘town’ consisted of no more than a
ruined castle on a hill.
The principal towns were beginning to build populations of hundreds
and thousands of people. The great leaps forward in the iron and steel
industry made throughout the eighteenth century by generations of
inventive ironmasters like the Darby family, who discovered that pit coal
could smelt iron more effectively than charcoal, moved the iron trade
permanently from the Weald of Sussex to the north. Towns like Derby,
Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow which had a history of metalworking
— small manufactured iron and steel items of all descriptions, from hooks
and eyes to weapons — grew exponentially, boosted by the demands made
by the war.
The political will for reform became inexorable. The Tories under
Wellington returned to power in the new Parliament in August 1830 to
mark the accession of George III’s third son, the sixty-five-year-old Duke of
Clarence, as William IV. George IV’s only child, the virtuous Princess
Charlotte, of whom much had been expected as she little resembled her
raffish parents, had died at seventeen. But this Parliament was full of men
who had been elected on the reform ticket. All over Europe the post-war
attempts at reaction and repression had come to an end. A spirit of violent,
visionary nationalism swept her populations, expressed in plays, operas and
poetry. Revolutions broke out in France, Belgium, the southern provinces
of the Netherlands, Poland, Italy and parts of northern Germany.
Even though the Polish and Italian revolts were suppressed by their
Russian and Austrian masters, in France and Belgium the middle-class
liberals triumphed. Charles XK, the reactionary Bourbon French king,
brother to both the ill-fated Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, who had tried to
restrict the power of the emerging middle classes and the press, was
overthrown. In his place was installed a cousin, the son of Philippe Egalité,
as a king on constitutional lines restricted by Parliament. He became King
Louis-Philippe, known as the citizen-king. Belgium successfully separated
herself from Holland and became an independent kingdom.
The success of liberalism abroad made pro-reformers feel all the more

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strongly that they should not give up in Britain. Queen Caroline’s legal
champion, the Radical Henry Brougham, showed the way opinion was
flowing when he managed to get elected to one of the Yorkshire seats. For
an outsider to be elected to a celebratedly xenophobic county was a sign of
the desperation among its inhabitants that there should be a voice in
Parliament for the huge industrial conurbations like Leeds, Sheffield and
Huddersfield. It had become simply intolerable that not one of their
inhabitants, however wealthy and important, had a vote between them.
Yet in the new Parliament’s first session the Iron Duke made it clear that
as long as he was in power the people could wait for ever before they could
participate in Parliament. When the veteran Whig reformer Lord Grey said
he favoured change, Wellington responded that the Parliamentary system
was so perfect that he could not imagine how a better one could be devised.
It was the final straw for what was left of the liberal Tories. Abandoning
party loyalty they voted with the Whigs to turn Wellington out of office,
and Earl Grey formed the first Whig government in over twenty years.
Grey was not a frightening figure for people fearful that Britain was
about to have her own revolution. He was a member of the House of Lords
with large landed estates. But he had fought for parliamentary reform all
his political life and it was appropriate that he should be the prime minister
to take the country into a different epoch. He had waited many decades for
this moment and under him a memorably reforming ministry came to
power. It consisted of Whigs, a sprinkling of Radical or extremist Whig
MPs like Henry Brougham, who became lord chancellor, and liberal
Tories. Among the Canningite Tories who joined the ministry were
Palmerston and Lord Melbourne.
Grey himself had been born in 1764, but most of his colleagues were
young men determined to modernize the voting system — England was the
Mother of Parliaments (in John Bright’s phrase of a generation later) and
it was important to stop the model for all forward-looking countries
becoming a laughing stock to its own citizens. On 31 March 1831 Lord
John Russell, the young Whig who had successfully taken the Test and
Corporation Acts off the statute book and opened state offices up to non-
Anglicans, moved a first reading of a Reform Bill in the House of
Commons. The reforms were sweeping: 168 members of Parliament were
to lose their seats, sixty boroughs were to be removed. All boroughs with
fewer than 2,000 inhabitants were to be disenfranchised and the thirty
boroughs with fewer than 4,000 inhabitants were to lose a member. All the
seats liberated by these measures were to be given to the unrepresented
cities like Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield, to new London
boroughs and to the large under-represented counties like Yorkshire.
To the existing electoral roll of 400,000 voters Russell had added

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around a quarter of a million adult males, not all of whom owned their
own homes. It was a daring stroke. For previously only property-holders
had been deemed responsible enough to vote — though a large property
qualification remained necessary to stand for Parliament. By extending the
franchise in towns to households which paid an annual rent of £10 Russell
gave the vote to the middle classes, to shopkeepers, small businessmen,
engineers, teachers. It was the end of Parliament as the exclusive fiefdom
of the landed interest.
In the counties where the franchise had always been more democratic —
freeholders whose property was worth only forty shillings a year had been
allowedto vote — some of the more well-to-do tenant farmers were brought
into the franchise, though there were still no poor working-class voters:
thus £10 a year copyholders and leaseholders for twenty-one years or more
to the value of £50 got the vote. From now on there was to be an electoral
register, which would be proof enough of a man’s right to vote, and the
actual voting, or poll, instead of stretching over weeks (which gave much
leeway for abuse), was to take place in towns over the course of one day,
and in the country over two, because distances were greater.
The Reform Bill passed its second reading in the Commons by just one
vote. The looks on the faces of the amazed Tories were compared by an
onlooker to those of the damned. But the Tories were not beaten yet. They
managed to defeat the bill in committee — the stage in the passing of an act
by Parliament when it is scrutinized in detail. The government resigned and
called a general election.
In effect a referendum, the Reform Bill election took place amid scenes
of tremendous excitement. A great many reformers were returned to
Parliament. In Birmingham, under the direction of the Radical
campaigner Thomas Attwood, soon to be MP for the city, a huge number
of citizens joined the organization called the Political Union, which
Attwood had created to persuade existing voters to support pro-reform
candidates in the election. Backed by the rallying cry ‘The Bill, the whole
Bill and nothing but the Bill’, the Reform Bill now passed without too
much difficulty through the House of Commons. But in October 1831
the House of Lords, true to its nature as a conservative landowning body,
threw it out. Rioting broke out all over the country. Peers and bishops
were attacked in the streets; in Bristol the bishop’s palace was fired.
Nottingham Castle was razed to the ground because it belonged to the
Duke of Newcastle. In many towns and cities the army had to be called
out to restore order.
But much more alarming than the mob excesses was the rebellion of the
middle classes. All across Britain, in town after town, her most respectable
citizens — lawyers, teachers, doctors, the backbone of the country — rushed

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to join the Radicals’ newly formed Political Unions, copied from

Birmingham, to signal their outrage at the vote being withheld from them.
Their self-proclaimed object was ‘to defend the king and his ministers
against borough mongers’. In Birmingham, where the church bells were
specially muffled and tolled day and night to show the city’s fury, the
150,000 members of the Political Union announced that they were ready
to march on London. As had happened under James II in the face of his
attempt to turn the country Catholic, the British started to refuse to
operate the great voluntary system of local government service on which
the country’s wellbeing and orderliness depended. They would not act as
JPs or as sheriffs. Courts could not sit. The public-service ethos which is an
inestimable part of the fabric of Britain was effectively being suspended. It
began to be disturbingly clear that the country was in real danger of falling
apart if something was not done to appease the reformers.
Against this background the Whigs created a third version of the
Reform Bill in December 1831. It got through the Commons and then
through the Lords, because many peers, alarmed by what was happening
in the country at large, were starting to see that the Reform Bill was
unstoppable. But it was stymied at committee stage at the end of April
1832 when a number of peers tried to prevent some of the provisions
being debated. Worse still the affable king refused to rescue Lord Grey,
declining his request to create fifty new Whig peers to override the Tory
majority in the Lords.
As the third of the many sons of George III, William IV had grown up
believing himself to be of little consequence, as indeed he had been until his
elder brother the Duke of York, the heir presumptive, died in 1827. As
Duke of Clarence he had enjoyed a very cosy family life in Richmond,
where he lived until 1811 with a jolly actress widow named Mrs Jordan,
by whom he had ten children all without benefit of marriage. In 1818 he
was persuaded to marry a more suitable royal personage, Princess Adelaide
Saxe-Meiningen. She produced two daughters, but unfortunately they did
not have the health of his illegitimate family, and died young. Having been
educated at sea for the most part, very far from the grandeur of court
ceremonial, William IV seemed completely unpretentious, with the
decidedly unregal rolling gait of a sailor. After he became king he
continued his amiable habit of giving lifts to friends in the street and,
despite his new royal status he always moved up to give them room.
Known as Silly Billy, supposedly behind his back, he is said to have
muttered at his coronation, ‘Who’s the Silly Billy now?’
While the Reform Bill had been going through Parliament, the bluff,
pop-eyed king had become extremely agitated and soon lost all his earlier
democratic feeling. Grey had no option but to resign. Wellington was once

53°
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more sent for and invited by the king to be prime minister, for William
believed that the duke would manage to get through a modified and
acceptable version of the bill.
The feeling in the country by now was at fever pitch. The Duke of
Wellington, who fifteen years before had been venerated as the saviour of
the nation, was the most unpopular figure in the country. His old home
Apsley House at Hyde Park Gate still bears the iron shutters it was thought
necessary to fit to his windows against the mob. When it was known that
Wellington was trying to form an administration, in what are known as the
Days of May giant placards appeared all over London with the slogan ‘Go
for gold and stop the Duke!’ Obediently, in Manchester and Birmingham
people started to take their money out of their accounts to destabilize the
currency. The Political Unions advocated withholding taxes from the
government. There is no doubt that had the duke been able to form a
government there would have been civil war. The whole system was in a
state of collapse; the middle-class Political Unions were drilling in
companies, bringing in men with military training to organize them.
In the face of such civil disorder, just as with Catholic Emancipation
Wellington had the sense to realize that he had to bow to the will of the
people. He gave up trying to form a government and, in a tense interview
with the king at Windsor, told him to recall Earl Grey and accept the bill.
To preserve the monarchy from the indignity of being forced to create
peers against the king’s will, and save the peerage from being devalued,
Wellington cajoled so many of his friends not to vote that on 4 June 1832
the bill went through the House of Lords with a large majority.
The first reformed Parliament sat in 1833. Strangely and symbolically a
year later the old House of Commons burned down. On its site arose the
magnificent pseudo-Gothic pile we see today, designed by Charles Barry.
Its medieval air rightly reminds us of Parliament’s origins at the end of the
thirteenth century. Nonetheless, the reformed House of Commons had a
new and modern spirit. Power had finally passed away from the few whose
ancestors had entitled them to shields and quarterings. The new MPs were
commercially minded, progressive and urban. Even so, the gentry and
aristocracy still had an inbuilt majority in the House of Lords and
remained the leaders of the county constituencies for many years to come.
What was immediately expressed by the House of Commons was what
had become the most fervent belief of the newly enfranchised, religious
middle classes: the wickedness of slavery. The trade had been abolished in
1807, but slavery itself had not come to an end - indeed it continued to
underpin the economy of the West Indies. One of the Grey government’s
first actions was to outlaw slavery throughout the British Empire, and the
planters were compensated financially with the colossal sum of £20 million

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between them. William Wilberforce, the father of the anti-slavery

movement, died that very year on the point of seeing his great work come
to fruition.
The spirit of the new Whig administration was to seek improvement and
change, and many of the MPs wanted it to mark the end of aristocratic
laissez-faire and the beginning of interventionist government. A large
number of commissions were set up by Lord Grey to investigate the state
of the country — whether in schools, factories, the Church or local
government — and identify areas where it could be improved. And on paper
the Whig reforms were impressive. This Parliament was responsible for the
beginnings of a national system of education. Funds for school buildings
were granted to the two Church organizations, the Anglican National
Society and the Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society, which
were the chief providers of schooling for the poor. By 1839 there was an
Education Department for the control of elementary education.
Under pressure from the Radicals and the Ten-Hour Movement, com-
mittees of local citizens dedicated to limiting the hours worked in factories,
a new Factory Act was passed in 1833 which extended the cotton-mill
legislation of 1819 and applied its provisions to all other textile factories.
Children under the age of nine were not to be employed in any of them; a
distinction was made between children, aged nine to thirteen, who were
allowed to work nine hours a day, and young persons, aged thirteen to
eighteen, who were allowed to work twelve hours. Employees under the
age of thirteen had to spend half their hours being educated, by tutors to
be provided by the mill-owners. And by creating a paid governmental
factory inspectorate, the Whigs ensured compliance with the health and
safety regulations in buildings in relation to ventilation and moving
machinery.
One of the most urgent problems facing the Whig government was the
agricultural depression, which had not let up since 1815, and the acute
rural poverty that manifested itself in incessant rioting. Hayricks were
burnt; threshing machines were sneaked out of farm buildings at night and
attacked with hammers. But although the Whigs believed in rationalization
and modernization, they dealt as savagely with the disturbances as the
Ultra Tories. Nine men and boys were hung for burning farmers’ ricks,
while many continued to be sent overseas to the penal colony of Australia.
Nevertheless under the energetic direction of reformers such as the
strenuous and controversial Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose innovative
inquiries into the health of the working man transformed public health, the
Whigs launched a commission to investigate the widespread discontent.
In the commission’s view the operation of poor relief was to blame. The
Speenhamland system of supplementing agricultural wages from the rates

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which so many counties had adopted during the Napoleonic Wars had
made the rates so burdensome that many farmers could not afford to keep
their own land. An already distressing situation had begun to spiral out of
control when farmers lowered wages as well as laying off labourers, and
the local magistrates attempted to reduce the mountain of taxation by
capping the poor relief. In 1834 the old Poor Law, which dated back to the
reign of Elizabeth, was abolished. By the new Poor Law, assistance out of
the rates (what would today be called unemployment benefit) could be
doled out only to the ‘aged or infirm’. Any healthy man or woman who
was sufficiently ‘able-bodied’ to work but needed assistance from the
parish rates had to live in the workhouse, a large local institution set up to
house the indigent. The new system also standardized the administration
of the Poor Law, which had varied from parish to parish, and made it
easier to look after vagrants and orphaned children. By removing the
agricultural subsidy, in the long term the Poor Law forced farmers to put
up wages.
In December 1834, however, the king suddenly felt that he had had
enough of all this busybodying. He was sick of the Whigs’ progressive ideas,
mainly because they showed no respect for the Church of England.
Melbourne, the new leader of the Whigs — for Grey had retired in protest
against a new Coercion Bill to limit crime in Ireland — had just reduced the
number of Irish Protestant bishops by ten. Parliament might have acquired
a far greater middle-class component, but William IV used the royal
prerogative to dismiss the Whigs for meddling with the Church. He made
Sir Robert Peel prime minister in the hope of some respectable Tory policies.
In fact Peel was attempting to form a different Tory party, one with
liberal leanings. He wanted to change it from a party of protectionist
landowners to one that could represent manufacturers as well. If the Tories
were to survive, Peel believed, they would have to reach out to where the
new power lay, to middle-class opinion. It would take him the best part of
ten years to rebuilt support in the country for the Tories, or Conservatives
as he now called them. They were conservative because they wished to
conserve the best ancient institutions, but they also looked to the future. At
the next election, however, the Tories were still in a minority in the
Commons, so the Whigs under Lord Melbourne returned.
As William Lamb, Lord Melbourne had been married to the notorious
Lady Caroline Lamb of Byronic fame. Brought up among the racy Whig
hostesses of the late eighteenth century, for his aunt was Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, he was in some ways an anachronism. He was
concerned with the old abstract Whig ideas of liberty but not much with
improving the conditions of working men, from whose predicaments he
was in every way quite insulated. Nevertheless the detached and

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intellectual Melbourne was a modernizer, and a series of innovative acts

improved the nation’s efficiency.
The Municipal Reform Act of 1835 removed control of the towns from
secretive, self-perpetuating oligarchies and gave it to the middle classes,
just as the Great Reform Act had done with Parliament. In the pursuit of
religious freedom, the Whigs continued to cut back the Church of
England’s hold over the country’s institutions. In England and Wales the
thousand-year-old custom of the local vicar being entitled to the tithe or
tenth of his neighbours’ earnings was abolished. From 1836 marriages
could be solemnized in Nonconformist chapels. Though religious tests
would not be abolished at the ancient universities of Oxford and
Cambridge until 1871, in 1836 the University of London was founded in
order to grant degrees without them. Now Nonconformists, Catholics and
Jews could study in England instead of being forced to go to Scotland or
the continent. Stamp duties on newspapers were reduced to a penny. The
first compulsory civil registration of births, deaths and marriages took
place in 1837, supplementing the parish registers invented in 1538 by
Thomas Cromwell. In 1839, thanks to the efforts of Rowland Hill, the
penny postage was adopted: any letter could be carried for a penny to every
part of the British Isles.

House of Correction in Coldbath Fields, Islington, London. One of many prisons

extended in the mid-roth century, after transportation ended and new methods of
punishment were required.

534
 1830-1837

But despite these modernizing laws, much anguish pulsated beneath the
surface. The 1834 Poor Law was disastrous in the short run. Oliver Twist,
which Dickens wrote three years after the new system began, exposed
workhouses as places of institutionalized cruelty whose inmates were
treated like prisoners though their only crime was poverty. Every little bit
of individuality, every bright touch, whether it was just a bunch of daisies
in a jar or a treasured knitted shawl, was banned. Meals were taken in
silence; couples were split up from one another and from their children;
and all slept in dormitories. Workhouses survived until the early twentieth
century when the 1906-14 Liberal government introduced old age
pensions, national insurance and unemployment benefit.
As for the factory legislation, it might have improved conditions, but the
reformer and philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury revealed that Britain had no
reason to feel proud of herself when there were five- and six-year-olds
working down the mines. By allowing the evangelical Shaftesbury to lead
an investigation into factories, the Whig government unleashed the
whirlwind. Though he had been the driving force behind the 1833 Factory
Act, he was not satisfied with it, and decided to broaden his remit into
investigating coalmines. His reports into what he found there reduced
some MPs to tears when extracts were read to the House of Commons
in 1840.
Shaftesbury’s ‘blue books’, the reports to Parliament of the Royal
Commission on Children’s Employment in Mines and Manufactures, sent
a shudder through Britain. In unemotive, official language which made its
subject matter all the more chilling, they detailed how six-year-olds spent
twelve hours a day under the earth harnessed to trucks of coal, dragging
‘ He “Ai

Children working underground in the mining industry. This print was one of the
pictures illustrating Lord Ashley’s 1842 report to Parliament. The children are on
hands and knees hauling a laden wagon through a low gallery.

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 HANOVERIAN

them along tunnels knee-deep in water, while their mothers heaved coal on
their heads up to the top of the mine. That was how Britain was obtaining
the coal which made her ‘the workshop of the world’.
The result was the 1842 Mines Act, which ended the employment of
women and girls and boys under ten in the pits, and the Second Factory
Act of 1844, which reduced the hours women worked to twelve and
children to six and a half hours a day — though children were now allowed
to be employed from the age of eight. Still shocking to our eyes, it was a
great step forward to contemporary opinion. Friendless and parentless
apprentices, and young boys of ten or more whose parents needed their
money, continued to be sent down the mines for thirty years to come. Their
tiny, blackened, undersized figures for some reason did not evoke the same
pity and fury among MPs that their sisters did. The ten-hour day
Shaftesbury campaigned for so tirelessly remained out of reach for years,
defeated by economists’ predictions about a fall in manufacturing, a loss of
markets and wages, and by the power of the manufacturers. Though the
ten-and-a-half-hour day came in in 1850, it was not until 1874 that the
ten-hour day was at last made the legal maximum.
Sir Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the
Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1842 revealed the filthy urban
slums so many Britons were living in, which had been thrown up cheaply
everywhere round the textile mills and coalmines. Factory workers lived
like animals, herded indecently ten to a room. The new streets were built
so quickly, and there were so many of them, that the sewerage practice of
the old midden heaps which had been acceptable in small numbers in a
village or hamlet became positively hazardous in the new towns.
Textile workers suffered from lung diseases brought on by inhaling
cotton fumes in ill-ventilated buildings. The fires and smoke belching out
from the factory chimneys besides which they lived darkened the skies for
miles around. Natural sunlight rarely penetrated, and life was carried on
in a perpetual sulphurous glow to the sound of machines pounding night
and day. Even at midday it felt like midnight. The striking change from the
‘green and pleasant land’ which the mystical poet William Blake had
known as a boy had made him wonder two generations before whether a
better, more Christian life could ever take hold again in the face of the new
capitalism. Blake had been considered a dangerous radical in his time, but
his views were becoming mainstream.
Now that people knew more about the hell-like misery so many workers
endured in the ‘satanic mills’, the industrialization process which had been
hailed with such excitement as the beginning of the modern age began to
be questioned. In 1844 the son of a German cotton manufacturer Friedrich
Engels, in a striking indictment of the industrial process, delineated the

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lives of the poor in Manchester in his book The Condition of the English
Working Class. The suffering that Engels saw convinced him that only
revolutionary change would stop the masses from being exploited by their
masters. Robert Owen, the son-in-law of Arkwright’s partner, as long ago
as 1799 had made his mills at New Lanark in Scotland co-operative, with
the profits being shared among the workers. Though the experiment failed,
Owen was so disillusioned by the toll that the industrial revolution was
taking on people’s lives that he concluded trade unions were the only
answer.
J. M. W. Turner would be one of the last important artists to celebrate
the power and glamour of steam in his painting Rain, Steam and Speed in
1844. By 1848, obeying the precepts of the century’s most influential art
critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters would self-
consciously hark back to the world portrayed by fourteenth-century Italian
painters as a revolt against their own time. A misty medievalism became
the mode as artists and intellectuals retreated from machines and modern-
ization. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century William Morris had
created the utopian Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated both the
individual artistry of the traditional craftsman over the machine made and
a revivified idea of the community.
Dickens’s Oliver Twist was the first of a series of socially concerned
novels which drastically changed the sensibility of the reading public.
Instead of thrilling to the popular so-called ‘silver spoon’ romances of high
life, as they had been wont to do, readers were brought face to face with
the meaning of rank poverty. The miseries of the age were publicized
through the circulating libraries. By the late 1840s novelists like Mrs
Gaskell and Charles Kingsley with Mary Barton and Alton Lock had
begun to rouse the British public to the same kind of anger about the lives
of the poor and children in factories that they had felt about slavery. An
informed public became a concerned public in nineteenth-century England.
It was a uniquely high-minded period, where the national discourse was led
by politicians, reformers and writers whose unquenchable desire to change
the world for the better had a contagious effect. Lord Shaftesbury’s
indignant revelations were the beginning of what became an ineluctable
belief that it was morally wrong to wear out children in factories; by the
end of the century compulsory elementary education at last brought child
labour to a close.
But, despite a new awareness of the human cost of their prosperity, the
British also revelled in their dramatic success abroad under the confident
touch of the Melbourne government’s swaggering foreign secretary. This
was Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, the racehorse-owning
epitome of John Bull, who was in fact an Irish peer and thus allowed to sit

Ja7
 HANOVERIAN

in the House of Commons. The pugnacious Palmerston held up a flattering

self-image to the British. The eloquent champion of liberalism and
constitutionalism, he supported the lawful queens of Portugal and Spain
and sent packing the reactionary pretenders to their thrones, Don Miguel
and Don Carlos. He safeguarded Belgium from the Dutch king’s attacks
and guaranteed her neutrality. Thanks to the fiery ‘Pam’, constitutional
rule remained firmly established not only in the Iberian Peninsula but in all
western Europe, in the teeth of opposition from the absolutist monarchies
of Russia, Prussia and Austria.
At the same time Palmerston had no scruples about toppling sovereigns
if they didn’t suit British interests, or using force to support British trade.
The term ‘gunship diplomacy’ was invented for him. In 1838 fears about
the danger to the north-west frontier of the Indian Empire presented by
Russian intrigues in Afghanistan set off the First Afghan War. The British
sent an expedition to replace the apparently pro-Russian Amir of
Afghanistan Dost Mahomed with a British puppet. It was followed by the
First China War a year later, when the Chinese destroyed contraband
British opium belonging to British traders and closed their ports to the
lethal but lucrative crop being pushed by Indian and British merchants.
It was a war easily won by Britain and the powerful Royal Navy. By the
Treaty of Nanking in 1842, five Chinese ports were to be opened to British
goods with tariffs which did not spoil British trade, while British traders
were not to be subject to Chinese laws. In addition Britain became the
owner of the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity, and of neighbouring
Kowloon twenty years later. By 1898 the Crown Colony of Hong Kong
also included the adjoining New Territories, acquired on a ninety-nine-
year lease to Britain, expiring in June 1997. In the twentieth century Hong
Kong would become the source of vast trading wealth. Although high-
minded MPs like W. E. Gladstone objected to forcing the Chinese to
import opium against their will, Palmerston ignored him, arguing that it
was the local Chinese gangs controlling the local opium traffic that did not
want the drug in China, not the Chinese people.
In 1839 Palmerston responded to the French-inspired revolt of the Pasha
of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, against the Ottoman Empire and Egypt’s invasion
of Syria by the swift despatch of the Royal Navy to Acre. With the added
threat of the allied armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia the following
year, the pasha was stopped dead in his tracks. Since the cornerstone of
nineteenth-century British foreign policy was to maintain the Ottoman
Empire in its entirety as a bulwark against Russia, Mehemet Ali’s rebellion
could not be countenanced. Nor could France’s attempts to extend her
influence in the Middle East. Both were quelled when Mehemet Ali
submitted to the Turkish sultan in return for his rule in Egypt being made

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hereditary. And in a deft move at the peace conference which followed in

London in 1841, Palmerston got the Bosphorus closed to all warships,
including Russia’s. For ever since 1833, in return for aiding the Turks
during an earlier revolt of Mehemet Ali, a worrying closeness had
developed between the sultan and the tsar, and Russian ships had been
freely issuing out of the Black Sea.
Palmerston’s bluff and rather brutal character appealed to the British.
He was admired for the way his common sense prevented him getting too
carried away by lost causes. It was his view that Britain had no eternal
enemies or allies, only eternal interests which it was her duty to follow.
Palmerston was debonair, xenophobic and famous for his love affairs, even
being cited in a divorce case in his late seventies. He detested pomposity.
There was one person, however, who did not share the widespread
adulation of Pam, or Lord Cupid as he was also known. That was the new
monarch, Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the throne in 1837. Strong-
minded, modest and soon to be happily married, over the next thirty years
she would be increasingly offended by his high-handed ways and his
Regency-rake lovelife.

S32
 Victoria

(1837-1901)

Corn Laws and Irish Famine (1837-18 54)

Victoria was the eighteen-year-old niece of William IV. On the king’s death
in June the throne passed to her as the only child of his next brother, the
Duke of Kent, who had died when Victoria was eight months old. In
contrast to the dissolute court life of her uncles, Victoria had been brought
up extremely quietly at Kensington Palace by her widowed mother,
Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Thanks to her German mother’s
serious nature the new queen had a strong sense of duty. She was to
transform the monarchy into an object of great pride and affection after it
had fallen into disrepute. Her reign, which ended sixty-four years later at
the beginning of the next century, would be one of the most glorious, and
the longest, in Britain’s history. At her accession Hanover became
separated from the English crown because the so-called Salic Law operated
to bar women from the throne. Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland,
became King of Hanover instead.
Until she married in 1840, Victoria was innocently infatuated with her
first prime minister, the suave Lord Melbourne, on whom she entirely
depended for comfort and information in her new position. She was a
naive young girl, as was emphasized by the long hair falling over her
dressing gown when she greeted the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
lord chamberlain on their arrival at Kensington Palace at five in the
morning, straight from William IV’s deathbed. But, although she still slept
in her mother’s room, Queen Victoria’s Journal reveals a determined
character with a profound sense of what was owed the country: ‘I am very
young and perhaps in many, though not in all things inexperienced, but I
am sure, that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do
what is fit and right than I have.’ The coronation took place in June 1838.
But, though Lord Melbourne had the favour of the queen, by the end of
the 1830s he was running out of support in the country. Palmerston’s
skilful footwork all over the globe had helped British interests to flourish
as never before, but he was a very expensive foreign secretary. Britain was
going into a slump which was hitting the working classes especially hard

540
 1837-1854
now that support from the rates had been withdrawn. By the early 1840s,
the Hungry Forties as they were known, unemployment in northern textile
towns was so bad that the poor in cities like Leeds were living on money
raised by local citizens. The workhouses couldn’t contain them. In one
town, 17,000 people were reported as starving to death. The lacklustre
Whig government’s only solution to reining in the deficit occasioned by
Palimerston’s adventures was to pile on indirect taxation. That took the
price of living through the roof. Melbourne had quite the wrong tempera-
ment to be prime minister at this critical moment. Under his leadership the
Whigs’ reforming zeal was slowing to a halt.
The Radicals, whose organizations had done so much to get the Reform
Bill passed, were extremely dissatisfied. It had become clear that most of
the Whigs saw the bill as the end of franchise reform rather than a starting
point. They had little time for working-class organizations and were
fearful of the potential power of the trade unions. In particular they were
alarmed by Robert Owen’s plan for a Grand National Consolidated
Trades Union to represent all the trades and craft unions in one body to
make them a more formidable force. In 1834 six agricultural labourers
from Dorset were sentenced to transportation to Australia, the so-called
Tolpuddle Martyrs, for the ‘crime’ of being seen taking secret oaths.
Because their Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers was affiliated to
Owen’s, their harmless actions were assumed to have revolutionary
significance. Despite the furore in the country provoked by the sentence,
Melbourne who was then home secretary refused to commute it, though
after two years’ lobbying the Martyrs were at last released.
Because there was no will for reform within Parliament, Radical MPs
became involved in an out-of-doors lobbying movement. In 1838 a former
Irish MP called Feargus O’Connor and a mechanic named William Lovett
founded the London Workingmen’s Association to obtain what the
Reform Bill had failed to achieve. Lovett drew up a petition consisting of
six demands for constitutional reform which was presented to Parliament
by Thomas Attwood, the Radical MP and founder of the Birmingham
Political Union. It was known as the People’s Charter and its supporters
were called the Chartists. The Charter insisted that there should be no
property qualification for the suffrage: every man over twenty-one years of
age, regardless of his wealth, should have the vote. MPs should be paid for
their services, otherwise only those with independent fortunes could afford
to stand for election. The vote should be secret, to make it harder to
threaten voters. Constituencies should be of equal worth. Lastly the
Charter demanded annual Parliaments. These would give MPs less
independence and oblige them to listen to their electors.
Within seventy years other than annual parliaments all the Charter’s

541
 HANOVERIAN

points would have been complied with. But in the 1830s and 1840s the
Chartists encountered great opposition, not least because a section of their
membership advocated violent revolution. In 1839 the branch known as
the Physical Force Party planned a general insurrection, to be initiated by
the seizure of the town hall at Newport in South Wales — only for the
mayor and his supporters to defend it with such vigour that they prevented
the Chartists from storming it. The rising never took place, and its leaders
were transported to Australia. Though the majority of Chartists were in
favour of using peaceful constitutional means to achieve their goals, they
were tainted by the Newport affair. Acute distress inevitably meant that
among Chartist members were machine-breakers and mill-burners, so a
reputation as dangerous revolutionaries always hung over them. For ten
years from 1838 the Chartists held huge, alarming rallies to try and
persuade Parliament to agree to their aims, but without success.
Monster demonstrations and marches were not just employed by the
Chartists, however. The most powerful and best-organized pressure group
of the period was the Anti-Corn Law League, another out-of-doors
movement, founded in 1838, which began to march on a daily basis in a
campaign for the repeal of the laws against importing cheap corn. The
poor suffered terribly through the late 1830s. Unemployment enabled
employers to keep wages low, and the continued Tory majority in the
House of Lords and the power of the landed interest kept the price of bread
out of the reach of the impoverished. Until the corn laws were finally
repealed in 1846 to feed an Ireland facing starvation after the failure of the
potato crop, the League’s agitation to get rid of this last bastion of landed
privilege was as violent as that of the Chartists. But it was much more
effective, because among its supporters were the wealthy, respectable
manufacturers of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
The Anti-Corn Law League was headed by two superb orators — Richard
Cobden, a calico printer, and John Bright, a Quaker manufacturer, both of
whom became Radical MPs in the 1840s. Bright made formidable political
capital out of Biblical references and the Lord’s Prayer. It was a sin, Bright
said in a hundred speeches, a hundred newspaper articles, to stop the poor
being able to eat their daily bread — a resonant phrase which was hard to
counter. He cast the mantle of a religious crusade over the Anti-Corn Law
League’s campaign for cheap bread. By public meetings and by making
great use of the penny postage — the new campaigning technique — the
League eventually created the same sort of groundswell which had brought
about the Great Reform Bill, and it soon developed into support for free
trade. If cheap foreign corn were imported, the country it came from would
allow Britain to export there, thus establishing a new market for her
finished goods. Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to curb the soaring

542
 1837-1854
National Debt, the Whigs sought to raise money by adding more and more
import taxes to foodstuffs, a policy which neither raised money nor
allowed the poor to eat.
A sign of the dissatisfaction with life at home can be detected in the
expanding number of colonies settled by the British in this period. The year
1836 saw South Australia colonized and its capital Adelaide named after
the wife of William IV, and three years later New Zealand was settled by
Gibbon Wakefield. In South Africa the British were a growing presence.
The original European settlers of Cape Colony, the Boers were antagon-
ized by the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, because they
depended on slavery for their farming, and the following year most of them
began the Great Trek northwards out of Cape Colony to create the
Republic of Natal on the north-east coast of South Africa. But the vigorous
British settlers pursued them and took over Natal in 1843. In 1854 the
Boers moved further north to create two more Boer republics, the Orange
River Free State and the Transvaal, and there they were left in peace.
After the American rebellion, the British ruling authorities had no great
expectations that colonies would remain tightly bound to the motherland.
After a rebellion in 1837 by the French in Lower Canada against the
English in the Upper Province, Canada was allowed self-government three
years later, with an executive ministry directly accountable to the
Canadian Parliament. This would form the basis for self-government in
most of the colonies. In 1850 representative government would be given to
South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania — just before the discovery of gold
in Victoria caused a rapid increase in the Australian population.
In contrast to these advances, the home country herself was beginning to
look ungovernable. The one hope for some kind of reconciliation between
all the warring factions and for bringing the reform movement back to
Parliament was provided by the impressive Sir Robert Peel, with whom
most of the Radicals were now voting. In 1839 Melbourne’s majority fell
to five and he resigned, leaving it to Peel to form a government. But the
young queen caused a constitutional crisis when she refused to dismiss her
Whig ladies-in-waiting. Under previous administrations the members of
the royal household had tended to belong to the governing party, and they
would resign when their party lost power. But to a queen who was scarcely
more than a girl her ladies (who were part of the Melbourne set) were not
just political symbols — they had become her intimate confidantes. Though
Melbourne had quite properly advised her that she must have Conservative
ladies-in-waiting, as Peel had requested, the young queen dug in her heels.
She found Peel cold, awkward and stiff, a depressing contrast to the
dashing gaiety of Lord Melbourne. The affair became known as the
Bedchamber Crisis. Absurdly, as neither side would give way, and Peel

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insisted on Tory ladies-in-waiting, Melbourne and the Whigs resumed

office again — as it was said, ‘behind the petticoats of the Ladies of the
Bedchamber’.
But it was not for much longer. A combination of fears about the Whigs’
budget, which in a last-ditch attempt to curb the deficit had taken a step in
the direction of free trade, and Peel’s support in the country enabled the
Tory leader in 1841 to force an election and win a massive victory. Victoria
had meanwhile married her first cousin Prince Albert, the younger son of
the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whose calm, pious, loving nature and
guidance greatly benefited his wife. One consequence was that the need for
Lord Melbourne and the Whig ladies was removed. Prince Albert had
studied British history and was anxious to be worthy of the position he
found himself in. He had ambitions to do something for the arts, of which
he was a considerable dilettante, and he got on well with Peel, for he shared
his moral earnestness and exalted sense of public duty.
Peel himself and his fellow MPs, like the gifted W. E. Gladstone, the son
of a Liverpool merchant, who became president of the Board of Trade, had
been moving in the direction of free trade themselves, and Peel’s
government decided to try a cunning experiment. Peel’s daring stroke was
to bring back the abhorred income tax, invented to bear the burden of the
Napoleonic Wars. Now its purpose was to lessen the burden of indirect
taxation on the poor. By restoring income tax, though only as a three-year
experiment, Peel and Gladstone believed that the tariff could be lowered
on many ordinary items, including corn. Instead the money the deficit
required would be raised from the comfortably off, who would scarcely
feel it. Peel reduced or removed duties on over 600 consumer goods and
raw materials, budgeting for a loss of £2 million which would be made up
by the reintroduction of income tax. With income tax rated at sevenpence
in the pound, and by exempting those whose annual incomes were less
than £150- which meant the majority of people, since a curate earned only
£100 — the government would be left with a surplus of £500,000 to help
reduce the deficit. Though the situation continued to be grave, gradually
over the next few years prices began to come down to a more acceptable
level.
To all aspects of government Peel’s businesslike mind brought sensible
management. With his Bank Charter Act the money supply was stabilized.
The entitlement of the many small private banks to issue notes above the
actual reserves they held had led in the past few decades to a harmful series
of failures. Such issuing was now forbidden. The late 1830s and 1840s was
the time when the British railway experiment took off and to some extent
alleviated unemployment in the textile industries. Lines crisscrossed the
length and breadth of the country, much of it financed by share issues to

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speculation-crazy private citizens. The restriction of credit by the Bank
Charter Act damped down the economy just when it was threatening to
overheat.
Lord Aberdeen was Peel’s foreign minister. He made a dramatic contrast
to Palmerston, aiming at peace abroad as part of the administration’s
attempts to keep its costs down. War was expensive and did not allow tax
cuts. The Afghan War had cost £15 million as well as thousands of British
lives when the government was being suffocated by a £7 million deficit. It
had also been quite pointless. In 1841, ignoring the British puppet, the
tribesmen of Afghanistan rose up, massacred many of the British and put
the amir,.Dost Mahomed back on his throne. Worse still, though a safe-
conduct was given to the British troops to allow them to evacuate the
country and return to India, they were ambushed as they tramped back
through the mountains. Out of 15,000 troops only one man, a Dr Brydon,
made it back alive over the Khyber Pass, the gateway to British India. The
new governor-general of India Lord Ellenborough furiously ordered the
Afghan capital Kabul to be sacked as punishment.
After this disastrous episode, Aberdeen and Peel were opposed to further
expansion on the Indian subcontinent. They did not share Palmerston’s
fear of Russia and were alarmed at the way Ellenborough in 1843 rushed
into annexing for security reasons the province of Sind, which bordered the
Bombay Presidency. Nevertheless the territory ruled by the British
continued to grow. In 1845 the British humiliation at the hands of the
Afghans encouraged the Sikhs of the independent Punjab to the north to
launch their own attack, only for the Punjab to be reduced to a
protectorate under the Maharajah Dhulip Singh.
Unlike Palmerston, who was distrustful of French ambitions, Aberdeen
desired friendly relations with France. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
were twice guests of Louis-Philippe at his court at Eu. There the royal pair
were introduced to the French court painter Franz Winterhalter, who
would execute a series of charming portraits memorializing them and their
large family. Louis-Philippe returned the compliment and visited them at
Windsor. Friendly relations developed into an entente, a diplomatic
understanding between two powers. Lord Aberdeen’s mild manner
resolved by diplomacy boundary problems for Canada created by the
movement west of the growing population of the United States. At issue
were the north-west coast where Vancouver is situated on the Pacific and
the boundary between Canada and Maine.
President Polk had just been elected in America on the ticket of ‘fifty-
four fifty or fight’, a policy to extend the state of Oregon to the line of
latitude of 54.50 degrees, right up to the boundary of the Russian territory
of Alaska. Peel and Aberdeen were determined that the American border

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should begin lower down at the 49th parallel, otherwise Canada would
have no outlet on to the Pacific. Polk did not fight, and the 49th parallel
was established as the boundary between America and Canada, except for
a small dip south to include Vancouver Island. A treaty negotiated by
Castlereagh which had abolished navies and military establishments on the
Great Lakes remained in place, symbolizing trustful relations between the
two powers.
Despite the fundamental surgery of Peel’s first budget the unrest
continued, and the Anti-Corn Law League continued to lobby for total
repeal. Peel was disgusted at how far the League was prepared to go in its
irresponsible use of orators to inflame opinion, but secretly — like many of
his more liberal colleagues — he had been converted. Cheap foreign corn
seemed the only way to solve the problem of feeding the starving
unemployed in textile towns. Overseas powers were simply not producing
enough to be able to threaten British farmers with exporting enormous
amounts of cheap wheat.
Since the effect of lowering corn duties in 1842 had not been to reduce
agricultural workers’ wages, by 1843 Peel had real anxieties about whether
he could continue to be in favour of the corn laws. He believed that
successful farming would ultimately depend on better ways of farming, not
on protection. The unending, increasing and organized level of anger
against the corn laws might come to threaten the landed classes and indeed
the whole country. Peel was perpetually frightened of a revolution. That
year his private secretary Edward Drummond was mistaken for Peel
himself and assassinated by a madman named Daniel Macnaghten while
riding in a royal procession in the prime minister’s carriage (Peel was with
the queen).
In all probability Peel would have reformed the corn laws sooner rather
than later. All his budgets were nudging towards free trade. But in response
a violent and irresponsible pressure group dedicated to protection,
popularly known as the anti-Anti-Corn Law League, was set up by the
Ultra wing of the Tory party, whose members had been opposed to Peel
ever since he betrayed them with Catholic Emancipation and feared that
the days of protecting estates based on wheat farming were numbered. In
the 1830s they had created the nostalgic Young England movement within
the Tory party centred around a mystical and probably mythical idea of the
aristocracy. The anti-Anti-Corn Law League was headed by the gifted
young speaker Benjamin Disraeli, a cultivated, flamboyant novelist and the
first British MP of Jewish extraction, and by the horse-mad Lord George
Bentinck, son of the Duke of Portland.
As the traditional supporters of the Church of England, the Ultra Tories
were alarmed by Peel’s determination to lessen the grievances of the

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Catholics in Ireland by increasing the state grant to the Catholic Maynooth
College. This was a time when the Tories’ worst fears about the dangers of
Catholic Emancipation were being realized. For in 1845 John Newman,
the influential leader of the Anglican High Church or Oxford movement,
which emphasized the Church’s links to the ancient pre-Reformation
Church, caused absolute consternation when he became a Roman
Catholic. Disestablishmentarianism, the ending of the Church of England’s
official position, seemed to be in the air. Only the year before 500 ministers
and many of their congregations had broken away from the Church of
Scotland to form the more democratic Free Presbyterian Church of
Scotland, known as the Wee Frees after their opening prayer ‘We the Free
Church of Scotland’.
Bentinck and Disraeli forgot Peel’s resurrection of the Tory party. They
remembered only what they considered to be his numerous betrayals of it.
Night after night Disraeli, who wore weird and wonderful clothing in the
House of Commons, strange cloaks in yellow, black and orange, disloyally
directed exquisitely turned jibes at his party’s leader. In one of his best
taunts, he said that Peel had found the Whigs bathing and run away with
their clothes.
But Peel was not only having to deal with enmity in his own party in
Parliament and outside it, where he was burned in effigy by the Anti-Corn
Law League. In Ireland in 1843 Daniel O’Connell, backed by an
organization which looked back to 1798 and called itself Young Ireland,
announced that this was to be Repeal Year. To crowded meetings held at
some of the most historic places in Ireland, including Tara, home of the old
High Kings of Ireland, O’Connell said he was aiming for three million
members, a repeal warden in each parish and a national convention to rid
Ireland of what he called the ‘Saxon’.
Alarmed by the possibility of a fresh Irish triumph after O’Connell’s
adroit tactics during the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, Peel banned
the meetings. O’Connell had to choose between obeying the law and
creating an armed insurrection for which he had neither the temperament
nor the inclination. When his followers found that he had no intention of
fighting, the enthusiasm which had propelled the movement forward
shrivelled and died. The English government nonetheless foolishly decided
to prosecute O’Connell tor high treason, on the ground that it had to make
an example of him. But the House of Lords set the conviction aside and
three years later, on a pilgrimage to Rome, O’Connell died, a broken man.
Perturbed by the level of anti-Union feeling, the exceptionally high
murder rate and the general dissatisfaction in Ireland, Peel sought help
from education. Despite Catholic Emancipation all the most influential
jobs continued to go to the Protestants, as they were far better educated

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than the Catholics. In 1845 Peel founded the Queen’s College at Belfast,
Cork and Galway in order that Catholics and Protestants might receive a
secular university education side by side. He hoped to remove any rational
grounds for discrimination against the Catholics. But like most things
which the far-sighted Peel did that were just and constructive, it earned him
tremendous unpopularity. Many Catholics as well as Protestants thought
that the new colleges would be godless institutions.
But a terrible catastrophe was about to take place in Ireland which
ensured that, despite Peel’s best intentions, hatred and resentment were to
be the chief emotions felt by the Irish towards England for a century and a
half. For in 1846 a disease of the potato destroyed what had become the
Irish peasantry’s only food crop. Thanks to the historical evil of a large
number of English absentee landlords, almost no Irish peasant owned his
own land. The scientific farming that had transformed England in the
eighteenth century had never existed in Ireland, where anyone who
attempted to make improvements in their methods of farming would have
their rents raised by the agents. The only way for the Irish peasant to make
money — and the peasantry comprised three-quarters of the population —
was to sublet part of their land to another family and get a cash rent. As a
result they had to feed themselves off a very small amount of soil.
The Irish had discovered that the crop which required the least soil for
cultivation was the potato. Out of a population of eight million, four

Famine burial in Ireland. A million people died in the famine of 1846/47 after the
failure of the potato crop which was their staple diet.

548
 1837-1854
million people were by 1845 living on potatoes alone. It was not a
balanced diet, but it was adequate if the crop was good. That summer an
American fungal disease known as the potato blight appeared in Europe.
It turned every potato to slime in the ground. The wet weather that
summer was especially conducive to the spread of the disease. In August
Peel, nervous of the implications, demanded weekly reports from the
constabulary on the state of the crop and sent scientists over to investigate.
By October the report from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was clear. The
potato crop had been pretty well destroyed throughout the country. Half
the population of Ireland were faced with complete starvation, four million
people who rushed from potato plant to potato plant hoping that the
stench rising from the fields did not mean all of the potatoes were rotten.
But there was not much chance of beating a disease carried on the wind
and worsened by the rain.
At a Cabinet meeting on 6 November Peel declared that on the evidence
he already had it was necessary to open the ports to cheap grain from
abroad at a reduced emergency tariff and put a new Corn Bill through
Parliament. But only three of his ministers would back him. The others did
not believe in the emergency and preferred to wait for the end of the month
when the two scientists Lyon Playfair and Professor Lindley would have
finished their report. Even when the report came in, the Tory party would
not back the repeal of the bread tax. Peel resigned, but when the Whig
Lord John Russell attempted and failed to form a ministry to repeal the
corn laws, Peel nobly took back his resignation and formed a government
again solely for that purpose. The repeal of the corn laws in May 1846 was
finally carried by the Free Traders, who were Peel’s supporters in the party
(they became known as the Peelites), together with Russell’s Whigs. But
Peel himself was forced out as Tory leader and the party split into Peelites
and Protectionists. Headed by Disraeli, the Protectionists attacked Peel in
the most wounding manner as a traitor to his party. But in his last speech
as prime minister Peel insisted that he had not betrayed any conservative
principles. He had simply done what he came into Parliament to do, which
was to show that ‘the legislature was animated with a sincere desire to
frame its legislation upon the principles of equity and justice’.
But the Irish did not see the Westminster government that way. Though
the Archbishop of Dublin asked prayers to be said in every Catholic church
for God’s mercy, there was to be no mercy. The devastating figure of one
million Irish people died in one year alone, between 1846 and 1847, and
another million would die over the next three years; those who did not die
of starvation were carried off by mortal illnesses brought on by
malnutrition. For the sacred nineteenth-century laws of political economy
decreed that corn could not be delivered free to the population. It could

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only be put into government depots and paid out in return for labour. This
bureaucratic approach was useless during an emergency. It took months,
hundreds of thousands of deaths and the example of private charities
physically taking provisions to the people for the British government to see
that in an emergency there was no room for economic laws. The only way
to get food to the starving was to deliver it to the people directly in a vast
relief effort.
The Irish famine was the greatest social disaster to befall any European
state in the nineteenth century. But the new Whig government that took
over from Peel, led by Lord John Russell, proved inadequate to the task.
By the Soup Kitchen Act of 1847 Parliament finally voted £10 million to
help Ireland. Thus more than three million men, women and children
received food from the soup kitchens. But the humanitarian aid ceased long
before it should have done. At the end of 1847 the British government
decided that the Irish should thenceforth be supported by their local parish
unions. Yet, with the economy destroyed, there were no rates to pay for
that support. The official British view was that if any further help was
given to the Irish it would make them too dependent on government aid. It
was the same mindset which had turned workhouses into forbidding places
to keep the poor out of them.
Most landlords behaved with astonishing callousness. Far from being
appalled by the sight of men, women and children dying around them,
their agents only registered missing rents. What was of concern to them-
selves and their employers was that the cottar system of farming — the
smallholder with a couple of fields - was proving unprofitable. A ruthless
series of evictions began. At mid-century it was averaging almost 20,000
families per year, as landlords incorporated many smallholdings into larger
ones on English lines. A constant kind of guerrilla warfare against
landlords was the response of those who remained. In 1848 there was
another failed attempt at rebellion under the Young Ireland movement,
which had been resurrected under a man named Smith O’Brien. But the
most frequent reaction of the Irish to their homeland’s ills was to abandon
her.
Sure that things would never get better in their lifetime, during the
course of the next fifty years one million Irishmen and women bitterly
made their way to the friendlier shores of the United States of America.
They settled predominantly on the eastern seaboard, particularly around
Boston. As important as their pitifully scant belongings was the loathing
they carried in their hearts for the English. It was sealed in blood by the
famine, and persists among their descendants even today. The treatment of
the Irish during the famine by the English is taught in some American
schools as an act of genocide, the deliberate murder of a people.

55°
 1837-1854
But in Britain herself the mid-century was faced with confidence and
self-belief. After the repeal of the corn laws the Tory Protectionists were led
by the Earl of Derby, after Lord George Bentinck’s death in 1848, and by
Disraeli. With Peel’s death out riding in 1850, leadership of the forty Free
Traders known as Peelites was taken over by Lord Aberdeen, the former
foreign secretary. Despite their small numbers the Peelites had a great deal
of weight in the House of Commons as they contained some of the ablest
men in Parliament, such as Gladstone and Sidney Herbert. They frequently
voted with the Whigs and Radicals, and would gradually over the next
twenty years merge to form the Liberal party.
By 1852 free trade had so much been proved to be the most profitable
way for Britain to function that it became national policy for all the parties;
protectionism was quietly abandoned by Derby and Disraeli. The repeal of
the corn laws had not destroyed British farming. Labourers had not been
thrown out of work nor cornfields abandoned, as had been feared. It was
only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that surplus wheat from
the North American prairies ruined prices in Britain. The price of corn had
not dropped as dramatically. in 1846 as the Anti-Corn Law League had
expected, but that was because the cost of all commodities rose over the
next ten years, and repeal acted to offset that rise in the case of corn.
Britain in the period 1846 to 1852 was peaceful compared to the
previous decade. It was felt that a great social injustice had been removed
in the tax on bread. Times were more prosperous, and there were fewer
people out of work. Thanks to Shaftesbury’s continued work, factory
legislation regulated most places of manufacture — the bleaching and
dyeing industries, the lace factories the match factories, the Potteries — the
result of a slew of commissions to investigate the physical conditions in
which children were employed. In the Potteries six-year-old children were
found to be working fifteen hours a day. Inspectors made dreadful
discoveries in match factories: there women developed a disease called
‘phossy jaw’ caused by phosphorus, which rotted away their faces.
In 1848 under the Public Health Act backed by Lord Shaftesbury, Sir
Edwin Chadwick set up the Board of Health, which had powers to overrule
local authorities. Towns thrust up by the industrial revolution were forced
to put in proper buried sewerage systems, replacing the shallow troughs
which had run down streets since the middle ages. Life expectancy in such
towns, which had been up to 50 per cent less than in the countryside, rose
dramatically as a result. Shaftesbury also helped abolish the practice of
putting small boys up chimneys to sweep them, though it was not until
1875 that the system finally ceased when a sweep’s licence became
conditional on his not having broken any of the laws on employing
children. Public opinion was marshalled against such practices by Charles

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Kingsley’s novel The Water Babies, published in 1863. As Lunacy

Commissioner, Shaftesbury exposed the treatment of the insane in institu-
tions. Until his intervention many of the mentally ill spent their already
unhappy lives chained to their beds in darkness.
Even 1848, the year of revolutions on the continent, passed in Britain
without much notice. Although the presentation of what turned out to be
the Chartists’ last petition was treated as if Napoleon was about to invade,
with the eighty-year-old Duke of Wellington in charge of London’s
defences and with cannon on every bridge, the expected mass demon-
stration never materialized. The petition was brought quietly to Downing
Street in a cab. Although it was mocked when some of its signatures were
found to be false (the Duke of Wellington, Mr Punch and Queen Victoria
were all inscribed several times), it was an impressive demonstration of
working-class British people’s faith in Parliament, even though they were
excluded from it.
It was an era when the popular writer Samuel Smiles’s doctrine of ‘self-
help’ became a watchword. The Friendly Societies started up just before
mid-century, inviting workers to make a weekly payment as an insurance
against illness or unemployment, and providing an income if those
eventualities occurred. Some of the trade unions provided similar benefits
to their members. The Co-op, still to be seen on certain high streets today,
also sprang into being. It began with individuals getting together in a co-
operative venture to buy foodstuffs in bulk — that is, at wholesale prices.
As the years went by, Co-ops set up normal shops where food was sold at
ordinary prices; the profit at the end of the year was divided between all
the members of the co-operative.
At mid-century Britain was reaching the peak of her prosperity as leader
of the industrial revolution. Her extraordinary success in international
markets, particularly those of South America and India, encouraged
Russell boldly to repeal what was left of the Navigation Acts. No country
could stand comparison with Britain in cheap manufactured goods. The
British carrying trade with the rest of the world was no longer to be
restricted to designated countries — any country’s ship could carry British
goods, and could man it with sailors of any nationality. This increased the
volume of shipping available to British merchants and manufacturers. By
1850 a quarter of the world’s trade was going through British ports.
It was a measure of Britain’s overweening self-confidence that
Palmerston, Russell’s foreign secretary, threatened to bombard Athens in
1847 when the Greek government refused to compensate a Gibraltarian
merchant named Don Pacifico, whose house had been destroyed by riots.
This sort of behaviour disgusted the Peelites and their allies the Radicals.
To Palmerston and his followers, however, the British Empire had become

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like the Roman Empire of old; as Palmerston himself put it in one of his
most grandiloquent speeches, “The Roman, in days of old, held himself free
from indignity, when he could say, Civis Romanus sum; so also a British
subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful
eye and the strong arm of England shall protect him against injustice and
wrong.’
In 1851, to symbolize what was hoped would be an era of peace and
progress, Prince Albert organized the Great Exhibition to put on show the
best goods the world could manufacture. Expected to be the first of many
such international gatherings, it took place in Hyde Park ina specially built
glass and iron structure designed by Joseph Paxton and nicknamed the
Crystal Palace. Visitors came via cheap excursion tickets on the new
railways. The Great Exhibition was visual proof that the British led the
world in the superiority, the variety and the cheapness of their
manufactures, 90 per cent of which were now exported. Out of it came the
Victoria and Albert Museum, to provide a place of permanent exhibition
for the arts and manufactures. Visitors to the Crystal Palace, like the

The Great Exhibition of 1851 organized by Prince Albert to show off the superior
British goods which made her ‘the Workshop of the World’.

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novelist Charlotte Bronté, who remained enthralled by the Duke of

Wellington, were able to spot him still strolling briskly about. His death in
September 1852 marked the end of a triumphant era for the British that
had begun with Waterloo.
Prosperity bred a new confidence everywhere, which in the female sex
appeared as rebellion. Women, the silent majority who for centuries had
been considered mentally and physically the weaker sex, suddenly became
more visible. They wrote defiantly of subjects which hitherto they had been
considered too ladylike to address. They refused to accept the limited role
of virtuous wife and mother which British nineteenth-century society was
keen to promote. The Woman Question, what was appropriate for
women, became the subject of furious debate. By 1851 there were the first
shoots of feminist organizations such as the Sheffield Women’s Political
Association, which was set up to demand the vote.
The first novels of the Bronté sisters appeared in an extraordinary year,
1847-8. The Brontés outraged convention with their passion, their honesty
and their realism, and so did writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mrs
Gaskell and Harriet Martineau. Queen’s College school was set up in
Harley Street in 1848, where it remains today, to equip women for the
professional life many were demanding. There began to be a rash of
schools for women, such as North London Collegiate (1853) and
Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1858), founded by the redoubtable Frances
Buss and Dorothea Beale. From there in theory it was a short step to
demanding university degrees and the vote, though neither were granted
until the second decade of the next century.
Britain congratulated herself on feeling scarcely a tremor during the
revolutions of 1848, a consequence of her foresight in accepting social and
Parliamentary reform before it was forced on her. Her stability and
tolerance turned her into a magnet for political refugees, as she is today. In
London salons at any one time might be encountered the exiled French
citizen king Louis-Philippe, the architect of conservative reaction
Metternich, as well as innumerable Italian revolutionary patriots in exile.
In fact, so confident was Britain, so liberal in her thought, so unthreatened
by inimical views, that within her ample bosom she even found room to
shelter the sworn enemy of her capitalist way of life, Karl Marx.
Expelled from Paris and Brussels for his Communist Manifesto of 1848
(the first draft was written by Friedrich Engels), for forty years Marx
laboured freely in the British Museum, employing statistics supplied by
Engels, to provide a recipe for progress. They attacked capitalism, religion
and culture and looked forward to what they believed would be the last
stage of an inevitable historical process: after a dictatorship of the
proletariat there would be a withering away of the state, and an idyll where

4
 1837-1854
all property would be owned communally. Their beliefs, which are also
known as scientific socialism, would have a profound and often
invigorating effect on politics for the next 150 years.
But in 1853 Marx and Engels were relatively unknown figures. The
Radicals were still dedicated to the franchise reform. The chancellor of the
Exchequer W. E. Gladstone’s intellectual obsessions were focused on
producing both the conditions for free trade, which Richard Cobden
continued to promote as the answer to the world’s ills, and the low
taxation which he himself believed necessary for creating a self-reliant
working man. In 1853 with his first budget Gladstone reduced duty on
imports to the lowest levels ever seen, and announced that he intended
steadily to reduce income tax until its complete abolition in 1860. Once the
new scale of duties took effect and stimulated consumption, income tax
would no longer be necessary. Gladstone’s budget expressed his confidence
in Britain’s power as top trading nation and her ability to keep peace in the
world. He also cut back on the army, for he felt no war threatened. As a
fervent Christian he believed that most wars were morally wrong anyway,
and that a Christian with money in his pocket would do more good than
the government.
In India Britain directly governed an enormous part of the territories of
the subcontinent. The empire stretched from Sind in the west to the
southern tip of Burma in the Far East, where the ill-treatment of British
merchants in Rangoon resulted in the annexation of Pegu in 1852; the
Second Sikh War of 1848-9 led to Britain’s outright annexation of the
Punjab. Yet the next two decades would reveal Britain’s rule in the east to
be fragile, expose the state of her army as deplorable, and demonstrate that
she was no longer the arbiter of international events. For on the continent
France and the emerging countries of Italy and Germany were determined
to destroy the 1815 Vienna peace settlement and remodel the map of
Europe to their own liking, with incalculable results.

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 HANOVERIAN

Palmerstonian Aggression (1854-1868)

The next twenty years of English life took place against an unprecedented
amount of war and frontier alteration on the continent of Europe as the
will to unify Italy and Germany became unstoppable. By 1871 these two
countries were no longer mere ‘geographical expressions’ but nations
united by political institutions, headed by a single ruler. The unification of
Italy under the constitutional King of Sardinia-Piedmont had been
passionately desired by the three leading liberal British statesmen of the
period, Palmerston, Lord John Russell and Gladstone. Nevertheless the
last pieces of the jigsaw of the Italian peninsula were fitted into place only
with the aid of the militaristic Prussian state. Her own pursuit of German
unification meant attacking her neighbours: first Denmark, then her fellow
German Austria, finally France.
Prussia’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck had told his fellow countrymen
that ‘the great questions of our time will not be decided by speeches and
majority decisions’ but ‘by blood and iron’. And by 1871 the world order
was utterly changed, signified by the Prussian king being crowned German
emperor at the Palace of Versailles. Built by Louis XIV, it had symbolized
the power of French civilization. Now the German presence there
emphasized the humbling of French pride and the destruction of France’s
Second Empire. Prussia’s superior army and lack of scruple about the use
of force made her the dominant power on the continent. And a united
Germany, under the aegis of the war-hungry Prussian state, became the
unexpected big player on the world scene. Britain, one of the most active
guarantors of the post-Waterloo settlement, had been confined to the
sidelines, unable to influence most of these events or to rescue the balance
of power.
From 1871 until the First World War broke out in 1914, the aggressive
nature of the Prussian state alarmed contemporaries, but without a
continental army there was little Britain could have done on her own to
resist Prussia’s rise to power, with so many other European states bent on
change. Her distrust of a new Napoleon across the Channel made the help
of a French army out of the question. For in the 1850s and 1860s, though
Russian expansion in Asia continued to be the threat to India, the real
menace as far as the British were concerned was Napoleon’s unpredictable
nephew Prince Louis Napoleon.
Prince Louis Napoleon — who had been elected president in 1848 but
wished to prolong his term of office —- seized power in 1851 on a
programme to alter the humiliating frontiers of 1815 to France’s advan-
tage, and a year later proclaimed himself the Emperor Napoleon III (his
first cousin the King of Rome should have been Napoleon II). A restless
dreamer, an idealist and by the end of his reign a seriously ill man, the new

wa 56
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Napoleon was a catalyst of change in Europe, seeking glory in war and

ready to exploit any situation to enhance his popularity with his people
and restore France to the world status from which he believed she had been
demoted. Although Napoleon III would periodically be Britain’s ally -
indeed he had spent a period of exile in London, when he had enrolled as
a special constable - the news that there was a new Napoleon in power
across the Channel created a volunteer movement as it had in the days of
Pitt the Younger. Throughout his twenty-year reign there were war scares
in England when 150,000 men would drill on the south coast —
commemorated in Tennyson’s poem ‘Riflemen form!’
Palmerston, Lord John Russell’s foreign secretary, at first welcomed
Napoleon If{I’s coup. His liberal sympathies had prompted him to react
with delight to the 1848 revolutions all over Europe, but when what had
been constitution-making turned to fighting in the streets, he became
seriously alarmed. He thought that the danger of real revolution was so
great that it was better for France to be ruled by military despotism.
Without the authority of the queen or the prime minister, Palmerston gave
official recognition to Louis Napoleon’s coup. But Queen Victoria and
Russell had had enough of Palmerston’s idiosyncratic and impetuous
behaviour, and he was sacked. Furious, he decided to take his revenge by
bringing down the government over a bill to strengthen the militia against
the Napoleonic threat. Since Palmerston could not form a government on
his own, the Tory Protectionists under Lord Derby as prime minister and
with Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer came in. But, though Disraeli
made the Tories abandon protection, the Peelites continued to be close to
the Whigs, and neither could do much with Palmerston outside their tent.
At the end of 1852 the Whigs and Peelites put the government in the
minority and the Tories resigned. Like musical chairs, a new coalition of
Peelites and Whigs headed by Lord Aberdeen took its place. Gladstone
returned to the Treasury, Lord John Russell became leader of the House of
Commons, and Palmerston was reinstated in the government, this time as
home secretary. But though he might be at the Home Office Palmerston’s
presence gave martial vigour to the administration. In 1853 when the
Russians invaded two Ottoman provinces on the Danube and sank the
Turkish fleet, Britain responded with war. The Eastern Question had once
more taken centre stage, though the war itself was to be fought on the
south coast of Russia where the Crimean Peninsula juts into the Black Sea.
The background to the conflict was quite straightforward. For a long
time the Russian tsar Nicholas I had been seeking to pre-empt what he
considered to be the inevitable break-up of the Turkish Empire by dividing
it among the great powers. The feeble nature of Ottoman rule even before
mid-century had convinced him that the empire should be parcelled out

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sooner rather than later. This would prevent the chaos of an uncontrolled
disintegration and the creation of independent Balkan nation states. Ever
since Greece had won her independence, the peoples of Bulgaria, Albania,
Serbia and Macedonia had been stirred by the idea of governing
themselves. .
As long as Russian influence remained paramount at Constantinople,
the tsar was prepared to leave the Turkish Empire alone. But in 1852 it
seemed that the French were replacing the Russians as most favoured
nation. For Louis Napoleon’s ambassador to Turkey persuaded the sultan
that henceforth Latin monks in Jerusalem should hold the key to Christ’s
tomb, the Holy Sepulchre, instead of Greek Orthodox monks. This was
intended to endear Napoleon’s regime to the French clergy.
The ‘affair of monks’, as it was known, plunged Europe into war. To the
Russians, for Latin monks to hold the keys to the Holy Sepulchre was no
different from having French warships in the Dardanelles. What the tsar
and his advisers did not want was control of their Turkish neighbour to fall
into the hands of France. This was what prompted the Russian invasion in
1853 of the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (modern
Romania). The Russians then refused to leave unless the Turks announced
that the Greeks were the custodians of the Holy Sepulchre. When the
Russians sank the Turkish fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea on 30 November
the British were hot for war against the threatening Russian bear. With
Palmerston always distrustful of Russian intentions, an alliance was made
with the new Bonaparte emperor, who welcomed the end to France’s
quarantine after Waterloo.
In January 1854 the French and British fleets, which were already at
anchor off Constantinople after the Russian invasion of the Danubian
provinces, sailed up the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea. There they
would land troops to destroy the Russian military installation at
Sebastopol in the Crimea and weaken Russia so thoroughly that she would
not try to seize Turkish territory again, while another British fleet would
go north to Kronstadt on the Baltic coast, the Russian equivalent of
Portsmouth.
From start to finish the operation was a disaster. The British troops were
equipped neither for the Russian winter nor for a long siege. It had been
incorrectly assumed in England that capturing Sebastopol could be
achieved in six weeks. It took a year. Autumn storms wrecked almost every
ship carrying food supplies and warm clothing across the Black Sea. Such
clothing as did eventually arrive was often inappropriate or unwearable
owing to the carelessness of the quartermaster’s agents — there were, for
example, 5,000 left boots because they had not been paired before they
left. The conditions of the peninsula are memorialized in the word

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‘balaclava’. Our modern article of clothing derives its name from the battle
named after the nearest Russian town to Sebastopol. The cold was so
intense and the British so badly equipped that the men had to put stockings
over their faces and cut the eye and mouth holes out. The Crimean War is
also infamous for the Charge of the Light Brigade. Immortalized in the
poem by the poet laureate of the day Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 600 British
cavalrymen led by Lord Cardigan rode two miles up ‘the valley of death’
straight into the firing line of the Russian guns — the result of the
subordinate officer Lord Lucan’s misunderstanding of an order, and only
a third of them returned alive. Marshal Bosquet, a French general who
witnessed the charge, exclaimed disbelievingly, “C’est magnifique, mais ce
n’est pas la guerre.’
Fortunately those British soldiers did not suffer wholly in vain, for there
was another, more influential witness at the scene of this crime of
ineptitude. The correspondent of the London Times, W. H. Russell, called
their masters to account and showed the nineteenth century that the pen
really could be mightier than the sword. Russell was the first of a different
breed, a war correspondent. Although most armies had endured suffering,
it was the first time that a nation’s public had been made vividly aware of
it. The humming wires of the telegraph had shrunk the world. Via Vienna
initially and then from the new telegraph office at Constantinople, Russell
sent back daily despatches reporting on the course of the war.
Above all, Russell attacked the absurd deference to regulations laid
down in London and the failure of the army chiefs to adapt to circum-
stances. Soldiers were falling ill because of their poor diet. They could have
been eating rice, which was easily available locally as it was the mainstay
of the Turkish diet, but they were prevented from doing so — because rice
was not the standard issue as laid down in the regulations. Bales of
urgently needed supplies could not be unpacked unless a board was called
— a board being six designated men required to note the contents of the
bales as they were unpacked to prevent thieving. Due to the chaos and
confusion of the war, bales of winter uniforms or dressings would languish
for weeks unopened because enough members of a board could rarely be
found at the same time. Meanwhile the troops in the field missed the winter
coats waiting at the quayside, and the wounds of the sick worsened
without the clean lint trussed up in the bales.
But Russell’s daring criticism had done its bit. The often lazy and
somnolent genie of British public opinion, so powerful when awake,
awoke now. The hopelessness of Aberdeen as a war leader and the need for
a masterly and decisive character like Palmerston was signalled when the
House of Commons voted in favour of a Royal Commission to investigate
the way the war was being handled in the Crimea. Aberdeen treated this as

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a vote of no confidence, and resigned. Palmerston took over as prime

minister.
But before the Aberdeen government fell in 1855, the war minister
Sidney Herbert had redeemed himself a little. He had asked his friend, the
wealthy thirty-four-year-old Miss Florence Nightingale, who ran a nursing
home in Harley Street, to go out to Scutari to visit the British hospital on
the Turkish side of the Black Sea opposite Constantinople, and find out
what was going wrong with the nursing. For until Florence Nightingale
started managing the hospital, more men were dying at the Barrack
Hospital at Scutari than in the field hospitals. The mortality rate was
running at almost 50 per cent of the hospital population. For more to
survive lying on frozen ground with a thin bell tent above them than in a
large hospital suggested that there was something very badly amiss.
Florence Nightingale was the one person Herbert thought might make a
difference to the unhappy situation by sheer force of personality, and he
was right. Her time at Scutari was as important to the success of the war
as Palmerston’s taking over the running of it.
To Miss Nightingale, as she tripped round the wards in her neat white
apron, one of the most obvious problems was immediately apparent.
Wherever she went, wounded men were lying alongside open sewers
breathing in infection. The conditions were worse than those of a prison.
She was also appalled by the attitude of the officers to their men. She and
her thirty nurses could not believe that their simple requests, such as the
removal of the men from the area of the sewage, frequent disposal of
waste, clean pyjamas, a monumental quantity of lint and properly cooked
meat, were seen as ‘spoiling the brutes’. She noted caustically that Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe, the influential ambassador to the Ottoman court,
for many years had twenty-seven servants all to himself. The hospital was
in full view of his palace on the Bosphorus. But, to her amazement and
indignation, he offered no help at all to the British citizens he represented,
even though ‘the British army was perishing within sight of his windows’.
Fortunately Palmerston listened to Florence Nightingale. The British
steam engine was harnessed to help the British army. A railway was
quickly built between the harbour and the siege camp at Sebastopol, for
ferrying supplies efficiently and the wounded comfortably. Soyer, the
sought-after chef of the Reform Club, volunteered his services in the
Crimea to develop delicate food for convalescents. Under a regime of
tender loving care where they were treated as human beings, the soldiers
began to recover in the hospital where previously they had tended to die.
Florence Nightingale never used the word ‘germ’ — in fact the concept of
germs would not be known for over a decade, when it was discovered by
Joseph Lister, the inventor of antiseptics. But she had an intuitive sense of

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bacteria, or dirt as she called it, passing from one person to another. In the
case of the seriously ill, she noted, this could be fatal. By forcing the
orderlies and her nurses to wash their hands between examinations, she
caused the rate of infection to drop dramatically. Before the invention of
antibiotics, this was almost miraculous. Thanks to elementary hygiene
rules, Florence Nightingale defeated something that could destroy an army
— disease.
The Royal Commissioners investigating what went wrong in the Crimea
had nothing but the highest praise for Miss Nightingale, who had become
known as the Lady with the Lamp (owing to her habit of wandering softly
about the beds by night holding a small lamp). From the end of the
Crimean War nursing became an admired profession under the strict rules
she had set out. Previously the nurses used in hospitals had simply been
pairs of hands, and tended to be ex-prostitutes retrieved by clergymen from
a life on the streets.
For all Florence Nightingale’s dedicated work, of the 25,000 British
soldiers in the Crimea, no fewer than 10,000 either lost their lives or were
shipped home to England as invalids. Despite brave fighting by the British,
it was the valorous French army (to whose numbers were added 15,000
Sardinian soldiers to ensure that the Italian question got a mention at the
peace table) who were chiefly responsible for the fall of Sebastopol. By
1856 the war had drifted to a close, with both sides eager for peace; the
Russians were particularly anxious to see the back of the British fleet which
still surrounded the naval base at Kronstadt. The Treaty of Paris, signed
that year, satisfied the French and English and humiliated the Russians by
neutralizing the Black Sea. The demilitarization of the Black Sea proved
unenforceable after 1871, however, when Russia seized the opportunity
presented by war between France and Germany to abrogate the treaty
unilaterally. By the 1890s the Russian fleet was one of the strongest in the
world and Sebastopol had been rebuilt. Nevertheless, by insisting that
Turkey put her house in order in her treatment of Christians, the treaty
gave Russia less excuse to interfere in her internal affairs and rendered the
continued upholding of the Ottoman Empire a more respectable aim of
British diplomats.
The British military establishment proved almost as impervious to
reform as the Ottoman Empire. Despite the scandal over the conduct of the
Crimean War and despite the Royal Commission’s findings, only a few of
its recommendations were implemented. It would take more than fifteen
years and the defeat of the French army by the Prussians to make Britain
sufficiently exercised about the state of her own army to revise her defences
in a thorough fashion.
Since 1855 Palmerston had been prime minister at the head of a Whig

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government, and so he remained — apart from a Tory interlude, a second

Derby—Disraeli ministry in 1858-9 — for the next ten years until his death.
In foreign affairs he was progressive, a Whig or — as the Whig—Peelite
coalition was increasingly becoming known — a Liberal, the friend of
constitutional governments and exiled Italian patriots. But, where
domestic affairs were concerned, Palmerston’s reforming instincts had
come to a full stop. As he would say in the early 1860s, when he was being
pressed for educational and franchise reforms, “There is really nothing to
be done. We cannot go on adding to the statute book ad infinitum.’ Until
he died, therefore, the Liberal party was unable to follow its true path. It
was kept in a conservative straitjacket.
Palmerston was soon occupied with another war, defending British
interests in China. Despite the concessions made after the first China War,
China remained reluctant to open herself up to trade with the west, a trade
Britain was most eager to pursue. She would not even allow a British
embassy on Chinese soil. When the Chinese authorities imprisoned the
crew of an English ship named the Arrow for suspected piracy, it was the
excuse for war. By 1860, after the capture of key forts in the Peiho river
and the burning down of the emperor’s summer palace as revenge for the
murder of unarmed westerners, Palmerston had opened the major Chinese
ports up to British custom and established diplomatic relations. In 1857
Richard Cobden, the veteran Radical, had put down a motion of censure
against Palmerston’s aggression, and Palmerston went to the country. But
his actions towards China were completely approved and he was returned
with a majority of eighty-five seats.
With Britain remaining in such a bellicose mood the news of mutiny in
India in 1857 broke like a thunderclap. A series of revolts and massacres by
Indian troops threatened British rule as well as the lives of British men and
women besieged in Cawnpore and Lucknow. Worse still, at that precise
moment the British army in India was denuded of British troops, most of
them having been diverted to the Crimea, China and Iran. For the seizure
of Herat in Afghanistan by Russia’s allies, the Iranians, was believed to
threaten the north-west frontier to India. The British army in India therefore
consisted mainly of sepoys. The mutiny broke out at Meerut and spread all
over northern and central India, but it was the East India Company’s Bengal
army that was most strongly affected. The immediate cause was a change in
weaponry, to the new Enfield rifle, an effect of the Crimean War. The
Enfield rifled musket had been observed to be superior to the old smooth
bore. A mischievous rumour swept the ranks that the tallow used to grease
the cartridges was made with a mixture of cow and pig fat. This disgusted
and offended at one stroke both the Hindus and the Muslims who now
made up most of the army of India: Hindus believe that the cow is a sacred

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animal, whereas Muslims believe that to touch a pig will defile them. Both
therefore refused to handle the cartridges, because, in order to use them, the
soldier had to bite off one end.
But its underlying cause was the drastic westernization process India had
been undergoing for the previous twelve years. The last governor-general
but one, the Marquis of Dalhousie, was a keen modernizer in the tradition
of his predecessor Lord William Bentinck, who believed it was his duty to
open India up to progress. Bentinck had destroyed the Indian custom of
suttee in the 1830s — the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral
pyres — and eradicated the Thugees, a caste of hereditary murderers whose
religion in the service of the goddess Kali directed them to wander around
the country strangling their victims. Dalhousie stepped up missionary
activity as another means of spreading western civilization among the
Indians. He brought the telegraph to the country, built proper roads,
tackled education, created irrigation systems, constructed industrial ports
and above all introduced the railway to India. Though Dalhousie had
many admirable objectives and a vision of what could be achieved in India,
his programme failed in one major respect. He did not take Indian
sensibilities into account.
For Hindu Indians, the majority of the population, the railway did not
represent progress as it did in Europe. In India the railway was seen as an
attack on the caste system, as different castes would have to travel in the
same compartments. In 1856 Dalhousie’s successor Lord Canning further
outraged Indian notions, especially among the Brahmins in the Indian
army, when he made altered conditions of service apply. Henceforth Indian
troops had to go abroad as part of their service contract. It was another
opportunity for the caste miscegenation forbidden by the Hindu religion.
Above all Dalhousie had angered Indians with the amount of territory
he had added to British India by what he called his doctrine of lapse. As
well as Burma — by the Second Burmese War in 1852, Lower Burma and
the important trading station of Rangoon were annexed — British India
obtained Sattara in 1848, Nagpore in 1853 and Jhansi in 1854. These were
three hereditary lands of the Maratha warriors that Dalhousie took over
on the grounds that each of the rulers lacked a direct descendant. Hindu
policy in these circumstances was to adopt a male heir, but the governor-
general would not have that. He maintained that the sovereignty of a
nation ‘lapsed’ to the paramount power - the British government — in
default of the natural heirs of a ruling family. Power could not pass to the
adopted sons without the consent of the governor-general, and that
Dalhousie would never grant.
By the 1850s no Indian ruling family of a dependent state, however
princely, felt secure with Dalhousie, who had enormously extended the

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boundaries of British India. The final straw was the annexation of the
powerful kingdom of Oude in 1856, again because there was no male heir
of the body. To British eyes the administration of Oude was despicably
corrupt and cruel, since the bulk of the massive taxes fell on the miserable
poor, but its annexation enraged the kinsmen of the late ruler. Dalhousie
himself had noted with concern that there was a great deal of unrest among
the Brahmins of the Bengal army, a high proportion of whom had been
recruited from Oude. A strange prophecy was circulating that a hundred
years from Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 the British would be driven
out of India. When stories of the abysmal performance of the British army
in the Crimea started to reach India, it encouraged the Indian troops to
revolt.
The spark for mutiny was the Enfield rifles and their supposedly
sacrilegious cartridges handed out to the Indian troops at Bengal. But
though the tallow was withdrawn it was not soon enough to stop wild
rumours sweeping the country that it marked the start of an attempt to
destroy the caste system and the Hindu and Muslim faiths, and to convert
India to Christianity. Panic spread throughout the country and the revolt
began. The Indian Mutiny was the worst crisis the British Empire had
encountered since the Napoleonic Wars. Much of India joined the rebels,
leaving isolated garrisons like Cawnpore and Lucknow in British hands.
But eventually, after a long siege, the British garrison at Cawnpore under
Sir Hugh Wheeler was forced to surrender.
Unfortunately the siege of Cawnpore was led by a vengeful victim of
Dalhousie’s lapse policy called Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last
Peishwah of Poona. Nana Sahib tricked the British garrison into letting
their wives and children go by granting them a safe-conduct pass. Then,
before the eyes of their husbands and fathers, as the party of women and
children began sailing away downriver Nana Sahib’s soldiers opened fire
on them.
Those who escaped death were dragged bleeding and terrified to a local
palace and locked up. There, five of Nana Sahib’s men hacked them to
death and threw their limbs, large and small, down the well of Cawnpore.
When news of Cawnpore reached England from the three men who
managed to escape it poisoned the attitude of the new British garrisons
towards the Indians for a generation. The rage of the English soldiers when
they discovered the remains of their comrades’ wives and children down
the well of Cawnpore led to equally barbarous scenes of retaliation upon
the Indian population — some were tied to cannons and blown up — which
could likewise not be forgotten by their Indian victims.
At Lucknow, the garrison managed to hold out until help arrived with
General Havelock, who had come from the Punjab. Britain had annexed

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the Punjab and its subject province Kashmir in north-west India only eight
years before after two strenuous wars against the Sikhs, a very martial
people. However, British treatment of the Punjab was very different from
that of Oude and the other disaffected areas thanks to its administration
by the Lawrence brothers Henry and John. The Lawrences, who had spent
most of their adult lives bound up with Indian affairs, respected and
admired Indian culture and deplored Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse. The
regime they created in the Punjab, which the Sikhs found acceptable,
ensured that it stayed loyal to Britain. In fact the military traditions of the
Sikhs and the fearless soldiers they produced became a crucial element in
the maintenance of the empire — never more so than at the time of the
Mutiny. 7
Confident that the Punjab would not rise, a force was collected of partly
British and partly Sikh soldiers which marched south from the Punjab to
recapture Delhi, while others sailed along the Ganges to relieve the
weakened defenders of Lucknow. Fortunately for the British, most of
Bombay, Madras and Lower Bengal did not join the rebellion, and most
independent local leaders such as the princes of Holkar and Sindhia
remained allies of the British. Fortunately, too, a detachment of soldiers on
its way to the Second China War could be diverted to India instead.
The Indian Mutiny dramatically demonstrated that it was absurd for
most of the enormous subcontinent of India to be governed by what
was essentially a commercial company, even if there was a Cabinet
representative to oversee its affairs. A Conservative government, the
second Derby—Disraeli administration, was now in power, Palmerston
having been briefly thrown out of office in February 1858. The India Bill
which dissolved the East India Company after it had ruled India for ror
years had the assent of both parties. It transferred the government of
British India to the crown, which was represented by a secretary of state
for India, and an expert council replaced the old Board of Control which
had been composed of directors of the company. In India itself, a viceroy
replaced the governor-general, and all the former presidencies such as
Bombay and Madras were henceforth subordinate to his rule. The
company’s army became conjoined with the British army. The son of Prime
Minister George Canning, Lord ‘Clemency’ Canning, who had acted with
aplomb during the Mutiny and insisted that most of the rebels be treated
leniently, became the first viceroy.
But the minority Derby and Disraeli government was driven from power
in 1859, and Palmerston came back for his second period as prime
minister. Although it was called a Whig—Peelite coalition it was in effect the
first administration of what by 1865 was becoming known as the Liberal
party. A few days before Palmerston took office, at a meeting at Willis’s

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Rooms in London on 6 June 1859 some 300 Whigs, Peelites and Radicals
had pledged themselves to work as one against Derby and Disraeli. For
many years they had supported one another on the issues where they had
ideas in common, such as representative government and free trade. Now
there was fusion, though the tension between the disparate elements
continued under Palmerston, since their leader shared none of the
commitment to a wider franchise and social progress that would be an
increasingly dominant theme for the new party.
In fact, regardless of party, there was a widespread consciousness among
much of the House of Commons of the changing times. Dissenters or
Nonconformists, whose numbers at mid-century in some cities rivalled
those of the Anglicans, would make up much of the Liberal party's
supporters. It was no longer appropriate for Britain to continue to be
confined within the Anglican settlement of two centuries ago. A less
exclusive mood was emerging in the country. Under the Tories in 1858 a
Jewish Disability Act allowing non-Christian jurors to become MPs
allowed the Jewish Lionel de Rothschild to take the seat in the House of
Commons he had won in 1847. In the same year the Property Qualification
Act laid down that for the first time MPs did not have to be men of wealth.
William Ewart Gladstone, chancellor of the Exchequer from 1859
onwards, was one of the leaders of the progressive section of the Liberals.
He clashed frequently with Palmerston, who was almost a quarter of a
century older. While Gladstone’s whole life was a voyage of intellectual
exploration, Palmerston’s ideas were immovable. He could not understand
Gladstone’s palpably growing confidence in the perfectibility of man and
democratic ideas. Gladstone was increasingly disquieted that lack of
money prevented some people from voting. It offended his Christian
conscience, which led him to regard all men as equal. He would soon be
making speeches in favour of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform,
though Palmerston had given strict orders that all attempts at expanding
the franchise were to be shot down. Palmerston even tried to stop
Gladstone’s bill to reduce duty on newspapers to make them cheaper and
more accessible to the working man, and sided with the House of Lords
when it tried to throw it out. But Gladstone triumphed by wrapping the bill
up in the budget. As a money bill, constitutionally it could not be touched
by the Lords.
The natural scientist Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in
1859, whose theories about evolution were popularized as ‘the survival of
the fittest’, increased Britons’ belief in their civilization. So did writers like
Lord Macaulay, the dramatic historian whose ‘Whiggish’ view of the
unending progress of English history was the required reading of the day.
Although the Indian Mutiny implied that the fruits of Victorian civilization

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might be less valued by other nations, the patriotic mission to impart

material achievements to less fortunate peoples did not cease.
British penetration into central Africa in the 1850s reinforced the
country’s sense of superiority. Africa’s impenetrable equatorial interior
had defied Europeans since Roman times. At the end of the eighteenth
century a young surgeon named Mungo Park had died in his attempt to
follow the uncharted Niger river to its source during his intrepid solo
journey into the Gambia, and no Briton had ventured there since. Tropical
disease and the lack of maps made any expedition potentially suicidal. But
in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s missionaries like David Livingstone and
British explorers like Sir Richard Burton and J. H. Speke at last mapped
out Africa’s geographical contours. The invention and widespread use of
steamships facilitated travel to Africa, while breakthroughs in medicine
made it possible to survive.
There had been considerable missionary activity in southern Africa,
working from the Cape northwards, ever since the British had captured it
during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was their activities which reawakened
interest in equatorial Africa. David Livingstone, a former mill hand from
Lanarkshire in Scotland, was the most celebrated missionary of Victorian
England. He became a national hero and was given a state funeral at
Westminster Abbey in 1874. His statue, with its peaked tropical cap,
located outside the Royal Geographical Society headquarters opposite
Hyde Park, reminds us that he was also one of the nineteenth century’s
most important explorers.
Having enterprisingly taken a short course in medicine because he
believed it would be of use to him, but with no special knowledge of Africa,
Livingstone had been sent to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) by the
London Missionary Society in 1840. From there he travelled north on foot
into the unknown. Using beads to barter for food, armed with his Bible and
a gun, he spent the next thirty years crossing and recrossing parts of east-
central Africa where no European had been before to bring her Christianity
and to denounce slavery. Whereas malaria and other tropical diseases had
put paid to earlier European adventurers, Livingstone’s survival was
ensured by his pioneering use of quinine.
He still suffered endlessly from malaria, but the quinine enabled him to
stay alive, and he refused to give up his mission. Like all missionary
endeavours it was kept going purely by public subscription. And on those
journeys of conversion Livingstone was the first European to discover Lake
Ngami, the Victoria Falls, the Zambezi valley, Lake Nyasa and the River
Luabala, which turned out to be the mighty River Congo.
From 1865 to 1871 Livingstone vanished in the jungles of Africa. Such
was the world’s anxiety about the whereabouts of this amazing man that

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the journalist and explorer H. M. Stanley was sent out by the New York
Herald to look for him. Alone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika Stanley
spotted an elderly white man and it was then that he hailed him with the
immortal words, ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’
Livingstone had been intent on finding the source of the Nile, the river
which flows from south to north. This had become an obsession for the
Victorians, and was a mystery unsolved since Herodotus. Rumours
emanating from Egyptian explorers and missionaries, and from Livingstone
himself, suggesting that the source lay in the great lakes rather than in
Herodotus’ four fountains at the heart of Africa, sent a number of British
expeditions to Africa in the 1850s. The most talked about was that of the
flamboyant Arabist Sir Richard Burton, who had entered the Holy City of
Mecca in disguise, and the explorer and soldier John Hanning Speke.
Together they discovered Lake Tanganyika in 1858. But it was Speke who
courageously travelled on alone to find where the Nile river rises out of a
great lake he named Victoria in 1862, in honour of the queen. As he made
his way down waters unmapped by Europeans, Speke came upon the
explorer Sir Samuel Baker, who was slowly making his way up the Nile,
charting it as he went. In fact the various sources of the Nile continued to
be disputed, so that in 1864 Baker would discover another source, Lake
Nyanza, which he called Lake Albert in honour of the prince consort.
By 1864, however, Prince Albert had been dead for three years. In 1861,
at the age of forty-two, the prince consort had fallen victim to typhoid,
scourge of rich and poor before the arrival of proper sewage disposal.
Queen Victoria had always been obsessed with the unhealthy and ancient
nature of the drains at Windsor, and had been putting in new ones when
her husband became ill. After a locum doctor’s initial failure to diagnose
typhoid, nothing could save him. Once widowed, Prince Albert’s adoring
wife, mother of nine children, became a recluse, quite unable to appear at
any state occasions so terrible was her grief. Colossal new buildings in
London, the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial opposite one another in
Kensington, provided public expression of her unhappiness. The monarchy
became extremely unpopular as the queen, soon known as the Widow of
Windsor, withdrew from public life to live in the deepest seclusion. Ever
after she blamed the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, for his father’s
death, because she believed that Prince Albert had caught the fatal disease
while visiting him.
Queen Victoria’s ten-year period of mourning coincided with a low in
Britain’s external relations, when the ageing Palmerston lost his touch. He
became preoccupied with the danger posed by Napoleon III to British
security and — as Prince Albert’s death had removed a very useful source of
information about German affairs — failed to understand the significance

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of what was going on in Prussia, where in September 1862 Bismarck had

become first minister.
Palmerston had looked with the strongest approval on the Italian wars of
unification, which began in April 1859, soon after the end of the Indian
Mutiny. England preserved a decisive and helpful neutrality. The three most
important members of the government, Palmerston, his foreign secretary
Lord John Russell and Gladstone his chancellor of the Exchequer, had the
greatest sympathy with the Italian cause — the Risorgimento or rebirth — as
did most of the bien pensant, educated, anti-papal middle classes, for Britain
had long been a home from home to Italian nationalist exiles. In 1861 the
first Italian Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of a unified Italy.
The Italian wars of liberation had begun after a secret deal between
Napoleon II] and the Italian nationalist leader Count Camillo Cavour that
they should attack Austria together and drive her out of Italy. When it
emerged that the price for the emperor’s help in Italy was the lands of
Savoy and Nice, which brought the French frontier in the south up to the
Alpine passes, Palmerston never trusted the French leader again. It
confirmed the British belief that Napoleon III was a warmonger who
would do anything to enlarge France’s territories. The final insult came in
1859 when the French engineer Ferdinand De Lesseps in a moment of
inspiration began building the Suez Canal — a passage by water across
Egypt from the Mediterranean through to the Red Sea. Palmerston
believed it was intended to threaten the British Empire in India.
So Britain began to draw apart from France, just when she might have
begun to need an ally on the continent, though relations between Italy and
England remained warm for over half a century. By 1859, the war scares
which had alarmed Britain throughout Napoleon III’s reign brought about
a Royal Commission to look into British defences. It pronounced them
inadequate. Napoleon not only had a fleet of steam-powered boats, he was
said to be building a huge naval base at Cherbourg just across the Channel.
From there would he not one day try launching an invasion of England
from Boulogne, just as his uncle had planned?
Demands for the expenditure needed to put Britain on a war footing led
to endless rows between Palmerston and Gladstone. Fortifying Portsmouth
and Plymouth in the manner Palmerston required would involve
drastically raising the taxation that Gladstone tried every year to reduce,
morally convinced as he was of the wickedness of war. With Gladstone’s
encouragement, in 1860 the Radical Richard Cobden brought about the
Franco-British commercial treaty reducing tariffs between the two
countries, as part of their commitment to the doctrine of free trade which
both men believed was the most enduring way of maintaining peace. But
distrust of France continued.

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In 1861 the American Civil War broke out when Abraham Lincoln
became president on an anti-slavery ticket. The Southern states’ wealth
depended on a slave economy if they were to run their cotton and tobacco
plantations at profit, so Lincoln’s arrival in the White House prompted
them to announce that they would exercise their right to secede from the
Union, forming the Confederate States under the presidency of Jefferson
Davis. But the Northerners refused to allow this to happen. When the
Southerners tried to seize Fort Sumter near Charleston, the capital of South
Carolina, civil war erupted. Despite their abhorrence of slavery, the
majority of the British were sympathetic to the South. Gladstone, who was
convinced of each nation’s right to self-determination, said that Jefferson
Davis had created a nation, and Palmerston himself preferred the
gentlemanly ways of the South and their aristocratic society to the crude
energy of the Northern Yankee. Nevertheless it would have been a great
mistake for Britain to take sides and be drawn into the war. Palmerston
successfully insisted that Britain remained neutral.
In northern England, however, manufacturers wanted the government
to lift the Northerners’ blockade of the Southerners’ shipping. This was
preventing the Southerners’ exporting their cotton, on which much of
Lancashire’s multi-million-pound industry was based. However, even if
Britain had succeeded in lifting the blockade, the partial ruin of the
Lancashire cotton industry would still have taken place, for the men and
women who worked the machines announced a boycott of all Southern
cotton on the ground that they did not want to support the cause of
slavery. The result was a million people in Lancashire living on the rates, a
situation a hundred times more pitiful than the Hungry Forties.
Nevertheless, the principled operatives continued to insist that they would
rather starve than support slavery. As a result of the war, Egypt soon
became preferred as one of the chief sources of cotton for British
manufacturing, all the more so after it was occupied by British forces in
1882.
The American Civil War came to an end after four years of fighting in
1865. The North had won under the military genius of Ulysses S. Grant,
helped by their greater wealth, their industrial economy and a larger
population which triumphed over the agrarian and less populated South.
Their swift action in creating a powerful navy to paralyse the Southerners’
principal exports of cotton and tobacco was also decisive. In the course of
the war all black slaves were declared to be free.
Napoleon III used the United States’ civil war to venture into what
America by the Monroe Doctrine defined as her sphere of influence.
Mexico was a part of the ‘back yard’ she considered a no-go area for the
European powers. But war-torn America was too preoccupied to object

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when alongside a British force sent to demand the repayment of a debt

owed to foreign bondholders came a French expedition to make the
bankrupt Mexico a client state of France. Napoleon III thus turned the
younger brother of the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I into the Emperor
Maximilian of Mexico. However, with the end of the American Civil War
in 1865 the Americans were able to force Napoleon to withdraw his
soldiers and abandon the so-called emperor to be executed by the
Mexicans.
The Mexican adventure confirmed Napoleon’s reputation for reckless
meddling. But it was his European activities the British worried about.
British diplomats were convinced that the emperor’s policy was to move
the French frontier up to the Rhine, as indeed it was. Despite the favoured-
nation status France and Britain now had with one another, the threat this
would pose to Belgium, always Britain’s first priority for her security,
increasingly entailed ruling out any thought of alliance with Napoleon. In
1863 the evident discontent of the Poles, who had rebelled against their
Russian overlords, and the claim by the North German Confederation to
the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, gave Napoleon the
opportunity to propose a European Congress so that all the post-1815
boundaries could be looked at afresh. The British made it abundantly clear
that they had no interest in what they believed would be an excuse for
France to shift her own boundaries.
But, in the case of Schleswig and Holstein, Britain suddenly needed an
ally. Encouraged by Prussia, the North German Confederation was not
frightened off by Palmerston’s command to leave the duchies alone — he
had completely underestimated the force of German nationalism. In 1863
the new King of Denmark inherited his throne through the female line. The
duchies recognized inheritance only through the male line. Thus the way
was open for a German heir. When the King of Denmark promulgated a
new constitution which incorporated the more Danish duchy, Schleswig,
wholly into Denmark, Austria and Prussia acting for the German
Confederation threatened the Danes with war if they would not give up the
duchies altogether.
To Palmerston the idea of the Confederation of German states, new-
comers in the power games of Europe, deciding who the territories of the
ancient Danish monarchy belonged to was preposterous. But he no longer
had the grip on current events that had made him such a force to be
reckoned with in the past. The septuagenarian Palmerston had first become
an MP as long ago as 1809. He had no idea of the significance of Bismarck
and the series of wars he had planned to weld the German states into one
united Germany, nor of the overwhelming German desire to achieve this.
When to Palmerston’s amazement in February 1864 Prussian and Austrian

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troops called Britain’s bluff and invaded Schleswig—Holstein, seizing the

duchies from Denmark, there was nothing he could do.
Palmerston had assumed that the Germans would be frightened off by
his warning that the Danes would not be fighting alone. His gallantry was
inspired by the marriage of the Prince of Wales to the exquisite Danish
princess Alexandra that very year. When the Austro-Prussian preparations
for war continued, approaches to Napoleon for an army elicited the
information that Bismarck had promised France compensation on the
Rhine if she stayed neutral over the Danish provinces. But Schleswig—
Holstein could not be saved by the British navy alone. After all
Palmerston’s bluster, the Danes had to fight on their own.
Britain’s international reputation, already low after the Crimea, sank
lower still. By now Palmerston and Russell were looking increasingly
foolish. Queen Victoria called them ‘two dreadful old men’. Lord Derby
described their ineffectual posturings over first Poland, when they had
fruitlessly demanded a say in the treatment of the Poles, and then Denmark
as a policy of ‘meddle and muddle’.
With Britain a spent force and France compliant, to the surprise of the
duchies’ inhabitants, not to say the German Confederation and the
German Prince Frederick of Augustenberg in whose name the Austrians
and Prussians were fighting for the duchies, Schleswig was annexed to
Prussia, and Holstein to Austria.
After Schleswig—Holstein, even German liberals began to support
Bismarck. They saw the truth of his harsh words about the military means
needed to unite Germany. In 1866 the promise of the Austrian-held Veneto
to Italy and the Rhine provinces to the emperor Napoleon III prepared the
way for a new war. Bismarck had bought off the Russians by supporting
them against the Polish rebellion in 1863, and waited for what he called
the favourable moment. Now Prussia could be sure of no stab in the back
from the east from Russia when she attacked Austria to seize the leadership
of the North German Confederation for herself. With Russia and France
both neutral, Prussia and Italy attacked Austria together, on the specious
pretext of the administration of Holstein.
In three weeks, to the watching world’s amazement, the Austrian army
had been defeated by the Prussians, by their superb soldiers, their
disciplined tactics and their new needle guns, at the Battle of Koniggratz, or
Sadowa as it is known in England, in July 1866. Austria was expelled from
the North German Confederation and the Veneto was duly ceded to Italy.
But when Napoleon III called in the great prize he believed that he had been
bribed with, the shifting of the French frontier to the edge of the Rhine
provinces above Alsace—Lorraine, Bismarck made it brutally plain that he
had been playing with Napoleon’s dreams. It was out of the question.

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But Palmerston was not there to see this astonishing manifestation of

Prussian military aggression which turned the world upside down. Lord
Cupid had died after a good breakfast of mutton chops a day short of his
eighty-first birthday in October 1865. Despite recent mistakes he remained
beloved of the Victorian public, his robust tendency to refuse to toe the
diplomatic line when natural justice was at stake always sure to stir British
emotions. Lord John Russell briefly became prime minister again. His
thoughts continued to revolve round broadening the franchise. The
reformers among the Liberals were now in the ascendant, but there were
still enough of Palmerston’s supporters to join the Tories and bring down
a new Refgrm Bill and Russell’s ministry in 1866. Derby became prime
minister and Russell retired as leader of the Liberals, his place being taken
by Gladstone.
In the event, by a strange turnaround, thanks to the canny Disraeli it was
the Tory government which brought in the Second Reform Bill of 1867.
Disraeli had been exasperated by his party’s exclusion from power for
twenty years. A new clamour for franchise reform had started up, and by
the autumn of 1866 there were riots in Hyde Park, with crowds shouting
‘For Gladstone and liberty’. Disraeli had persuaded the Conservatives that
unless something was done to gratify working men’s desires for a
democratic Parliament they faced the possibility of real disorder. It was
clear that the Tories did not appeal to middle-class opinion, but they might
achieve an upsurge in support if the potentially vast working-class
constituency was given the vote.
Although some of the Tory grandees like Lord Cranborne (the future
prime minister Lord Salisbury) handed in their resignations in 1867, the
age of middle-class democracy begun by the Great Reform Bill now came
to an end. Disraeli ‘dished the Whigs’, as he put it, by introducing
household suffrage in the towns. Even lodgers got the vote as long as they
paid £10 a year in rent and lived in the same rooms for a year (it was £12
a year in the counties). Lord Derby called it ‘a leap in the dark’: who knew
what government would be voted for by a new kind of voter, whose lack
of education made educational reforms more pressing than ever?
Accompanying the bill extending the suffrage was a Distribution of Seats
Bill — eleven obsolete boroughs were disenfranchised, and thirty-five others
having fewer than 10,000 inhabitants gave up one member, freeing up MPs
for towns whose populations had grown and counties whose populations
were also increasing.
By the Reform Act of 1867 Disraeli brought in an innovative dimension
of working-class support for the Tories which he would foster by a striking
foreign policy, his ‘forward’ attitude to the empire and important social
reforms. His tough stance as a negotiator where Britain’s interests were at

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stake was sharply defined against the approach of the Gladstonian Liberal
party, which was committed to an ethical foreign policy, international
standards of morality and the rights of small nations.
In the late 1860s Britain got her first taste of the Irish militancy that
would bedevil British politics for the next fifty-five years. The previous
decade had seen the founding in the United States of the Fenians, an Irish
secret society devoted to establishing a republic in Ireland, and with the
end of the American Civil War many Irishmen took their military
experience to their native land. In 1867 they tried an uprising. When that
failed they moved on to mainland Britain, where a series of outrages
culminated in the blowing up of a wall of Clerkenwell Prison. Gladstone
believed that that was what he called the chapel bell, ringing to declare that
his mission was to pacify Ireland.
Solving the Irish question would be the consuming ambition of the
second half of Gladstone’s career. Appropriately it was Ireland that in
1868 brought down the Tory government (now led by Disraeli owing to
Derby’s ill-health). The Tories traditionally were the party of the
established Church. Even Disraeli could not change that. So when
Gladstone took up the cause of disestablishing the Protestant Church in
Ireland as a way of pleasing the Irish population, the Conservatives had to
oppose it. Disraeli’s government fell as the Commons, by a huge majority,
voted for Gladstone’s proposals. At the 1868 election the newly
enfranchised electorate ungratefully gave Disraeli only 265 seats and 393
to Gladstone, who thus formed the first Liberal ministry.
The sixty-four-year-old Disraeli retreated to lick his party’s wounds and
reorganize it by creating the Conservative Central Office. His poetic,
elegant and slender person, with its thin, witty face surrounded still by
long, lustrous black lovelocks, was replaced at the government despatch
box by the frequently anguished, almost superhumanly strong Gladstone.

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Gladstone and Disraeli (1868-1886)

William Ewart Gladstone’s vigorous first ministry began in 1868. For the
first time the aristocratic Whigs were no longer in a majority in the Liberal
party and the Radicals and Nonconformists were to the fore. Gladstone
presided over the sort of reforming government which had not been seen
since Grey and Peel and which produced the beginnings of the modern
Britain we take for granted today, committed to a meritocratic democracy.
Both the civil service and the army were thrown open to competition. In
1870 an exam system was instituted for the civil service, while in the army
from 1871 commanding rank was no longer to be achieved by purchasing
a commission.
Ever since the Crimean War the disgraceful performance of the army had
convinced many that it should be reformed from top to toe and purged of
its aristocratic commanding officers. But it was extremely hard to persuade
the army itself of this, particularly as the Duke of Wellington continued to
be held up as a vindication of the system. Edward Cardwell, the new
secretary for war, believed that this was not only unfair, but in the light of
the behaviour of Lords Lucan and Cardigan in the Crimea positively
dangerous. Moreover the menace of Prussian arms had now reached
France, just across the Channel, where the destruction of the French army
in a matter of days had given the question of army reforms additional
urgency.
There was furious opposition to Cardwell. The House of Lords threw
out the bill to protect its own. But Gladstone was not going to be thwarted.
He ingeniously made Queen Victoria cancel the royal warrant which
authorized the purchase of commissions. The system of buying promotion
was at an end. Short service was introduced, and the militia and volunteers
were integrated with the commissioned forces. Cardwell also destroyed the
division of command which had plagued both the Napoleonic and the
Crimean Wars — between Horse Guards, where the commander-in-chief’s
department was based, and the War Office. The commander-in-chief, a
post which had usually been held by a royal duke not necessarily on the
side of the elected government, was made subordinate to the secretary for
war, who had to be a member of the ruling party.
The legalization of trade unions in 1871 accompanied the broadening of
the franchise, the Trade Union Act recognizing their status as friendly
societies. From 1872 the Secret Ballot Act ensured that voters could no
longer be intimidated — perhaps by an aggressive candidate — as they spoke
their votes to the teller. From now on the vote was an anonymous piece of
paper placed in the ballot box. Women still did not have the vote, but the
old pseudo-scientific prejudices about women’s brains being inferior to
men’s, and the debates about women’s capabilities which had occupied so

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much newspaper print for the previous forty years, were dying down.
Though they could not take degrees, by 1872 women started being
accepted at Cambridge, with two female halls of residence, Girton and
Newnham. The London Medical School for Women was established in
1875, and Oxford followed in 1878 with Lady Margaret Hall and
Somerville.
At Oxbridge women no longer met only members of the Church of
England. For by at last abolishing the University Test Act in 1871 under
pressure from the Nonconformists the Liberals opened the ancient
universities to all the intellectual talent in the kingdom, even if they were
Jews, Roman Catholics or Nonconformists. Until that date non-Anglicans
had been prevented from studying at Oxford or Cambridge, if they could
not take an oath of allegiance to the monarch as head of the Church of
England.
And as part of these changing mores the position of women continued
to improve throughout the rest of the century. Though they were hardly a
minority in the country, women had begun the nineteenth century not only
socially but legally inferior to men. Married women could not be
represented separately from their husbands in the law courts until 1857.
The influential philosopher John Stuart Mill’s 1869 publication The
Subjection of Women both reflected advanced thought and did much to
raise the consciousness of his era about how women were oppressed.
Enlarging the franchise on such a wide scale brought up the question of
female suffrage. In 1865 Mill, who was the Radical MP for Westminster,
proposed the vote for women, eloquently advocating the equality of
women to men in an amendment to the Second Reform Bill. Though it was
defeated, female suffrage societies began to spring up in the major cities.
In 1869 the Liberal government gave women the right to vote in
municipal elections; from 1870 women could vote in school board
elections and be elected to the boards, while by 1894 women played a more
visible role in local government, as they were allowed to serve on urban
and district councils. In 1873 the humane Custody of Infants Acts ensured
that all women could have access to their children in the event of divorce
or separation, a right previously denied them and the cause of much
anguish.
From the 1870s to the end of the century a mass of case law was built
up to support women as independent beings with separate and equal
rights. In 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act at last put an end to the
husband’s legal right to all his wife’s earnings. Although in practice
suspicious fathers and brothers, or clever women like Charlotte Bronté,
had always found ways round this by creating trusts to which only they
had access, it was a significant development.

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Education was also fundamentally reformed. In 1870 the Cabinet

minister W. E. Forster, a former Quaker married to the daughter of Dr
Arnold who had revitalized Rugby School with an ethos of public service,
carried an Elementary Education Act through the Commons. This created
the first national system, making education available to all children from
the age of five to thirteen. Any local district could elect a school board
which would have the power to levy a rate and then spend it either on
schools already existing in their area or on building new schools. Although
the boards were given powers to enforce attendance up to the age of
thirteen, it was not until 1880 that elementary education was made legally
compulsory, and it was not until 1891 that this became meaningful when
a new Education Act made it free.
The period after the Second Reform Bill is often seen as marking the
transition from the rule of the middle classes to a wider democracy. But the
universal feature of late-Victorian Britain was the proliferation of a self-
improving middle-class high culture. It is glimpsed in the imposing civic
buildings of Liverpool and Manchester — the concert halls, the orchestras,
the art galleries, the public parks and the free public libraries begun by the
American millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1880. The
Victorians loved joining things and they loved building things.
Since 1845 there had been the university boat race between Oxford and
Cambridge, since 1863 a Football Association. In 1864 the first county
cricket match had been held. The youthful cricketer W. G. Grace had
played for the MCC and was soon to have the sort of following that top
sports stars have today. The railways and the introduction of three
national Bank Holidays in 1871 contributed to increasing the British
fascination with competitive sports — in the same year the Rugby Football
Union was founded. In 1873 the first lawn tennis club was established, and
the neo-Gothic Natural History Museum finished. Easily mistaken for a
cathedral, the museum towered over South Kensington and provided a
home for the curious specimens being sent back to Britain by her explorers.
For those with literary tastes, by the 1870s there was a different spirit
abroad. Charles Dickens, whose skewering of social wrongs had epitom-
ized the early Victorians, died in 1870 with his last novel The Mystery of
Edwin Drood unfinished. Now that the state had been mobilized to
address social problems, and organizations like the Salvation Army set up,
the novel could concentrate on the emotions and moral dilemmas, as in
George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy’s first novel Under the
Greenwood Tree, both published in 1872. Hardy’s background as the son
of a stonemason signified that the novel was beginning to encompass a
hitherto unrepresented section of society. The king of poetic enchantment
continued to be Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate. The first

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The new Houses of Parliament whose architect was Sir Charles Barry. The
building was begun in 1836, finished in 1868.

generation of children had been thrilled by an Oxford mathematics don

Charles Dodgson who under the pen name Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. He followed it up in 1871 with
Through the Looking Glass. Though still in deepest mourning Queen
Victoria had become an author herself, publishing the bestselling Leaves
from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands in 1868, the same year that
Wilkie Collins published The Moonstone.
As modernizers, the Liberals approached with some impatience the way
justice was dispensed. Its obscure and dusty traditions drastically needed
reorganizing and rationalizing. The complex of law courts in the Strand,

The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, built after the 1873 Liberal
government Judicature Act.

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known as the Royal Courts of Justice, between Lincoln’s Inn and the
Temple was built in the 1870s to house all the civil courts. Henceforth they
were to be administered together under one roof. The very gradual
development of English law over the centuries from the old Curia Regis of
the various courts — Exchequer, Common Pleas, King’s Bench and
Chancery — had resulted in overlaps and unhelpful demarcations. All the
courts were now brought together to form divisions of one Supreme Court
of Judicature.
With the Nonconformist element so strongly represented in the govern-
ment a fresh approach could be found towards Ireland, increasingly a sore
in the body politic. The 1869 Church Disestablishment Act removed the
insulting title of official state Church from the minority Protestant Church
of Ireland. Even in the north it had next to no membership other than its
clergymen, for most Ulstermen were Presbyterians. The Irish Church
became a free Episcopal Church and its bishops no longer sat in the House
of Lords.
But as far as the majority of the Irish were concerned the important
issue was the land. Other than in the north with its linen and ship-
building industries, farming provided the only employment in Ireland.
Depopulation after the famine had brought in a series of landlords
attracted by cheap land, but they proved as ruthless as the old, and only a
little more scientific. Gladstone’s first Irish Land Act in 1870 attempted to
put right the many grievances of the Irish tenant farmer, by compelling
landlords to compensate tenants for evictions if they had made
improvements in their holdings. A system of loans was instituted to enable
tenantsto purchase land.
But though the Liberal government might congratulate itself on being
such an effective new broom, its reforms had taken place against a
menacing background. It was at last plain after the Franco-Prussian War of
1870-1 that the balance of power had tilted away from France and Britain.
For 400 years the British had viewed the French with wariness if not enmity.
At the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, when the North German
Confederation took a Bonaparte emperor prisoner as well as the astounding
number of 104,000 of his soldiers, the French became pitiable victims.
In continued pursuit of his ambition to unite the remaining southern
German states under Prussia, Bismarck tricked the French into beginning
the Franco-Prussian War on the basis of their objections to the German
Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne. Napoleon III needed a war
to revive his flagging popularity. But though it emerged that he had
intended to move the French frontier into Belgium and that he still had
hopes of the Rhine provinces, the cumulative impression of Prussian
savagery and French weakness left Europe gasping. The price of peace was

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the surrender to Germany of the French lands of Lorraine and Alsace and
payment of an indemnity ‘for causing the war’ of £200 million to
Germany. A German garrison would be maintained on French soil until it
was paid. France took ten years to recover her strength as an international
force, and for the first time the British began to envisage Germany as the
enemy. Real fear of Prussian soldiers forced the British army to agree to the
much needed reforms outlined above.
But Britain remained neutral over the Franco-Prussian War. She was not
in the mood nor had she the strength to interfere in the continent of Europe
when attacks on the old balance of power became regular events. British
statesman were conscious of how foolish the British lion had looked
roaring over Schleswig—Holstein when it had no teeth. When in 1871,
seeing the French disorder, the Russians abrogated the peace treaty that
had ended the Crimean War and remilitarized the Black Sea, Britain
accepted that there was nothing she could do.
In the mysterious way of electorates, a subtle discontent began. The man
in the street felt that Britain had been worsted by the Russians over the
Black Sea. There was also a dawning realization that, though Britain
dominated world shipping, her share of manufacturing was beginning to
decline from the high-water mark of twenty years before. Gladstone had
also agreed to have an arbitrator appointed over claims by the United
States that she should be compensated for the destruction of Northern
shipping during the Civil War by the Confederates’ British-built Alabama.
When news broke that the arbitrator had decided that Britain should pay
the colossal sum of £3 million to the United States, it was greeted with
stupefaction. It was not so many years since Palmerston had laid down the
rule that Britain’s natural mode of expression was gunboat diplomacy. The
Alabama affair added to the British public’s impression that Mr Gladstone
was unable to stand up for Britain’s interests abroad, whatever good he did
at home. Did being Liberal-minded also make you feeble-minded?
By 1874 the British public had had enough of being improved. With the
reorganization of the Conservative party by Disraeli, the Tory machine
became a formidable weapon at elections. The dazzling Disraeli attacked
Gladstone and the Liberals as not being patriotic enough, comparing the
Cabinet seated on the front bench opposite him to a range of exhausted
volcanoes. He played on the fears of the well-to-do. How would their sons
get into the civil service or the army now that the old routes of patronage
were gone? Among the less progressive there was a feeling of the world
changing too much and too fast for them.
Gladstone’s 1872 Licensing Act, which shortened the hours of drinking,
annoyed everyone who enjoyed passing time at their local. He himself told
his brother after his defeat at the next election that he had been ‘borne

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down in a torrent of gin and beer’. That election came in 1874: Gladstone
dissolved Parliament with the manifesto promise to abolish income tax,
but Disraeli became prime minister for the second time, and remained so
until 1880. Gladstone for his part announced moodily that he was leaving
the Liberal party and Parliament, so that he might have ‘an interval
between Parliament and the grave’. In fact he would be prime minister for
three more terms, which fortunately for her the queen lacked the prescience
to see.
Disraeli was ecstatic — he was back at ‘the top of the greasy pole’ as he
had put it in 1868. The queen was very pleased too. Gladstone had lectured
her during private visits as if she were a ‘public meeting’. Much to her
annoyance he was always trying to involve the Prince of Wales in state
business. Disraeli the literary man treated her as if she was a character from
an old romance. She was ‘the Faery’ to him, as he constantly told her, and
she loved it. They exchanged literary gossip — ‘we authors, ma’am’, said
Disraeli the distinguished novelist tactfully, as Queen Victoria was very
proud of her journal’s publishing success.
Disraeli ended a ten-year period of great unpopularity for the monarchy
since Prince Albert’s death, during which republican movements had
mushroomed, by getting Victoria to appear in public after years of
seclusion. Soon Disraeli was allowed to sit in the royal presence whereas
Gladstone had always had to stand. He was also permitted to write to the
queen in the first person, instead of referring to himself as ‘the prime
minister’. He amused her, yet he was profound and sentimental by turns.
+He did not frighten her with dour democratic thunderings. Being with
Disraeli was as intoxicating as drinking champagne, and he enjoyed a good
deal of that too.
Above all Disraeli deliberately expanded the British Empire. Like most
other politicians of his era, Disraeli had previously believed the colonies to
be a millstone round the British government’s neck, but he changed his
mind. He began instead to be excited by the idea of Britain as an imperial
country with an imperial destiny, publicly regretting that the grants of self-
government to colonies like Canada had not been accompanied by
measures for an imperial tariff, and keen to see a federation of the Dutch
and British colonies in South Africa. Disraeli added to the queen’s royal
titles and her glamour by making her the Queen Empress of India in 1876
and had her proclaimed in this new style at Delhi. By far his most
important achievement, however, was securing the Suez Canal for Britain.
The Suez Canal was the fast route to India. When it opened in 1869 it
cut the distance from Britain to India by about six weeks and thousands of
miles, for its waterway was a short cut between the Mediterranean and the
Red Sea. For the British, with their huge, distant Indian Empire, its

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strategic value was even more important than its commercial. In the event
of another Indian Mutiny or of invasion of the subcontinent by Russia, the
Suez Canal could carry reinforcements far more quickly than the old route
down the Cape. If the British controlled it, they controlled the gateway to
their eastern empire.
Disraeli was at his best in foreign affairs. For him, secret deals and
backstairs arrangements were the breath of life. When in the autumn of
1875 he heard a rumour from one of his sources that the Khedive of Egypt
was about to go bankrupt and that his shares in the Suez Canal were up
for grabs, or more importantly were on the point of being grabbed by a
French syndicate, he had no time to lose.
Parliament was still in recess and could not grant the money immediately.
It might take months to debate such a purchase and give its approval. In a
typically dashing move, Disraeli approached the Rothschild banking family,
whose liquidity was such that they had often produced the cash to pay the
troops during the Napoleonic Wars when the government was running
short. The prime minister’s private secretary Montague Corry was sent to
the Rothschild bank headquarters at New Court. Ushered into Baron
Rothschild’s presence Corry told him that the prime minister needed the
then colossal sum of £4 million (worth about a billion pounds in today’s
money). ‘When?’ asked Lord Rothschild, without much excitement.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Corry. Rothschild was picking at a plate of lustrous
muscatel grapes on a silver-gilt stand. He took another grape and, having
ruminated thoughttully, spat out the skin. ‘What is your security?’ he asked.
‘The British government,’ said Corry. ‘You shall have it,’ said Rothschild.
With the Rothschild loan, Disraeli bought 40 per cent of the shares in
the Suez Canal, making Britain the largest single shareholder in the
company. It was a stunning coup. Disraeli sent a dramatic note to the
queen telling her about the Suez Canal. ‘It’s yours,’ he wrote, as if the
Canal were a personal gift.
Disraeli’s prime ministership also saw a great deal done in the way of
domestic legislation. Like Peel, he believed the Conservatives must
continue to remake the alliance between the commercial and landed
interests in the country if they wanted to be a viable party. Since their
enfranchisement in 1867 those commercial interests now had to include
the working classes. There had to be social reform if what Disraeli called
Tory Democracy was to be properly cemented. His government set out to
improve the lot of the poor. Where Gladstone was more interested in
bettering men’s souls, Disraeli addressed himself to their material needs.
Thanks to the outstanding Tory home secretary Richard Cross, in 1875
the Tories passed an enormous amount of practical social legislation. The
Artisans Dwellings Act enabled local authorities to sweep away slums and

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replace them with healthy housing. In Birmingham in particular, under the

Radical mayor Joseph Chamberlain, the unhealthy slums which had grown
up round sites of manufacture were levelled to the ground and modern
housing constructed in their stead. Legislation removed the last legal
remnants restricting the trade unions when the Conspiracy and Protection
of Property Act legalized peaceful picketing.
Disraeli’s chance to perform on the world stage came in 1875, a year
after he had become prime minister, with the revival of the Eastern
Question — that is, the question of what was to become of the Ottoman
Empire. But this time it was the Eastern Question influenced by the
unifications of Italy and Germany. More than ever the peoples of the
Balkans felt the same nationalist stirrings for their own states, while
Austria — now that she had been deprived of her territory in Italy — looked
to make it up in the Balkans.
In 1875 there was a series of risings by the inhabitants of Bosnia and
Herzegovina against their savage Turkish overlords which were brutally
put down, despite protests from the great powers. These were followed by
revolts among the Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins. In the case of
the Serbians and Montenegrins they were sufficiently well armed to begin
a war against Turkey in June 1876. But so successful were the Turkish
armies against them that Russia felt the need to back the Christian rebels.
By 1878 the Russians were at Adrianople (modern Edirne), and thus
threatening Constantinople.
The need to protect Turkey became pressing. But at the end of June 1876
the general British acquiescence to the policy of supporting Turkey had
vanished, as the Daily News started to publish reports from its own
correspondent of the appalling massacres taking place in Bulgaria. Just as
during the Greek Wars of Independence, a wave of indignation swept the
now enormous British newspaper-reading public. How could Britain,
which prided herself on being the friend of liberty, the foe of slavery, the
home of justice, the refuge of oppressed exiles, be the ally of such people?
Was she not sullied by her association with barbarism?
Over one weekend Gladstone poured out one of the best-known
political pamphlets ever written, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question
of the East. (Disraeli muttered that of all the Bulgarian Horrors it was the
greatest.) Selling 200,000 copies in a month, in thundering phrases it called
for the Turks to leave Bulgaria forthwith: “Their Zaptiehs and their
Mudits, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their
Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the
province they have desolated and profaned.’ Turkey should not be allowed
by the authority of the European powers to renew her charter for ruling
Bulgaria.

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At a great public meeting at Blackheath Gladstone called for the

liberation of all the miserable provinces rebelling against Turkey. He was
back in politics. The best resistance to Russia would come not from
propping up the odious Turks but by reinforcing the strength and freedom
of those countries which had to resist her. The solution to the Eastern
Question, said Gladstone, was ‘to place a living barrier between Russia and
Turkey’.
Disraeli had no sympathy for this moral earnestness. He was incapable
of taking the matter seriously, even though by now a government agent
sent out to Turkey had confirmed the worst of the reports and hundreds of
thousands of British people believed that it was shameful for Britain to
have an ally like Turkey. Disraeli felt that morals were not part of alliances;
he had no moral objection to an alliance with Turkey. To the last he
thought that some of the massacres were made up, the ‘babble of coffee
houses’. But, with Gladstone at the head of the campaign, the country
became fixated on the atrocities. Even so, Gladstone’s speeches incensed
the queen — she began to consider him a half-mad firebrand.
With extraordinary fickleness, however, public opinion suddenly swung
round in favour of Turkey after her general of genius, Osman Pasha, kept
the Russians at bay for five months at Plevna. The heroic deeds of Turkish
defenders during the siege did much to make the British forget the
Bulgarian Horrors, as did the British weakness for the underdog. They
remembered that the Russian bear extending its great shadow over Asia,
threatening India, was the real enemy. A rumour even started that
Gladstone was a Russian agent. In December 1877 Osman surrendered,
Plevna fell, and at the end of January 1878 the Russian General Skobelev
reached Adrianople. Surely Britain now had to make a move or the
Russians would be at Constantinople, and unlikely ever to want to move
out.
Fortunately for Disraeli, Britain was now violently pro-Turk and anti-
Russian: Russia had captured the whole of Armenia and huge swathes of
Turkish Asia, arousing alarm right across Europe. Passions were running
very high. Gladstone was booed in the street and even had his windows
broken. The music-hall song —

We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,

We've got the men, we've got the ships, we’ve got the money too,
We've fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople

— gave its name to the militaristic sentiment of jingoism. It was sung

everywhere, and it was a sentiment that became stronger and stronger

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towards the end of the century. The tiny queen herself was threatening
abdication if the British did not go and give ‘those Russians such a beating’.
On 28 January Disraeli, who had been made the Earl of Beaconsfield,
obtained a £6 million grant from Parliament for war. The fleet was ordered
to leave Besika Bay and move up to Constantinople. By 15 February it was
in place. The Russian army was beginning to march down towards that
city when the order was suddenly given to pull up. Before its eyes were the
massive grey hulls of six British warships tethered like basking sharks off
Prinkipo island in the Sea of Marmara, guarding the glistening minarets of
Constantinople.
The Russians returned to Adrianople. Though the tsar wanted to speed
on to Constantinople, his brother the Grand Duke Nicholas believed it
would be madness to proceed. On 3 March, in order to consolidate their
gains while still not technically at war with Britain despite those warships,
Russia quickly signed a separate peace with Turkey by the Treaty of
San Stefano. Disraeli’s action had stopped Russia from entering
Constantinople and seizing the Straits, but for how long? For ten weeks
England held her breath, believing that an Anglo-Russian war could break
out at any moment.
Deeply suspicious of this peace treaty, Disraeli did not stop his
preparations for war. When it transpired that the treaty provided for a
rearrangement of the Balkan peninsula so that it would be dominated by a
‘Big Bulgaria’ whose Slav population would give the Russians the
preponderant influence in the Balkans, the prime minister announced that
he was calling up the reserves. Two weeks later he sent 7,000 Indian troops
to Malta —a sign that India had been restored to the imperial bosom. These
actions convinced the Russian ambassador to London, Count Shuvalov,
that the tsar could not seize Constantinople with impunity. The Russian
government conceded that the great powers would have to be consulted
about these changes because they affected Europe. It was agreed to call a
Congress of the great powers, to take place in Berlin, capital of the
dominant power of Europe, Prussia.
The Congress was hailed as Disraeli’s triumph, as in many ways it was
— when it was over he was offered a dukedom by Queen Victoria. Though
he was so pale from the kidney disease which killed him three years later
that he wore rouge to go out at night, his actions at the Congress kept the
Russians up to the mark. When they tried to stop the Turks controlling the
passes of Bulgaria south of the Balkans and claimed a larger area of
Armenia, he revealed a secret agreement with the Sultan of Turkey: in
return for guaranteeing Turkey in Asia, Britain had been allowed to occupy
Cyprus. And Disraeli now gave orders for more of the fleet to move to that
island. Faced with two British fleets the Russians agreed to everything.

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Disraeli returned home to be acclaimed for having secured peace. By his

superior poker-playing he had restored Britain to her old international
position of honour: he had reduced Russian influence in the Balkans by
preventing Big Bulgaria, he had secured better rights for the Christian
subjects of the sultan, who were to be monitored by military consuls, he
had kept the Russians out of Constantinople, and he had stopped them
gaining too much of Armenia, which could have been the jumping-off
ground for penetration into Asia Minor or the Persian Gulf. In any case
that danger had been neutralized because Great Britain now had a base at
the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
In fact the Congress was a piece of gifted stage-management, of smoke
and mirrors. Most of the agreements about territory between the great
powers which made the Congress go so smoothly had actually been
arranged a month before. Alarmed by Disraeli’s continued threat of war
the Russians had agreed to divide Big Bulgaria in two. Meanwhile Britain
had made a gentleman’s agreement with Austria-Hungary to support her
occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Despite the excitement with which it was hailed, there was nothing very
lasting about the Congress of Berlin. For all Disraeli’s conviction of the
need to keep the Turkish Empire as a bulwark against Russia, it had been
partially dismembered and small nations put in its place. Fears of Bulgaria
becoming a Russian satellite proved quite illusory. Though seven years
later the two Bulgarias reunited, the new nation was resistant to Russian
influence and jealous of her independence. Cyprus proved to be a
deadweight round the British neck, as it was soon to be superseded as a
base in the eastern Mediterranean by Egypt. Moreover Britain was
embarrassed by being tied to Turkey, which never kept her promises of
reform. Despite the military consuls, the rulers went from bad to worse in
their abuse of human rights, the best known being the Armenian massacre
of 1892. In fact the most striking effect of the Russo-Turkish War and the
Congress of Berlin was that Serbia felt hard done by. Like Montenegro and
Romania she had won her independence, but she had a considerable
grievance because Austria-Hungary had been allowed to occupy Bosnia
and Herzegovina, whose populations were mainly Serbian.
Nevertheless most of Britain, with the vehement exception of Gladstone,
believed that it was Disraeli’s finest hour. He turned down the dukedom
but accepted the Garter on condition that Salisbury, the foreign secretary,
was awarded it too. Disraeli’s ‘forward’ policy of expanding British
territories in South Africa and India was far less successful, however.
Although in west Africa, where Britain had had trading settlements since
the eighteenth century, she had defeated the warlike Ashanti tribes on the
Gold Coast in 1873, the Zulu War of 1878-9 was a public relations

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disaster. The Zulus, the most fearsome tribe in southern Africa, had been
driven by drought into looking for other lands on which to graze their
cattle. By 1877 the bankrupt Transvaal Republic had agreed to be annexed
by the British in order to obtain their protection against the Zulus.
The formidable Zulu chief Cetewayo had revived the organization of the
tribe on the old military basis. All the young unmarried men had to belong
to regiments; removed from their families at puberty to live in barracks
beside the royal kraal or palace, they were not allowed to marry until they
had wet their spears with blood. When the British demanded an end to
Zulu mobilization, the Zulu War began — and, despite the obvious
advantages of guns over spears, at Isandhlwana a camp of British soldiers
was wiped out by an impi, or Zulu army, of 20,000 men. The Zulus used
the land so skilfully, moved so fast and secretly, that no one had the least
idea that they were in the vicinity, until they suddenly rose out of the dust
in their feathered headdresses to wreak havoc among the British. The war
continued badly: Napoleon’s III’s son, the Prince Imperial, who had
volunteered for the British army to gain experience, was killed in an
ambush. Abandoned by his commanding officer, he was found dead in a
pool of his own blood — though Queen Victoria, who liked the Zulus (they
were brave and ‘cleanly’, she thought), was impressed by the way the Zulus
had been so scientific in severing his arteries that he died without pain.
At Rorke’s Drift, where a handful of British soldiers held out against the
entire Zulu army, British honour was to some extent redeemed, and at the
Battle of Ulundi the power of the Zulus was broken for many years to
come. But the war had made Disraeli unpopular. It had been conducted so
badly that it would have been almost comic had the thought of men being
pointlessly slaughtered not also made the electorate angry; it was their sons
and brothers whose lives were being thrown away so cavalierly.
Afghanistan was another scene of humiliation. Though India herself
remained quiet, Russian movements in Asia took on new significance in the
summer of 1878 when tension between Britain and Russia was at its height.
Fears that the tsar would steal a march in Afghanistan, where the Russian
ambassador was received but not the British, instigated an invasion of the
country by three British armies. The amir fled, and his son Yakub Khan
signed a treaty which appeared to make Afghanistan a British protectorate.
But the British resident Sir Louis Cavagnari and his entire staff at the British
embassy were murdered in September 1879, and the new Amir was forced
to seek refuge in the British camp. A second punitive invasion of
Afghanistan followed under the masterly soldier Sir Frederick Roberts, who
had won the Victoria Cross for gallantry during the Indian Mutiny.
Though Roberts took Kabul successfully, deposed Yakub Khan and
made an extraordinary march from Kabul to Kandahar, the murder of a

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British consul and of Foreign and Colonial Office personnel and the
strikingly incompetent campaign in South Africa combined to wipe the
shine off Disraeli’s record popularity as a general election approached in
t880. On top of that, a severe agricultural depression struck in the late
1870s. Though this was not the Conservatives’ fault, it gave the impression
of a government which had lost its grip.
For in 1876 the extraordinary economic boom which the British people
had enjoyed since the 1840s came to a halt. Other European countries like
Germany and France which had industrialized later were now drawing
level with Britain. There was a slump and a flurry of bankruptcies in 1879.
At the same time British grain prices collapsed. This was the result of
successive bad harvests in 1875-80 which made it impossible to do
without importing cheap grain, combined with the cheapness of that
foreign grain suddenly available from Canada and the Midwest of
America.
The tide turned against the Conservatives as thousands of farmers went
to the wall. For the cheap foreign corn continued to come into the country,
unhampered by protection. And Disraeli, who had pronounced protection
‘dead and damned’, could not bring it back. Though other European
countries turned to tariffs to protect their infant industries, free trade was
still an article of British nineteenth-century faith. The result was a massive
flight from the land. Between 1860 and 1901, some 40 per cent of male
labourers went to live in towns or emigrated, and by the beginning of
the twentieth century 95 per cent of British food was imported, as it still
is. The invention of refrigeration and canning processes at the end of
the nineteenth century meant that cheap meat could be bought from the
Argentine, where costs were lower.
Disraeli’s government had also failed to manage the House of
Commons. A new generation of more militant Irish Nationalist MPs who
called themselves Home Rulers was obstructing business at Westminster.
The bad harvests, which were even more disastrous for Ireland’s rural
economy than for England’s, and the fact that the 1870 Land Act was only
partially successful, made them determined to have a Dublin Parliament
again.
There was a lot of material for Gladstone to build on and, being a
virtuoso orator, he triumphed in his whirlwind Midlothian campaign
across Scotland. Disraeli’s foreign policy was made to look perilous and
morally wrong as Gladstone denounced any alliance with the Ottomans in
energetic and novel stump oratory. He took his views to the people, giving
speeches that lasted for several hours, day in, day out, wherever a railway
line could be found — a new form of electioneering with whistle-stop train
tours across the country. Gladstone had formulated a style to appeal to the

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massively increased electorate. Instead of voicing the considered views of

the sophisticated Victorian gentleman, Gladstone had his eye on greater
popular participation and a more emotional, simplistic approach to the
issues.
The campaign was enormously successful, and the election brought the
Liberals in on a huge majority in 1881 — 349 Liberals were returned against
243 Conservatives. It elevated the Grand Old Man, as Gladstone was
known, to a sort of superstar status. However, thanks to the secret ballot,
sixty Irishmen were elected on the Home Rule ticket. That was where the
future battleground lay. Meanwhile as Gladstone started to undo most of
Disraeli’s imperial policies, withdrawing from Afghanistan, granting
independence to the Transvaal, the great man himself was dying. Queen
Victoria asked if she might visit Disraeli on his sickbed, but he refused,
quipping to intimates that she would only ask him to carry a message to
Albert. By April 1881 he was dead. Victoria was so upset that she
personally wrote out the announcement of his death in the Court Circular.
Though protocol forbade the sovereign from attending a funeral (a custom
Queen Elizabeth, her great-great-granddaughter, broke when she attended
the funeral of Winston Churchill), Victoria sent a wreath of primroses
from Osborne, with a note saying they were Disraeli’s favourite flowers.
The new Liberal Parliament looked destined for even greater success
than its radical predecessor of 1868. But instead of further reforms
Gladstone’s second government found itself bogged down by Ireland,
whose Home Rulers were now headed by a ruthless master of tactics in
Charles Stewart Parnell. Much of Gladstone’s time was taken up in dealing
with him and his terrorist allies in Ireland, while a series of untoward
events in the empire lost him a great deal of popularity. Gladstone’s foreign
policy was coloured by his determination to destroy what he contemp-
tuously described as ‘the castle of Beaconsfieldism’ — Disraeli’s grandiose
imperial projects. He felt strongly that the British Empire could not
continue to grow nor to administer such vast swathes of the world’s
population and that Britain’s interests were often best served by
encouraging self-determination and what he called ‘the healthy growth of
local liberty’.
At the Battle of Majuba Hill in 1881 the First Boer War ended in the
crushing defeat of the British, and Gladstone granted the Transvaal her
independence once more. Now that the Zulu threat had been removed the
Boers had no reason to be federated with the British. In Britain the battle
was seen as a mortifying failure for the British army and for Gladstone,
who, many federationists considered, should have continued to fight to
keep the Transvaal within Cape Colony. In 1880 Britain withdrew from
Afghanistan. British forces had helped establish Abdur Rahman on the

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 HANOVERIAN

1886 Vanity Fair cartoon of some of the most important figures in Victorian
politics in the Lobby of the House of Commons. It includes W. E. Gladstone,
John Bright, Charles Stewart Parnell, Joe Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill,
Lord Hartington (later 8th Duke of Devonshire), 6th Earl Spencer and
Sir William Harcourt.

throne in the hope that the widespread support for him would make
Afghanistan a firm barrier between India and the Russians. When in 1885
Russian forces occupied Penjdeh within Afghanistan’s borders it seemed as
though Britain might be forced into war with Russia. But by submitting the
problem to international arbitration — the King of Denmark ruled in favour
of giving Penjdeh to Russia — war between the two powers over what had
become known as the Great Game was narrowly avoided.
Nevertheless even Gladstone could not completely resist Britain’s
tendency to expand into new territories to protect her existing empire.
Ironically it was he himself who shifted the axis of Britain’s interests into
the Near East when he occupied Egypt in 1882 to prevent a rebel officer
from closing the Suez Canal. For the Canal had utterly changed Britain’s
priorities — her foreign policy had had to swing round to protect Egypt
against all comers. By occupying Egypt, Gladstone set up the base camp for
the creation in Africa of an extraordinary forward expansion of the British
Empire, what is known as the ‘new colonialism’.
As Turkey continued to disintegrate, Egypt, which was still technically
part of the Ottoman Empire under a Turkish governor, had become almost
entirely self-reliant. She also became increasingly important as a major part
of the world’s shipping now passed through the Suez Canal. But being

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exposed to the huge amount of new capital that flooded in destabilized her
economy. In 1879, when the state was bankrupted under the rule of the
unbusinesslike and extravagant khedive, Disraeli joined France in setting
up a system of dual control in Egypt. This effectively put the government
of the country, which was soon largely financed by British and French
shareholders, into the hands of the two western powers.
In £882 an Arab nationalist revolt broke out under an Egyptian army
officer named Arabi Pasha, who seized the crucial harbour and forts of
Alexandria and threatened to close the Suez Canal. With Alexandria swept
by rioting, against his deepest principles Gladstone was forced to send a
British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley to occupy Egypt on behalf of the
Canal’s creditors. The khedive and his viceroy Tewfik were reinstated.
Britain was alone in this adventure as France refused to help, still
exhausted by the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War and the ruinous
reparations. The mighty British fleet which had ruled the waves for three-
quarters of a century was sent to pound Alexandria until it capitulated.
Gladstone believed that there was nothing else he could have done, but he
offended all his venerable old Radical colleagues like the Quaker John
Bright, who resigned from the government.
As a result of the French no-show, dual control ended. Though the
khedive had been reinstated, the real rulers of Egypt were the British army
and Sir Evelyn Baring, a practical and efficient financial administrator, sent
out by Gladstone to supervise the way Egypt was run and return her
chaotic finances to solvency. The British thus found themselves controlling
Egypt almost by accident. Only Gladstone’s conscience stopped outright
annexation. Although the occupation was never official, in effect Egypt
became part of the empire. The British army put into Egypt by Gladstone,
friend of small nations struggling for birth, would remain there until 1954.
By the time Baring retired as the first Earl of Cromer in 1907, after
almost forty years of his reforming activities Egypt was prosperous and
thriving. But once Britain had become embroiled there other problems
surfaced. At the beginning of 1880 a fanatical religious leader called the
mahdi raised a revolt in the south of the country, in the Egyptian-occupied
Sudan, and soon most of the area was under his sway. An English officer,
Hicks Pasha, sent south with an Egyptian army to capture the mahdi, was
massacred by the rebel leader and his followers, to the outrage of the
London papers. This reverse was so conclusive that the government
abandoned its attempt to hold the Sudan and decided to evacuate the few
Egyptian garrisons that were left round Khartoum in the middle of the
country.
The engineer officer chosen to evacuate the Sudan, General Gordon, was
a legendary figure to the English public. Nicknamed ‘Chinese’ Gordon for

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his thirty-three victories in the service of the Chinese, as the khedive’s

administrator he had zealously suppressed the slave trade in the Sudan
during the 1870s. In 1883, with immense pomp Cabinet ministers and the
Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief of the army, saw off Gordon
at Charing Cross station, but once the general got to the Sudan the
government refused, on grounds of cost, to give him the further troops he
needed for a successful expedition. As a result Gordon became marooned
in Khartoum, cut off from his headquarters in Egypt. From late March
1884 onwards, Sir Evelyn Baring begged the Cabinet to send an
expeditionary force to relieve Khartoum, but ministers could not agree
despite a vociferous campaign in the newspapers and in the nation at large
in favour of rescuing General Gordon. Gladstone in particular worried
about being dug deeper into the African continent. He was unwilling to
face the fact that by occupying Egypt he had done exactly that, irreversibly.
Despite the mounting anger in Britain at leaving Gordon, the Cabinet
was paralysed for four months. Not until August was Sir Garnet Wolseley
sent to the Sudan. And it was not until 28 January 1885 that his deputy Sir
Herbert Stewart at last arrived to rescue Gordon, having fought his way up
the Nile. But Khartoum had been taken by the mahdi two days before and
Gordon himself executed.
The few who survived told of how Gordon, though weak from disease
and inanition because the town had run out of food (the soldiers were
having to eat the horses and dogs), had impressed everyone by the way he
nursed his dying men. Most were so weak that they could no longer stand
upright at the palisades of the fort. But, on 26 January, the Nile waters,
which had been so low that they impeded the British rescue mission coming
upriver, finally receded so far that there was only a trickle of water dividing
Khartoum from the mahdi. At twilight the mahdi and his hordes crossed.
Gordon refused to wall himself up in the palace and insisted on dying
alongside the inhabitants of the town. He had been killed as he was coming
down the steps of the palace just before dawn when the slaughter began. It
was there that Sir Herbert Stewart found his headless body. Beside it was
Gordon’s diary: ‘If the expeditionary force, and I ask for no more than two
hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have
done my best for the honour of our country. Good-bye.’ It was the
general’s last entry, written six weeks before in December. Soon afterwards
Gordon’s head was discovered in the mahdi’s camp across the river from
Khartoum at Omdurman, his blue eyes still half open.
When the news burst on Victorian England there was uproar. The queen
herself sent three furious telegrams to the foreign secretary, the war
secretary and Gladstone himself. They were deliberately written en clair,
that is not in the usual governmental code, so that her views would be

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publicized as widely as possibly by being leaked to the newspapers. It was

an extraordinary action. Accusing Gladstone of being directly responsible
for Gordon’s death, she wrote: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful,
and to think that this all might have been prevented and many precious
lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’ The question now was
whether to avenge Khartoum or abandon the Sudan to the mahdi. It was
the news that Russia had taken the Afghan town of Penjdeh and was thus
threatening India’s north-west frontier which made Gladstone issue the
order to retreat. Fighting both Russia and the mahdi would have been too
much for Britain’s never large military resources.
Gladstone became immensely unpopular. His affectionate nickname the
GOM, Grand Old Man, was replaced by MOG, Murderer of Gordon. He
was booed when he went to the theatre. For Gordon had been exactly the
sort of man that the Victorian English prided themselves on producing.
Like that other Victorian hero, the African explorer and missionary Dr
Livingstone, Gordon had been a good light in a naughty world, heroically
spreading abroad the peculiar virtues of British civilization, godliness and
dutifulness. To forsake such a man scandalized the British public and
caused them to lose faith in the government.
Meanwhile if Gladstone was despised by the public at large he was also
embattled within the party. One of the reasons that he had failed to rescue
Gordon was that his whole being was dedicated to solving the Irish
problem. Not only had civil disorder reached an alarming pitch owing to
an organization recently started up by Fenian revolutionaries called the
Land League, which was persuading Irish tenant farmers to refuse to pay
rent. Its president, Charles Stewart Parnell, had become leader in 1880 of
the Irish MPs.
The pale Anglo-Irish Parnell, a Protestant landowner from County
Wicklow, was far more formidable and ruthless than Isaac Butt, the
ineffectual former leader of the Irish MPs, who had also proposed self-
government for the Irish within the Union. Brought up by a mother who
hailed from an old American revolutionary family, he was full of visceral
hatred for the English. He saw that the large number of Irish MPs the secret
ballot had brought to Westminster could be used to obstruct Parliamentary
business so thoroughly that Westminster might be forced to give Ireland
her independence back. Meanwhile the Land League, by making Ireland
ungovernable through a land war, would put pressure on Westminster to
grant Parliamentary independence to Ireland.
The Land League had been set up to resist the mass evictions that the
1870s agricultural crisis was causing in Ireland. As the low prices farmers
got for wheat were not enough to cover their rent, evictions spiralled into
thousands every day. Once again the dreadful but commonplace Irish

23
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scenes of the old and sick lying in their beds at the roadside were to be
found throughout the country. But this time there was a difference. The
Land League organized mass meetings to get rents reduced to reflect the
price of wheat.
For with the best intentions Gladstone’s 1870 act had a fatal flaw.
Although the landlord was supposed to pay compensation if he evicted a
tenant, the statutory wording was that the compensation was payable only
if the rent asked for was ‘exorbitant’. This was designed to protect the
tenant farmer against unfair price hikes. However, that was not the issue
in 1880. The rents demanded by the landlords were at the usual level. It
was the farmers’ earnings from crops that had fallen.
The Land League was a formidable success, but it was mainly run by ex-
Fenians. They made it a brutal, lawless body founded on the belief that
nothing was so efficacious as the threat of force. While by day the Land
League was visibly organizing the orderly mass meetings for rent
reductions, by night it was a different story. The League was running a
land war. Anyone suspected of paying a rent which the League considered
to be too high or who had taken over a plot from the evicted would be
visited at dead of night by gangs of men. Shots would be fired through their
windows, or open graves dug before their doors and signed ‘Captain
Moonlight’ in the dirt. After a year of this treatment Ireland was at the
mercy of the Land League. There were areas of the country which simply
could not be controlled by the British government.
The leadership of the Land League always distanced themselves
officially from the violence, as did the League’s president Parnell himself in
Parliament. The only course of action Parnell verbally encouraged was a
‘species of moral coventry’. A proclaimed enemy of the Land League
should be treated ‘like a leper of old’ by being rigidly denied all social and
commercial contact. The most celebrated victim of this treatment, Captain
Boycott, was driven out of Ireland and gave his name to this activity in the
word ‘boycott’. In actual fact, though, the high-sounding moral coventry
was generally broken by a more practical follow-up visit from Captain
Moonlight and his friends.
Parnell, however, had a different agenda from most of the Land League
and its Irish-American financial patrons. Most of the Americans believed
with the Land League that only through violent revolution would Ireland
win her independence. Parnell thought that change would come only
through constitutional means. Nevertheless he could not afford to offend
the League and its shadowy backers, since the whip hand he had over the
British government substantially depended on being able to control them.
The trouble was that the League began to believe that the chaos that it was
creating was the prelude to independence. Thus when in 1881 Gladstone

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gave Ireland a Land Act which incorporated all the requisites long seen as
the solution of the tenant farmers’ difficulties, the Land League in Ireland
refused to accept it. The ‘Three Fs’ — fixity of tenure, free sale by the tenant
of his interest, and fair rents to be determined by land courts — granted by
the act might kill off the desire for Home Rule. So the rural crimes did not
cease; the violence continued.
Parnell could not call a halt to the lawlessness without enraging or
making suspicious the men of the hillsides, whether in America or Ireland,
who were willing to go only so far with constitutional channels. But Parnell
the consummate political operator, though he did not believe that the
revolutionaries’ way could ultimately be successful, at the same time could
not lose their support. He had to play both ends against the middle. He was
forced to denounce Gladstone’s Land Act and the government. He thus
greatly enhanced his credibility among the revolutionaries who feared
being sold out, especially when Gladstone sent him to jail for not halting
the violence.
But though Gladstone had exasperatedly said that the ‘resources of
civilization were not yet exhausted’, when he clapped Parnell and his
supporters into Kilmainham Jail, it seemed that they were. From prison
Parnell issued a defiant statement that no rent was to be paid at all. Though
the Land League was proscribed by the British government, matters had
now reached stalemate. As Ireland descended into frightening chaos, the
pragmatic Gladstone saw that the only way of controlling the violence was
through Parnell — despite the scruples of members of his Cabinet about
treating with a man like Parnell, who in their opinion had blood on his
hands. To the distaste of the Irish secretary W. E. Forster in particular,
Gladstone started to negotiate with Parnell in prison, promising to release
him if he brought Ireland under control.
Fortunately for Gladstone Parnell was ready to negotiate. In April 1882
the two reached an understanding via intermediaries which is known as the
Kilmainham Treaty. Only a month later an event occurred which smashed
Gladstone’s policy to ruins and made most of the Liberals want as little to
do with Parnell as possible. Forster had already resigned from the Cabinet
in disgust, and his place as Irish secretary taken by the Whig Liberal Lord
Frederick Cavendish, who was married to one of Mrs Gladstone’s nieces.
But his tenure was to be brief. A few days after arriving in Dublin, as he
and his under-secretary Thomas Burke walked in Phoenix Park, they were
attacked and hacked to death by a splinter group of Parnell’s allies, the
Irish Republican Brotherhood.
The Phoenix Park murders shattered the unofficial alliance between
Parnell and the Liberals in favour of Home Rule. Any further concessions
to Ireland were stymied; the murdered Cavendish had been the younger

a5
 HANOVERIAN

94 PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [Fenrvary 21, 1891.

q
(OG
(CLAN

A ys
—_— VAL.

\\ ste
A r Z

: Gel
Se

Gm Old Wraman’” hi, tema Chillherl a tarieate

ALL-ROUND POLITICIANS. No. 1.—THE QG. O. M. VARIETY ENTERTAINER.

Punch’s view of Gladstone in 1891: ‘All round politicians. No. 1. The G.O.M.
Variety.’

brother of Lord Hartington, who was the leader of the Whig section of the
Liberal party. For fear of splitting the party, Gladstone now had to take a
very hard line indeed towards Ireland. For a large number of Liberal MPs,
dislike of Parnell, who made no secret of his hatred of the English,

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 1868-1886

hardened into enmity, along with the most vehement conviction that
Ireland should never be ruled by such a man. To the further outrage of the
Liberals Parnell threw in his lot with the Conservatives by voting against
Gladstone.
He caused the government to fall in June 1885 and a minority
Conservative government took over under Lord Salisbury, Disraeli’s
foreign secretary, until an election should be held in November. Parnell,
who held the same sort of secret meetings in London with the
Conservatives he had had with the Liberals, believed that Salisbury if
returned to office would bring in Home Rule. He therefore primed his
troops on. the British mainland to vote Conservative in the November
election to add to the Conservative vote, while his own Irish MPs would
ally themselves with Salisbury.
Meanwhile the Liberals themselves were in disarray — Gladstone’s
relations with his own party were fraying. The old anti-imperialist Liberals
of his own generation had turned against him over Egypt. His hesitancy
over further franchise reform had angered the new generation of Radicals
led by the former mayor of Birmingham, the screw manufacturer Joe
Chamberlain. The Radicals nevertheless pushed the 1884 Third Reform
Bill through, which brought the farm worker within the franchise. When
the Conservative Lords headed by Salisbury resisted the bill, to Gladstone’s
alarm Chamberlain responded with a campaign to discredit a class of
whose power he violently disapproved. To him, a self-made man (his father
had been a cobbler), the Tory Lords sitting on their ancestral acres, ‘who
toil not neither do they spin’, had no right to interfere with a proposal to
give the vote to decent working people. A series of strikingly phrased
speeches calling to the country to ‘Mend Them or End Them’ proposed
doing away with the House of Lords if it did not pass the bill. It passed,
however, adding two million to the electorate of Great Britain. Its impact
was magnified by a separate Redistribution of Seats Act in 1885.
At a personal level Gladstone never got on with Chamberlain. Though
Gladstone himself hailed from a commercial family, his classical education
put him in a different league from Chamberlain. Chamberlain, on the other
hand, was angered by the way his leader played his cards so close to his
chest. There were also philosophical differences. Unlike the penny-
pinching Gladstone, Chamberlain and his friends saw state interference as
a positive good and believed that there was great untapped potential in the
colonies and the empire. But despite his ability and his influence in the
country at large, Chamberlain was only president of the Board of Trade.
By the 1885 autumn election campaign, relations between Chamberlain
and Gladstone were so poor that Radical Joe went out on the stump with
his own ‘unauthorized programme’ (so called because Gladstone had not

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approved it) for social and agrarian reform. Each worker should have three
acres and a cow. Chamberlain was a thrilling speaker and developed an
immense following, particularly in the midlands. The success that the
Liberals had at the polls was due to him. But the Third Reform Act had the
most dramatic effect in Ireland. At the November election Parnell came
back with twenty-five more Home Rulers than before. His 86 Nationalist
MPs added to the 249 Conservatives gave Salisbury the majority he needed
to continue in power, though the Liberals themselves had 335 members.
Thanks to Parnell, Salisbury remained prime minister. But the strange
alliance rapidly unravelled.
Despite Salisbury’s courting of Parnell and the Irish Nationalist vote to
achieve power, it went too much against the grain for the Tories to give the
Irish Home Rule. There were rumours that they were about to abandon it.
Meanwhile, unknown to all, by mid-December Gladstone had finally come
to the decision that it was imperative that Home Rule be achieved. The
strength of the Home Rule vote in Ireland in the election caused him to fear
Irish secession and the possible reconquest of Ireland if a Home Rule Bill
was not put through fast. Now he had heard that if the Conservatives
would not do so, the Liberals must. Unfortunately Gladstone did not reveal
to his shadow Cabinet his decision to throw himself behind a self-
governing status for Ireland. Leaked to the newspapers on 17 December
1885 by his son Herbert Gladstone, it incensed the two key players in the
power structure of the Liberal party: Joe Chamberlain was affronted at
once again being kept in the dark, while Lord Hartington was incensed at
the idea of giving in to terrorism.
The leak put an end to the brief Conservative government. When
Salisbury announced that the Tories would not pass Home Rule, Parnell
moved back into alliance with Gladstone, the minority Tory government
fell and Gladstone was back in office by February 1886, having pledged to
put through a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. But by the spring both
Chamberlain and Hartington had not only resigned, they had crossed the
floor to defeat the Home Rule Bill and their former leader from the
Conservative benches. Home Rule had split the Liberal party.
With Chamberlain (denounced as ‘Judas’ by one Liberal MP) on his side,
Salisbury defeated Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill. Ninety-three Liberals,
who called themselves Liberal Unionists, joined the Conservatives. They
feared that Gladstone's bill, which proposed an Irish Parliament to govern
all domestic Irish affairs, would be the first step towards the break-up of the
Union, because Irish MPs would no longer be represented at Westminster,
which henceforth would deal with external affairs. Chamberlain in
particular refused to believe that the Home Rulers really meant it when they
said that Home Rule would not mean independence for Ireland.

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The heated atmosphere in Parliament was added to by a member of the

Conservative so-called ‘ginger group’, Lord Randolph Churchill, the
younger son of the Duke of Marlborough. He stirred up the longstanding
insecurity of the Presbyterian Ulstermen, who ever since they had been
planted in Catholic Ulster in the seventeenth century had felt beleaguered.
Mischievously Churchill told them they would be badly disadvantaged by
a largely Catholic Dublin government. Ulstermen should do everything in
their power to stop Home Rule. The slogan ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will
be right’ was first heard in 1886.
In June the Conservative party’s ninety-three new allies stopped the bill
from passing by thirty votes, and Gladstone resigned. The election of July
1886 gave the allied Liberal Unionist and Conservative parties a huge
majority over the followers of Gladstone and Parnell. Their prime minister
was Salisbury, whose great expertise was in the field of foreign affairs.
With their Liberal Unionist allies the Tories would remain in power for
most of the next twenty years.
Those twenty years were the heyday of the empire, especially in Africa
where diamonds had been discovered in the 1860s and gold in the 1880s.
The British presence in Africa grew so rapidly that the adventurer Cecil
Rhodes dreamed of a railway on British territory between the Cape and
Cairo. The two million new voters were fascinated by flamboyant figures
like Rhodes, who dominated the period. Their curiosity was fed by
sensationalist newspapers like George Newnes’s Titbits, begun in 1880,
the Pall Mall Gazette and the first mass-circulation paper, the Daily Mail,
which went on sale in 1896.
Though the British might have obtained some of their empire in a fit of
absence of mind, as was claimed a little disingenuously, for a brief period
until the end of the century they suddenly exulted in it. The dedication to
the cause of the empire known as imperialism was only a little short of
religious fervour. It even infected the Liberals: ‘The greatest secular agency
for good now known to the world’, Gladstone’s colleague the future prime
minister Lord Rosebery called it.

579
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Imperialism and Socialism (1886-1901)

Unlike its Roman predecessors, the British Empire did not consist of
contiguous territory. It was higgledy piggledy and amorphous. That was
because it had been created in an ad hoc way over the previous 250 years
by a mixture of daring adventurers, chartered companies and, very
occasionally, deliberate government policy. Trade was the driving force
behind the British Empire, and ever since the American colonies became
independent it was the trade centred on India that controlled its direction.
India was the ‘jewel in the imperial crown’, and protecting India was what
the empire was all about.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century India had made the East
India Company extremely wealthy with its spices, as well as its luxury
goods of silks and printed calicoes. Two hundred years later India was the
entrep6t for a very sophisticated three-cornered trade. It continued to
make all concerned in it, British merchants and manufacturers, Indian
merchants and maharajahs, Chinese merchants and Mandarins, and the
British Treasury, very rich. After the industrial revolution Britain exported
cheap finished cotton, woollen and metal goods to India, India sent some
of these goods to China and China exported tea to Britain. By the mid-
nineteenth century a domestic Indian cotton industry was supplying cotton
for British manufacturers, as well as tea from the Indian tea plantations
created for the British export market.
Britain’s was never a militaristic or centrally planned empire like those
of Spain and France. Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century and in the
course of her duel with France for colonial supremacy in India and
America, Britain used war to gain territory, and she used war to protect her
commerce. Her position as the world’s premier trading nation began with
her gains at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which she consolidated after the
Napoleonic Wars. By the late nineteenth century her occupation of
strategic harbours meant that safe ports for British ships were strung like
a helpful safety net from the coast of China via India, through the Arabian
Sea round the coast of Africa. They ran from Hong Kong, to Labuan island
off North Borneo, to Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea. Keeping Ceylon
after the Napoleonic Wars enabled Britain to defend India from attack
from both east and west. The tea trade with China was secured in 1819
when Stamford Raffles had seized Singapore. Britain thus commanded the
Straits of Malacca with what became one of the empire’s most important
naval bases. Her emphasis on commerce tended to ensure that the flag of
official government followed unofficial traders.
The inestimable financial value of India kept even so reluctant an
imperialist as Gladstone occupying Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, and it
was the need to consolidate the defence of an empire centred on India that

600
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determined the government’s foreign policy. Protecting India often meant

extending the empire’s territories. Burma, which provided India’s border
to the east, was annexed in 1886 as a result of fear of French activity in
Indo-China. Protecting India’s north-west border would have led to a
protectorate over Afghanistan had her conquest not proved so elusive; it
required the occupation of Baluchistan in 1876, and in 1907 the
establishment of a protectorate over southern Iran. All of these moves
derived from the need to control the land route to India, and that also
provoked the persistent antagonism towards Russia over her own
expansion into central Asia.
The empire bred its own colonial imperialists too. By 1900 Singapore,
which had begun as a small island trading colony, insisted on occupying
the Malay States to protect herself. In the late nineteenth century
Australians and New Zealanders added about one hundred Pacific islands
to their territories, such as New Guinea in 1883 and the New Hebrides in
1887. By the late 1880s South Africa, where a struggle for dominance
between British and Boer had been going on for close to a century, had
produced the most vocal of the colonial imperialists, an MP for Cape
Colony named Cecil Rhodes. Well over six feet tall he soon became known
as the Colossus, a pun on his name and on his ambitions for the British
Empire.
The son of an East Anglican vicar the young Rhodes had been sent out
to South Africa to cure the weak heart which eventually killed him at the
age of forty-nine. Instead he made a fortune with the De Beers diamond
company at Kimberley. He was patriotic to the core. His views that British
territory in South Africa had to extend much further north coincided with
Lord Salisbury’s desire to find additional markets for British trade and to
stymie German ambitions.
Rhodes was just one of the three most famous late-nineteenth-century
empire-builders — the others were Sir William Mackinnon and Sir George
Taubman Goldie — whose activities vastly expanded British territory in
Africa. By 1900, out of thirty European protectorates in Africa fifteen were
British. From the late 1880s Britain’s economy was faltering under the
threat of industrial competition from Germany and America. Most
European countries had abandoned free trade and adopted tariffs to
protect their infant chemical and electrical industries. The seeds of very
widespread discontent had been sown in Britain by the depression and
unemployment. Energetic, patriotic businessmen like Rhodes, Goldie and
Mackinnon believed that Africa, where Britain already had a considerable
presence, was the answer. Not only was Britain the occupying power in
Egypt and the dominant power at the Cape, as a result of her taking the
lead in the anti-slavery movement fifty years before she had ousted the

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Dutch and Danish settlements on the west coast of Africa. By the mid-
1870s after the defeat of the Ashantis Britain controlled the Gambia, the
Gold Coast and Sierra Leone.
Much of the immense continent of Africa was empty of human
habitation. It was freshly mapped by explorers and made easier to get to
because of steam power; it offered markets and raw materials which were
becoming scarce in Europe. Developed nations were now making their
own manufactures with British machinery. Britain’s falling share in world
trade after a century of supremacy convinced the Conservative and
Unionist governments that they should actively welcome the empire-
builders’ plans to extend their areas of operation. Under royal charter,
specially established companies exploited the resources of and frequently
ended up governing the lands whose chiefs they made agreements with.
The Royal Niger Company was founded in 1886 by Goldie to consolidate
Britain’s already dominant position on the west coast of Africa. It extended
the British territories inland from Lagos in the Gulf of Guinea to the
borders of French West Africa and the German colony of Kamerun.
Mackinnon’s mission to end the Arab trade in slavery that Livingstone had
found still flourishing on the east coast saw the beginning of British rule of
the territories later known as Kenya and Uganda. The founder of the East
Africa Company in 1888, Mackinnon employed H. M. Stanley to
negotiate business deals with the chiefs of the Nile Lakes area. Instead of
selling their people, they could be paid to have their lands mined.
The acquiring of protectorates or areas of influence in Africa by private
chartered companies meant that the British government achieved foreign
policy aims without despatching troops or warships. However, Britain was
not alone in seeing Africa as a solution to her economic woes. By the mid-
1880s her control of Egypt to secure the route to India was threatened by
the penetration of Africa by other European powers determined to find
their own diamond mines.
King Leopold II of Belgium made arrangements in the late 1870s with
local chiefs to form a state on the Congo river, the immense river system
discovered by Livingstone which bisected the African continent from east
to west. Alarm at Leopold’s activities resulted in a conference of the
European powers at Berlin in 1884 — intended to orchestrate the peaceful
division of Africa into colonies. The conference laid down rules for the
claiming of territory and spheres of influence. All nations were allowed free
navigation of the Congo, Zambezi and Shire rivers, while the Congo Basin
formed part of the Congo Free State which became Leopold’s personal
fiefdom.
This set a pattern of avoidance of war, and in the next five years Lord
Salisbury came to peaceful arrangements with the other European powers

602
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over the division of Africa. A private treaty with King Leopold ceded land
near Lake Tanganyika to the British East Africa Company, while in 1890
Britain swapped the apparently unimportant island of Heligoland in the
North Sea to Germany in return for Zanzibar and Pemba. An Anglo-
French treaty defined spheres of interest in Nigeria, Zanzibar and
Madagascar in 1890. In 1891 treaties with Italy and Portugal defined
British and Italian Somaliland, and the extent of Portuguese and British
territory.
But, despite these arrangements, Britain and the British population of
Cape Town were extremely worried in 1884 when Germany joined what
had become known as ‘the scramble for Africa’. Convinced by her
industrialists that as a united empire she should have her ‘place in the sun’,
in the next two years Germany acquired millions of square miles to the
north of the British Cape Colony, moving troops into Togo on the west
coast and creating German East Africa, which reached from Lake Victoria
down to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Most alarming of all, on
the west coast of southern Africa Germany occupied the land stretching
from the northern border of Cape Colony along the Orange river up to
Angola, or Portuguese West Africa. It was named German South West
Africa.
For three-quarters of a century Britain could have expanded into this
area but had not done so. With the threat of a large German colony there
in 1885, on Cecil Rhodes’s advice the British government annexed
Bechuanaland, the territory running north of Cape Colony between the
Boer republics and German South West Africa. In the view of Rhodes and
many of the Cape British, the discovery of gold in the Boer Transvaal in
1886 had wrecked the balance of power in southern Africa so that the
Transvaal, with its vast income of £24 million a year flowing from the
goldmines of the Rand (the massive gold-bearing ridge in the Transvaal),
threatened to become more powerful than the British Cape Colony.
To tip the balance back to the Cape Colony, it was argued, a new British
Empire should be constructed running north-south. There should be a
forward movement up Africa. Rhodes believed that if Britain was not
careful she would soon be shut in by Boer and German colonies. Germany
had her eye on greater influence in South Africa and she had begun to court
the Boer republics, with whom she had a natural affinity. Annexing
Bechuanaland put an end to the movement of Boer settlers there, but
Rhodes also believed that British territories should extend further north
into Zambezia, the immense lands running up to the Belgian Congo.
Rhodes’s own chartered company, the British South Africa Company, was
formed in 1889 to find a new Rand north of Boer territory in Zambezia.
The Boers continued to be as unwilling to associate with non-Boers like

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Rhodes as they had been in the days of the Great Trek half a century
before. Terrified by the way their colonies, first the Cape and then Natal,
had been taken over relentlessly by the British, they allowed foreigners or
Uitlanders few civil rights and forced them to pay most of the taxes.
Enthusiasm for acquiring land in Africa began to snowball as the British
government became influenced by the Cape imperialists, who were also the
financiers of the new private companies that owned concessions in the
goldmines of the Boer Transvaal. Even imperial civil servants sent out from
London were infected by a patriotic sense of having to stop the Germans,
the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese and the Belgians.
By 1895 the visionary Rhodes had added to the British Empire 750,000
square miles of African territory, north from the Transvaal to the Belgian
Congo — the colony of Rhodesia. He became the darling of a large number
of Britons and was said to be one of the richest men in the world. The mass-
circulation newspapers liked nothing better than colourful tales of derring-
do on the ‘dark continent’; it was all part of the imperial fever which led to
the dictum that ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’. As the empire
now stretched through eight times zones, it was true enough.
The territory then named after Rhodes but now called Zimbabwe had
been gained by a trick. Her ruler, the grand and difficult potentate King
Lobengula, had been warned by the Aboriginies’ Protection Society in
London not to allow Rhodes anything other than the mineral rights for
which he had been negotiating. But though the agreement between the two
was indeed solely for mineral rights and not land rights, the summer of
1890 saw a column of handpicked Cape Colony pioneer settlers trekking
into Lobengula’s Mashonaland, the area south of the River Zambezi. Each
had been promised a 3,000-acre farm by Rhodes, by now prime minister
of the Cape Colony, in return for building a road across the country. They
planted a flag at what they called Mount Hampden and even began
building a city named Salisbury in honour of the British prime minister.
Though Lobengula refused to accept delivery of the charter company’s
shipment of rifles, to show that he repudiated the treaty, he dared not
attack the settlers. After all, their superior weaponry had slaughtered his
cousins the Zulus at Ulundi. Meanwhile the smoothtalking Dr Storr
Jameson, Rhodes’s right-hand man and the managing director of De Beers,
who had negotiated the treaty with King Lobengula, continued to avow the
charter company’s peaceful intentions. He even relieved Lobengula’s
painful gout by giving him morphine injections. But Mashonaland, as
some in the Colonial Office had predicted, was not a second Rand. The
chartered company nearly went bankrupt paying for a police force, for a
telegraph line and for a railway, while no gold showed up to finance the
infrastructure. Dr Jameson, who by 1893 had become resident com-

604
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missioner of the new colony, decided with Rhodes that the way out of
bankruptcy would be to go further north again and annex Lobengula’s
other kingdom, Matabeleland. When Jameson used a border raid by
Lobengula to destroy Matabeleland’s army, the king took poison and was
buried in an ox skin in a cave.
Matabeleland became Northern Rhodesia and was annexed to the
crown. All the land and cattle of the Ndebele people were removed from
them and appropriated by the company. The company’s hut taxes drove
the Ndebele to work as labourers since they could not pay them by selling
cattle. The Ndebele, an aristocratic tribe who had always relied on servants
to perform menial tasks, were forced to help build white towns or to work
in the copper mines. When these proud warriors protested, they were
beaten by Rhodes’s men. Liberating Africa from the slave trade might have
been a rallying cry in the past, but under Rhodes a new kind of servitude
was taking place.
The British Liberal press was convinced of skulduggery, but doubts
about Rhodes’s unscrupulous methods were swept aside — the ends surely
justified the means. By the late 1880s dislike and disapproval of the
Colossus among the high-minded was irrelevant. ‘Chartered’, as shares in
the British South Africa Company were known, traded for huge sums on
the Stock Exchange. Influential thinkers like the Cambridge professor of
modern history Sir John Seeley in his 1883 book The Expansion of
England had already given credence to the idea of Britain’s imperial
mission. So did the popular novels and bestselling verse of the Bombay-
born Rudyard Kipling from the mid-1880s on. However the empire was
acquired, it was justified by Kipling’s injunction to:

Take up the White Man’s burden —

Send forth the best ye breed -
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.

That was the empire’s unofficial motto. The British believed they had
much to be proud of when they built a church on the site of the old slave
market in Zanzibar and freed the slaves winding through the forests tied
to one another by wooden yokes to be shipped to Arabia. The best
Victorian newcomers brought Africa the astonishing advances their
century had made in medicine, education, manufactured goods and
technical innovation. Christian humanitarians, often from modest back-
grounds themselves, wanted to help improve the lives of people whose
simple pastoral existence and superstitious beliefs appeared primitive to
them.
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The engineering which had changed the face of Britain changed Africa
even more dramatically. Dams and bridges allowed roads to be made
where no road had ever run before, across dizzying falls and gigantic rivers.
British companies brought pipes for sanitation and drainage. Soon they
would carry the cables for electricity for lighting, refrigeration and
telephones.
Nevertheless, to the anti-imperialists in Britain much of the behaviour of
empire-builders seemed like the exploitation of peoples for their cheap
labour, and the theft of what was actually their property, the zinc, copper,
iron ore and other valuable minerals. British soldiers might fight the Arab
slave-traders who continued to prey on neighbouring African tribes, but
treaties to develop the country’s mineral rights were generally obtained at
the point of a gun. Sir George Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company
held a royal charter to rule all the land surrounding the Niger from the
Benue to the sea, yet historically this was the land of the Benin people.
These private companies, unregulated by the state, yet acting for the British
Empire, had great drawbacks — as the history of the East India Company
showed. Many of their number were unscrupulous entrepreneurs dedi-
cated to nothing more philanthropic than profit margins. Nevertheless
they were being allowed to rule hundreds of thousands of square miles of
land, and their inhabitants.
But imperialism was overwhelmingly the mood of the age, all the more
so after the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, which
marked fifty years on the throne. When the queen processed from
Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey attended by a great throng of
representatives of all the countries and nationalities within the empire, the
empire was made visible. The bestselling author H. Rider Haggard created
even more of a sense of the magic and mystery of Africa with his novels
King Solomon’s Mines and She, published in 1886 and 1887 and still
widely read today. Going out to work in the colonies, whether managing
a tea plantation in India, being a district commissioner or exploring the
African jungle was just what a young man of spirit might want to do. By
1907 the British Empire would occupy more than one-fifth of the world’s
land mass, the largest empire the world had ever seen, reaching from
Canada’s Hudson Bay in the frozen north to the green mountains of New
Zealand in the far east.
Nevertheless, even for the most ardent imperialists there were questions
that had to be asked about the empire. How large should it become, given
that it was inevitably costly to administer, and for how long should it be
controlled from Westminster? Moreover, there were two very specific
problems with the empire, and both were to do with self-government. One
was Ireland; the second was emerging as India, where the first political

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movement dedicated to Indian self-rule — the Indian National Congress —

had begun to meet as a party.
By the late nineteenth century colonial self-government was an
established fact in the case of peoples of European origin. Responsible self-
government had been granted to Canada in 1840, Australia in 1856, Cape
Colony in 1872 and Natal in 1892, with the British monarch’s repre-
sentative the high commissioner reigning but not ruling. Excluded from
this were the Irish, for reasons of security, and non-European peoples
whose civilizations were believed not to measure up to European
standards.
Successive British governments balked at giving India self-rule. It had
taken Britain long enough to give the franchise to those of her own
nationals who were unpropertied and illiterate. The sense of caste made
Indians seem careless of improving the education of the masses, an attitude
which offended the theoretically more democratic British: a country with
such widespread poverty and illiteracy was unready for democracy, for the
western Parliamentary institutions which Britain believed offered the best
method of ruling. As the keystone of the empire, Indian independence had
to be very tightly controlled. Additional problems were created by the
colour prejudice prevalent among the British population within India. In
the 1880s Britons reacted with fury to the Liberal viceroy Lord Ripon’s
plans for judicial reform which would allow Indian judges to try
Europeans.
In response the Indian Congress Party was founded in 1885, and had
achieved national support by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Though small measures of self-government for Indian nationals were
granted during Liberal administrations by expanding the power of locally
elected councils in 1892 and 1909, they were not enough. British
investment and British engineers had given India 40,000 miles of canals
and millions of acres of irrigation schemes. But Indian impatience with
being treated like children grew. A protectionist policy against the
importation of Indian textiles into Britain galvanized a Home Rule move-
ment in 1916 under the leadership of the political activist and journalist
Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the social reformer and Fabian Annie Besant.
Like India, Ireland’s position within the empire was strategically too
important for her to be given her freedom. While the Conservatives were
in power they tried to ‘Kill Home Rule with Kindness’. The Congested
District Board Act of 1891 improved Irish farming methods, while various
land purchase acts of the 1890s allowed more tenant farmers to buy the
land they farmed with a loan from the state. The Conservatives and
Unionists believed they had safely got rid of Ireland’s nationalist
aspirations.

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In the meantime the Irish nationalists were afflicted by a series of

disasters to their cause. Their leader Parnell was cleared by a Parliamentary
commission in 1888 of writing forged letters which approved of the
Phoenix Park murders, published by The Times newspaper. But when
Parnell was cited in the sensational divorce case of the wife of his fellow
Irish nationalist MP Captain O’Shea a year later, it destroyed his
reputation and the party he had led to prominence. For this was an era
when Queen Victoria would not receive divorced persons at court, and the
fiercely moral Nonconformists in the Liberal party refused to have
anything to do with him. Parnell was forced to resign as head of the Irish
Home Rulers. He insisted on starting up his own party, but the strain of
the disgrace and the campaigning was too much for him. In 1891 he
departed for England on business, having told his friends in Ireland that he
would be back in a week. He was, but in his coffin, dead from pneumonia
aged only forty-six.
After Gladstone got his Home Rule Bill passed by the Commons but
kicked out by the Lords in 1894, for a long time British politics were
largely ignored by the Irish. They had lost faith in constitutional methods
after the failure of two Home Rule Bills, and the Home Rulers had split
into Parnellites and anti-Parnellites. Instead the ideas of Irish nationalism
found their way into other areas of Irish life. An extraordinary renaissance
of Irish culture took place. Scholars set out to rediscover the Irish language;
schools teaching only Gaelic were opened, staffed by passionate
nationalists like Padraic Pearse; Irish myths and legends inspired the poetry
of William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey that became fuel
for the fire of Irish patriotism. Paradoxically, by the early twentieth
century the sense of Ireland as a separate culture and nation would build
up such a head of steam that total severance from Britain proved
unstoppable.
It was not until 1900 that the Irish MP John Redmond was sufficiently
authoritative to reunite the Irish nationalists at Westminster and approach
Home Rule by constitutional means. But in 1907 Sinn Fein, a
revolutionary party standing for total independence — its name means
‘ourselves alone’ — was started up by the journalist Arthur Griffith and
was soon attracting the support away from Home Rule. The argument had
moved on a stage - Redmond had had the ground cut from beneath his
feet.
Presiding over these conflicts was the bearded, bearlike and imperturb-
able third Marquis of Salisbury, prime minister for most of the period until
1902, when ill-health removed him from office and his nephew Arthur
Balfour took over. Salisbury’s bent was for foreign policy. With Europe in
such a volatile state, he kept Britain out of foreign entanglements when

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continental states had abandoned the balance of power and were

persistently forming antagonistic treaties against one another. Bismarck
had tied Austria-Hungary and Russia into a complex web of alliances to
protect Germany’s flanks against the retaliation he believed must one day
come from France.
Britain remained aloof. Salisbury believed in safety first. By refusing to
make alliances with other powers Britain could not be dragged into a war
that he constantly feared would break out, a war which the British people
lacked both the army and the inclination to fight. It was a Canadian
premier who in 1896 first used the phrase ‘splendid isolation’ to describe
Britain under Salisbury: ‘whether splendidly isolated or dangerously
isolated, I will not now debate; but for my part I think splendidly isolated,
because now this isolation of England comes from her superiority’.
Salisbury was splendidly isolated himself. Descended from Lord
Burghley, Elizabeth I’s greatest servant, he was a superior aristocrat, a
remote and inaccessible figure. He spent most of his time at his stately
home Hatfield House, twelve miles north of London, under whose very
oaks Queen Elizabeth I had received news of her accession. The possessor
of a highiy cerebral intelligence, Salisbury enjoyed carrying out chemical
experiments for a hobby. But he had no aptitude for personal relations and
it was said that he knew the names of none of his Cabinet.
Moreover he seemed isolated from the very great social discontent of the
1880s and 1890s arising out of the worsening economic situation. In 1884
along with the Prince of Wales and Cardinal Manning Salisbury had been
a member of the Royal Commission into the Housing of the Working
Classes set up in response to a devastating description of life among the
poor in London entitled ‘Bitter Cry of Outcast London’. But, despite all the
evidence he heard on the committee, only modest social reforms took place
in the next fifteen years of Conservative rule, none of which did anything
to help those being thrown out of work. As a natural corollary to the 1884
broadening of the franchise, the Conservatives had set up elective county
councils in 1888 which theoretically removed local government from the
grandees of the shires, the magistrates in quarter sessions. But most
ordinary people did not have time to give to the county council, so matters
continued much as before. Having the vote didn’t seem to stop them living
in slums, or dying of overwork, disease and simple poverty.
But just because the Conservative government lost interest in social
reform after the resignation in 1886 of the only Tory democrat in the
Cabinet, Lord Randolph Churchill, it did not mean that there were not
plenty of people in Britain determined to effect change. Thanks to the
education acts and the broadening of the franchise Britons were more
politically aware and more militant. There were demonstrations by the

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unemployed in early 1886 which led to window-smashing in the West End.

Trade unionism from being the preserve of middle-class unions like the
engineers spread to unskilled industrial workers; the new unions were
responsible for a series of mass strikes for higher pay and shorter hours of
which the most famous was the dockers’ strike in 1889. These trade unions
organized on an industry-wide basis were no longer happy with the
Liberals, as the old unions had been. They felt they did not adequately
represent the concerns of the working man.
And progressive intellectuals were also discontented with the Liberal
party after its split over Home Rule. It was becoming a party dominated by
a Celtic programme of disestablishing the Welsh Church and Irish Home
Rule. But because the reforming impulse was not adequately represented in
party politics, it began to surface in all kinds of other places. At Oxford in
the 1870s the philosopher T. H. Green, with his theory of active citizenship
and the need of the classes to mingle, had a particularly strong effect on the
best and the brightest spirits there. The noted university settlements in the
East End of London which had begun in the 1880s — the best known is
Toynbee Hall — attempted to put these ideas into practice. Alaw centre was
set up to provide free legal advice, as it does to this day. Eager young
graduates with feelings of social responsibility moved to the East End to
impart their own learning to those less fortunate than themselves. From
Toynbee Hall flowed the once celebrated Workers Education Association,
designed to provide an adult education college and night classes for those
in employment who had never had the benefit of a university education but
wanted to stretch their minds.
The Toynbee Hall settlements fed into a revival of the vigorous
evangelicalism that had inspired Lord Shaftesbury in his pioneering
reforms of the factory laws. Ninety homes were established for destitute
children in the East End by Dr Thomas Barnardo in 1870; round the same
time William Booth founded the Salvation Army to do social work and
rescue the wretched, the impoverished, the drunken and the sinful in the
East End at large revivalist meetings. The ‘Sally Army’ with its ‘soldiers’ in
black uniforms accompanied by brass bands were a familiar sight in
London until the late twentieth century.
The miserable lives revealed by the strikes of industrial workers, the
match girls and the dockers (who marched through London holding the
fishheads which were all they could afford to eat), alarmed the social
consciences of the middle class. There was a new purposefulness about the
social reformers who set out to investigate the troubles of the poor. The use
of scientific research and statistics to find out what was going wrong and
arrive at a proper solution instead of piecemeal measures was pioneered by
wealthy businessmen of conscience like the social reformer Charles Booth.

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Beatrice Potter, the daughter of a rich industrialist, collected the statistics

for Booth’s landmark study of the poor, Life and Labour of the People in
London; begun in 1886 it would not be finished until 1903, and became
one of the most important influences on progressive thinking. It would lead
to the revision of the Poor Laws and recognition of the need for old age
pensions (see below).
The catalogue of monstrous facts which these studies produced
reinforced a general sense of the unfairness of the present system. To many
it seemed that only some form of communal ownership of the means of
production or socialism would prevent the shocking human casualties
which were the by-products of capitalism. A number of socialist societies
grew up in the 1880s, of which by far the most influential was the Fabian
Society, founded by the reformer and researcher Sidney Webb, his future
wife Beatrice Potter and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. The Society
was named for the Roman general Quintus Fabius who never faced the

at aay
LTECTEEEN

DA

A SCIENTIFIC CENTENARY.
Faraday (returned), ‘‘Wein, Miss Scrmnox, I HEARTILY CONGRATULATE YOU ;YOU HAVE
MADE MARVELLOUS PRoeRESSs SINCE MY TIME!”

Cartoon of a Scientific Centenary — Punch (1891).

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 HANOVERIAN

superlative Carthaginian general Hannibal in battle but wore him down

gradually over the duration. The Fabians intended to wear down Britain
until their socialist ideas of a fairer society became accepted.
Many of these societies were influenced by Chamberlain’s work in
Birmingham. Such prototypes for state provision were admiringly
christened ‘municipal socialism’ by the new socialist thinkers. But
Chamberlain’s radicalism was imprisoned in the Tory party, kept there by
Home Rule. Even so, the Fabian Society, with its slogan ‘evolution not
revolution’, would be instrumental in the formation of what after 1900
was called the Labour party, which was intended to represent the working
man. But, by the next general election in 1892, the political system was still
eight years away from the meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon
Street on 27 February 1900 when representatives of the Fabian Society, the
Social Democratic Federation (created by a former stockbroker, H. M.
Hyndman, in the 1880s) and half a million trade unionists set up the
Labour Representation Committee to field candidates in the Parliamentary
elections. Nevertheless the 1892 election produced some straws in the wind
which suggested that the present system of parties-was about to
disintegrate.
Two trade unionists and the Scots ex-miner Keir Hardie were elected to
Parliament. They were the tentative first attempts to create other means of
representing the working man’s interests than by relying on the Liberals.
Their supporters had come to believe that only a political party for the
trade unions would win legislation restricting the hours of manual labour.
To the amazement of the silk-hatted MPs, Hardie turned up to the House
of Commons wearmg his working-class cloth cap as a badge of honour.
Although Hardie in 1893 founded the small Independent Labour party at
Bradford to fulfil such a role for the unions, when he failed to hold the seat
in 1895 it proved that only a national organization could ensure
continuous representation. It would take a further worsening of relations
between the Conservative government and the working man as the strikes
by the new unskilled trade unions became more ferocious and the legal
reaction against them grew more severe to make the formation of a mass
party imperative.
In 1892 a new alliance with the Irish Home Rulers enabled the depleted
Liberals to become the governing party again. The election was a protest
vote against the lack of social reforms by the Tories. The eighty-three-year-
old Gladstone took part in no fewer than eighty-five debates and at last got
Home Rule for Ireland through the Commons, only for the House of Lords
to reject it. When he resigned as leader in 1894, the immensely wealthy
Lord Rosebery became premier for a year. Handsome and attractive,
married to a Rothschild, Rosebery did not please the rank-and-file

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Liberals. He lacked both the common and the serious touch and made no
attempt to acquire them — he was openly disapproved of by the still
substantial Nonconformist element in the Liberal party for his frivolity in
winning the Derby while prime minister not once but twice. By 1895 the
Liberals were out of office again and the Conservatives and Lord Salisbury
back in for another ten years on an increased wave of imperialist fervour.
The Liberal administration had put through many radical changes — for
one thing it had increased the democratization of local government by
creating parish councils — but its programme was not exciting enough for
a public thirsting for more martial triumphs. The succumbing of a section
of the patty under H. H. Asquith to imperialism further weakened the
party’s appeal for old Radicals with their long history of pacifism. Some of
them were drawn to the new socialist organizations, for an important
strand of socialist thought was against war.
Overall though the idea of a strong and conquering Britain was what
won the public imagination and made them vote Conservative. When
Salisbury returned as prime minister in 1895, imperial fever was at its
height after the conquest of Lower and Upper Rhodesia. Imperialism was
the dominant mood, and not just in Britain. The defeat that year of the
decaying Chinese Empire by her tiny island neighbour Japan which had
industrialized and modernized along western lines was the signal for
Russia, Germany, France and Britain to demand spheres of influence in
that empire for themselves. The Boxer Rebellion five years later resulted in
the slaughter of the personnel in the European embassies’ compound at
Peking (Beijing). Supposedly the work of rebels, the rising was in fact aided
by the Chinese government behind the scenes, but the European powers
rapidly reasserted control. Even America, whose whole history had been a
reaction against colonialism, succumbed to the spirit of the age and joined
in carving up the undeveloped world. She declared war on Spain in 1898
and took the Spanish Empire, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and
Cuba for her own. The only real success for the non-European world,
which otherwise was uniformly defeated by the imperialist powers, was
when the Ethiopians routed the Italians at Adowa in 1896.
Even Rudyard Kipling occasionally viewed the expanding British Empire
with the melancholy of historical perspective. He wrote the poem
‘Recessional’ at the height of the imperial frenzy in 1897 to warn of the
suddenness with which ‘all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and
Tyre’. But there was nothing melancholic about the ex-Liberal Joe
Chamberlain, who regarded the empire’s economic potential with all the
enthusiasm of the screw manufacturer he had once been. Chamberlain
gave up as a bad job attempting to bring both halves of the Liberal party
back together, asked Salisbury for the then unimportant job of colonial

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secretary and took firm hold of the imperial tiller. All he could think of was
that the empire which had gained three and a half million square miles in
twelve years must be the solution to Britain’s financial troubles. As the age
of iron gave way to the age of steel, German advances in steel manufacture
meant that by the mid-1890s Germany was overtaking Britain’s steel
production. The empire was like an undeveloped estate. If it was better
managed, it could be the making of Britain - after all, its combined
population was 300 million people.
Britain, Chamberlain believed, was a force for good, whose rule over the
new territories of the British Empire could be justified only if she brought
‘security and peace and comparative prosperity to countries that never
knew these blessings before’. Under Chamberlain the Colonial Office
regularized the production of tropical crops like jute, cocoa, palm oil and

Commemorative mug of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897, bearing the

legend ‘Empire on which the sun never sets’.

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 1886-1901

coffee. In west Africa he made the government build ports and schools of
medicine and sent troops to clear off marauding local tribes. He interfered
in the economies of the West Indies by creating Royal Commissions to
investigate the trade of the islands, some of which were facing bankruptcy
since the decline of their share of the sugar industry owing to the
cultivation of sugar beet in mainland Europe from the late nineteenth
century. Indeed, Chamberlain let it be known that where he had once
thought in terms of the nation he intended to think in terms of empire. The
cautious Lord Salisbury himself even committed himself so far as to divide
the world into ‘living and dying’ nations and emphasized ‘England’s . . .
Imperial ihstincts’.
The 1887 Golden Jubilee had been marked by the first Colonial
Conference of prime ministers at which Salisbury had emphasized the need
of the empire for self-defence. Ten years later at the Diamond Jubilee, to
mark sixty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Chamberlain tried to draw the
colonies into an even closer relationship with Britain. As part of the jubilee
ceremonies fifteen colonial premiers were sworn in as members of the Privy
Council. At the new Colonial Conference Chamberlain attempted to create
a Council of the Empire to co-ordinate defensive policy. But, although
Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders took pride in belonging to the
British Empire, they valued their recently achieved self-government far too
much to consent to what they feared might be the thin end of a wedge of
centralization. Chamberlain’s invitation was politely refused.
The Diamond Jubilee was the subject of much attention both in Britain
and abroad. An even larger parade of representatives of all the nationalities
protected by Britain took place to mark the occasion of Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee than had done at the Golden Jubilee. The huge array of
ships at Portsmouth reminded the world that Britain continued to rule the
waves as she had done since the Battle of Trafalgar. The tiny Queen
Victoria crowned by her widow’s lace veil led the imperial procession
through London in her open carriage. The ‘Grandmother of Europe’, as
she was known now that so many of her children had married the heirs to
European thrones, more than ever was the reassuringly human apex of the
richest, most powerful, most stable empire in the world. A famous Punch
cartoon of that era shows Britannia dancing with herself in ‘splendid
isolation’. Britain apparently had no need of foreign allies when she owned
so much of the world. In fact the empire was heading for a fall.
With the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal Republic two years before
British imperialism had begun to overreach itself. Cecil Rhodes and the
Rand lords, whose engineering expertise was responsible for developing
the Rand goldmines, had never ceased to resent the way they were treated
by the Dutch, as it was their efforts that had made the Transvaal rich. As

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a boy of ten, the Transvaal’s President Kruger had been part of the Great
Trek away from Cape Colony to find a new promised land. He had no
interest in alleviating conditions for the Uitlanders besmirching it, who
were a motley crew of speculators, adventurers and camp followers. He
disliked and disapproved of them quite as much as his primitive and
religious fellow Boers. By 1895 affairs were at such a pitch that 35,000
Uitlanders had signed a petition asking for better treatment by the Boers,
but it had been rejected. Many of the leading Uitlanders then began to plot
a rising against Kruger.
With Chamberlain as colonial secretary, Britain used gunboats and
soldiers in a way which had not been seen since Palmerston. Troops were
sent to defeat the constant encroachments of the French into British West
Africa. During his first term British battleships appeared in the Indian
Ocean to force President Kruger to open the fords he had closed to prevent
Uitlanders using them to avoid tax on the railways. With Chamberlain so
keen to defend British interests, the inventive Cecil Rhodes, by now prime
minister of the Cape, and his chief lieutenant Jameson believed they had a
receptive audience for their plan to wrest control of the Transvaal and its
goldfields from the Boers.
When Chamberlain was approached by Rhodes and Jameson and
warned that they planned to go to the rescue of the Uitlanders with a force
of about 500 men, he did not try to stop them — he may even have helped
them by notifying the police of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland to
join the raid. But he does not seem to have known when it would take
place. Meanwhile the momentum for a rising fizzled out, partly because
many of the Uitlanders were not British but German or American. By
coincidence the US president S. G. Cleveland, who was facing re-election,
chose this moment to threaten Britain with war over British Guiana’s
disputed border with Venezuela. American patriotism was running high —
Cleveland talked of twisting the lion’s tale.
Uitlanders did not want the raid to be a triumph for British imperialism,
so their uprising never took place. Jameson and his 470 accomplices
nonetheless thundered optimistically into the Transvaal. But this time he
was dealing not with the more credulous warriors of the Matabele peoples
but with the politically savvy Kruger, who having captured Jameson and
his troops created an enormous international outcry about the attempt to
take over the Transvaal. Britain responded with a whitewashing official
inquiry described by the Liberal press as the ‘Lying in State’. Though
Chamberlain was cleared, Rhodes was forced to resign as prime minister
of Cape Colony. But the British were still largely behind Jameson, whose
derring-do became the subject of popular ballads, and many agreed with
Chamberlain’s sympathetic description of Rhodes as a ‘rebel patriot’.

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Anglo-German rivalry was felt more keenly round this time and was
increased by a tactless telegram which the kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen
Victoria’s nephew, sent to President Kruger in January 1896. The kaiser
congratulated Kruger on foiling the raid ‘without recourse to the aid of
friendly powers’, which suggested that in the event of a war in South Africa
the Dutch would have German arms on their side. Germany had become
noticeably less friendly to-the British. The two powers were rubbing up
against one another in colonial and commercial rivalry round the world,
with friction arising not only over South Africa but over the Middle East.
Germany, intent on replacing Britain as most-favoured nation at
Constantinople, used Britain’s demands for reform after a new Armenian
massacre by the Turks in 1898 to cement her position and obtain the rights
to build a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. France remained Britain’s chief
colonial rival, but she had never made the mistake of attempting to
compete with the British fleet. Yet in 1897 Germany began to build a navy
as big as Britain’s, and when the kaiser announced that Germany’s future
lay on water, alarm bells began to ring within the British government. It
was well known that the minuscule size of Britain’s professional army
required her to entrust her defence to her navy, as she had done for almost
a hundred years. Germany’s refusal to limit her naval expenditure while
maintaining and increasing the 400,000-strong army which had mauled
France in the Franco-Prussian War was an action Britain could only
perceive ashostile.
Germany was replacing Russia as the power Britain felt most wary of,
especially after 1890 when Russia, disturbed by the strength of the British
reaction over the Penjdeh crisis, turned away from expansion in central
Asia in favour of penetrating the failing Chinese Empire instead. In the
mid-1890s there had been a general regrouping of alliances all round,
though Britain continued to remain unallied. After the death of Kaiser
Wilhelm I and the consequent fall of Bismarck, the German-Russian
alliance lapsed. France, perpetually afraid of a fresh attack from Germany
and desperatelyin need of a friend, beganto court Russia. The under-
standing between Russia and France was symbolized when French loans
were raised at the Paris Bourse for a Trans-Siberian Railway. And in 1895
their links became official. Fear of Germany had created strange bed-
fellows: Russia’s eastern autocracy in a Dual Alliance with the volatile
Third Republic of France against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria—
Hungary and Italy. Thwarted colonial ambitions had pushed Italy on to
Germany’s side when France seized Tunis in northern Africa. Thus by
1895 Europe was divided into the two armed camps which were such a
feature of the geopolitical world in the years before the First World War.
But uneasiness about Germany made little difference to Anglo-French
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colonial rivalry. In the Upper Nile at Fashoda the two countries very nearly
came to blows. Though the Jameson Raid had failed, the spirit of gung-ho
imperialism was flourishing more strongly than ever in England. The
country now thrilled to the reconquest of the Sudan by Sir Horatio Herbert
Kitchener, the commander-in-chief, or sirdar, of the Egyptian army, at the
Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. British honour and the death of
Gordon were avenged when Kitchener destroyed the dervish armies of the
mahdi’s successor, the khalifa, and retook Khartoum. The nation rejoiced
even more when Kitchener faced down a small French force sent out from
French West Africa to claim the Upper Nile, for France continued to be
infuriated by the British control of Egypt. Straight from the heat of
Omdurman Kitchener marched south to Fashoda to challenge Captain
Marchand, who had hoisted the French flag. Kitchener put up the British
and Egyptian flags in response and left an Egyptian force there. But though
the farcical situation was worthy of the contemporary comic operas of Sir
William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, both countries were in deadly
earnest. Lord Salisbury announced that Britain was prepared to open
hostilities, and the Royal Navy was put on alert. But when France’s new
ally Russia made it very clear that she had no intention of going to war
with Great Britain over somewhere in Africa, France was forced to back
down.
It seemed yet another triumph for British arms, and it was in a mood of
patriotic euphoria that Britain began to move towards war with the Boers.
The Boers believed that the British government had been secretly behind
the Jameson Raid and that there would one day be another attempt to take
over the Transvaal. President Kruger’s government began to stockpile arms
with the enormous profits from the goldmines. Chamberlain and the rest
of the Conservatives and Unionists became convinced the Boers were a
threat not only to peaceful coexistence but to British supremacy at the
Cape. The Jameson Raid had created race hatred between the Boers and
the English settlers. After Rhodes’s disgrace his government had been
replaced by a Dutch ministry at the Cape sympathetic to the Boers. With
some of the Boers in the Transvaal advertising themselves as liberators of
the oppressed Dutch at the Cape, the possibility loomed of the colonies
joining up under Dutch leadership in a Dutch United States of South
Africa. There were rumours that German officers were advising the Boers.
The Germans were certainly selling arms to them.
The treatment of the Uitlanders within the Boer republics worsened.
There were violent clashes between Boer police and the Uitlanders, and a
petition from over 20,000 workers was sent to Queen Victoria asking her
to help them. The high commissioner of South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner,
warned that Britain had to intervene quickly to protest about the

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 1886-1901

Uitlanders’ treatment or the sight of ‘thousands of British subjects kept

permanently in the position of helots’ would undermine faith in the British
Empire. War was inevitable if Kruger would not grant the civil rights that
Britain requested. There was a last conference at Bloemfontein in 1899.
But the stubborn old Kruger would not betray his people and their sacred
land. If the Uitlanders were given the vote, even in five years’ time, they
would outnumber the Boers. When Kruger could not agree, Milner broke
off negotiations and went back to the Cape. The Second Boer War ensued.
Apart from Radical Liberals like the rising Welsh solicitor MP David
Lloyd George and the socialists, British public opinion and press were still
in the grip-of military frenzy. Young men, particularly well-to-do ones,
were mustard keen for the war, believing in a vague way that it would test
them, that it would be good for them. Everybody imagined that the war
would be short and sweet. In fact it was prolonged, very expensive and far
from the walkover that Britons expected.
The Boers turned out to be superb marksmen armed with state-of-the-
art European weaponry. Most of their soldiers were really just Dutch
farmers, but a hard life on the veldt had left them in superb physical
condition. Britain’s popularity with other nations, repelled by what
appeared to be bullying of the two small Boer republics by the mighty
British Empire, dwindled to a dangerous low. And the Orange Free State
and the Transvaal were almost a match for her. It took two and a half
years, £200 million and 450,000 British soldiers to defeat 50,000 Boers.
More and more volunteers were sent out by the boatload from Britain
4,000 miles away in their brand-new ‘khaki’ combat uniform, invented to
blend into the African bush.
The Boers’ fatal mistake was to attack the colony of Natal, which
contained only British settlers, instead of making for the Cape where there
were 30,000 Dutch. Nevertheless for much of 1899 and 1900 British
troops were completely unable to relieve the siege of Ladysmith in Natal,
and Mafeking in Bechuanaland on the border of the Transvaal. Under
Colonel Robert Baden Powell, Mafeking held out for 217 days. (Baden
Powell would later become famous as the founder of the Boy Scouts and
Girl Guides movement, which trained young people in disciplined and self-
reliant behaviour.) So badly did the British fare against the Boers, despite
their superior numbers, that after ‘black week’ in December 1899, a series
of massive defeats, the commander-in-chief Sir Redvers Buller was
replaced by Lord Roberts. It was not until May 1900 that Mafeking was
relieved by Roberts.
Ultimately the Boers were let down by their lack of military training and
coherent strategy. Roberts and his second-in-command Kitchener of
Khartoum managed to outflank the Boers’ commander Piet Cronje. By

619
 HANOVERIAN

The Boer War: one of the blockhouses built by Kitchener to guard the railways;
Howitzer gun at Balmoral camp; cricket group amongst British soldiers at
Balmoral camp.

August 1900 Roberts had seized the capitals of the Boer republics
Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, the main Boer armies had given up and
Ladysmith had been relieved. Later that year the Transvaal and the Orange
Free State were formally annexed as colonies to the British crown. A khaki
election — that is, a war election, because many of the voters were still in
khaki uniform — was called that year by the Conservatives, who hoped to
cash in on the war’s popularity.
They duly won the election, but their hold over the nation was drawing
to a close. The Labour Representation Committee, prototype of the
Labour party, had been created six months before in February 1900. Its
candidates won only two seats in the general election, with Keir Hardie
gaining one of them, and the Conservative majority was 134. But the
Labour party was the rising sun, though its breakthrough would not come
until the 1906 election. The long years under the Conservatives had
achieved very little for many workers, as was dramatically highlighted at
620
 1886-1901

the beginning of the Boer War by the poor physical shape of the recruits.
Shockingly, one in three of the British men who volunteered for service was
found unfit for duty by the army doctors. The Tory government simply
could not pay for social reforms when Chamberlain was sending British
armies-all over Africa, nor was there the political will.
The Boer War was continued by little groups of Boers carrying on
guerrilla warfare from the hills. Lord Kitchener had taken over as
commander-in-chief and in the end the Boers were defeated by his ruthless
use of total war. He built blockhouses or garrison huts to guard the
railways and prevent the Boers blowing them up. Much more contro-
versially, to thwart the guerrilla tactics which made every home a potential
shelter, Kitchener forced the evacuation of the Boer farms. Civilian Boers
were placed in enormous concentration camps, in huts surrounded by
barbed wire, a concept which was to be used with such evil effect some
thirty years later in Germany.
Though it was extremely effective, such an inhumane way of proceeding
created an uproar in Britain, especially when it became known that a fifth
of the inmates were dying in the camps. Of the 100,000 Boers confined in
them, 20,000 died. The figures were even worse for one camp, where
disease and insanitary conditions killed half the Boer children interned
there. It was then that the quiet new leader of the Liberals, a Glaswegian
MP from a wealthy family named Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, forever
endeared himself to the Boers and the Radical wing of his party. At a time
when the national mood was blindly patriotic he dared to criticize the
British army publicly by calling the concentration camps ‘methods of
barbarism’. A strong-minded British spinster, the fearless Miss Emily
Hobhouse, led an expedition out to South Africa to find out what was
going on. When she was stonewalled by the army, she took the story to the
press to create more of an outcry. Chamberlain was forced to send out
proper administrators for the camps to take over from the army, which had
enough problems feeding itself let alone the enemy. The anti-militaristic
and humanitarian spirit of England had started to reassert itself after a
period of quiescence. The mushroom growth of imperialism was starting
to shrivel and die as rapidly as it had sprung up.
But the Queen of England was also declining rapidly. The consummate
Victorian, Gladstone, had died three years before and had been
buried in Westminster Abbey after a magnificent state funeral. The old
queen lived to see the first year of the twentieth century; after that her
health began to falter. On 22 January rg9or she died in her eighty-
second year at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Despite her
fondness for a forthright and elderly Scots ghillie named John Brown,
Victoria had never ceased mourning Prince Albert. She was buried

621
 HANOVERIAN

beside him in the mausoleum at Frogmore, inside Windsor Home Park.

The Victorian age and the nineteenth century had come to an end
together. When Victoria died there was not only great sorrow among her
subjects but also a sense of disbelief. She had been on the throne since
1837, so that even people in their sixties had known no other monarch. She
had been a fixture that seemed as permanent as the Tower of London.

622
SAXE-COBURG
 Edward VII
(1901-1910)

The next thirteen years of life in Britain display a curious mixture of the
ultra-modern existing side by side with the traditions of the past. Fifteen
per cent of Britons were still employed as servants, making possible the
grand lifestyle enjoyed by the well-to-do in the wake of the example set by
the new monarch Edward VII. The long dresses and formal outfits we see
in photographs of the Edwardians speak of an age still very different to
ours. On the other hand, after the first election of Edward VII’s reign, over
fifty British constituencies had Labour MPs. More women had jobs than
ever before as teachers and nurses and in the new profession of typist.
Although they did not have the vote, a suffragette movement was
beginning.
With the extraordinary Liberal landslide at the 1906 election the battles
for hearts and minds waged by social reformers over the past twenty years
seemed to have resulted in a great victory for humanitarianism.
Ploughshares had truly become more important than swords. It was
accepted that the state had a duty to care for the people in sickness and old
age. By rgrzt the harsh old Poor Laws had been thrown out and old age
pensions and national insurance had been brought in. War went out of
fashion and seemed uncivilized; it belonged to a less advanced age. Yet the
period was overshadowed by an awareness of the increasing German
arsenal. To defence chiefs the disarmament conferences and peace
movements of the time could leave Britain disastrously vulnerable. When
the period ended in the immolation of the First World War, ten million
dead worldwide made a belief in progress seem like vanity.
But at the beginning of the twentieth century the omens were favourable.
Telecommunications continued to shrink the globe. In rgo1, after
experiments conducted with the backing of the British government, the
Anglo-Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent the first electro-magnetic signal
across the Atlantic, from the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall to
Newfoundland — Britain was linked to the North American continent by
radio wave. By 1912, some 700,000 British people had telephones. Even
the most distant regions of the earth, its North and South Poles, yielded up

625
 SAXE-COBURG

their secrets. The Briton Captain Robert Scott led his first expedition to the
Antarctic in t900-4 and discovered what he called King Edward VII’s
Land, while the American Admiral Robert Peary got within a hundred
miles of the North Pole in 1902. London became full of motor buses. The
Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines were sunk deep underground, making travel
round London much faster.
Around 1905 arose the starry constellation of left-leaning intellectuals
known as the Bloomsbury Group. A handful of gifted publishers, writers,
artists and art historians did more to end Victorian attitudes than the death
of the queen herself. Champions of the avant-garde with their art
exhibitions, Roger Fry and Clive Bell introduced Britain to the conceptual
revolutions taking place on the continent. Often the children of eminent
Victorians — like the writer Virginia Woolf, whose father, Sir Leslie
Stephen, was the founder of The Dictionary of National Biography — the
Bloomsbury circle mercilessly deconstructed the Victorian assumptions
they had grown up with. Just as the Cubists refused to go on representing
the world literally, writers like Woolf challenged literary form with their
fractured, allusive technique. They were mesmerized by the new science of
psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the subconscious. Pioneered by
Sigmund Freud it began casting its spell at the turn of the century. The
importance of the instinct versus the intellect made a huge number of
converts, of whom the most famous was D. H. Lawrence, a coalminer’s
son from Nottingham whose novel Sons and Lovers came out in 1913.
Presiding over these changes was the old-fashioned figure of the new
king. The most abiding image of Edward VII is in the waisted Norfolk
jacket he used for his favourite sport, shooting, at his unpretentious house
Sandringham. The style of the Marlborough House Set, as his friends were
called, harked back to the days of the prince regent. Edward revelled in
meals that were not only extremely rich but involved eight to ten courses
and port and cigars in profusion. But in his way he was an innovator. He
made it his business to get to know people from all walks of life, including
union leaders and some of the new Labour MPs. As a young man he had
insisted on meeting Italian revolutionary Garibaldi when he visited Britain,
to his mother’s consternation. Where Queen Victoria’s court had consisted
of the landed aristocracy, Edward VII preferred plutocrats and Jewish
financiers.
Edward’s immense girth and genial presence had been a constant feature
of ceremonial occasions in Britain and the empire for forty years. But
Queen Victoria had prevented him from taking on any real kind of royal
responsibilities and jealously guarded her powers. In fact, she disliked her
eldest son, and despite protests from ministers, until he reached the age of
fifty refused to allow him to read state papers. On his accession he was

626
 I9OI-1910

almost sixty. Deprived of a real role Edward had thrown himself into
pleasure and did all he could to live in a way quite different to the Queen.
Though the Victorian Sunday was sacred, and for many Victorians began
and ended with church services, the Prince of Wales made a point of
holding extravagant Sunday-night suppers. Though devoted to his
beautiful and elegant wife Queen Alexandra, he had numerous mistresses,
the most celebrated of whom were Mrs Alice Keppel and the Jersey actress
Mrs Lillie Langtry. The subject of paintings and hundreds of society prints,
Mrs Langtry was fondly known as the Jersey Lily. As Prince of Wales,
Edward was cited in two divorce cases, but he shocked the manners of the
day even’more when it emerged that he had played the illegal game of
baccarat at a house named Tranby Croft. He was called as a witness in a
slander trial when Sir William Gordon Cumming sued some of his fellow
gamblers at Tranby Croft for saying he was a cheat.
Once he became king, Edward VII took himself and his role far more
seriously. Throughout his reign he was assiduous in maintaining peaceful
relations with other European sovereigns, to many of whom he was closely
related, gaining the nickname Edward the Peacemaker. His charm and
extremely good French made him an important weapon to end the hostility
between the two western democracies. After he had made a state visit to
Paris, the final thawing out of relations between France and Britain
reached a natural conclusion with the diplomatic understanding known as
the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In fact ever since Fashoda a series of
agreements over territories had started to lessen the. hostility between
Britain and France, culminating in a historic breakthrough when many old
colonial disputes across the globe which went back to the early eighteenth
century, including one over fishing rights off Newfoundland, were settled
once and for all. France recognized Britain’s occupation of Egypt
unconditionally, while the British allowed the French ‘a free hand in
Morocco’ which joined up France’s north and west African imperial
possessions.
This was a time of anxiety for Britain, for the Boer War had revealed her
as having no friends in Europe. The early part of Edward VII’s reign saw a
great many attempts to improve Britain’s relations with the rest of the
world. Though Britain’s territories had never been more widespread, the
last few years had been an inglorious period, and the once magnificent
isolation seemed positively irksome. To counter it, in 1902 under the new
foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, Britain made her first alliance with
Japan, the rising power in the east.
Like many British politicians the king was disquieted by German inten-
tions. His wife Alexandra, the former Danish princess who had watched
with horror as Prussian troops marched into her country, regarded most

627
 SAXE-COBURG

Germans with suspicion. For all Edward’s desire to be a peacemaker, he

greatly disliked his nephew, the rash and often scintillating know-all Kaiser
Wilhelm II. The kaiser’s personal diplomacy was unpredictable: he would
send messages abroad or make speeches on foreign affairs without consult-
ing ministers. Born with a withered arm, into a militaristic society which
detested his mother for being English and therefore a dangerous liberal, the
kaiser both admired and resented his English relations. But, though the
English laughed at him and found his obsession with uniforms absurd,
William was deadly serious about building a navy to rival his uncle’s.
In the face of that fleet-building, Britain’s greatest threat suddenly
seemed to come from across the North Sea instead of from across the
Channel, as it had done since the late seventeenth century. The king had
strongly supported the commander of the Mediterranean fleet and future
first sea lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher, when he had insisted that a naval base be built
at Rosyth in 1903 on Britain’s east coast to guard against attack from the
north coast of Germany. To counter the German menace Fisher invented
the huge ironclad battleship called the Dreadnought and the fast and
heavily armed battle cruisers. The Dreadnought made every other warship
of lower tonnage and smaller guns obsolete against it. By 1907 for the first
time Britain had a General Staff; it was felt that she could no longer do
without one when all the other major European powers had possessed
them for the previous fifteen years.
Britain began to tie her naval security arrangements together with those
of France. The Mediterranean fleet based on Malta was reduced as part of
an exercise to bring more of the Royal Navy into home waters. Britain
would rely on the French navy to help her patrol the Mediterranean. The
two nations were to let one another in on their military secrets. There was
no quicker way to draw an Entente closer together, although for fear of
angering the ever touchy Germany British diplomats perpetually avoided a
final commitment to France.
The last years of the Conservative government have an air of played-out
exhaustion about them. Lord Salisbury resigned in July 902 on grounds of
ill-health, and was succeeded as prime minister by his nephew the gifted
intellectual A. J. Balfour, formerly the chief secretary to Ireland. The Irish
Land Purchase Act of the following year was the most successful attempt
made by Britain to solve the Irish land problem. It put loans of £5 million a
year at the disposal of tenant farmers wishing to buy out their landlords. By
an annual redemption payment or mortgage, tenants would become owners
of their farms after sixty-eight years. Two hundred and fifty thousand
people had taken up the scheme by 1909. But, with belief in a separate Irish
state gathering momentum again, the fact remained that a separate nation
for the Irish was going to be a far more powerful idea than mortgages.

628
 I9OI-1910

Balfour addressed Britain’s industrial decline with a new Education Bill

in 1902 which brought secondary education under control of the state and
caused the building of hundreds of local grammar schools. But the
problems of the poor in Britain were too immediate to be dealt with by
the education of the future. An incontrovertible shock had been given
to the empirically minded and practical British by the youthful science of
statistics. The solid evidence of Charles Booth’s figures showing the almost
inevitable link between poverty and old age, published in his exhaustive
Life and Labour of the People in London in 1903, combined with the
equally influential B. Seebohm Rowntree’s groundbreaking 1901 Poverty:
A Study of Town Life in York, could not be denied. It appeared that
around a third of the British people were living below what Seebohm called
the poverty line.
Joe Chamberlain’s faith in an ingenious new form of imperialism, an
Imperial Customs Union which would have preference over the rest of the
world, did not fit the mood of urgency. The Tariff Reform League — which
he formed after resigning from the Colonial Office — and the import duties
that would fund social programmes at home were denounced as a threat to
food prices. It was Chamberlain’s fate to split parties: this time it was the
Conservatives’ turn. Free trade was a shibboleth on which Britain had built
her immense prosperity. Conservative free traders like Winston Churchill
believed that an Imperial Customs Union would drastically increase the
cost of living because other countries would slap on their own retaliatory
import duties. The Tory free traders accordingly went over to the Liberals
to campaign for the forthcoming general election under the slogan of the
Big Loaf (free trade and the Liberals) against the Little Loaf (tariff reform
and the Conservatives). In December 1905 the Conservative government
had to resign and the Liberals under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman —
whose moral bravery in attacking the conduct of the Boer War at the
height of war fever united a party split into imperialists and anti-
imperialists — returned to power. Chamberlain himself suffered a stroke the
year after and had to retire from politics. The Tories had come to represent
a sort of callousness. It became known that, with the high commissioner
Lord Milner’s acquiescence, Chinese labourers were being imported to
work in the Rand goldmines on contracts that were little short of slavery.
Much was made of their treatment at a time when the Labour movement
was starting to feel its strength.
At the general election in June 1906 the Liberals won a landslide victory,
377 Liberal seats against only 157 Conservatives and Liberal Unionists,
which gave the new government a convincing mandate from the nation to
implement real social reforms. But it contained a great surprise. The
number of Labour MPs had leaped from two in 1900 to fifty-three

629
 SAXE-COBURG

(twenty-nine for the Labour Representation Committee and twenty-four

others who counted themselves Labour). The Liberals’ passive acceptance
of the landmark 1901 Taff Vale legal decision, which allowed a trade
union to be sued for damage caused by its members during a strike, had
driven the unions towards Labour. The large number of MPs fielded by the
Labour Representation Committee pointed to the desire for radical change
in the way that the working man was treated. After the 1906 election the
twenty-nine LRC members called themselves the Labour Parliamentary
party and Keir Hardie became its chairman. In fact the mood of many
Liberals was very close to the new Labour party; after all, until recently the
Liberals had been the party representing the working class, and in many
constituencies they still were. The Liberal MP John Burns, who became
minister for the Local Government Board, was the first working man to be
a member of the Cabinet. A socialist engineer and trade unionist, he had
been one of the chief instigators of the great strikes of the late 1880s.
The new Liberal administration contained some of the twentieth
century’s most outstanding politicians, future prime ministers who would
steer Britain safely through the First and Second World Wars. The
chancellor of the Exchequer was H. H. Asquith, a Yorkshireman and gifted
Nonconformist barrister. Somewhat to the surprise of his down-to-earth
relations he had married the high-spirited daughter of a chemical bleach
magnate, Margot Tennant, a member of the most dashing section of
Edwardian society. David Lloyd George, the solicitor known as the Welsh
Wizard, was at the Board of Trade but would soon become chancellor of
the Exchequer; his views were informed by personal experience of the
poverty he had grown up with in the Welsh valleys as the nephew of the
local cobbler. Winston Spencer Churchill, under-secretary at the Colonial
Office but about to go to the Board of Trade and then to the Home Office,
was the son of the Tory Democrat Lord Randolph and the American
beauty Jenny Jerome. He may have been born in Blenheim Palace but he
had a hatred of injustice as strong as Lloyd George’s. The Northumbrian
landowner Sir Edward Grey became foreign secretary, a post he would
hold until after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1906, to all these
men the twentieth century promised a fresh start in attempts to solve the
problems that had disfigured the nineteenth.
In the case of the African colonies, as in India, most Liberal and Labour
politicians believed that the British Empire was merely a trustee for the
future. Britain’s role was to guide them to democracy when they were
ready — which meant when education had become widespread.
The black African colonies began to be governed at arm’s length by
Britain, the Liberals preferring to rely on local leaders and local
institutions, or ‘indirect rule’. British MPs formed an important part of the

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 I9OI-1910

international mission in 1908 which investigated rumours that King

Leopold had ordered massacres of African people in the Belgian Congo.
When it reported that the ‘mission to civilize’ had resulted in the Congo
becoming a private slave kingdom for Leopold, where any resistance was
met by death, the king was forced to hand over its administration to the
Belgian state.
As a result of Campbell-Bannerman’s outspoken defence of the Boers
during the war, he found their leaders easy to deal with. The Boer War
peace treaty of 1902 had anyway been generous. None of the leaders was
punished for going to war with Britain, and £3 million compensation was
given to “restart the farming destroyed by Kitchener’s scorched-earth
policy. The Liberal decision to grant the Boers self-government in 1907
also improved relations, although two former rebel leaders, Louis Botha
and Jan Smuts, became the most important figures in the Transvaal
government. In 1908 the Liberal administration invited the four South
African colonies, the two Boer ex-republics and the two British, the Cape
and Natal, to form a Dominion of Scuth Africa.
However, the price of creating another Dominion, as the self-governing
colonies had elected to be known since 1907, was black votes. Despite their
idealism, it was a price the majority of the British government was willing
to pay. When the four colonies created not a federation of colonies but a
Union of South Africa in 1910, Boer ideas predominated. The old Cape
Parliament had a ‘colour blind’ franchise, but under pressure of the Boers
the new constitution of the Union included the Boers’ colour bar. A
deputation representing the nine million-strong black majority in South
Africa led by William Schreiner, and protests from the Aboriginal
Protection Society and others like the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke and the
Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, were ignored. The Liberal government
washed its hands of the affair, on the ground that insisting on safeguards
for black African rights might cause the peaceful Union process to collapse.
Ministers did assure Schreiner, however, that the three black High
Commission territories of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland,
which had no white population whatsoever and which were to be absorbed
into the new Union, would be protected by various guarantees, and they
were. But the colour bar passed. Relations with London grew much more
amicable. South Africa came into the war on the side of the British Empire
in 1914. Smuts, who had followed Botha as prime minister, became a
member of the British War Cabinet.
Campbell-Bannerman’s energy had been exhausted dealing with the
aftermath of the Boer War. Some important domestic measures were
passed under him, but it was not until after April 1908, when on account
of Campbell-Bannerman’s ill-health H. H. Asquith took over as prime

631
 SAXE-COBURG

minister, that the progressive wing of the party came to the fore. A flood
of bills made dramatic changes to the social fabric of Britain.
Profound advances were made in the treatment of prisoners. Jail
sentences were shortened. Young people under fourteen could no longer be
sent to prison; instead they were held in borstals — remedial centres with
educational facilities. The use of solitary confinement for all prisoners on
arriving at jail was stopped, as was automatic imprisonment for non-
payment of fines. The Liberal government anticipated the concerns of
many penal reformers fifty years later, believing that the experience of
prison was in itself harmful. Prison libraries were introduced, as well as a
lecture system, to fit prisoners for the outside world to which they must in
the end return. The Liberals believed that the treatment of crime and
criminals was one of the real tests of civilization.
Legislation to compensate workmen for injuries received at their place
of employment was finally passed in 1908. The hours to be worked in a
coalmine were fixed at eight hours per day. The Trade Disputes Act of
1906 repudiated the Taff Vale case, which had forced the railway union to
repay the cost of its strike in damages to the Taff Vale Railway Company.
Union funds became untouchable. In 1909 a Trade Boards Act produced
wage-fixing machinery to prevent sweated labour, while another act
created stricter safety standards for coalmines. In 1914 the Liberals tried
to reduce the number of hours of work in shops from eighty to sixty per
week, but were defeated by pressure from shopkeepers. However, the
government succeeded in getting one early-closing day a week, and the
British tea break was enshrined in law in rgrt.
The misery of seasonal unemployment was tackled by a national system
of Labour Exchanges pioneered and run by a protégé of Sidney and Beatrice
Webb, a young university lecturer named William Beveridge, whose special
interest it was. Thirty-five years later in 1944, after a career as director of
the London School of Economics, the same man would issue the Beveridge
Report that gave birth to Britain’s welfare state and the National Health
Service, to protect the population ‘from the cradle to the grave’.
But an early version of that care was given by the r9r1 National
Insurance Act and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. They were the
greatest innovations of the Liberal government and they were driven
through the Commons and the Lords by the energy and conviction of
Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The Old Age Pensions Act ensured
that every old person had five shillings a week from the age of seventy, if
he or she did not have more than eight shillings a week income from other
sources. In return for a small weekly contribution by employer and
employee, the National Insurance Act gave sickness benefit, free care by a
doctor, and money for every week out of work. The Liberal government

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 I9OI-I910

was on a crusade against poverty. But how was it to finance the reforms,
especially as the threat from Germany was prompting a level of expendi-
ture on both the army and navy that was unheard of in peacetime Britain?
The Liberal secretary of state for war, R. B. Haldane, who had close
links with Germany, was so alarmed by the military preparations taking
place there that he not only increased army spending but created the small,
superbly equipped British: Expeditionary Force with which Britain would
help defend France against the Germans at the beginning of the First World
War. The Anglo-French Entente had the effect of driving a paranoid
Germany to still greater lengths to increase her navy and throw her weight
around over her further colonial expansion. Germany believed that she
was merely protecting her commercial interests. For France and Britain,
however, she was unacceptably aggressive when in 1905, in a bid to halt
the French colonization of Morocco, she threatened war if there were not
a conference to discuss its future. The great-power conference at Algeciras
in Spain the following year demonstrated that Germany’s rough behaviour
had worked: the development of Morocco was to take place under
international supervision, which would make room for German trade.
Then at the Hague Conference on Disarmament in 1907, Germany
refused utterly to decrease her Dreadnought-building programme in return
for reductions by the British. She was convinced that this was a cunning
British gambit to make her navy less powerful. Admiral Tirpitz, head of the
German navy, had been delighted that the Liberal government had lowered
the amount of spending allotted by the Conservatives to Dreadnoughts in
order to finance its social reforms. This had given him time to start his own
programme to build Dreadnoughts, which he did with gusto.
In a world perpetually anxious about Germany it was inevitable that
Britain would seek ways to protect the empire from German activities. The
Entente drew her into a relationship with France’s ally Russia. Once
Britain’s greatest enemy in central Asia, Russia had been revealed as a
spent force when she was defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of
1904-5. Now it seemed far more important to achieve joint collaboration
to check German penetration of the Middle East. The Anglo-Russian
Conventionof 1907 in theory committed Britainto nothing. It merely
declared that Britain’s influence was recognized as supreme in Afghanistan
and southern Persia, while Russia was accepted as the dominant power in
northern Persia. But the understanding between Russia and Britain
increased Germany’s fear of encirclement.
In 1908 the underlying tension in Europe was ratcheted up several levels
when Serbia threatened to attack Austria-Hungary, and Germany
retaliated by announcing that Russia would face war with her if she backed
Serbia. Fearing that the Young Turk revolution at Constantinople would

633
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undermine the position she had built up over thirty years, Austria—
Hungary had finally annexed the Balkan lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
which she had occupied since 1878. But, just as the days of deference were
passing in Britain, new forces were operating in relations between old
empires and young upstart nations like Serbia. Austria-Hungary might
think of Bosnia and Herzegovina as compensation for her lost empire in
Italy and Germany, but Serbia believed she had more right to the two
provinces because of their large Serb population. She was sufficiently self-
confident to fight for them to create her dream of a greater Serbia, a South
Slav or Yugoslav Empire, and she appealed to Russia as the special
protector of the Slavic peoples to back her against Austria-Hungary.
After being so recently defeated by the Japanese, Russia was in no
condition to take on Germany as well as Austria-Hungary. Austria—
Hungary retained her new provinces, but that only stored up trouble for
the future. Though Serbia was forced to back off, agitation about her Serb
brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not die away. In fact it became
stronger with every passing year. The European atmosphere was not
improved by an interview the kaiser gave to the London Daily Telegraph
in which he said that most Germans detested the British and would happily
go to war with them, and that he was their only friend.
In 1909, right in the middle of the crisis over the Balkans and as Britain’s
demands for an international conference were being ignored, came news of
secret German plans for a vast increase in the size of the German navy. The
German naval estimates revealed to Parliament spread panic through the
country. Admiral Tirpitz had already caught up with Britain in the number
of Dreadnoughts. With the new programme, he might overtake the British.
Many soldiers, including Lord Roberts the commander-in-chief of the Boer
War, wanted immediate conscription. The urgent need to build new
Dreadnoughts was captured in the music-hall song, ‘We want eight and we
won't wait’. Even the Liberals, with their antipathy towards military
spending, were convinced that the naval race with Germany called for
more battleships to be built that year and the next.
But where was the money to come from? Not only did extra money have
to be found for the ships, the new welfare provisions had to be funded too.
For David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the Exchequer, the answer was
a graduated income tax to get the rich to pay more. But the super-wealthy
had their well-ensconced defenders in the House of Lords. Ever since the
split over Irish Home Rule there had been no peers left on the Liberal side
of the House. Moreover the Lords had become far too accustomed to using
its Conservative majority to defeat bills sent up by the Liberal Commons.
The Liberal government’s measures to promote greater fairness in
British life had created a malevolent hostility in the House of Lords.

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 I9O0I-I910

Encouraged by the fact that the last two prime ministers Salisbury and
Balfour had been aristocrats, many peers felt a resurgence of the conviction
that those born to wear ermine were born to the purple too. Bills to end
plural voting, a new licensing bill which allowed a drinks licence to be
withdrawn by the local council if it so wished, and a bill to increase the
number of smallholders in Scotland, all incensed their lordships for one
reason or another, and were rejected.
In 1894 Gladstone had warned the Lords when they rejected Home Rule
that they were tampering with the constitution, since an unelected House
was interfering with the wishes of the elected House. He had told them that
they should fear for their future if they continued to thwart the democratic
will. The Liberals had experienced thirty years of the Lords throwing out
their measures whenever it suited them. They had had enough of their
smart new twentieth-century legislation being destroyed by a group of
people whom Lloyd George daringly described as being ‘five hundred men,
ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’. Should
they, he asked, ‘override the judgement — the deliberate judgement — of
millions of people engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of this
country?’ Hereditary privilege was beginning to look absurd. Lloyd
George decided to get rid of the powers of the Lords once and for all. He
would raise the immense funds he needed by a method almost guaranteed
to arouse the wrath of the Lords: a super-tax on top of income tax for
higher incomes, plus a higher rate of death duty for the wealthier estates.
Most infuriating of all was a tax on any unearned increase in the value of
land, to be paid whenever land changed hands.
It was a tradition that only the House of Commons could alter money
bills. If the Lords rejected the budget, it would be in breach of a
constitutional convention. The People’s Budget would be the test, as Lloyd
George put it, of ‘whether the country was to be governed by the King and
the Peers or the King and the People’. But the House of Lords was so
enraged by the budget, and by the idea of the state preparing to value every
field in the country to estimate its unearned increment, that it completely
lost its head. In 1909 the greatest landowners in the country still were, as
they had been for centuries, the aristocracy and the landed gentry, whose
relatives represented them in the House of Lords. Lloyd George’s tax
seemed aimed at them, the 1 per cent of the population who owned 70 per
cent of the country.
Lloyd George’s budget passed the Liberal House of Commons, but was
thrown out by the House of Lords. The chancellor’s response was to cry,
‘We have got them at last!’ Asquith dissolved Parliament and called a
general election for January 1910 on the ground that the rights of the
Commons had been usurped. The election was bitterly fought. The peers

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made the great mistake of taking part in it. Their collective wisdom might
have been encyclopaedic and their knowledge of local affairs second to
none, yet the hustings revealed the lottery of heredity at its worst. Many of
the lumbering backwoodsmen appeared eccentric and selfishly concerned
with their own interests.
The election, the second of Edward VII’s reign, returned the Liberals to
power, but the result was disappointing. The landslide had vanished. The
Liberals had only three MPs more than the Unionists. To push their
measures through, the Liberals were dependent on the votes of the Labour
party and the Irish Nationalists. A new Home Rule Bill would be the
payment demanded for the Irish Nationalists’ co-operation.
The Conservative Lords suddenly agreed to pass the budget. But Asquith
and Lloyd George were not put off. Asquith introduced the Parliament Bill,
which strictly limited the House of Lords’ powers: it should no longer be
able to change or throw out a money bill; any bill which was passed by the
House of Commons in three successive sessions, even if it was rejected by
the Lords each time, should become law.
The Parliament Bill had only had its first reading in the Commons when
the House adjourned for the Easter Break. But on 6 May 1910 the nation
was abruptly distracted. Following a holiday in his favourite French resort
of Biarritz, the genial Edward VII had died at Buckingham Palace after a
series of heart attacks.

636
WINDSOR
 George V
(1910-1936)

Last Years of Peace (1910-1914)

The new king, George V, was almost forty-five. As the second son of
Edward VII he had pursued a career as a naval officer for fifteen years until
1892, when his elder brother, the sickly Duke of Clarence, died and he
became heir to the throne. As a result of his years in the Senior Service,
George V was sensible, businesslike and disciplined. He had a great sense
of the empire, much of which he had visited on duty tours. To mark his
becoming Emperor of India at the end of his coronation year, he gave a
magnificent Durbar, or gathering, at Delhi. George’s wife was Princess
Mary of Teck. The granddaughter of one of George IV’s brothers, the
Duke of Cambridge, she had been born and brought up in England. They
had six sons and daughters.
Hard-working and realistic, after his father’s funeral George V called a
round-table Constitutional Conference with all the party leaders to seek a
consensus on what should be done about the Parliament Bill. But, with no
agreement reached and reluctant to see the crown interfere in politics, the
Liberals decided on a second election. George V insisted that the bill should
actually be voted on by the House of Lords before Asquith called a new
election, in order for the Conservative peers to propose alternative
suggestions. But the king also agreed, as William IV had done in the crisis
over the 1832 Reform Bill, to create around 250 peers to swing the
Parliament Bill through the second chamber if the Lords rejected it.
In December 1910 the Liberal government’s position was reaffirmed.
The electoral result was practically unchanged: the Liberals and the
Unionists had the same number of seats, 272 each, the Irish Nationalists
had 84, an increase of two, while Labour’s share stood at 40. The new
Parliament Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons in May
1911 to great excitement and amid ungentlemanly scenes. The son of the
Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, lost control of himself and heckled
the prime minister so ferociously that he had to stop speaking. In the
House of Lords a ‘Die-Hard’ group of peers started a last-ditch movement
to get the peers to refuse the bill. But by July the message had got through.

639
 WINDSOR

However furious the Lords might be about their ancient rights being
trampled underfoot, the threat of being swamped ensured that by August
1911 enough had abstained for the bill to pass.
But there was yet more trouble for the government. An epidemic of
strikes paralysed the country throughout the summer. Agitation and
vituperation had surrounded the Parliament Bill. There was a feeling of
alarm at the changing nature of things — not everyone in Britain was
progressively minded, as the last elections had made clear. Then suddenly,
at the end of June, a serious war scare began.
The German government had sent a gunboat, the Panther, to seize the
port of Agadir in Morocco. Over the previous couple of years, German
relations with Britain had improved under a new German chancellor,
Bethmann-Hollweg, for he was intent on breaking up the over-cosy
relationship between France, Britain and Russia. The kaiser himself had
appeared to be in a more friendly mood, even visiting London in the early
summer of rgrz for the unveiling of a memorial to his grandmother Queen
Victoria. But, after the naval panic of 1909 and the generally threatening
stance of the German government, the Panther could have meant anything.
During the seventeen days when the German government refused to
disclose its intentions, the world held its breath.
Rumours abounded that Germany was preparing for war and about to
march through Belgium. Reports of the military camps in Germany, where
the peacetime army approached a million men, and the increased number
of German soldiers up against the Belgian frontier did nothing to dispel
this. The strange elongated railway platforms, which could only have been
built for troops, along the German frontier with Belgium had long been
noticed by the British military. An Official Secrets Act was brought in for
the first time to protect against the spying known to be going on in the
dockyards and all over the country. The letters of anyone suspected of
getting orders from Germany were opened.
The year 1911 saw the hottest summer for forty years. London sweltered
in the heat as anxiety mounted about what Germany would do next. What
did she want; did she want war? So anxious was even the pacifist Cabinet
about Germany having control of a port from which her warships could
raid British ships moving into the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic that
it warned that Britain would go to war if the Panther was not removed.
The Germans began to back down. They made it clear that they did not
desire war with Britain or with anyone else. The Panther gunboat turned
out to be their undiplomatic response to the French breaching the
international agreement at Algeciras that Morocco should be a free-trade
area. Taking advantage of internal unrest there, the French were moving to
annex the colony. Germany thought her commercial interests were being

640
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ignored by the French. The Panther was her way of asserting her right to
interfere in Morocco if she chose.
In September, as negotiations went on with Germany, Britain was
nevertheless believed to be so close to hostilities that soldiers were sent to
guard the south-eastern railway lines. There was considerable anxiety
about the strength of the French army, as its manpower was only three-
quarters of the Germans.:The once dim shape of conflict was becoming
clearer. In November the Agadir crisis was over. The Germans had been
given some more territory, 100,000 square miles in the Congo, so that the
Panther could be withdrawn. But by 1912 the British military establish-
ment had’ become immovably pessimistic about Germany’s future
intentions. Haldane, who had pushed Britain into a state of greater military
preparedness with a General Staff and the British Expeditionary Force, had
in 1911 insisted on a War Book being drawn up. This was a plan for each
government department setting out the procedures they should follow in
the event of war. Another attempt at ending the naval race between Britain
and Germany by a reduction in ships had foundered. The proposed
German limitations were not large enough, and they were dependent on
Britain ending her Entente with France and Russia and making an alliance
with Germany only. To that Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, could
not agree.
After Grey had turned down the German offer, the German naval
estimates for 1912 were larger than ever. Britain’s reaction was to remove,
very ostentatiously, the whole of her magnificent battle fleet from Toulon
and away from the Mediterranean. Henceforth the two navies of the Anglo-
French Entente were to divide the guarding of their respective waters
between them. The French were to be responsible for the Mediterranean,
while the British were to protect the Channel and North Sea.
The military links between the French and English governments became
soldered together. Unknown to most of the Cabinet except for the foreign
secretary and the prime minister Asquith, in 1912 France and England
began to share military secrets and to second staff to one another’s armies.
Morally speaking there was now an alliance in all but name: an attack
by Germany on France’s Channel ports or her northern and western coasts
must, in the French view, bring Britain into the war. But the British
government nevertheless refused to make it official. British public opinion
would not allow the countryto fight for France if France attacked
Germany first. Three-quarters of the Liberal Cabinet were pacifists who
would not countenance an alliance with France, and the government
continued to wish not to alarm Germany with an alliance she would
perceive as aimed at her. If it did come to war, the two Entente govern-
ments would meet to hammer out what would be their next move, whether

641
 WINDSOR

in fact they would act together. With this curious position the French had
to be content. But the actions of the Liberal government spoke louder than
words. Early in 1912, spurred by the Agadir crisis, Asquith set up the
Invasion Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, which met off
and on until 1914. Discussions on how to get troops to France began to
absorb government attention.
The Agadir episode had been seen by other countries as a sign that force
was rewarded, that aggression paid. During September 1911 when the
Admiralty was quarrelling with the army about war procedure (the
Admiralty wanted the army to stay offshore in boats while most of the
battles were fought at sea), Italy successfully invaded Tripoli in north
Africa. She had no difficulty in swiftly defeating its nominal overlord
Turkey, which was racked by the chaos of a new regime. Italy’s success
gave hope to all the unsatisfied Balkan countries for their own war against
Turkey.
Against this background of international lawlessness the peaceful fabric
of British life, which had successfully survived the upheavals of the
industrial revolution, frayed to breaking point. The trade unions, the
suffragettes, the Conservative and Ulster Unionists, all one way and
another were dissatisfied by too many or too few government reforms.
Despite the Parliament Bill, many of the more recent elements in politics -
the working classes, the trade unionists and the militant suffragettes — were
disappointed by the slow nature of the Parliamentary process. All broke
with traditional or legal methods of expressing themselves; anarchy
loomed.
During 1912-14 Britain was swept by a series of national strikes that
almost brought the country to her knees. Labour had lost 25 per cent of
their seats at the January 1910 election. From fifty-three MPs their numbers
went down to forty. It confirmed the blue-collar workers’ disillusionment
with Parliament as a way of addressing their concerns. The single-ballot
system was weighted against a third party, which made it hard for Labour
to get elected, and its supporters felt that they were not being represented in
numbers proportionate to the Labour party membership. This bitterness
was aggravated after 1909 when sixteen Labour MPs had to go without
salaries after the Osborne case had dried up the party’s funds. The Liberal-
supporting railwayman W. V. Osborne had successfully challenged his
trade union’s compulsory levy to the Labour party, the Law Lords ruling
that trade unions could no longer provide for Parliamentary representation
by a compulsory levy. In rgrz the Liberals remedied this when they
instituted the payment of MPs, a Chartist demand since the 1840s.
But the damage was done. The optimism which the historic number of
Labour MPs in Parliament had created turned to anger when they

642
 I9IO-1914
appeared to make so little difference. Hardship remained widespread for
many industrial workers. Wages had remained the same from the
beginning of the century, even though prices and the cost of living had
risen. People wanted instant solutions, which the threat of stoppages
provided. Thanks to Labour pressure, laws relating to strike action had
recently been relaxed. As a result the country was rocked by them. To the
short-sighted they seemed an easier route to power than Parliament; some
trade unionists came under the influence of the French Trade Union or
Syndicalist movement which distrusted Parliamentary methods, preferring
the strike as a method of operation. The Syndicalists looked to a Utopian
future where trade unions would form the basic unit of society.
In 1910 the government reluctantly used troops against miners in the
Rhondda Valley in South Wales who had attacked a pithead to get more
pay. At first it sent only London policemen. The Liberals were disturbed by
the thought of using soldiers in industrial disputes, believing that the
owners were frequently as unreasonable as the men. But the use of troops
deepened the unions’ sense of grievance. During the summer of 1911, in
the midst of the Agadir crisis, another rash of strikes by the seamen’s,
firemen’s and dockers’ unions brought the Port of London to a standstill
until there were pay rises all round. It was followed by what was very
nearly a national railway strike to protest against the deaths of two rioting
dockers in Liverpool fired on by soldiers. The strike shut down most of the
industrial midlands for four days. So tense was the situation, and so great
was the fear of revolutionary action, that troops were brought into the
centre of London. In the blistering heat their tents crowded the dried-up
lawns of St James’s Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, which were
more usually thronged with prams. But Lloyd George was skilful in his
handling of the union. The new leader of the Parliamentary Labour party,
Ramsay MacDonald, joined the negotiations and the railway strike ended
with no recriminations and no job losses.
Permanent machinery was set up to sort out the railwaymen’s
grievances. The generally sympathetic treatment the unions received
helped ensure that, despite talks between the dockers, the miners and the
railwaymen about a general strike, in Britain strikes never became a
revolutionary instrument for social change. In 1912 after a new miners’
strike for a minimum wage, when the intransigence of the owners
prevented attempts to fix it mutually at local level, the Liberals passed a
minimum-wage bill. By 1913 there was still less room for discontent when
the government rescinded the Osborne judgement. The 1913 Trade Union
Act made it legal for trade union levies to be spent on politics as long as
members were canvassed for their views. Any member of a different
political persuasion could decline to contribute.

643
 WINDSOR

The strikes petered out, but London was now subjected to an arson
campaign. This was conducted by a militant branch of the suffragette
movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, founded in
r903 when the Independent Labour party failed to include women’s
suffrage in their programme. It was run by the charismatic Mrs Emmeline
Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel; Christabel had been
prevented from reading for the bar, despite her law degree, because she was

r in Hyde Park, 23 July roro. It was not until 1918 that women
y could vote neParliamentary elections. In 1928, the voting age for
yen became twenty-one, on a par with men.

The 1907 Qualification of Women Act allowed women, married or

i illors, aldermen or mayors and to sit on county and
it the Parliamentary vote continued to be denied them.
marched for the vote, but nothing was done. Mrs
hters and other suffragettes were imprisoned several
public disorder when they heckled Liberal election rallies.
t franchise reform failed, the first because the Liberal
government would not introduce a bill to enfranchise single women with
s that would mean increasing the vote of the traditionally
. In frustration the Pankhursts decided to abandon

Letterboxes, a school, a railway station were set on fire. The British

i ked, as was the orchid house at Kew. The suffragettes

644
 I9IO-1914

even went for the Tower of London. Across England members of the
society, who numbered around 40,000 women, hoisted up the long skirts
that continued to be de rigueur in the early twentieth century and stole out
after dark to cut telephone wires. They even tied themselves to the railings
of ro Downing Street. Soon several hundred suffragettes were locked up in
Holloway Women’s Prison. Moreover, once the suffragettes were incarcer-
ated they went on hunger strike. As some began to die, the anxious prison
authorities turned to force feeding. But there were fears about its legality.
In desperation the home secretary Reginald McKenna introduced the so-
called Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed hunger strikers to be released
and to be rearrested without further proceedings once they had recovered
at home. One of the Pankhurst suffragettes, the forty-one-year-old Emily
Davison, threw herself under George V’s horse at the 1913 Derby and died
from her injuries. The WSPU’s extremism alienated many more moderate
campaigners for women’s suffrage like the veteran campaigner Emily
Davies, one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge. When
Christabel Pankhurst escaped to Paris after a warrant was issued for her
arrest, much of the agitation died down.
Within Britain there was a growing sense of despondency. The
confidence which had been so manifest in 1906 was ebbing away, chased
by vague but prevalent fears about a coming conflagration. The sinking of
the Titanic in 1912 by an iceberg underlined the frailty even of modern
man and his engineering. Even more haunting to the pre-1914 imagination
was the fate of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Nature was
not tamed as easily as the twentieth century thought.
At Christmas 1912 Captain Robert Scott and four others including
Captain Lawrence Oates reached the South Pole, only to discover that the
Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. When the frostbite on
Oates’s feet began to endanger the expedition’s progress, Oates sacrificed
himself for his friends by walking out of his tent into the blizzard. ‘I am just
going outside and may be some time,’ he said. His body was never found,
but his words became revered for their very British understatement.
Captain Scott and the rest of the expedition failed to reach the food depot
they were seeking. When an Antarctic search party at last reached them in
November 1913 it was to find them dead in their tents several miles away.
Beside Scott’s body was the journal in which he detailed Oates’s heroic
end.
Even the Asquith government, which had taken power as the essence of
probity and high-mindedness, was rocked by financial scandal. The
telegraph signal company Marconi was awarded the contract to provide a
radio service throughout the empire under the aegis of the Post Office. But
in 1912 it was alleged that both the postmaster-general Herbert Samuel

645
 WINDSOR

and the attorney-general Sir Rufus Isaacs held shares in the company and
had not declared their interest. Both parties were cleared of insider dealing,
Samuel outright and Isaacs because he had only bought shares from the
American branch of the company after Marconi had won the contract.
However, the secretary of the American company turned out to be Isaacs’
brother. The suspicion that Rufus Isaacs had used his influence to secure
the contract for Marconi would not go away. There was a feeling that
something underhand had been going on, even if it could not quite be
pinned down. The affair left a cloud over the Liberals.
Above all, Asquith was unable to control the situation in Ireland. Since
1912 when preparations for the Third Home Rule Bill began, Sir Edward
Carson, the formidable solicitor-general in the last Conservative govern-
ment, and the MP James Craig had assembled a private Protestant army
named the Ulster Volunteers to resist Home Rule in Ulster. Now that the
automatic Unionist majority in the Lords could no longer prevent Home
Rule, they would put their trust in force. Andrew Bonar Law, the
inexperienced leader of the Conservatives and Unionists who succeeded
Balfour, encouraged this lawless behaviour. In a series of astonishing
speeches, he pledged the Conservatives to defend Ulster physically against
the British government if it tried to enforce Home Rule. He even went to
Ireland to take the salute of the Ulster Unionist troops as they paraded.
On 28 September 1912 the whole of Belfast closed down to sign the
Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule. The hooting sirens of
the shipyards and the machines of the factories stopped as nearly 500,000
people lined up to sign the pledge by which they refused to recognize the
authority of any Home Rule Parliament. Most of Ulster seemed to be
armed. Many of the men signed the pledge in their own blood.
But, although half of Ulster, the Protestants, was against Home Rule, the
other half was Catholic and in favour of it. Moreover the head of the Irish
Nationalist MPs, John Redmond, could not give up Ulster and Irish unity.
By going for Home Rule instead of independence, Redmond had already
sacrificed much. For the past few years his leadership had been challenged
by Sinn Fein, the total-independence movement in Ireland, which had
become notably popular in southern Ireland among blue-collar workers
politicized during a series of strikes in 1912 and 1913. In Dublin an army
of strikers called the Irish Volunteers had grown up under two leaders,
James Connolly and James Larkin, who had none of Redmond’s scruples
about violence. The Irish Volunteers started drilling like the Ulster
Volunteers. By 1914 they were 100,000 strong, and a third of them were
in the north.
As the situation in northern and southern Ireland became more
intemperate, with both sides plotting to import arms, the Home Rule Bill

646
 1910-1914

was passed twice by the House of Commons and thrown out twice by the
House of Lords. But, by the autumn of 1913 as Home Rule came closer to
implementation, the government was becoming increasingly uneasy at the
idea of imposing Home Rule on Ulster. Perhaps it would be impossible to
coerce Ulster; in any case it was very unLiberal to coerce anyone.
Under George V’s aegis, discussions were opened between all parties at
Balmoral to discuss the possibility of excluding Ulster. Redmond
reluctantly agreed to partition, angering many of the Sinn Feiners and
further weakening his position with the Irish Volunteers. The question
was, where should the exclusion line run? The talks continued throughout
the winter-of 1913-14, while the two illegal armies of southern and
northern Irish drilled regardless.
The apparent favouring of the Unionist side was epitomized by the
government turning a blind eye to what was called the Larne gun-running
in April 1914 when the Ulstermen landed 30,000 rifles and a million
rounds of ammunition. The police and coastguards made no real attempt
to stop the operation. But in July that year, when the Irish Volunteers
landed guns at Howth near Dublin, troops were called out to stop them.
Protesters threw things at troops in Dublin, provoking the soldiers to fire
into the crowds, killing three and wounding forty more. This more than
ever aggravated relations between Dublin and Westminster, and between
Redmond and the Irish Volunteers.
Meanwhile the very loyalty of the army in Ireland had been called into
question. The commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, Sir Arthur Paget,
who had strong Unionist sympathies, had chosen to ignore the tradition
that the British army was apolitical and that its first duty was to obey the
civilian government. In an episode known as the Curragh ‘mutiny’ after the
area where the army was based, in March 1914 Paget told officers that he
could not order those who disapproved of Home Rule, especially if their
homes were in the north, to impose it on Ulster. He recommended that
those who did not wish to coerce Ulster should resign from the army. No
fewer than fifty officers out of seventy said they would resign if ordered
north.
The secretary for war who had encouraged Paget’s extraordinary
dereliction of duty was sacked after this became public. Nevertheless the
officers concerned could not be court-martialled, as there was an
increasing anxiety at top government levels that some kind of war was not
far off. The atmosphere in Europe in late May 1914 to an American
observer Colonel House was ‘militarism run stark mad’. The French had
vastly added to their conscripts. There were constant rumours that the
German army was the real force behind its country’s foreign policy, that it
had insisted on a war tax and had called in all foreign loans.

647
 WINDSOR

May and June passed. In May it seemed that a way out of the Irish
impasse had been found. It was a typical piece of Lloyd George cunning:
there would be an amendment to the Home Rule Bill that any county, if a
majority of its voters agreed, could vote itself out of Home Rule for six
years. The Nationalists concurred, but the House of Lords insisted on
changing the amendment: the whole of Ulster must be excluded from
Home Rule without a time limit. However, when the altered bill returned
to the Commons on 14 July, the government’s attention was shifting away
from the passions of Ireland to the wider world.
For on 28 June the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the archduke
Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo.
Austria-Hungary had long been wanting to crush the Serbs. With her
military establishment hot to strike, she was using the excuse to reach the
brink of war. The question was, would she drag all the other allied nations
of Europe in with her? Anxious telegrams flew between the chancelleries
of Europe.
While the world once more held its breath, discussions on the Irish Home
Rule Bill pressed on. The bill could not be accepted by the Commons in its
amended state, but there had to be a resolution to the crisis. So
uncompromising was the atmosphere that at Asquith’s instigation on 18
July another round-table conference was called at Buckingham Palace.
Redmond and the Nationalists accepted the exclusion of Ulster, and the
Unionists agreed to Home Rule for the rest of Ireland. But the conference
broke down over the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. With their equally
mixed Catholic and Protestant populations, should they be part of northern
or southern Ireland? The drilling continued in both parts of the country.
Though there was as yet no civil war, the threat remained. However, the
whole matter was overtaken by events in the outside world. The conference
broke up without conclusion, to reconvene in the autumn. Just as its
members were rising from their seats, the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey
came in, carrying the ultimatum which Austria-Hungary had sent to Serbia
on 24 July. Although Serbia replied in the most abject manner, Austria—
Hungary broke off relations and began to bombard her capital, Belgrade. It
was the beginning of the First World War.
In September 1914, when Parliament returned after Britain had declared
war in August, the position of the Irish Home Rule Bill was still fraught
with confusion. The bill was meant to become law, as was a bill
disestablishing the Welsh Church, because they had both successfully
passed three times through the House of Commons. Although no agree-
ment over Ulster had been reached, Asquith at first announced that the
exclusion of Ulster should be added to the bill. When the Irish Home
Rulers, whose seats the Liberals continued to rely on for their majority,

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refused to countenance this, Asquith said that the bill would have to go on
to the statute book in its original form. At this the Unionists left the House
of Commons in protest. Irish Home Rule and the disestablishment of the
Welsh Church went on to the statute book, but with another act tacked on
to them suspending both bills from coming into operation until six months
after the end of the war. The issue was thus shelved.
But now we must return-to the outbreak of the First World War, or the
Great War as it was originally known - or, as the Fabian writer H. G. Wells
and its more hopeful participants called it, the War that Will End War.
Before 1914 the peace in Europe had been fragile, but it had held, partly
because a’ great deal was done to placate Germany, partly because
Germany herself refrained from hostilities. She had made herself extremely
unpopular with France and Britain by continually threatening war, but she
had not actually brought it about.
Despite Britain’s distrust of German intentions, she continued until 1913
to try to convince Germany of her friendliness. That year another attempt
had been made at calming down the atmosphere by offering a twelve-
month ‘naval holiday’ between the two countries, but that was turned
down. By 1914 Lloyd George had made the speech warning off the
Panther, and three-quarters of the government had reverted to their old
radical pacifist colours. They believed that the best hope of peace was for
Britain to reduce the number of ships built.
Agreements were reached in Germany’s favour about longstanding
disputes over colonies in Africa, the Baghdad railway and the Persian Gulf.
Despite the close relationship between the French and British military,
Britain still would not enter into an official alliance with France and Russia
because Grey did not want to inflame the situation with Germany. This
would later be criticized on the ground that, if Britain had shown she
intended to fight for France, Germany would never have gone to war.
However, in 1913 there was a tremendous upset in the Balkans which
completely altered the power structure there in Russia’s favour. When
under Russian auspices the Balkan League Wars reduced European Turkey
to a tiny corner thirty miles wide, and made Russia’s influence paramount
at Constantinople, some kind of war over the Balkans looked unavoidable.
Kept out of central Asia and the Persian Gulf by the Entente with Britain,
and out of China after her defeat by Japan in 1904, Russia had been forced
back on her old stamping ground, the Balkans. She was the Slav
nationalities’ traditional champion. She decided to concentrate once more
on her old objective of being the favoured power at Constantinople and
controlling the Dardanelles, that vital conduit between her ships and ports
on the Black Sea and the Aegean—Mediterranean.
But this threatened both the ambitions of Germany to expand into the

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Middle East, because it put in doubt the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway which

was projected to run straight through Constantinople, and the very
existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What made war in the near
future imperative for that empire was the imminent threat to her from
Serbia. In 1908 the Serbs had been prevented from attacking Austria—
Hungary by Russia’s weakness and Germany’s strength. They had sulkily
obeyed German diplomats’ warning to put an end to the Serbian
propaganda in government-sponsored newspapers and disarmed their
gathering troops. But after Serbia’s victories in 1913, which had doubled
her size, all the Serb areas of the Habsburg Empire were in a fever of
nationalist excitement.
It was quite evident to Austria that Serbia was no longer to be restrained
by what the great powers wanted. From 1913 on, Serbian irredentism or
expansionism expressed in endless newspaper articles was demanding a
war to gather to the Serbian motherland the six million Serbs spread
throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover Serbia had not only
doubled in size but she had shown that her soldiers could defeat the
German-trained Turkish troops, who were supposed to be the best in the
Balkans. There was a real danger that in a war with the empire Serbia
might win. The situation seemed so menacing that scarcely had the Balkan
War peace treaties been signed than Austria-Hungary had decided that the
moment had come to attack Serbia. Backed by Italy, Germany managed to
restrain Austria-Hungary. The war never took place because Germany
was the one ally Austria-Hungary could not move without. So, despite all
the fears that Europe had about Germany, it was Germany which
prevented war in 1913.
Just the same, the threat of an impending clash in the Balkans remained.
Strategists in the armies of three great powers, Russia, Austria-Hungary
and Germany, believed that a war for influence would come at some point.
Thus when in July 1914 two Bosnian Serbs assassinated the heir to the
Austro—Hungarian Empire, the archduke Ferdinand, it both seemed to be
the signal that the Serbs were about to attack the empire and the perfect
excuse for Austria-Hungary to fight a limited war to scotch ‘the nest of
vipers’ — as her generals called Serbia. This time, in 1914, Germany did
little to hold her back.
It was an alarming situation and desperate remedies seemed called for.
Given her paranoid fears Germany could not afford to let her only ally be
broken up by Serb nationalists. Many of the top generals in both the
Austro-Hungarian and the German armies viewed some kind of limited
preventive war in the Balkans as a solution to their difficulties, while they
had the military advantage in armaments and personnel. The general
European balance would be tilted against Germany and Austria-Hungary

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within a few years. But, for now, the army of Serbia’s chief ally, Russia,
was still in the throes of modernization. A group of General Staff officers
within the German army did much to convince their government that this
would be a good time for that limited war in order to assert German
influence in the Balkans. The kaiser told the emperor Franz Joseph that
Austria—Hungary had his support.
But the idea of a limited war was a chimera. Serbia’s ally Russia had too
much at stake not to begin her laborious process of mobilization. That
decision inevitably dragged France into the war. When Russia would not
cancel the orders for mobilization, Germany declared war on Russia on 1
August and on France on the 2nd. War plans drawn up in 1905 took
precedence over common sense: the German plan was predicated on
attacking France and defeating her within six weeks, then turning east to
dispose of Russia.
After the worldwide slaughter that ensued, for the war was anything but
local, some members of the pre-war German government claimed they had
hoped Britain would restrain Russia from mobilizing. The British
ambassador had in fact pleaded with Russia not to do so. But the complex
system of alliances had a series of automatic consequences. As one writer
put it, ‘the guns went off by themselves’.
For Britain, declaring war was less simple. She was legally bound by
treaty to defend Belgium, whose existence she had guaranteed at her birth
in 1839 and reaffirmed in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. The
Anglo-French naval arrangements which had the British guarding the
Channel for both countries surely made war with Germany inevitable. But,
until German troops actually advanced into Belgium, Grey was doubtful
that his Cabinet and British public opinion would agree to war. The most
he could tell the French ambassador was that the German fleet would not
be allowed into the Channel. The army and navy nevertheless sent out their
secret code and signal books to the French, albeit with an embargo on their
use.
The pacifist element in Cabinet remained so powerful that when
Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, insisted on calling out the fleet
reserves, eight or nine ministers said it was unnecessary. Fortunately for
Britain the maverick and impulsive genius Churchill had decided earlier in
the week that the international situation looked so alarming that he should
quietly send the portion of the fleet not needed to guard the Channel to
hide at its ‘war station’ up above Britain in the secret harbour of the
Orkneys, Scapa Flow. The main fleet was thus out of the way of surprise
attack by German torpedoes.
Meanwhile there was no certainty about how the Belgians would
respond if asked to allow German troops to pass through their country to
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France. Many in the Cabinet thought Belgium might not resist. There was
even a suspicion that there was a secret agreement between Belgium and
Germany to allow the German armies free passage into France. Thanks to
the atrocities in the Congo, Belgium’s stock was not high; a secret agree-
ment would explain why there was such a high level of German military
preparations all along the Belgo-German border. Nevertheless, after much
argument, a majority of the Cabinet finally agreed that violation of Belgian
neutrality would bring Britain into the war.
By evening that Sunday, 2 August, war for Britain suddenly seemed very
near. It was then that a twelve-hour ultimatum was handed to the Belgian
government by the Germans requesting that their armies be allowed to pass
through its territories into north-eastern France. But the new Belgian king
Albert I was of a very different calibre to his uncle Leopold II. On Monday,
3 August the Belgians, led by their king, refused to allow the German
armies in. They would fight. King Albert sent a telegram to George V
personally appealing for help.
That afternoon Grey made an eloquent speech to the House of
Commons which both explained Britain’s legal obligations to Belgium and
argued the case for intervention, for only Parliament could decide whether
Britain went to war. He described the Channel guarantee to France, and
requested all present to ask themselves what friendship or Entente meant
when that friend was threatened by a foe like Germany. He did not believe
that, even if Britain stood aside, she would be in a position after the war to
undo what had happened in the course of it, to prevent the whole of
western Europe falling under the domination of a single power. And he
added, ‘I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have
lost us all respect.’
In the House of Commons Bonar Law and the Conservatives gave their
support. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, also pledged
his MPs to Grey. Support for war became unanimous, other than among
Labour MPs, many of whom remained true to their pacifist roots. Grey
had not argued the case for intervention in a spirit of enthusiasm. He
believed that this war could lead to the destruction of civilization. ‘The
lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our
lifetime,’ he said that evening as he stood by the window of the Foreign
Office.
The next day the order was given to mobilize the reserves. Britain still
had not declared war. A twelve-hour ultimatum was given to Germany,
which had invaded Belgium that morning. If Germany did not withdraw
from Belgium and respect her neutrality, she would be at war with Great
Britain. On the very hot night of 4 August at 11 p.m. Greenwich Mean
Time, twelve o’clock in Berlin, the British ultimatum ran out. Outside the

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Houses of Parliament a crowd had gathered; just before eleven it began to

sing ‘God Save the King’. As Big Ben tolled, the deadline expired without
a single German soldier moving out of Belgium. Soon afterwards and all
through the night, messages flashed halfway across the world in code
telling the British Empire that it was at war with Germany.
As day broke on 5 August, thanks to Haldane the six divisions of the
British Expeditionary Force under its commander-in-chief John French
were ready to land in France. Fourteen territorial divisions were deputed
to guard the British Isles. The immediate problem, however, was to get the
six regular divisions across the Channel. This took from 9 to 22 August.
For three days, when the crossing was at its height, the fleet stood guard.
The operation was extremely tense, owing to fears that the troopships
would be torpedoed by the Germans, but nothing happened. The Grand
Fleet sailed back unscathed to its hideaway position above Britain at Scapa
Flow. By the 24th British troops were in the middle of France and had
begun fighting the Germans.
Lord Kitchener, the new secretary of state for war, warned against
optimism. Unlike other British generals, he said that the struggle would not
be over in a few weeks but might take several years. In his view the war
could be won only by battles fought on land, not by seapower. A huge
recruiting drive would be immediately necessary to supplement the army
by half a million male volunteers. It was a mark of Liberal Britain that even
in these desperate times it was believed the population would not stand for
conscription.
At the outbreak of the First World War Britain faced major problems.
Unlike those of the central powers, as Austria-Hungary and Germany
became known, her economy was not geared for war. For this was a war
that she had been conspicuously reluctant to wage and had done almost
everything to avoid. Even if she recruited enough men for ‘Kitchener’s
Army’ she did not have enough guns, nor enough factories to produce
guns, nor enough shells to arm them.
Today we can see that commercial and colonial rivalries created
impossible stresses between the great powers and were among the most
important underlying causes of the First World War. On the other hand,
to those alive at the time the most striking feature about the pre-war world
was the sense of menace which emanated from united Germany and her
militaristic culture. Even though Austria had begun the war, Germany was
assumed to be responsible. The consensus in most British households was
that Germany had been wanting a war, and with the First World War she
got it.

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The First World War (1914-1918)

The British professional army, the highly trained 150,o00-strong British
Expeditionary Force (BEF), went straight to France, but the immense
portion of the earth covered by the British Empire meant that British
military operations took place all over the globe. Two million soldiers from
the empire were occupied in what were called sideshows separate from the
main action — British armies fought to take over the German colonies in
Africa, and troops were poured into the Middle Eastern section of the
Ottoman Empire, to protect the Suez Canal and India after Turkey had
declared war on the side of the central powers in October 1914.
When the war finally ended, after four years of immense suffering,
France and Britain divided between them much of the old Ottoman Empire
which their armies were occupying. The British Empire was larger than
ever, for Britain added Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq in 1921, and Palestine
to her realms in an unofficial form of imperialism, what one historian has
called the ‘scramble for Turkey’. Britain for thirty years became an
influential power in the Middle East. But it was an illusion. The expense of
the First World War ruined British global hegemony, along with that of
France, and made way for America’s emergence as a superpower. The post-
war settlement was really France’s and Britain’s last hurrah as the great
imperial powers they had been for the previous 200 years. Despite Britain’s
celebrated naval superiority, which cast a cordon round Germany and
began to starve her to death, despite the courage of the immense French
armies, what finally tipped the balance and won the First World War was
not those nations, but the industrial might and money of America.
The first few months of the First World War determined the shape of
what became known as the western front, the location of a three-and-a-
half-year campaign by British, French and British Empire troops to keep
the Germans from overrunning France. As we have seen, the German
military strategy, the Schlieffen Plan, was predicated on France being
conquered in six weeks, before the old-fashioned Russian war machine had
been completely mobilized. However, the plan, which was intended to
prevent the German armies fighting a war on two fronts, was not fulfilled.
In August 1914 the immense fortresses guarding Belgium’s frontier had
been as much use as toy forts in stopping the German war machine. Over
a million German soldiers swept through Belgium and swarmed over
north-eastern France. But their progress was considerably held up at the
Battle of Mons on 23 August by the BEF, which the Kaiser had called a
‘contemptible little army’. And though by early September, to the horror
of the inhabitants of Paris (many of whom remembered the 1870-1 Siege
of Paris), the German armies were within forty miles of the French capital,
the war in France was not the lightning strike and rolling up of the French

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and British armies that the Schlieffen Plan envisaged. The British and
French troops were far more of a match than had been anticipated by the
Germans. Moreover the number of German soldiers in France had been
weakened by the need to send troops to what became known as the eastern
front to deal with the Russians.
The Russians had invaded East Prussia before they were quite ready to
do so as a diversionary tactic to help France. As a result, at one of the
decisive battles of the war, the Battle of the Marne between 6 and 12
September 1914, the German armies’ encircling manoeuvre to pen in the
French army was defeated. When the German troops were attacked in the
rear by the French chief of staff General Joffre with the BEF, the roll-up of
the French armies around Paris had to be abandoned because General von
Kluck was forced to retreat. The victory of the Marne wrecked the
Schlieffen Plan right at the outset. Until 1917, when the Russian
Revolution broke out and Lenin’s new government sued for peace,
Germany had to fight on two fronts, which was what she had been
determined to avoid. She was never able to turn her back on France and
concentrate on Russia.
Furthermore, a key ingredient of the original Schlieffen Plan had been
abandoned — striking at France through Holland as well as through
Belgium — which shortened the defensive line. An attack through Holland
would probably have outflanked Belgian resistance and so have prevented
the British from establishing defensive positions from Ypres to the coast,
which secured the Channel ports for them. As it was, the German armies
were pushed back to the Aisne river, and had to race the allied armies to
the North Sea. Had the Germans arrived first this could have had a doubly
disastrous effect: the British would have had to take some of their troops
out of France to provide a Home Guard, and it would have prevented their
landing further British troops in France to reinforce the allied armies. The
first Battle of Ypres in Flanders, Belgium from 19 October to 11 November
1914 prevented this, at the cost of literally decimating, that is killing one
in ten soldiers of the BEF, the young men so carefully groomed for warfare
for the previous seven years.
What remained of both armies settled down to sit out the winter in
trenches opposite one another. There they would remain in growing
numbers for the next three and a half years. By the end of the war German
and English soldiers had begun playing football with one another at
Christmas, so surreal had the situation become. The trenches — the form of
warfare which most characterized the First World War — were a visible
stalemate. The two sides, the allies and the central powers, opposed each
other in two continuous lines of soldiers sheltered in deep ditch dugouts.
These trenches ran from the coast of Belgium, dipped south into industrial

656
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northern France and skimmed the French border with Alsace and Lorraine
until they reached the frontier of Switzerland.
In December 1914 the war became real to the people of Scarborough,
Whitby and Hartlepool, when they were bombarded by German warships.
It was the first enemy assault on British civilians since Charles II’s reign,
when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway. By Christmas one million men
of all shapes and beliefs had volunteered for the British army to defend
their homeland. They were inspired by Lord Kitchener’s recruiting
campaign, not least the famous poster of Kitchener pointing his finger at
the observer with the legend beneath, ‘Your country needs YOU’.
By 1916; when conscription was brought in, as many as two and a half
million Britons had volunteered to fight. After a short training in how to
handle a gun they crossed the Channel to reinforce the trenches — often
organized in neighbourhood battalions. For the first time ever Britain put
an enormous land army into the field to prevent the Germans overrunning
France. The Kitchener armies were indispensable. By the end of t915 the
old professional army, 150,000 soldiers, had been wiped out.
Over the next three years more than a million French, British and empire
troops died in the trenches, often for just a few feet of land. Keeping the
line steady took a terrible toll in lives. The only way the French and British
could move forward and drive the Germans out, or the Germans move
forward into France, was by colossal artillery barrages to clear the enemy.
Then the infantry would leap out of their trenches and charge ‘over the
top’. The line never moved more than about twenty miles east or west, and
it never really broke until 1917. It merely bulged until other men were
rushed in to close the gaps.
The flower of the rising generation died and were hastily buried in the
earth of Flanders. Those battlefields, or slaughterfields, destroyed many of
the best and bravest who had volunteered early, unhappily for Britain in
the 1920s and 1930s. The number of junior officers killed — that is, the
ablest young soldiers — was especially high because so much of the action
required leading from the front to take out machine-gun nests.
On the eastern front, on the other side of Europe, things did not look
more promising despite the enormous numbers of Russian troops and their
proverbial stoicism. The gallantry of the Russian attack on East Prussia
helped save Paris and the allies, but during battles at Tannenberg at the end
of August 1914, and then in early September by the Masurian Lakes,
250,000 Russians were killed. The strategy of two brilliant German
officers, Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, produced a triumph
for their armies. Though the Russians overran the Austrian province of
Galicia, by the summer of 1915 the Germans had thrown them back to the
Duna river.

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The Ottoman Empire had entered the war in the hope of retrieving Egypt
and Cyprus from Britain. It thus posed a threat to the Suez Canal, and an
additional 250,000 empire troops had to be sent to guard it. British and
French troops began attacking the Turks all over their Middle Eastern
empire. Indian troops provided the bulk of the soldiers for the campaign in
Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) which began in 1915, though they were forced
to surrender in 1916 after being besieged at Kut-el-amara on the Tigris.
In May rors Italy declared for the allies, after weighing up what she
would get out of the war and having already had her differences with the
Ottoman Empire when she seized Tripoli. She had always had close links
with England and she intended after the war to consolidate her
Risorgimento by taking more territory from Austria. In the secret Treaty
of London of 26 April the allies had assured Italy that she would gain the
southern Tyrol, the Trentino, Istria and the Dalmatian coast. Bulgaria,
which might have joined the allies, came in on the German side and
successfully invaded Serbia in October.
Nineteen-fifteen was not a good year for the allies. Britain, which was so
entirely dependent on her colonies for food, began to have her shipping
sunk by German torpedoes and submarines. Submarine warfare was a
naval innovation in whose development Germany had taken the lead. The
first Zeppelins, pneumatic grey airships in the sky, appeared over London
in May and thereafter became one of the features of the war, attacking
many British cities. A mass onslaught was carried out by fourteen German
airships from the Humber to the Thames in September 1916.
There were also raids by aircraft. The first British plane had flown in
1908 and the Frenchman Louis Blériot crossed the Channel in 1909.
Although it was not until the next war that the Royal Air Force was to
come into its own, by 1912 its predecessor — the Royal Flying Corps — had
been established, and by 1914 around 120 aircraft, divided between the
army and navy, were being used for reconnaissance. In April 1918 in
response to the air-raids the Royal Air Force came into existence as a
separate service.
Meanwhile the British public, already appalled at losing their sons,
husbands and brothers in such numbers, were scandalized when
commander-in-chief of the BEF, General Sir John French, announced that
his men were dying for lack of shells. This was so whipped up by the press
that it came to be widely believed that it was government inefficiency that
was losing the war, and the Liberal administration was forced to enter a
coalition in May 1915 with the Conservatives and some Labour MPs. But
with the coalition’s appointment of Lloyd George as minister of munitions
the production of shells increased dramatically. The energy and ingenuity
of the Welsh Wizard made him the dominant figure in the government, and

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he soon began running the war effort more or less single-handed. In a coup
effected with the help of the Conservatives he would replace Asquith as
prime minister at the end of the following year.
Lloyd George’s rule of thumb, as he candidly revealed, was that all
generals underestimated their soldiers’ needs and never ordered enough
shells: one should take what the generals ordered and multiply it by three.
Thanks to enterprising manufacturers, many of whom were friends of
Lloyd George, munitions factories were set up all over the country. Though
unionized labour was inadequate for the numbers of shells required,
unions were reluctant to allow dilution — that is, to have unskilled workers
brought ins But Lloyd George made a deal with the unions: for the length
of the war they would accept women and unskilled workers, provided that
the position returned to normal at the end of the war. He also promised to
restrict profits while the war was on and union rights were temporarily in
abeyance; and the unions were to participate in deciding how their
industries were run via workers’ committees. The trade unions thus vastly
increased their role, and doubled their membership, during the war. These
arrangements — what Lloyd George called ‘the great charter for labour’ —
were a stroke of genius. He had reassured factory workers, and the
resulting enthusiasm for the war and for the government had the effect of
increasing productivity. The charter lessened the danger from strikes,
which might have bought about Britain’s defeat — for the pre-war influence
of syndicalism continued, even if it was temporarily overcome by
patriotism.
But, despite the increased number of shells less than a year after Ypres
the Battle of Loos between 25 September and 13 October 1915 killed
50,000 British soldiers. Britain was stunned. The nation was not used to
deaths on this scale. The Germans began nerve-gas warfare using mustard
gas. Gas masks became a feature of the war, something else to load down
the poor Tommy, as the British soldier was nicknamed. Its victims
frequently had to be sent home and often became lifelong invalids racked
by uncontrollable nerve-storms.
The worst setback of 1915 was the Dardanelles catastrophe. The static
nature of the western front and the troubles besetting Russia’s armies, which
were running low in munitions and food in the early part of the year,
prompted Churchill and Lloyd George to conclude that another front should
be opened somewhere to break the deadlock in the west. Lloyd George had
hopes of a Balkan front based on Salonika to strike north against Austria—
Hungary, but it was Churchill’s proposal to land in the Dardanelles on the
Gallipoli Peninsula that was taken up. The expeditionary force should seize
Constantinople, remove the Ottoman Empire from the war and from there
run supply lines to Russia through the Black Sea.

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But this ingenious attempt to break away from the stalemate of the
western front was poorly executed. Mines prevented British and French
warships forcing the Dardanelles, and it was decided that only by landing
troops could the peninsula be taken. That operation became the province
of the British army. The naval attack which could have backed up the
assault was, astonishingly enough, called off - as the entire operation
should have been. Since it was quite obvious to the Turks what was about
to happen, they moved their guns forward on to the cliffs above the allied
soldiers. The 75,000-strong force, many of whom were Australian and
New Zealanders, the Anzacs, were landed at the far end of the Gallipoli
Peninsula. There they stayed, unable to advance because of the Turkish
gun emplacements above them. For seven months, from 25 April (later
designated Anzac Day) until December, when they were at last evacuated,
the soldiers were stuck at Gallipoli. Many of them never managed to get
off the beach, dying there as the Turkish guns picked them off like flies.
The blame for their ordeal fell on Churchill, who fell from office.
The argument was to continue throughout the war between westerners
— who believed that the main war effort should be concentrated on the
western front, where the war would be won after a long siege — and the
easterners — who believed that the western front was taking an intolerable
toll on lives with very little to show for it. The catastrophe of Gallipoli gave
a great fillip to the western-fronters.
The western front remained the chief arena of the world war, to which
troops from the other theatres of war, the sideshows like the Middle East,
would often be seconded when major force was needed. Nevertheless,
throughout the war what Lloyd George called knocking away Germany’s
props — her allies Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria-Hungary — continued to be
almost as important a strategy. Although Lloyd George became dis-
enchanted with Salonika, in Macedonia, as a base for the allied armies
attacking Austria-Hungary on her weakest frontier from the south, he was
a keen supporter of an Italian front which thrust at Austria-Hungary from
the north. It would be the knocking away of the props that finally forced
the German high command to accept that the central powers had lost.
But if the non-western-fronters were unpopular and Churchill’s
reputation was under a cloud, Lloyd George’s inventive spirit continued to
transform the war effort. The government became a major employer. By
the end of the war the Munitions Ministry was employing three million
people in the new factories. A superb state-run war economy was pouring
out sO many munitions that Britain could provide shells for her allies as
well as for her own troops.
After Kitchener was drowned on the way to Russia in early June 1916,
Lloyd George took his place as secretary for war. It was a low moment.

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Kitchener’s death had deeply affected British morale, and there continued
to be fears about Irish stability after the failure of the Easter Rising, a
republican attempt to seize power in Dublin. Ireland, always Britain’s
Achilles’ heel, had decided to make the most of her neighbour’s travails.
The majority of the rebels, incluiding the Gaelic schoolteacher Padraic
Pearse who had founded the Irish Volunteers, were shot. One of them, a
mathematics teacher named Eamon De Valera, who went on to be the first
president of the Republic of Ireland, could not be executed because he had
an American passport. Sir Roger Casement, the former British consul who
had landed from a submarine with German arms and German money, was
tried at a’summary hearing and subsequently shot. The trial dismayed
many as not living up to the highest standards of British justice. On the
other hand, to side with Germany was treasonous when Britain was
involved in what continued to be a life-and-death struggle against the
central powers.
Nineteen-sixteen was also the year of the Somme. This battle, which
lasted from 1 July to 18 November, changed the British people’s attitude
to the war. Kitchener was not alive to see 20,000 of ‘his’ soldiers, who had
volunteered for the war, die together in their neighbourhood battalions on
the first day of the campaign. The new British commander-in-chief Sir
Douglas Haig believed that he could make Britain’s breakout against the
German trenches across the Somme river in north-eastern France. All the
powers had hoped to make 1916 the year that changed the war. The
Somme campaign was intended to distract the Germans’ attention from
their major offensive against the French at Verdun, which had begun in
February.
Verdun, south of the Ardennes, was one of the most important fortresses
protecting the French frontier. It had enormous historical and patriotic
resonance; the German commander General von Falkenhayn believed that
the French would throw everything into defending it. Attacking Verdun
would attract Frenchmen from all over the western front and the Germans
would then be able to bleed France to death. Germany now perceived
Britain, whose fleet was completing a blockade of German ports, as her
chief enemy. Although she had abandoned the idea of invading Britain, her
commanders believed that, if they could knock out France at Verdun,
Britain would have lost her ‘best sword’ on the continent.
The Somme offensive was a disaster — the breakout never happened. Yet
the offensive continued for five months, during which around 400,000
British soldiers died or were wounded. Haig did not seem to care how
many there were of them. Every day from 1 July thousands of men, many
of whom were inexperienced youths in their teens, were sent out of their
trenches without sufficient use of artillery beforehand. They were picked

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First World War, Ypres, 1917.

off by the Germans as they came. The losses were so great that the British
army decided to introduce the tank as a last-chance experiment in
September to flatten the German defences.
At the Somme the British wounded alone amounted to half a million.
The poppies sold before Remembrance Day were chosen as a symbol of the
dead because men were cut down as easily as the poppies which had first
covered the Flanders fields. So complete was the slaughter of the first day
of the Somme that there was no one left to dispose of the corpses. The
soldiers’ rotting bodies had to lie where they fell, often in no-man’s land,
the area between two armies — a reminder of what lay in store for those
sitting in the trenches tensely waiting for the order to go. The trenches were
often knee deep in water, giving rise to a disease named trench foot.
Day after day men dutifully went over the top as they were ordered, yet
their deaths seemed to make no perceptible difference. A feeling of futility
and anger set in against the generals who were so careless of their soldiers”
lives. It proved hard to shake off, even if by 1917 it was clear that the
Somme had succeeded in its objective of preventing the French war effort
from collapsing and had weakened the German line. The Germans were
forced to retreat to what was called the Hindenburg Line, a fortified zone
behind the western front designed to halt any allied breakthrough.
Nevertheless, to those who lived through the battle, it seemed that their
friends had lost their lives for something as paltry as a few more miles of
French land. The cost was too high. An anti-war feeling developed, in
which a substantial element was hostility to Haig.
To put extra vim into the war effort, in 1916 Lloyd George cut the

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nation’s public drinking hours. Pubs had to close at two o’clock in the
afternoon, which they continued to do until the end of the century. British
losses finally forced Lloyd George that year to bring in conscription. So
strong was the British tradition of anti-militarism that it was not until then,
two years into the war, that the authorities dared take this step, though
almost every other continental government assumed that it had a right to
call up its nation’s citizens for the army. Again unlike anywhere else in
Europe, once conscription had been introduced, against the wishes of the
Liberal party, conscientious objectors were allowed to go before special
tribunals and explain why they would not fight. Many of them drove
ambulances as a way of contributing to the war without killing people.
Conscription was part of a dawning realization that different rules applied
during total war, that there was no place for British individualism, that the
whole nation had to contribute to the war effort if Britain was going to
win. Until that point the British had been confident that the war would end
before such amove became necessary.
The superior quality of the Royal Navy, the best fleet in Europe since
Cromwell, unbeatable since Trafalgar, told for the most part. In most of
the battles around the globe between German and British fleets, Germany
generally came off worse. However, the first big-ship encounter between
the two fleets off Coronel in Chile in November 1914 was won by
Germany’s Pacific Squadron. This was the first British naval defeat for a
hundred years and, like the bombardment of the east coast of England,
greatly shocked public opinion. But the British got their revenge when
Germany’s Pacific Squadron was destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland
Islands a few weeks later.
The two High Seas Fleets whose naval race had contributed so signally
to pre-war tensions were kept out of the way until May 1916. Then, in
their only engagement, they fought the Battle of Jutland. Although it
confirmed British naval superiority in the North Sea this was really just a
skirmish. German ships caused greater losses among the British fleet than
they sustained themselves, but by the evening the German fleet was
hurrying back to the Baltic. It did not venture out into the North Sea again
for the rest of the war, but was kept pinned down by the threat of the
British ships awaiting them.
As we have noted, the First World War saw the first use of submarines,
on both sides. The Germans earned the condemnation of the world in the
spring of 1915 when they began to sink ships on sight without warning,
regardless of whether they were warships or unarmed vessels. The sinking
of the transatlantic liner the LusitaniainMay 1915 at the Old Head of
Kinsale off Cork, with the loss of 1,201 lives, some of whom were mothers
with babes in arms, created extraordinary revulsion. Many of the
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Lusitania’s passengers were Americans, and by chance some were friends

of President Woodrow Wilson. Alarmed by an official US protest, for
America was strictly neutral, Germany announced that henceforth she
would attack only warships.
America remained outside the war until April 1917 when she came in on
the allied side. It was just in time, for the eastern front collapsed when the
Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia that autumn. There were powerful
pro-German influences at work in America. As in the War of 1812, much
of American opinion continued to see Britain as the enemy. Moreover,
Britain’s blockade of Germany violated the principle of the freedom of the
seas, and Americans believed that it was typical of Britain’s imperialist
desire for world domination. They also objected to the British navy
searching neutral ships and seizing contraband. Nevertheless, as a sign of
the even-handed United States attitude to both sides, by the end of 1916
President Wilson was suggesting that he should broker a negotiated peace.
This angered the allied powers. They did not like being seen as the moral
equivalent of Germany: they too wished for a negotiated peace but one
based on victories over Germany. However, it was expedient to bring
America’s overwhelming financial and industrial weight into the war on
the allies’ side and to end the stalemate, so Wilson’s ideas could not be
treated brusquely. Discussions with the Americans about war aims had to
be couched in terms that would please the then strongly anti-imperialist
American people and their leaders in Congress. A doctrine of national self-
determination for small countries began to be evolved which had not been
the original purpose of the war at all.
The entry of America into the war on the allied side became more certain
at the beginning of 1917, up to which point she had continued trying to get
food to Germany via Scandinavian ports. The German high command was
now desperate to take Britain out of the war and believed that it could be
done by starving the British into submission. Unarmed civilian shipping
was no longer to be excluded from submarine warfare; instead on 1
February 1917 a campaign of ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ was begun
against any vessels visiting British ports. With a hundred U-boats operating
in British waters the German high command reckoned that Britain would
be forced to pull out of the war after five months. In the face of this threat
Lloyd George, who had become prime minister of the coalition
government the previous December, once again showed his peerless
executive qualities. He overrode the Admiralty and revived the convoy
system which had been a feature of the Napoleonic Wars. Royal Navy
destroyers accompanied merchant shipping and enough food got to Britain
to keep her going despite the lethal creatures lurking off her coast.
And help was now at hand from across the Atlantic. Wilson had broken
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off diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February because America

could not approve unrestricted submarine warfare. And on the 23rd a
telegram intercepted by British Naval Intelligence from the German foreign
minister, Dr Alfred Zimmermann to the German embassy in Washington
revealed that Germany was negotiating with the two threats to America’s
backyard, Japan and Mexico. Mexico was asked to invade the United
States if the Americans declared war on Germany. Coming into the war on
the allied side, as an independent or associated power, and thus not subject
to allied command, was made easier for Wilson when in March the first
stage of the Russian Revolution began. The reactionary tsar abdicated and
was replaced by a republic which the American republic could support.
The advent of America into the war in April 1917 boosted the sinking
allied morale; it also considerably shortened the length of the conflict. The
British Empire’s blockade of Germany was no longer being breached by
America. That in the end would bring Germany to her knees, just as the
prospect of unlimited manpower from North America meant that the allies
must eventually defeat the central powers in the field. The arrival of
300,000 American recruits in the spring put fresh strength into the allied
armed forces.
However, the second Russian Revolution of October 1917 almost undid
all the advantage to the allied cause that America’s entry had brought. The
communist-inspired Bolshevik Revolution orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin
persuaded the starving Russian soldiers to desert their theatres of war to
return home from what they called the capitalist war and seek ‘bread,
peace and land’. The central powers therefore no longer needed half a
million men stationed on the eastern front. But the Bolshevik Revolution
rekindled the old revolutionary ideas which had been so prevalent in
Europe before the war. Strikes increased in Britain as blue-collar workers
were reminded of their historic antipathy towards their masters. In a
moment of great danger for France, anti-war revolutionary propaganda
and the army’s carelessness with soldiers’ lives in the Nivelle offensive on
the Aisne in 1917 persuaded perhaps as many as 100,000 soldiers in the
French army to mutiny. They were overcome only with difficulty.
Fortunately England’s government was in the deft hands of Lloyd George,
who with the help of the Labour MPs managed to surmount the political and
industrial unrest in the country. Though there were calls for peace, and one
with ‘no annexations and no indemnities’, the support of the trade unions —
which under Lloyd George enjoyed what was in effect a partnership with
government — ensured that these voices never amounted to much.
There was better news, too, from the Middle East by 1917. The
Ottoman Empire fragmented rapidly under the impact of the British army
based in Egypt. Jerusalem was captured under the enterprising cavalryman
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General Allenby. Hussein the hereditary Grand Sharif of Mecca, a

descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, had already brought the desert
tribes on to the allied side with great effect, getting the Arabs to rise against
their Turkish overlords whom they had detested for six centuries. The high
commission at Cairo was run by scholarly and romantic orientalists. One
of them, an archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence who was soon to become
famous as Lawrence of Arabia, became the military adviser of Hussein’s
son Prince Faisal.
Lloyd George might be able to encourage the British to pull together by
attending to the soldiers’ needs, by promoting managerial improvement in
industry, and by introducing universal suffrage in February 1918 for men
over the age of nineteen and women over thirty. But the generalship of the
war on the western front continued to create anxiety. The hundreds of
thousands of deaths and casualties and the absence of results seemed to
mean nothing to Haig. On 31 July 1917 he began another offensive in
Flanders, known as Passchendaele, intended to make up for the cata-
strophic French campaign earlier that year and free Belgium. It lasted until
6 November and only compounded his unpopularity.
By moving north-west the British were to fight out of the Ypres triangle
through Passchendaele, reach the Belgian coast and then turn on the
German army. Haig had been given warnings about drainage problems in
the area. He chose to ignore them. The wettest August for years turned the
countryside to mud. The ‘mud of Flanders’ was an all-too literal expression
to describe conditions which made it impossible to move forward at all.
Even the new weapon, the tank, did not work. It sank. The offensive died
in the mud, along with 240,000 British casualties. The pessimistic War
Cabinet, whose members were anxious that there should not be a second
Somme, had asked Haig to cancel the campaign if its first efforts showed
no likelihood of success. But Haig persisted with the Passchendaele
offensive for three long months, before he would accept that it was
pointless.
There was discontent at home with food and fuel shortages; rationing
would be invented in the last year of the war. The consensus in the national
government was breaking down, and only Lloyd George’s adroit
management kept Labour in the Cabinet. The Italians were roundly
defeated by their old enemy the Austrians at the Battle of Caporetto, 50
French and British troops had to be diverted from the western front to help
them. By now Britain was blithely lending her allies huge sums of money
to finance the war, and no less blithely borrowing similar quantities from
America. In many countries the war effort was in danger of faltering
completely. British convoys made sure the allies got food while the
Germans began to starve.

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The beginning of 1918 was Germany’s last chance to achieve a breakout

on the western front and overrun France. For three months the dice were
loaded in their favour: the need for an eastern front had come to an end in
March 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war.
Though units of the central powers’ forces remained behind to supervise
the transfer of food and oil supplies from the important Romanian
oilfields, the surplus eastern front troops would reach the western front
long before the American troops landed to replenish the sagging allied
lines.
On 21 March 1918 German troops began a massive offensive along a
huge front of four miles, almost destroying an entire British army, the
Fifth, in the process. But, although the line of the western front was pushed
in, gallant troops under an excellent French commander-in-chief, General
Foch, who now had sole command of allied troops, rushed in to fill the
gaps. Eventually in July and August a counter-offensive was begun by the
British and French, whose efforts were better co-ordinated now that the
two armies were united under a single command.
As the summer drew to an end, the British in the north began to push the
German armies back. It was the end of trench warfare. In late September
the British finally broke through the Hindenburg Line. In the Middle East
Allenby’s victories in Syria and Palestine continued. The British army had
not only reached Mosul but was marching west towards Constantinople to
be joined by troops from Aleppo. Meanwhile victories in the Balkans
allowed the allies based on Salonika to fan outwards like a plume. Bulgaria
had surrendered on 30 September. Allied forces reached the lower Danube,
the Hungarian Plain and central Europe further west, as well as threatening
Constantinople. Caught in a pincer movement the Turks signed an
armistice on 30 October. That same month Austria-Hungary, which was
rapidly disintegrating into ethnic groups, was defeated by Italy. She
surrendered on 3 November. Germany’s armies were still undefeated in the
field, though they were beginning to crumple under the vigour of the
American troops. But at last the German high command concluded that
Germany could not continue, with her armies and people at the end of their
tether. As well as being exhausted and demoralized, the German people
were starving as a result of the British blockade.
On 3 October the German government had asked President Wilson to
dictate the terms for peace. As the war went on, an increasing number of
Social Democrats in Germany voted against the government being allowed
to prosecute the war any longer. The Fourteen Points Wilson had suggested
as a fair basis for peace in January were accepted by Germany on 23
October. On 7 November envoys passed through the lines to accept the
armistice document from the British and French military representatives

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Admiral Wemyss and General Foch who were seated together in a railway
carriage. The terms required the German armies to retire behind their pre-
1914 borders.
But there was now a mutiny in the German navy at Kiel that signalled
the end of the old regime. In early November, imitating Russia, councils of
soldiers and workmen established themselves all over northern Germany
and overthrew their militaristic rulers. The kaiser fled to Holland. Despite
calls for him to be hanged, the Dutch government refused to give him up.
The Republic of Germany was announced in Berlin, and on 11 November,
early in the morning, the new republican and socialist German government
signed the armistice in the Forest of Compiégne. At the eleventh hour of
the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent and the
First World War came to an end.
After the armistice, discussions about how the world should be
reconstructed in the wake of the Great War took place at the Paris Peace
Conference which began in January 1919, attended by seventy delegates
representing the thirty-two allied and associated powers. But drawing up
the separate peace treaties for the defeated central powers was mainly the
work of the Big Four, as they were known: Lloyd George for Britain,
whose national coalition had been re-elected at the end of 1918, Prime
Minister Clemenceau for France, Prime Minister Orlando for Italy and
President Wilson.

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Peacemaking and the Rise of Fascism (1918-1936)

As Sir Edward Grey had predicted, the lights of European civilization had
been practically extinguished. The old pre-war European world lay in
ruins. France and Belgium were devastated. Farmland everywhere was
smoking or abandoned, so there was not enough food. Millions of
servicemen and ex-servicemen were trying to get home, men who had lost
whatever idealism had first inspired them to fight. Many of them had
become fairly barbaric after what they had seen. Many of them were half
starved or ill.
The Dominions had lost huge numbers of their citizens. Although no
request for help from the Dominions had been made by the British
government, of their own volition they had sent hundreds of thousands of
men to fight. There were 60,000 Australian war dead — indeed, one in ten
of Australia’s total male population had been killed or wounded; and
56,700 Canadians had been killed and 150,000 seriously wounded — one
in twenty of the male population.
The fields of north-eastern France and Belgium were as unusable as if
they had been annexed by a foreign power. They were a kingdom of two
million dead. All over Europe there was chaos. The great railway lines
running across France, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had
brought soldiers so swiftly to every front were buckled and broken. The
manufacturing output of everyday goods in Britain was almost nonexistent
after the switch to an all-out war economy. Many of the frontiers and
signposts of the continent had been changed, as territories were gained and
lost by the endless tramp of different armies advancing and retreating.
Everything, not just millions of people but the familiar landmarks of the
pre-1914 world, seemed to have vanished and been swallowed up in the
cataclysm. The 700,000 horses Britain had imported into France had
become redundant in the course of the war, which transformed tank and
air warfare — they belonged to an old-fashioned, more chivalrous time. The
post-war world was strange and often unnerving. Four empires came to an
end as a result of the Great War, three of which had been the earth’s
permanent furniture for centuries: the Russian, the Ottoman, the Austro-
Hungarian and the German. Before 1914 the British Empire, with its
investments all over the world, had been the biggest creditor nation and the
United States the biggest debtor nation. Now, it would emerge after the
war, the positions had been reversed.
The Russian Empire had lost Poland, the Baltic provinces and the
Ukraine, all acquired in the eighteenth century, so it no longer reached the
Baltic Sea or the Black Sea and ceased to be a great power. Communist
ideas and workers’ councils, which had taken root in Russia, threatened
revolution in many European countries, most of all in Germany and Italy

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where their simple solutions appealed to people exhausted by the misery of

war; there was anyway a vacuum as religious belief faltered in the face of
the widespread horrors. The nature of Russia’s internal revolution was so
antipathetic to the existing structure in the rest of the world that the Soviet
government had withdrawn from the world’s councils — it had no interest
in participating in a world order it wished to see abolished by a universal
workers’ revolution. Russia had always had an enigmatic quality for the
rest of Europe. When, from 1919, she developed an instrument for
exporting revolution, the Communist International, or Comintern, she
became a dangerous enemy.
Unfortunately for the permanence of the peacemaking process, the
conflict had been too overwhelming and too many people had died for it
to be arranged in the disinterested fashion it should have been. Around the
world ten million soldiers had died in the Great War. Seventeen million
soldiers were wounded, of whom five million would live out the rest of
their lives as chronic invalids. These were numbers almost beyond the
capacity of human beings to understand. The effect of losing one-third of
the young men of the next European generation was as devastating
demographically and psychologically as the Black Death.
There were four million European widows; in France, whose population
had been hit hardest by the war, one in four children were fatherless. The
period which succeeded the war could not help but be one of sorrow,
suffering and pessimism. The British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the
Germans in Brussels, had become a wartime heroine to the British. Her
most famous words, inscribed on the statue erected to her in London, were
‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone,’
but the French had little room for anything else. Even though a government
was in place in Germany which had thrown off her militaristic leaders, she
was treated as if she were still ruled by Prussian autocrats and she
continued to be blamed for the world catastrophe. All of this was
compounded by a pandemic of the influenza known as Spanish flu.
Originating in South Africa and hitting half a million German soldiers in
June 1918, Spanish flu swept through the war-weakened populations
killing another ten million people. It was a time of the darkest gloom.
The vindictive and punitive peace imposed on Germany by France to
ensure that her old enemy could never threaten her again ruined beyond
repair what before 1914 had been the dynamo of the European economy.
But it also destabilized the entire structure of German civilization. As in all
European countries, ordinary life in Germany was already tottering
because of the hardship of the war. The Versailles Treaty with Germany,
signed at the Paris Peace Conference on 28 June 1919, paved the way in
the post-war period for a desperate people to seek desperate solutions.

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Germany was being treated as a pariah. Economic misery and despair over
her reduced status meant she soon became an aggressive pariah threatening
the post-war settlement.
Unlike the reshaping of Europe in 1815, there was no equivalent of
Wellington to act as a restraining influence, a statesman who had thought
of the consequences of embittering Germany by her treatment. Lloyd
George had won the r918 election by talking of squeezing Germany ‘until
the pips squeak’. After the war Germans would become united by their
belief that they had been treated unfairly at the Paris Peace Conference,
and by their consequent desire for revenge. In 1815, after twenty years of
French war, the allies’ policy of not treating France too harshly had
ensured that she could soon return to the European family of nations in a
constructive spirit. That lesson was forgotten in 1919. What has to be
remembered was that the French were too fearful of Germany to treat her
magnanimously. They were also determined to have their pound of flesh
and make the Germans feel the same pain they had inflicted on the French
after the Franco-Prussian War. Twice in forty years Germany had come
close to destroying France. The French aim under Clemenceau was
straightforward: it was to make certain that it never could happen again.
So deep was the hatred felt by France for Germany that it was believed that
in order to bind the Leviathan he must be crippled first.
Germany was no longer permitted to have a navy (apart from a small
surface fleet for security in the Baltic) or air force. Her army was to be the
same size as Belgium’s,a limit of 100,000 men, without a General Staff, to
prevent German militarism becoming the threat to world peace it had been
in 1914. Alsace and Lorraine were naturally enough returned to France,
though for forty years they had been the centre of Germany’s iron
production and her new steel industry. Much of Germany’s own territory
was also removed from her. The Saar Basin, the centre for coal and a
source of her great industrial wealth, was to be run by the League of
Nations. It was to be the subject of a plebiscite in fifteen years’ time when
its inhabitants could choose whether to be reunited with Germany or join
France. In the interim the money raised by its coal sales went to France.
Although Germany kept Holstein and southern Schleswig, northern
Schleswig was also to decide its future by plebiscite.
In the east, Germany lost not only three million of her population when
West Prussia and Posen became part of the new Poland, whose frontiers
returned to something close to what they had been in the eighteenth
century before the partitions. Germany’s remaining territory was also
insultingly separated from East Prussia, spiritual home of the German
Empire, by a strip of land known as the Polish Corridor which gave Poland
access to the sea. She also lost many of her coalfields too, particularly after
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another plebiscite joined Upper Silesia to Poland, as well as much of her

iron and steelworks. Owing to her entirely German population the port of
Danzig (the Polish Gdansk) on the Baltic at the top of the Polish Corridor,
was not given to Poland. However, in order for Poland’s trade to continue
freely Danzig was made a free city administered by the League of Nations.
All in all, in Europe Germany lost about four million citizens through
transfers of territory.
In fact even these measures to break up Germany did not really satisfy
France’s need for security. She had first demanded that her eastern frontier
be advanced to the Rhine. She had to be content with a neutralized Saar
Basin, the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland — that is, all
Germany to the west of the Rhine and fifty kilometres to the east of it.
President Woodrow Wilson pledged that with Britain the USA would
guarantee France’s frontiers. As far as the Germans were concerned, the
self-determination which had been one of the themes of the conference
scarcely counted. But France still did not have enough.
Having been thwarted in her attempt to get the kaiser hung as a war
criminal, France had to be satisfied with what appeared to be a war-guilt
clause which began the reparations section of the peace treaty. This clause
was intended to be a technical statement, that Germany would pay
‘compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies
and their property by the aggression of Germany, by land, by sea and from
the air’. But it was believed for ever more to attribute the whole guilt for
the war to the German people. It was another reason for Germans to be
angry about the treaty — many of them considered that the allied powers
had been just as much to blame for the war. “The stab in the back’ theory
about the republican government started to circulate in Germany: that
government, it was alleged, could never be trusted, for it had signed the
treacherous peace even though the German armies had never been
defeated.
The war-guilt clause would have meant that only France would obtain
reparations from Germany, as most of the destructive action had taken
place on her territory. Lloyd George now insisted that a clause be included
covering pensions for widows and orphans of British soldiers killed in
action. In 1921, after much discussion, the total cost of what Germany
owed the two countries was reckoned at over £6,000 million. With all
Germany’s colonies also confiscated from her, so that after the war she
could trade only in Europe, these reparations were beyond Germany’s
capacity to pay.
Nothing was discussed in person with the German delegation; they were
able to raise their objections only in writing. They scarcely had time to do
so — the peace treaty was more or less imposed on them. The treaty was
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signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the very room in
which Germany had proclaimed her new empire to the humiliation of the
French in 1871. It was now used by the French to humiliate the Germans.
By the end of the next decade the view that Germany had been treated too
harshly at the peace conference and deserved to have the Versailles Treaty
revised had become common currency in Britain. The economist John
Maynard Keynes resigned as the British Treasury’s chief representative at
the conference and quickly wrote The Economic Consequences of the
Peace, in which he expressed in vigorous language his conviction that
Germany,had been harshly treated.
President Wilson himself optimistically believed that the League of
Nations, the international body to regulate the world which was an
integral part of the peace treaties, would find a way of adjusting those parts
which were unworkable. No peace conference started out with more
idealistic aims than that which remade Europe in 1919. Woodrow
Wilson’s Fourteen Points had promised a new world order based on doing
away with the old patterns of secret diplomacy, arranging equality of
trading conditions and providing an impartial adjustment of all colonial
claims. The levelling of the pre-1914 civilization could be a positive thing
if a better world was built on the ashes of the old. Most of the world’s
nations, including much of Germany, were dominated by a profound wish
that never again should the destruction of war be allowed to ravage their
lives.
Many of them, like Canada and other Dominions who were representing
themselves for the first time instead of being spoken for by British imperial
statesmen, came to the peace conference enthusiastically. They were
inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations to outlaw war
and to protect the rights of small nations. A worldwide reduction of
armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety, which
would make the world ‘safe for democracy’ as Wilson put it, offered a
chance to escape from the blind destruction of the past. The League, which
Wilson spent much time and effort explaining, was to be set up in Geneva,
Switzerland and every nation was invited to join and send members to its
international assembly.
Wilson’s novel idea, that all the peace treaties should have the League’s
charter as an integral and dominating part, was adopted by all the
delegates. The charter was a reflection of the peace movements which had
grown up during the war, as well as of the Disarmament Conferences
before 1914, to find international procedures for arbitration. The powers
which signed the Covenant of the League of Nations were mindful of the
uncontrollable process of acceleration by which small wars could become
big ones. By putting their names to the Covenant they vowed to refer their

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disagreements to the League for discussion before taking up arms. They

also vowed to go to the aid of any fellow member which had been attacked
and to act against any member which used force against the League.
It was heady stuff. The world was so exhausted by the war that none of
the statesmen in Paris could imagine any country ever wanting to repeat
such an experience. The dream of global peace seemed to have achieved
reality. The peace conference proposed to resettle Europe along lines of
self-determination to prevent the sort of quarrel the Serbs had had with the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Habsburg Empire was already no more,
and the Habsburgs were deposed after the armistice. Their immense
territories were broken up into states on ethnic lines. By the Treaty of St
Germain, signed with the new Austrian Republic, Austria became a small
landlocked country of seven million people forbidden to join up with
Germany. Bohemia, Moravia and part of northern Hungary, which were
inhabited by western Slavs (the Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians), were
united to create the Republic of Czechoslovakia. Croatia, Dalmatia,
Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, inhabited by the southern Slavs, were
united under Serbia to form the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Italy, though
balked of Dalmatia, obtained Trentino, Trieste, South Tyrol and Istria.
Hungary, meanwhile, which lost almost three-quarters of her post-1867
kingdom — Romania acquired the whole of Transylvania - in 1920
reluctantly signed the Treaty of Trianon.
Bulgaria, as an ally of the central powers, by the Treaty of Neuilly had
to cede large areas to Greece and the new Yugoslavia. The independence
of Finland, and of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was
preserved. Russia meanwhile would make no peace treaty. Although
initially British and French troops were sent to help the White or
conservative forces within Russia against the Bolsheviks, an impasse was
reached and they were evacuated.
The treaty agreeing peace with the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of
Sevres, was not completed until 1920. It destroyed the 300-year-old
Ottoman Empire, more or less expelled the Turks from Europe apart from
Constantinople, made Armenia and Kurdistan independent, and removed
from them Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, Cyprus and what they
owned in north Africa. Greece was to be given much of Asiatic Turkey
behind Smyrna.
President Wilson intended that European imperialism should wither
away. Former German colonies or Turkish possessions, even if they were
taken over by the old imperial powers, were now to be called mandates. By
an article of the Covenant of the League, the great powers like France and
Britain were commanded to govern the mandates in the interests of their
inhabitants until they were ready to be admitted to the League of Nations.

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Thus a better world was supposed to be remodelled at the peace

conference. Unfortunately, although all the peace treaties were predicated
on the League of Nations, despite his enthusiasm for the new world order
President Wilson had made an elementary mistake. He failed to convince
Congress of the importance of the United States guaranteeing the post-war
settlement, so despite his own internationalism after the war she returned
to her usual isolationism. Congress rejected US participation in the League
of Nations, yet the whole new settlement was based on US support for the
League. Nor would America guarantee France’s borders against Germany.
As for imperialism withering away, it was really lack of money as far as
Britain was concerned — with the post-war slump and debts owed to
America of £900 million — that in the end hurried forward the end of
empire. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary from October 1919, and much of
the India Office might be excited by the mandate system which gave Britain
Mesopotania and Palestine to administer as an unofficial way of extending
the empire. The importance of the oil-rich Middle East had been recog-
nized before the war and the area offered new markets now that India had
her own growing manufacturing industry. With Russia locked in internal
revolution, Britain had no rival in the Middle East. But a severe post-war
slump prevented Britain from imposing herself on the mandated territories
as she would have done in the past. The old empire itself was under attack
from nationalists in India. In Ireland a war of independence against the
British broke out the year after the war ended. There was a rebellion in
Egypt, which had been made a British protectorate at the beginning of the
war and wanted immediate independence.
Mesopotamia was in a state of revolt and despite her oilfields most
members of the British government had no wish to spend money on
subduing her. Though the British retained a great deal of influence, in 1921
they made her into the kingdom of Iraq. Eleven years later in 1932 the
mandate ended and Iraq achieved full independence. Faisal, the son of the
Hashemite Sharif Hussein, became her king as a reward for his father’s
help during the war. This partly offset the obligation on the British to fulfil
their wartime promise of creating an independent Arab state in Syria and
Palestine, as did carving the independent mandate of Jordan out of their
mandate for Palestine. Faisal’s brother, Hussein’s other son Abdullah,
became Jordan’s emir. Though a British resident initially controlled both
her economic and her financial policy,in 1946 the mandated territory
became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Palestine posed more of a problem because of the 1917 Balfour
Declaration, which had been critical in keeping influential Jewish opinion
in America onside during the war. This recognized the rights of the Jewish
race to establish a national homeland in Palestine, so long as no harm was

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inflicted on the native Arab inhabitants. At the end of the nineteenth

century, the victimization of Jews (especially in eastern Europe) had seen
the growth of a powerful Zionist movement, whose objective was to
establish a homeland for the Jews in their ancestral home of Palestine. In
consequence, between 1882 and 1914 Palestine attracted 60,000 Jewish
immigrants, bringing the Jewish population to about 85,000. The question
of how many Jewish people could settle in the Jewish homeland without
upsetting the lives of the 600,000 Arab Palestinians was to be the subject
of much debate within the British government over the next twenty-five
years. Sympathy for Jewish settlers who were attacked by Arabs wrestled
with official British fears that the poorly educated Palestinians would soon
be at a disadvantage in a small country with a land shortage.
The First World War had made the territorial extent of the British
Empire greater than ever, but it dramatically loosened its already lax
bonds. Before 1914 the imperial government was in the last resort
responsible for the foreign policy of the entire empire. But by the end of the
war the effect of their vast losses, their separate representation at the peace
conference and their membership of the League of Nations set the
Dominions on the path to real nationhood. They began to make it clear
that in future wars their assistance could not be taken for granted. Separate
ambassadorial representation to other countries, a lack of imperial ships to
defend the empire east of Suez and a definitive Imperial Conference in
1926 resulted in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This recognized the
changed and wholly independent status of the Dominions, though they
remained ‘united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely
associated as members of the British Commonwealth of nations’.
But India was not part of the magic circle of the Dominions. She was
very disappointed at not being rewarded as she had hoped after her efforts
during the war. One and a half million Indians had fought for the empire,
and India had been admitted to the Imperial Conference in 1917. Like the
Dominions, India had achieved separate representation in the Assembly of
the League of Nations. Many Indians, particularly Mohandas Gandhi,
who had studied law in London and was a member of the Inner Temple,
had believed in the liberty-loving nature of a Britain ruled by Parliament.
They had assumed that India would achieve Dominion status immediately
after the war. But it did not happen.
The Indian professional classes felt fobbed off by the 1919 Government
of India Act which they were offered instead. It gave India a two-
chambered Parliamentary system and allowed Indians to form the majority
on the Central Legislative Council, but the diarchal arrangement kept law
and order and taxation in the hands of non-Indians. Moreover the
legislature could not remove the executive. The notorious Amritsar

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Massacre in 1919, when General Dyer shot dead 379 unarmed civilians in
the Punjab who were protesting against new security laws, crystallized the
growing discontent with British rule. People lost faith in the Raj’s
promises. For the next seven years, led by Gandhi, India embarked on a
new movement for independence with frequent strikes and the boycotting
of British goods.
India was inspired by the empire’s other ‘poor relation’, Ireland. In a
series of dramatic moves she was casting off British authority. The harsh
punishment of those Irishmen involved in the Easter Rising caused Sinn
Fein and the revolutionaries to triumph over the moderate Home Rulers in
the first election after the war and withdraw from Westminster. Seventy-
three of them gathered in the Mansion House in Dublin and announced
that they constituted an independent Irish Parliament, which they called
the Dail Eireann, meaning the Parliament of the Irish Republic. A
provisional government was elected with De Valera as president. By 1919
there was all-out war between Britain and southern Ireland.
The charismatic Michael Collins, known as the ‘big fella’, minister of
finance in the new Dail, was southern Ireland’s commander. His unortho-
dox army, the old National Volunteers, who wore trench coats and trilby
hats, vanished into the shadows after each guerrilla exploit. His charm and
his daring refusal to wear much disguise while bicycling about Dublin gave
Collins the status of a folk hero. Even though 8,000 ex-soldiers were
drafted in to supplement the Royal Irish Constabulary, the south of Ireland
became ungovernable. Because the RIC did not have enough of their usual
dark-green uniforms, the new policemen wore khaki, with the black belts
and dark-green caps of the RIC. The savagery with which they hunted
down the Irish guerrillas got them the caustic nickname of the Black and
Tans, after a pack of hounds from County Tipperary. British politicians
became sickened by what was going on in Ireland and demanded a political
solution.
When Lloyd George was informed by British military chiefs that it
would take a military campaign involving 100,000 men to subdue Ireland,
he baulked at such an enterprise so soon after the trauma of the Great War.
Money was needed to reconstruct Britain, not to fight Ireland. In 1921 the
two sides began a series of negotiations. The Anglo-Irish Treaty in
December resolved the Ulster Unionist problem by partitioning Ireland,
turning southern Ireland into a Dominion called the Irish Free State.
But even this did not bring peace. In 1922 the Irish Civil War broke out
between the pro-treaty forces headed by Michael Collins and Arthur
Griffith and those like De Valera who believed that Ireland should become
a republic inclusive of Ulster. As the death toll in Ireland mounted,
assassinations by the newly formed military organization of the anti-treaty

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nationalists, the Irish Republican Army, or IRA (Collins was one of the
victims), were followed by dawn executions of suspects without trial by the
Irish Free State government. Eventually the cool, calculating, bespectacled
De Valera, who was suspected of ordering Collins’s assassination, called a
halt to the anti-treaty IRA’s warfare. The civil war petered out. The
struggle should go forward by political means, De Valera said, though at
elections he made use of terrorist pressure from the IRA to get out the vote
for the rapidly enlarging Fianna Fail republican party.
If the empire was in tumult in the early 1920s, there was much misery
and dislocation in Britain herself, despite the release from war. From 1916
to 1918, when Labour seceded from the national government, Britain had
continued to be ruled nominally by the coalition of three parties, though in
reality the controlling figure was the amazingly energetic Lloyd George.
Parliament should have been dissolved in 1916 but as an election in
wartime would have been impossible, acts had been passed from time to
time prolonging its life, and thus the life of the coalition. In 1918 Lloyd
George and Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservatives, saw no reason not
to carry on as before. They agreed that the task of returning Britain to a
peacetime existence also deserved government by consensus. In the coupon
election of 1918 (so called because Lloyd George and Bonar Law had
written a letter or coupon asking the parties not to oppose one another) the
coalition — now the 335 coalition Conservatives and 133 coalition Liberals
— was successfully returned. The new government lasted until 1922. The
electorate had trebled again as a result of the 1918 Electoral Reform Act.
If he wanted to be prime minister again, Lloyd George had to fulfil his
election promise to make Britain ‘a land fit for heroes to live in’.
With such an enlarged electorate, many of whom were working class,
numerous measures for social reform were required. The reforms Lloyd
George promised were even more sweeping than those achieved before the
war. The state would pay for housing, what were called council houses, to
replace the slums that still disfigured towns. By the Unemployment
Insurance Act of 1920 all workers were entitled to benefit for fifteen weeks
as long as they had paid twelve weeks’ contributions. But soon many of the
measures — including a new Education Act in 1918 which was intended to
increase teachers’ salaries, provide for the compulsory attendance at school
of children up to fourteen and establish continuation schools for boys and
girls up to eighteen — proved impossible to implement. They were too great
an expense for a country still getting back on her feet. The boom the war
caused in munitions and a resurgence of the textile trade after the war were
followed by a slump in 1921. There were two million people out of work.
Domestic service, which had been an immense source of employment
before the war, had almost vanished as few people could afford to employ

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servants any more. Before 1914 even the most meagre households with
pretensions to being middle-class had some kind of help.
Britain did not have the severe problems suffered by some European
countries. Germany lacked half her heavy industry and was bent under the
huge weight of reparations. France was only beginning to rebuild her
agriculture and industry, and she had to do that with almost a third of her
manpower missing. Strikes had crippled Italy to the point where she feared
a communist workers’ takeover. In 1922 terrified of revolutionary chaos
Italy abandoned Parliamentary democracy for one-party or totalitarian
rule at the hands of violent ex-servicemen in the Fascist party under their
leader Berfito Mussolini. Parliamentary government had been discredited
by a peace settlement which brought her none of the colonies she desired
in Africa to add to Libya, and gave much of what she had been promised
by the Treaty of London to Yugoslavia. Named after the fasces or bundle
of twigs that Roman senators carried as a symbol of their authority, the
intensely nationalistic fascists were anti-capitalistic and anti-clerical, but
also abhorred socialism and communism. Awash with comforting and
simplistic slogans in the nihilistic post-war atmosphere, paying lipservice
to the certainties of monarchy and Church, the fascists’ squads of
paramilitaries restored order, purpose and international prestige to an
extremely unstable country. The consequence was that by the end of the
decade the Fascist party had become completely entwined with all Italian
institutions, from social clubs to town councils.
But though the British might be free to take their usual pleasure in
expressing their political opinions, the country was deeply burdened by
America’s insistence on being repaid her war loans immediately. Britain
had financed much of the war for her European allies, but she had not
demanded prompt payment of her debts, because most European countries
were in no position to comply. Hampered by shortage of money,
diminished populations and the need to work on the ruined land to make
it fit for cultivation, the European economies were only slowly getting back
to pre-war production levels.
In Britain the coal and cotton export markets collapsed. The business-
man Sir Ernest Geddes, appointed to work out where the government
could save money, and known as the Geddes Axe, hacked back many of
Lloyd George’s promises. ‘A land fit for heroes’ became an ironic saying.
The general post-war discontent manifested itself in strikes and lockouts.
In industries where she had led the world, Britain was falling behind
because she had not invested in new machinery. Nevertheless she remained
the world’s leading shipbuilder for another forty years, as befitted a
country whose navy had been the best in the world for over a century.
But even that bit of glory had come to an end. The Washington Naval

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Agreement at the end of 1921 was a sign of the changing times when
Britain agreed to parity with America in warships. She could no longer
afford to build the ships or bases to defend the empire in its entirety. For
the next twenty years Singapore, which was meant to be a great defensive
naval base for the empire east of Suez, was not fortified properly or
supplied with an adequate number of ships to defend herself.
All of the Royal Navy’s ships were built in Britain, where her welders
and engineers had an expertise envied by all other advanced countries.
However, especially on what became known as ‘red’ Clydeside near
Glasgow, the home of so much of Britain’s shipbuilding since the
nineteenth century, a fiery love of striking and militant socialist trade
unionism proved fatal to the industry. A smaller navy, and the strikes
which lost the yards business, combined to put shipbuilding in Britain into
continuous decline.
Lloyd George lived on until 1945, but by 1922 his political day was
drawing to a close amid a great deal of bitterness. He had been absent too
much in Paris at the peace conference trying to hold back the French, and
the Conservatives were beginning to chafe under his grip. He had split the
Liberal party when he ousted Asquith, so he had few followers there. His
reputation began to be harmed by tales about his honours list, about how
as in the days of James I a baronetcy was to be had for £10,000, a peerage
for £50,000 and so on. In the grim atmosphere of the slump tongues
wagged about how well his entrepreneurial friends had done out of the
war. Moreover, many Conservatives did not like the way Lloyd George
had relinquished southern Ireland.
Lloyd George’s fall was engineered by the ‘knights of the shires’, as Tory
backbenchers have often been known, over the Chanak Crisis. They were
worried that Lloyd George was about to resume the war against Turkey,
whose republican government under Mustapha Kemal had refused to
accept the peace treaty which gave Greece Smyrna. In a revolt in October
1922 they voted at the Carlton Club to resume independence as
Conservatives. As Kemal’s victorious army advanced towards the
Dardanelles, where a neutral zone had been created, the danger of a
collision with the British garrison at Chanak was averted only by the tact
of General Charles Harington. The Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923
restored to Turkey at the expense of Greece much of the European territory
of which she was to have been deprived.
The Chanak Crisis was the final nail in Lloyd George’s coffin. He
resigned, the coalition ended and the Conservative leader Bonar Law
briefly formed a Conservative ministry from 1922 to 1923 until ill-health
forced him to retire. The genial pipe-smoking iron manufacturer Stanley
Baldwin, the epitome of British pragmatism, became prime minister for a

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year. He made the mistake of abandoning free trade at the December 1923
election which he had called to shore up his position, hoping that tariff
reform would help the disastrous level of unemployment. But although the
Conservatives returned to power as the party with the largest number of
seats in the House of Commons, and Baldwin remained prime minister, he
lacked a majority. With a puff of ancient free trade breath, the fading
Liberals reunited under Asquith joined with the Labour party to extinguish
tariff reform by a vote of no confidence. As the largest of the opposition
parties, Labour was then asked by George V to form a minority govern-
ment pending a general election. On 23 January 1924 Ramsay
MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Scottish farmworker, was sworn in as
leader of the first Labour government. He became foreign secretary as well
as prime minister.
The excitement within the Labour party at achieving office for the first
time after the disappointments of the post-war period was tremendous,
though the government lasted for only eight months. Being dependent on
the Liberals to remain in power, the Labour government could not bring
in some of its more extreme ideas, such as taking key industries into state
ownership, as Clause 4 of their 1917 manifesto demanded, or ‘the gradual
building up of a new social order’ by wealth redistribution, as their
constitution decreed. In the privacy of his diary George V wondered what
his grandmother Queen Victoria would have thought of a government
whose members were ‘all socialists’, but he believed that they should ‘be
given a chance’.
Nonetheless, the conservatively minded feared the Labour government
as if it were the prelude to a Bolshevik Revolution. In the recent past,
Labour councils such as Clydeside and the London Borough of Poplar had
flown the red flag of revolution. Under the high-minded idealist George
Lansbury, who in the 1930s briefly became leader of the Labour party,
Poplar Council became a byword for the defiance of central government by
local authorities. Poplar Labour councillors were frequently imprisoned or
otherwise in trouble for refusing, because theirs was a poor council, to pay
as much as rich local authorities towards the upkeep of the London County
Council. They made a habit of paying out more poor relief than their rates
afforded.
In fact the short-lived Labour minority government was decent, sensible
and constructive. Its members were anxious to prove themselves trust-
worthy and responsible custodians of government. Such policies as they
implemented in their eight months were for the most part a continuation
of Lloyd George’s. Many of the Labour party’s leaders, including home
secretary Arthur Henderson, were vehemently opposed to the tyranny and
ideology of the communist system in Russia, which some of them had seen

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at first hand. They were determined that Britain with her Parliamentary
democracy should not adopt anything like it. Labour constantly refused to
allow the few thousand members of the British Communist party (founded
in 1920) to link up with Labour. Communists were not permitted to be
Labour candidates or even to be members of the Labour party.
With the former professions of ministers ranging from engine-driving to
furnace-stoking, their principal aim was to raise the expectations of the
working class. A new Education Bill made a first tier of secondary
education the right of the many instead of the preserve of the few who
could afford private education. It became the state’s duty to provide senior
classes for children up to the age of fourteen, not just primary schooling. It
was hoped to raise the school-leaving age to fifteen, though costs would
make this impossible for some years. Labour once more attempted to
tackle the housing shortage by committing the government to a fifteen-year
scheme of expanding council housing available to rent. The bill passed
easily through Parliament. The duty of the government to provide houses
was becoming part of the post-war consensus, part of the ever greater
expansion of the state’s responsibilities for its citizenry. But although
insurance for the unemployed was extended, Labour could find little more
to do for them. Their number was still hovering about the one-million
mark. It was an issue that Britain, the workshop of the world, had never
had to tackle before.
Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, like many Labour people, was an
idealistic socialist and committed internationalist. He had voted against
Britain entering the war, believing that wars benefited only imperialists
and arms merchants and destroyed the working classes, who were used as
cannon fodder. He was a fervent proponent of international organizations
to ensure that no war ever happened again and he attended League of
Nations gatherings at Geneva which he hoped would remedy what was
unsatisfactory about the peace treaties.
For Franco-German relations continued to be destructive and fraught
with hatred. America and Britain were not part of the European continent,
which had been menaced by Germany for half a century, so their statesmen
possessed no intuitive understanding of France’s feelings about her
neighbour. She had agreed to a peace treaty which did not bring her
frontier up to the Rhine because she believed that she had America’s wing
to shelter under. Once America refused to join the League of Nations,
France, terrified once again for her security, became trigger-happy. Thus
when Germany in 1923 defaulted on her reparations payments to France,
French troops were rushed into the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial
heartland, to make her pay. For a year the French occupied the Ruhr while
German industry came to a halt in a show of defiance against the invader.

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The French left in 1924, but they had already inflicted the damage on the
German economy which made the German mark collapse. By the end of
1923, inflation was so out of control that one American dollar was worth
hundreds of millions of marks. With the mark worth so little, people had
to bring wheelbarrows full of paper money to pay even small bills.
Germany was meanwhile bedevilled by assassination attempts and coups.
Nevertheless the internationalists in Europe like MacDonald were deter-
mined to help. Germany was not left to sink. In 1924 an American scheme,
the Dawes Plan, adjusted the reparations burden to make it less harsh. By
1929 the Allied Reparations Commission had found the reparations to be
disproportionately heavy on Germany, and they were reduced to less than
a third of the total established in 1921. By the mid-1920s not all seemed
bad. The German mark recovered.
A better era seemed to be ushered in for Germany under the gifted
republican statesman Gustav Stresemann. Though Germany had never
ceased to campaign to revise Versailles, in 1925 she at last appeared to
have officially accepted her western frontier with France when she signed
the Locarno Treaty. Germany was admitted to the League of Nations and
the Rhineland was demilitarized. By 1926 she was no longer seen as a
pariah nation. In 1928 the Kellogg—Briand Pact, produced by an American
and a Frenchman, attempted to eliminate war as an instrument of national
policy. Its multilateral treaty almost made up for America not joining the
League.
The first Labour government had shown itself to be moderate and
unexceptionable and contained reassuring personnel from Asquith’s last
Cabinet, such as Lord Haldane who became lord chancellor. Nevertheless
a trade treaty and a loan which Labour tried to negotiate with Soviet
Russia and what purported to be revolutionary instructions from the
Soviet government did for the government. Four days before the general
election in October 1924 the Daily Mails publication of a letter from one
of the Russian Bolshevik leaders named Zinoviev which appeared to be
addressed to Labour gave the country a fright.
The Conservatives returned to power under their new leader Stanley
Baldwin. Although Labour was out, only forty Liberals were returned as
opposedto 151 Labour and 413 Conservatives. The 1924 election is
therefore interesting because it marks the real eclipse of the Liberal party.
Labour had received one million more votes and had effectively become the
second party in the British two-party system.
Baldwin now had a decent overall majority. Always seen chewing on his
pipe he was a reassuring figure in troubled times, although his comfortable
image disguised a mind like a trap. He was a formidable Parliamentary
operator. The economic depression which began in 1921 had not ended,

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and indeed was about to get worse. Among Baldwin’s Cabinet was
Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer. He had last been a
Conservative in 1903 when he had resigned over tariff reform. Many in the
Conservative party believed that the only way to defeat the depression was
to return to the pre-1914 monetary system, by which the pound sterling
was fixed at a price reflecting its gold reserves. In 1925 therefore with
Churchill as chancellor the country returned to the gold standard. It was a
disaster that resulted in massive deflation and the overvaluing of the
pound. Manufacturers exporting abroad found their order books dimin-
ishing because the strong pound made their products too expensive.
The economic depression created a crisis in the British coal industry.
Until 1914 Britain had been the world’s greatest exporter, but many
industrialized countries had begun to mine their own coal. The coal
industry would have declined more rapidly had it not benefited from
France’s invasion of Germany’s Ruhr coalfields. By 1926 the writing was
on the wall. As part of the war economy the huge industry had been taken
out of private hands and run by the government. After the war the miners
did not want the coalfields to return to private ownership because the
wages offered were lower than those paid by the government. For several
months they refused to return to work, though as a lure they were offered
a seven-hour day. The simple truth was that British coal was too expensive.
The mine owners asked for wage reductions and slightly increased hours.
A Royal Commission of Inquiry achieved little, and the government
eventually appeared to come down on the side of the owners when it
recommended that the working day go back to eight hours. The miners
took their case to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. On
3 May 1926 a general strike was declared.
But this was not the start of the revolution in Britain that had been
feared — and hoped for by Russia. Though the railwaymen, printers, and
iron and steel trades came out in sympathy with their fellow workers, it
was a social event rather than a political one. There was little professed
desire to overthrow the government. The general strike — that formidable
weapon by which workers could bring a country to its knees — was not
applied very ruthlessly. The responsible, upright TUC had no wish to
endanger the country’s health; hospital and agricultural workers were
excluded from the strike.
There was some violence by police and union members but after nine
days, by 12 May, Britain could breathe again. The general strike had been
called off, no revolution had taken place and Britain had kept going thanks
to all kinds of enthusiastic volunteers from students to businessmen driving
the buses. The working man had the Labour party to represent him in
Parliament. Another Labour government would be a better way of making

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sure his voice was heard than the destruction of the general strike. Britain
had no stomach for the way strikes were used abroad, with such lethal
effects.
Only the miners remained on strike, staying out for another seven
months until December 1926. Once their union funds were exhausted,
they had to return to work. The strike had lasting effects on the coal
industry. Many coalminers remained out of work because pits could not be
reopened. The high rate of unemployment which followed in the industry
forced lower wages and longer hours on the miners. To prevent another
countrywide stoppage, in 1927 the Conservatives brought in a new Trade
Disputes Act. General strikes were outlawed, and henceforth trade union
contributions for political ends like supporting the Labour party had to be
individually earmarked by the member concerned.
Although the Conservatives had weakened the trade unions, progressive
social reform continued. One of the most notable effects of the war was
that all parties now accepted that the state should play a far greater role in
British life as a beneficent provider. The Ministry of Health, created to deal
with insurance and health issues, was not disbanded after the war, as state
provision for pensions and insurance continued to expand. The minister
of health Neville Chamberlain, Joe’s son, finally did away with the last
remnants of the punitive approach to the destitute by abolishing the
Elizabethan guardians of the poor. Instead the destitute became the
responsibility of county councils, whose Public Assistance Committees
provided new buildings and assistance for the old and sick who had
nowhere else to go. The Conservative government, which in 1928 carried
the Fifth Reform Act allowing women the vote at twenty-one in line with
men, brought in a more generous state pension scheme. The Widows,
Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925 allowed insured
people to draw an old age pension at sixty-five and gave pensions to
widows and allowances for bereaved children under fourteen.
The Conservatives also established the National Grid which provided
cheap state-owned electricity across the country via a wire and pylon
system run by the government-owned Central Electricity Board. By 1939
two-thirds of Britain had electricity, though in wilder parts of the country
its supply could be less certain. Swans or snow on the line in the Highlands
of Scotland often left local people without electricity for a day or two.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, created in 1927 by a group of
radio companies, was also set up as a state monopoly owned by the
government. Established by royal charter, the BBC was intended to have
high ethical standards, which it has largely maintained. Its refusal to take
advertising has always given it an editorial freedom and integrity. Soon
most homes possessed a wireless. The BBC tradition of high-mindedness

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and public service broadcasting was encouraged by its first chairman, the
Scot Lord Reith, who believed in a mission to improve Britain through his
corporation. For many Britons, until the 1944 Education Act established
free secondary schooling, BBC Radio served as a form of further education.
The impartiality of the BBC, jealously guarded, made it one of the great
British institutions of the twentieth century. Envied by other countries it
remains a testament to the British love of fair play. The BBC Radio World
Service has traditionally been a forum giving political exiles the chance to
speak and broadcast to their homelands.
British women’s lives changed dramatically during the war. With three
and a half million men called up to fight in France, women had to take over
many of their jobs on farms or in munitions factories. Those serving as
nurses on the western front earned the heartfelt respect of the men. As a
reflection of the new seriousness with which they were viewed, women
were admitted to membership of Oxford University in 1920 — though it
was not until 1948 that they could receive full degrees at Cambridge. Other
acts of 1918 and 1919, recognizing their war work, revolutionized the civic
position of women by removing sex qualifications for admission to the
professions and to seats in the House of Commons. One of the best-known
beneficiaries of this was the American-born Nancy Astor. She was the first
woman to sit in the House of Commons when in 1919 she took over her
husband Waldorf Astor’s seat for Plymouth Sutton after he inherited his
father’s viscountcy. She remained an MP for twenty-five years.
When all British women over twenty-one became entitled to vote in 1928,
they had stolen a march on their more protected French contemporaries —
in France the vote for women only came in 1944. In Switzerland it was
1971. As a sign of their independence, skirts rose and women took up the
fashion of bobbing or cutting their hair short, a fashion prompted by the
need to keep it out of machinery during the war. The long lustrous locks
piled up in elaborate folds so characteristic of the pre-war era vanished.
Jazz music, which began in the black part of New Orleans and spread
throughout America, crossed the Atlantic to Europe in the 1920s and
became all the rage. Millions of young people bought phonographs to hear
recordings and dance the wild Charleston. Such enthusiasms showed that
they belonged to the new world which rejected the boring and destructive
ideas of the old. Inspired by sheer relief at the ending of the war and by the
world’s subsequent recovery, well-to-do people became hedonistic. Instead
of being associated with the war, France exploited her holiday resorts such
as Juan les Pins and Biarritz, to become the playground of the young, rich
and gifted, particularly Americans like the writer Scott Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald gave this short-lived breathing space between the wars its
nickname, the Jazz Age. ‘Seize the day’ was its motto — with so many young

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people dead, who could say who would be alive tomorrow? A rather
desperate frivolity reigned. From the mid-1920s onwards, London theatres
were full of Noél Coward’s bitter-sweet sophisticated comedies about
world-weary, liberated young people. Divorce — a stigma before 1914 —
started to become accepted as something that happened. Being realistic,
being true to yourself, was what mattered now that so many of the old
certainties of European «civilization from religion to the army had
disintegrated or been found wanting. The young Evelyn Waugh’s cynical
and often cruel novels, including Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies
(1930) were hugely popular.
Despité the weakening of the trade union movement in the aftermath of
the general strike, the Labour party returned to power for another two
years in 1929. Though Labour had 287 MPs against Conservatives’ 261,
and the Liberals had a sorry 59, Labour was still in a minority. Once again
an attempt was made to co-operate with the Liberals but it was not very
successful. Nineteen-twenty-nine was the year the worldwide great
depression began. It started with the Wall Street Crash in America, which
wiped millions off the value of shares in October. The newspapers were full
of ruined financiers committing suicide by jumping out of skyscrapers.
The Crash put an end to America’s capacity to prop up the European
monetary system, as she had done ever since the Great War ended. US
financiers were forced to call in their loans. German banks failed. Between
1929 and 1932 the American economy shrank by almost 40 per cent. But
the desperation of the unemployed in the dustbowl of America was as
nothing to the political effects of the depression in Europe. The economic
collapse wiped out responsible democratic governments which world
statesmen were relying on to keep the peace.
The truth was that the European economic system had not properly
recovered eleven years after the war had ended. In many ways it was not to
recover for another seventy years. Europe’s problems had been masked by
America’s readiness to bail out the post-war European economies,
Germany’s in particular. After the war German goods were not bought by
other countries in the quantities needed to rebuild the German economy.
They needed to restart their own economies and began to manufacture
goods themselves which they had previously bought from Germany. The
Russian market, a major source of revenue before the war, after the
Revolution was effectively nonexistent. The war-guilt reparations imposed
on Germany could not be paid without massive loans from the US, so when
the American loans were withdrawn Germany’s economy collapsed in 1929.
German foreign trade fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, wiping
out completely the savings of the middle classes. The situation was worse
than that of 1923. Professional and well-to-do people went from leading
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an affluent life to penury, forced to sublet every room of their apartments.

The effect hyperinflation had on Berlin, for example, may be vividly
glimpsed in the writings of Christopher Isherwood. Conspiracy theories
began to circulate, of which the most pernicious were ‘The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion’, forged documents purporting to show that there was a
Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and ruin everyone who was not
Jewish. In their distress the German people not only lost their faith in
democracy, they lost their faith in reason. They were looking for scape-
goats, and the scapegoats put forward by Adolf Hitler and the National
Socialist Party, or Nazis, who were attracting growing support, were Jews,
big business controlled by Jews, foreigners, communists and the Versailles
Peace Treaty.
In Britain the Conservatives had been voted out in 1929 for failing to
solve the unemployment problem. But under Labour in the next two years
unemployment soared to levels the country had never experienced before.
Factories closed and men started being laid off in massive numbers in the
north, in all the industries which had made Britain’s fortune in the past: in
coal, the iron and steel industries, shipbuilding, clothing. In some towns
like Jarrow in Tyneside, once the home of the Venerable Bede, the
unemployment level reached 75 per cent. Investors started to withdraw
money from London. By July 1930 unemployment had jumped by almost
a million. It was rising so fast that it was expected that one-third of the
workforce would soon have no jobs. But the deepening industrial
depression was beyond the control of any government because it was due
to worldwide pressures and the way the war had thrown international
trade into confusion. —
This catastrophe left Labour reeling. A rich young Labour minister
named Sir Oswald Mosley, influenced by the writings of John Maynard
Keynes, in 1930 suggested greater state control of industry and more state-
financed public works along the lines of the New Deal that President
Roosevelt would use to get America on her feet again. But the Cabinet
rejected these remedies and Mosley, who was hot-blooded and impetuous,
resigned from the government and from his party. When the New party he
attempted to found with six other former Labour MPs had no success,
Mosley decided that Parliament was going to be no use to him. In 1932 he
dumped the New party and created the British Union of Fascists. He had
been deeply affected by a visit to fascist Italy where the system of public
works, state monopolies of heavy industry and attempts at economic self-
sufficiency gave the impression that the employment crisis had been solved.
Labour under its austere chancellor Philip Snowden believed that
retrenchment and ultimately more loans from America were the only way
out of the depression. But America had more stringent ideas for balancing
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the budget than Britain did. Her financiers would not lend the funds
required unless the Labour government agreed to reduce the money spent
by the state. When MacDonald proposed to the Labour Cabinet in August
1931 that unemployment benefit for the very poorest should be reduced by
IO per cent, as well as the incomes of teachers and members of the armed
forces, ministers were so disgusted that most of them resigned. MacDonald
therefore formed a National Government with the help of members of both
the Conservative and Liberal parties to restore British credit abroad and
maintain the value of the pound sterling. Three other Labour members of
the Cabinet, including Chancellor Snowden, remained with him. Many
members6f the Labour party never forgave him for what they regarded as
his class treachery.
To counteract severe unemployment in the north the national govern-
ment in 1934 gave special statutory relief for depressed areas, but ministers
seemed unmoved by deputations from the old heavy industries of the
north-east, such as the Jarrow Marchers accompanied by their MP Ellen
Wilkinson, begging for help. The means test introduced by the government
for people unemployed for over six months — which involved public
officials entering homes to assess whether household effects could be used
to raise an income — intensified the anger of the Labour party against
MacDonald. To many, the insensitive way the means test was carried out
was a return to the era of the Dickensian workhouse. To this day the term
‘means test’ remains politically unacceptable.
The National Government never actually put through many of the
economies which had caused so many Labour ministers to resign. Alarmed
by a peaceful ‘mutiny’ by 12,000 sailors at Invergordon, the government
modified the pay cuts. But because no more money could be borrowed,
while £200 million in gold had been withdrawn from London since July,
the government went off the gold standard in September 1931. It was
feared that this might be disastrous, but in fact it was a great success as it
made the pound cheap and British goods cheaper. The export trade began
to revive.
Later that year MacDonald went to the polls to seek legitimacy, and the
election produced an overwhelming mandate for the National Govern-
ment, which won 558 seats (471 of these were Conservatives). The Labour
party, which had only fifty-two seats, was led in opposition by George
Lansbury. Though MacDonald remained prime minister, the National
Government became increasingly Conservative in tone. With Neville
Chamberlain back as chancellor — Snowden became lord privy seal -
protection was adopted as a remedy for the economic crisis, a Lo per cent
levy being slapped on most imports, especially manufactured goods. This
resulted in the resignation of the Liberal free traders from its ranks.
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In 1932 at the Imperial Conference in Ottawa Britain hoped to establish

the policy of imperial preference in trade, giving advantageous tariffs
within the empire. The Dominions, however, agreed only where it would
not hurt their own produce. Ottawa thus achieved very little. But the
national government managed to balance the budget and revive the
national credit, so in 1934 the unemployment pay cuts were restored, and
by 1936 Britain had come out of recession. At its height, just under three
million people had been unemployed. Meanwhile the lack of American
investment in Europe had been making it harder to pay reparations and
war debts, so in 1931 the American president Herbert Hoover accepted a
one-year moratorium. The following year Germany’s reparations pay-
ments were permanently suspended after the Lausanne war-debts
conference. Unable to repay the United States without being repaid herself,
by 1933 Britain waived her allies’ old debts and abandoned repayment of
the £900 million she owed to the United States. This only increased
America’s view that meddling in the old world did her no good, and she
continued to be strongly isolationist.
An extremely powerful disarmament movement took hold of the British
people in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935 the Peace Ballot organized by
the League of Nations Union and distributed by enthusiasts found that 90
per cent of the British people still favoured multilateral disarmament.
There was more belief than ever before in ‘collective security’ and of
submitting all disputes to the League of Nations to prevent the suffering of
another war. In 1933 when the Oxford Union, the university debating
society, passed the motion ‘This House will not fight for King and
Country’, it was the high point of a distinctly anti-war feeling. People
passionately believed that peace was the only option. But the early 1930s
were also the time when it became clear that the Paris peace settlement
based on collective security and orchestrated by the League would not last
in its present form. For the system to work everybody had to obey the
rules. In 1930 MacDonald presided over a London Conference on Naval
Disarmament attended by Britain, the USA, France, Italy and Japan. Yet a
year later Japan had seized Manchuria in China and pulled out of the
League of Nations when it condemned her.
Despite the promises embodied in the Covenant of the League, no
further action was taken against Japan. With most economies at a stand-
still League members could do nothing except express moral disapproval.
The League’s creators had not imagined that by the 1930s there would be
governments which did not subscribe to the honourable conventions of the
past and did not care if they lost the good opinion of the world. Once Japan
had led the way the whole rationale of the League of Nations dissolved.
Even so, people still believed in it, and the Word Disarmament Conference

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which met in 1932 at MacDonald’s urging was the high point of the British
government’s acceptance of that belief.
But the conference was a dismal failure. The French would not agree to
their arms being reduced to equality with Germany’s official quota, unless
British troops patrolled her eastern frontier. They were tormented by the
prospect of German militarism reviving, for it was an open secret that
Germany was rearming. Britain was in no financial position to send troops
to guard the Franco-German borders and rejected the proposal.
Meanwhile the Germans and their new leader Hitler, who had come to
power in January 1933, chose to represent themselves as insulted by the
French. By October that year Germany had withdrawn from the
Disarmament Conference and left the League of Nations.
Adolf Hitler had been elected on a very clear programme: to destroy the
humiliation of Versailles and to reclaim the land removed from Germany.
In his book Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), he had openly described his plans
to exterminate races he believed were either evil like the Jews or stupid like
the Slavs. He outlined a policy of occupying territory in the east to give the
superior German race living space, or Lebensraum. But at the time the
book was written in the 1920s no one could take Mein Kampf seriously.
Hitler was then a would-be painter and political activist who had been
imprisoned for a failed coup in Munich. Yet only a few days after he took
over as chancellor he had removed civil liberties for Jewish people, and two
years later racist laws were in place forbidding Jewish people to marry non-
Jews; by 1938 half the Jewish population of Germany had left in despair.
Hitler’s actions effectively destroyed the principle of collective security
based on disarming to the lowest point, but its enthusiasts refused to accept
that. For the rest of the decade Winston Churchill was one of the strongest
voices urging action against Nazi Germany. As early as April 1933, he
warned Parliament, ‘One of the things which we were told after the Great
War would be a security for us was that Germany would be a democracy
with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have
dictatorship, most grim dictatorship.’ If Germany was allowed to rearm,
he said, she would soon snatch back her lost territories — territories which
bands of unemployed German youths were aggressively campaigning for,
‘singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army,
eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die
for their fatherland’. Churchill believed that MacDonald’s ideas, for all
their nobility, were a load of hot air, that while he talked of Britain
dropping four air-force divisions, European factories were filling with
arms. ‘I cannot recall any time when the gap between the kind of words
statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so
great as it is now,” he told the Commons.

691
e,
 WINDSOR

After Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference the

government acknowledged to some extent that the ideas of disarmament
and reduction of armaments to the lowest point were no longer viable. In
1934 a new air-defence programme was announced, increasing the RAF by
forty-one squadrons, and the following year the government published a
White Paper which recognized the need for greater military provision.
Nevertheless, at a popular level disarmament went on being the remedy for
the world’s ills. There was a general reluctance to contemplate the
possibility of war. Moreover the British government, like many Britons,
felt that Germany had been treated too harshly and was sympathetic to
Hitler’s revision of Versailles. For that reason, nothing happened in 1935
when Hitler told the world that he had created an air force, or when he
started military conscription again to add another thirty-six divisions to his
army. The British had thought they had protected themselves by signing a
treaty with Hitler that limited the German navy to 35 per cent the size of
the British, and submarine strength to 45 per cent.
At the same time, neither the British nor the French wanted to alienate
Mussolini, the Italian leader. In April 1935, at the Stresa Conference called
specifically to discuss Hitler’s announcement that Germany would no
longer be bound by the arms limitations of Versailles, Britain, France and
Italy sought agreement on forming a common front against German
rearmament. Nevertheless Mussolini had more in common with Hitler as
a fellow dictator whose regime was based on violence than with the
western democracies of France and Britain.
Despite joining the Stresa Front in October that year Italy, which had
been very disappointed by the territories she had gained in the peace
treaties, flouted the precepts of the League of Nations and invaded Ethiopia
in pursuit of her dream of a north African empire. Reluctantly, because she
still wanted Mussolini as an ally, Britain along with the rest of the League
imposed sanctions on Italy. But the Italian forces did not withdraw.
The French and British governments now behaved very curiously: they
decided to ignore the League of Nations and make a deal with Mussolini.
By the secret Hoare—Laval Pact, signed by the British foreign secretary
Samuel Hoare and the French prime minister Pierre Laval, they offered
Italy a partition plan that gave her two-thirds of Ethiopia. In December the
agreement leaked out and aroused such anger in Britain that Hoare had to
resign. Italy nevertheless remained in possession of most of Ethiopia. The
Anglo-French policy of appeasement, of allowing dictators to take chunks
of territory at will in preference to fighting a war, had begun to take shape.
MacDonald the idealist grew too ill to remain in office and at the general
election in November 1935 Baldwin became prime minister, his National
Government winning a majority of 245. The public-school-educated

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barrister Clement Attlee had been elected to lead the Labour party, which,
though it remained out of office, now had 154 seats in Parliament, a gain
of one hundred.
Having seen that nothing had happened to Mussolini over Ethiopia, on
7 March 1936 Hitler moved his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland,
proclaiming that Germany would no longer abide by the peace treaties.
Versailles was at last visibly dead in the water. France was devastated by
this move. The buffer between her and Germany had been removed, and
she was left staring at a militarized frontier with Germany that now
bristled with soldiers.
But Britain, France’s ally, did not share her fears. British ministers were
distracted by the many other issues demanding their attention which
seemed just as important as containing the European dictators. In
Mandated Palestine, British troops were required in greater numbers
because of clashes between the indigenous Arabs and Jewish settlers. As the
decade went on, growing numbers of Jewish refugees fled there from
Germany, though a 1930 government White Paper on Palestine empha-
sized the resulting plight of the Arabs. It warned of the possibility that they
might be swamped by a Jewish majority if there was not a temporary end
to Jewish immigration.
But the real issue preoccupying British statesmen and British newspapers
was India. In 1931 the architect Edwin Lutyens completed his masterpiece,
the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, little knowing that it was only to be
used for another sixteen years. All kinds of excuses continued to be found
for preventing India from obtaining independence or even reaching
Dominion status. There was now an articulate party called the Muslim
League under Mohammed Jinnah, who like Gandhi was a lawyer. Jinnah
was beginning to call for the partition of India to surmount the racial
hatred between Muslims and Hindus.
With the great business of India linking so many members of the British
middle classes, the subject of Indian independence obsessed Britain in the
1930s. Generations of Britons had been Indian civil servants, tea-brokers,
planters and district commissioners; they were incensed at the way their
businesses were being ruined by Gandhi’s boycott of British goods.
By 1927, with Congress refusing to recognize the provincial legislatures
because they would be satisfied with nothing less than full responsible
government, Indian discontent produced a new Parliamentary Commission.
Members of all three British political parties were sent to India to
investigate her grievances. Though it was headed by the distinguished
Liberal Sir John Simon, former attorney-general and home secretary, it did
not contain a single Indian member. The viceroy Lord Irwin, the future
Lord Halifax, who had become friendly with Gandhi, had already stated

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in 1929 that Dominion status was the ultimate goal of the British govern-
ment for India. But this was not good enough for the militant Indian
politicians, nor did the Simon Commission promise it when the report was
published in 1930.
Neither did the Government of India Act of 1935. This act was brought
in when it was at last acknowledged that talks with Gandhi were the only
solution, after 100,000 people had been imprisoned for taking part in his
civil disobedience campaigns. It created a federal structure so that the
national administration could reflect the diversity of the provinces within
the country, an arrangement which the Indian princely state rulers led by
the Maharajah of Bikaner agreed to participate in. But, although this gave
responsible self-government to the provinces, it still was not the self-
government of a Dominion. At national level despite a federal legislature
to which Cabinet ministers were responsible, the ultimate say on foreign
affairs, defence and religion continued to lie with the viceroy. The new
constitution was considered not to have taken into consideration properly
the rights of the Muslims and to have given too much power to the Indian
princes. It had nonetheless just begun to be implemented when the Second
World War broke out.
The Cambridge don E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which high-
lighted the uneasy relationship between the British and their colonial
subjects, was published in 1924, and soon reached classic status in Britain.
Nevertheless complacency was an overwhelming characteristic of the
empire in the 1930s. This was partly because the empire and British
influence seemed as prevalent as ever. A treaty of 1936 put an end to the
occupation of Egypt, but British troops still guarded the Suez Canal, and
there was a clause allowing Britain to reoccupy the country in the event of
any threat to her interests.
British businessmen, officials, civil servants and advisers continued
knocking around in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and other famous British
expat haunts. Shrewd deals made in the nineteenth century ensured that
the empire still controlled parts of the Gulf States, such as Kuwait whose
foreign policy was run by Britain until 1961. To the growing number of
Arab nationalists in the Middle East, nothing much seemed to have
changed. When in 1924 the warlike Wahhabi tribe under their leader Ibn
Saud pushed the sharif Hussein out of Mecca, uniting the whole of Arabia
under what would become the Saudi royal family, they negotiated their
borders with the British.
Though Iraq was no longer a Mandate after 1932, rebelling Iraqi
tribesmen were still strafed by British aeroplanes. The Brooke dynasty of
white rajahs continued to rule Sarawak, a state in Malaysia on the island
of Borneo, as they had done for nearly a century. The Malaysian rubber

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planters, as was candidly observed by the novelist Somerset Maugham,

whiled away their time with chota pegs brought to them by natives they
called ‘boys’, as if nothing would ever disturb the empire. Few of them
took much notice that Britain was no longer absolutely assured of being
able to defend the far eastern parts of the empire like Singapore and
Malaya, whose rubber in the age of the motor car had become very alluring
to the Japanese.
In Britain life went on much as usual. The publisher Victor Gollancz had
started the Left Book Club in 1935, a vehicle for attacking fascism and
promoting left-wing ideas which two years later had half a million
subscribers. Gollancz and his supporters wanted to wake Britain up to the
fact that in Italy fascism had destroyed free speech and imprisoned its
opponents, while in Germany it had become a daily occurrence for Jews to
be beaten up, robbed and sometimes killed. Yet the British and their
government attempted to ignore what was going on in Europe. Britain
continued to be a predictable, mainly tranquil land where all classes were
passionate about games. Too many of her people were shutting their eyes
to the impending cataclysm of world war.

695
 Edward VIII (1936)
George VI (1936-1952)

The Failure of Appeasement (1936-1939)

Stanley Baldwin was a reassuring leader of a country whose people were
longing for stability and the nostalgic sort of England which they
remembered from before 1914. The dreamlike calm in which Britain
existed between the wars was only briefly disrupted by the Abdication
Crisis. In 1936, the year after Baldwin became prime minister, the popular
king George V died. He and his wife, the redoubtable Queen Mary, had
stored up a great deal of affection for the monarchy (George V had even
nobly forsworn alcohol as part of the war effort), as was seen during the
celebrations of their Silver Jubilee in May 1935.
But their son, the new king, Edward VIII, a handsome, weak-willed
man-about-town, was quite unlike them. Showing none of the attentive-
ness to duty characteristic of the British royal family, frivolous and
pleasure-loving, he was famed for his mistresses and his hedonistic way of
life at Fort Belvedere, his country house. He had a soft-hearted and
emotional side, however, and had earned some popularity by speaking out
about the unemployed and about miners’ conditions in Wales during the
depression. But the bulk of his time was spent playing among the
fashionable London fast set. He became enamoured of a hard-bitten,
twice-married American named Mrs Simpson, who could not have
adorned the throne and might in fact have endangered it. As the head of
the Church of England, despite the anomaly that its founder Henry VIII
had been married many times, the king, it was felt, could not be married to
a divorcee. It was also believed that such an unsuitable marriage might be
the last straw for the already fragile empire and Dominions, which were
united by the crown.
Somehow, guided by Stanley Baldwin, Edward VIII had enough sense of
his royal duty to abdicate, ‘for the sake of the woman I love’, as he put it
dramatically in a speech broadcast to the world by the BBC. Edward took
the title Duke of Windsor and retired to France. His younger brother the
Duke of York, whose daughters were the ten-year-old Princess Elizabeth
and the six-year-old Princess Margaret Rose, became King George VI. The

696
 1936-1939
Duchess of York, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, became Queen
Elizabeth. Thanks to Baldwin, the country and the throne survived tremors
which could not have been less welcome. For the international situation
had suddenly taken a turn for the worst.
Nazism seemed to win international respectability when the 1936
Olympic Games were held in Berlin, a venue arranged two years before the
Nazis came to power. The Olympic stadium was tarnished by being draped
with swastikas, and the Olympic experience by being associated with the
Nazis, who used the Games to hand out leaflets about the superiority of
the Aryan (non-Jewish German) race. But though the Germans won the
largest number of medals, their racist propaganda was exposed for
nonsense when the black American Jesse Owens won four gold medals.
The impression that Nazism was socially acceptable was enhanced the
following year when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Germany
to meet Hitler.
Despite Baldwin’s kindness as a man, his readiness to respect views other
than his own and his gifts as a Parliamentarian, his weakness as a prime
minister was that he was not really interested in foreign affairs. Britain in
the late 1930s with her slightly parochial air, reminds one of a jolly ocean-
liner heading comfortably towards catastrophe. With its red telephone
boxes (first seen in 1929), its red buses, its men in bowler hats, London was
as orderly and safe as it had always been. And no real extremists flourished
to either the right or the left despite the turmoil on the continent.
Few Britons joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists,
created in 1932 in response to what Mosley called the communist threat.
He used his claim that Jews were behind the Russian Revolution as an
excuse to unleash his own brutal quasi-military gang, the Blackshirts, on
innocent Jewish people. The Blackshirts used to march through the East
End of London where many Jewish people then lived and beat them up.
That same year Parliament passed the Public Order Act which gave the
home secretary the power to stop marches and banned the wearing of
political uniforms. But like everything to do with Britain, for good or bad,
it was felt that the home secretary could have moved a lot more quickly to
stop Mosley than he had done. The tolerance traditional in Britain, where
communism could attract intellectual sympathy but not inspire a large
political party, allowed most people to think of Mosley as little more than
a foolish man. He was permitted to carry on with his BUF rallies — he was
knocked unconscious at one in Liverpool in 1937 — and was not interned
until May 1940, nine months after war had broken out (he was released in
November 1943).
However, to the young and intellectual, Britain’s pragmatic indifference
to extremism in foreign countries where it did not threaten her interests

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smacked of moral cowardice, of passing by on the other side. The Spanish

Civil War, which broke out in 1936, was a case in point. Many believed
that Britain should have done more to prevent the republican Spanish
government being destroyed by right-wing forces under General Franco.
The lack of support the republicans received from the liberal powers of
Europe such as Britain and France drove brave young men from those
countries and America, alarmed by the apparently unstoppable spread of
fascism, to go out to Spain to help the republicans. But Baldwin and
Chamberlain stuck to the view that it would be wrong to intervene in a
civil war.
They also did not want to antagonize Italy, which they still wished to
wean away from Germany, even though the two countries had combined
to form an alliance called the Axis — and the Axis powers supported the
right-wing side in the Spanish Civil War, while Soviet Russia armed the
legitimate government.
Baldwin retired in 1937, having seen George VI safely on to the throne
and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor off to permanent exile abroad.
Neville Chamberlain took over as prime minister. He was a good, decent
man, the author of much progressive social legislation. But he faced a very
difficult international situation, which had given rise to the widespread
belief that to oppose the dictator Hitler would plunge Britain into war.
Chamberlain shared that belief, and as a result became associated with
what after the Second World War would be regarded as the craven policy
of appeasement. There was in fact little else Britain could do at a time when
she was so weak militarily.
In the late 1930s the international situation began to spiral out of
control. Even southern Ireland turned up the heat. By 1933 De Valera’s
Fianna Fail had become the majority party, and immediately set about
unilaterally dismantling Ireland’s relationship with the British Empire and
jettisoning the old constitution of the Irish Free State. Relations between
Britain and Eire (Fianna Fail’s new name for southern Ireland) became
even more bitter: De Valera repudiated the £100 million lent by the British
government after the 1903 Irish Land Act which had enabled tenant
farmers to buy more than nine million acres from their landlords, and a
trade war began between the two countries. By 1937 Eire, in every way but
name, was an independent republic. In 1949 that final detail was remedied
and the Republic of Ireland was formally declared. She announced her
neutrality at the outbreak of the Second World War but would not let
Britain use her southern ports, thus endangering Britain’s security.
Ever since Germany had broken the terms of the Versailles treaty, the
danger she posed to international peace was all too evident to far-sighted
people like Winston Churchill and an increasing number of Labour and
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 1936-1939
Conservative MPs. They believed that Britain should spend more on
rearming and should stand up to the dictators who were destroying
democracy in Europe by threatening to fight them if necessary. But the
national government was still in power in London and its leaders still held
to appeasement. They shrank from plunging Britain into another world
war when she had scarcely got over the dislocation caused by the first.
In 1937 Lord Halifax was sent to discuss treaty revision in central
Europe with Hitler. To the dismay of his critics, Chamberlain a year later
made a more dramatic move to separate Mussolini from Hitler: the British
government accepted Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia by recognizing the
King of Italy as its Emperor. But the foreign secretary Anthony Eden who
had become convinced that this level of appeasement was a mistake,
believed the price was too high and resigned in February 1938.
In March Hitler drastically began to reinvent the German Empire. A
German army went into Austria in March 1938 and joined her to the Third
Reich, or Third Empire. Welcomed by most Austrians, the ‘Anschluss’ had
been expressly forbidden by Versailles, yet not a soul stirred to prevent it.
The Nazi government had been confident that nothing would happen,
because reports from its ambassador to London Joachim von Ribbentrop
had assessed the British upper classes as being pro-German, mainly on the
evidence of the appeasers he met at Nancy Astor’s home, the so-called
Cliveden Set. One of them, the editor of The Times Geoffrey Dawson,
wrote his paper’s pro-German editorials. Sir Oswald Mosley, whose
admiration for the Nazis was so great that he would be married to his
second wife Diana Mitford at Goebbels’ house in Berlin, continued to be
received by much of upper-class London society.
Hitler had only just begun. The German government, whose presses
were pouring forth directives describing what the new German Empire
demanded from its citizens, started churning out propaganda about the
plight of the three million Sudeten Deutsch (or Germans) who lived in
former Habsbuig territory which the 1919 Treaty of St Germain had given
to the new state of Czechoslovakia. It was quite obvious that
Czechoslovakia was Hitler’s next target, and in September he duly gave her
an ultimatum. America’s failure to guarantee the peace had driven France
to make alliances on Germany’s borders to protect herself more
thoroughly. By the terms of one of these treaties she was bound to come to
Czechoslovakia’s aid. This meant war.
It was a war for which Britain was simply not ready. Moreover, since
Europe was devoted to the right of self-determination there did seem to be
good reason for the Sudetenland to be joined to Germany. Neville
Chamberlain, who had had two earlier meetings with Hitler at
Berchtesgaden and Godesberg, and had been persuaded that the Sudeten

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fst

Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich, 30 September 1938, waving the bit of
paper which, he claimed, granted Britain ‘peace in our time’ by allowing Hitler to
take Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

Germans had a point, flew to Munich to negotiate with the Fuhrer. At the
Munich conference attended by the French prime minister Edouard
Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain, it was agreed that Germany
would take over the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain
returned clutching a piece of paper and saying in what would become a
notorious phrase that he had achieved ‘peace in our time’. Duff Cooper,
the first lord of the Admiralty, resigned in protest at the betrayal of
Czechoslovakia.
Nothing could have been less true than Chamberlain’s belief that he had
achieved peace for his time. He had bought a breathing space by throwing
Czechoslovakia into the mouth of the wolf. And, as the clearest sign that
appeasement did not work, Germany’s military position became still more
formidable once her tanks had rolled into the Sudetenland and
appropriated forty divisions of the Czech army and most of the country’s
natural defences.
Whatever Chamberlain’s feeling that it was ‘horrible, fantastic and
incredible . . . that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks
here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom
we know nothing’, it was becoming clear that even Britain could not
insulate herself from Hitler’s activities. By March 1939 the Fithrer had
broken his word to Chamberlain and seized the rest of Czechoslovakia,

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the non-German Czech part — her steel mills, her industries and her
population. All Chamberlain had bought was time, a year, for Britain to
rearm and create an air force able to take on the Luftwaffe. Even he now
saw that his policy of appeasing dictators had failed. Reluctantly Britain
began to prepare herself for war. Appeasement formally came to an end on
31 March 1939 when guarantees of her territorial integrity were offered to
Poland by France and Britain. Soon afterwards similar guarantees were
granted to Romania and Greece.
Conscription, which even at the height of the First World War had
appeared such an ethical problem and a threat to Britain’s civil liberties,
was introduced without prior discussion or much protest on 29 April, its
first appearance in peacetime. The menace of Hitler, who had grabbed one
country after another, made most Britons accept the need to begin military
training. Once again Britain, which had been on distant terms with her
First World War ally for too long, co-ordinated military secrets with the
French.
Hitler had no fear of their preparations. Since 1936, if not before, many
ordinary German factories had been turned over to manufacturing a huge
arsenal for the drive to the east to recapture all the cities wrongfully given
to Poland in 1919. That summer, more strenuously than ever, the German
press pounded out demands to get Danzig and the Polish Corridor back
where they ‘rightfully’ belonged. The only country which might prevent
this was Soviet Russia. France and Britain now found themselves in a race
with Germany to obtain an alliance with her new ruler Stalin.
But the dictator Stalin had not been impressed by the western powers’
sacrifice of Czechoslovakia to save their skins, and Poland — with painful
memories of her old ruler’s savagery — refused to allow any of Russia’s
troops on to her soil.
On 23 August 1939, to the despair of the liberal western powers the
German-—Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was announced. It contained a secret
agreement that Germany and Russia would divide Poland between them.
Chamberlain warned Hitler that Britain would support Poland if she were
attacked, and that pledge finally became an official Anglo-Polish Treaty on
25 August. But Hitler had obtained the go-ahead he needed. On the first
day of September Nazi tanks supported by dive-bombers invaded Poland,
spreading terror wherever they went. Two days later Britain and France
declared war on Nazi Germany. The Second World War had begun.

7O1
 WINDSOR

The Second World War (1939-1945)

For the inhabitants of Britain, the Second World War began in a strangely
hesitant way. A couple of thousand miles away, in the middle of the
continental landmass, palls of smoke hung over the bombed-out cities of
Poland. By the end of September 1939, more than 80,000 Polish soldiers
had abandoned their homeland to avoid joining the 700,000 prisoners
taken by the Germans and their allies, the Russians, who invaded Poland
from the east that same month. But in Britain, Poland’s ally, all was as
quiet and peaceful as if she were not at war.
An army was created for Britain’s defence, a Home Guard called the
Local Defence Volunteers, and 146,000 men enlisted that summer. They
were mainly Great War veterans, allowing young men to fight abroad. But,
for all the noise of air-raid warnings, and the inconvenience of the black-
out which put an end to street lighting and doubled road accidents, no
enemy planes flew over Britain. The East End had been evacuated of half
its children, many of whom were billeted in distant Cornwall to keep them
out of harm’s way when the Luftwaffe bombed the London Docks. But it
never happened. After a few months the evacuee children went home
again. No British or French soldiers fired a shot against the Nazis. In
disgust, American newspaper correspondents called this period the
‘Phoney War’ and wondered what the two governments were up to. Would
Britain and France in the end betray Poland as they had betrayed
Czechoslovakia, and accept a peace offer?
In late 1939 the whiff of Munich continued to hang over the British
government as a result of Chamberlain’s delay in declaring war on
Germany. While the civilized world watched with fascinated horror the
newsreels which recorded the onrush of the German tanks through Poland,
for two days the British government did nothing. It seemed an extra-
ordinary hesitation; in fact it was a sensible hesitation reflecting the fact
that Britain was in no position to wage war against anyone, let alone miles
away in Poland. Nevertheless Britain was bound by her August Treaty to
declare war immediately on Hitler, and it looked like cowardice that she
had not done so.
Forty-eight hours after the attack on Poland, Prime Méinister
Chamberlain had announced to the House of Commons that if the German
government withdrew its forces as far as the British government was
concerned the situation could revert to peace as before! He was hoping
that the Poles would offer Hitler Danzig to save England from war.
Chamberlain still thought, even then, that he could bargain with Hitler. It
took the threatened resignation of half the Cabinet to force Chamberlain to
his senses as midnight approached. Earlier that evening, amid angry scenes
in the House of Commons, the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood

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had remonstrated with Chamberlain about ‘imperilling the very founda-
tions of our national honour’. ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ came the shout
from the angry Conservative backbenches when he stood up.
The next morning, 3 September, the ultimatum Chamberlain had been
made to give Germany expired. But though Britain and France were bound
to come to Poland’s aid, their war on her behalf would take place in a
different arena. This was not immediately understood by those who were
anxious to make up for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. But the speed of
Germany’s campaign, as her forces unveiled her new method of warfare,
the Blitzkrieg or lightning strike—with tanks advancing a hundred miles a
day, in tandem with screaming dive-bombers — saw her overrun Poland in
two weeks. Though the Poles were brave fighters and superb airmen, their
equipment — they still deployed a prized cavalry division — was old
fashioned and swiftly annihilated.
Many people publicly urged that British bombers should cover a French
attack on Germany, but the service chiefs would not risk it. Britain did not
have the aircraft to defend herself if she were to attack German troops. The
government’s policy of appeasement had left Britain with too few planes,
and parity with Germany would not be achieved until the spring of 1940.
With only a small professional army in readiness, Britain’s initial response
to the war could only take place at sea, and not in Poland. Her powerful
navy was far larger than Germany’s and would prevent food and fuel from
reaching her. But that was going to be a slow process.
The French army on the other hand was enormous and conspicuously
superb. Consisting of ninety infantry divisions, as opposed to Britain’s ten,
if it had combined with the Polish army at the beginning of September they
would have fielded forty more divisions than the German army. Germany
had only left twenty-three divisions to guard her frontier with France and
they could have been speedily overcome.
But the French army never had a chance to invade Germany from the
rear to take the pressure off the Poles. The French reliance on conscript
armies — that is, on soldiers who held ordinary jobs in peacetime — meant
that the French mobilization in September 1939 took two weeks. During
that time, while Frenchmen left their jobs as lawyers, clerks, hoteliers, and
donned their uniforms, Poland was forced to surrender. Russia entered
Poland on the 17th of that month to complete her swift dismemberment
from the east. Accordingly, the order was given to withdraw the small
number of French troops who had already made a few skirmishes over
Germany’s western frontier. Instead France settled down to defend the
Maginot Line, the defences of trenches, pillboxes and big guns that ran
along her frontier with Germany. The rest of Europe remained neutral, and
peace — other than in Finland, which Russia invaded on the last day of

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 WINDSOR

November to re-establish herself on the Baltic - seemed to reign that

winter.
The question now was where the allies should launch their attack on the
Axis powers. From September onwards Britain and France sent their
aircraft factories into frenzied production. Britain in particular was
remarkably badly prepared for war. Even though the Royal Navy was
hunting German submarines deep beneath the icy northern seas, the
improved facilities required by the naval base at Scapa Flow, including a
better anti-submarine boom, would not be ready until the following year.
In October a German U-boat managed to penetrate the base and sink the
battleship Royal Oak, killing 800 seamen. It would not be until March
1940 that twenty divisions of conscript soldiers would be trained and
ready to cross the Channel to join the British Expeditionary Force, Britain’s
small professional army, in France.
That was one of the penalties of being a peace-loving, unmilitaristic
nation. Britain started the war with one hand tied behind her back. Against
the enormous professional armies of fascist Germany, whose torchlit
parades throughout the 1930s had been a source of amusement to the
irreverent British, was mustered an army of eccentric amateurs. The
Germans also had the munitions and armies of Austria and
Czechoslovakia to call on. On the other hand Britain had France and the
vast resources of the British Empire at her back.
The British armies that fought the Second World War would be even
larger than Kitchener’s armies. By the end of the war, six years later, from
Britain alone five million men would have been called up. But the shadow
of the Great War, which had ended only twenty years before, made Britain
and France in 1939 very reluctant to throw their armies into battle against
the Germans and Russians. The all too recent memory of the trenches,
and of the Somme in particular, had convinced the British forces chiefs
that the war would have to be won in the air. But where was the war to
be fought?
In the spring of 1940 the allies decided to put an end to the German
export, via the Norwegian port of Narvik, of Swedish iron ore that was
crucial for the German war effort, especially in the manufacture of shells,
submarines and tanks. The plan involved laying mines in Norwegian
waters. Meanwhile in vivid broadcasts on the BBC Winston Churchill, first
lord of the Admiralty since 3 September, was advising the neutral states of
Norway, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland to join Britain and
France against Nazism or they would be swallowed up too. ‘Each one
hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last,’
he said. There was of course a second crocodile at work: the Finns’ tiny but
gallant army on skis — ‘white death’ it was called — consisting of only

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twenty-five divisions held down one hundred Russian divisions until 20
March 1940, when it was forced to surrender.
By this time the allied plan to mine Norwegian waters had become
known in Berlin. Thus, in a surprise invasion, German forces landed in
Norway on 9 April, shortly before the British were due to arrive. Backed
by the Luftwaffe, they captured the capital Oslo and all Norway’s main
ports and airfields in only a few hours. On the very same day German tank
regiments moved north across the German border to capture Copenhagen
and overrun Denmark. British forces were soon landed in Norway, but her
main ports remained securely in German hands. After moving out of Oslo
to rally the country with radio messages broadcast from a secret mountain
village, the King of Norway reluctantly agreed to evacuate. He left his
country at the beginning of June 1940, ona ship bound for Britain with the
last of the British soldiers.
His departure had been precipitated by news from the south which
ruined all hope of saving Norway as allied territory. On to May, as
guerrilla fighting continued in the icy fjords, German armies invaded
neutral Holland and Belgium. At dawn, as in Norway, parachutists
attacked Holland’s two principal cities, Rotterdam and the Hague,
capturing all their bridges before the Dutch could blow them up. By the
15th the Dutch had surrendered. A few hundred miles south-west Belgium
was also fighting for her life, assisted by the British Expeditionary Force
which had rushed to her aid from France. In another deadly surprise, only
seventy-eight German parachute engineers were needed to capture the fort
guarding the Albert Canal. Further airborne invaders prevented other
crucial bridges being destroyed. Belgium too was soon overwhelmed. But
this was just the prelude to Hitler’s main objective, the capture of
Belgium’s vast neighbour France. For his ultimate game plane was to
control France’s Atlantic ports, and, after he had captured European
Russia, to be prepared for the war between America and the future
German empire, which he was convinced would one day take place.
While the French army and the whole of the British Expeditionary Force
were rushing north-east to defend Belgium, to the south, unbeknown to
them, German armies were invading France. German tanks were plunging
through the thick woods of the Ardennes into France just above
Luxembourg where the defensive Maginot Line came to an end. This
weakness in the French border defences had been noted before the war by
British strategists with some dismay. But the French military always
reassured them that they considered the hilly, forested terrain of the
Ardennes quite impassable by tanks. The Ardennes were therefore in no
need of any great defence forces since they were a natural barrier in
themselves.

Linge)
 WINDSOR

The leader of the Panzer division which ploughed through the Ardennes
was a man named Heinz Guderian who before the war had become
fascinated by tank warfare. The British army had been leaders in the field
and their experiments had been closely followed by Guderian. Not only
was he convinced that tanks could be used like battering rams in wooded
terrain, he had also become a master of strategy. His theory was that
victory could be achieved by what the military historian Sir Basil Liddell
Hart called ‘deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces’
involving ‘a long-range tank drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing
army far behind its front’. Guderian would do just that to the allied armies.
The crucial point of the operation was to get the tanks across the River
Meuse before the French realized what was happening. On 13 May at a
point just west of the scene of another major French defeat, Sedan, German
infantry crossed the river in rubber boats, attended once more by
screaming bombers. As the French troops on the other side of the river
were rounded up, pontoon bridges were constructed, over which soon
trundled a stream of German tanks. While French attention was still
focused on sending help to Belgium, the Panzer division began sweeping
west to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. They took
Abbeville on the Somme, and then, having reached the coast, occupied
Boulogne and Calais. They were now within fifteen miles of Dunkirk, just
by the French border with Belgium — the only port from which the trapped
British army could escape. But amazingly the German tanks went no
further, because Hitler gave the order to halt. Although this is sometimes
called Hitler’s first mistake (his second was to invade Russia), he was
following the advice of one of his senior commanders in France, General
Gerd von Rundstedt, who wanted to preserve his tanks for the south, and
that of Goring, who believed that the Luftwaffe would be sufficient to wipe
out the British. Had the German army not stopped, the entire British
Expeditionary Force would have been killed or captured. As it was it had
to leave all its heavy artillery and tanks behind in France to be seized by the
Germans.
The order to evacuate the British army from Dunkirk was given against
the protests of the French. But it was evident that the British had to get out
or be captured. On 26 May the mass evacuation began. In what became
known as ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’, between 850 and 950 ordinary boats
responded to the government’s SOS and, organized by the Admiralty,
rushed to France to help evacuate the army. They included cross-Channel
boats, holiday steamers, hopper barges from the London County Councils,
and nine tugs which towed barges behind them, as well as yachts, lifeboats
and other private small craft. As the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed them,
the exhausted soldiers waded through water up to their waists to get out

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to the hundreds of boats bobbing in the Channel. Some 224,000 British
troops were retrieved from France and 95,000 French. Despite the
murderous attacks by the Luftwaffe, thanks to the Royal Air Force and the
weather, only 2,000 men died during the brilliantly executed evacuation.
On 9 June, as the Germans swept through France, her army crumbled
and her government fled Paris for Tours. Meanwhile Mussolini, scenting
spoils and a way to expand the Italian Empire, announced on the roth that
Italy (which had remained neutral until then) had entered the war on
Hitler’s side. On the 14th German troops goosestepped through the French
capital, and two days later the French government asked for an armistice.
It was granted on the 2oth in the same place, Compiégne, and in the same
railway carriage where the armistice of just over twenty years before had
ended the First World War. The German revenge for Versailles seemed
complete. When Churchill, who had just become prime minister in a
turnabout for both his and Britain’s fortunes, heard the news of France’s
defeat by the Nazis, he wept.
With the tragedy of the fall of France, the offshore islands of Great
Britain were facing a hostile coastline of 2,000 miles. The most likely
prospect was that she would be the next to be overrun by a regime which
tortured and murdered anyone who got in its way or displeased it. Hitler
assumed that Britain would make a separate peace, as the US ambassador
to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, had predicted.
But Hitler had mistaken her nature. Ever since the invasion of Holland
and Belgium, Britain had been led by a man who for a decade had been
warning the world about the need to resist the evils of Nazism. During the
Second World War Winston Churchill’s superhuman energies could be
used to the full. At last a real fighting spirit had become prime minister,
ready to remind the British that this war was not ‘a question of fighting for
Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the world from the
pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man.’
Had Chamberlain remained prime minister, it is possible that Britain
would have given in; certainly some of the Cabinet had thoughts of a
negotiated peace. With German planes and boats on the north coast of
France and the whole of northern and western Europe overrun by German
armies, logic would suggest that a country which was so highly dependent
on imports for food should simply do a deal. Italy’s entry into the war
guaranteed that at any moment the tiny British armies in Egypt (36,000
men) and the Sudan (9,000) would be confronted by 200,000 invading
Italians from their north African empire.
Nevertheless there were still the Dominions and colonies and their
manpower ranged round the world, all of which had declared that they
would support the empire. Many exiled governments, including those of

GOL
 WINDSOR

Norway, Holland and Belgium, found refuge in Britain; their fellow

countrymen would start resistance movements from within their occupied
countries. Moreover Churchill, who began negotiating with the US
president Franklin D. Roosevelt almost immediately for matériel and
above all credit, was hopeful that one day America would join the war.
Ever since Churchill had taken over the government on to May, the
same day that the German invaders parachuted into Holland and Belgium,
a new spirit had been infused into England. The acute national danger and
the collapse of the Norwegian campaign made the House of Commons
realize that it could no longer put up with Chamberlain’s well-intentioned
muddling. Now Britain had Churchill, an extraordinary public speaker
and her most inspirational wartime prime minister. As he would so
stirringly broadcast to the nation on 4 June 1940 after Dunkirk, Britain
would never give in: ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we
shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall
never surrender.’ What has been called the bulldog spirit, a grip that
refuses to let go even in its death throes, was epitomized in this
magnificent, short, fat, bald Englishman. Although his generals often
found him maddening, owing to his love of amateur strategy, Churchill’s
inventiveness, his refusal to accept defeat, above all his extraordinary
eloquence roused the British people in their country’s darkest hour. He said
on his appointment, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and
sweat’, but it was enough. In his siren suit, cigar clamped in his teeth,
fingers in a V-sign for victory, he represented hope.
In the mid-1930s Churchill’s reputation had suffered as a result of his
opposition to Indian self-rule and his support for Edward VIII. He was not
popular among the Conservative grass roots thanks to his habit of
changing parties. But in the Second World War his being above party was
a huge asset. He immediately created a coalition ministry, bringing in four
Labour ministers (Attlee was Lord Privy Seal) and one Liberal, as it was
important to draw the nation together during such a crisis. While Churchill
was orchestrating all parts of the war effort with the sort of bravura Lloyd
George had shown in the First World War, Labour was left in charge of
home affairs and began drawing up plans for social reform. Churchill was
more of an official war leader than Lloyd George had been, he was less of
an intriguer and he had better relations with the armed services. Moreover,
by assuming the title minister of defence in May 1940, he had operational
command of the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet.
One of Churchill’s most important appointments was the flamboyant
Canadian newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft
production. Under the tycoon’s influence, production of aircraft increased
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threefold, though a shortage of trained pilots would prove a serious
problem. The manufacture of arms also had to be dramatically increased
after Dunkirk. If the Germans had landed in Great Britain at any time in
the month after the fall of France the British would not have had the
munitions to defeat them.
Seeking refuge in London was General Charles de Gaulle, a distin-
guished soldier who had escaped from France to carry on the struggle
abroad. He made himself what he called the leader of the Free French
forces and was thus a potential leader for all the French colonies. What was
left of the Third Republic was a rump French state centred at Vichy in the
south ruled’by Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun in the First World War.
The rest of France was occupied by the Germans. Many of the French felt
betrayed by Britain. They believed that she could have lent them more
fighter planes before the fall of France. And they were furious when, to
prevent it being used by the Germans, the British navy sank the French
Mediterranean Fleet at Mers El Kebir in July 1940 and killed 1,300 French
seamen.
Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, had refused to yield
to the French pleas for aircraft because he had carefully calculated the
number of planes needed to defend Britain. The Battle of Britain, which
began about ten days after Churchill rejected a separate peace with
Germany in August, was, to borrow from the Duke of Wellington, ‘the
nearest run thing’. Like Waterloo it resulted in a decisive victory for
Britain.
When it was made very clear by the eloquent roar of Winston Churchill
in August 1940 that Britain was continuing the war on her own against
Nazism, Hitler decided to invade. This was Operation Sealion. All French
Channel and southern North Sea ports from the River Scheldt to Boulogne
became choked with invasion barges containing grey-uniformed soldiers
waiting for the Luftwaffe to soften Britain up first. People began to fear
that, as in the cest of western Europe, stormtroopers would soon be
overrunning Britain. The Germans had occupied the Channel Islands on 30
June and established a concentration camp on Alderney. The Churchill
government announced that Britain was about to be invaded. But first the
Germans would have to dispose of the Royal Navy guarding the Channel
— and those warships were protected by the Royal Air Force.
The Battle of Britain opened on 13 August 1940. That day the Luftwaffe
made 1,485 sorties over Britain’s south-eastern airfields. Day after day
they flew in over Kent and Sussex dropping their deadly loads. Fortunately
their effectiveness was greatly impaired by the secret use of radar, invented
by Sir Robert Watson-Watt and developed by British research scientists
between the wars. Radar stations set up at intervals all over the south and

IF
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east coast of England from 1936 onward gave early warning of

approaching planes, enabling RAF fighter pilots to rush to their machines
and meet the foe in the air. On 15 August the RAF conclusively defeated a
massive force of almost 1,800 German aircraft which could have wiped out
the fighter aircraft which had been allowed for to defend southern
England. The battle over the skies of England that hot August day was
crucial in averting the invasion.
Nevertheless, if the German planes had continued to bomb the fighter
airfields and aircraft factories, they probably would have done for the
British in the end. But Hitler and the Luftwaffe leader Hermann Goring
were infuriated when the RAF dropped bombs on Berlin in retaliation for
the Germans mistakenly bombing London. Instead of continuing the
assault on the airfields they ordered the attacks on London known as the
Blitz. On 7 September, to the surprise of Londoners 900 German aircraft
(300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters) roared overhead in broad daylight
at about 4.30 in the afternoon, flying from the east in tight formation up
the line of the Thames. Having bombed the Docks, they turned over central
London and, like a monstrous flock of geese, flew back over the East End
and down over southern England to France again. Then, at about 8.30 that
evening, the night bombing began. Wave after wave of bombers came over
until 4.30 in the morning. By then the whole London skyline seemed to be
on fire, and about 2,000 people had been killed or badly injured. The East
End and the Docks were ablaze. Meanwhile from the ground the
searchlights of the anti-aircraft batteries - London’s defences — raked the
sky looking for German planes.
The number of German troop carriers in the Channel was growing daily,
but the risk to Britain was over. Though in September a few church bells
in southern villages were rung as an invasion warning, Germany was being
defeated in the air. The boats in the Channel never disgorged their
ferocious occupants to bring blood and death to England’s quiet beaches.
Although London continued to be bombed for fifty-seven consecutive
nights, by 17 September the Battle of Britain had been won. Hitler was
forced to postpone the invasion of Britain indefinitely, or at least until the
following spring. By then his attention had turned to the conquest of
Russia, and once again, as during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain remained
free against a continental tyrant, a toehold from which the long struggle to
overthrow him could begin.
At a cost of 900 aircraft, young British pilots — aided by gallant Poles
determined to avenge the loss of their homeland — had fought off the
Luftwaffe, downing about 2,000 enemy planes. The Battle of Britain was
the first setback Nazi Germany had encountered anywhere since the war
had begun a year before. Churchill would sum up the national mood in his

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tribute to the airmen: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much
owed by so many to so few.’
Even so, with brief respites the night attacks went on until May 194r.
Many Londoners made use of the Tube network to take shelter until the
all-clear was sounded; an official count on 27 September 1940 showed that
177,000 men, women and children spent that night sleeping in the
Underground stations. Between September 1940 and May 1941 some
18,800 tons of bombs fell on London. But London was not alone. There
were Blitzes on other cities. A thousand people were killed in Coventry on
14-15 November. There was heavy bombing of Birmingham on 29
November, and of Liverpool that same night and in early May 1941.
Southampton and Plymouth were bombed on 30 November 1940; Bristol
on 2 December, Manchester on 22 December; Glasgow on 18-19 March
1941, Belfast on four nights in April and two in May. Between 23 April
and 6 June 1942 there were the so-called Baedeker raids on cities of
historic interest in revenge for attacks on Liibeck; in these raids Exeter,
Bath, York, Norwich and Canterbury suffered.
But Great Britain did not have just herself to defend. She had her Middle
Eastern interests to consider, particularly Egypt and the route to India. The
British stopped a pro-Axis group against the Iraqi regent in May 1941, and
in an operation from Palestine with the help of Australian, Indian, British
and Free French troops overran Syria and the Lebanon, where the Vichy-
controlled administration was replaced by the Free French. The Italian
troops in north Africa made a campaign there necessary. Britain also
wanted to encourage any neutral states in continental Europe to turn away
from the Axis. From the end of October 1940 there was a window of
opportunity for the allied cause in the Balkans.
Mussolini, who had already seized Albania in May 1939, attempted to
invade Greece in October 1940. Despite that year’s Pact of Steel alliance
between Italy and Germany, Hitler (who had already partially dismembered
Romania to control her oilfields) was challenging Italy’s natural hegemony
in the Balkans, where Mussolini planned to extend his empire. The Greeks
ejected Mussolini’s forces, and by December 1940 they held part of
Albania. A build-up of British troops began in Greece. But German forces
were rushed across the Balkans to rescue the situation, and the window of
opportunity began to close. The following March 50,000 British soldiers
who had been enjoying a series of triumphs in the Western Desert of north
Africa under General O’Connor and had almost succeeded in throwing the
Italians out of north Africa — were suddenly diverted to Greece. In April
Hitler attacked both Greece and Yugoslavia, which had declared against the
Axis after a coup by General Simovi¢. By mid-May it was all over — both
countries were occupied by the Germans.

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The British forces had to be evacuated to Crete, the island at the foot of
the Greek mainland. On 20 May almost 30,000 British, Australian and
New Zealand troops were defeated by another airborne invasion, of
German soldiers. The allied troops had almost no air cover and, though
they fought with great courage, they were evacuated as soon as possible.
Not just north-western but southern Europe were now in German hands.
North Africa, which could have been clear of Italians by early 1941, was
once more a desperate battleground. Because O’Connor had not been able
to finish the job, there had been time for Hitler to ship his most brilliant
general Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps tanks across the
Mediterranean to help out the Italians, just as he had helped them out in
the Balkans. Rommel drove the British out of Cyrenaica east along the
coast and began menacing them in Egypt. Only Ethiopia remained secure.
There British soldiers, Kenyans and other African peoples fought together
to capture 200,000 Italians and restored the emperor Haile Selassie to his
throne.
The Balkans campaign had been a failure for Britain. Yet it had an
unlooked-for but crucial consequence. It delayed Hitler’s invasion of
Russia by six weeks while Germany overran Greece and Yugoslavia. Those
six weeks were the invasion’s undoing, because they ensured that it was not
completed before winter set in. The German army was thus at the mercy of
that powerful Russian ally, General Winter. For by March 1941 Hitler had
begun planning for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion that summer of his
ally Russia. As it had been for that other would-be world conqueror,
Napoleon, Russia was where Hitler's campaign foundered irretrievably.
Curiously enough, the Fihrer’s invasion began on 22 June, the day before
that of Napoleon had started in 1812. Operation Barbarossa put an end to
the threat of invasion for Britain and pegged down German armies for
years.
How did Hitler come to commit such a monumental error, one which
would ultimately lead to his downfall? In fact he had always planned to
invade European Russia and make her part of his empire, but he had
intended to do it around 1943. His real hatred of Bolshevism meant that
the Russo-German alliance was only ever going to be temporary. What
brought the campaign forward was that in 1940 Russia’s occupation of
half of Romania threatened one of Hitler’s most important sources of fuel,
the Romanian oilfields. He could not use those of Iraq and Persia because
they were occupied by the allies. Hitler also had designs on Russia’s own
oilfields in the Caucasus. His distrust of Stalin’s intentions had been
increased by his occupation of the Baltic states Lithuania, Estonia and
Latvia in 1940, arousing the fear that Russia would invade Germany one
day. By Christmas 1940 Hitler had secretly decided on a quick campaign

Fiz
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against Russia to stop Germany being stabbed in the back by her rival, to
be followed by a fight to the finish against England.
But unfortunately for Hitler the British knew his plans. The rescue of the
German code machine, Enigma, early in 1941 from the U-Boat U-r10,
which was on the surface after her crew abandoned ship, enabled British
cryptanalysts to decipher the codes in which messages were sent from the
high command in Berlin to all the German armies. At Bletchley Park in
Oxfordshire, a team of academics, mathematicians and crossword-puzzle
fanatics sat up night and day working out variations on the codes and
listening to German messages being tapped out across Europe. Thanks to
Enigma Britain was able to recover after almost losing what Churchill in
March 1941 called the Battle of the Atlantic. This was the war against
German U-boats which since the occupation of France had threatened
Britain’s supply of food and oil from America. From ports on the French
Atlantic coast, German submarines hunted in what were called wolf-packs
and destroyed hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping.
The British codebreakers had already intercepted information about
Operation Barbarossa passing from Berlin to the German armies in the
east. But when the British government informed the Russians they refused
to believe it. They thought it was a capitalist trick to divide Germany and
Russia. But they were soon to realize it was nothing of the kind. Leaving
only forty-four divisions behind to guard the west, on 22 June German
army divisions advanced over a thousand-mile front between the
Carpathian mountains in the south and the Baltic Sea in the north. Stalin’s
bloody purge of his generals in the late 1930s caused the British
government to underestimate the Russian army’s potential. But Russia had
three times as many tanks as the Germans, a gigantic, deeply patriotic
population and a high command with a careless attitude to soldiers’ lives.
Her roads were another secret weapon: they were so hopelessly bad that
they prevented any invader getting very far. Unlike the level, tarmacked
motorways of Holland, Belgium and France which had been a boon to
German tanks, at a touch of rain the sandy Russian roads turned to mud.
They were almost as effective at holding down German armies as the
Russians themselves. It was the one feature of the Russian campaign that
the Germans had not considered.
As they penetrated further into Russia, the Germans’ methods of high-
speed warfare could no longer work. A military campaign in Russia had to
be different. There could be none of the swift moves forward as in the west.
As for cutting the Russians off from their baggage trains — the Russians did
not have baggage trains. Half starving, they lived off the land and any
animal that moved. By December 1941 Hitler’s armies, dug deep into
Russia, had been brought to a standstill, struggling fruitlessly against the

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giant snows which blotted out all landmarks and froze their tanks.
Nevertheless to the rest of occupied Europe it was not at all clear that
Hitler was coming to grief.
However, that winter an event occurred that proved to be as important
as Hitler’s decision to invade Russia. America was attacked by Japan at
Pearl Harbor on 7 December. Three hundred Japanese planes flew all the
way to Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Without any warning,
and without declaring war on America, they bombed the US fleet where it
lay at anchor in the harbour. Three thousand American servicemen were
killed, four out of eight American battleships were sunk and the ensuing
uproar in the United States was momentous. America at last entered the
war.
What had been a European war had thus become a truly global conflict
with a new arena in the Pacific, and with Nationalist China brought in as
America’s ally against Japan. Fortunately Hitler declared war on America
a few days later, on 11 December. Had he not done so, the American
Congress might have insisted that their war should be confined to south-
east Asia and the Pacific, which would have left Europe still struggling
under Nazism. Until Japan’s unprovoked attack on the US navy in Pearl
Harbor much of America looked upon the conquest of Europe by Hitler as
a European problem.
The far-seeing Roosevelt had been backing Britain unofficially since a
plea for help by a beleaguered Churchill after the fall of France in the
summer of 1940. The US president had lent Britain fifty destroyers in
return for America being allowed to lease British bases in the West Indies.
By the generous arrangement of Lend-Lease from March 1941, American
food and matériel were supplied to Britain on credit. This had solved
Britain’s cash-flow shortage caused by the war’s interruption to her usual
business. But it was not at all the same thing as having American troops
fighting alongside British soldiers as they were from 1942, or having the
full weight of America’s manufacturing engine on the allied side. But now
that the United States, the greatest industrial nation in the world, had
joined the fight, Nazism could be defeated. And Roosevelt agreed that
Germany should be defeated before Japan.
One of the Axis powers since 1937 and long hostile to the western
democracies, Japan had decided to take advantage of France’s and
Britain’s predicament in the west to become the dominant power of the
Pacific and south-east Asia. The French and British colonies of the Dutch
East Indies, Indo-China and Malaya held 80 per cent of the world’s rubber,
a very important commodity in a twentieth-century world of tanks and
cars, and would provide Japan with the oil and rubber she needed to
become self-sufficient. Following a downturn in her economic fortunes,

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she was ruled by the army from 1940; a year later the aggressive General
Tojo was head of the government. To him Japan’s rightful dominance of
the Pacific was being thwarted by the British base at Singapore and the
American fleet stationed in Hawaii. Tojo regarded the American warships
as ‘a dagger pointed at the throat of Japan’. If Pearl Harbor were
destroyed, Japan would be able to control the Pacific with impunity. The
plan very nearly succeeded. Only a prolonged American campaign in the
Pacific over the next four years prevented Australia from being occupied.
But Japan was triumphant among outposts of the British Empire in the Far
East. Both Hong Kong and the supposedly impregnable Singapore were in
Japanese Kands by mid-February 1942.
The Japanese also took over Burma, and their arrival at the border with
India was used by the Congress Party in India to extract an assurance of
post-war independence from the British, failing which they would welcome
in Japanese troops to liberate them. The British slowly drove the Japanese
out of Burma and down the Malay Peninsula to retake Singapore after
three and a half years. Among many brave allied soldiers, the Chindits in
Burma under General Orde Wingate became legendary for their daring.
Nevertheless, in late 1942 apart from Britain most of Europe, from the
French border with neutral Spain to half-way across Russia was in Axis
hands. It was not at all clear for how much longer the rest of Russia could
hold out. The epic battle for Stalingrad, the city which controlled entry to
the Caucasus and its oilfields had been raging since September. And despite
Enigma the threat from the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic was still so
severe that allied ships were being sunk at the rate of three a day.
The only positive feature of the way the Germans abused the countries
they occupied was that it produced resistance movements in almost all of
them, made up of heroic peoples of all kinds who kept the spirit of the
country alive. Yugoslavia’s partisans remained pro-British thanks to the
daring activities of the commando Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean. He urged
Churchill to back their leader Tito in 1943 and parachuted into Yugoslavia
to arrange a supply of arms for them. For the rest of the war twenty-five
German divisions were tied down by Tito’s little band of partisans hidden
in caves all over the mountains of Yugoslavia.
Both women and men like the mysterious French resistance hero Jean
Moulin carried on deadly games of espionage on behalf of the allies to
inform them of German troop movements, to sabotage the German
defences and to help the allies’ special forces which began secretly to be
parachuted into occupied Europe. Their role was often to spirit Jews out
of harm’s way, for since 1941 with a monstrous project euphemistically
called the Final Solution the Nazis had embarked on a programme of mass
extermination of the Jewish race, gypsies and Slavs in death camps in

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Poland. Once a country was occupied all Jews were rounded up, their
property was stolen and they were sent by railway to the death camps of
Auschwitz and Dachau.
The entry of America into the war raised the problem of strategical aims.
As the larger country America was now the senior partner in the alliance
with Britain, but her vision of the world she wished to see after the war did
not coincide with Britain’s. America did not want to spend money on
troops to protect the British Empire. Equally, as Churchill put it, ‘I have
not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the
liquidation of the British Empire.’ This underlying theme lent some tension
to what were otherwise mainly good relations between the allies.
And there had been bad news for Britain’s imperial interests in the
Western Desert in the first half of 1942 when Tobruk fell to Rommel. It
was as depressing for British morale as the fall of Singapore had been three
months before. The British had to abandon the Egyptian frontier to the
Germans as well as half of their Egyptian territory and make an urgent
retreat right back inside Egypt to entrench themselves at El Alamein, only
fifty-five miles from the key port of Alexandria. On 30 June Rommel
moved his army right up to El Alamein to face them. The danger was so
acute that the British fleet, which had been at anchor outside Alexandria,
turned down the Suez Canal to take shelter in the Red Sea. The Egyptians
believed that the British had lost the war for Egypt and were about to pull
out. But they stood fast and, under General Auchinleck, managed to beat
off Rommel in the first Battle of El Alamein that July. But it was not until
late October, at the final battle of El Alamein, by which time the British
had acquired a new commander, the dynamic General Montgomery, and
massive reinforcements in the shape of American Sherman tanks, that the
Desert Fox (as Rommel was known to the admiring British) was at last
defeated. When this triumph was followed in January 1943 by the
surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the turning point of the
war had been reached.
Although Roosevelt did not like underwriting what he considered to be
Britain’s imperial aims, the American people needed to see something being
done now that they had entered the war. Roosevelt therefore fell in with
Churchill’s plan to secure Egypt, by driving all German and Italian forces
out of north Africa. By May 1943 this was successfully achieved, after
British and American troops had landed in Morocco and Algeria the
previous November.
At the beginning of 1943 Stalin urged the British and Americans to open
a second front in Europe: if they landed in northern France it would take
the pressure off the Russians. After some argument, it was agreed that such
an invasion should not take place until sufficient troops had been gathered

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on the south coast of England to ensure as far as possible that it was a
complete success.
But it was decided to put the Nazis on the retreat in mainland Europe by
invading from the south via Italy. The Axis forces had made this easier to
achieve because they had poured troops into north Africa and not left
enough to defend mainland Europe. German plans were further thrown by
a clever piece of deception on the part of the British with The Man Who
Never Was. The body of a dead soldier was planted off the coast of Spain
with plans in his wallet suggesting that the invasion of Europe was to take
place on Sardinia. Sardinia was indeed a far more logical way of getting
back into’France, as it was almost directly south of the French port of
Marseilles. In fact the allies landed in Sicily on 10 July. This would mean
fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, but it offered a safer route back
into Europe than the French coast, particularly as Mussolini had turned
down Hitler’s embarrassing offer of German troops to defend the Italian
mainland. Capturing Sicily would help free up the Mediterranean which
had more or less become an Axis lake. The island of Malta had held out so
gallantly as the Axis air forces tried unsuccessfully to bomb it into
submission that George VI awarded her people the George Cross.
A little cautious optimism was at last growing among allied leaders
thanks to a coup d’état on 25 July 1943 which saw the overthrow of
Mussolini. The new Italian government under Marshal Badoglio
surrendered to the allies in September. Germany was then forced to fight
her former Axis partners the Italians as well as the British and American
forces. Nevertheless, the allied advance up the Italian mainland was
extremely slow, and it took almost two years to reach the northern border.
So savage was the fighting that nine months later, on 4 June 1944, the
allies had only just reached Rome, a four-hour train ride from Naples. But
two days later in a tremendous amphibious operation allied troops under
the overall command of the US general Dwight Eisenhower, landed on the
coast of occupied France.
Thanks to the continued freedom of the islands of Britain, all the men
and matériel needed for the invasion could be stockpiled on her southern
coast, and camps set up for the training of 300,000 men steadily mush-
roomed. Despite their visibility, it was important to keep as much of the
operation secret as possible. The camps revealed to the German high
command that an attack was imminent, but they did not indicate where it
would take place. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief
of the Armies of the West, thought that the crossing would happen at the
narrowest part of the Channel, with the invaders landing between Calais
and Dieppe. Hitler and Rommel (now effectively in command of the
Channel defences) both had an inkling it might be Normandy. Following

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his hunch, in the spring of 1944 Rommel ordered mines to be laid in the
waters off the Normandy coast.
On D-Day, 6 June taking full advantage of allied air superiority, in an
extraordinary logistical exercise the allies managed to land 156,000
troops, who were mainly British, Canadian and American, on the beaches
of Normandy. Five days later, the rest of the soldiers had crossed from
England along with 54,000 vehicles, and were creating an eighty-mile
bridgehead, fanning out west and south. Although Field Marshal
Montgomery, commanding the landing forces, would say that D-Day had
gone like clockwork, its success was by no means a foregone conclusion.
The weather was rough and stormy. Though this gave the expedition the
advantage of surprise, as the Germans did not think the allies would risk a
landing in such weather, there were very heavy casualties - some 10,000
among allied troops, with perhaps 2,500 killed outright on the beaches.
But the losses might have been heavier had so many German divisions not
been tied down in Italy. From small landing craft, thousands and
thousands of gallant allied soldiers threw themselves on to the shore.
Behind them the artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours specially built for the
landings were towed in, allowing the disembarkation of supplies.
Meanwhile American airplanes rushed in and bombed the bridges all along
the Seine and Loire, preventing Panzer divisions from racing up to
Normandy to stop the allied soldiers.
The Normandy landings signalled the beginning of the end of the Nazi
tyranny. By September 1944, from east and west, from Russia and France
and Italy, the allies were sweeping the German armies before them. That
month France was liberated. Britain was no longer plagued by the Vrs, the
flying bombs or ‘Doodlebugs’, now that their launch-sites had been
captured, but for a few months the new V2 rockets caused limited
destruction. Also in September Montgomery’s advance into Germany
suffered a setback at Arnhem in Holland when airborne troops dropped to
seize bridges over the Rhine were killed or captured. But on the whole the
allies were beginning to win.
In January 1945 Russian forces under General Zhukov captured
Warsaw, the capital of Poland, which had previously been in German
hands, and began moving through East Prussia. Soon less than 400 miles
separated the Russians from their western allies’ most forward positions.
Hitler, more alarmed by the approaching Russians than by the Americans
and British, decided to throw troops at the threat in the east on the River
Oder. This freed up the Anglo-American forces in the west and enabled
them to get across the Rhine. After that, the end came very quickly. By the
end of April the Russians were in Berlin, Hitler then committed suicide
and on 8 May Victory in Europe Day was proclaimed after Germany had

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at last surrendered. The war against Japan continued for another three
months.
In Britain people danced in the streets. Light-hearted with relief, they
flooded into Piccadilly and the Mall to cheer Churchill and the royal
family, who had refused to leave London. Every London landmark bore
the scars of war, including Buckingham Palace and the Houses of
Parliament, and most major British cities had been hit by bombs too.
Some 60,000 British civilians had been killed by the Luftwaffe; nine
million people had been working for one military organization or another;
almost every family had lost a son, brother or a father in the war. They had
dug potatoes for victory as exhorted to by Churchill so that they did not
have to rely on imported food, and they had lived on tiny rations. They had
also paid higher taxes. America, by heiping to finance the war, had given
Churchill the tools he had asked for ‘to finish the job’, and the British had
at last finished it.
By the end of 1945 Britain was a very different place from what she had
been in 1939. She was far more unified internally. The camaraderie of total
war had dissolved many class differences. Churchill’s government enjoyed
unanimous support during the war and had outlined plans for social
reforms that were welcomed by pretty well everyone. After such an epic
— struggle, most people in Britain believed that there should be a safety net
to protect the poor and vulnerable, like the widows whose husbands had
died for their country. There should be a good education for gallant
soldiers’ sons. There was a new idealism after the ordeal of war. People had
a keen sense of the fairer country that Britain should become.
At the same time the world and Britain herself were full of a gloomy
pessimism. The terrible, unimaginable figure of fifty-five million people
had died worldwide, five times the number who had died in the Great War,
and there were around twenty million refugees in Europe. Unspeakably
cruel things had been done to human beings, by the Nazis to the Jews, by
the Japanese to their allied prisoners. But the allies had also unleashed a
weapon of destruction on the world which would overshadow it for more
than forty years — the atom bomb. In order to end the war in Japan quickly
and to prevent its occupation by Russian troops, two atom bombs were
dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each
explosion killed approximately 80,000 people and caused birth defects to
thousands more unborn Japanese children. Enormous mushroom clouds
rising above white heat announced that man had discovered a power which
could annihilate life on earth. Though nine-tenths of their shipping had
been destroyed, the Japanese had been refusing to surrender, and they were
still holding thousands of allied prisoners in conditions of extraordinary
brutality. On 14 August 1945, one week after the bombing of Hiroshima,

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the Emperor of Japan announced that his country had surrendered

unconditionally.
With the surrender of Japan the Second World War had finally come to
an end. Though the British Empire still stretched far across the globe, it
was a shadow of its former self. India was poised for independence, and
the strength of anti-colonial feeling among British possessions in Africa
and Asia suggested they wanted theirs too. Ties of affection between
Britain and the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand had
been strengthened by their shared struggle against Hitler. But after 1945
the Pacific Rim countries made treaties with America to protect them. It
had after all been American forces which had saved Australia from the
Japanese.

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 1945-1952
Reform at Home, Communism Abroad (1945-1952)
Peace came officially to a shattered Europe on 8 May 1945, when
Germany surrendered unconditionally. Over that preceding week there
had been a series of armistices on the different fronts in the west. Ever since
the news that Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April the life had gone
out of the German war effort, though it had been trickling away for some
time. In early 1945, the sight of triumphant Russian armies swarming
across Europe had brought a few high-up German officers like General
Wolff of the Army in Italy into secret negotiations with the allies
independently of Hitler. The Germans might hate the allied democracies,
but they did not hate them quite as much as they feared the communism
the Soviet Red Army represented. Many German officers believed that it
would now be better to join the allies to defeat communism. But the allies’
insistence on unconditional surrender, and terror of Hitler, prolonged the
war. In Berlin, while Hitler cowered in his bunker a hundred feet below the
Chancellery, civilians fought the Russians street by street, from the suburbs
to the centre of the city. They had the crazed bravery of the desperate.
The German fear of the Red Army soon proved justified. It was spread
right across eastern Europe and showed every sign of remaining there.
Under the extraordinary General Zhukoy, victor of Stalingrad, the heroic
~
feats of the Russian army had acquired a legendary reputation. At the cost
of twenty million dead, its soldiers had driven the Germans out of eastern
Europe: first out of their native land, then out of Poland, Hungary and
Austria; it had fought across half of Germany to reach Berlin. But in the
process the Red Army occupied those countries and would continue to
occupy them after the war was over. It was the price the allies now paid for
allowing the Red Army to liberate the continental landmass from the Nazi
tyranny.
Roosevelt and Churchill had proclaimed that their countries sought ‘no
aggrandizement, territorial or other’, and that they respected ‘the right of
all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’.
Their ally Stalin’s war aims were exactly the opposite. But to keep Russia
on the allied side Roosevelt and Churchill had to accept her demands that
eastern Europe should become her sphere of influence. Stalin intended to
re-establish Russia as the great power she had been before the end of the
First World War. To prevent a strong central European power like
Germany arising to threaten her, Stalin’s plan was to ensure that all the
countries which touched Russia’s borders became her loyal satellites or
client states — that is to say, ruled by communist regimes run by leaders
trained in Moscow.
Unfortunately the American State Department took an overly benign
view of Stalin, whom one historian has called ‘that charming temporary

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gentleman Uncle Joe’. Unlike Churchill and the more wary British Foreign
Office, the US made the naive assumption that Russia’s eastern European
client states would be set up on British or American democratic lines. The
US government believed that Stalin would mysteriously change his spots
and permit free elections throughout the Soviet sphere of influence.
President Roosevelt had been crucially important to Britain’s war effort
when she stood alone against a Nazi-controlled Europe, not least by
unofficially financing Britain’s fight-back before most of America would
have been sympathetic to participating in the war. But he was not as
interested in the shape of post-war Europe as he should have been, partly
because he was a dying man. Unlike Churchill, he did not square up to
Stalin at the strategy conference held at Yalta in the Crimea in February
1945. In the confusion after Roosevelt’s death, with the excellent but very
inexperienced President Truman at the helm, America’s attention had not
been focused on what Stalin was up to in eastern Europe. But Churchill’s
was.
With his usual sense of strategy, Churchill had seen that as the war
ended it was important for the western powers to prevent the Red Army
pushing too far west. Once the Russians entered a country it would be very
hard to get them out without fighting them, which Britain did not have the
manpower to do. If allied soldiers got to Prague, Berlin, Vienna and
Warsaw before the Russians and liberated them there would be no reason
for the Russians to go near those capitals. But American commanders were
not interested in politics and there was no keen American president above
them to order them forward, so they refused to press on further east.
Churchill's desire to keep the Soviets at bay was thwarted. With Soviet
armies stretching as far as the eye could see, Stalin was more formidable
than ever.
It soon became clear as peace resumed that Russia’s export of world
revolution, which had been on hold during the war, had resumed. The Red
Army was a far more effective way of spreading communism than the
Comintern had ever been. Free elections in Poland after the war had been
one of Churchill’s demands to which Stalin had agreed. But Stalin had lied.
In re45 the wishes of the Polish government-in-exile in London were
ignored — its leadership was in any case divided and ineffectual after the
mysterious death of the premier General Sikorsky in 1943. Poles trained in
Moscow appeared in Warsaw to set up a communist government, and non-
communist leaders of the other political parties were arrested, taken for
trial in Moscow and executed. And that was only the beginning of what
Churchill would in 1946 call an ‘iron curtain’ descending over Europe
from “‘Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. In country after
country which had divisions of the Red Army stationed in them at the end

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of the war, voters — under the eye of soldiers with red stars on their lapels
— returned communist regimes.
Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia all went
communist, and would remain so for the next forty years. Indeed until they
were liberated from the late 1980s onwards, when the glasnost era broke
up the Soviet Empire, there seemed no reason why things should ever
change. The countries of the eastern bloc appeared doomed to a one-party
system of government in which dissent was punished by death. Despite
their long and colourful histories, by 1946 a dreary grey uniformity had
been enforced across what became known in 1955 as the Warsaw Pact
countries: their peoples had little to eat, few medicines and lived their lives
in fear. In 1948 Czechoslovakia became part of the unhappy band. When
the foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell out of a window in his office in
Prague, almost certainly having been pushed, it was the beginning of the
end. By September Czechoslovakia had joined the Soviet bloc.
It was in Potsdam in occupied Germany at the peace conference held in
July 1945 that the post-war governments of the democratic west and the
autocratic secretive communist east rubbed up against one another. There
were some hopeful omens. The United Nations, an international organiz-
ation intended to keep the peace the way the League of Nations had never
succeeded in doing, had been created at a conference in San Francisco the
previous month. Fifty nations signed the organization’s Charter and began
to meet at the General Assembly, a sort of world Parliament in New York.
Reflecting the UN’s origins at the end of the war the great powers of the
time, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France
became the only permanent members of the organization’s Security
Council, each of which possessed the right of veto.
But at Potsdam the burning issues were what should happen to
Germany, Austria and, to a lesser extent, to Italian possessions. Though
Italy had fought on the allied side at the end, she had to yield some of Istria
and the city port of Fiume to Yugoslavia and the Dodecanese islands to
Greece; she also renounced her African empire. Austria was to remain
divided into British, French, US and Soviet zones of occupation until 1955,
when she became strictly neutral.
It had been agreed that Germany was likewise to be divided into four
zones to be occupied by those same four powers. Though France had been
defeated in 1940, Britain argued successfully that she should be included in
the army of occupation. The German capital Berlin was also divided into
four sections among the four powers. Unfortunately Berlin lay some distance
by rail and road from the zones of the western powers: it was situated in
Russian-occupied territory in old Prussia. This was soon to raise problems.
Britain began with two representatives at Potsdam, Churchill (now

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heading a caretaker government pending a general election) and the

Labour leader Clement Attlee. To the Tories’ and his own surprise Attlee
took Labour to a landslide victory at the end of July 1945. It was the first
Labour majority government. The population might love Churchill, the
great saviour of his country, but returning soldiers voted to have the
country rebuilt by Labour. To the British people the Tories still seemed
‘suilty men’, even at the end of the war — guilty of not caring enough in
the 1930s and guilty of the appeasement which had led to war. In short
the population did not believe that they would get the sort of social
reforms from the Tories they were determined to have after six years of
total war.
Attlee had been Churchill’s deputy prime minister. Although he looked
disconcertingly like Lenin, he was a kindly former barrister who had spent
much of his life on philanthropic projects in London’s East End, but he was
a good judge of men. Many were surprised that the stately role of foreign
secretary went to Ernest Bevin, who had no diplomatic background and a
reputation for calling a spade a spade. He was then best known for being
the robust head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and minister
of labour in the wartime coalition. But Bevin was an honourable, fearless
man who had always been passionately interested in international affairs
and was known for holding his own in any debate. He had been one of
Labour’s earliest critics of appeasement. Moreover, for many years he had
fought the communists in the unions. Thus he had few illusions about the
real nature of communist dictatorships and was ideally suited to dealing
with the Cold War, as the continuous state of tension between Russia and
her former allies was beginning to be known.
The Labour government began rapidly transforming Britain. The trade
unions were liberated by the repeal of the 1927 Trade Disputes Act and
allowed to recommence their fundraising. Heavy industries were
nationalized. Plans were drawn up for new housing and an innovative free
medical service. But the big problem Attlee and Bevin were wrestling with
was what should happen to Germany after her division into zones.
It is hard to imagine more than half a century later the anger that was
felt towards Germany at the end of the Second World War. German
militarism had once again devastated the European continent and created
a world war only twenty years after the first. The French had suffered three
invasions, three destructions of their countryside, with two occupations of
their capital Paris in seventy years. They simply did not believe that the
Germans could be trusted with a national central government. Their
experiences made them believe that the German nation was too warlike
and powerful to be allowed to govern herself. The nature of the German
people, the size of their country and her mineral resources made it
 1945-1952
inevitable that they would always want to dominate the continent.
France’s view overshadowed post-war discussions.
But there was considerable delay as the allies argued about what form
post-war Germany should take. Some believed that there should only be
local state governments as before German unification, and that any
government at federal level should be controlled by Britain and France.
Controls were imposed on German industries, and anything which could
be turned to military manufacture was forbidden. At the same time the
French drew up plans for the international management of iron and steel
manufacture in Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr.
Aside from long-term political and geographical solutions, the
devastated country also presented immense and more immediate practical
problems. Not only was the countryside of Germany itself ruined and
burned out, but Europe was filled with homeless peoples and marauding
Russian armies. Two million Germans were fleeing from what had become
western Poland as a result of Yalta. The occupying Russian soldiers, filled
with fury against the German people whose soldiers had ruined their
homeland, continually avenged themselves on the German civil popula-
tions, particularly by raping women.
The occupying American and British armies were at first forbidden to
speak to the German people. British soldiers were so appalled by the death
camps they had liberated at Belsen, one of the several sites where six
million people of Jewish origin had died, whether gassed, killed by disease
or worked to death, that they had no wish to fraternize with them.
Germans in towns nearest to these sites were forced to rebury the dead in
individual plots, so many of them having been thrown into mass graves.
But, as the year wore on, the physical plight of the German people became
so frightful that compassion crept into the allied powers’ attitude to them.
In a country with hardly a building standing they began to see the wisdom
of Churchill’s advice not to insist on punitive reparations. Thus, though the
Nazi leaders were tried in the German city of Nuremberg by a multi-
national court of judges for war crimes, crimes against humanity and
genocide, reparations (except to Russia) would come to an end quite soon.
From the start relations were bad between the occupying powers. The
British and American occupying armies were outraged by the callous and
brutal behaviour of the Red Army. Although it had been agreed that the
Russians should be allowed to remove German industrial machinery as
reparation for the destruction inflicted on Soviet plants, Britain and
America had not anticipated the level of asset-stripping to which the
Russians would descend, carrying off whatever German industrial equip-
ment they could get their hands on. From typewriters to telephone lines,
from rolling stock to whole factories of superb German machinery,

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everything movable was loaded on to Russian lorries and disappeared into

the east.
As the dust settled and the world began to spin in its own peaceful orbit
again it became clearer that democracy had not completely died in
Germany. Some pre-1933 politicians who had survived imprisonment by
the Nazis were the best hope of future democracy in the western allies’ part
of Germany, such as Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne. The
western powers concluded that the whole country should be united under
one government. But it became clear that Russia had no intention of
allowing that to happen unless it was to be under the communist parties
which soon controlled all the state governments in the eastern zone.
Meanwhile, after free elections the whole administration of the city of
Berlin was in the hands of democratic socialists, the SPD, despite Russian
intimidation of its members through arrests and assault.
Matters came to a head with the brutal winter of 1947-8. The weather
seemed to conspire with a simple lack of money to put back post-war
recovery in Europe for twelve months. Britain ground to a halt because the
extreme cold prevented fuel from being moved. For much of the time coal
could not be mined, massively upsetting an already teetering balance of
payments. With most of Britain’s factories having been turned over to the
war effort there was next to nothing to export to earn money. There were
constant power cuts because of the weather and equally constant strikes in
the newly nationalized coal industry.
The Labour government, however, continued to feel ‘exalted’, as Hugh
Dalton, the chancellor of the Exchequer put it, at the thought of the
changes it was going to make to life in Britain. But those reforms needed a
great deal of money. And despite higher taxation lack of money was one
of the most striking features of the post-1945 Labour government.
American credit, American generosity, had made it possible for Britain to
continue in the war after 1940. But directly the war in Japan had ended in
August 1945 the Americans had cut off the Lend-Lease loans. From
September that year Britain was left floundering.
Continually suspicious of Britain’s imperialist aims, the US had given no
consideration to the sacrifices made by Britain to fight Hitler, which had
consumed about a quarter of her national wealth and all her overseas
assets. In order to defeat Germany, Britain’s manufacturing industries had
been turned over to munitions factories, her heavy industry to warships,
tanks-and aircraft. America gave Britain no time to adjust to post-war
dislocation. Two-thirds of the nine million people employed in the armed
forces were going to be unemployed, even if it was only temporarily as old
industries started up again. Nevertheless, returning to everyday production
would be far from easy since many of the old pre-war overseas markets had

720,
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been lost as the countries concerned had opened their own factories to
replace British goods.
Dalton was allowed to borrow £1,300 million from America and
Canada but only on condition that after twelve months the pound would
be convertible to any other currency. But after six months the loan had
been used up, and Dalton had made way for Sir Stafford Cripps, a high-
minded but rather desiccated man whose name became a byword for
austerity. In what is known as the convertibility crisis — a run on the pound
as it was used to buy dollars to pay for the American goods which
dominated the post-war world — the sort of measures employed in wartime
Britain were implemented once again. Very limited amounts of cash were
allowed out of the country. Rationing continued into the early r950s as
Britain did not have the money to import food nor the ability to grow it
herself. The pound was devalued. Newspapers were permitted to print
only four pages. Petrol could be bought for private use only for specific
reasons listed by the government. The black market reappeared.
Britain was thus sinking psychologically under the combined effects of
expensive domestic reforms and the cost of trying to reconstruct Germany
when, like the rest of western Europe, she was rescued by the American
Marshall Plan loan. Despite the western armies’ best efforts, the British and
French governments were unable to afford the level of reconstruction
needed in Germany after the war, whether it was laying new sewage pipes
or rebuilding homes in the rubble of bombed cities. Fortunately for Britain
and France in 1947 President Truman at last woke up to the dire straits the
allies’ economies were in. Though he had none of FDR’s elongated
glamour, the small tubby Truman was hard working and sincere. He had
become alarmed by the shape eastern Europe was taking with the barring
of anti-communist parties in the Soviet zone of Germany, as well as in the
other Russian-controlled countries. He proposed the Marshall Plan to put
Europe back on its feet and proclaimed what is called the Truman
Doctrine: ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation
by armed minorities or outside pressure’.
For 200 years America’s attitude to Europe had been that the republic
should hold itself aloof from the decadent Old World which the New
World had been created to escape. The Versailles settlement had foundered
on America’s isolationist refusal to underwrite what President Wilson had
devised. But from 1947 onwards the United States undertook to involve
herself in renewing the prosperity of the Old World by underwriting the
economic reconstruction needed so desperately after the war. Named for
the US secretary of state General George C. Marshall, who announced it,
the Marshall Plan poured £1,325 million into all the countries in Europe
which requested funds through the OEEC, the Organization for European

727
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Economic Co-operation. American dollars transformed the post-war

European situation in return for very little. It was an altruistic action. This
generous gift is sometimes regarded as a hedge against communism, but in
fact it was offered to all countries irrespective of their political structures,
but was turned down by Russia on behalf of all eastern European
governments under her sway.
The Marshall Plan accentuated the line drawn down Europe by the Iron
Curtain. On the western side the economies became prosperous. On the
eastern side, however, the countryside was dotted with ramshackle
buildings and rusty machinery. (Only in space was individual genius
allowed to shine: Russia was the first country to put a man into orbit with
Sputnik in 1957.) Stalin would not accept western aid. He continued to
hope and believe that the capitalist contradictions in western democracies
would make them collapse, as they should according to Marxist theory.
The many partisan or resistance movements during the war throughout
western Europe had had strong communist elements. The Russians were
convinced that it was only a question of time before the communist parties
took over.
As a result of the Marshall Plan, the western powers were able to reform
the currency in their zones in Germany. The combination of a less punitive
attitude towards German industry and agriculture had almost magical
results when controls were removed. Until 1948 many industries using iron
and steel had been banned in Germany, while any surplus produced by
factories or farms above a certain level had been exported to allied
countries as a form of reparation. Now, the black market died at a stroke,
food appeared in shops, and money took the place of the barter system to
which the German economy had sunk.
But the success of the western efforts in rebuilding Germany made the
Russians feel threatened — they had been hoping that the whole of
Germany would slowly go communist. When the western powers
suggested spreading the helpful currency reforms to Berlin, the Russians
reacted savagely. Believing that such reforms might lose them control of
their zone, they took the extraordinary decision to close the roads from
Berlin to the west. From June 1948 the Russians blockaded the city, even
though a democratic local government was flourishing there, and even
though it also contained the allied occupying forces of America, Britain
and France. The Russians would allow nobody already in Berlin to go out,
nor food to go in. These opening moves in the Cold War could have led to
a third world war had it not been for Britain and America’s calm response.
The skills of the US and British air forces made the Berlin Airlift possible:
240,000 tons of everything human beings needed to survive — foods,
clothes, baby milk — were flown into the city in an unending succession of

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plane loads. The Berliners became heroes of the hour for their refusal to
give in to the Russians, and the whole episode did much to draw western
Germany back into the community of European nations. In May 1949 the
Russians gave up the gamble and Berlin was reopened to the west.
Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall: there was to be no reuniting
of the four German zones for the moment. The western allies therefore
continued to organize their zones to operate on their own. The small town
of Bonn became the temporary capital of a West German government. By
August 1949 a constitution for the German Federal Republic had been
approved by the western allies, and a free election made Konrad Adenauer
the first West German federal chancellor. In October of the same year the
Moscow-controlled eastern zone set up the German Democratic Republic.
Berlin continued nevertheless to be too much of a magnet for young
dissatisfied East Germans because it was a gateway to the west. In 1961 the
Berlin Wall was put up between the two halves of the city by the Russians
to end the stream of emigration. Crowned with barbed wire and guarded
by sentries who shot to kill, then dragged the bodies of their victims back
into their sector, it was the very symbol of the Cold War.
After the furore of the Berlin Blockade, western attitudes towards Russia
hardened. A military alliance became a necessity. Anxiety about Russian
intentions thus created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. A
visible sign of the Truman Doctrine, NATO bound America in an
unprecedented military alliance to protect western Europe. Britain had
already attached herself to the Benelux countries (Belgium, the
Netherlands and Luxembourg) and France in a mutual defence treaty.
Now America, Canada, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Portugal
joined up with their own troops to create what became a formidable
military system.
The formation of NATO put Russia on notice to tread more carefully.
The United States, which had spread her wing over Europe, had the bomb
and the dollars. In August 1949 the Soviet Union exploded her first atomic
bomb, its programme greatly accelerated by the betrayal of critical data by
the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. The western alliance and the
strength of the Cold War truce was to be tested only the next year by the
outbreak of the Korean War. Once again this could have led to a mighty
conflagration in the Far East, but all powers concerned were anxious to
prevent it getting out of hand.
Korea descends from mainland China into a peninsula opposite Japan,
her former ruler. From 1945 she was occupied by American troops in the
south and Russian troops in the north. But on 25 June 1950 the communist
government of North Korea sent troops into South Korea, armed with
Russian tanks and supported by Russian aircraft. The brand new United

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Nations sprang into action and asked its fellow members to support South
Korea by sending a defence force to help her. Britain naturally contributed
troops, though she could scarcely afford to. She continued to have
important imperial commitments in Malaya and was anxious about
Chinese communist influence there — for Chiang Kai-shek, China’s
nationalist leader, had been defeated and expelled by Mao Tse-tung the
previous year.
The United States had a large number of troops in the region already
owing to her occupation of Japan. At first US and UN troops under
General MacArthur chased the North Koreans almost to their border with
Manchuria. But communist China now began to throw her weight behind
North Korea. Although there was a moment when it seemed that the world
trembled on the edge of its third global conflict as American soldiers were
directly engaged with Chinese troops, the conflict was contained — it never
explicitly became an out-and-out war between China and the United
States. The Americans did not attack Chinese territory, and did not use the
atomic bomb. Russia too restrained herself. Despite the initial aid to the
North Koreans, she did not send troops to the battle zone.
Seventy-five thousand South Koreans and United States servicemen died
during the Korean War, but the conflict ended inconclusively. All
concerned were anxious to show that they did not really wish for war. In
1951, a ceasefire was agreed upon and the country reverted to the status
quo ante. The old frontier between North and South Korea at the 38th
parallel was retained in a treaty agreed in 1953. That was also the year of
Stalin’s death, which caused the world to heave a collective sigh of relief.
Nikita Khrushchev, who took over as secretary-general of the Soviet
Communist party, denounced Stalin’s dictatorship and his cult of person-
ality. There seemed to be a distinct thaw in the Cold War: the Communist
party congress in 1956 recommended a deStalinization process, as long as
it did not go too far. Controls over Russia’s client states in eastern Europe
were loosened.
The expense involved in sending British troops to the Korean War was
the final straw that broke the back of the Labour government, despite its
remarkable achievements. It had made huge strides in changing the fabric
of Britain, but the austerity measures it required of the public were very
harsh because the costs of those changes were so huge. Nationalizing the
coalmines cost hundreds of millions of pounds to acquire them from
the private owners, and similar costs were incurred in nationalizing the
railways, the utilities (that is, gas, electricity and water) and the iron and
steel industries. Although they lost the 1951 general election (there had
been another election the year before in which their majority had been
drastically reduced), Labour had an enormous amount of which to be

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proud. There had been relatively little disagreement about their reforms.
Many Conservatives agreed wholeheartedly with nationalization if it
benefited the country as a whole as opposed to a few wealthy private
owners. They too felt that the National Health Service was a benchmark
of what the most enlightened twentieth-century democratic civilization
could achieve.
And what twentieth-century governments represented was of course at
the forefront of British politics in the aftermath of the war. The shame of
the Nazis’ treatment of minorities and of the vulnerable gave an additional
edge to considerations of what post-war society ought to be like. In fact in
the r9508 national politics were marked by their consensual nature:
Labour and Conservative tended to implement programmes that mod-
erates in all parties could approve of. This consensus politics came to be
called Butskellism, taken from the names of the progressive Conservative
chancellor of the Exchequer, R. A. Butler (author of the 1944 Education
Act, which created universal free secondary education for all to the age of
fifteen) and Hugh Gaitskell, his predecessor as chancellor, who became
leader of the Labour party in 1955 when Attlee retired to the House of
Lords. Their policies were remarkably similar, and (to a much lesser
extent) elements of consensus were maintained until the arrival of Mrs
Thatcher.
The most important contribution to national life made by Labour was
the creation in 1948 of the welfare state, set up by two statutes: the
National Insurance Act and the National Health Service Act. Its architect
Sir William Beveridge, the ‘People’s William’, proudly explained that this
all-encompassing plan for national insurance would look after everyone
‘from the cradle to the grave’. Every adult in Britain would contribute to it
by paying national insurance, to ensure that everyone in British society was
provided for. Every British citizen would be entitled to free medical care in
free hospitals provided by the National Health Service. Child benefit was
to be paid for every child after the first. There was to be cover for industrial
accidents. State pensions were to be given to all citizens — to women at sixty
and men at sixty-five.
Labour also took important decisions to reduce Britain’s responsibilities
overseas. India had been promised independence, but the division between
Muslims and Hindus was so deep that it became clear that only partition
would work — that the country was on the point of civil war. The Labour
government announced that India’s new viceroy Lord Mountbatten, a
distinguished naval officer and member of the royal family, would hand
over rule in June 1948 to an Indian government which would be set up by
local parties. But once Mountbatten had arrived in the country he decided
that independence had to be brought forward to a much earlier date,

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15 August 1947. He believed that, if the subcontinent were swiftly divided

into Muslim and Hindu states, this would cut down on the mounting death
toll.
Pakistan, the new Muslim state, was to comprise those regions with
large Muslim communities, concentrated in the north-west corner of India
and above the Bay of Bengal, east of Calcutta. Unfortunately the two
halves of the new state (known as West and East Pakistan) were a thousand
miles apart. Worse still, the nine weeks during which Mountbatten
organized partition saw the number of deaths rise to perhaps 200,000.
Meanwhile the short period of time given to the Muslims of India to cross
into Pakistan and the Hindus of the new Pakistan to cross into India
created separate difficulties. During that two-and-a-half-month period, ten
million people of rural origins, their bedsteads and belongings loaded
anyhow on to oxen and carts, were on the move across the huge Indian
subcontinent. They had to be within the freshly established frontiers before
the stroke of midnight on 15 August. This vast movement of peoples, for
whom shelter had to be found, was an additional source of strain for the
brand-new governments of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
The second enormous headache for the Labour government was Israel,
another ancient country struggling to be born anew in the late 1940s. The
problem of Israel and Palestine was as complicated as that of India. In the
1930s Nazi persecution of the Jews greatly increased their immigration
into Palestine. By 1936 the Jewish population was almost 400,000 or a
third of the whole. Conflict in Palestine brought about the Peel Report’s
1937 recommendation of partition, but this was rejected by both sides. The
last British government investigation into what was best for the mandate
of Palestine in 1939 had produced the recommendation in a White Paper
that the final number of Jewish immigrants be limited to 75,000. The
mandate would be given up, Palestine would become independent under
Arab majority rule. Previously Jewish emigration between the wars had
been of an individual and unofficial nature. The situation, however, was
dramatically changed after the Second World War by the sufferings of the
Jews under the Nazis. From 1945 onwards the immigration into Israel
threatened to become a flood which would upset the balance between
Arabs and Jews in Palestine, when the American government asked Britain
to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine.
The British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin felt that if the Jews were
allowed to immigrate into Palestine in the numbers the United States was
proposing they would swamp the original Arab inhabitants. The Palestinian
Arabs in any case refused to accept further Jewish immigrants. Britain had
been entrusted to rule in the Palestinians’ best interests by the League of
Nations mandate, and Bevin believed she could not simply abandon them.

13>
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There were also the wishes of the Arab leaders of the Middle East to
consider. These were important allies for Britain of long standing whom
Bevin was anxious not to offend, who were already opposed to the Jewish
National Home. Their importance was made greater by the west’s
increased reliance by mid-century on the motor car, fuelled by petrol
converted from oil beneath the desert kingdoms of Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait
and, since 1938, Saudi Arabia. So when boatloads of illegal Jewish
immigrants began to arrive in Palestine often visibly sick from their
treatment by the Nazis, Britain felt compelled to use force to stop them
from disembarking, though this was greatly deplored by the rest of the
world.
Meanwhile a guerrilla war was being fought between the Palestin Arabs
and Jewish terrorist gangs. Jewish terrorist attacks were also carried out on
the British army, which was trying to keep the peace between the two
warring sides. The British resident minister Lord Moyne was assassinated
in 1944, the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British army) was
blown up without warning in July 1946, killing ninety-one people, and two
young British sergeants were hanged in July 1947. British public opinion
became increasingly disenchanted with remaining in Palestine. Britain’s
duty towards the Arabs was offset by the high cost to an impoverished
Britain of enforcing the mandate, in the year of austerity 1947. Britain
could no longer afford to play the world’s policeman. Moreover, with
India gone in August 1947, the importance of Palestine to British interests
fell away. Earlier that year Britain had referred the problem of Palestine to
the newly founded United Nations in America, as an international arbiter.
The UN recommended partition. In September the Labour government
decided that British forces would leave in mid-1948, for Bevin would not
use British soldiers to enforce partition on the Arabs who did not want it.
The day that the British mandate in Palestine expired, 14 May 1948, as
the last British troops pulled out of the country, the Jews declared the
existence of the independent State of Israel. It was to be open to any Jew
throughout the world. David Ben Gurion became the first Israeli prime
minister, while Chaim Weizmann was president. The Israeli Parliament,
the Knesset, was set up in 1949. The reappearance of the State of Israel
with all its historic biblical resonances for Jews and Christians, almost
2,000 years after vanishing from the map of the world, caused great
rejoicing among many sympathizers. But the Arab leaders whose lands
surrounded Israel on all sides were furious. Three days after the new state
had been declared, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and others declared war.
Astonishingly, in the tradition of David and Goliath the infant state
defeated her mighty Arab neighbours and enlarged her territory by a
quarter. The war ended in January the following year with the sacred city

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of Jerusalem divided in two between Israel and Jordan, which also

occupied most of the UN-designated Palestinian state, and many of the
650,000 Palestinian Arabs homeless.
By 1951 Labour had run out of money for further domestic reforms —
the first year of free dental and eye treatment alone had cost £400 million.
Shortage of funds was so severe that all the medical centres the government
wanted to build for free health care had to be postponed, while many
people had started to live permanently in their ‘pre-fabs’ because there still
was not enough money to build the promised new houses. When Labour
realized that the only way out of these costs after the Korean War was to
charge for medical prescriptions, Aneurin Bevan, the fiery health minister,
and Harold Wilson resigned from the government in protest.
Some of Labour’s spirit evaporated with the death in 1951 of Ernest
Bevin, and by that time the British would have been superhuman not to
have wanted an end to the rationing, hard times and retrenchment which
they associated with Labour. They had had enough of sacrifice during the
Second World War. At the 1951 election the Conservatives got in again
with a majority of seventeen seats. That meant the return of the seventy-
seven-year-old Winston Churchill. He was not quite Britain’s oldest prime
minister — Gladstone held that distinction, having been premier at the age
of eighty-three — but he was made to seem distinctly elderly when King
George VI died the following year, and his twenty-five-year-old daughter
succeeded as Queen Elizabeth II.

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 Elizabeth II
(1952-)

Wind of Change (1952-1964)

To have Winston Churchill as prime minister gave the new queen
Elizabeth’s reign a wonderful beginning and sense of continuity. Elizabeth
had been popular with her subjects ever since the war. In the service
tradition of the British royal family she had gone into uniform and served
in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, enabling her to change vehicle wheels
with the best of them. In 1947 she had married her Greek cousin Prince
Philip Mountbatten, and they soon had two children, Prince Charles (born
in 1948) and Princess Anne (born in 1950).
A few days before Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in Westminster
Abbey in June 1953, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary climbed Mount
Everest. A year later the Briton Roger Bannister became the fastest man in
the world when he ran the mile in less than four minutes. It seemed that an
age of New Elizabethans had begun, ruled over by a new Gloriana who
was photographed looking radiant and regal by Cecil Beaton. On the
South Bank of the Thames a huge arts complex was rising like a strange
modern city to house the nation’s astonishing creative output. It would
eventually contain the Royal National Theatre and the Hayward Gallery.
The opening of its first building, the Royal Festival Hall, in 1951 had been
the highlight of the Festival of Britain, organized by the Labour home
secretary Herbert Morrison to demonstrate British cultural achievements a
hundred years after Prince Albert had arranged the Great Exhibition to
celebrate Victorian invention.
The 1950s would be a prosperous decade for Britain, as Japan’s and
Germany’s industrial muscle would take another decade to rebuild and the
British could export to their former markets. Britain continued to be an
important world power, despite the increased acceptance that the days of
the largest empire in the history of the world were coming to an end. There
were bases and British administrations from Gibraltar to Malta, from
Egypt and west Africa to Aden and Malaya. Educational and trade links
reinforced a sense of common belonging between the far-flung countries of
what was now called the Commonwealth. Britain was one of the three

FD
 WINDSOR

countries in the world to be sufficiently advanced to have built an atom

bomb. As one of the Big Five on the Security Council she was able to veto
the proposed actions of the United Nations.
Nevertheless the lands over which the young Queen Elizabeth II ruled
were greatly diminished from Queen Victoria’s day and about to diminish
further. Under Labour, India had become two independent republics, the
British mandate for Palestine had become the State of Israel, and the 1950s
and early 1960s would see a speeded-up process of decolonization in the
face of independence movements throughout the old British Empire in
Africa. Britain simply could not afford to maintain what had become a
very reluctant empire.
Even so, from the late 1940s she had to fight a jungle war in her colony
of Malaya, which held two-thirds of the world’s rubber plantations, and
which had been badly battered by the Japanese invasion during the war.
Now communist guerrillas from the native Chinese population threatened
Britain’s hold on the country. By 1956 the communist threat had been
defeated but local antagonism to Britain made it pointless to delay
independence. In 1957 Malaya became an independent state but remained
within the Commonwealth.
But it was in 1956 that it was brought home to Britain how altered her
position was in the post-war world. British power had been so substantial
and so long-lived that the prime minister Anthony Eden - who had
succeeded Churchill the year before — had assumed that Britain could
continue to use military force if her interests were threatened. Eden was a
conscientious, gentlemanly, Conservative politician of great integrity who
had resigned over Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators of the
1930s. Unfortunately the need to stand up to later dictators in case they
should prove to be another Hitler obsessed him. When the new leader of
Egypt, Colonel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal — which was still
owned by France and Britain — Eden decided that the move had to be
resisted by armed force, at the risk of war with Egypt.
The Arab nationalist Nasser had seized the Suez Canal zone when
America and Britain had withdrawn an offer to fund the construction of a
dam at Aswan on the Nile. In the midst of the Cold War America had
become alarmed by the Nasser government’s carelessness about its
finances and about an arms deal it had agreed with the Soviet Union.
Nasser seized the Canal zone declaring that its income would pay for the
Aswan Dam. But Eden and much of the British public could not accept
this. Although it had been agreed between the two countries twenty years
before that British troops would leave the Canal zone in 1956 and that
British influence over Egypt was at an end, Eden made plans to retake it
with the connivance of the French government. The latter was closely

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involved with Israel, which had been buying French arms in quantity and
saw this as a good opportunity to expand her territory at Egypt’s expense.
France was especially keen to see Nasser deposed because he was the chief
source of arms for nationalist rebels in the French colony of Algeria.
Nasser was a dictator, yet he did not, as Eden believed, threaten the
whole of the Middle East. However outrageous it was to seize the Canal,
which had been built with British and French funds, it would have been
wiser to accept it as a hazard of the post-colonial world. Though America
warned Britain to hold herself back when dealing with Egypt, Eden was
soon deep in a complicated plot with the French and Israelis to attack
Egypt.
On 29 October Israeli troops marched into the Sinai Desert in Egypt,
and a day later the French and British issued a pre-agreed call for both sides
to withdraw ten miles from the Canal zone. When this was not done within
twenty-four hours, French and British forces bombed Egyptian airfields.
Four days later, to the world’s amazement, French and British soldiers
parachuted successfully into Egypt and captured Port Said. But within a
further twenty-four hours, to France’s fury, the Anglo-French action had
been halted: the Canal zone had not been seized by the French and British
paratroopers as planned because Britain had decided to withdraw from the
operation.
Eden had been taken aback by the strength of world condemnation.
Russia had threatened to launch rockets at the Anglo-French force,
Australia had refused to back Britain’s action, and Britain and France had
been condemned in the United Nations by sixty-four votes to five.
American pressure on Britain to withdraw from Suez, which she could not
ignore because she needed another large loan from the US-controlled
International Monetary Fund, brought the episode to an ignominious end.
Eden ordered a ceasefire and a UN force took the place in the Canal zone
of the British and French troops.
‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role’, was the former US
secretary of state Dean Acherson’s much quoted epithet six years later.
Britain and France were both humiliated by Suez, which had underlined
the fact that they were not the great imperial powers they had been for two
centuries and could no longer interfere in other countries’ affairs when it
suited them. Meanwhile the Soviet Union had taken advantage of the
world’s attention being focused on Egypt to move her tanks into Hungary
to crush an uprising against communism prompted by Moscow’s
relaxation of controls over Iron Curtain countries after the death of Stalin.
Britain’s international reputation had been damaged because she had lost
her moral edge. Arab countries were bitterly angry, and Nasser’s stock had
risen. Anglo-French diplomatic relations took two decades to heal, with

POT
 WINDSOR

the French feeling that they had been betrayed by Britain, which they saw
as having become a poodle of the United States. This breach contributed to.
France’s decision to veto Britain’s application to join the Common Market
in 1963.
The European Economic Community, or Common Market, had
developed out of schemes in the late 1940s in the three Benelux countries
and France to find a way of integrating German industry into Europe. Its
forerunner was the Schuman Plan devised by the French foreign minister
Robert Schuman, which in 1951 became the European Coal and Steel
Community. By this treaty France and Germany were to produce their iron
and steel under a joint higher authority. Despite the parlous state of
Germany at the beginning of the 1950s, Schuman and the French
statesman Jean Monnet believed that a country as large and resourceful as
Germany would always revive. It was therefore important to absorb her
within a federalist Europe.
Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were all
attracted by the scheme, and so was Germany. Its very successful
implementation for iron and steel was followed in 1957 by the Six (as they
had become known) creating the European Economic Community (EEC)
in order to include an agricultural policy. Although Britain was
approached about joining, she regarded the insistence of the Six on the
imposition of a single tariff towards the rest of the non-European world as
incompatible with her preferential tariffs with the Commonwealth.
Although Britain had been satisfied with the OEEC (the organization set
up to implement the Marshall Aid plan) as a forum for communication
between European countries, in 1960 she became a founder member of the
European Free Trade Association (EFTA) with Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, Portugal, Austria and Switzerland. This was a loose customs
union between those countries which left all of them free to regulate their
external trade.
At the beginning of the 1960s, however, the British government’s attitude
to the Common Market underwent a sharp about-turn. The ties linking the
Commonwealth had been very much weakened by the independence that
many colonies had gained from Britain in the previous decade, and statistics
demonstrated that trade with the Common Market might offer a great deal
more to Britain than trade with the Commonwealth. The catastrophe of
Suez had been a salutary experience for Britain. Unlike France she had
neither the political will nor the money to fight wars in order to keep her
colonies.
Since the turn of the twentieth century much of the Colonial Office in
London had tended to the view that Britain governed the colonies in trust
for the indigenous populations until they were ready for democracy after a

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western-style education. But by the 1950s an elite in most of the countries
had taken the same higher exams of English boards and the same courses
at British universities as the colonial administrators. They had just as much
knowledge of western political ideas. They also had experience of
Parliamentary democracy, since every British colony (with the exception of
the recently acquired Somaliland) featured an elected legislative assembly.
After India led the way there was considerable agitation in Africa for
independence. The leader of the independence movement in the Gold
Coast, Kwame Nkrumah, was at first imprisoned for his activities. But in
1957 Britain had bowed to the inevitable and he became prime minister of
Ghana, the ancient African name of the country. In 1960 Nigeria also
became an independent republic. Both elected to remain members of the
British Commonwealth of Nations, as they are today.
This was the beginning of a widening process of decolonization that
began under Harold Macmillan. Macmillan succeeded as prime minister
when Eden resigned after Suez in January 1957. In 1960 in a speech
made in South Africa Macmillan spoke of the ‘wind of change . . . blowing
through the continent’. Britain should yield to the strength of African
national consciousness, he said. Thereafter, a stream of African countries
obtained independence — Sierra Leone in 1961, Tanganyika (now
Tanzania) and Uganda in 1962, Kenya and Northern Rhodesia in 1963,
Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1964, the Gambia in 1965, Basutoland (now
Lesotho) and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1966, Aden (now South
Yemen) in 1967 and Swaziland, the last, in 1968. In all these countries
black majority rule took the place of the white colonial administration.
This was not true, however, for two former British colonies in Africa: in
Southern Rhodesia (see below) and the Union of South Africa.
In 1948 the Boer Nationalist party defeated General Smuts’s United
party and began governing South Africa. To the consternation of the rest
of the world they instituted a policy of separating citizens of African and
Indian extraction from those of European, the white minority, by a system
known as apartheid. Segregated schools, public lavatories, even swimming
pools, were brought in to create a completely separate existence within one
country. In 1961, as the apartheid system became increasingly barbaric
and inhuman, South Africa was forced to withdraw from the Common-
wealth and became an international outlaw, her goods boycotted for thirty
years. Not until after the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994
did South Africa rejoin the Commonwealth.
Other former British colonies outside Africa also achieved rapid
independence as part of the dismantling of the empire: in 1962 Jamaica,
Trinidad and Tobago; in 1965 it would be Singapore’s turn, in 1966
Barbados and British Guiana, in 1968 Mauritius. Most of them paid

Tipsy
 WINDSOR

Britain the compliment of remaining members of the Commonwealth. In

Cyprus, which had been a British colony since after the First World War,
a long war against the British began in 1954. Despite the presence of a
large Turkish minority on the island the majority Greek population led by
Archbishop Makarios desired enosis, or union with Greece, but Britain
was loath to grant their wish and thereby lose an important base in the
eastern Mediterranean and also upset Turkey, a no less important ally in
the Cold War. But in 1960, after the rights of Greek and Turkish Cypriots
had been guaranteed by both Turkey and Greece, Cyprus was given her
independence. Since 1974, however, after an attempted coup by the then
military government in Greece, the island has been divided into two.
Harold Macmillan has been compared to Disraeli, on account of his
robust romantic patriotism and his historical sense of Britain’s destiny. His
wit and elan helped restore Britain’s self-confidence at a time when she was
still feeling her way in the post-war world. Despite his aristocratic languor
and mournful-bloodhound looks, he was a ruthless personality. When he
sacked most of his Cabinet, including his chancellor of the Exchequer
Selwyn Lloyd, in July 1962, his action was dubbed the ‘night of the long
knives’ after Hitler’s assassination of the Brownshirt leaders in 1934.
When his first chancellor and two other Treasury ministers had
damagingly resigned a few years before Macmillan had laconically called
it ‘little local difficulties’, but this time he was considered to have panicked.
The 1950s saw real growth in the British economy. With much of the
rest of Europe still in ruins, for the present Britain had few competitors,
and the retreat from empire and overseas responsibilities greatly reduced
her costs. Like Disraeli, Macmillan never underestimated the importance
of the nation’s comfort; his government built hundreds of new houses with
the end-of-empire dividends. By 1959 Harold Macmillan’s boast that the
British people ‘have never had it so good’ was evidently felt to be accurate.
The Conservatives increased their majority by a hundred seats in the
general election of that year.
Macmillan also addressed himself to defence options for Britain herself
in a post-imperial age. Now that the atomic bomb had been invented,
nuclear missiles offered a far cheaper way of defending Britain than
conventional forces. Not having to support men and their families on
military bases would save a great deal of money. It would end the
unpopular and unBritish conscript ‘national service’ which had been in
operation since the Second World War. But, although there was some
experimentation in Britain with nuclear warheads, it became clear that
America had perfected nuclear weapons to a higher degree than Britain
could afford.
Britain’s abandonment of her own nuclear-weapon research and the

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Nassau Agreement of 1962, which signalled her dependence on America

for such weapons, alarmed France. When Britain decided to apply for
membership of the EEC in 1963, President Charles de Gaulle felt that
Britain — and through Britain, America — would try to dominate the
organization. The proudly nationalist de Gaulle did not accept France’s
reduced role in the world and feared British power at the centre of Europe.
He had no wish to encourage America as a superpower. Britain’s applica-
tion was accordingly vetoed by France.
The humiliation inflicted by the EEC’s rejection as well as the mockery
made by Labour of the much vaunted ‘independent British deterrent’,
which was ‘neither independent, British nor a deterrent’, was the beginning
of the end of thirteen years of Conservative rule. At the height of the Cold
War there was one spying scandal after another. Britain’s security seemed
deeply compromised in the early 1960s: there was the Portland spy ring,
the Admiralty clerk William Vassal, as well as the intelligence officer
George Blake who got forty-two years in prison for spying for the
Russians. Questions were still being asked about the identity of the third
man involved in the defection to Moscow of the high-ranking British
diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. Then the Profumo
affair in 1963, when the secretary of state for war John Profumo was
accused of sharing a call-girl mistress Christine Keeler with a Russian naval
attaché, confirmed a growing suspicion that there was a careless decadence
at the heart of the upper-crust government.
Although Profumo initially denied the relationship in a statement to the
House of Commons, he eventually was forced to admit it and resigned. The
senior judge Lord Denning’s official report into the affair exonerated
Profumo of espionage, but confirmed the sensational press stories sur-
rounding Lord Astor’s country home Cliveden. The affair sounded the
death knell for an increasingly unpopular government. The trial for living
off immoral earnings of Stephen Ward, a society osteopath who had
introduced Profumo to Keeler and seemed to have provided mistresses for
many Tory politicians, provided an unfavourable contrast with the
situation in the country, where sterling crises prevented pay increases in the
public sector. Since 1959 the Conservatives had put through little domestic
legislation. Four new universities had been founded in 1961 and six more
were planned in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report, as were a number
of new hospitals. Nevertheless the government gave the impression of
being unwilling to put money into the maintenance of Britain’s public
buildings, not least her schools. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act,
which restricted immigration from Commonwealth countries, looked
racist. Hugh Gaitskell denounced it in the House of Commons as ‘a plain
anti-colour measure’. The Rent Act, which allowed far more competitive

741
 WINDSOR

pricing, produced ruthless landlords like London’s Peter Rachman, who

terrorized innocent bedsit-dwellers in the then run-down area of Notting
Hill.
Thanks to Macmillan’s good relationship with President Kennedy,
Britain became closely allied with America. Yet during the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962 it was quite obvious that, however special the ‘special
relationship’, so often said to exist between the two countries, Britain was
not accorded the status of a partner by the United States. When an
American spy satellite orbiting over Cuba spotted Russian missiles
apparently pointing at the United States, a world crisis of terrifying
proportions threatened. Though America belonged to NATO, John F.
Kennedy, the youthful and charismatic American president, opted to play
a lone hand against the Russian threat.
He put a blockade round Cuba and brought the world to the brink of a
third world war without telling his allies, not even Britain. British civil
servants and politicians began to see that an alliance with America did not
really offer a solution for post-imperial Britain, for evidently there was to
be no discussion among equals. Therefore, in spite of de Gaulle’s rebuff,
Britain began to revive her interest in the organization of European states.
In terms of combined populations and of industrial and economic power,
they made up as large a unit as America.
As a result of his theatrical abilities and his gift for presentation,
Macmillan had become known to cartoonists as Supermac. But by the end
of 1963 even his ability to convince the public was wearing thin. Although
employment was high during the 1950s, the government’s economic policy
had never been very smooth. In order to prevent inflation, the
Conservatives had resorted to ‘stop-go’ policies: if prices rose too sharply,
tax was suddenly increased; if they fell, interest rates were reduced. All in
all, Macmillan’s administration was looking increasingly tawdry. At last,
in 1963 illness forced him to resign dramatically in the middle of the
Conservative party conference.
From his hospital bed Supermac made sure that it was a compromise
candidate, the effete-looking fourteenth Earl of Home, who succeeded him
as party leader and prime minister. Home gave up his peerage and became
an MP as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Had his principal rival, the multi-
talented progressive R. A. Butler become prime minister in his stead, as
many in the party wished, the 1964 election might have had a different
outcome.
Unfortunately Sir Alex was a completely unreconstructed aristocrat,
more interested in shooting on his grouse moor than in managing the
House of Commons, which as a member of the Lords he scarcely knew
anyway. Macmillan in a lordly way might pretend that the grouse moors
742
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were his natural habitat, but in reality he was a furiously energetic party
politician beneath the apparently effortless superiority.
As the 1964 election approached the world was dominated increasingly
by new scientific discoveries, symbolized by America’s plans to put a man
on the moon. The old certainties about Britain’s role were vanishing. Who
was more fitted to lead Britain into an ever more competitive future where
new industries must take the place of the old and obsolete? A cadaverous
and faint-voiced lord who said that he used matchsticks to count with, or
an energetic young economics don who promised to introduce Britain to
‘the white heat of technology’? Although it was a close-run thing there was
not too much trouble deciding. Harold Wilson led Labour to victory by
five votes in October 1964.

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The Sick Man of Europe (1964-1979)

With the arrival of Labour in power in October 1964, the Swinging Sixties,
as this progressive period is popularly known, really began. Prime Minister
Harold Wilson was determined to modernize Britain. Her historic stability
meant that the weight of tradition had a tendency to stifle change. The
Ministry of Technology was created to thrust Britain forward into the
modern age. By the late 1960s British and French engineers in happy
collaboration trounced their American rivals by producing the Concorde
aeroplane, which flew faster than the speed of sound. Consideration was
even given to the amazing feat of submarine engineering to link the two
countries which was finally achieved thirty years later, the Channel
Tunnel.
Wilson’s government coincided with a seismic shifting of the historical
templates, with revolutions in thought in both Britain and abroad. In July
1964 Winston Churchill retired from Parliament after almost sixty years as
an MP; the previous year the last young men had emerged from doing
national service, marking a full stop to the era of wartime austerity and to
the habit of clean-cut conformity among the nation’s youth that the army
required.
Youth’s rejection of the older generation had been announced by John
Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger in 1956. By the mid-1960s ‘angry
young men’ with long hair and outrageous clothing fresh out of university
were not only the gadflies of the state, they set the tone for Britain. They
became known for being ‘anti-establishment’, but in fact they were a new
establishment whose allies were pop stars like the Liverpool group the
Beatles, actors, photographers and models. With satirical TV shows such
as That Was the Week that Was, and the satirical magazine Private Eye,
which all made jokes not only about politicians but about the royal family,
people in public life could no longer expect to escape criticism. The
proliferating new universities — Sussex opened in 1961, Kent and Warwick
in 1965, then eight more in 1966 — gave Britain a far larger undergraduate
population. Since many students were the first in their family to experience
tertiary education, the universities became hotbeds of radical thought.
The impresario and anarchic director Joan Littlewood had already
challenged the notion that all plays should take place in drawing rooms
with her championing of working-class dramas and actors in her Theatre
Royal in the East End. One kitchen-sink drama, A Taste of Honey in 1963,
unblinkingly showed the trials of an unmarried mother. Littlewood’s 1963
musical Oh What a Lovely War! encapsulated the mood of the time in the
scorn it poured on the officer class, an image from which they subsequently
found it hard to escape.
The 1960s were the heyday of ideas and idealism and, paradoxically, of

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affluence. The young bought tellies, modern-looking furniture and bizarre
fashionable clothes whose skirts were so short that only their generation
could wear them. In 1966 young Britons began a consumer spree which
has still not ended, and which their parents could never have enjoyed.
Britain’s first credit card, the Barclaycard, transformed the notion of credit,
which hitherto had hardly been taken further than paying in instalments
for a three-piece suite bought on hire purchase. It paved the way to what
has today become a leisure explosion of clothes, household appliances and
the package holiday, all of which could be put on the credit card. By
August 2002, some 49 per cent of all Britons had credit cards and were
using themto spend £540,000 a minute — a total of £285 billion in 2001
alone.
The 1960s opened with the trial of Penguin Books for publishing an
obscene book, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They were
acquitted, a verdict which brought the notion of literary censorship to an
end. The jury’s decision heralded an era of experimentation in all areas of
life, with sexual permissiveness now made easier by the invention of the
contraception pill. Under a great reforming home secretary, Roy Jenkins,
the brilliant son of a miner MP, Labour moved Britain forward into a
gentler, more humane society. Abortion was made legal in 1967 and thus
safe for the poor (it had always been safe, though illegal, for the rich). This
was part of an increasing sense that women were taking control of their
destinies, the movement known as women’s liberation, which flourished
from the late 1960s onwards and reflected the growing number of young
women being educated. In 1951 only one-quarter of the student
population were women; by the end of the century it would be over half.
Prodded by the popular new disciplines of psychiatry and psychology at
the more modern universities, the old British private educational system of
repressive boarding schools began to seem barbaric. Public schools were
now laughed at for producing an unimaginative kind of imperial admini-
strator who was made to seem redundant with the end of the empire.
Indeed, education was undergoing huge changes at all levels. Labour, with
their commitment to social reform, were determined to break a vicious
circle of a tiny number of the population being creamed off at eleven by the
eleven-plus exams, which separated the gifted few and packed them off to
grammar schools. The rest mainly sank in the secondary moderns laid
down by the Butler Education Act of 1944. Labour embarked on a
programme of building comprehensive schools so that children of all
abilities would be educated together, in the belief that this would take care
of the problem of late developers or children from disadvantaged
backgrounds who were eternally condemned by the eleven-plus to the
outer darkness of the despised secondary moderns.

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After the 1967 Plowden Report, teaching at primary level entered an

experimental and imaginative phase in which understanding the child took
precedence over the rigorous discipline with which British schooling had
previously been associated. A whole generation of schoolchildren grew up
of whom it was said that they were very happy and superb at creating
things out of yogurt pots but could scarcely read. Nevertheless, initially it
seemed that a new heaven on earth was being created by enlightened
people which had done away with the problems, mainly class-ridden, of
the past. The bowler hat vanished, and young Etonians spoke mockney
(mock cockney) to imitate the argot of young working-class photo-
graphers. It was a romantic age: hairdressers were working-class heroes
and ran off with heiresses, pop stars ran off with countesses. Stiff British
society swung; the idea of class was turned on its head. Money was uncool;
upper-middle-class people gave up sending their sons to their old prep
schools and sent them to the local primary school. The Labour MP Tony
Benn, who had been educated at Westminster public school and had
renounced a viscountcy, made Holland Park Comprehensive famous when
he sent all of his children there.
In 1967 homosexuality between consenting adults was made legal,
ending years of misery for men (homosexuality among women had never
been a criminal offence) who had previously been liable to imprisonment.
The painful procedure of divorce was made less cruel by removing the
question of guilt and providing that after two years of separation a
marriage could be ended on grounds of irretrievable breakdown. Perhaps
most important of all, in 1965 Britain abolished the death penalty, though
it was too late for many innocent victims of prejudiced trials such as Derek
Bentley.
That same year Labour, by the Race Relations Act, set up the Race
Relations Board to tackle racism. A growing number of Indian, Pakistani
and Caribbean immigrants from the old empire had been encouraged since
1945 by successive governments to fill employment gaps in factories,
hospitals and on the railways. In the mill towns of the north they were
forming sizeable communities and cultural differences were being
exploited by those who feared that immigrants would not adapt to the
British lifestyle. The act made the incitement to racial hatred a criminal
offence. In 1968 a second Race Relations Act rendered racial dis-
crimination in employment, advertising and housing illegal, created new
immigration-appeal procedures and gave the Race Relations Board power
to act directly in the courts.
By now America was not only conquering space ahead of Russia by
sending men to the moon and back, she was heavily involved in the former
French Indo-China fighting communism in the shape of the North
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Vietnamese, who, backed by communist China, had invaded South
Vietnam.
The Labour government supported the American presence in Vietnam,
though it declined a US request to send British troops. But as the war
dragged on it became extremely brutal in its methods. Not only the left of
the Labour party - which hitherto Wilson had been regarded as part of —
violently disapproved of what they regarded as neo-colonialism, but
millions of young Americans were outraged by it. One of the most
important effects of the American anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was
that protest movements became mainstream. By 1968 all over the world
the young had gathered for revolution.
In Paris a student protest against poor teaching under the conservative
Gaullist government turned into a massive strike, while in Prague behind
the Iron Curtain there were the first attempts to break up the monolithic
communist system. In what is known as the Prague Spring the Czech
Communist party leader Alexander Dubcek attempted to introduce
‘socialism with a human face’ by abolishing censorship and introducing
multi-party elections. But it ended in August 1968 with Warsaw Pact tanks
rolling into Prague to restore what was effectively Soviet domination.
There were photos in all the world’s newspapers of a despairing young
Czech student named Jan Palach who burned himself alive in 1969, five
months after the Prague Spring had failed to make it into summer.
Though British society was undergoing revolutionary change at all
levels, Britain escaped revolutionary violence. Her problems were
financial. Harold Wilson’s TV persona — he liked to be seen pipe in hand
wearing a raincoat — was intended to reassure the viewer of his down-to-
earth British credentials, but he seemed always to be fighting a losing battle
against economic instability, having found himself in the middle of a
balance of payments crisis when he took office, set off by Tory fiscal
irresponsibility. He and his chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan
staved off a devaluation crisis for long enough to win another election in
1966, massively increasing Labour’s majority to ninety-seven. But the
British economy was failing. Industry was threatened externally by the
rapidly reviving post-war economies of Germany, France and Japan and
internally by the damage done by industrial action and strikes and soaring
wage claims. The 1965 Trade Disputes Act made the strike weapon easier
as it gave union leaders full legal protection to use it where there had been
a threat of redundancy.
Wilson established the Prices and Incomes Board to investigate prices
and wage demands with representatives from business and the trade
unions, but when rising inflation necessitated giving the board legal
powers to suppress soaring wage claims this angered the left in the Labour

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party as well as the trade unions themselves. Many felt that a Labour
government with its roots in the trade union movement should not be in
the business of preventing claims for higher wages. But Wilson had seen the
figures: Britain could not afford the sort of claims which the unions were
putting in. When he announced a statutory wage freeze to be put through
Parliament to avoid devaluing the pound, there was uproar on the Labour
backbenches. It would only get louder as the decade progressed.
Wilson’s novel weapons of wage freeze and wage restraint did not stop
Britain arriving at another sterling crisis by the autumn of 1967,
precipitated by her renewed desire to enter the Common Market. Strikes
threatened, and confidence in the pound fell to a new low, with gold
reserves rapidly diminishing. In November the government was forced to
devalue the pound, having been unable to raise any further foreign loans
to prop up its value. This was a traumatic moment for Labour, who had
been desperate to avoid further association with this drastic remedy after
its deployment by the Attlee government in 1949. Although Wilson, the
cunning communicator, insisted the next day that this did not mean ‘the
pound in your pocket’ was worth less, no one believed him.
The new $x billion loan arranged for Britain by the International
Monetary Fund had the usual conditions of curbing government spending
for what was becoming a cap-in-hand nation. Harold Wilson in the late
1940s had himself resigned from government when charges for spectacles
were introduced by the Attlee administration. Twenty years later he was
presiding over prescription charges on the NHS, building fewer council
houses and putting off (until 1973) that key improver of children’s lives,
raising the school leaving age to sixteen.
Labour did not want to abandon all reforms, but they had to rely on
emergency budgets to raise money. Worldwide, markets were in turmoil.
Under Roy Jenkins, who replaced Callaghan as chancellor after the
devaluation, there were price hikes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes
intended to control inflation. Austerity ruled at the gloomy Treasury. Once
again, as in the late r94os, Britons were allowed to take only £50 out of
the country on holiday. It was not until the autumn of 1969 that economic
recovery and a trade surplus put an end to a financial regime which Britons
today would find unacceptable.
Meanwhile industrial action and the millions of days lost to industry
were destroying the economy. Laws were needed to prevent wildcat
unofficial strikes by left-wing shop stewards. Wilson and Barbara Castle,
the secretary of state for employment and productivity, tried to use
legislation to bring the trade union movement to heel, and in a famous
White Paper entitled In Place of Strife they proposed that all strikes should
first be approved by a ballot of the members. But MPs such as Jim
 1964-1979
Callaghan, who in a job-swap with Jenkins was now home secretary, were
extremely unhappy at the idea of introducing laws of which the
Conservative party might have been the author. A backbench revolt com-
bined with the TUC’s refusal to accept fines or legislation against strikes
ensured that by 1969 Wilson and Castle had to accept that the government
had no chance of putting anti-strike legislation through Parliament, despite
its enormous majority. They were forced to rely solely on the TUC’s word
that it would use its influence to prevent unofficial strikes.
Britain’s revived attempt to join the Common Market was vetoed, for
the second time, by de Gaulle shortly after the devaluation in 1967. Some
comfort was derived from the resignation of de Gaulle in 1969, which
suggested that next time it would be easier to be accepted into the
Common Market. Britain therefore persisted with her negotiations for
membership. Although Labour had set up a Ministry for Overseas
Development to help the newly independent Commonwealth countries
find their feet, the dynamics of nationalism had loosened ties between the
old colonies and Britain. The increasing volume of trade with Europe made
joining the Common Market seem inevitable.
Labour pressed on with relinquishing commitments, withdrawing
what troops remained east of Suez. Under pressure from the African
Commonwealth countries in 1965, the government imposed sanctions
against the white Rhodesian politician Jan Smith when he made a
Unilateral Declaration of Independence to evade the transition to black
majority rule. Commonwealth pressure chimed in with Labour’s natural
idealism to stop Britain selling arms to South Africa in 1967, though many
argued that this would lose thousands of jobs in the UK and that South
Africa would obtain arms anyway from the French and the Israelis.
Nevertheless Labour believed that they should not be seen to approve of a
pariah nation. However, the support of the Wilson government for the
Nigerian authorities when they refused to allow Biafra to break away and
fought a bloody war (1967-70) angered many on both sides of the House.
During the campaign for the 1970 general election Labour seemed
bound to win again. The government had been responsible for a remark-
able quantity of improvements to the fabric of modern Britain.
Establishing a Parliamentary Ombudsman to look into failures in
Whitehall departments made the process of government more accountable
to the people. But in 1970 it seemed Britons were dissatisfied by the rising
tax demands and attracted by the Conservatives’ patriotic reminders of
Britain’s great-power past. Despite all Labour’s reforms their choppy
financial record made the electorate turn to the more grandiose
Conservatives, who denounced Labour’s economic ‘plans’, higher taxation
and incomes policies as interference in people’s personal affairs.

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 WINDSOR

The Conservatives presented a united front under their new leader

Edward Heath, with his bright-blue eyes and booming voice. Heath came
to power determined to succeed where Wilson had failed: he wanted to cut
government spending and see off the unions. The millions of days lost in
unofficial strikes continued to run down British industry and lose inter-
national markets, despite the TUC’s vow of self-regulation. But the
Conservatives came to grief in the epidemic of inflation which gripped the
world at the beginning of the 1970s. There were enormous rises in world
food prices and commodities which badly hit British shops.
The Conservatives were forced to devote large sums of taxpayers’ money
to saving some of Britain’s most famous industries such as Rolls-Royce
aero-engines and Clydeside shipbuilders. But the Heath government’s
decision to enforce a nationwide wage freeze when the TUC and the
Confederation of British Industry together failed to reach a self-restricting
wage limit outraged the unions. Their members were watching the price of
milk and butter rise by 25 per cent a year. Heath set up two national
organizations which were even more far-reaching than Wilson’s: the Price
Commission and the Pay Board which had to approve all pay rises
affecting more than a thousand people.
The subject nearest Heath’s heart was joining the European Common
Market. This had always been one of his great enthusiasms (the others
were yachting and music — he had been the organ scholar at Balliol College,
Oxford). And fittingly it was under his government that Great Britain
became part of the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973.
To prepare for joining Europe, in 1971, the Conservatives brought in
decimalization, the conversion of the British pound into a system based on
tens to chime in with the continent. To a fanfare of national protest, the
pound now comprised 1oo new pence instead of 240 old pence; the
sixpence was replaced by two and a half pence, and the shilling by five
pence. Although Britain was also supposed to have converted to European
kilometres, the majority of the population regardless of their age continue
to talk about that ancient unit brought to Britain by the Romans, the mile.
Nevertheless, kilograms and millimetres are now Britain’s official units for
weights and measures.
The Market’s common external tariff ended Britain’s very close
relationship with Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand, which
sent almost 90 per cent of her dairy products to Britain and in return received
over half of her imports from Britain. Nowadays most of New Zealand’s
dairy trade is with Asian countries. The rupture of the former empire’s
trading links angered many politicians. They feared the end of cheap food
from the empire and the effect on Britain’s fishermen of not being allowed
to fish at will in the seas surrounding Britain, given that each EEC country

TS?
 1964-1979
has its quota. The left wing of the Labour party began to turn anti-
marketeer. So did some Conservatives who felt that the Commonwealth was
being too swiftly abandoned for Europe.
Relations with the Commonwealth were made dramatically worse in
1971 when the government attempted to implement a harsh new Immigra-
tion Act. This would have prevented any further automatic immigration into
Britain from former Commonwealth countries, while making it easier for
EEC nationals. The bill aroused outrage on all sides of the House. MPs were
still sensitive about the Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of
blood’ speech in 1968 in which he had proposed voluntary repatriation for
Asians and- West Indians. The legislation was altered: members of
Commonwealth countries who wished to immigrate into this country who
had a ‘grandpatrial’ connection, that is whose grandparents were from
Britain, had preference over citizens of European Community countries. By
accepting all 40,000 Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin, the dictator of
Uganda, in 1972 without a quibble, the Conservative government did
something to restore good relations with the Commonwealth. So did the
continuance of sanctions against Rhodesia.
As traditional supporters of the British arms industry, it was to be
expected that under the Conservatives arms sales to South Africa would be
resumed. That did not stop the increasingly assertive Commonwealth from
condemning the move. In 1971 the Conservatives showed a return to a sort
of mini-imperialism east of Suez by setting up a mutual defence pact with
Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. Diplomatic relations
were opened with Maoist China, which had been severed since 1949, an
event memorialized by Beijing’s gift to London Zoo of two giant pandas
named Chi-Chi and An-An.
Not content with changing the currency and the country’s trading
orientation, the Heath government massively remodelled local government
to reflect population trends. In six conurbations outside London new
metropolitan counties came into being — Merseyside, South Yorkshire,
Tyne and Wear, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Greater
Manchester.
The Heath government also saw the intensification of a civil war in
Northern Ireland which had erupted in the last year of the Wilson
administration. Stormont, the local Parliament for home affairs established
in 1920 on the edge of Belfast, had ruled Northern Ireland in the interests
of the two-thirds Protestant majority. Protestants controlled everything,
including housing and employment, leaving Catholics with very few civil
rights. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, the province’s police force, was
Protestant to a man and discriminated against Catholics.
For forty years the Catholics of Northern Ireland had endured being

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 WINDSOR

treated as a lesser race. However, at the end of the 1960s the example of
black people successfully asserting their civil rights in America inspired
them to revolt. Civil rights organizations began to flourish in Northern
Ireland, helped by a liberal reforming prime minister, Captain Terence
O’Neill. The Royal Ulster Constabulary outraged world opinion by using
violence against demonstrators, but no policeman was punished for this
brutality and no attempts were made at government level to get Stormont
to be more responsive to the needs of the Catholic community. So serious
did the situation become, with clashes between Protestant and Catholic
rioters and the burning of hundreds of mainly Catholic homes in Belfast,
that in 1969 Wilson sent British troops to the province.
At the same time a deadly new splinter group called the Provisional IRA,
or the Provos, started murdering Protestants in Northern Ireland. They
believed that the only way things would ever improve for the Catholics was
to obtain the unification of Ireland. The bombing campaign waged
pitilessly by the Provos was answered just as bloodily by Protestant
terrorist groups. When the British government insisted on introducing
internment without trial, the prejudice against Catholics seemed to be
confirmed even in the treatment of suspected terrorists, as no Protestant
terrorists were being interned.
The watershed came one day in January 1972 that became infamous as
Bloody Sunday, when thirteen members of a peaceful group of Catholic
demonstrators were shot dead in Derry. With the province in uproar the
Conservative government concluded that the fifty-year-old Stormont
Parliament should be closed down. Direct rule would be imposed for
twelve months while plans were drawn up for a fairer assembly and a
power-sharing executive created from that assembly with equal rights for
Catholics and Protestants.
The Heath government understood that one of the most important
factors in obtaining peace in Northern Ireland was to involve Southern
Ireland or Eire. At Sunningdale in 1973 the Council of Ireland was created,
a body with members from both north and south. In return for gaining
some say in the north’s affairs, Dublin agreed to give up its fifty-year-old
claim to Northern Ireland. Dublin also accepted that the province would
never change its status and be reabsorbed into the south unless the majority
of its citizens wished it.
Despite the importance of these exchanges, the sectarian hatreds of
Northern Ireland prevented the assembly’s rule of the province from
getting under way as planned in January 1974. All the successful candi-
dates in the elections to the new assembly, except one, were opposed to
sharing power with the Catholics. Strikes took place all over Ulster in bitter
protest against the Sunningdale agreement. The British government was

752
 1964-1979
forced to suspend Stormont and retreat to direct rule once more, with
20,000 soldiers now stationed in Ulster.
As Heath’s initiatives in Northern Ireland ground to a halt, by the
beginning of 1973 his industrial strategy was also being violently rejected.
A series of massive strikes had been directed against his pay and price
initiatives. Even normally restrained civil servants went on strike as the
price of food soared and unemployment rocketed. The American dollar
was devalued with knock-on effects on the pound. So ruinous and
uncontrollable was the rate of inflation that Heath’s chancellor Anthony
Barber was forced to make emergency payments to those on social security
and to subsidize the price of butter. He also handed over no less than £15
million to the mortgage companies to make sure they kept their interest
rates down because the cost of living was rising too fast.
Unlike Labour, the Conservatives had not been divided among them-
selves over legislation to restrict the powers of the trade unions. They
pushed through industrial relations laws and set up the National Industrial
Relations Court. But this policy of confrontation did not stop the strikes.
In 1972 the Conservatives had been humiliated when an inquiry awarded
striking miners a pay rise three times the amount the government was
offering.
In October 1973 the already spiralling inflation spun out of control, as
it did all over western Europe, as a result of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur
War. Enraged by western support for a victorious Israel, which had once
again defeated the Arab nations, Arab revenge had been hardhitting.
Countries which had supplied arms to Israel were boycotted, and oil prices
were quadrupled. This pitched the economies of western Europe into
recession. At this time of crisis it was more necessary than ever to keep a
ceiling on wages and prices. But the miners rebelling against Heath’s price
controls realized that the moment gave them unique leverage. With fuel at
a premium, they refused to work overtime unless they were given a pay
increase above the government’s norm. They were joined in fraternal
solidarity by the electricity power engineers and by ASLEF, the
Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen; this
disrupted not only the running of power stations but the movement of coal.
As the icy winter of 1973 drew on the country began grinding to a halt.
Heath felt he had to stand by his inflation strategy, but the result was
deadlock. Once again the government was forced to employ emergency
measures. British industry was rationed to working a three-day week to
save electricity. A sense of despair pervaded the country. A government-
imposed speed limit took the place of petrol rationing, but the effect on
morale was the same. Television stations were forced to close down by
government order at 10.30 each night. When the TUC stepped in to offer

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 WINDSOR

to negotiate a one-off settlement with the miners outside Heath’s pay

norm, the newspapers asked ‘Who governs Britain?’ But the miners refused
to enter into further negotiations. They wanted a dramatic increase in
wages, even though Britain could not afford it. When that was refused the
miners declared that on 9 February 1974 they would strike. In response
Heath called a general election for 28 February.
Heath had only been pursuing policies which Labour had pursued more
cautiously. But, just as he had been defeated by the miners, he was defeated
at the election — though so narrowly that he could approach the Liberals
and ask them to form a pact with him. There was not enough common
ground between the two parties, and so Harold Wilson formed a minority
government, returning to power for the third time. In October that year he
went to the country again, in search of an overall majority; he succeeded,
but his majority was only three. Heath was challenged for the leadership
of the Conservative party in February 1975 by Margaret Thatcher, his
former education minister. With right-wing support she succeeded in
replacing him.
In theory, an agreement known as the social contract between Labour
and the TUC that had been reached before the February election should
have made industrial relations less fraught. In return for the Labour
government repealing Heath’s anti-union legislation, the TUC promised
once more to lean on the unions and dissuade them from demanding from
the country more than it could afford. The miners’ strike was indeed soon
settled. Nevertheless, the rate of inflation ensured that the unions were not
inclined to restrain themselves. By 1975 annual wage increases were
averaging a grotesque 25 per cent a year, in line with inflation. Over the
previous five years, the PSBR (the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement —
the total borrowing of the government and of nationalized industries) had
gone up by £8 billion. Once again in July 1975 the Labour government fell
back on a statutory price freeze and a statutory prices and incomes policy,
so that those earning over £8,500 a year were not allowed more money.
Labour fought a losing battle to keep down the cost of government.
Mammoth amounts of money were still borrowed by the government and
poured into British industries such as British Leyland Cars, Rolls-Royce
and Ferranti. By 1976, once again, to the outside world Britain under
Labour seemed to be sinking. In March Wilson retired without warning as
prime minister. He was succeeded by James Callaghan, who had held the
offices of home secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer in previous
Wilson administrations and had been foreign secretary since 1974. He and
his chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey’s immediate task was to
negotiate another vast loan of £3,900 million from the International
Monetary Fund in Washington to prop up sterling. Once again, the

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conditions dictated to the British government by the IMF were to reduce
public spending.
Denis Healey would implement deep cuts in health and education. But
the Labour government was already committed to higher taxation as part
of their policy of wealth redistribution. Healey’s frappant remarks about
soaking the rich could not be forgotten when supertaxes came in, with the
highest rate pitched at a colossal 83 per cent. Many high earners chose to
leave Britain now that they were only receiving seventeen pennies for every
pound they earned. The new administration could not counter the
widespread feeling that the unions ruled Britain. The weakness of the
government was shown at every level.
A series of dismal by-elections had cut Labour’s overall majority down
to one. Only an agreement with the Liberals, the Lib-Lab pact, allowed
them to continue in office, as Callaghan did not want to call an election.
The Liberals under the youthful David Steel, ‘the Boy David’, made it a
condition of their support that they should be able to veto every new
Labour law. As ever the Liberals were hoping for electoral reform and
proportional representation: in February 1974 they had polled six million
votes out of a total of twenty-seven million, almost a quarter of the voting
population, and yet had won only fourteen seats out of 635 in the House
of Commons. But owing to an upsurge of Celtic nationalism, the Liberal
vote started falling. When the Liberals decided to withdraw their support
Callaghan was forced to turn to the newly powerful Scottish Nationalists,
who had eleven seats by October 1974. The Scottish Nationalists
demanded devolution and a Scottish Assembly in exchange for their
support. The discovery of oil in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland in
the late 1960s had given the Scots confidence that ‘their’ oil could finance
an independent government. Their demands for Scottish independence
obliged Labour to speed up an inquiry into the possibilities of devolution
and regional assemblies for Scotland and Wales.
Sunny Jim, as the burly, commonsensical Callaghan was known, had
begun his reign full of optimism and with the support of the unions. He
was determined to unite left and right within the Labour party. But by the
beginning of 1979 the unions were no more inclined to obey him or the
TUC than they ever had been. They simply refused to be tied to the wage
increases the government had asked for to keep down inflation. Almost all
asked for double — and got it.
And the way they got it was by strikes. There was endless industrial
action by transport workers and a reckless strike mentality spread into
every industry in Britain. When in late January 1979 over a million
workers in the public services, dustmen, ambulance drivers and water
engineers, went on strike for a day it seemed that Britain was collapsing

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into its own filth. The dead could not even be buried. It was Britain’s
‘Winter of Discontent’.
In marked contrast to Callaghan’s constant and ultimately feeble remon-
strations with the unions was the voice of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the
new leader of the Conservative party. She did not mince her words as she
watched the government's guidelines on incomes and industrial policies
being destroyed by the unions. Increasingly most of the country agreed
with her as the rubbish mounted outside their windows during a three-and-
a-half-month dustmen’s strike. At the end of March 1979 the Labour
government had run out of deals. On a no-confidence motion in the House
of Commons, it was brought down by one vote and an election was called
for 3 May.

~ anON
 1979-2002

The Thatcher Legacy (1979-2002)

In a dramatic reversal of fortune the 1979 election gave the Conservatives
339 seats, against Labour’s 268. With an overall majority of forty-three the
Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher took office. With her elegant
blonde coiffeur, her high court shoes, flowing skirts and handbag she
looked no more threatening than the wife of the company director she was.
But Mrs Thatcher’s sedate appearance disguised the fact that she was a
revolutionary, a revolutionary of the right.
By 1979 British industrial productivity had reached dramatic new lows.
Britain was known as the Sick Man of Europe and was being held to
ransom bythe unions, whose legendary union-sponsored tea breaks made
the country a laughing stock all over the world. The Labour government’s
stormy attempts to curb the unruly unions weakened Britain’s inter-
national standing and undermined sterling. Restrictive union practices —
for example, that such and such a worker could only do the job his union
permitted — were holding back Britain from the sort of technological
innovation without which industries die. The print unions were preventing
the British newspaper business from using the computer technology that
would have made their papers far cheaper to produce, because it would put
the compositors out of a job — the people who each day pasted up the type
for the hot-metal printing process invented in the fifteenth century. Japan
and Germany were forging ahead because they had rebuilt their industries
from scratch after the destruction of the Second World War, unimpeded by
obstructive unions.
In 1979 the state not only owned practically every large industry from
Vickers shipbuilding to British Steel, from Jaguar to British Gas, from
British Airways to Rolls-Royce. It owned and maintained all the nation’s
council houses; it paid the salaries of the whole of the civil service and its
myriad subdivisions which took care of tax collection and parking fines; its
employees also included all the nurses and doctors employed in NHS
hospitals and the cleaning staff too. It had to meet gigantic welfare bills.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century the British state had been
expanding its remit until it was the biggest employer and provider in the
country. And yet Great Britain plc was going broke. She could not afford
to run all the businesses she owned; she was constantly having to bail out
many of the older industries like shipbuilding and coalmining with
subsidies, because other countries could produce those products more
cheaply. The spectre of mass unemployment in the communities that had
grown up round shipyards and mines kept them open.
Mrs Thatcher was adamant that Britain could not go on borrowing
immense sums from the International Monetary Fund to save failing state
industries for what she considered to be sentimental reasons. She believed

ee
 WINDSOR

that Britain had drastically to reduce the overwhelming Public Sector

Borrowing Requirement, and also to bring down the terrifying inflation
rate, not by agreements with the trade unions but by controlling the money
supply. Mrs Thatcher became famous for making Britain balance her
books, for only paying what she could afford, and for a campaign to
replace the culture of benefit scrounging with a nation of responsible home
owners.
Though the Conservative party was traditionally a party of pragmatists
who distrusted ideology, the Thatcherites were known for their slogans.
They believed that they had a hard road to travel to rid Britain of the creep
of socialist ideas, those post-war consensual assumptions Mrs Thatcher’s
mentor Sir Keith Joseph called ‘well-intentioned statism’. Their most
celebrated slogan summed up everything about the Thatcher Revolution.
It was ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. Privatization of numerous
state activities was the Thatcher government’s most significant contri-
bution to British politics; in the process they invented what they called
‘popular capitalism’ through a ‘stakeholder democracy’. British politics
were turned on their head.
Almost all of the nationalized industries, most of which had become
unprofitable monoliths, were sold off to private companies, or privatized,
starting in 1980 with British Aerospace and British Airways. Private sector
involvement was heavily encouraged in the public services. In the process
Mrs Thatcher for most of the decade succeeded where her predecessors for
the previous thirty years had failed: she broke the power of the trade
unions once and for all and slew the dragon of inflation. By ridding the
government of responsibility for inefficient and expensive state-owned
industries, by the late 1980s she had raised £20 billion for the Treasury,
and still more was raised when her creation of a deregulated, free-market
economy helped spark a consumer boom.
By giving ordinary people who had never bought a share in their life a
stake in the privatized industries and utilities of Britain, Mrs Thatcher
intended to strengthen the bulwarks of the democratic process against
socialism, by restoring people’s pride in their independence. She believed
that a dependency culture was eating away at Britain — too many people
expected everything to be provided by the welfare state instead of by their
own efforts. She was determined to create an enterprise culture instead
where the sort of people who supported her were rewarded, not those who
depended for everything on what she called the nanny state. In some ways
Mrs Thatcher’s convictions were simplistic. One of her favourite slogans
was that Britain must return to ‘Victorian values’, when the state had been
kept at arm’s length by the self-reliant ethos which had made Britain great.
She believed that if people owned their houses they would become more

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upright citizens and take greater care of their environment. Her Council
House Acts of 1980 and 1984 which enabled council-house tenants to buy
their own homes with large discounts helped swing the working-class vote
her way.
Mrs Thatcher had oa chemistry at Oxford in the late 1940s, at that
time a considerable achievement for a woman. As prime minister she stood
out against her all-male Cabinet, as she did against the 63 5-strong House
of Commons, for in 1979 there were only nineteen women MPs. She had
shown similar robustness as education minister under Heath and had given
some hint of the shape of things to come when she ended free milk in
schools, gaining the nickname ‘Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher’. Some of her
keenest supporters were self-made British Asian businessmen whose values
of frugality, hard work and self-sufficiency were so similar to hers. But her
followers came from a wide spectrum: they were not only bankers and
financiers, they were small businessmen, shopkeepers and ordinary people
fed up with the culture of Labour which seemed to be epitomized by
inefficiency and the closed shop. The advertising slogan accompanying a
posed photograph of a snaking dole queue which had helped win the
Conservatives the 1979 election, ‘Labour isn’t working’, said it all.
The arrival of the new government was overshadowed by two IRA
assassinations, spectacular even after a five-year Provisional IRA campaign
to get the British troops out by bombing the mainland. There had been
bombs on the Méz, and at pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, but when
the IRA succeeded in penetrating the House of Commons car park and
blew up Mrs Thatcher’s mentor, the MP and Colditz escaper Airey Neave
days before his protégé was elected prime minister, there was consternation
over the threat to state security. It was followed at the end of August 1979
by the no less shocking murder of Earl Mountbatten and members of his
family in a fishing boat in Ireland.
In its first months in office the Conservative government scored a
remarkable diplomatic success. The seemingly intractable problem of the
fifteen-year-old war in Southern Rhodesia yielded to the formidable
foreign secretary Lord Carrington when he decided to deal directly with
the guerrillas. Under the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 Smith and
the guerrilla leaders agreed to a ceasefire and democratic elections. The
guerrillas handed in their guns in an orderly fashion at collection points,
and free elections were arranged on the basis of one man one vote. Black
majority rule brought the former guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe to power
in February 1980. He became prime minister of the independent nation of
Southern Rhodesia, which took the African name Zimbabwe.
The same year the amount of oil flowing from Britain’s North Sea
oilfields took a quantum leap five years after coming onstream and solved

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Britain’s fuel crisis. Cushioned by oil income — Britain in the early 1980s
was extracting close to one-tenth of the world’s production — Mrs Thatcher
reinvented the British economy. Under her chancellor of the Exchequer
Geoffrey Howe, Labour’s swingeing taxation of the wealthiest was ended,
the supertax of 83 per cent was cut to 60 and income tax reduced. A few
years later the highest tax band would be 40 per cent. Mrs Thatcher
believed that the pounds saved from the taxman would create a consumer
boom. At the same time indirect taxation such as VAT was almost
doubled, which (as some commentators noted) put the tax burden back on
to those least able to bear it.
As the work of freeing the state of its vast burden and dismantling the
enormously top-heavy public sector got under way, inflation fell towards
single figures. Life slowly began to improve for many Britons as Mrs
Thatcher and her team embarked on breaking up the state monopolies.
Control over telephone equipment, for example, was removed from the
Post Office in 1980. Once the telecommunications industry had been
opened up to competition, the bad old days of a quarter of a million people
waiting for phones, as they had done in the 1970s, were over. British
Telecom, the new name of the privatized industry, was obliged to compete
in the market. Overall Britain became far more efficient.
But the Thatcher success story and the Thatcherite mantra that the
market must rule and the government not interfere had social drawbacks:
massive unemployment and the contraction of the United Kingdom’s
manufacturing base. As a result of the new government’s determination
not to pour good money after bad, many state-owned and private
businesses started to go bankrupt. In September 1980 the steel works at
Consett, County Durham, which was the main source of work in the area,
closed down. In historic manufacturing centres like Leeds, where
engineering, textiles and printing had provided employment for more than
a hundred years, the unprofitable, in the Thatcherite jargon of the day, had
‘to go to the wall’. Manufacturing slumped from 52 per cent of the British
economy to 32. All over the north, the centre of heavy industry, unemploy-
ment rose by leaps and bounds.
By the spring of 1982 more than three million people were out of work,
figures which were worse than those seen in the great depression. Helped
by the harsh economic climate, Mrs Thatcher’s war against the unions was
dramatically successful. She outlawed secondary picketing, reduced the
scope of the closed shop and made it easier for employers to sack
inadequate employees, which previously would have brought the unions
out on strike. Unions could also be fined for unlawful industrial action. As
unemployment climbed in the recession of the early 1980s the unions lost
much of their power as a result of huge redundancies. They were not able

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to come out on strike because their membership had decreased so rapidly,

and the TUC no longer encouraged strikes as they had in the past. In 1983
a newspaper publisher from Manchester named Eddy Shah paved the way
for the computerized newspapers of our era when he launched a paper
called Today without unionized labour.
In a failure of imagination born of her own comfortable circumstances
and her own strong character, Mrs Thatcher could not visualize the plight
of the poor or unemployed who through no fault of their own were living
on benefit. To discourage reliance on the welfare state and force the
unemployed into looking for jobs, her government deliberately set benefits
to be increased at a rate 5 per cent below inflation. This was a saving at the
expense of those least able to afford it, but Mrs Thatcher believed that harsh
measures were the only way to break what she thought of as a vicious circle.
Mrs Thatcher’s pronouncements to the effect that she did not believe in
‘society’ infuriated many of Britain’s institutions — the universities and
Churches, local councillors and the caring professions. The government’s
reputation could not but be dented by the unprecedented unemployment
figures. The complaints that Thatcherism was cold and unfeeling began to
be heard even among Tories, many of whom were of the One Nation
Disraelian variety. They believed with Peel and Disraeli that Conservatism
must not be the rule of the haves without reaching out to the have-nots.
Mrs Thatcher herself divided her party into wets (One Nation Tories) and
dries (her sensible followers). Britain’s greatest asset in many people’s eyes
was that she was a uniquely caring society, the jewel in whose crown was
the safety net of the National Health Service. But Mrs Thatcher and her
brilliant Cabinet, whose grasp of the mysteries of economics could reduce
opponents to silence, believed that this was the sort of talk that had driven
the country massively into debt. Yet no matter how much hard men
surrounding Mrs Thatcher suggested that the unemployed ‘got on their
bikes’ and out of the social security offices to find work, too many areas
had unemploynient levels approaching 50 per cent.
In the spring of 1981 the tension in Britain suddenly exploded into inner-
city riots. Brixton in south London was out of police control for several
days. Although they were called race riots, the motive seems not to have
been racial so much as the reaction of disadvantaged inner-city people who
saw no future for themselves. Lord Scarman, a distinguished law lord who
was chosen to chair an inquiry into the riots, was of that opinion. In
Scarman’s view the underlying problem was not criminal elements but
unemployment and social despair in the decaying inner cities. Mrs
Thatcher, however, refused to believe his evidence. Scarman also recom-
mended that larger numbers of the police be recruited from the ethnic
minorities and greater efforts be put into community policing.

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Though Mrs Thatcher personally continued to believe in ‘criminal

elements’, other members of the government nevertheless accepted that
there was an urgent need for some state involvement to accelerate urban
renewal. Grant-aided schemes for the unemployed were produced to help
them start up their own businesses. The environment secretary Michael
Heseltine launched a big northern initiative to help Liverpool’s Toxteth
district where there had been rioting for three days.
A few months after the Brixton riots the social fabric of Britain was
strong enough to revive for the marriage of Prince Charles, the heir to the
throne, to the enchanting blonde nursery-school teacher Lady Diana
Spencer, in July 1981. She was a nineteen-year-old member of an old
aristocratic landowning family with strong links to the court. Princess
Diana’s youth and spontaneous charm took the popularity of the royal
family to new heights, as did her warm-hearted espousal of many difficult
causes. She was admired for insisting on shaking hands with AIDS sufferers
at a time when many thought that it was like leprosy and spread by touch.
She would go on to do much to discredit the use of landmines throughout
the world. The wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral was watched by millions of
people round the world and there were celebratory street parties all over
the country.
Meanwhile Mrs Thatcher’s success curve continued onwards and
upwards: she moved from setting Britain’s financial house in order to claw-
ing back the nation’s surplus contribution to the European Community
budget, and by 1983 she had achieved a £450 million EC budget rebate to
the UK. Nevertheless her revolution continued to antagonize many
sections of British society, as did her close relationship with the ultra-
conservative Republican administration in Washington. The election in
1980 of President Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979, restarted the Cold War after a promising period of détente which
had seen work begin on a gas pipeline between Siberia and western Europe.
Most western European governments took a more pragmatic view of the
Soviet Union’s actions than the United States, believing the invasion of
Afghanistan was a defensive measure against Muslim fundamentalism,
which was threatening Russia’s southern borders. But Reagan and his far-
right supporters insisted that there should be a new arms race. Thanks to
his imposition of sanctions against Russia, the growing exchange of
information and technology between Iron Curtain countries and western
Europe came to an abrupt halt.
When the Reagan administration announced out of the blue that it was
extending the arms race into space by embarking on a ‘Star Wars’ pro-
gramme to create a defensive nuclear shield over the American continent,
European peace movements mushroomed. The Russians pulled out of

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arms-control talks, talks which American conservatives were threatening

to stall anyway. Europe seemed to be on the edge of nuclear war. By 1981
more than 200,000 people in Britain had registered as members of CND,
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organization which had sunk
from view after the Aldermaston marches in the 1960s.
The United States stationed the latest generation of nuclear missiles in
western Europe to protect the west from 300 Russian SS-20s. But large
numbers of European protesters became convinced that, with American
conservatives in the driving seat bent on confrontation with Russia, their
countries would form the theatre of nuclear war, while Americans
remained’ safe 3,000 miles away. Women from all over Britain, young and
old, built camps round the US airfield at Greenham Common in Berkshire
when it was decided to locate cruise missiles there.
By the spring of 1982 Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism were thus faced
with a rising tide of unpopularity which threatened the whole experiment
with early extinction. Abruptly and unexpectedly, in April that year she
was rescued by Argentina’s invasion of the tiny Falkland Islands. Although
the islands are 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, the 1,800-strong
population is entirely British and has continued to be British since it
became part of the empire in 1833. On the orders of the military dictator
General Galtieri a small force of Argentine soldiers overpowered the
seventy-nine Royal Marines on the main island. With the governor of the
Falkland Islands, Sir Rex Hunt, they were flown to Montevideo. Twelve
thousand Argentinean troops were then landed on the islands, which were
claimed for Argentina as Los Malvinas.
Britain had a choice of either giving in to Argentina or defending British
nationals, even though they were 8,000 miles away. Under the warlike Mrs
Thatcher, who was now compared by admirers to Boudicca, Britain chose
to defend them. In a last gasp of imperial power a hundred ships of the
Royal Navy steamed to Argentina accompanied by two aircraft carriers,
one of which contained the queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, a daring
helicopter pilot.
By the end of June the Argentineans had been defeated (their military
dictatorship was later overthrown as a result) at a cost to Britain of
hundreds of millions of pounds. Mrs Thatcher said that what had been at
stake was the safety of British nationals abroad. Nevertheless Britain no
longer had the power, money or effectiveness to wage colonial wars in this
fashion. It would have been impossible to go to war on such principles over
Gibraltar or Hong Kong. Nor could Britain have won a war in the distant
southern hemisphere without the support of the American administration
in tackling the many logistical problems that arose.
The Falklands War made Mrs Thatcher a popular heroine at home. A

763
 WINDSOR

fever of patriotism and traditional British xenophobia killed the beginnings

of a revolt against her methods. At the June 1983 election, the ineffective-
ness of Callaghan’s successor as Labour leader Michael Foot, and by a left-
leaning Labour manifesto later described as the ‘longest suicide note in
history’, the Conservative party’s majority rose from 43 to 144. As if to
celebrate, a month later, £500 million of public spending cuts were
announced.
Labour’s share of the vote shrank to just over 25 per cent, a record low
for a main opposition party. It had been split by the formation of the Social
Democrat party in r98r by four prominent members of the Labour
shadow Cabinet, in protest against the influence of the hard left and the
destruction of independent opinion within the Labour party. They
included the former Labour foreign secretary Dr David Owen and Roy
Jenkins, the former home secretary and chancellor. They believed that
Labour was no longer a party dedicated to achieving its programmes
through Parliamentary means. New rules allowed the deselection of sitting
MPs if they offended grass-roots members, and gave trade union and other
organizational blocs 40 per cent of the vote in the electoral college to
choose the party leader. Labour had become backward looking and
primitive in its anti-Common Market views and irresponsibly unrealistic in
its adoption of nuclear unilateralism, the decision to rid Britain of nuclear
weapons without asking others to do the same. A dramatic series of by-
election wins parachuted the SDP leaders, known as the Gang of Four, into
Parliament and made it clear that the Social Democrats were a force to
reckon with.
But history was still with Mrs Thatcher. With such huge electoral
approval, by 1984 Mrs Thatcher had begun limbering up to take on the
miners. Having failed to close twenty-three unproductive pits in 1981, this
time she was determined to win the war to reform the coalmining industry,
whose subsidy cost the government £800 million a year. In some pits coal
cost £20 a ton more to extract from the ground than it could be sold for.
Since its heyday in the 1920s, when the industry employed a million and a
quarter miners, British coal had been rapidly declining as a source of power
and was being replaced by alternative methods that were cheaper and
cleaner — nuclear-powered electricity stations, Middle Eastern oil, and now
oil and gas from the North Sea. By the 1980s only 300,000 miners
remained, 400,000 having taken advantage of excellent early-retirement
deals to leave voluntarily in the 1960s and retrain.
In March the government announced that twenty pits had to be closed
and 20,000 jobs lost. The leader of the National Union of Mineworkers
Arthur Scargill, an old-fashioned Marxist, was determined to prevent it.
For a year he kept the miners out on strike, but he did so without a national

764
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ballot, so he never had the entire industry’s support. Moreover, under a

new Trade Union Act in July, unions lost their legal immunity if they struck
without a ballot. By October 1984 the High Court had ordered the
sequestration of the NUM’s funds. The NUM was penniless, and it was not
going to be able to keep the strike going for long without money.
Despite the anti-union feeling among many Britons after years of being
at their mercy, there was a great deal of sympathy for the plight of the
miners and their families facing unemployment in areas where whole
communities centred round the coal pit. At the same time the level of
violence and intimidation on the picket lines against miners who wanted to
work — in One incident a taxi-driver was killed by a concrete block being
dropped on his cab — disgusted many. So did Scargill’s financial links with
the pariah terrorist state of Libya. That very year Gaddafi’s diplomats had
horrified their British hosts by firing at and killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher
when she was escorting a demonstration against the People’s Bureau of
Libya in London’s St James’s Square.
Determined not to repeat Heath’s mistakes and resort to a three-day
week the Thatcher government stockpiled coal at power stations and made
plans for non-union drivers to deliver it. It had also arranged for the
mechanisms of many power stations to be adapted so that they could fire
on oil as well as coal, and it organized the police so that they could be sent
at a moment’s notice to any trouble spot. Support for the strike within the
mining industry itself was never unanimous: less than two-thirds of the pit
supervisors voted in favour. Productive pits in the Nottingham area
created a breakaway union, the UDM, whose members wished to continue
to work.
By March 1985 the year-long strike was over. Under Ian McGregor, a
Scot who had emigrated to Canada and who promised to re-examine
decisions on pit closures, the National Coal Board succeeded in bringing
the strike to an end. Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader who, after Labour’s
poor showing at the polls in 1983, had replaced Michael Foot, weakened
his public standing by not condemning the picket-line violence. In fact he
personally believed that Scargill was doing more to destroy the coal
industry than the Tories were. Many pits, once closed, would cost too
much to reopen. The strike cost the British government £3 billion, but the
Labour party conference and the TUC had both backed it.
The miners’ strike epitomized the conflict between old industries and the
Thatcher government’s determination to modernize British industry,
between old-fashioned, obstructive unionism and progress. It had ended in
a definitive victory for Thatcherism. It was followed the next year by the
global tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s successful defiance of the print unions in
moving The Times and his other newspapers from Fleet Street to Wapping.

765
 WINDSOR

There he established union-free presses using the new technology and

indirectly paved the way for the Independent newspaper, which was set up
by journalists reluctant to cross the picket line. Thatcherism had begun to
seem like the norm.
The defeat of the miners caught Labour at a low point in their electoral
fortunes. The resounding Thatcher victory of 1983 was a sign that many
in Britain were turning their backs on the trade union movement, partly
because the working class (in the sense of manual workers) had shrunk to
a third of the employed population. Though Mrs Thatcher’s methods
seemed insensitive at first, it was hard to deny and would become harder
to deny that they were also very successful. She had broken the
stranglehold of the unions and had made slimmed-down British industry
an example to the rest of the world. Her success made it increasingly
difficult for Labour as the client of the trade unions to be taken seriously
as an electable party. Few people believed any longer that the trade unions
could be relied on to create a viable wages policy. State capitalism had
proved too expensive to work. Mrs Thatcher, who had drastically reduced
government borrowing and inflation seemed to be proof that the free
market first enunciated 200 years before by Adam Smith was the cure for
Britain’s ills.
The left-leaning progressive thought that had dominated the values of
educated Britons was beginning to look obsolete. Yet left-wing extremists’
control over Labour in the mid-1980s ensured that the party continued to
insist that the way forward was through higher and higher spending. Each
Labour party conference demanded more rather than less nationalization
— though where the money was to come from was not discussed. As the
British economic miracle took hold, it became as fashionable to hold right-
wing views as it had been odious since the 1960s. Public schools and
conspicuous consumption came back into fashion. The generation known
as Thatcher’s Children did not seem to have one atom in their bones of the
old British yen for social reform that had been such a powerful legacy of
the nineteenth century.
The final blow for all varieties of left-of-centre opinion seemed to have
been dealt when Thatcherism contributed to the demise of Russian
communism. Mrs Thatcher’s success in privatizing state industries, in
replacing stagnant state monopolies by economic competition, made the
state planning of Warsaw Pact countries look old fashioned and ridiculous.
Known in the Soviet Union as the Iron Lady, Mrs Thatcher was to achieve
fame abroad comparable to that of Winston Churchill. For she continued
on a roll. Her courageous conduct of the Falklands War cemented her
warm personal relations with President Reagan. The special relationship
with America sought by so many British post-war premiers genuinely

766
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{ >

A new era in East-West relations 71 years after the Bolshevik Revolution:

Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, 1988.

existed in the 1980s thanks to the personal chemistry between Mrs

Thatcher and President Reagan. She was a key player from 1985 onwards
during the extraordinary period in east—west relations when under Mikhail
Gorbachev the Cold War was ended and the Iron Curtain dividing Europe
was put aside.
Gorbachev came to power as general secretary of the Soviet Communist
party at a time when the economic and political contradictions of
Marxism-Leninism were reaching crisis point. Given overwhelming moral
force by the backing of the Polish pope John Paul II, the Solidarity
movement in Poland was demanding greater autonomy, as were other
Soviet bloc countries. Russia herself desperately needed European and
American capital if she was not to sink into the dark ages just when the
advances in telecommunications were remaking the modern world.
Gorbachev understood that the almost bankrupt Russian state needed to
be opened up to the same market forces that had benefited Britain under
Mrs Thatcher. Russia no longer had the resourcesto competein an arms
race in space with America and maintain her increasingly ramshackle Iron
Curtain empire. Twenty-five per cent of her national income was going on
her armed forces. What had become known as the Brezhnev Doctrine of
armed intervention in Warsaw Pact countries was no longer practicable.
Both superpowers agreed to arms reductions. Gorbachev allowed Mrs
Thatcher to talk about democracy and human rights on Soviet television,

767
 WINDSOR

which had never been done before. Mrs Thatcher’s force and conviction
were greatly to the taste of the Russian people (rather more by now than
to that of her fellow countrymen) and she attained iconic status in many
former Iron Curtain countries. In 1988 President Reagan’s visit to Moscow
was followed by a profound shakeup in Russia’s institutions. A Parliament
was elected and Gorbachev became president instead of general secretary;
in 1990 the seventy-year-old communist dictatorship came to an end when
the Soviet Parliament removed the party from the constitution and multi-
party democratic politics were allowed. Gorbachev had also allowed free
elections in the Soviet bloc countries. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall
was torn down by the East Germans with disbelieving joy — not a tank
moved to stop them and German reunification began.
But there were still more astonishing things to come. At the end of 1991
the Soviet Union was abolished after an attempted coup against Gorbachev
by Russian conservatives. The new president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin
forbade the Soviet Communist party from continuing in Russia, and the
fifteen Soviet republics led by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus announced that
they were forming the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev
was no longer Soviet president because there was no Soviet Union.
These momentous events sounded the death-knell of the Marxist system
and heralded a new post-ideological age. They have had endless inter-
national repercussions, not least of which is that they have left the United
States the only superpower in the world. America immediately agreed a
series of arms-limitation treaties, as there were around 27,000 warheads in
the new republics. Many eastern European countries applied to join the
European Union, and ten who were accepted as members after signing the
Treaty of Accession in 2003 are set to join the fifteen existing members on
1 May 2004. Former Soviet-bloc countries also joined NATO, the
organization originally set up to counter the threat they presented as
members of the Warsaw Pact.
In Britain the break-up of the Soviet system only underlined to the small
group of Labour modernizers the desperate need for change if the party
wanted to avoid becoming a dinosaur like the Soviet Communist party.
Neil Kinnock saw that Labour must become more moderate if they wanted
to return to office. Alarmed by the success of the SDP, whose electoral pact
with the Liberals began eating away at the Labour vote in the mid-1980s,
he spent the rest of the decade cleaning out the hard left from the Labour
party. With the help of a communications director of genius, a young
television producer named Peter Mandelson, grandson of the 1945 Labour
home secretary Herbert Morrison, Kinnock began changing Labour’s
image. In 1986 at the party conference the outmoded revolutionary Red
Flag was swapped for a softer red rose as the party’s emblem. The next few

768
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years would see Labour abandon CND, nationalization and punitive

taxation.
Kinnock’s greatest challenge was the Trotskyist organization Militant,
which had become entrenched within the Labour party. Militant believed
in permanent revolution rather than Parliamentary democracy and were
especially powerful in local government. They would prove extremely
difficult to dislodge. Kinnock found an unexpected ally against Militant in
Mrs Thatcher. In her second term of office, she embarked on her great
experiment of controlling expenditure at local government level.
Militant had given town-hall funding a bad name by insisting on giving
money to increasingly esoteric projects which suited their extremist beliefs,
and this began to infuriate taxpayers. In 1984 with the introduction of
rate-capping — enabling central government to ‘cap’ the rates if it con-
sidered them to be too high — Mrs Thatcher hoped to put an end to
Militant’s activities. Councils which overspent had their grants reduced,
while those which kept within their limits would also have their grants
reduced — it was a late-twentieth-century version of Morton’s Fork and just
about as popular. Although Britons were getting tired of strange projects
belonging to what was now being called the loony left, they also disliked
the way rate-capping limited local services. School buildings suffered, as
did social services, housing and homeless shelters. In 1985 Faith in the
City, a report by a Church of England commission, urged emergency
action by the government to relieve the plight of inner cities.
In areas like Liverpool where many of the councillors were members of
Militant, they refused to accept rate-capping and went on spending. This
had been made illegal so that council leaders would be personally liable for
costs, but Liverpool Council elected to go bankrupt when central
government withheld its funds. The council had to borrow the unheard of
sum of £30 million from a foreign bank to cover its debts. But the council
still could not pay many of its workers. Militant’s irresponsible behaviour
enraged ordinary Labour supporters.
In June 1987 Mrs Thatcher won her third successive election with a
reduced but still substantial majority of ror. Her final push to control local
expenditure demonstrated that she had rather lost her political touch. She
had already outraged liberal opinion with an attack on local freedoms in
the form of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act which forbade
the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities. This provision was
her response to media reports that local councils were promoting the idea
of families with two gay parents.
Moreover in the late 1980s the gilt had begun wearing off the economic
miracle of Thatcherism which had so mesmerized the world, with inflation
reduced to 2.5 per cent in 1986. What had been boom was turning to bust.

769
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In 1987 the pro-European chancellor Nigel Lawson slashed interest rates

as the economy soared. He was shadowing the European Monetary
System, the first step on the way to a single currency for the whole of
Europe. At the same time a huge tax cut took the basic rate of income tax
from 27 per cent to 25. Lawson believed the boom would last forever but
low interest rates, low tax rates and double tax relief sparked a property-
buying frenzy and house prices suddenly started rising by 34 per cent a
year. Interest rates had to be sharply raised to cool the overheating
economy as retail price inflation rose to ro per cent in 1990 — and the
Lawson boom was over.
In an excess of centralizing zeal Mrs Thatcher had abolished the Greater
London Council in 1986 when it refused to reduce its expenditure. Now as
Labour councils carried on raising the rates to counter the squeeze from
central government, she decided that the only solution was to abolish the
rates. In their stead she introduced the poll tax — poll being an ancient
world for head. This tax had caused a revolt in the time of Richard IL. It
would have the same sort of effect in the reign of Elizabeth II.
Like many aspects of the Thatcher Revolution, the poll tax made logical
sense to the Thatcherites but was hard for unbelievers to grasp. This time
the Thatcherites’ proud reputation for thinking the unthinkable was
simply unthinkable, and a public-relations disaster. Mrs Thatcher and her
researchers had hit on the fact that only a minority of the population were
paying local taxes, less than half of the electorate of thirty-five million.
Every man and woman able to vote would pay the one-off poll tax (its
formal name was actually the community charge). That would soon keep
council taxes down as voters hit in their pockets would vote for lower-
spending (and so no doubt Conservative) councils.
Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet believed the poll tax would unleash the
angry citizenry on the town halls determined to curb their spending. But
the government had badly miscalculated: instead the angry citizenry turned
on the government in widespread poll-tax riots. The message which the
British people picked up on was that the duke and the dustman were going
to have to pay the same tax, and their sense of fair play was outraged.
Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher would not draw back. Her motto, she had
once said, was ‘This lady’s not for turning.’ But many in the Conservative
party began to worry about her increasing inability to listen to the
electorate or to the Cabinet. In 1989 Nigel Lawson resigned, chiefly
because of Mrs Thatcher’s reluctance to join the European Exchange Rate
Mechanism, or ERM, although she had signed the Single European Act in
1986 which provided for greater European Community economic and
social integration from 1992.
The poll-tax riots took place in March 1990. In August that year the
 1979-2002

dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, thus threatening

Europe’s oil supplies, and despite a UN Security Council resolution, failed
to withdraw. Mrs Thatcher was at her courageous best encouraging the
new United States president George Bush to lead a multinational coalition
under UN auspices to war against Saddam when he refused to obey the
UN. But disaffected Tories were worried by the way their party’s lead was
dropping in the opinion polls. The Thatcher revolution was running out of
steam, even for her followers. Three months later Mrs Thatcher was to find
herself stabbed in the back by a challenge to her leadership. That
November John Major became British prime minister.
Mrs Thatcher had been in power for eleven years. There is no disputing
her lion heart. Not only had she changed Britain almost overnight. Under
her education minister Sir Keith Joseph, who was responsible for much of
her regime’s intellectual daring, she had paved the way for the greater
testing and standardizing of education which began with the introduction
of the national curriculum system in 1988. Tests for children at seven,
eleven and fourteen, designed to show where schools were failing, signalled
the end of thirty years of progressive teaching that had derailed into an
undisciplined belief that it was more important for children to explore or
‘find themselves’ than to take in information.
Mrs Thatcher’s Hillsborough Agreement in 1985 setting up an
experimental inter-governmental Anglo-Irish Council was the beginning of
the political solution that Catholic leaders had warned was the only way
of ending the civil war in Northern Ireland. When half of the British
Cabinet only just escaped death when their hotel was blown up in Brighton
at the party conference in October 1984, Mrs Thatcher accepted that
Britain could never win a war against the IRA. She was extremely shaken
by the explosion. Even so she insisted that the local Marks and Spencer
open early to provide outfits for ministers who had had to leave the hotel
in their nightclothes. She was determined to chair a Cabinet meeting that
morning. ‘Business as usual,’ she said, though two of her friends were dead
and the trade and industry secretary Norman Tebbit’s wife badly injured.
Despite protests from republicans and loyalists, the British government
began to consult the Irish government on an official and regular basis
about the administration of Northern Ireland and to hammer out a
common policy for border security and justice. Eight years of Anglo-Irish
co-operation would lead in 1993 to the Downing Street Declaration by the
Irish and British premiers Bertie Ahern and John Major that welcomed
Sinn Fein to all-party talks and ushered in an IRA ceasefire.
But, for all Mrs Thatcher’s great gifts, by the early 1990s members of the
Cabinet desired it to be more collegiate, for she had become increasingly
dictatorial. There was also bitter disagreement over Britain’s relations with

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Europe. The Thatcher years coincided with a movement in France and

Germany to accelerate the process of ‘ever closer union’ within the
European Common Market, transforming it into a European superstate.
The movement was led by Jacques Delors, the French president of the
European Commission, and assisted by Chancellor Kohl of Germany and
President Mitterrand of France. All three were on record as hoping that 80
per cent of legislation would soon be made by the European Parliament
instead of at national level.
Mrs Thatcher fought Britain’s corner on the principle of subsidiarity — a
piece of EC jargon proclaiming the belief that all decisions should be taken
at the lowest effective level, but used by the British as a euphemism for
national decision-making. In October 1990, however, anxious not to lose
her new chancellor of the Exchequer John Major and the equally pro-
European foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, she took Britain into the ERM,
a preliminary to joining the European Monetary System, itself the first step
on the way to a single currency for the whole of Europe. The ERM was a
system set up to create currency harmonization between EC members at
the level of their national banks, and required national governments to
intervene in foreign exchange markets to make sure that their currency
kept its value within the system.
With Mrs Thatcher gone, a month later it was left to the new prime
minister John Major and his chancellor Norman Lamont to weather the
vicissitudes of the ERM. Unfortunately neither man had Mrs Thatcher’s
genius or political luck to ride out the two stormy years that followed. The
high interest rates of the bust after the Lawson boom had already begun to
strike at the heart of the enterprise economy that Mrs Thatcher had
brought into being. But after Britain joined the ERM with the pound
pegged to the German Deutschmark, the strongest currency in Europe,
British interest rates started to go through the roof, with the British
economy in deep recession. Germany’s interest rates had to be kept high
because of her economy’s problems arising out of the reintegration of
impoverished East Germany. By August 1992 her interest rates were
forcing Britain’s into double figures, way beyond what the economy could
sustain. The economic miracle of the 1980s was on its way to becoming the
economic disaster of the early 1990s. And on 16 September, Black
Wednesday, Major and Lamont were forced into the ignominious decision
to pull sterling out of the ERM immediately. At a stroke Britain’s economy
and European strategies were in tatters.
Despite the débacle Lamont saw no reason to fall on his sword. But
Black Wednesday had not only convinced Eurosceptics that Britain could
never flourish in a single currency, it lost the Conservatives the reputation
tor being the safe managers of the economy which had been their greatest

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asset. From September 1992 Labour began to overtake the Conservatives

in the opinion polls, while the Tories began a civil war over Europe which
slowly tore them apart. In fact, after the initial shock, the effects of pulling
out of the ERM were beneficial. Britain went on to enjoy ten years of low
inflation, steady growth and falling unemployment, her economy grew
faster than those of France and Germany, her inflation was lower and her
jobless figures were lower.
Half the Conservative party had become violently anti-European and
embarked on an internecine war in the media against pro-European Tories
who composed much of the Cabinet. Nevertheless John Major did not pull
back from his insistence on having the Treaty of Maastricht, which he had
signed that February, approved by Parliament. The treaty revised the
European Community’s founding Treaty of Rome and turned the EC into
the EU, the European Union — a further step towards ‘ever closer political
union’. But Major won the concession that Britain need not ultimately
substitute the European single currency for sterling nor need she accept
Delors’ social charter (or Chapter, as it became known) guaranteeing
minimum EU working standards, which it was believed would increase
Britain’s labour costs.
John Major was the son of an impoverished trapeze artist. He had
reacted against his exciting origins and, as one wit said, ran away from the
circus to join a bank. Perhaps memories of poverty in Brixton made him
more compassionate than his old boss. Benefits were raised in line with
inflation, and the poll tax was transformed into a council tax banded
according to property values. The radical Thatcherite principles of
privatization and reform of vested interests continued as before. But after
Black Wednesday many felt that the Conservatives’ day was drawing to an
end.
The sentimental British public harked back to the old consensus politics;
they did not like feeling that their country contained what some American
sociologists were happy to call an underclass. The Conservative
government actually increased the amount spent on the National Health
Service each year, but ministers managed to give the impression that the
NHS too would soon be a thing of the past, partly because they had
introduced the internal market as a way to allow competition to make
healthcare more efficient.
At the April 1992 general election, a Labour victory was widely
expected. Middle England had had enough of tax cuts. It felt that the
cherished infrastructure of the country was decaying under the Conserva-
tives, and was dismayed by long hospital waiting lists (so many wards were
being closed), potholes from underspending councils, poor social services
and decaying schools. But ill-advised remarks by John Smith, then shadow

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chancellor of the Exchequer, made many people fear that the punitive
taxation of the 1970s would be reimposed should Labour return to office.
The upshot was the fourth Conservative victory in succession, with a
modest majority of twenty-one seats. But a shadow still hung over Labour.
Neil Kinnock bowed out of the Labour leadership after his defeat,
leaving the leadership to John Smith. Smith improved the voting system in
the electoral college, while warning the unions they could expect no pay
increases without productivity. But he died unexpectedly in 1994, and the
leadership jumped a generation to the telegenic Anthony Blair, who was
then under forty.
Blair, a former barrister and devout Christian with a formidable QC
wife and three young children, (a fourth, Leo, would arrive in 2000, the
first baby to be born to a serving British prime minister in 150 years),
further modernized the party with the help of Peter Mandelson and
Gordon Brown. They believed that people were still frightened of Labour
and that it was their job to reassure them that the party had abandoned
what had been known as the ‘politics of envy’, its commitment since 1918
to the redistribution of the nation’s wealth by taxation. Blair excised
Clause 4 from the Labour constitution, which promised ‘common owner-
ship of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. The unions
were kept at arm’s length and Labour embraced the European cause with
fervour. Blair and Mandelson believed that New Labour, as they called the
party, had to reach out to a wider audience.
On 6 May 1994, as a sign of closer relations between Britain and
Europe, the Channel tunnel was opened. For the first time since the Ice Age
Britain was linked to the continent. It had been dreamed of more than a
hundred years before, but it was not until the late 1980s that Britain and
France had the technology to build the tunnel, which runs 150 feet below
the sea. The three tunnels, north, south and a service facility, required the
removal of seventeen million tons of earth and cost £15 billion. It now
takes just three hours to reach the centre of Paris from the centre of
London.
But the triumph of the Eurotunnel and the excitement that it generated
did nothing for the Tories’ reputation. Labour was climbing higher and
higher in the opinion polls, while the Tory government was slowly sinking
into a self-inflicted mire of sleaze, lying ministers, illicit arms sales and
money for votes.
The Tories even seemed unlucky on the question of Ireland, where by the
beginning of the r990s Mrs Thatcher’s Hillsborough Agreement was
having very positive effects. Although some Unionists saw the agreement
as a form of betrayal, the Irish government reaffirmed that political union
would come about only if the majority of citizens of Northern Ireland

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wished it. There was a change of attitude within the Sinn Fein leadership,
who recognized that many of its supporters were exhausted by the war. By
August 1994 the IRA had agreed a ceasefire, and this was followed by a
loyalist paramilitary ceasefire in October. It was a great moment after
twenty years of war. But decommissioning the IRA’s weapons was the
sticking point for the Unionist parties, which insisted that Sinn Fein could
not participate in the political process until the Provisional IRA had
destroyed their weapons.
In January 1996 the Major government turned down a proposal from
the former American senator George Mitchell, President Clinton’s adviser
on Irish’ affairs, who headed the independent International Body to
examine the process of decommissioning paramilitary arms, that the
decommissioning should take place in tandem with all-party talks. Instead
it began the election process without Sinn Fein. By way of response the
following month the IRA bombed Canary Wharf in the Docklands. It was
clear that the peace process had been derailed.
But it was the crisis over the spread of bovine spongiform encephalo-
pathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) from cattle to humans that finally finished
off the Conservatives. The public could just about accept ministerial
prevarication over the Matrix-Churchill affair revealed by the Scott
inquiry into the trial of three businessmen prosecuted by Customs and
Excise for illegally exporting arms to Iraq, whose report was published in
February 1996. This showed that several Tory ministers had been willing
to let three innocent men go to prison rather than reveal that the
defendants had been working for the British secret services. But when the
Whitehall culture of secrecy endangered the nation’s health, for
Conservative ministers refused to come clean about how safe beef was to
eat at a time when the television news was filming young people dying of
CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, thought to be a human variant of BSE), it
was the end. As 4.7 million cows were slaughtered at a cost of £3 billion,
after British beef had been banned round the world, eighteen years of
Conservative rule collapsed. Unlike the Tories, the fluent and sensible
Tony Blair, who had moved Labour far from their socialist roots towards
the acceptable middle ground, looked like a man who could be trusted.
In May 1997 the people of England uttered a resounding no to the
Conservatives. Labour won 419 seats, ror of which were held by women,
the so-called Blair Babes, and the Conservative vote was wiped out in
Scotland. Blair swept to victory with a huge majority of 179 seats and
proceeded to carry out extensive constitutional reform. John Major
resigned as leader of the Tory party and was replaced by the thirty-six-
year-old William Hague, a Parliamentarian of considerable gifts who had
been secretary of state for Wales. But despite Hague’s down-to-earth

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manner, as befitted his Yorkshire ancestry, the Tories failed to make any
headway in the polls despite much soul-searching. After another landslide
win for Labour at the election in June 2002 (a majority of 167), Hague too
resigned, to be succeeded by an ex-soldier, Iain Duncan Smith.
The Labour government soon showed itself to be a modern admini-
stration. It incorporates a Women’s Unit, though not yet a Women’s
Ministry, and provided the machinery since 2000 for an elected mayor of
London, the capital’s first, who took the place of the Greater London
Council that Mrs Thatcher got rid of in 1986. The Bank of England was
made independent in 1997 as soon as Labour took office and was given the
sole power to decide interest rates, a power previously vested in the
Treasury. Interest-rate decisions have thus been taken out of the political
arena to avoid the boom and bust of the Lawson years and to create the
economic stability required for economic growth.
After 120 years of delay, in 1999 the House of Lords began the first
stage of being modernized when hereditary peers — other than ninety-two
elected to oversee reforms — were excluded. This brings Britain well and
truly into the third millennium. The reformed Lords will incorporate the
best of its ancient traditions as a council of non-partisan professional
experts and wise men who act as a delaying and revising chamber in the
face of over-hasty legislation passed by the House of Commons. However,
four years later, in July 2003, no decision had been reached on the
construction of a reformed, representative second chamber which would
not be a rival to the elected Commons.
Labour had promised regional assemblies to Scotland and Wales. After
two referendums produced a vote in favour of devolution, the year 2000
saw both the opening of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.
Reflecting Scotland’s long history of independence and her separate legal
system, the Scottish Parliament has powers to alter taxes raised at
Westminster by 3 per cent and to legislate over internal affairs — the
environment, social services, education and health. As befits a smaller
country with a far longer history of being attached to England, the Welsh
Assembly does not have the power to make laws though it may alter some
designated Westminster legislation. The same number of Welsh and
Scottish MPs will be retained at Westminster, leaving some commentators
to wonder whether England should not, in fairness, have her own regional
assembly too.
Labour came to power determined to end social division and chronic
underinvestment in the public sector and manufacturing sector. Britain no
longer has the absolute poverty with which Booth and Rowntree appalled
middle-class consciences at the beginning of the last century. Nevertheless
the respected charity the Child Poverty Action Group in 2002 estimated

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that nearly a quarter of the population, including almost four million

children, are living in what is defined internationally as ‘income poverty’.
That is too high a figure for a civilized country to tolerate. Britain’s infant
mortality rates, once the lowest in the world, are on the rise, a sign that
conditions among the poor are deteriorating and need to be improved.
Labour believe that the government has a social responsibility to foster
growth in the economy by fighting unemployment, not just to let the
market rule and the devil take the hindmost. But the lessons of the past
have convinced them that government investment in industry cannot be
afforded without the help of the private sector. Guided by the Scottish
chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the Labour government
displayed a fiscal prudence that gained it a formidable reputation. Its
auction in 2001 for licenses for the third generation of mobile phones
raised the colossal sum of £22.5 billion. The City of London, traditionally
a Tory stronghold, was reported, temporarily at least, to have become a
Labour bastion. Labour also ended the internal market in hospital care,
gave help to pensioners with heating bills and to the poor with tax credits,
and introduced their New Deal intended to get people off benefit and into
employment as soon as possible.
In July 1997 one of the last great outposts of empire was relinquished
when Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese. The lease on part of the
Crown Colony had expired, but the whole of it was handed over following
an agreement negotiated by the Thatcher government in 1982. Communist
China undertook to allow Hong Kong considerable internal independence
and leeway as a Special Administrative Region where capitalism would be
permitted for the next fifty years at least, and it would continue to be a free
port. In addition, the Basic Law for Hong Kong envisaged a freely elected
legislature, and that has been honoured.
In August 1997 the former wife of the Prince of Wales, the beautiful
Princess Diana, was killed in a car crash in Paris aged only thirty-six. For
the previous sixteen years her sympathetic nature, youth and spontaneity
had given her a considerable hold over the nation’s affections. There was
a great outpouring of sorrow at her death and for her bereaved sons, the
fifteen-year-old Prince William and the thirteen-year-old Prince Harry.
Continental Europe of the 1990s was racked by the spectacle on the
nightly television news of a vicious civil war between members of the
federation of Yugoslavia in the wake of the changes in eastern Europe. The
brutal massacres of around 250,000 Muslims and forcible expulsion of
another two million from the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbs,
who resisted their fellow Yugoslav republics’ demand for independence
and recognition by the European Union, generated a new expression that
had echoes of the Holocaust — ethnic cleansing. In 1999 NATO warplanes

PTE
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bombed Belgrade to put an end to the Serb cleansing of the province of

Kosovo of ethnic Albanians: 800,000 of them, many of them with babies
and with their possessions in carts, were dying in the mountains. Although
the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevié was deposed and handed over to a
special tribunal set up by the UN at the Hague to be tried for war crimes,
the refugee crisis caused by these dispossessed peoples continues to pose
great problems for the EU.
But in Northern Ireland at Easter 1998 the twenty-six-year war finally
came to an end. It was decided to allow the decommissioning of weapons
to run in tandem with the devising of a new government. The only thing
that Sinn Fein and the other political wings of paramilitary groups like the
loyalist UDA had to do to participate was to get their paramilitaries to
restore the ceasefire of 1994. The IRA had begun the process in July 1997.
On Good Friday 1998 an agreement was signed by all shades of opinion
in Northern Ireland that set up a power-sharing Assembly whose creation
had been deferred for over twenty-five years. Once more it was reiterated
that it would be the will of the people of Northern Ireland, not those of Eire
or Britain, that would decide their future. The withdrawal of troops from
Northern Ireland put an end to the most dangerous tour of duty in every
British soldier’s career.
The peace process could have been derailed by a bomb set off at Omagh
in August 1998 by a nationalist terrorist group beyond the control of the
IRA. But Sinn Fein and the IRA condemned the tragedy in the strongest
terms and the Assembly survived. Decommissioning remained an issue.
However, the effect of the 11 September 2001 outrage in New York when
the Twin Towers were destroyed by Islamic terrorists was to make
Americans understand at first hand what terrorism does. So the IRA,
despite its traditional American support, found that it had to alter its
tactics, and in October that year a new effort at decommissioning began.
Punishment beatings by both sides and mutual distrust continue to cause
problems in Northern Ireland, however. Sadly, in October 2002 the
Assembly was suspended (and remained so as at July 2003) and direct rule
reimposed. After allegations of an IRA spy ring at Stormont, other parties
refused to continue in government with Sinn Fein.
On 1 January 1999 eleven of the fifteen member states of the European
Union abandoned their currencies for the euro, or single currency, which
is managed by the European Central Bank. The eleven were Finland,
Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Ireland, France,
Spain, Germany and Belgium, and they were joined in 2001 by Greece. To
date Britain remains outside the euro zone; opinion polls show that around
60 per cent of Britain’s businessmen are in favour of jettisoning the pound
in its favour, but a similar portion of the public are opposed. Tony Blair

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promised Britain a referendum before sterling is abolished and Britain joins

a single European currency. But in principle his government was in favour
of joining the euro, and in February 1999 the prime minister published a
national changeover plan outlining the steps being taken in preparation.
Britain’s ancient democratic institutions mean she cannot view a
European superstate without protest. The EU headquarters, where one
man one vote seems irrelevant compared to the powers of appointed
bureaucrats, appears to some to be a threat to British freedoms. From
earliest times observers like Tacitus noted that the inhabitants of these isles
have an obsession with their liberty. Today it may translate as a desire to
preserve national sovereignty over matters like taxation, and to halt
further attempts to harmonize national laws through the EU. On the other
hand it might be argued that until the (European) Romans came there was
much that was uncivilized about Britain, and that that remains true today.
Britons interested in their freedoms will have noted that Europe is not short
of liberties herself. The European social chapter, which Labour signed up
to in 1998, has made Britain bring in legislation to ensure that the
workplace is protected by far greater health and safety requirements and
to set a minimum wage that she seemed incapable of introducing on her
own. Successful appeals to the Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg,
whether over the UK’s harsh treatment of her children or over gender
equality, show that there is much to learn from Europe. The Human Rights
Act that Labour implemented in 1998, which incorporated into UK law the
European Convention on Human Rights, is bringing Britain into line with
a more humane way of life. Women, many of whom have not shared
British liberties until recently — the Church of England only allowed
women to be ordained vicars in 1993 — can especially look forward to the
benign influence of Europe, which is committed to enforcing equal rights
for women. Pay for women in Britain lags well behind other EU countries:
as the Equal Opportunities Commission’s witty poster of a young girl put
it, ‘Prepare your daughter for working life. Give her less pocket money
than your son.’
Though women are hardly a minority, their lack of representation at the
higher levels of the judiciary until very recently was mirrored by the ethnic
minorities. In the twenty-five years since it was created to combat racism
the Commission for Racial Equality has been extremely successful in
harmonizing relations between ethnic and white Britons. Nevertheless in
1999 the failure of the parents of Stephen Lawrence to get their son’s
murder properly investigated seven years before led the High Court judge
Sir William Macpherson to conclude that the British police were guilty of
institutionalized racism, which he defined as a failure to provide a
professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic

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a 4 ‘ toe
s IRS Ye ‘ f es es ier Caan a

Labour MP Paul Boateng, who became the first black Cabinet minister in British
history when, in May 2002, he was made Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Seen
here with Chancellor Gordon Brown.
origin. Most white Britons felt deeply shamed by the Macpherson Report,
and it resulted in a massive shake-up in British institutions. There was an
investigation by the Home Office into statistics on race and the criminal
justice system, and a decision by the Labour government actively to
combat hidden or institutionalized racism in other public bodies. The Race
Relations Amendment Act of April 2001 imposes a legal duty on central
and local government bodies to represent their ethnic minorities in
proportion to their communities and this also applies to hospitals, schools,
universities and public institutions like the BBC.
Prince Charles, who has taken a close interest in inner-city regeneration
for three decades, has done much to bring together the many different
elements in Britain’s multicultural society. He says he intends to adapt the
papal title bestowed on his ancestor Henry VIII and be, not the defender of
the faith, but the defender of all faiths.
After more than half a century as queen, Elizabeth II lends grace,
humanity and dutifulness to her position and continuity at a time of flux.
In June 2002 the immense success of the Golden Jubilee to mark her fifty
years on the throne was visible in the one million people who gathered in
the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace to salute her. The deaths of the
queen’s sister Princess Margaret and of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
in the Jubilee Year only enhanced the sympathy felt for her.
The queen continues to live at Windsor Castle whose site above the
River Thames was chosen more than nine centuries ago by William the
Conqueror because it was a day’s march from the Tower of London - it
was intended to guard the western approaches to the capital. Though the
Mg4 and a sprawl of housing and flyovers now lies between Windsor and
the Tower, the queen’s residence there reminds us of the extraordinary
continuity the monarchy provides as a national institution and of Britain’s

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great good fortune in not having been invaded since 1066. The
monarchy’s ancient roots provide an element of stability in an ever-
changing world. Yet the queen herself has made a habit of moving with
the times. Though her Rolls-Royce may look as old fashioned as her
handbag, she insisted on her coronation being televised in 1953 in order
to include as many of her fellow countrymen as possible. Today she even
has her own web site. ~
Britain’s days of pre-eminence as a great power are gone, as Antony
Gormley’s ironic statue The Angel of the North, a huge angel in rusty iron,
reminds us, looking back to northern Britain’s industrial and engineering
past. All over the country, old industrial structures — whether the former
Bankside power station in London or the Albert Dock at Liverpool — are
being turned over to what is sometimes called the leisure industry.
(Bankside and the Albert Dock became the art galleries Tate Modern and
Tate Liverpool.) Britain’s manufacturing base may continue to decline, but
service or skills industries are more important than ever. In the twenty-first
century Britain’s expertise as a great imperial power enables the once
informal arrangements between merchants waiting at wharves for their
ships to arrive to be transformed into complex international insurance and
maritime businesses. In the era of super-telecommunications, London’s
fortunate position equidistant between the time zones of Asia and America
makes the City the world’s leading financial centre, where 48 per cent of
the global foreign equity market is traded. But ‘leisure industry’ seems a
poor way of describing a mission to raise the British people’s cultural
expectations and range. In the age of the computer chip, the future for the
European world seems increasingly to be in highly skilled work. Machines
and computers have made much physical labour redundant where it is not
already uncompetitive with the third world. Ford Cars closed its last
British factory in 2001.
When an earlier Tyneside inhabitant, the eighth-century monk Bede
of Jarrow, composed his history of the English people, ferreting out
documentary evidence in the archives of English abbeys and in the
papal registers at Rome, he was writing for a tiny audience, the few
nobles who could read. In those days culture was then dispersed to the
many, if at all, through priests’ sermons or Bible readings at church. But
one of Bede’s most moving stories was that of Caedmon, the poor lay
brother whose poetry earned him a place in the monastery. How pleased
Bede would be to think that in the thirteen centuries since his birth a
sense of inclusive cultural renaissance was gathering that has now
exploded in a great new building on the River Tyne, the Baltic Exchange,
which opened in August 2002. Tyneside, once a neglected and depressed
industrial area, is reviving under the impact of cultural centres, cinema

781
 WIND SOR

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 1979-2002

complexes, concert halls and cheap homes for young professionals.

Despite all the change, some things about Britain remain the same. For
many people the most striking feature of the country is a sense of
community-mindedness, a sense that — whatever Mrs Thatcher believed —
society matters. The National Health Service was once described as the
nearest thing the British have to a state religion. Thatcherism may have
been a revolution, but now that the revolution is over, old beliefs in the
state as a disinterested force for good cannot help resurfacing. The
privatization Mrs Thatcher pioneered is looking a little less shiny.
Railtrack in particular angered many, with the large dividends paid to
shareholders instead of being devoted to the maintenance of the railways’
infrastructure or to a proper inspectorate. When a broken rail caused an
avoidable crash in Hertfordshire in 2002, the last of a line of terrible
accidents, private finance initiatives began to look less good. The British
expect political accountability in their public services, which many voters
expected Labour to restore.
Britain has more or less gracefully withdrawn from the 400-year-old
trading empire which made a great power out of some small north-westerly
islands and their canny, energetic and not over-scrupulous natives. Though
Britain has been reduced to her original area of a few offshore islands
whose longest island is little more than 600 miles long, hers is the world’s
fourth largest economy and she is its fourth largest monetary power. Her
influence persists in disproportionate relation to her small size.
Britain is now a fully signed-up member of the European Union. The
question is what sort of Europe is Britain agreeing to be part of? Will it fall
to England once more to take up her historic role of leading the resistance
to a masterplan for continental tyranny expressed in European institutions
which are not politically accountable enough?
I say England advisedly, because the country called Britain, which was
invented in 1707 to describe the union of the Scottish and English crowns,
may soon no longer exist. With the financial support of Brussels Scotland
may find irresistible the national will to become an independent country
again.
The British are a rather schizophrenic and mysterious lot where
authority is concerned — the result perhaps of having had to adapt to so
many waves of invaders, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and
the Normans. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish spent many centuries
fighting off the aggressive English state. There is both an official culture
which the British subscribe to and a secret, rather Celtic, side of Britain
which carries on regardless. It ishelped to flourish by the nature of the
country’s geography. Her veiling fogs, dense forests, indented coastline
and hidden valleys, particularly in the north and west, lend themselves to

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movements resisting all manifestations of central government, whether it

be new dynasties or new religions. This inextinguishably individualistic
side smoulders and periodically flares up, whether as Boudicca,
Hereward the Wake, Catholic recusancy or Jacobite revolts. Who are
Britain’s’ greatest heroes? Anti-heroes, that’s who, from Robin Hood to
Rob Roy.
Sir Howard Newby, the President of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, warned in 2002 that Britain must fight off what
he calls ‘increasing anti-intellectualism’ and hostility to scientific progress
which could leave Britain behind the rest of the world. The national
passion for rural life as a sort of paradise on earth sometimes leads to a
suspicion of all scientific inquiry whether over genetically modified food or
the necessary use of animals for experimentation to cure disease. Yet from
Isaac Newton onwards British life has always contained a very strong vein
of scientific inquiry. Not content with inventing the steam engine, Britons
have split the atom, produced the first test-tube baby and cloned the first
animal, Dolly the sheep.
As Dr Tristram Hunt trenchantly reminded a Britain apparently over-
flowing with monarchists during the Queen’s Jubilee, the island story is
also ‘a story of freethinking and restive inventiveness utterly at odds with
the stifling conformity of court life. The Britain of Thomas Hobbes, Adam
Smith and Jeremy Bentham is a tradition of pioneering political thought
unrivalled in western Europe.” Although the Nonconformist conscience
may have been identified as a national feature only in the seventeenth
century, the rebellious British seemed genetically predisposed to make it
their signature tune.
Pity the poor British then, despite their country’s renowned stability. As
with the seas that surround them they are continually washed by one
current and then another. Their views seem as peculiar as their weather. Is
it the changeable sea winds that make it impossible to predict how the
British will react, one minute swayed by intense patriotism, the next
supremely rational and suspicious of emotion? For the British contain
within themselves two warring strains of thought that can never quite be
reconciled. There is what amounts to a folk belief in the necessity of kings
and queens. Yet that coexists alongside an equally powerful and living
tradition of liberty and progress, expressed in some of the world’s great
reforming movements — Parliamentary democracy, the anti-slavery
movement, penal reform, anti-militarism and municipal socialism.
From the middle ages onwards, Britain is generally held to have
distinguished herself from other European countries by virtue of her highly
mobile class system — considered to be one of the secrets of her prosperity.
Yet foreigners complain that despite their apparently informal manners,

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there is no other people so hard to get to know as the British, and no

country so class sensitive. As for Britain’s position in Europe, there the
Europeans believe she is a maddening law unto herself, neither
wholeheartedly pro nor quite against. A curious and contradictory people
indeed.

785
 FURTHER READING

This book could not have been prepared without relying on the scholarship
provided by the standard histories and reference books, in particular the
Oxford History of Britain, the New Cambridge Modern History, the
Dictionary of National Biography and the Pimlico Chronology of British
History by Alan and Veronica Palmer. The following is a list of suggestions
for stimulating further reading — works by modern authors or translators
which are in print or available from libraries.

Ackroyd, Peter Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. G. N. Garmonsway (1953)
Aubrey, John Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (1975)
Ayling, Stanley The Elder Pitt (1976)
Bede, the Venerable The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. L. Sherley-
Price (1968)
Beevor, Anthony Berlin: The Downfall (2002)
Black, Jeremy Culloden and the ’45 (1990)
Blake, Robert Disraeli (1963)
Bragg, Melvyn Speak for England (1976)
Brewer, Derek Arthur’s Britain (1985)
Briggs, Asa A Social History of Britain (1983)
Brooke, Christopher The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (1969)
Brooke, John The Reign of George III (1972)
Calder, Angus The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 (1969)
Cannadine, David Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (2001)
Cannon, John and Griffiths, Ralph The Oxford Illustrated History of the British
Monarchy (2000)
Churchill, Winston $. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 12 vols (1956)
Clark, Alan The Donkeys (1991)
Clark, Peter Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990 (1996)
Cobban, Alfred A History of Modern France (1965)
Colley, Linda Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1997)
Coogan, Tim Pat Michael Collins (1991)
Cornwell, John Hitler’s Pope (1999)
Curtis, Gila The Life and Times of Queen Anne (1980)
Davies, Norman The Isles: A History (2000)
Davies, W. Wales in the Early Middle Ages (1982)
Donaldson, G. and Morpeth, R. S. Who’s Who in Scottish History (1973)
Duby, Georges The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980-1420 (1981)
Edwards, Ruth Dudley The Faithful Tribe (1999)
Ehrman, John The Younger Pitt, 3 vols (1996)
Elton, G. R. Reformation Europe 1517-1559 (1963)
Evans, Richard In Defence of History (2001)
Feiling, Sir Keith The History of England (1950)
Ferguson, Niall The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World (2002)
Field, John Kingdom, Power and Glory: A Historical Guide to Westminster Abbey
(1999)
Figes, Orlando A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (1998)
Flenley, Ralph Modern German History (1968)
Foster, Roy Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988)

786
 FURTHER READING

Fraser, Antonia Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (1973)

Galbraith, J. K. The Great Crash 1929 (1955)
Gardiner, Juliet and Wenborn, Neil, eds The History Today Companion to British
History (1995)
Gash, Norman Sir Robert Peel (1972)
Gilbert, Martin Churchill: A Life (1991)
Gillingham, John Richard the Lionheart (1978)
Girouard, Mark Life in the English Country House (1978)
Glenny, Misha The Fall of Yugoslavia (1992)
Graham-Campbell, James The Viking World (2001)
Halevy, Elie History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 5:
Imperialism and the Rise of Labour 1895-1905 (1951)
Hallam, Elizabeth and Prescott, Andrew, eds The British Inheritance: A Treasury of
Historic Documents (1999)
Hampson, Norman The Enlightenment: The Pelican History of European Thought
(1968)
Hibbert, Christopher The Tower of London (1971)
Hill, Christopher Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1972)
Hobsbawm, Eric The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1988)
Horne, Alistair How Far from Austerlitz? (1997)
Hough, Richard and Richards, Denis The Battle of Britain (2001)
Howarth, David Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch (1997)
Huizinga, Johan The Waning of the Middle Ages (1955)
Hume Brown, P. A. A Short History of Scotland (1951)
Hunter Blair, Peter An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (1956)
Huntingdon, Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World
Order (1997)
Hutton, Will The State We’re In (1996)
James, Lawrence The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (1995)
Jenkins, Roy Gladstone (1995)
Jenkins, Simon England’s Thousand Best Churches (1999)
Johnson, Paul The Offshore Islanders (1972)
Kabbani, Rana Europe’s Myths of Orient (1986)
Kee, Robert The Green Flag 3 vols (1976)
Keegan, John The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme
(1976)
Keen, Maurice The Penguin History of Medieval Europe (1991)
Kennedy, Paul The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1988)
Kenyon, John The History Men (1983)
Kershaw, Ian Hitler: 1889-1936 — Hubris (2001)
La Guardia, Anton War without End: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for a
Promised Land (2002)
Lee, Christopher This Sceptred Isle (1997)
Lefebvre, Georges The French Revolution (1962)
Lewis, Bernard The Middle East (1997)
Lewis, Jane Women in Britain since 1945 (1992)
Lloyd, Christopher The British Seaman (1968)
Longford, Elizabeth Wellington 2 vols (2001)
Mackay, Angus and Ditchburn, David, eds Atlas of Medieval Europe (1997)
MacKenzie, Alexander and Prebble, John The History of the Highland Clearances
(1996)
Mattingley, Garrett The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1959)
Medlicott, W. N. British Foreign Policy since Versailles 1919-1963 (1968)
Monbiot, George Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000)
Monroe, Elizabeth Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1914-1956 (1963)

787
 FURTHER READING

Morgan, Kenneth O., ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (1984)
Morison, S. E. Builders of the Bay Colony (1931)
Namier, Lewis The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1972)
Neale, J. E. The Elizabethan House of Commons (1976)
Nicolson, Harold Peacemaking 1919 (1984)
Owen, Richard and Dynes, Michael The Times Guide to the Single European Market
(1992)
Pakenham, Thomas The Scramble for Africa (1991)
Palmer, Alan Victory 1918 (1998)
Palmer, Alan The Kaiser — Warlord of the Second Reich (1997)
Paxman, Jeremy The English (2001)
Pelling, Henry A History of British Trade Unionism (1971)
Pimlott, Ben The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II (1997)
Plumb, J. H. Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (1973)
Pocock, Tom Horatio Nelson (1987)
Potter, T. W. and Johns, Catherine Roman Britain (1992)
Price, Munro The Fall of the French Monarchy (2003)
Ramm, Agatha, ed. Grant and Temperley’s Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (1984)
Ridley, Jasper Lord Palmerston (1970)
Roberts, Andrew Salisbury: Victorian Titan (1999)
Roberts, J. M. The Penguin History of the World (1995)
Robertson, Geoffrey Crimes against Humanity (1999)
Rose, Kenneth George V (2000)
Ross, Charles Richard III (1981)
Rowse, A. L. The Story of Britain (1979)
Runciman, Steven A History of the Crusades, 3 vols (1954)
Schama, Simon A History ofBritain, 4 vols (2002)
Sebag Montefiore, Simon Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar (2003)
Shannon, Richard Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865-1898 (1999)
Sked, Alan and Cook, Chris Post-War Britain 1945-1992 (1997)
Somerset, Anne Life and Times of William IV (1981)
Starkey, David Elizabeth (2001)
Strong, Roy The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts (1999)
Tacitus The Agricola and the Germania, trans. Anthony R. Birley(1999)
Tacitus The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (1956)
Taylor, A. J. P. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (1954)
Taylor, Barbara Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the
Nineteenth Century (1984)
Thomas, Charles Celtic Britain (1997)
Thomas, Hugh The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870
(1997)
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
Thomson, David Europe since Napoleon (1962)
Thurley, Simon The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (1993)
Tillyard, Stella Aristocrats (1994)
Trevelyan, G. M. History of England (1926)
Tuchman, Barbara The Guns of August (1962)
Uglow, Jenny Hogarth: A Life and a World (1997)
Vincent, John The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857-1868 (1966)
Williams, Neville Henry VII (1973)
Wilson, A. N. The Victorians (2002)
Worden, Blair, ed. Stuart England (1987)
Young, Hugo One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (1989)
Ziegler, Philip The Black Death (1969)

788
 KINGS OF ENGLAND 802-1135

including Kings of Wessex, Danish Kings, House of Godwin

and Dukes of Normandy

EGBERT of WESSEX (802-39)

ETHELWULF (839-58)

ETHELBALD ETHELBERT ETHELRED ALFRED

(858-60) (860-6) (866-71) (871-99)
|
EDWARD the ELDER
(who called himself King of the English)
(899-924)

ATHELSTAN EDMUND EDRED

(924-40) (940-6) (946-55)

EDWY EDGAR
(955-9) (959-75)

EDWARD THE MARTYR ns ae THE UNREADY

(975-8) (978-1016)= (2) Emma of Normandy (1) =CNUT
(1017-35)
|
(King of Denmark & England)

HAROLD HAREFOOT HARTHACNUT

(1037-40) (1040-2)

EDMUND IRONSIDE EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

(1016) (1042-66) = Edith (dau. Godwin)

Edward HAROLD Tostig Gurth Leofwine

| (1066)

Edgar the Atheling St Margaret = Malcolm Canmore,

King of Scots
| WILLIAM I = Matilda of Flanders
Duke of Normandy
(1066-87)

Robert, WILLIAM II Matilda = HENRY I Adela = Stephen,

Duke of Normandy (1087-1100) (1100-35) Count of Blois
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 THE HOUSES OF HANOVER, S:
JAMES I

Elizabeth = Elector Palatine

Sophia = Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Liineburg (

(Elector of Hanover or Brunswick after 1692)
(George Louis, Elector 1698) = Sophia Dorothea of Celle
GEORGE I (1714-27) |

Caroline of Brandenburg-Anspach = GEORGE II Sophia Dorothea

(1727-60)

Frederick |
Frederick, Prince of Wales = Augusta of Anne = William IV William,
(d. 1751) Saxony-Gotha of Orange Duke of Cumberland
(d. 1765)

Augusta = William Ferdinand, GEORGE III = Charlotte of Mecklenburg- Strelitz

Duke of Brunswick- (1760-1820)
Wolfenbiittel

Caroline of Brunswick = GEORGE IV Frederick, WILLIAM IV = Adelaide of Edward, Duke = Victoria of Ernest, Augu
(1820-30) — Duke of York (1830-7) Saxony- of Kent Saxe-Coburg Duke of Duke of
(d. 1827) Meiningen (d. 1820) Cumberland, (d.
Charlotte = Leopold Saxe-Coburg _ after 1837
(d. 1817) after 1831 King of BELGIUM King of Hanover
Albert of Saxe-Coburg = VICTORIA (d. 1851)
(nephew of Duchess (1837-1901)
of Kent and Leopold George, Duk
of Saxe-Coburg) (d.
(d. 1861)

Frederick Il, = Victoria EDWARD VII= Alexandra, Alice = Louis, Grand duke Alfred,
King of Prussia, (1901-10) | dau. Christian IX (d. 1878)] Hesse-Darmstadt Duke of
German Emperor of Denmark Edinburgh
(d. 1888) | (d. 1900)
William Il, German Emperor
(1888-1918)

ant . ‘ Albert Victor, Lo

William, Crown Prince of Prussia DakockCorence (a1

(d. 1892)
Victoria of Hesse = Louise of Battenberg, Alix of Hesse = Nicholas II,
(1872-1918) 1st Marquess of (1872-1918) Tsar of Russia
Milford Haven (1868-1918) |

EDWARD VIII = Wall

2nd Marquess of Louis of Battenberg, Alice of Battenberg = Andrew of k eae
Milford Haven ist Earl Mountbatten (1885-1967) Greece LE NL SOS
of Burma (1900-79) (1882-1944) AL)
SS

Prince Philip = ELIZABETH I

Duke of (1926-)
Edinburgh
(b. 1921)

Lady Diana Spencer = Charles, Prince Anne, Princess = (1) Mark Philips And
dau. Earl Spencer of Wales Royal = (2) Tim Laurence Duke «
(div.) (d. 1997) (b. 1948) (b. 1950) (b. 1

oe
Prince William Prince Harry Peter Philips Zara Philips
T
Princess Bi
(b. 1982) (b. 1984) (b. 1977) (b. 1981) (b. 198
BURG-GOTHA AND WINDSOR

liam II

> |
ohus, Six
eof daughters
ridge
850)

3
Mary Adelaide = Francis,
(d. 1900) Duke of Teck

christian Louise = John, Duke Arthur, Leopold, Beatrice = Prince Henry

swig- of Argyll Dukeof Duke of |of Battenburg
1 (d. 1923) (d. 1939) Connaught Albany Victoria Eugenie=Alfonso XIII,
(d. 1942) (d. 1884) King of Spain

Bina
Victoria Maud = King Haakon
d. 1935) (d. 1938) of Norway
$$ $$$,
GEORGE V = Mary of Teck, Queen Mary
(1910-36) | (d. 1953)

EORGE VI = Lady Elizabeth Mary, Princess = Henry, Viscount Henry, = Alice Montagu- George, = Marina, princess John
1936-52) Bowes-Lyon, dau. Royal Lascelles, 6th Earl Duke of |Douglas-Scot Duke of | of Greece (d. 1919)
Earl of Strathmore (d. 1965) of Harewood Gloucester] (b. 1901) Kent | (d. 1968)
(d. 2002) (d. 1942) (d. 1974) (d. 1942)

strong-Jones = Margaret Rose George, 7th Earl of Harewood William Richard, Edward, Alexandra Michael
on (1930-2002) (b. 1923) (1941-73) Duke of Duke of (b. 1935) (b. 1942)
Gloucester Kent
(b. 1944) (b. 1935)

Edward, = Sophie David, = Hon. Serena Lady Sarah = Daniel Chatto

aT Earlof Rhys-Jones Viscount | Stanhope Armstrong-Jones
Wessex Linley (b. 1964)
(b. 1964) (b. 1961)
Eugenie
290) Hon. Charles Hon. Margarita Samuel Chatto Arthur Chatto
Armstrong-Jones Armstrong-Jones (b. 1996) (b. 1999)
(b. 1999) (b. 2002)
 Prime Ministers
Party labels are only given where appropriate

1721 April Sir Robert Walpole (Whig)

1742 February Earl of Wilmington (Whig)
1743 August Henry Pelham (Whig)
1754 March Duke of Newcastle (Whig)
1756 November Duke of Devonshire (Whig)
1757 July Duke of Newcaslte (2nd) (Whig)
1762 May Earl of Bute (Tory)
1763 April George Grenville
1765 July Marquis of Rockingham
1766 July Earl of Chatham
1768 October Duke of Grafton
1770 January Lord North (Tory)
1782 March Marquis of Rockingham (2nd) (Whig)
July Earl of Shelburne (Whig)
1783 April Duke of Portland (coalition)
December William Pitt (Tory)
1801 March Henry Addington (Tory)
1804 May William Pitt (Tory)
1806 February Lord Grenville (Whig)
1807 March Duke of Portland (znd) (coalition)
1809 October Spencer Perceval (Tory)
1812 June Earl of Liverpool (Tory)
1827 April George Canning (Tory)
August Viscount Goderich (Tory)
1828 January Duke of Wellington (Tory)
1830 November Earl Grey (Whig)
1834 July Viscount Melbourne (Whig)
December Sir Robert Peel (Con.)
1835 April Viscount Melbourne (2nd) (Whig)
1841 September Sir Robert Peel (2nd) (Con.)
1846 June Lord John Russell (Whig-Lib.)
1852 February Earl of Derby (Con.)
December Earl of Aberdeen (Peelite)

798
1855 February Viscount Palmerston (Lib.)
1858 February Earl of Derby (2nd) Con.)
1859 June Viscount Palmerston (2nd) (Lib.)
1865 October Earl Russell (2nd) (Lib.)
1866 June Earl of Derby (3rd) (Con.)
1868 February Benjamin Disraeli (Con.)
December ~W. E. Gladstone (Lib.)
1874 February Benjamin Disraeli (2nd) (Con.); became Earl of
Beaconsfield 1876
1880 April W. E. Gladstone (2nd) (Lib.)
1885 * “June Marquis of Salisbury (Con .)
1886 February W. E. Gladstone (3rd) (Lib. )
July Marquis of Salisbury (2nd) (Con.)
1892 August W. E. Gladstone (4th) (Lib. )
1894 March Earl of Rosebery (Lib.)
1895 June Marquis of Salisbury (3rd) (Con.—Unionist)
1902 July A. J. Balfour (Con.—Unionist)
1905 December Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Lib.)
1908 April H. H. Asquith (Lib.)
1915 May H. H. Asquith (2nd) (coalition)
I916 December David Lloyd George (coalition)
1919 October David Lloyd (2nd) (coalition)
1922 October Andrew Bonar Law (Con.)
1923 May Stanley Baldwin (Con.)
1924 January J. Ramsay MacDonald (Lab.)
November Stanley Baldwin (znd) (Con.)
1929 June J. Ramsay MacDonald (znd) (Lab.)
1931 August J. Ramsay MacDonald (3rd) (national)
1935 June Stanley Baldwin (3rd) (national)
1937 May Neville Chamberlain (national)
1940 May Winston S. Churchill (coalition)
1945 May Winston S. Churchill (2nd) (Con.)
July Clement Attlee (Lab.)
1950 February Clement Attlee (2nd) (Lab.)
1951 October Winston S. Churchill (3rd) (Con.)
T1955 April Sir Anthony Eden (Con.)
1957 January Harold Macmillan (Con.)
1959 October Harold Macmillan (2nd) (Con.)
1963 October Sir Alec Douglas-Home (Con.)
1964 October Harold Wilson (Lab.)
1966 March Harold Wilson (2nd) (Lab.)
1970 June Edward Heath (Con.)

p22
i974 March Harold Wilson (3rd) (Lab.)
1976 James Callaghan (Lab.)
1979 May Margaret Thatcher (Con.)
1983 June Margaret Thatcher (znd) (Con.)
1987 June Margaret Thatcher (3rd) (Con.)
1990 November John Major (Con.)
1992 April John Major (znd) (Con.)
1997 Anthony Blair (Lab.)
2001 June Anthony Blair (znd) (Lab.)

800
 Index

Abdur Rahman 589-90 Alabama affair 580

Abelard, Peter 121 Alamein, El (1942) 716
Abercromby, Sir Ralph 486 Alaric 21
Aberdeen, George Gordon, 4th Earl Alban, St 20
545, 551, 557, 559-60 Albania 558, 711, 723
Aborigines’ Protection Society 604, 631 Alberoni, Cardinal Giulio 417
abortion 745 Albert I, King of the Belgians 652
Acre, siege of (1191) 151-2 Albert, Prince Consort 544, 545, 553,
Act of Supremacy (1534) 264-5, 267 568, 621-2
Act of Supremacy (1559) 290 Alexander I, of Scotland 164
Act of Union (1707) 400-2 Alexander I, Tsar 502, 508
Addington, Henry see Sidmouth, Alexander II, Pope 85
Viscount Alexander II, Tsar 585
Adelaide, Queen 530, 543 Alexander III, Pope 131, 132, 133,
Adeliza of Louvain 119 1352139
Adenauer, Konrad 726, 729 Alexander III, of Scotland 180
Adminius, Prince 8 Alexandra, Queen 572, 627
Adrian IV, Pope 130 Alfred, King, the Great 35, 56, 57, 58,
Aelfgar, Earl of Mercia 83, 84 59, 61-2, 63-71, 72
Aelle, King of Northumbria 58, 59 Alfred (son of Ethelred) 76, 78, 79
Aetius 26-7 Alice, Princess 144, 151, 153
Afghanistan 538, 545, 562, 587, Allectus 19
589-90, 601, 762 Allen, Cardinal William 294-5, 300,
Africa 453, 567-8, 599, 601-6, 615, 301
630-1, 649, 674, 707, 711, 712, Allenby, General Sir Edmund 665-6,
716, 739, 749; see also South Africa 667
Agadir crisis (1911) 640-1, 642 Alsace—Lorraine 572, 580, 671
Agincourt, Battle of (1415) 189, Alva, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo,
ZAS—27 52 17, Duke of 294, 297
Agricola 13-14, 17 America, North 233, 247, 253, 437-8,
agriculture see farming 439, 442, 446, 462; British colonies
Aidan, St 45-6, 48, 50-1 307, 325-6, 370-1, 405, 446-7,
Aislabie, John 419 454-5, 456, 458-60, 464-5; War of
Aix-la—Chapelle, Treaty of (1748) 436 Independence 460-1, 463, 646; see
 INDEX

United States of America Arlington, Henry Bennet, Earl of 371,

Amiens, Treaty of (1802) 488 372, 373
Amm, Idi 751 Armagnacs 215, 218
Amp»ntsar Massacre (1919) 676-7 Armenia 384, 585, 386, 674
Amundsen, Roald 645
Andrew, Prince, Duke of York 763 Artevelde, James van 192
Angles, the 24, 25, 29, 30 Arthur, King 28, 122, 176-7, 189, 242
Anglesey 11, 12, 13, 180 Arthur, Prince of Wales 242, 250, 263
can Church 248, 255, 264-5, Arthur of Brittany 156-7, 159, 165
316-17, 329-30, 362-3, 388, 402, Artisans Act (1875) 582
425, 534, 346, 547, 779 artists 49, 121, 256, 272, 327, 339,
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The 26, 52, 365, 426, 446, 557. 626
69, 69, 102, 122 Arts and Crafts movement 337
Anglo-Saxons 23, 25, 26, 28
Anjou, Duke of 292, 298
Anjou/Angevin empire 120, 124, 124,
125, 126, 127, 138, 139, 143, Arundel Castle, West Sussex 115
144-5, 146-7, 151, 158, 162, 165, Ascham, Roger 276
173, 192 Ashley, Lord see Shaftesbary, Ist Earl
Anne, Queen 314, 370, 381, 382, 385, of 371
392-3, 394, 395, 396, 397, 400, Aske, Robert 268
402-5, 406-8 Asquith, Herbert Henry 633, 630,
Anne, Princess Royal 735 631-2, 635, 636, 639, 641, 642,
Anne of Bohemia 203, 205 645, 646, 48-9, 680, 681
Anne of Cleves 271, 272 Asquith, Margot (sé Tennant) 630
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury Asser, Bishop 62, 68, 70
110-11, 115, 118 Assize of Arms (1181) 140
Anson, Admiral George 436 Astor, Nancy 686, 699
Anti-Corn Law League 542, 346, 5347. Athelney, Ie of 64, 64-5, 68-9
$51 Athelstan, King of Wessex 71-2
Anzacs 660 atomic bombs 719, 729, 736, 740
apartheid 739 Atrebates, the 7. 16
Aquitame 112, 125, 127, 138,1139, Atterbury, Francis, Bishop 420
143-4, 147, 154, 156, 158, 160, Atle the Hun 26-7
172, 189, 196, 214 Attlee, Clement 692-3. 708, 724, 731,
Arabi Pasha 591 748
Arabs 153, 591, 602, 606, 666, 694: Attwood, Thomas 529, 541
see also Palestine Auchinleck, General Sir Claude 716
architecture/building 4, 15, 37-8, 39, Augusta of Sexony—Gotha, Princess of
46, 30, 50, 91, 95, 105, 105, 106, Wales 423, 451, 452
121, 122, 150, 169, 169-70, 189, Augustine, St, of Hippo 20, 29, 33, 34 -
210, 367. 408, 426, 428, 314, 553: ++
see also housing Augustus, Emperor 16, 19
Arcot, siege of (1751) 438 Aulas Pleutius §
Argyll,
1 Archibald Campbell, Sth Earl Aurehanus, Ambrosius 28
ae33, 347, 352-3, 333, 367 Austeriitz, Battle of (1805) 493
Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl Australie/Australians 472, 532, 542,
375,378 343, 601, 607, 615, 660, 669, 712,
Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 1st Duke
390-1 Austra 405, 429, 430-1.4 480.
Argyll, John Campbell, 2nd Duke 407 431, 482, 485, 486, 487-8 “498,
Arkwright, Richard: waterframe 538, 356. 569. 571-2. 674. 699.
463-6 704, 721, 723, 738: se aie.
802
 INDEX

Austro-Hungary Bedchamber Crisis (1839) 543-4

Austro-Hungary 583, 586, 609, 617, Bede, Venerable 24, 29, 40, 43, 49, 54,
633-4, 648, 650-1, 653, 659, 660, 68, 781
667, 669 Bedford, John of Lancaster, Duke of
IAs
Babington Plot (1586) 299-300 BEF see British Expeditionary Force
Bacon, Sir Francis 322, 324 Behn, Aphra 365
Bacon, Roger 171 Belgian Congo 602, 603, 631, 652
Badajos, storming of (1812) 501 Belgium 507, 527, 538, 571, 579, 602,
Baden Powell, Robert 619 640, 651-3, 654, 666, 669, 704,
Baker, Sir Samuel 568 705, 708, 729, 738
Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem 146 Bell, Clive 626
Baldwin, Stanley 680-1, 692, 696-8 Belléme, Robert de 115
Balfour, A. J. 608, 628-9, 635, 646 Belsen death camp 725
Balfour Declaration 675-6 Ben Gurion, David 733
Ball, John 202, 203 Benn, Tony 746
Ballard, John 299-300 Bentham, Jeremy 466, 518
Balliol, Edward 191 Bentinck, Lord George 546, 547, 551
Balliol, John 180-1, 191 Bentinck, Lord William 563
Bancroft, Richard, Archbishop of Bentley, Derek 746
Canterbury 320 Beohtric, King of the West Saxons 51,
Bank Charter Act 544, 545 52)
Bank Holidays 577 Beorhtwulf, King of Mercia 58
Bank of England 391-2, 483, 776 Beowulf 38, 49
Bannister, Roger 735 Berengaria, Queen 151, 156
Bannockburn, Battle of (1314) 186 Berkshire 63, 90, 170, 483
Barber, Anthony 753 Berlin 494, 602, 688, 697, 710, 721,
Barbon, Praisegod 356 723, 728-9; Wall 729, 768
Baring, Evelyn see Cromer, Earl of Berlin, Congress of (1878) 585, 586
Barnardo, Dr Thomas 610 Bernicia 29, 37, 42
Barnet, Battle of (1471) 232-3 Bertha, Queen 29, 34
barons, English 109-10, 122-3, 125, Berwick—on—Tweed 140, 191-2, 228
139, 140, 143-4, 147, 151, 155-6, Besant, Annie 607
WRG (462-5170, 172257 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von 640
177-8, 185-6, 211 Bevan, Aneurin 734
Barry, Sir Charles: Houses of Beveridge, Sir William 632, 731
Parliament 531, 578 Bevin, Ernest 724, 732, 733, 734
Bath 16, 426, 711 Bewcastle Cross 41, 50
Battle, East Sussex 15, 19, 89-90 Biafran War (1967-70) 749
‘Battle of Britain’ 709-11 Bibles and prayerbooks 262, 265, 270,
Bayeux Tapestry 86, 88, 106 277, 278, 282, 289, 290, 291,
BBC 685-6, 704 307-8, 309, 319, 319-20, 333, 466
Beaker People 4 Birmingham 517, 527, 528, 529, 531,
Beale, Dorothea 554 S416) Olle elena?
Beaton, Cecil 735 Biscop, Benedict 39
Beaufort, Henry, Cardinal 217, 221, Bishops’ Wars 334
223-4 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 556, 569,
Beaufort, Lady Margaret 239, 240, 241 Dial eo ett OU noi
Beaverbrook, W. M. Aitken, Baron Black and Tans 677
708-9 Black Death 190-1, 197, 198, 210
Becket, Thomas a, Archbishop of Black Prince, Edward, the 189, 191,
Canterbury 128-9, 130-5, 134, 138, 194, 196-7, 199, 201
139.262 Blackshirts, the 697
803
 INDEX

Blair, Tony 774, 775, 778-9 Brittany 17, 27, 126, 139, 159
Blake, George 741 Brixworth Church 50, 50 S
Blake, Admiral Robert 355, 358 Broc, Ralph de 133
Blake, William 479, 536 Bronté, Charlotte 554, 576
Blenheim, Battle of (1704) 399-400 Brougham, Henry 495, 510, 516, 528
Blenheim Palace 400, 401, 630 Brown, Gordon 774, 777 —

Blériot, Louis 658 Browning, Elizabeth Barret 554

Blitzkrieg 703 Bruce, Robert, King of Scotland 180,
Blondel de Nesle 154 183-4, 184, 186, 187, 191
Bloomsbury Group, the 626 Brueys, Admiral Francois Paul 484
Bliicher, Marshal Gebhard von 503, Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 526
504, 506 BSE 775
Boateng, Paul 780 Bucer, Martin 278
Boer Wars 589, 618-20, 620, 621, Buckingham, Duke of 235, 23940
627, 629, 631 Buckingham, rea Villiers, Ist Duke
Boers 543, 601, 6034 of 323, 323, 324, 328, 329
Boleyn, Anne 255, 262, 263-4, 265-6, ——— SeonVilliers, 2nd
267, 271, 290 Duke of 371, 377
Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount Bulgaria 5558, S83, S85, S86, 658, 660,
405, 406, 407, 407, 413, 415, 420, 667, 674, 723
427, 449 Buller, Sir Redvers 619
Bonaparte, Jéréme 493 Bunyan, John 364 =F
Bonaparte, Joseph 493, 496 Burbage, James 307
Bonaparte, Louis 493 Burdett, Sir Francis 495, 510
Bonner, Edmund, Bishop 272 Burgess, Guy 741
Book ofKells 54 Burgh, Hubert de 165, 170
Booth, Charles 610, 629 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord 288,
Booth, William 610
Bosnia and Herzegovina 583, 586, Burgoyne, Genet John 463
634, 674, 777 Burgundians 215, 218, 221, 231, 234
Boston Tea Party (1773) 460 Burgundy, Charles the Rash, Duke of
Bosworth Field, Battle of (1485) 241-2 231, 234
Botha, Louis 631 Burgundy, Jean Sans Peur, Duke of
Bothwell, James Hepburn, Earl of 293 215, 218
Boudicca, Queen 11-13, 119 Burgundy, Philip the Good, Duke of
Bouillon, Godfrey de 112 218, 221, 223
Bouvines, Battle of (1214) 162 burhs 66, 71
Boxer Rebellion (1900) 613 Burke, Edmund 456-7, 465, 467, 476,
Boycott, Captaim Charles 594 480
Boyle, Robert 366 Burke, Thomas 595
Boyne, Battle of the (1690) 389 Burma 555, 563, 601, 715
Braddock, General Edward 442 Burns, John 630
Bradshaw, John 349, 351, 362 Burton, Sir Richard 567, 568
Bradstreet, Colonel 443 Bury St Edmund's 59, 149
Bréugny, Treaty of (1360) 196, 214 Bush, President George 771
Bngantes, the 10, 13, 17 Buss, Frances 554
Bright, John 528, 542, 591 Bute, John Stuart, Earl of 4524
Brighton 514, 771 Butler, Joseph, Bishop 425
Bristol 122, 127, 23 3, 252, 341, 464, Butler, Richard Austen 731, 742
$29, 711 Butler, Samuel 365
British Expeditionary Force 633, 641, Butskellism 73
653, 654, 656, 657, 658, 659-60, Bye Plot 316
704, 705, 706-7 Byng, Admiral George 439
804
 INDEX

Byron, George Gordon, Lord 511, 521 Carroll, Lewis 578

Carteret, John, 1st Earl Granville 417,
Cabal, the 371 427, 430, 431, 433
Cabinet, the 413, 414, 630 Cartimandua, Queen 10
Cade, Jack 225 Cartwright, Edmund: loom 465
Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd 44 Casement, Sir Roger 661
Caedmon 47-8, 781 Cassivellaunus 5, 7, 9
Caerleon 13, 17, 18 Castle, Barbara 748, 749
Caernarvon Castle 180 Castlemaine, Barbara Villiers, Lady
Caesar, Julius 3, 5-7, 8, 9, 16 365
Calais 189, 194, 195, 196, 215, 227, Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount
285 499, 501, 507, 508-9, 517, 519, 546
Calcutta, Black Hole of 439 Cat and Mouse Act (1913) 645
Calder, Sir Robert 491 Catesby, Robert 317, 318
Caledonians, the 13, 19, 20 Catherine of Aragon 250, 255, 259,
Caligula, Emperor 8 262, 263, 264, 265-6, 278-9
Callaghan, James 747, 748-9, 754, Catherine of Braganza 365, 368
7555756 Catholic Church/Catholics 68-9, 77,
Calvin, Jean/Calvinists 270, 288, 289, 104010 3-58110-140114 215)
291, 292,320) 388 118-19, 126, 129, 160-1, 164, 178,
Cambridge University 140, 171, 256, 198, 210-11, 214, 247, 248; and
341, 534, 576, 577, 645, 686 Luther 253-4; and Henry VIII 255,
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 262-5, 266-7; under Mary I 280,
(CND) 763, 769 282-3; Counter-Reformation 294-5,
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry 621, 297, 298; 17th-19th century
629, 631 316-18) 32299 23.3251345,357,
Campbells, the 391 367, 360, 373, 374, 378, 379-81,
Canada 442-6, 543, 545-6, 581, 588, 388, 467, 521; in Ireland 522-4,
607, 615, 669, 673, 720, 727, 729 546-8, 599, 751-2, 771; see also
canals 425-6; see also Suez Canal Jesuit order; Test Acts
Canning, Charles, Earl 563, 565 Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) 513, 517
Canning, George 489, 499, 517, Catuvellauni, the 5, 7-8
519-20, 521, 522, 523, 524, 565 Cavagnari, Sir Louis 587
Canterbury 52, 58, 106, 121, 711; Cavaliers, the 339, 362-3
Cathedral 34, 105, 134, 134, 269 Cavell, Edith 670
Cantii, the 6 Cavendish, Lord Frederick 595-6
Canute, King see Cnut, King Cavour, Count Camillo 569
car industry 733. 754, 757, 781 Cawnpore, siege of (1857) 562, 564
Caractatus 9-10 Caxton, William 211, 233-4, 242, 243
Carausius 19 Ceadda, St 46
Cardiff Castle 101 Ceawlin 29
Cardigan, James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cecil, Lord Hugh 639
559-575 Cecil, Sir Robert (Earl of Salisbury)
Cardwell, Edward 575 304, 305, 308-9, 313, 314, 316,
Carlisle 13, 108, 433 5175318) 320
Carnegie, Andrew 577 Cecil, William see Burghley, Lord
Carnot, Lazare 481 Cedd 46
Caroline of Ansbach, Queen 421, 422, Celtic Church 16, 20, 28, 29, 44
429, 430 Celie'4.G, 8. 14..15,416, 17,28) 137,
Caroline of Brunswick, Queen 513, 180
514-16, 528 Cerdic 57
Carolingian Renaissance 51 Cetewayo, Chief 587
Carrington, Lord Peter 759 Chad, St 46
805
 INDEX

Chadwick, Sir Edwin $32, 536, S51 Christianity, early 17, 20-1, 26, 28,
Chamberlain, Joseph 583, 597-8, 612, 29-30, 33-4, 38-40, 42-3, 44,
613-15, 616, 618, 621, 629 45-5 1; see Catholic Church
Chamberlain, Neville 685, 689, 698, Church of England see Anglican
699-701, 700, 702-3, 707, 708, Charch
736 Charchill, Lord Randolph 599, 609,
Chanak Crisis (1922) 680 630
Channel Islands 158, 709 Charchill, Sir Winston 589, 629, 630,
Channel Tunnel 744, 774 632, 684, 723-4, 725, 734, 735,
Charlemagne 31, 53, 61, 85 736, 744; and World War 1651,
Charles I, of England 320, = 322. 659, 660: and World War II 691,
323-4, 325, 326, 327-50, 698, 704, 707, 708, 709, 710-11,
ot 713, 714, 715, 716, 719, 721, 722
33 Cinque Ports 160
nie 35 t, 3s 4, 354, 359-6 D, Cintra, Convention of 497
361-2, 362, 363-5, 367-8, 370, Cistercian a 121, 154, 177, 249
372— > . 3933, 467
civil service 375, S80
Charles il,of Spain 393, 394 Civil War (1642-9) 339-45, 347, 349,
Charles IV, of France 188, 191, 193 361, 363, 370
Charles IV, of Spain 490, 496 Clarence, George, Duke of 231, 232
Charles V, Emperor 253, 259, 262-3, 234, 237, 249
264, 270, 2278q 4283. 285. 297
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 336,
Charles V, of Pranck 196, 197, 201 362, 370, 371
Charles VI, Emperor 402, 405, 417, Clarendon Code 363, 364
431 Clark, Mary Ann 498
Charles VI, of France 201, 205, 214, class system 209, 210
214, 218, 220, 221 Claudius, Emperor 7, 8, 9, 10
Charles VII, Emperor 431 Clemenceau, Georges 668, 671
Clement VII, Pope 262, 264
Charles VILL, of France TT Cleveland, President Stephen G. 616
Charles X, of France 527 Clittord, Rosamund 138
Charles XI, of Sweden 417 Clifferd, Thomas, Baron 371, 372, 373
Charles, Prince of Wales 735, 762, Clive, Robert 438, 439, 447, 447-8,
780 So+
Charlotte, Princess 514, $27 Cliveden Ser, the 699
Charlotte, Queen 449, 472, 513 Clovis, King of Gaul 33
Chartists S41-2, 552, 642 CND see Campaign for Nuclear
Chatham, Earl of see Pitt, William, the Disarmament
Elder Cnut, King 76-8
Chaucer, Geoffrey 189-90, 190 coal mining 327, 535, 535-6, 632,
Canterbury Tales 135, 190 643, 68453, a 726, 730, 753-4,
Cheltenham Ladies College S54 757, 764-5, 76
Chester 13, 17, 18, 73, 103 Cobber, W ‘liam 5 SI 539
Chester, Earl of 122-3 Cobden, Richard 542, 555, 562, 569
Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl coimage/currency 5, 7, 8, 18, 23, 42,
of 427 $1, 66-7, 177, 178, 274, 401, 425,
Chiang Kai-shek 73¢ 750
children, employ mentours532, <335, Coke, Sir Edward 322, 328, 329
335-46, 537, 551-2 Cake, Thomas 465
China 538, 562, 600, 613, 649, 690, Colchester 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18
714, 723, 730, 736, 747, 751, 777 Cold War 724, 728-9, 730, 736, 740,
yee:
chivalry, code of 195 762, 76
Christian, King of Denmark 328 Colet, John 234
D 06
 INDEX

Collingwood, Admiral Cuthbert 492 cotton industry 465-6, 471, 532,

Collins, Michael 677, 678 536-7, 570
Colman, Bishop 48 Counter—Reformation 294-5, 297, 298
Columba, St 29, 45, 48 courts see law courts
Columbus, Christopher 233, 253 Covenanters 342, 343-4, 352, 367,
Combination Acts 510, 518 374, 375
Comines, Robert de 95 Coverdale, Miles 265
Commius 7 Coward, Noél 687
Common Market see European Cowper, William 470
Economic Community Craftsman (magazine) 427, 428, 429
Commonwealth, the 735, 736, 738, Craig, James 646
739, 741, 749, 750-1 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of
communism 669-70, 681-2, 722-3, Canterbury 265, 265-6, 270, 272,
724, 728, 730, 736, 737, 746-7, LID oA fy LIB, 219,20} 202283;
766, 768 284
Compromise of Avranches (1172) 139 Crécy, Battle of (1346) 194, 195
Compton, Bishop 381 credit cards 745
Comyn, John 183 cricket 577, 620
concentration camps 621, 709; see also Crimean War (1853-6) 557-61, 562,
death camps 575, 580
Concorde 744 Cripps, Sir Stafford 727
Connolly, James 646 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl of 591,
Conservative party 574, 580, 582-3, 592
589, 597-9, 607, 609, 620-1, Cromwell, Oliver 178, 314, 339, 341,
628-9, 636, 646, 652, 683-4, 685, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 350, 351,
687, 688, 731, 734, 749, 775-6; see 352, 352-3, 354, 355-8, 362
also Heath, Edward; Major, John; Cromwell, Richard 358-9
Macmillan, Harold; Thatcher, Cromwell, Thomas 266, 266, 269,
Margaret 272, 277, 534
Constantine I, Emperor 19-20, 21 Cronje, Piet 619
Constantine, Emperor III 22 Cross, Richard 582
Constantine, King of Scotland 72 crosses, standing 41, 49-50
Constantinople 253, 501, 583, 585, Crusades 112, 114, 121, 138, 144,
586, 633, 649, 650 146-7, 149, 151-3, 173, 175,
Constantius I 19, 20 177,
Constitutions of Clarendon 131-2, Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) 742
133,139 Culloden, Battle of (1746) 434, 436
Cook, Captain James 443, 472 Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of 540
Cooke, William 525 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke
Co-operative Society 552 of 432, 433-4, 435, 439, 441
Coote, Colonel Eyre 448, 464 Cumming, Sir William Gordon 627
Cope, General Sir John 433 Cunobelinus, King 8, 9
Copenhagen, Battle of (1801) 488 Curia Regis 104, 116, 125
Corks 2136 Curragh ‘mutiny’ (1914) 647
Corn Laws 511, 512, 542, 546, 547, currency see coinage
549, 551 Curzon, George, Marquess 675
Coruwall’4, 17, 215922726/28;:29;37, Cynewulf, King of Wessex 38
249, 257, 341, 345, 425 Cynric 57
Cornwallis, Charles, Marquess 463, Cyprus 586, 658, 674, 740
486 Czechoslovakia 674, 699-701, 704,
coroners 142 Taa,y IAG
Corry, Montague 582
Corunna, Battle of (1808) 497-8 Daily Mail 599, 683
807
 INDEX

Dalhousie, Sir James Ramsay, Marquis Diana, Princess of Wales 762, 777
of 563-4,
565 Dickens, Charles 525, 577; Oliver
Dalrymple, John, Master of Stair 390, Twist 535, 537
391 Diderot, Denis 450
Dalton, Hugh 726, 727 Diet of Worms (1521) 253, 255
Danby, Thomas Osborne, Earl of 373, Dilke, Sir Charles 631
374, 376, 377, 380, 381 Diocletian, Emperor 19, 20, 21
Danegeld 36, 74-5, 77, 79 Disraeli, Benjamin 546, 547, 549, 551,
Danelaw 67-8, 71, 73, 75 557, 562, 565, 566, 573-4, 580,
Danes 55; see Vikings 581-2, 583, 584, 585-6, 587, 588,
Danzig (Gdansk) 672, 701, 702 589, 591
Dardanelles, the (1915) 659-60 Dissenters 363-4, 372, 376, 380, 388,
Darien scheme, Panama 400 402, 407, 420, 566
Darnell’s case 329 Divine Right of Kings 315, 327-30,
Darnley, Lord Henry 293, 294 382, 384, 396, 473
Darwin, Charles 566 divorce 262, 516, 608, 696, 746
David I, of Scotland 114, 121, 123, Domesday Book 96, 99, 99-100, 109
27 Domitian, Emperor 14
David II, of Scotland 191, 196 Dorsetsy 29, 2355255975 63
Davies, Emily 645 Dost Mahomed, Amir of Afghanistan
Davis, Jefferson 570 538, 545
Davison, Emily 645 Douai seminary 294-5
Dawes
Plan (1925) 683 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 742, 743
Dawson, Geoffrey 699 Dover 8, 13, 18, 81, 160
death camps 715-16, 725 Dover, Treaty of (1670) 372
decimalization 750 Dowding, Sir Hugh 709
Declaration of Breda (1660) 359-60 Downing Street Declaration (1993)
Declaration of Rights (1689) 383, 384 THA
Deira 29, 34-5, 37, 40, 42, 72 Drake, Sir Francis 295, 296, 297, 299,
Deism 450-1 301, 302, 304
de la Mare, Sir Peter 199 drama see theatre(s)
de la Pole, Michael, Earl of Suffolk 204 Dreadnoughts 628, 633
Delors, Jacques 772, 773 Dream of the Rood, The 49
Denmark 76, 328 507, 556, 571, 572, Druids 5, 6, 11, 14
590, 704, 705, 729, 738 Drummond, Edward 546
Derby 63, 71, 433, 434, 527 Dryden, John 365, 365
Derby, Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Dubcek, Alexander 747
SILI S75 S625 SO SNS 667 Doro. Dublin 55, 71, 72, 136, 137, 647;
574 Phoenix Park murders 595-6, 608
Derby, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Dudley, Edmund 252, 257
241-2 Duncan, Admiral Adam 483
Dermot, King of Leinster 136, 137 Dundas, Henry 487
Despenser brothers 187, 188 Dundee, John Graham, Viscount 390
des Roches, Peter 170 Dunkirk, evacuation of (1940) 706-7
Dettingen, Battle of (1743) 431-2 Dunning, John 466
de Valera, Eamon 661, 677, 678, 698 Dunstan, St, Archbishop of
de Vere, Robert, Earl of Oxford 204 Canterbury 73, 74, 91
Devon 63, 170, 341 Dupleix, Joseph Francois, Marquis de
Devonshire, 8th Duke of see 437, 438
Hartington, Lord Durham 50,95, 102; Cathedral 40,
Devonshire, Earl of 381 108, 109
Devorgil 136 Dyck, Anthony van 339
Dhulip Singh, Maharajah 545 Dyer, General Reginald 677
808
 INDEX

Eadbald, King of Kent 40 Edwin, Earl of Mercia 84, 86, 87, 90,
Eadburgha, Queen 51 91595, 96
ealdormen 35, 38, 66 Edwin, King of Northumbria 40, 42,
Ealdred, Archbishop of York 90 43-4
East Africa Company 602, 603 Edwy, King of Wessex 73
East Anglia 18, 25, 35, 40, 46, 57, 58, Egbert, King of Wessex 57, 61
59, 60, 68371 (725 94,078 2210 Egfrith, King of Northumbria 50
East India Company 325, 368, 437, Egypt 484, 485-6, 538-9, 569, 570,
438, 468, 471, 562, 565, 600 582, 586, 590-1, 600, 601, 602,
Eastern Association army 342-3, 345 627, 658, 675, 694, 707, 711, 716,
Eastern Question 520, 557, 583-4 733, 736-7
economic systems 509, 544-5, 555, Eisenhower, Dwight D. 717
588, 604, 678-9, 683-4, 687-90, Eleanor of Aquitaine 124, 125, 138,
726-7, 741-2, 744-5, 747-51, 753, 139, 145, 150, 154, 155, 157, 159,
JS 78216666
ITOD BATIA: 160
776 778-9, 781, 783; see also Eleanor of Castile 177
taxation; trade and commerce Eleanor of Provence 170, 171
Eden, Sir Anthony 736-7, 739 electricity supplies 685
Edgar, King of England 67, 73-4 Elfrida 74
Edgar, King of Scotland Eliot, George 577
Edgar the Atheling 82, 90, 91, 95, 96, Eliot, Sir John 328, 329, 330, 332
iD: Elizabeth I, of England 248, 250, 257,
Edinburgh 140, 333, 426, 433; St 166, 278127657, 2792281, 2851
Giles’s Cathedral 333, 333 286-94, 288, 295, 296-302, 303,
Edith (Edgitha), Queen 79, 80, 81, 90 304-5, 307-9, 321, 325
Edmund, King of East Anglia 59, 60 Elizabeth II 589, 696, 734, 735,
Edmund I 72, 73 780-1, 782
Edmund II (Ironside) 76, 78, 81, 114 Elizabeth, Queen (née Woodville) 231,
Edred, King of Wessex 73 235,:2378240
education 14, 15, 27, 38, 49, 61-2, 68, Elizabeth, Queen Mother 697, 780
6997104912660 41--5 323537; Elizabeth of Bohemia (the Winter
577, 609, 610, 731, 745-6; of Queen) 322, 323-4, 328, 331, 341
women 554, 576; see also schools; Elizabeth of York 240, 242, 248, 249
universities Ellenborough, Lord 545
Edward I, of England (Longshanks) Ely 105, 121
150, 174, 175, 176-84,
185 Emma of Normandy 75, 76, 78, 79, 82
Edward II, of England 176, 184, 185-8 Empson, Richard 252, 257
Edward III, of England 188, 189-97, enclosure system 274-5, 277, 465
198, 199-200, 214, 226 Engels, Friedrich 536-7, 554-5
Edward IV, of England 227, 229, 230, Enigma code machine 713
231, 232-4, 235, 237, 240 Enlightenment, the 450-1
Edward V, of England 234, 235, 236, Entente Cordiale (1904) 627, 641
237-8 Equiano, Olaudah 464
Edward VI, of England 269, 271, 273, Erasmus, Desiderius 234, 256
276, 277, 278-9, 279, 280 ERM see Exchange Rate Mechanism
Edward VII, of England 568, 572, Bssex 7, $)10211°12,125835.°57,
170,
581, 609, 625, 626-8, 636 347
Edward VIII, of England see Windsor, Essex, Geoffrey Fitz Peter, Earl of 156
Duke of Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of
Edward the Confessor 76, 78, 79, 80, 288, 304-5
81-2, 83, 83, 84, 92, 100 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of
Edward the Elder 71, 72, 73 341, 344
Edward the Martyr 74 Ethelbald, King 50, 51
809
 INDEX

Ethelbert, King of Kent 29, 33, 33-4, Castille 250, 253

35, 36, 40, 42, 70 Ferdinand of Brunswick 442, 448
Ethelbert, Prince of Wessex 58 Festival of Britain (1951) 735
Ethelburga, Queen 42, 44 feudalism 97-8, 101, 109, 156, 211
Ethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians 67, 71 Field of the Cloth of Gold 259-60, 260
Ethelfrith, King of Northumbira 37, 42 Fielding, Henry 426, 428
Ethelgiva 69 Finland 494, 674, 703, 704-5
Ethelred, King of Wessex 61, 62 Fisher, John, Admiral 628
Ethelred, King (‘the Unready’) 74-6 Fisher, John, Bishop 266-7, 268
Ethelred, ruler of the Mercians 67 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 686-7
Ethelwulf, King of Wessex 58, 61 Fitzgerald family (Earls of Kildare)
Ethiopia 692, 693, 712 136, 137, 138, 249, 251, 274, 298
Eton College, Windsor 228 Fitzherbert, Maria 473, 514, 515
Eugene, Prince of Savoy 398, 399, 405 Flambard, Ranulf 109, 110, 114
European Economic Community Fleetwood, General Charles 358
(Common Market)/European Fletcher, WPC Yvonne 765
Community/European Union 738, Foch, General Ferdinand 667, 668
741, 748, 749, 750-1, 762, 770, Foliot, Gilbert, Bishop 131, 133
772-3, 773, 778-9 Fontenoy, Battle of (1745) 432
Eurotunnel see Channel Tunnel Foot, Michael 764, 765
Eustace, Count of Boulogne 81 football 577
Evangelical movement 466 Forbes, John 443
Evesham, Battle of (1265) 175 Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India 694
Exchange Rate Mechanism 770, 772-3 Forster, Wi Bs 57/7, 595)
Exchequer, the 116, 117 Fox, Charles James 467-9, 473, 476,
Exclusion Crisis 374-5, 376 479-80, 489, 494, 495, 495
Exeter 143518; 63595; 1403714 Fox, Henry 467
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 282, 283
Fabian Society 611-12, 649 Fox’s Martyrs 469
Factory Acts 518, 532, 535, 536 Framlingham Castle 140
Fairfax, Ferdinando, 2nd Baron 341, France: 19th century 508-9, 519, 561,
342 575, 591, 617-18; early 20th
Fairfax, Thomas, 3rd Baron 341, 342, century 627, 633, 640-1, 655;
343, 345, 351, 359 World War J and after 651-3, 654,
Faisal, Prince 666, 675 656-7, 661-2, 665, 667-8, 669,
Falaise, Treaty of 140, 147, 180 670, 671, 672, 679, 682-3, 684,
Falkenhayn, General Erich von 661 686; 1930s 690, 693; World War II
Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount 336, and after 699, 701, 703, 704,
342 705-7, 715, 716-18, 723; and Suez
Falklands War (1982) 763, 766 736-8; see also Aquitaine, Charles
famine 186-7; in Ireland 548, 548-50 IV—X, Francis I, French Revolution,
farming 4, 18-19, 23, 37, 38, 72, 75, Gaulle, Charles de, Henry III, IV,
100,101) 1223001020025) 274-5, Louis VII-XVIII, Louis—Napoleon,
366, 427, 465, 510-11, 541, 546, Napoleon, Napoleon III, Normandy,
588; cattle diseases 187, 775; in Philip I-VI; wars see
Ireland 548-50, 579, 593-4, 607, Franco-Prussian, Hundred Years’,
628; sheep 16, 37, 154, 177, 191, Napoleonic, Seven Years’, War of
274; wages 190, 483, 510, 532-3 the Spanish Succession
fascism 679, 695, 697 Francis I, of France 259-60, 260, 263
Fashoda, Sudan (1898) 618 Franco-Prussian War (1871) 579-80,
Fawkes, Guy 317 591, 651, 671
Ferdinand II, Emperor 322 Franks 25, 29, 34, 39, 53, 63, 68, 72
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 648, 650
8IO
 INDEX

Frederick I, Emperor (Barbarossa) George II, of England 411, 412-13,

131-2 414, 420-1, 422-3, 425, 428, 429,
Frederick II, Emperor 171, 172 431-2, 433, 436, 438, 439-40, 441,
Frederick II, of Prussia (‘the Great’) 446, 448
431, 436, 438, 441, 448, 451, 452 George III, of England 413, 428, 448,
Frederick, Elector Palatine 322 436, 448, 449-50, 451-2, 453-4,
Frederick, Prince of Wales 422, 423, 456, 458-60, 463, 465, 466, 467,
427-8 : 468-9, 472-3, 487, 489, 495, 500,
French, General Sir John 653, 658 513,522
French Resistance 715 George IV, of England (formerly
French Revolution 396, 473-7, 479 Prince Regent) 468, 472, 473,
French Revolutionary Wars 478, 500-1, 506, 510, 513, 514-16, 520,
479-85 - 520,524, $25,527
Freud, Sigmund 626 George V, of England 639, 645, 647,
Friendly Societies 541, 552 652, 681, 696
Frisians 53, 63, 68, 69 George VI, of England 696, 698, 717,
Frobisher, Martin 299, 302 719, 734
Fry, Elizabeth 518 George of Denmark, Prince 403
Fry, Roger 626 Gerald of Windsor 136
Fuchs, Klaus 729 Gerard, Father 317
fyrd 36, 60, 66, 97, 121, 140, 156, 178 German Democratic Republic 729
Germanic tribes 4, 19, 21, 22, 24—S,
Gage, General Thomas 460, 461 26-73 5x45
Gaitskell, Hugh 731 Germanusot2on2i7
Gallipoli (1915) 659-60 Germany 3225323,4115555,556;
Gandhi, Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) 676, 568-9, 571-2, 583, 601, 609, 614,
677, 693, 694 617, 627-8, 633, 634, 640-1, 655,
Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop 272, 280, 757, 772; World War I and after
281 649-54, 656-64, 665, 666-8, 669,
Garnet, Father 317-18 670-3, 679; French occupation
gas lighting 525 682-3; interwar 683, 687-8, 690,
Gascony 172, 181,182, 192, 196, 691, 698-701; World War II and
214, 215, 224 after 702-19, 724-6, 727, 728; see
Gaskell, Elizabeth 537, 554 also Prussia
Gates, General Horatio 463 Ghana (Gold Coast) 586, 602, 739
Calis) 4952687914,
17: 222,06, Gibraltar 400, 405, 463, 464, 552
27,395.39 Gildas 26: Of the Destruction of the
Gaulle, Charles de 709, 741, 749 British 26, 27, 28
Gaveston, Piers 184, 185 Giraldus Cambrensis 136, 140, 143
Gay, John: The Beggar’s Opera 425, Gladstone, William Ewart 538, 544,
428 551, 555,556;566,15699570,.573:
Gdansk see Danzig 574, 575, 579, 580-1, 582, 583-4,
Geddes, Sir Ernest 679 586, 588-90, 591, 592-5, 596, 596,
Geddes, Jenny 333 597, 598, 599, 600, 608, 612, 621,
General Strike (1926) 684-5 635, 734
Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances 90 Glanvill, Ranulf 152, 155; De
Geoffrey of Anjou 126 legibus... Angliae 141
Geoffrey of Brittany 139, 143-4, 157 Glasgow
333, 527, 680, 711
Geoffrey of Mandeville 122 glass—-making 24, 28, 39
Geoffrey of Monmouth 122 Glencoe, Battle of (1692) 390-1
George I, of England 406, 407-8, Glendower, Owen 211, 212, 213, 240
411-13, 412, 414-17, 418, 420-1, Glorious Revolution (1688) 384, 387,
422 396
SII
 INDEX

Gloucester 16, 105, 170, 188, Grey, Sir Edward (later Viscount Grey
189 of Fallodon) 630, 641, 648, 649,
Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of 221, 651, 652, 669
224 Grey, Lady Jane 279, 281
Gloucester, Richard, Duke of see Grey of Ruthin, Lord 211
Richard III Griffith, Arthur 608
Gloucester, Richard, 7th Earl of 174 Grim, Edward 134
Gloucester, Robert, Earl of 121, 122, Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop of
193.407 Canterbury 291
Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, Grossteste, Robert, Bishop 171
Duke
of 204, 205 Gruffydd ap Llywelyn 82-3
Goderich, Frederick Robinson, Lord Guderian, General Heinz 706
S175 21-2 Guesclin, Bertrand de 197
Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry 374 guilds 210, 269
Godiva, Lady 81 Gunhildis 75
Godolphin, Sidney 402, 404 Gunpowder Plot (1605) 317-18
Godwin, Earl of Wessex 78, 79, 80, Gutenberg, Johann 211
81-2 Guthrum 63-4, 65-6, 67-8
Godwin, Gyrth 83, 87 Gwynne, Nell 365, 377
Godwin, Tostig, Earl of Northumbria
81, 82, 84, 85-6,87 habeas corpus 329, 374, 479
Goebbels, Joseph 699 Habsburg Empire 259, 285, 297, 322,
Goldie, Sir George Taubman 601, 602, 402, 405, 431, 481, 571, 650, 674
606 Hadrian, Emperor 17
Gollancz, Victor 695 Hadrian’s Wall 17, 18, 18, 22
Good Friday Agreement (1998) 778 Haesten 66
Gorbachev, Michael 767, 767-8 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider 606
Gordon, General Charles 591-3 Hague, William 775-6
Gordon Riots (1780) 467 Haidar Ali 464
Goring, Hermann 706, 710 Haig, Sir Douglas 661, 662, 666
Gormley, Anthony: Angel of the North Hakluyt, Richard 325
781 Haldane, Richard B., Viscount 633,
Grace, W. G. 577 641, 653, 683
Grafton, Augustus Fitzroy, 3rd Duke Halfdan 59, 62
of 453, 458 Halifax, Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of
Grant, Ulysses S. 570 D135 SUS
Grattan, Henry 464, 466 Halifax, Edward Wood, 1st Earl
Great Exhibition (1851) 553, 553-4 693-4, 699
Greece 674, 680, 701, 711, 712, 740; Hamilton, James, 3rd Marquess 347
Wars of Independence 520-1, 522 Hampden, John 332, 332, 337, 341
Green, Thomas Hill 610 Hampshire
57, 63, 65, 90, 102, 170
Greenham Common 763 Handel, George Frederick 413
Greenway, Father 317 Hardie, James Keir 612, 620, 630
Greenwood, Arthur 702-3 Hardy, Captain Thomas 491, 492
Gregorian calendar 436 Hardy, Thomas 577
Gregory I, Pope (‘the Great’) 29, 30, Hargreaves, James: Spinning Jenny 465
33, 34-5,68 Harington, General Charles 680
Gregory VII, Pope 102-3, 104-5 Harlech Castle 179, 180
Gregory IX, Pope 171 Harley, Robert 393, 403, 405, 407
Grenville, George 427, 454-5, 494 Harold (Godwin), King 80, 81, 83,
Grenville, Sir Richard 304, 306 84-90
Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl 480, 510, 528, Harold Hardrada, King 82, 85, 87
SUE Sail, SSW Harold Harefoot, King 78-9
812
 INDEX

Harrying of the North 95-6 Hereford, Humphrey Bohun, Earl of

Harthacnut 78, 79 182
Hartington, Spencer Cavendish, Lord Hereford, William FitzOsbern, Earl of
(later 8th Duke of Devonshire) 596, 91297
598 Hereward the Wake 96-7
Harvey, William 366 Heseltine, Michael 762
Hastings 36, 86, 160 Hicks Pasha 591
Hastings, Battle of 86-90 hideage/hides 36, 37
Hastings, Warren 464, 471 Hilda, Abbess of Whitby 47, 48
Hatton, Sir Christopher 287 Hill, Rowland 534
Havelock, Sir Henry 564 Hillary, Edmund 735
Hawke, Admiral Edward 436, 448 Hillsborough Agreement (1985) 771,
Hawkins; fohn (Jack) 296, 301, 302, 774
304, 326 Hindenburg, General Paul von 657
Hawksmoor, Nicholas 408 Hiroshima, bombing of 719
Hazelrigg, Sir Arthur 335, 337 Hitler, Adolf 688, 691, 692, 693, 697,
Healey, Denis 754-5 698-701, 702, 705, 706, 707, 710,
Heath, Edward 750-1, 752, 753-4 71221307
149707, 718) 7215-740
Henderson, Arthur 681 Hoare-Laval Pact 692
Hengist and Horsa 25 Hobhouse, Emily 621
Henrietta Maria, Queen 324, 325-6, Hogarth, William 426
327; 32775305335, 336, 338 Holbein, Hans 256, 272
Henry I, of England 107, 111, 112, Holland see Netherlands
113, 114-15, 116-19, 120, 141 Holland, Henry Fox, 3rd Baron 480,
Henry II, of England 119, 124, 495
125-45, 146-7, 148, 155 Holles, Denzil 330, 337
Henry III, of England 165, 169, homosexuality 746, 769
169-71, 172-5 Hong Kong 538, 715, 777
Henry III, of France 292, 298, 299 Honorius, Emperor 22, 23
Henry IV, Emperor 85, 104 Hooper, John, Bishop 278, 280, 282
Henry IV, of England 205, 205-6, Hopton, Sir Ralph 339
209 2A 12 House of Commons/Lords see
Henry IV, of France 304, 316, 318 Parliaments
Henry V, Emperor 119 housing 428, 582-3, 609, 724, 734,
Henry V, of England 189, 212, 741-2, 769, 770; council 678, 682,
213-18, 219, 220, 251 748, 758-9
Henry VI, Emperor 154, 155 Howard, Catherine 272-3
Henry VI, of England 189, 218, 220, Howard, Admiral Charles, 2nd Baron
221, 223, 224-6, 227-8, 230, 232, Howard of Effingham 301, 302, 304
233 Howard, John 466, 518
Henry VII, of England 238, 239-40, Howe, Geoffrey 760
241, 242-3, 247, 248, 249-52, 255, Howe, Admiral Richard, 1st Earl
256-7 470
Henry VIII, of England 247, 249, 250, Howe, General Sir William, Sth
253-4, 256, 255-61, 262-75, 276, Viscount 461
297,291 Huddleston, Father 377
Henry, Prince (Henry II’s son) 129, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln 156, 150
132, 133, 138, 143, 144 Hugh of Chester 139
Henry, Bishop of Winchester 120, 123 Huguenots 297, 298, 328, 380
Henry, Patrick 460 Human Rights Act (1998) 779
Heraclius, Patriarch 147 humanism 234, 256
Herbert, Sidney 551, 560 hundred courts 36, 70, 99, 100, 101,
Hereford, Earl of 187 142, 178
813
 INDEX

Hundred Years’ War 189, 192-7, 215, Ireton, General Henry 339, 345, 358,
224 362
Hungary 431, 674, 721, 723, 737; see Irish Republican Army see IRA
also Austro—Hungary Isaacs, Sir Rufus 646
Huns, the 21, 26-7 Isabella, Queen 188, 191, 192, 193
Hunt, Henry ‘Orator’ 511, 512 Isabella of Angouléme 159, 172
Hunt, Sir Rex 763 Isherwood, Christopher 688
Hunt, Dr Tristram 784 Isle of Ely 96-7
Hurd, Douglas 772 Israel 733-4, 737, 753
Hus, Jan 218 Tealye2Sts SS5y SS 635 69957255893
Huskisson, William 517, 518, 522 613, 642, 658, 666, 667, 668, 669,
Hyde, Edward see Clarendon, Earl of 61AS6719, 6CIONEC 92695070 Leelee
Hyndman, Henry Mayers 612 TAG, (233 129.738
Ivar the Boneless 59
Ibn Saud, Abd al-Aziz 694
Iceni, the 7, 11-13 Jacobins 476, 479, 511
immigration 741, 746, 751 Jacobites 387-8, 390, 392, 393, 395,
Independent (newspaper) 766 405, 406-7, 414-16, 432-6
India 325, 368, 437, 438, 439, 447-8, Jaffier, Mir 447, 447
463-4, 468-9, 471, 480, 545, 55S, Jamaica 357-8, 739
556, 581-2, S85, 600-1, 606-7, James I, of England (VI of Scotland)
654, 676-7, 693-4, 731-2, 733 293, 299, 300, 309, 313-17, 314,
Indian Congress Party 607, 715 318-23, 324, 325
Indian Mutiny (1857) 562-5, 566, 587 James II (formerly Duke of York) 339,
Industrial Revolution 465—6, 471, 510, 362; 3647 370; 371,373,374, 375;
376, 377, 378-81, 379, 382, 385,
Ine, King of Wessex 36, 57, 70 387-8, 389, 390, 391, 392, 394,
Innocent III, Pope 160-2, 164 3955530
Inquisition, the 283, 291, 297, 429 James IV, of Scotland 249, 250, 258
International Monetary Fund 737, James V, of Scotland 259
754-5, 757 Jameson, Sir Leander Storr 604-5,
Iona 29, 45, 45, 54 615, 616, 618
IRA (Irish Republican Army) 677-8, Japan 613, 627, 634, 649, 665, 690,
ESLET SIS TEATS 695, 714-15, 719-20, 730, 736,
Iraq 654, 658, 675, 694, 733, 771, SF
Jarrow 39, 40, 54, 58, 688
Ireland 4, 20, 29, 45, 47, 48, 55,1 61, Jarrow Marchers 689
304, 309, 313, 331, 342, 351-2 Jefferson, Thomas 463
367, 389, 464, 466, 482, 574, 579, Jeffreys, Judge George 379
675, 698; Anglo-Irish Treaty 677; Jena, Battle of (1806) 494
Catholics 486-7, 522-4, 546-8, Jenkins, Roy 745, 748, 749, 764
599; civil war 677-8; Easter Rising Jerusalem 112, 144, 146-7, 148, 152,
(1916) 661; famine 542, 548, 153, 247, 558, 665, 733-4
548-50; farming 548-50, 579, Jesuit order 294, 295, 317
593-4, 607, 628; Fitzgerald risings Jews 105, 146, 148-50, 164, 178, 191,
249, 251, 274, 298-9: Home Rule 357, 534, 546, 566, 576, 626, 688,
588, 589, S95, 597, 598-9, 607-8, 697; in Germany 691, 693, 695; in
612, 635, 646-9; Irish Volunteers World War II 715-16, 719, 725; in
646, 647, 661; Land League 593-5; Palestine 675-6, 693, 732-3, see
missionaries 20, 29, 39, 45, 46; Israel
Norman invasion 135-8; Parnell jingoism 584-5
593-7; Ulster Plantation 324-5, Jinnah, Mohammed 693
599: see IRA; Northern Ireland Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent 203
814
 INDEX

Joan of Arc 221-3, 224 Koniggratz, Battle of (1866) 572

Joffre, General Joseph 656 Konigsmark, Philipp, Count of 412
John, King of England 115, 126, 143, Korean War (1950-1) 729-30
LAS I4S, USS 58 U4 S157, Kosovo 778
158-65, 169, 170, 172 Kruger, Paul 616, 617, 618
John Il, of France 196 Kuwait 694, 733, 771
John of Brittany 183
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster 190, Labour Party 612, 620, 625, 629-30,
197, 199, 200.202.2035; 204, 206; 639, 642-3, 652, 666, 681-2, 684,
2128233 687, 688-9, 708, 724, 726, 730-1,
John of Salisbury 130, 132 732, 734, 743-9, 754-6, 764,
John Paul I, Pope 767 768-9, 773-4, 775, 776-7
Jones, Inigd 327 Lafayette, Marie Joseph Motier,
Jones, Paul 465 Marquis de 463, 474, 475
Jonson, Ben 307, 327 Lambert, General John 359
Jordan 675, 733, 734 Lamont, Norman 772
Jordan, Dorothea 530 Lancashire 268, 510, 542, 570
Joseph I, of Austria 451 Lancaster, Henry, Duke of 204
Joseph, Sir Keith 758, 771 Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of 186-7
judges 70, 116, 125, 126, 130, 141, Lancaster House Agreement (1979)
170, 178 se
Julius Il, Pope 250, 255, 258 Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury
Junot, General Andoche 497 103, 110
Jutes, the 24, 25 Langton, Stephen, Archbishop of
Jutland, Battle of (1916) 663 Canterbury 161, 162
Juxon, Bishop William 349 Langtry, Lillie 627
languages 4, 14, 15, 17, 24, 27, 62,
Kay, John: Flying Shuttle 465 69, 79, 80, 91, 102, 103, 171, 189,
Kellogg—Briand Pact (1928) 683 307
Kemal, Mustapha 680 Lansbury, George 681, 689
Kendal, Countess Ehrengard von der Lansdowne, Henry Petty—Fitzmaurice,
Schulenburg, Duchess of 421 5th Marquess of 627
Kennedy, President John F. 742 Larkin, James 646
Kennedy, Joseph P. 707 Latimer, Hugh, Bishop 270, 276, 282,
Keseis 619405534995936, 375 40, 282
57, 58, 66, 90 Laud, William, Archishop of
Keppel, Alice 627 Canterbury 320, 325, 328, 329-30,
Kérouaille, Louise de see Portsmouth, 330, 331, 334-5, 336, 341, 345
Duchess of Lauderdale, John Maitland, 2nd Earl
Ket, Jack 277-8 37)
Keynes, John Maynard 673, 688 Laurentius, Bishop 40
Khartoum 591, 592, 618 Laval, Pierre 692
Khrushchev, Nikita 730 law 14, 23, 26, 34, 35, 36-7, 67, 70,
King William’s War 389, 391-2 77, 97, 98-9, 126, 163, 177, 579;
Kingsley, Charles 537, 551-2 canon 103-4, 128, 130; common
Kinnock, Neil 765, 768-9, 774 103, 104, 140-1, 329, 331; forest
Kipling, Rudyard 605, 613 102, 109; see also law courts
Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, Earl 618, Law, Andrew Bonar 646, 652, 678
6196201621
Gat 65S) 657; law courts 35, 36, 116, 127, 141-2,
660-1 177-8, 189, 331, 530, 578, 578-9;
Kluck, General Heinrich von 656 assize 141; Church 103, 129-30,
Knox, John 289, 289, 292 139, 178; circuit judges 116, 125,
Kohl, Helmut 772 141; Curia Regis 104, 116, 125;
815
 INDEX

hundred see hundred courts; juries Liverpool 525, 577, 697, 711, 762,
98, 142; shire (county) 99, 100, 101, 769, 781
116, 126, 142; Star Chamber 251-2, Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl
331, 336 of 501, 511, 516, 517, 521
Lawrence, D. H. 626; Lady Livingstone, David 567-8, 602
Chatterley’s Lover 745 Lloyd George, David 619, 630, 632,
Lawrence, Henry 565 634, 635, 636, 643, 648, 649,
Lawrence, John 565 658-9, 660, 662-3, 664, 665, 666,
Lawrence, Stephen 779 668, 671, 672, 677, 678, 679, 680
Lawrence, T. E. 666 Lloyd's insurance 392
Lawson, Nigel 770 Llywelyn, Prince of Gwynedd 161
League of Nations 671, 672, 673-5, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd 172, 175, 176,
676, 682, 683, 690, 691, 692, 723 178-9
Le Breton, Richard 133-4 Llywelyn ap Lorwerth 172
Leeds 527, 528, 541, 760 Lobengula, King 604-5
Left Book Club 695 Local Defence Volunteers 702
Leicester 63, 71 Locarno Treaty (1925) 683
Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 287, Locke, John 372, 450, 451, 459, 474
298, 299, 301 Lollards 198, 202, 213-14, 214
Leipzig, Battle of (1813) 502 London and environs 12, 17, 18, 35,
Lely, Sir Peter 365 37, 58, 66, 67, 76, 82, 90, 127-8,
Lenin, Vladimir I. 656, 665, 724 149, 163, 165, 340, 341, 367, 428,
Leofric, Earl of Mercia 81 439, 467, 514, 552, 609, 697, 781;
Leopold II, King of the Belgians 602, Albert Hall 568; Aldwych 67;
603, 631 Apsley House 531; Banqueting Hall,
Leslie, General David 345 Whitehall 327, 349; Billingsgate
Lesseps, Ferdinand de 569 Market 459; Brixton riots (1981)
Levellers 351, 358 761; Charing Cross 177; Cheapside
Lexington, Battle of (1775) 461 Cross 340; Chelsea Physic Garden
Liberal party — (365-6, 573, 574, (More’s House) 267, 267; Courts of
$75, 576, 578, 579, 596-7, 580, Justice 578, 578-9; Fortnum &
$89, 597, 598, 610. 612- = 629 Mason 472; Globe Theatre 307;
Golden Jubilee (2002) 782; Great
643, 658, 680, 687, 755 Exhibition (1851) 553, 553-4; Great
Liberal Unionists 598-9 Fire 368, 369, 370; Greater London
libraries 426, 577 Council 770; Greenwich 327, 392,
Licensing Acts 428, 580-1 411; guildhalls 210; Hampton Court
Lichfield 52, 103 256, 260, 263, 271, 388; Holland
Limerick, Treaty of (1690) 389 Park Comprehensive 746; House of
Limoges, sack of (1370) 196-7 Correction, Coldbath Fields 534;
Lincoln 14, 16, 18, 63, 71, 121, 123, Houses of Parliament 531, 578;
149, 165; Cathedral 105, 150 Kensington Palace 388; Lambeth
Lincoln, President Abraham 570 Palace Prison 214; mayor 775;
Lindisfarne 45-6, 48, 50, 54, 61 Natural History Museum 577;
Lindisfarne Gospels 39, 46, 54 North London Collegiate 554;
Lindley, John 549 Notting Hill 742; Poplar Council
Lines of Torres Vedras 500 681; Queen’s College School 554;
literature 38, 40, 43, 47, 49, 68, 102, Richmond Palace 242; Royal
135, 190, 233-4, 256, 307-8, 364, College of Surgeons 256; Royal
365, 408, 425, 426, 446, 514, 525, Festival Hall 735; St Bartholomew’s
535,337, SS1-2, S54, 566, 577-8, Hospital 120, 256; St Paul’s
606, 608, 626, 694, 695, 745 Cathedral 367, 368, 400; St Paul’s
Littlewood, Joan 744 School 234; Somerset House 278;
 INDEX

Southwark 67, 82, 90; Tate Modern Maastricht Treaty (1992) 773
781; Tower of London 91, 105, MacArthur, General Douglas 730
177, 205, 238, 242,257, 287; Macclesfield, Lord 425
Toynbee Hall 610; underground Macdonald, Flora 434
626; University 534; Victoria & MacDonald, Ramsay 631, 643, 681,
Albert Museum 553; Westminster 682, 683, 689, 690-1, 692
Abbey 79, 82, 83, 83, 90-1, 169, Macdonalds, the 390-1
170,476)48199 8252135219, 220, McGregor, Ian 765
226,233, 256,319; 457: McKenna, Reginald 645
Westminster Hall 109, 116, 348, Mackinnon, Sir William 601, 602
349; Whitehall 366, 388; World Mackintosh, Sir James 518, 519
War I 652-3, 658; World War II Maclean, Donald 741
702, 740, 711, 719 Maclean, Brigadier Fitzroy 715
London Workingmen’s Association Macmillan, Harold 739, 740, 742
541 Macnaghten, Daniel 546
longbows 192-3, 196, 217 Macpherson, Sir William: Report
Longchamp, William, Bishop of Ely 779-80
147, 150, 151, 154 Mafeking, siege of (1899-1900) 619
Loos, Battle of (1915) 659 Magna Carta 163-4, 170, 171, 172,
Lords Ordainer 185, 186, 187 182
Louis VII, of France 125-6, 128, 129, Magnus Intercursus Treaty (1496) 250
138, 139, 142 Magnus Maximus 22, 27
Louis VIII, of France 162, 165, 170 Main Plot 316, 322
Louis IX, of France 172, 174 Major, JohneilawiZ2a7 134775)
Louis XI, of France 231-2, 234 Makarios, Archbishop 740
Louis XII, of France 258 Malaysia 694-5, 714, 730, 736, 751;
Louis XIII, of France 324, 328, 329 see also Singapore
Louis XIV, of France 357, 364, 368, Malcolm I, King of Scotland 72
370, 371-2, 3734, 377, 378, 380, Malcolm II, King of Scotland 76-7
385, 388, 391, 394, 395, 396, 398, Malcolm III (Canmore), of Scotland
400, 402, 405, 406, 415, 416-17, 82, 108
556 Malcolm IV, of Scotland 126
Louis XVI, of France 474, 475, 477, Malplaquet, Battle of (1709) 401, 403
527. Malta 484, 488, 585, 628, 717
Louis XVIII, of France 502, 503, 527 Maltolt, the 182, 233
Louis Napoleon see Napoleon III Manchester 517, 525, 528, 531, 537,
Louis-Philippe, of France 527, 545, 554 577, 711; ‘Peterloo’ (1819) 512-13
Lovat, Simon Fraser, 11th Baron 436 Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd
Lovel, Francis 249 Earl of (formerly Lord Mandeville)
Lovett, William 541 338, 344
Loyola, St Ignatius 294 Mandela, Nelson 739
Lucan, Lord 559, 575 Mandelson, Peter 768, 774
Lucknow, siege of 562, 564-5 Mandeville, Lord see Manchester, Earl
Luddites 510 of
Ludendorff, General Erich von 657 manors 38, 75, 100, 102, 122
Luftwaffe 701, 703, 705, 706-7, Mao Tse-tung 730
709-11 Mar, John Erskine, 11th Earl of
Luidhard, Bishop 34 415-16
Lusignan, Hugh de 159, 172 Maratha Wars 464, 493
Lusitania, sinking of the (1915) 663-4 March, Edmund Mortimer, 4th Earl of
Luther, Martin 253, 255, 262, 263, 210-213
266, 289 March, Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of
Lutyens, Edwin 693 see Mortimer, Roger
817
 INDEX

March, Roger Mortimer, 3rd Earl of Bavaria 398, 399

209 Medeshamstede monastery 59
Marchand, Captain Jean-Baptiste 618 medicine 153, 366, 560-1, 567; see
Marconi, Guglielmo 625 also National Health Service
Marconi (company) 645-6 Medina Sidonia, Duke of 302, 303
Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy 249 Mehemet Ali 538-9
Margaret of Anjou, Queen 223, 225, Melbourne, William Lamb, Lord 522,
227228-9,.23052329233 528, 533-4, 540, 541, 5434
Margaret Rose, Princess 696, 780 mendicant friars 171
Margaret Tudor 250, 259, 293 mental institutions 552
Maria Theresa, Empress 431, 436 Mercia 35, 44, 46, 50, 51, 52, 57, 59,
Marie Antoinette, Queen 476, 499 60, 63, 67-8, 71, 72, 73, 78, 80,
Marie Louise, Archduchess 498-9 84-5
Marlborough, John Churchill, Earl of Methodists 363, 425, 426, 426, 466
382, 392, 393, 396-400, 402-5, 417 Metternich, Prince Clemens von 508,
Marlborough, Sarah Churchill, Lady 554
(née Jennings) 396, 399, 403-4, 430 Mexico 253, 259, 394, 570-1, 665
Marlborough House Set 626 Militant (organization) 769
Marlowe, Christopher 307 Mill, John Stuart 576
Marne, Battle of the (1914) 656 Milner, Sir Alfred 618-19, 629
Marshall, Richard 170 Milosevic, Slobodan 778
Marshall, William, Earl of Pembroke Milton, John 336, 350, 351, 357
146, 165, 170 mining 3, 4; see coal mining
Marshall Plan 727-8 Minorca 405, 439, 440, 453, 463, 464
Marston Moor, Battle of (1644) 342, missionaries 20, 21, 29, 34, 38, 39, 44,
343 45, 46, S1
Martineau, Harriet 554 Mitchell, George 775
Martyr, Peter 278 Mitterrand, Francois 772
Marvell, Andrew 350 monasteries 38-9, 45, 46-8, 49, 53,
Marx, Karl 554-5 54, 68-9, 73, 74, 121, 135-6, 154,
Mary I, of England 273, 279, 280-1, 262; Dissolution of 266
281, 283, 285 Monck, General George 341, 359, 359
Mary II, of England 370, 373, 380-1, Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of 375,
382, 383, 384, 385, 388, 390, 392 376, 378-9
Mary, Princess 338 Monnet, Jean 738
Mary of Guise 292 Monroe Doctrine 520, 570
Mary of Modena 378, 381, 382 Mons Badonicus, Battle of 28
Mary of Teck 639, 696 Montagu, Charles 391, 392
Mary Queen of Scots 278, 292-4, Montcalm, Louis Joseph, Marquis de
299-300, 301 443, 446
Mary Rose 257-8 Montenegro 583, 586
Maryland, USA 325-6 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,
Masaryk, Jan 723 Baron 450
Masham, Abigail 403-4, 407 Montfort, Simon de 173, 173, 174-5,
Massachusetts 458-61 179
Masséna, General André 500 Montgomery, General Bernard 716,
match girls 551, 610 718
Matilda, Empress 119, 120-1, 122, Montmorency, Roger de 102
12344 Montrose, James Graham, Sth Earl of
Matilda, Queen (Edith) 114 333, 343-4, 345
Matrix—Churchill affair 775 Moore, General Sir John 497-8
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico 571 Moray, James Stewart, Earl of 292,
Maximilian Emmanuel, Elector of 293, 294
818
 INDEX

Morcar, Earl of Mercia 84, 86, 87, 90, navy, British 63, 77, 81-2, 86, 87,
91, 95, 96, 108 160, 192-3, 257-8, 301, 332, 340,
More, Sir Thomas 266-8, 267 355, 370, 470, 480, 520, 538, 585,
Morgan, William, Bishop of Asaph 600, 628, 633, 651, 663, 664,
309 679-80, 703, 704, 709, 763; see
Morocco 627, 633, 640-1, 716 also Nelson, Lord
Morris, William 537 Nazis 688, 697, 699, 707, 715-17
Morrison, Herbert 735, 768. Ndebele, the 605
Mortimer, Sir Edmund 212 Neave, Airey 759
Mortimer, Roger, 1st Earl of March Nelson, Horatio, Lord 482-3, 484-5,
187, 188, 191, 192 488, 490, 491-2
Morton’s Fork 252, 769 Netherlands/Holland 259, 354-5, 368,
Morville, Hugh de 133-4 370-3, 374, 378, 394, 398, 402,
Moseley, Lady Diana (née Mitford) 478, 480, 481, 483, 527, 656, 704,
699 70527085 7295738
Mosley, Sir Oswald 688, 697, 699 Neville, Anne 232, 234, 240
Moulin, Jean 715 Neville, Richard, 1st Earl of Salisbury
Mountbatten, Lord Louis 731-2, 759 226-7, 228
Mounteagle, Lord 317, 318 New Forest, the 102
Mountjoy, Charles Blount, Earl of New Model Army 345
324-5 New York 371, 461, 778
Mowbray, Robert de 109-10 New Zealand 472, 543, 601, 615,
Mowbray, Thomas, Earl of 660, 712, 720, 750, 751
Nottingham 204 Newby, Sir Howard 784
Mugabe, Robert 759 Newcastle, Earl of 341, 342
Municipal Reform Act (1835) 534 Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles,
Murdoch, Rupert 765-6 Duke of 423, 433, 439, 440, 441,
Murdock, William 525 453,456
Mussolini, Benito 679, 692, 693, 699, Newcomen, Thomas 366
G00; 707, 7115 ie Newman, Cardinal John 547
newspapers 583, 599, 757, 761, 765-6
Nagasaki, bombing of 719 Newton, Sir Isaac 366, 450
Nana Sahib 564 Ney, Marshal Michel 501, 503
Napoleon Bonaparte 481-2, 483, 484, Nicholas I, Pope 68
485, 486, 487-90, 491, 492, 493, Nicholas I, Tsar 521, 557
494, 496, 497, 498, 501, 502-4, Nicholas II, Tsar 665
506, 507 Nicholas, Grand Duke 585
Napoleon III (Louis—Napoleon) 556-7, Nigel, Bishop of Ely 125
558, 568, 569, 570-1, 572, 579, 587 Nigeria 602, 739, 749
Napoleonic Wars 478, 488-94, Nightingale, Florence 560-1
496-506, 523, 533 Nile, the 568, 592
Naseby, Battle of (1645) 345 Nile, Battle of the (1798) 484-5
Nash, John 514 Ninian, St 20, 29
Nasser, Gamal 736-7 Nithsdale, William Maxwell, Sth Earl
National Debt 392, 418, 470, 542-3 of 416
National Grid 685 Nkrumah, Kwame 739
National Health Service 632, 724, Norfolk 7, 11, 170; see also East
731, 734, 741, 748, 757, 773, 783 Anglia
National Insurance Act (1911) 632 Norfolk, Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of 140
nationalization 726, 730, 731, 769 Norfolk, Roger Bigod, 2nd Earl of 182
NATO 729, 742, 768, 777-8 Norfolk, John Howard, Duke of 241
Navarino, Battle of (1827) 522 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke
Navigation Acts 355, 367, 400 of 256, 262, 263, 269, 272, 274
819
 INDEX

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke Olympic Games (1936) 697

of 294 Omagh bombing (1998) 778
Normandy 63, 72, 85, 111-12, 115, O’Neill, Terence 752
119, 125, 126, 138, 143, 144, 158, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ 712-14
159, 160, 218, 224 ‘Operation Sealion’ 709
Normandy landings 717 opium trade 538
Normans 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 87, Orange Order 486
95, 96, 98, 127, 136-8, 141, 142 Order of the Garter 195
Norsemen see Vikings Ordericus Vitalis 109
North, Frederick, Lord 458, 460, 466, Ordovices, the 9, 13, 25
467, 468 Organization for European Economic
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Co-operation (OQEEC) 727-8, 738
see NATO Orléanists 215, 218
North Briton (newspaper) 455 Orléans, Henrietta (“Minette”),
Northern Ireland 324-5, 337, 548, Duchess of 372
579, 399, 639, 646-8, 711, 751-3, Orléans, Philippe, Duke of 415, 416-17
771, 774-5, 778 Ormonde, James Butler, Ist Duke of
Northumberland see Northumbria 351-2, 367
Northumberland, John Dudley, Duke Ormonde, James Butler, 2nd Duke of
of 278-9, 281 405, 417
Northumberland, Henry Percy, Earl of Orosius 68
212 Osborne, ogee Look Back in Anger
Northumberland, Henry Percy, 4th 744
Earl of 241 Osborne, W. V. 642, 643
Northumbria/Northumberland 29, 35, Osman Pasha 584
37, 39, 40, 42, 43-4, 45-6, 50, 51, Ostrogoths, the 21, 24
57, 58-9, 60, 62-3, 71, 73, 78, 82, Oswald, King of Northumbria 44-5, 46
84-5, 96, 126, 139, 170, 211 Oswy, King of Northumbria 46, 47,
Norway 507, 704, 705, 708, 729, 738 48, 50
Norwich 57, 149, 278, 711 Otto, Emperor 162
Nottingham 59, 63, 71, 510, 529, 765 Ottoman Empire see Turkey
Nottingham, Daniel Finch, Earl of 402 Overbury, Sir Thomas 322
nuclear weapons 740-1, 763; see also Owen, Dr David 764
atomic bombs Owen, Robert 537, 541
Owens, Jesse 697
Oare, Somerset: church 50 Oxford 123, 142, 285, 341, 345, 367,
Oates, Captain Lawrence 645 375
Oates, Titus 374 Oxford Movement 547
O’Brien, Smith 550 Oxford University 140, 171, 256, 262,
O’Casey, Sean 608 263, 341, 534, 576, 577, 686, 690
O’Connell, Daniel 523-4, 547
O’Connor, Feargus 541 Paget, Sir Arthur 647
O’Connor, General 711, 712 Paine, Tom: The Rights of Man 479
Odo, Bishop 86, 91, 91, 106, 109 Pakistan 732
OEEC see Organization for European Palach, Jan 747
Economic Co-operation Pale, the 137-8
Offa 50,51-2, 70 Palestine 146, 654, 667, 674, 675-6,
Oglethorpe, James 426 693, 711, 732-4
Ohthere 68 Pall Mall Gazette 599
oil industry 675, 733, 755, 759-60, Palmerston, Henry Temple, 3rd
764 Viscount 522, 528, 537-9, 540
‘Old Pretender’ see Stuart, James 545, 552-3, 556,5
Oldcastle, Sir John 213-14 561-2, 565, 566, 5€
820
 INDEX

Pandulf (papal legate) 162 Pelham, Henry 423, 433, 436, 437
Pankhursts, the 644, 645 Pembroke, Earls of 187; see also
Panther (gunboat) 640-1, 649 Marshall, William; Strongbow
Paris 55, 159, 297, 654, 657, 707, Penda, King of Mercia 44, 45, 46
747; see also French Revolution Peninsular War (1808-14) 496-502,
Paris, Treaty of (1763) 452, 453 519
Paris, Treaty of (1865) 561 Penjdeh crisis (1885) 590, 617
Paris Peace Conference (1919) 668, Penn, Sir William 357, 364, 371
670, 671, 690 pensions 465, 632, 685, 731
Parisi, the 10, 13 Pepys, Samuel 361
Park, Mungo 567 Perceval, Spencer 499, 501
Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Percy, Sir Henry (Hotspur) 212
Canterbury 289-91, 290 Percy family 211, 226, 230
Parliaments 172, 173, 174, 181, 182, Perrers, Alice 199
185; Barebones 356; black MP in Pétain, Marshal Henri—Philippe 709
780; Convention 382; Good 199; Peter of Blois 127
House of Commons 187, 199, 201, ‘Peterloo’ (1819) 512-13
205, 206, 209, 218, 233, 243, 261, Peter’s Pence 104
305, 307, 313, 314, 315-16, Pevensey, East Sussex 86
318-19, 320-1, 326, 330-2, 334, Philip I, of France 106
336-8, 344, 347, 356, 358, 376, Philip II (Philip Augustus), of France
384, 393, 394-5, 413-14, 427, 127, 143, 144, 145, 146, 151, 152,
528-9, 531, 566, 776; House of 153, 154-5, 156, 159-60, 162, 165
Lords 199, 349, 531, 634-6, Philip II, of Spain 281, 283, 285, 286,
639-40, 776; Little 355-6; Long 288, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297, 299,
334-5, 359, 362; Merciless 204; 300-1
Ombudsman for 749; Reformation Philip IV, of France 181
264-5; Rump 349, 351, 354-5, 359; Philip IV, of Spain 357
Short 334; the Speaker 199; women Philip V, of Spain 394, 398, 402, 417
in 686, 759, 775; see also Reform Philip VI, of France 193-4
Bills Philip, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh 735
Parma, Duke of 299, 302-3 Philippa, Queen 195
Parnell, Charles Stewart 589, 593, photography 525
594-5, 596-7, 598, 599, 608 Picts 13, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
Parr, Catherine 273, 276, 277 29, 50
Paschal II, Pope 118 Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) 268-9, 270
Paschal HI, Pope 131 Pill,
the 745
Passaro, Cape: battle (1718) 417 Pipe Rolls, the 116
Passchendaele (1917) 666 Pitt, William, the Elder, Earl of
Patrick, St 20, 23, 29 Chatham 414, 426, 427, 430, 432,
Paulinus, Bishop 42, 44 439-42, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449,
Paulinus, Suetonius 11, 12, 13 452-3, 454, 456, 457, 457, 458,
Paxton, Joseph 553 459, 460, 469
Peada, King of Mercia 46 Pitt, William, the Younger 467, 468,
Pearl Harbor (1941) 714 469-71, 472, 473, 475, 477-8, 478,
Pearse, Padraic 661 479-80, 481, 482, 483-4, 485,
Peary, Admiral Robert 626 486-7, 489, 491, 492-4, 497, 522
Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 198, 201-3 Pius V, Pope 294
Peel, Sir Robert 517, 518-19, 521, Place, Francis 518-19
522, 533, 543-5, 546, 547-8, 549, plague 368-70, 369; see Black Death
Sot Plantagenets, the 126, 165
Peelites 549, 551, 552, 557, 562, 565-6 Plassey, Battle of (1757) 447, 447,
Pelagianism 20, 23 448, 564
821
 INDEX

Playfair, Lyon 549 476-7, 480, 481, 503, 504, 506,

Plevna, siege of (1877) 584 507, 538, 556, 568-9, 571-2, 656,
Plowden Report (1967) 746 671; Franco-Prussian War 579-80
Plymouth 302, 342, 711 Prynne, William 331, 336
Poitou/Poitevins 125, 159, 162, 172, Pulteney, William 427
196 Punch 596, 611, 615
Poland/Poles 481, 508, 527, 571, 572, Puritans 289, 290, 291, 305, 318-19,
669, 671, 672, 701, 702-3, 710, 320; 3205 325-6;1330;:331,3395
TVSSI2IE22 oe 336, 342-3, 344, 356, 361, 362-4
Pole, Cardinal Reginald, Archbishop Pym, John 329, 334, 335, 337-8, 340,
of Canterbury 270, 272, 280, 281, 342, 375
283, 283, 285 Pytheas 3
police 519, 761
Polk, President James K. 545-6 Quakers 363, 364, 518, 591
‘poll tax’ 770 Quebec, capture of (1759) 442, 443-6,
Polyclitus 13 444
Poor Laws 533, 535, 611, 625
Pope, Alexander 366 Rachman, Peter 742
Popish Plot (1678) 374, 375 racism 746, 779-80
Porthgwarra, Cornwall 425 radar 709-10
Portland, Hans William Bentinck, 1st Radical movement 495-6, 510,
Duke of 385 511-13; 5185 5257528-529=30:
Portland, William Bentinck, 3rd Duke 541, 543,4552.55525625566,575,
of 468, 480, 498 576, 597, 613
Portsmouth, Louise de Kérouaille, Raedwald, King of East Anglia 40, 42,
Duchess of 365, 467 43,44
Portugal 233, 247, 248, 252-3, 496, RAF see Royal Air Force
497, 499-500, 519-20, 538, 729, Ragnar Lodbrok 55, 58-9, 63, 65
738 railways 525, 526, 544-5, 577, 588,
postage 534, 542 632, 643, 730, 746, 783
Potsdam Conference (1945) 723-4 Raleigh, Sir Walter 305, 307, 316,
Powell, Enoch 751 3225325
Poynings, Sir Edward 251 Ramsay, Allan 426
Prague Spring 747 rate—capping 769
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 537 Reade, J. B. 525
Presbyterianism 319, 333, 344, 345, Reagan, President Ronald 762, 766-8
346-7, 362-3, 364, 486, 547, 579, Red Army 721, 722, 725
599 Redmond, John 608, 646, 647, 648,
Pride’s Purge (1648) 347, 349, 359 652
Priestley, Joseph 451-2 Reform Bills 525-7, 528-9, 530-1,
printing 211, 233-4 573,576
prisons 70, 130, 141, 148, 214, 329, Reformation 247-8, 255, 264, 266,
347, 466, 479, 518, 534, 632 270275:
privatization 758, 783 religions 17, 24, 38, 53; see Catholic
Procopius 26 Church; Celtic Church; Christianity;
Profumo affair (1963) 741 Druids; Protestantism
Protestantism 153, 270, 276, 279, Rent Act (1961) 741-2
280, 282-3, 284, 287, 297, 309, Restoration 362, 364-5, 367-8, 370
313, 384; see also Anglican Church; Rhodes, Cecil 599, 601, 603-5, 615,
Huguenots; Luther, Martin; 616, 618
Methodists Rhodesia, Southern see Zimbabwe
Provisions of Oxford 173, 174 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 699
Prussia 406, 430-1, 438-9, 441, 472, Rich, Edmund, Archbishop of
822
 INDEX

Canterbury 171 Rothschild, Lionel de 566, 582

Richard I (the Lionheart), of England Rousseau, Jean—Jacques 450, 474
138-9, 143-5, 146-8, 147, 149, Rowe, Sir Thomas 325
151-6, 172 180 Rowntree, B. Seebohm 629
Richard II, of England 201, 201, Royal Air Force 658, 692, 701, 703,
203-6, 212, 213 707, 708-11
Richard III, of England (Richard of Royal Oak (battleship) 704
Gloucester) 234, 235, 237, 237-8, Royal Society 366
239-42 Rubens, Peter Paul 327
Richard, Duke of Cornwall 172 rugby 577
Richardson, Samuel 426 Rundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd von
Richelieu, Cardinal 324 706, 717
Richmond; Edmund, Earl of 240 Runnymede 163, 163
Ridley, Nicholas, Bishop of London Rupert, Prince 341, 342, 342, 343,
DASS27IS Z80 28248282 345, 352
Ridolfi Plot 294 Rurik, Viking chief 54
Rievaulx Abbey 121 Ruskin, John 537
Ripon, Lord 607 Russell, Lord John 510, 521, 528-9,
Risorgimento, the 569, 658 $49-55055525 S9695575069,.57 25
Rizzio, David 293 573
roads and bridges 13, 15, 18, 24, 37, Russell, Lord William 376
97, 426 Russell, William Howard 559
Robert, Duke of Normandy 95, 106, Russia/Soviet Union: 18th century 451,
409-411-242
4113 1445115 472, 481, 485, 486; and Napoleonic
Robert of Jumiéges, Archbishop of Wars 487, 488, 493, 494, 501-2;
Canterbury 80, 82 early 19th century 507, 508, 509,
Roberts, Frederick, Earl 587, 619-20, 520=1, 522; 538, 5395 556; Crimean
634 War 557-61, 580; Russo—Turkish
Robespierre, Maximilien 476, 477 War 583-6; invasion of Afghanistan
Rochester 35, 44, 66, 105, 106 587, 590, 601, 617; early 20th
Rocket (train) 525 century 633, 634, 649, 650; World
Rockingham, Charles War 1651, 656, 657, 667;
Watson—Wentworth, 2nd Marquis Revolution (1917) 656, 664, 665;
of 451, 453, 455, 456, 466, 467 Communism 669-70; interwar 674,
Rodney, Admiral George 464 683, 698; World War II and after
Roger, Bishop of Salisbury 115-16, 7015702)
TOS=ART 1221487150716,
DSS 20S: 721-3, 725-6; Korean War 729,
Rogers, Canon John 281-2 730; and Cold War 724, 728-9,
Roland, Marie Jeanne 477 730, 762; and Hungarian and Czech
Rollo 63, 72 uprisings 737, 747; invasion of
Romanesque architecture 105 Afghanistan 762; and US Star Wars
Romania 24, 558, 586, 667, 674, 701, programme 762-3; end of
TAL STZ, 723 Communism 767-8
Romans 3-30 Rye House Plot (1683) 376
Romilly, Sir Samuel 495 Ryswick, Treaty of (1697) 391, 394,
Rommel, General Erwin 712, 716, 395
717-18
Rooke, Admiral Sir George 400 Sacheverell, Dr Henry 404, 404
Roosevelt, President Franklin D. 688, Saddam Hussein 771
708, 7 F45716, 7215-722 Sadowa, Battle of (1866) 572
Roper, Thomas 267 St Albans 14, 16, 20, 105, 121
Rosebery, Archibald Primrose, Sth St Albans, Battle of (1455) 226, 227
Earl of 599, 612-13 St Bartholomew’s Massacre (1572) 297
823
 INDEX

St Brice massacre (1002) 75 Secoton 306

St Germain, Treaty of (1919) 674, Sedan, Battle of (1870) 579
699 Seeley, Sir John 605
Saladin the Great 144, 146, 151-3 Serbia/Serbs 558, 583, 586, 633, 634,
Salisbury 100, 105, 182, 240, 327, 527 648, 650-1, 658, 674, 777-8
Salisbury, Earls of see Cecil, Robert; serfs 75, 100, 101, 190, 202-3, 204
Neville, Richard Seven Years’ War (1756-63) 422, 437,
Salisbury, Margaret, Countess of 270-1 438-9, 441-8, 452-3, 464, 467
Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne—Cecil, 3rd sewage systems 536, 551
Marquis of 573, 597, 598, 599, 601, Seymour, Jane 271
602-3, 608-9, 613, 618, 628, 635, Seymour, Thomas 273, 276-7
639 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Salvation Army 610 1st Earl of 362, 371, 372, 373-6,
Samuel, Herbert 645-6 451
Sancroft, William, Archbishop of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Canterbury 378, 380, 380, 386 7th Earl 535, 536, 951,252
Saratoga, Battle of (1777) 463, 476 Shah, Eddy 761
Saudi Arabia 694, 733 Shakespeare, William 216, 235, 242,
Saxby, Colonel 358 256, 287, 307, 308, 317
Saxons 19,21, 22, 23) 24/25, 26, 27, Sharp, Granville 464
28, 51, 78, 80-1 Shaw, George Bernard 611
Scapula, Publius Ostorius 9, 10-11 Shaw, Dr Ralph 237
Scargill, Arthur 764, 765 Sheffield
527, 528
Schism 202, 218 Sheffield Women’s Political
Schleswig—Holstein 571-2, 580, 671 Association 554
Schlieffen Plan 654, 656 Shelburne, William Petty, Earl of 451,
Schmalkalden league 272 452, 467-8, 469, 470
schools 49, 70, 140, 210, 228, 269, Shelley, Percy Bysshe: The Mask of
532, 554, 577, 629, 678, 682, 741, Anarchy 512-13
745-6, 748, 766, 771; see also Sheppey, Isle of 58
education Sheridan, Richard 480
Schreiner, William 631 sheriffs 66, 80, 81, 83, 98, 104, 116,
Schuman Plan 738 141, 142, 147, 170, 174, 180
Scotland: and Romans 4, 13, 16, 17, shires 66, 80, 81, 98, 100, 101, 103,
22, 25; and Anglo-Saxons 29, 55, 174
6271s TI ETON TART OL7. 82h in Shrewsbury 115, 179
Middle Ages 108, 114, 121, 126, Shrewsbury, Battle of (1403) 212
140, 164, 176, 180-1; Auld Alliance Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, Duke of
181; 13th-16th century 181, 182-4, 385, 407
191-2, 211, 249, 258-9, 289, Shrewsbury, Treaty of 175, 178
292-3; 17th century 314, 332-4, Shropshire 9, 13
342, 343-4, 346-7, 367, 375, Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Viscount
390-1; union with England 400-2; 488, 489, 490, 511, 517, 519
Jacobite rebellions 414-16, 432-6; Sidney, Algernon 376
19th-20th century 514, 685, 755, Sidney, Sir Philip 299
776, 783 Sikh Wars 555, 565
Scott, Captain Robert 626, 645 Silures, the 9, 11, 13, 16, 25
Scott, Sir Walter 226, 494, 514 Simnel, Lambert 249
Scottish Nationalists 755 Simon, Sir John: Commission 693, 694
Scrope, Richard, Archbishop of York Singapore 601, 680, 695, 715, 176,
22. 739, 751
scutage 128-9, 130, 164 Sinn Fein 608, 646, 647, 677, 771,
Sebastopol (1854) 558-9 LIS SETS
824
 INDEX

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 190 Spence, Thomas/Spenceans 511, 513
Siraj-ud—Daula 439, 447 Spenser, Edmund 298, 299
Siward, Earl of Northumbria 81, 82 Stalin, Joseph 701, 712, 713, 716,
slavery/slave trade 296, 326, 451, 464, 721-2, 728, 730
466, 471, 479, 496, 509, 531-2, Stamford 63, 71, 149, 162
570, 592, 602, 605, 606 Stamford Bridge, Battle of (1066) 87
Sluys, Battle of (1340) 192-3 Stamp Act (1765) 454-5, 456
Smiles, Samuel 552 Stanhope, Lady Hester 493
Smith, Adam 454, 470 Stanhope, General James 417, 418, 419
Smith, Ian 749, 759 Stanley, Henry Morton 568, 602
Smith, Ian Duncan 776 Stanley, Lord see Derby, Earl of
Smith, John 773-4 Star Chamber 251-2, 331, 336
Smuts, Jar 631, 739 Statute of Mortmain 178
Snowden, Philip 688, 689 Statutes of Westminster 178, 676
social and welfare issues 532-3, steam engines 366, 465, 471, 480
5§35-7, 551-2, 582-3, 610-11, 625, steamships 525
629, 632-3, 678, 682, 685, 689, Steel, David 755
708):734,°934, 76157665 773; Stephen of Blois, King 119, 120,
776-7 121-4.196
Social Democrat Party (SDP) 764, 768 Stephen, Sir Leslie 626
Somerset 57, 65, 170, 341 Stewart, Sir Herbert 592
Somerset, Charles Seymour, 6th Duke Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury 82,
of 407 85, 90, 91, 103
Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Stirling Bridge, Battle of (1297) 182-3
224,225; 226 Stone of Scone 181, 182
Somerset, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke Stonehenge 3, 4
of 273, 274, 275, 276, 277-8 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of
Somerset, Robert Ker, Earl of 321-2 328, 331, 334-6, 335
Somme, Battle of the (1916) 661-2 Stresa Conference (1935) 692
Sommersett, James 464 _ Stresemann, Gustav 683
Sons of Liberty (Massachusetts) 458 Strongbow (Richard de Clare, Earl of
Sophia, Electress of Hanover 395, 406 Pembroke) 136-7
Sophia Dorothea of Celle 412-13, 421 Stuart, James Edward (‘the Old
Soult, Marshal Nicolas 498, 500, 502 Pretender’) 382, 395, 398, 400,
Soup Kitchen Act (1847) 550 406-7, 413, 414-16, 417, 436
South Africa 543, 581, 586-7, 588, Stuart, Prince Charles Edward (‘the
589, 601, 603-4, 607, 615-16, 617, Young Pretender’; ‘Bonnie Prince
739, 751; see also Boer Wars; Boers Charlie’) 417, 432, 432-4, 436
South Sea Bubble 418-19 submarine warfare 658, 663, 664,
Southampton 57, 74, 127, 711 692; 7049713, 715
Soviet Union see Russia Sudan, the 591-3, 618, 707
Spain 22; 15th-16th century 248, 250, Sudetenland Germans 699-700
253, 281, 283, 287, 291-2, 294, Suez Canal 569, 581, 582, 590-1, 600,
295, 296-304; 17th century 322-4, 654, 658, 694
351, 357-8; 18th century 393-4, Suez Crisis (1956) 736-8
402, 405, 406, 417, 429, 430, 431, Suffolk, William de la Pole, 1st Duke
432, 462, 463, 464, 480, 481; 19th of 224
century 490-1, 496-7, 500-1, 509, suffragettes 642, 644, 644-5
519-20, 538 Suger, Abbé 72
Spanish Armada 300-3, 303 Sunderland, Charles Spencer, Sth Earl
Spanish Civil War (1936) 698 of 417, 420
Speenhamland system 483, 510, 532-3 Sunderland, Robert Spencer, Earl of
Speke, John Hanning 567, 568 379
825
 INDEX

Sunningdale Agreement (1973) 752 Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of

Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 256, Canterbury 39, 48-50
274, 294 Thirty Years’ War 322, 331, 347
Sussex 7, 25, 35, 57, 78 Throckmorton Plot (1583) 299
Sutton Hoo ship burial 42, 43 Thundridge, Hertfordshire 38
Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark Thurstan, Archbishop of York 121
75-6, 80, 81 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 607
Swift, Jonathan 407, 408, 425 Tillotson, John, Archbishop of
Swinging Sixties 744-5 Canterbury 386
Syndicalist movement 643 Tilsit, Treaty of (1807) 494
Synge, J. M. 608 Times, The 559, 608, 699, 765-6
Syria 146, 667, 674, 675, 711, 733 Tincommius 7
Sicily 172, 250, 259, 405, 717 Tintern Abbey 269
Tirpitz, Admiral Alfred 633, 634
Tacitus 7, 9, 14, 779 Titanic, sinking of the 645
Taff Vale case (1901) 630, 632 Titbits 599
Talavera, Battle of (1809) 500 tithing 77, 142
Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewsbury 224 Tito, Josip Broz 715
Talbot, William Fox 525 Today 761
Tallard, Marshal 399 Tojo, General Hideki 715
Talleyrand, Charles de 477 Tolpuddle Martyrs 541
tank warfare 662, 666, 669, 701, 703, Tone, Theobald Wolfe 482, 486
705-6, 712, 713, 714, 718 Torbay, Devon 381, 387
taxation: under Romans 16, 23; Tories 374, 376
medieval 36-7, 63, 68, 74-5, 77, Tourville, Admiral Anne Hilarion
79-80, 97, 108-9, 116, 147, 153, 389-90
154, 155, 171, 172, 182; 1Sth-16éth | Townshend, Charles, 2nd Viscount
century 209, 215, 218, 25 252 417-18, 420, 427, 465
17th-18th century 321, 329, 362, Townshend, Charles (d. 1767) 456, 457
391-2, 424, 428-9, 454-5; 19th Towton, Battle of (1461) 230, 233
century 533, 541, 544, 555; 20th Tracy, William de 133-4
century 760, 769, 770, 773-4 trade and commerce: under Romans 3
Sie 5625,645-6, 760 4, 5, 7, 14, 18, 23; medieval 42, 71,
television 744, 75 72, 105, 120-1, 127, 159, 171, 177
tennis 577 191, 192, 198, 201; 15th-17th
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord $57, 559, 577 century 209-10, 211, 215, 250,
Test Acts 373, 379, 380, 420, 470, 252-3, 313, 325, 326, 354-5, 368;
$215S22>525 18th century 401, 405, 418-19,
Tewkesbury, Battle of (1471) 233, 424, 425, 426, 429, 430, 440-1,
234, 240 453, 459-60, 470, 471, 480; 19th
textile industry 171, 192, 210, 465, century 494, 509, $17, $19, 520,
536, 541, 544; see also cotton 527, S38, 542-3, 544, SS1, 552,
Thames, River 6, 58, 123, 163, 163 SSS, 569, 580, S88, 600, 602; 20th
thanes 38, 83, 97 century 629, 632, 679, 681, —
Thanet 25, 33 738, 747-51, 754, 757-8;see also
Thatcher, Margaret 754, 756, 757-9, economic systems
760-2, 763-4, 765, 766-8, 767, trade unions 518-19, 537, 541, 552,
769-71, 783 575, 583, 612, 642-3, 659, 724,
theatre(s)/drama 210, 307, 327, 331, 753-4, 755, 757, 758, 760-1, 766;
364, 365, 367, 425, 428, 687, 744; strikes 610, 630, 632, 642, 643,
see also Shakespeare, William 644, 684-5, 747, 748-9, 750, 753,
Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury 755-6, 764-6
128, 129, 130 Trafalgar, Battle of (1805) 491-2
826
 INDEX

Treasury 116, 117, 120, 480 Utilitarianism 466, 517-18

Trewhiddle Hoard 60 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713) 405-6, 417,
Trinovantes, the 6-7, 11, 12 418, 420, 430, 453, 600
Troyes, Treaty of (1420) 218, 221
Truman, President Harry 722, 727 Valens, Emperor 21
Truman Doctrine 727, 729 Valéry, St 86
Tull, Jethro 465 Valmy, Battle of (1792) 476-7
tuns 38 : Vanbrugh, Sir John 400, 408
Turkey/Ottoman Empire 247, 252, Vandals, the 21, 24, 25
253, 485, 508, 520-1, 522, 538-9, Vanity Fair cartoon 590
557-61, 583-6, 588, 590, 617, 642, Vassal, William 741
654, 658, 659-60, 665-6, 667, 669, Venables, Robert 357
674, 680,-740 Venice: St Mark’s 507
Turner, J. M. W. 537 Verdun (1916) 661
Tyler, Wat 202, 203 Versailles, Treaty of (1783) 464
Tyndale, William 262, 265, 270, 320 Versailles, Treaty (1919) 670-3, 683,
Tyneside 781 688, 692, 693, 698, 699, 727
Tyrconnell, Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Vichy France 709, 711
324 Victor Emmanuel, of Italy 569
Tyrell, Sir James 238 Victoria, Queen 539, 540, 543-4, 545,
Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of 304, 546°557,°568, 572) 5759785984;
324 582, 585, 587, 589, 592-3, 606,
Tyrrel, Walter 112 0b Ned4 1615061906) 1220026!
640
Ubba, Viking king 59, 63-4 Vienna, Congress of (1814) 502,
Uganda 751 507-9
Ulster Plantation 324-5, 599 Vietnam War 746-7
unemployment 552, 632, 678, 682, Vikings 36, 52, 52-6, 57-66, 61,
685, 688, 689, 760-1 CTR S713 074-576-7836
unions see trade unions villeins 100, 101, 201-2, 204
Unitarians 363, 388 Villeneuve, Admiral Pierre 490, 491,
United Nations 723, 729-30, 733, 492
F3IOs/ SITLL 18 Vimeiro, Battle of (1808) 499
United States of America (see also Virginia, USA 307, 325; 326, 437
America, North) 520, 543, 545-6, Visigoths, the 21, 23, 24, 25
550, 737, 766-7; Anglo-American Voltaire 439, 450
War (1812-15) 403, 517; Civil War Vortigern 24
(1861-5) 570-1, 574, 580;
Spanish-American War (1898-9) Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 472, 543
613, 616; World War I 664-5; Wales/ the Welsh 9, 13, 17, 21, 22, 26,
interwar 669, 675, 679, 683, 687, 28: DOWAAL S55 8572634067508
688-9, 690; World War II and after 72, 74, 82-3, 101, 102, 108, 110,
714-16, 718, 719, 720, 721-2, 725, 1230126 diSGhols Zor t75M176.
726-8; Korean War 730; Cuban 178-80, 211-12, 251, 309, 776; see
Missile Crisis (1962) 742; Vietnam also Anglesey
War 746-7; and Soviet Union Wall Street Crash (1929) 687
721-2, 725, 728-9, 736, 762-3, Wallace, Sir William (Braveheart) 182-3
767, 768 Walpole, Horace 423, 452
universities 126, 128, 140, 253, 459, Walpole, Sir Robert 403, 413-14, 418,
521, 534, 548, 554, 744, 745; see 419, 419-21, 422, 423-4, 427,
also Cambridge; Oxford 428-9, 430, 431-2, 439, 440, 441
Urban II, Pope 111, 112, 147 Walsingham, Sir Francis 288, 291,
Urse, Reginald Fitz 133-4 294, 299, 300
827
 INDEX

Walter, Hubert, Archbishop of Whitefield, George 425, 466

Canterbury 154, 155, 156, 160 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of
Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon 96, 97, Canterbury 291, 291, 308, 320
114 Wilberforce, William 496, 532
Walworth, William 203 Wilfrid of Ripon 46, 48, 51
War of the Austrian Succession 430-2, Wilfrid of York 47
436, 440 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 617, 628, 634, 640,
War of the English Succession 389, 391 651, 654, 668
War of Jenkin’s Ear 430, 436 Wilkes, John 450, 454, 455-6, 458
War of the Spanish Succession 394, Wilkinson, Ellen 689
395, 396-400, 401, 402, 403 William I (‘the Conqueror’) 78, 81. 82,
Warbeck, Perkin 249-50 84-92, 95-105, 106-7, 109
Wars of the Roses (1455-85) 226-9, William II (William Rufus) 106, 107,
230-3, 234, 239-42 107, 108-11, 112, 116, 117
Warsaw Pact 747, 766, 767, 768 William II, of Orange 338
Warwick, Earl of 205 William III, of Orange 373, 380,
Warwick, Richard Neville, Earl of 381-2, 383, 384, 385-6, 387,
(Warwick the Kingmaker) 227, 229, 388-95, 397, 473
230-2, 234 William IV, of England 527, 530, 531,
Warwick, Earl of (d. 1499) 249, 250 533, 540
Washington, George 437, 461, 463 William, Prince (son of Henry I) 119
Washington Naval Agreement (1921) William of Wykeham, Bishop of
679-80 Winchester 189, 199
Waterloo, Battle of (1815) 478, 503-6, William the Lion, King of the Scots
SOS 139, 140, 147
Watling Street 18, 68 William the Silent, Prince of Orange
Watson—Watt, Sir Robert 709 297, 299
Watt, James 465, 471, 480 Willibrord, St 51
Waugh, Evelyn 687 Wilmington, Spencer Compton, Earl of
Webb, Beatrice (ée Potter) 611, 632 430, 433
Webb, Sidney 611, 632 Wilson, Harold 734, 743, 744, 747-8,
Weizmann, Chaim 733 749, 750, 752, 754
Wellesley, Richard, Marquis 480 Wilson, President Woodrow 664-5,
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of 667;66 8622) G73) 67455727
480, 482, 493, 497, 499-506, 507, Wilton House, Salisbury 327
508.521 S22. $245525°52 75.528: Winchelsea, Robert, Archbishop of
§30-1, 552, 554, 575 Canterbury 182
Wentworth, Sir Thomas see Strafford, Winchester 71, 88, 112-13, 121, 123,
Earl of 145, 189, 242; School 189
wer-gild 35, 36 Windsor, Edward, Duke of 696, 697,
Wesley, John 363, 425, 426, 426, 466 698, 708
Wessex 29; 35, 36, 46, 51, 52,/57,'58, Windsor, Wallis, Duchess of 696, 698
60, 61, 71-2, 76, 78, 80; see also Windsor Castle 780-1; St George’s
Alfred the Great Chapel 189, 195, 350
West, Benjamin 446 Wingate, General Orde 715
Wheatstone, Charles 525 Winthrop, John 325
Wheeler, Sir Hugh 564 witan, the 37, 67, 81, 82, 83, 91
Whigs 362, 374 Wolfe, General James 442, 443-6
Whitbread, Samuel 495 Wolff, General 721
Whitby, Synod of (663) 47, 48 Wolseley, Sir Garnet 591, 592
White, John 306 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 255, 258,
White Mountain, Battle of the (1620) 258, 259-62, 263, 264, 266
S22 women 554, 575-6, 625, 686, 745,
828
 INDEX

TSI AG3S7 715s 71OSSeealso 42, 44, 48, 59, 63, 71, 72, 95-6,
suffragettes 140, 149-50, 170, 187, 210, 629,
Women’s Social and Political Union 7a
644, 645 York, Frederick, Duke of (d. 1827)
Woodstock, Oxfordshire 117, 138, 472, 480, 498, 530
281, 400 York, Richard, Duke of (d. 1460)
Woodville, Sir Edward 235 225-6, 227, 228
Woolf, Virginia 626 York, Richard, Duke of (d. 1483) 234,
Wordsworth, William 475 237-8, 239
Workers’ Education Association 610 Yorkshire 10, 13, 62, 72-3, 121, 154,
workhouses 533, 535 211, 226, 268, 341, 465, 510, 528,
World War, First 625, 648, 649-53, 542
654, 656-68, 669-70 Young, Arthur 465
World War, Second 699-701, 702-20, Young England movement 546
721, 726 “Young Pretender’ see Stuart, Prince
Wren, Sir Christopher 367, 388, 392, Charles Edward
400 Ypres, Battles of 656 (1914), 662
Wyatt, Sir Thomas 256 (1917)
Wyatt, Sir Thomas (son) 281 Yugoslavia 679, 711, 712, 715, 723,
Wycherley, William 365 VAL
Wyclif, John 198-9, 202, 202, 214, 218
Zhukov, General Georgii 718, 721
Yakub Khan 587 Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) 604,
Yalta Conference (1945) 722, 725 749, 751, 759
Yarmouth, Lady 440 Zimmermann, Dr Alfred 665
Yeats, William Butler 608 Zinoviey, Grigori 683
Yeltsin, Boris 768 Zionism 676
Yom Kippur War (1973) 753 Zulu War (1878-9) 586-7, 604
Work 13. 16,.17,,182519, 29; 34-5, 37, Zwingli, Ulrich 270, 278

829
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ebecca Fraser’s dramatic portrayal of the |: r-than-life characters who

ioyuexcrog oh
eaesbtekmerteCosormbolyutatiatosaketertemcls (c. clellemeotecerent(euloycmcomeratatyn
history and a useful chronology ofthe past. A highly readable account of the men
and women who created turning points.in history, it is packed with anecdotes
about British scientists, explorers, soldiers, traders; writers, and artists.

REBECCA FRASER has worked as a researcher, an editor, and a

journalist, and has written for many publications, including Tadler,
Vogue, The Times, and the Spectator. She is the author of Charlotte
Bronté and lives in England. $

ISBN-13: 978-0-393-3290295 _
ISBN-10: 0-393-32902-x

9 "780393"329025