Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

Another verse reads:

Und die Kinder, how are they?

Ont-ils eu la rougeole [measles] lately?

Sind sie avec vous today?

J’aimerais les treffen greatly.

This piece of fun, written nearly a hundred years ago, can still raise a smile today. In fact it feels quite modern. It displays a certain relevance to the integrated European world in which we live – a continent without borders, sharing for the most part a common currency, which has turned its back on the conflicts of the past to sink its hopes in a united vision of prosperity and peace.

The European Union of today was created out of the ashes of war.

Harry Graham’s poem was written before the First World War devastated the hopes of Britain and its Empire, before the long depressions of the inter-war years and the fight to the death against Nazi Germany. It is no wonder that after nearly forty years of conflict and decline the tottering nations of Europe decided to grasp each other for support and to build something between them that might prevent the outbreak of war again. The European Union of today was created out of the ashes of war, and the greatest of the wartime leaders, Winston Churchill, was one of its first proponents. Speaking in Zurich in 1946 he said: ‘We must build a kind of United States of Europe.’ Quoting William Gladstone in his famous defence of Home Rule for Ireland he called for what the nineteenth-century Prime Minister had called ‘the blessed act of oblivion’ and added: ‘We must all turn our backs on the horrors of the past and we must look to the future.’ Most importantly, and presciently, he said there ‘must be a partnership between France and Germany’. He thought this was more important than Britain’s involvement and ended his speech with this: ‘If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join a union we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.’ In the event this is what happened. The European state which was not willing or able turned out to be Britain.

In May 1950 the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, announced that the French and German governments were going to create a common ‘High Authority’ to regulate and control the production of coal and steel within the two countries. Other countries in Europe would be invited to participate in the plan which would ‘make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’. The British government was given only a few hours’ notice of Schuman’s announcement, and its reaction was one of dismay. The nation still felt itself to be a world power. It was not like the other countries of Europe. It did not need to be pushed or chivvied into schemes it had not helped to invent. Furthermore it had just completed the nationalisation of its coal industry and was not inclined to unpick this to please some new, European dream.

In fact Schuman and the planning brains behind the Franco-German idea, Jean Monnet, were prepared to let Britain join their partnership even though its coal industry was nationalised, but the British government under the re-elected Labour leader, Clement Attlee, declined. The country had a strong trading relationship with the Commonwealth and a political alliance with America – although America was very much in favour of seeing Britain absorbed into the European alliance. In 1952 the Treaty of Paris created the European Coal and Steel Community, made up of France, West Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Five years later, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome took it one stage further and established the European Economic Community. Britain could only watch these developments from the sidelines. It had decided to stay out, following the approach laid down by Winston Churchill who, although he had eloquently defended the idea of European integration in 1947, told his cabinet four years later: ‘We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged and do not forfeit our insular or Commonwealth character.’

By the 1960s the realities of international commerce were beginning to filter into the minds of British politicians. In 1960 Britain joined an organisation called the European Free Trade Area, or EFTA, whose other members were Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal. This was simply a trading association without the same political apparatus of the European Community. A year later, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, told the House of Commons that Britain was tendering a formal application to join the Common Market on condition that its obligations to the Commonwealth could be met. He was, he said, ‘not confident, but hopeful’ of success. Neither confidence nor hope would prove enough. The French President, Charles de Gaulle, sceptical of Britain’s commitment to the European idea, exercised his veto on two occasions, in 1963 and 1967, to prevent it from joining. In 1967 he loftily declared that Britain would need to accomplish ‘a profound economic and political transformation’ before it could become a member. Only in 1973, with the first enlargement of the original six-nation membership, was Britain allowed into Europe, along with Denmark and Ireland.

Britain today, in 2008, has been part of the European idea for thirty-five years. The EEC has become the European Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union’s control of the countries of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, combined with the reunification of Germany in 1990, has fuelled its expansion on an unexpected scale. There are twenty-seven members with three more waiting to join. One of these is Turkey whose candidacy is highly controversial: a former French President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, declared that Turkey was ‘not a European country’ and that its membership of the eu would mean ‘the end of Europe’. Meanwhile the member states have committed, under the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, to strengthen the organisation and institutions of the Union, giving more power to its parliament, appointing a new President of the European Council and extending its activities to include defence. In Britain, and in some other countries, there has been strong opposition to these reforms being introduced without ordinary people approving them through a popular vote. The idea of the war-torn nations of Europe embracing one another in an act of self-protective friendship has grown into a vast multi-national conglomerate. It has turned European history on its head; the historic rivalries of individual sovereign states have been abandoned in a surge of democratic optimism; ‘Europe’ is as influential in the life of the modern British citizen as Britain itself.

Britain has always been a bit unsure about its feelings towards the rest of Europe. It grew out of it and then away from it: its real power came ultimately from an empire which had few roots in the European continent. It also came to believe that its political development was different from its continental neighbours. The Victorian historian Macaulay, for instance, argued that Britain had avoided the upheavals of the revolutions which affected several European nations in 1848 because it possessed a constitution founded on precepts of liberty. ‘All around us,’ he wrote in his History of England, ‘the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations … It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy.’ Macaulay believed the history of England to be a history of progress – beneficial progress at that. In the twentieth century his views fell out of fashion but today they are being reconsidered. Britain did not succumb to either communism or fascism: does this not tell us that an innate belief in liberty lies deep in its roots?

The French view of Britain

In March 2008 the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, paid a state visit to Britain. He was a President in a new mould, very different from the sort of men who had held power in France since the end of the Second World War. To many British eyes the main thing that set him apart from his predecessors was his glamorous Italian wife, a former model and singer, whom he had recently married after his second divorce. But if they had eyes only for his wife, their ears burned with what he had to say about the relationship between France and Britain. In a speech to the combined Houses of Parliament on 26th March, Nicolas Sarkozy spoke in a way no other French President had done before. Ever since Charles de Gaulle had refused to allow British entry into the Common Market, the leaders of France had always displayed a certain froideur in their dealings with Britain – friendly but invariably slightly cool. Sarkozy’s approach was completely different.

The son of a Hungarian immigrant who fled from his homeland to France as the Red Army marched westwards in 1945, the new President instinctively recognised Britain’s wartime achievements, and had no trouble in talking about them. ‘I want to say something on behalf of the French people,’ he said. ‘France won’t forget. France will never forget that when she was verging on annihilation it was Britain who was at France’s side … We haven’t forgotten because we haven’t the right to forget what young Britons did for the freedom of the French people … France will never forget the British people’s heroic resistance, without which all would have been lost.’

With a few passionate words, President Sarkozy sought to blow away the diffidence that had been the hallmark of Franco-British relations for sixty years. Ironically, it was exactly two years to the day since his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, marched out of a European Union summit meeting in disgust after a fellow Frenchman insisted in making a presentation in English because, he said, it was ‘the language of business’. In the European Union, unity has often been a fragile affair: Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech gave new and unusual strength to Britain’s relationship with France.

By the end of the nineteenth century, secure in the wealth of Empire, Britain preferred isolation to involvement. In the twentieth it fought against German militarism and saved Europe from tyranny. But it still harboured suspicion of the motives of some European countries long after that fight was over. Margaret Thatcher, to date Britain’s longest-serving post-war Prime Minister, was determined to prevent ‘a European super state exercising a new dominance from Brussels’. Today ‘Europe’ is still a place which for many British people means ‘somewhere else’.

If the European Union is to succeed it will have to convince not only the people of Britain, but those of other countries too, that they are better off relinquishing some of their sovereignty in return for the benefits of being part of something bigger. To the kings, queens, politicians, writers, artists and historians who helped build the British nation from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the notion of losing national status would have been unthinkable. They devoted their energies to the idea of a Britain which was proud, independent and free. But if you go further back, to the days of Henry II, or William the Conqueror, or even Alfred the Great, it does not seem so incredible. In those days Europe’s regional borders were altogether more flexible. The nation state as we understand it today did not exist. Places and peoples were merged as required under the authority of victorious kings. The European Union marks another great turn in the wheel of history: nobody yet knows to where it might roll.

2 (#ulink_de960ef7-4852-54ef-8a54-ff46a7644117)

Struggle (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

The Battles for Britain (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

Introduction (#ulink_14afc657-0bcf-5d91-a379-1c5f46bd6be8)

Each evening at precisely 8 o’clock, three, sometimes four, members of the volunteer fire brigade in the town of Ypres in Belgium pick up their silver bugles and sound ‘The Last Post’ at the Menin Gate. The Gate is a memorial to the soldiers who lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and whose bodies were never found. I filmed this ceremony for the BBC some years ago. To stand in front of the memorial listening to the plaintive sound of ‘The Last Post’ as your eyes scan the names of nearly 55,000 soldiers who have no grave is an intensely moving experience. A small Belgian town, a great memorial and a simple ceremony combine to express the colossal sadness of war.

Human beings can probably make no greater sacrifice than to die for their country, however wrongheaded the conflict in which they find themselves might be. In the history of Britain, millions of men and women have died in this way. Sometimes they have died in acts of aggression, sometimes in acts of defence; sometimes they have fought for national salvation, sometimes they have found themselves caught up in futile power struggles. Whatever the reason, their deaths were part of British history. The story of the battles in which they died is a central part of the story of who we, the British, are.

This chapter starts in 1415 with one of the most famous battles of the Middle Ages, the Battle of Agincourt, which began the last phase of the so-called Hundred Years’ War against France. Britain’s ambitions to rule France declined after Agincourt and domestic problems became more significant. The Battle of Bosworth in 1485 ended years of internal conflict and ushered in the powerful Tudor dynasty.

It fell to the Tudors’ greatest monarch, Elizabeth I, to defend the country against the Spanish Armada in 1588. She was also very successful at holding the nation together but her successors were less so. The Battle of Naseby in 1645 saw Charles I having to defend his throne against the forces of parliamentary opposition.

By the end of the seventeenth century stability had begun to return to the nation but it had powerful enemies abroad. The next three battles were fought against France, which had once again become its greatest European rival. The Battle of Blenheim in 1704 held in check the imperial ambitions of the French king, Louis XIV. The Battles of Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 first disrupted and then defeated the Emperor Napoleon’s attempts to dominate the continent of Europe.

Comparative peace in Europe followed the victory at Waterloo, but this was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War, which saw many terrible battles. The Somme in 1916 was one of its worst.

The heavy price that Germany was forced to pay at the end of the First World War led directly to the Second World War just over twenty years later and Britain had to fight for its life in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

The last battle of the chapter, the Battle of Goose Green in the Falklands War of 1982, marks the moment when Britain rallied from a long period of post-war decline to tackle important problems both abroad – and at home.

These ten battles against enemies within and without are an important part of the British story. Britain has had to fight, fight – and fight again – to become the nation it is today.

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_1540a78d-7edf-5d30-8ae1-412e72f25981)

The Battle of Agincourt (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

1415 (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

In 1415 an English army under Henry V defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt in northern France. The battle was a central event in the last phase of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France.

Henry V won the Battle of Agincourt but it was Shakespeare who made his victory live forever. Shakespeare was not only the finest poet and dramatist Britain has ever produced, he was also a skilful propagandist. In Henry V he gives us an account of a brave and noble English king sacrificing everything to win – against all the odds – a monumental battle against a far greater power. Shakespeare’s play appeared in London right at the end of the sixteenth century, about ten years after England had repulsed the invasion by the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth I was nearing the end of her long, careful reign. Her little country had a new-found confidence and had begun to flex its muscles as it struck out to explore new territories abroad. Shakespeare provided it with the images to support its developing strengths. He was so good at it, and his ideas so enduring, that his play would be used for pretty much the same purposes nearly three hundred and fifty years after it was written. Laurence Olivier’s film was produced in 1944 as a morale booster for a Britain once again at war and the government provided some of the money to make it:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here …

In those six lines alone are contained some of the most famous phrases about men and battles in any piece of literature anywhere in the world. ‘We happy few’, ‘band of brothers’, ‘gentlemen in England now a-bed’ – these marvellous words have remained an inspiration for men and women in adversity since the day they were written. As far as the British are concerned they tell the story of Agincourt.

Henry V became King of England two years before Agincourt. His father, Henry Bolingbroke, had seized the throne from his cousin Richard II in 1399 and had then ruled as Henry IV. Richard was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire where he died in 1400, some say murdered on the orders of the man who had taken his throne. Henry IV’s reign had been about as troublesome as any mediaeval monarch’s could be. His barons constantly jostled for power and he faced a rebellion from Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, known to all lovers of Shakespeare as Harry Hotspur. The Welsh too were in revolt: their leader, Owain Glyndwr, declared himself the true Prince of Wales and led an army against the English King. In fighting off these uprisings Henry IV came to rely increasingly on his son. The young prince fought against Hotspur and Glyndwr and by the time his father died was already well blooded in the business of military leadership, as well as the management of political affairs. He put this experience into practice as soon as he ascended the throne.

Henry V had known Richard II well. Richard had banished Henry’s father from the kingdom and taken his inherited lands away from him – one of the main reasons why Bolingbroke had rebelled against him. Richard had no quarrel with Bolingbroke’s son and had befriended him while the young man’s father was in exile. When Henry V became king thirteen years after Richard had died at Pontefract, he ordered that Richard’s body be reburied at Westminster Abbey. His motives perhaps had as much as to do with a need to calm rebel spirits as to demonstrate an act of friendship – but they had the right effect. By honouring the memory of Richard, Henry V showed that he was rather more than just his father’s son. He also knew that gestures of this kind would not on their own be enough. He needed something else and in searching for it he looked towards France.

The concept of the nation state as we understand it today did not exist in the Middle Ages. Rulers owned and controlled lands through war and conquest. Their approach was to a certain extent as much tribal as it was national: they sought to capture territory in the name of their families and to pass it on to their successors. The Normans, the most successful of the conquering tribes of the medieval period, had added Britain to their tally in 1066 – and from this time on the Kings of England began to own lands on both sides of the Channel. When Henry II, one of the greatest of the medieval kings, died in 1189 the English monarchy owned territory throughout western France, but bit by bit his successors managed to lose a great deal of it. In 1327, another powerful English monarch, Edward III, came to the throne. He ruled for fifty years – and spent much of his reign trying to reassert England’s claim to France. He had considerable success, winning great battles at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. He was the king who started the Hundred Years’ War – a war that Henry V, his great grandson, decided he would continue. He declared himself King of France and began to prepare to recapture Normandy for the English crown.

Henry V was a warrior king. At the beginning of the fifteenth century it was customary, as it had been in the centuries before, for a king to lead his troops into battle. Henry supervised and managed all aspects of his expedition to France – guns, artillery, weaponry for breaching city walls, scaling ladders and food supplies. Most important of all, he also had to raise the army itself and find the men at arms whom he would lead into war. This was the most difficult part of the operation. All his noblemen were expected to take part – but Henry had to help foot the bill by raising loans on his royal jewellery. The final size of Henry’s army is not known for sure but it is believed that he eventually led 12,000 men across the Channel to France. They sailed in a fleet of 1,500 ships – not just soldiers, but horses, grooms, blacksmiths, tent makers and carpenters. The royal household went too, including the King’s minstrels. The whole panoply of medieval government set sail for war.

The Hundred Years’ War

The English invaders landed at Harfleur where for over a month they laid siege to the town. It was well fortified and surrounded by water ditches that had to be filled in to enable Henry’s forces to bring their guns close enough for attack. The conditions were difficult: many English soldiers died from dysentery. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/ Or close the wall up with our English dead,’ cries Shakespeare’s Henry in his famous speech during the siege. The stirring words are eerily prophetic. Five hundred years almost exactly separate the Battle of Agincourt from the Battle of the Somme fought in the same area in 1916: five hundred years between one wall of English dead and another. In both cases ultimate victory came at a high price.