THE STORY OF BRITAIN
THE STORY OF BRITAIN
From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History
REBECCA FRASER
W. W. Norton & Company
NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright © 2003 by Rebecca Fraser
Originally published in Great Britain under the title A People’s History of Britain
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
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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.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Great Britain under the title A People’s history of Britain”—
T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Great Britain—History—Anecdotes. I. Title.
DA32.8.F73 2005
941—dc22
2004026049
ISBN: 978-0-393-07249-5
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
Contents
Preface
ROMAN
ANGLO-SAXON
Ethelbert of Kent to the Viking Invasions (597–865) 33
Alfred the Great to the Battle of Hastings (865–1066) 57
NORMAN AND ANGEVIN
William I (1066–1087)
William II (1087–1100)
Henry I (1100–1135)
Stephen of Blois (1135–1154)
Henry II (1154–1189)
Richard I (1189–1199)
John (1199–1216)
PLANTAGENET
Henry III (1216–1272)
Edward I (1272–1307)
Edward II (1307–1327)
Edward III (1327–1377)
Richard II (1377–1399)
LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST
Henry IV (1399–1413)
Henry V (1413–1422)
Henry VI (1422–1461)
Edward IV (1461–1483)
Edward V (1483)
Richard III (1483–1485)
TUDOR
Henry VII (1485–1509)
Henry VIII (1509–1547)
Edward VI (1547–1553)
Mary I (1553–1558)
Elizabeth I (1558–1603)
STUART
James I (1603–1625)
Charles I (1625–1649)
Divine Right (1625–1642)
Civil War (1642–1649)
The Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–1660)
Charles II (1660–1685)
James II (1685–1688)
William and Mary (1689–1702)
Anne (1702–1714)
HANOVERIAN
George I (1714–1727)
George II (1727–1760)
George III (1760–1820)
Patriot King (1760–1793)
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815)
Radical Agitation (1815–1820)
George IV (1820–1830)
William IV (1830–1837)
Victoria (1837–1901)
Corn Laws and Irish Famine (1837–1854)
Palmerstonian Aggression (1854–1868)
Gladstone and Disraeli (1868–1886)
Imperialism and Socialism (1886–1901)
SAXE-COBURG
Edward VII (1901–1910)
WINDSOR
George V (1910–1936)
Last Years of Peace (1910–1914)
The First World War (1914–1918)
Peacemaking and the Rise of Fascism (1918–1936)
Edward VIII (1936)
George VI (1936–1952)
The Failure of Appeasement (1936–1939)
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Reform at Home, Communism Abroad (1945–1952)
Elizabeth II (1952–)
Wind of Change (1952–1964)
The Sick Man of Europe (1964–1979)
The Thatcher Legacy (1979–2002)
Further Reading
Genealogies
Prime Ministers
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 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 testimoni
al 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 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. I am 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.
ROMAN
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 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 1000 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 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.
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