Language and Culture

PART TWO THE STORY OF BRITAIN

For close to two centuries, the dominant account of the history of Britain that BriFsh people have told themselves
is of how a disparate number of kingdoms within the BriFsh Isles gradually coalesced to form a single state, the
United Kingdom, and how one part then broke off to form an independent alternaFve, the Republic of Ireland. The
central insFtuFon of public life in the United Kingdom was Parliament, with sovereignty vested with the Crown in
Parliament.

While recent decades have seen a more insistent focus on some of the crueller and more self-serving aspects of
Britain’s history as a global power, the emphasis before that was on how Britain had exported the parliamentary
system – a stable model of government through representaFve insFtuFons – in which one fundamental principle
was the rule of law (while also providing modern infrastructure in the form of ports, roads, and above all railways).
The main rival to this among democraFc systems of government is the presidenFal system developed by BriFsh
colonists in North America in opposiFon to royal and parliamentary rule. Many former BriFsh colonies around the
world, whether monarchies or republics, have some form of parliamentary system.

Chapter 1 Invasions

The first inhabitants of the BriFsh Isles to have made an impact on wriWen history are the Celts. They were the
peoples living in Britain at the Fme of the first wriWen records, which were produced by Greek geographers and
Roman invaders. Anyone familiar with Asterix will know that druids were the priests and wise men of the ancient
Celts, passing on their knowledge by word of mouth. Another group in CelFc society was that of the warriors, while
a third was that of the bards, whose job was to celebrate or commemorate the achievements of kings and heroes.
The vast majority of the populaFon worked the land and herded livestock.

During his campaigns to subjugate Gaul, Julius Caesar twice invaded Britain, in 55 BC and again in 54 BC, to prevent
the Britons from coming to the aid of their Gaulish neighbours and perhaps also to gain an idea of how feasible a
conquest would be. Neither invasion established Roman rule on the island. It was almost ninety years later, in 43
AD, under the Emperor Claudius, that the Romans came to stay.

Although the armies that conquered Britain were loyal to the Emperor of Rome, they were ethnically quite mixed.
The Roman legions were supported by what they called auxiliaries: soldiers from allied or conquered peoples who
provided cavalry, archers, slingers, and other specialised types of soldier. Much of the cavalry that gave the Romans
control of BriFsh territory came from areas that are now in the Benelux. The conquest itself took about 40 years
and only very briefly included the northernmost parts of Britain that are now in Scotland. SubstanFally what are
now England and Wales formed the Roman province of Britannia for roughly 350 years.

One of the best-known incidents from the Roman conquest of Britain is the revolt led by Boudicca, Queen of the
Iceni, around the year 60 AD. Her husband, the king of the Iceni, had become an ally of the Romans and lee his
kingdom jointly to his daughters and to the Roman emperor. The Romans took everything and mistreated Boudicca
and her daughters. In retaliaFon Boudicca and her supporters slaughtered the Roman
inhabitants of Colchester (Camulodunum) and St Albans (Verulamium), and then of
London (Londinium). The archaeology of these Roman ciFes shows a layer of
destrucFon from when they were burnt down during the revolt. While this was
happening, the largest part of the Roman army in Britain was busy invading the island
of Anglesey to wipe out the druids who were the main leaders of resistance to
adopFng Roman ways. They hurried back to mainland Britain and defeated Boudicca,
who killed herself rather than be enslaved. The only wriWen accounts are those of the
Romans themselves. Two Roman historians, Tacitus and Cassius Dio, tell the story in
some detail. This might be ancient history, but it conFnues to be well known. A bronze
statue of Boudicca in her war chariot was erected at Westminster Bridge in 1902. In
1999 another statue was erected in Essex. The story of Boudicca also features in ficFon, children’s entertainment
(or what is someFmes known as ‘edutainment’, such as the BBC children’s series Horrible Histories), and now also
in video games. It would be harder to grow up in Britain without hearing of her than to grow up in Belgium without
having heard of Ambiorix.

1
The five CelFc languages spoken in the BriFsh Isles – Cornish, Welsh, Manx, Scots Gaelic and Irish – are descendants
of the languages spoken before the Roman period, and their speakers today will oeen trace their cultural heritage
and idenFty back to pre-Roman Fmes (or in the case of Welsh and Cornish, to Romanised Britain).

In the year 122 AD, work was started on Hadrian’s Wall, a forFficaFon that ran
across northern Britain from east to west to control access to Roman territory by
the unconquered peoples of the north. Ruined stretches of the Wall can sFll be
seen (pictured), and parts have been reconstructed to give an idea of what they
would have looked like in Roman Fmes. The Roman Wall is one of the World
Heritage Sites in the United Kingdom. North of the wall lived unsubdued
Caledonian tribes, now part of Scotland’s self-image as a proudly autonomous
place that was never amenable to foreign invasion.

Before the Wall was built, the Romans maintained control from a number of forts scaWered across the landscape.
The most famous of these, the outline of which can be seen on Google Earth, is Vindolanda, near the Fny village
of Chesterholm. The reason it is famous is that a number of ancient documents were found there, wriWen on strips
of wood about the size of postcards and known as the Vindolanda tablets. These documents give a unique insight
into the everyday existence of Roman soldiers in the provinces, and into the LaFn that they used. They are the sort
of day-to-day documents that would not be archived and they were in fact thrown away, but were preserved by
the low acidity of the wet ground where they were dumped. Similar documents have now also been found in
London. The only other part of the Roman Empire in which chance documents have been preserved in this way is
in North Africa, where preservaFon is due to aridity rather than wetness. The website of the BriFsh Museum at
one Fme had a secFon on ‘Our Top Ten BriFsh Treasures’, one of which was the Vindolanda tablets. A similar trove
of Roman wriFngs turned up during building works in London in 2015, including the oldest known hand-wriWen
documents in Britain, and the oldest menFon of the city’s name (as ‘Londinio’).

The most famous of the Vindolanda tablets is a note in which Claudia Severa, the wife
of the commander of an auxiliary cohort, asks Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of the
commandant of the fort at Vindolana, to visit her to celebrate her birthday. Claudia
Severa’s husband was the commander of the Cohors prima tungrorum, a cohort of
auxiliaries recruited from the lands around Tongeren in what is now Belgian Limburg.
Sulpicia Lepidina’s husband, Flavius Cerialis, was prefect of the Cohors nona
batavorum, troops recruited from around Nijmegen in the Netherlands, in the area
that is now called the Betuwe. These people are spoken of as ‘Romans’, but they were
from places we would now call Belgian and Dutch. Apart from Tungrians and Batavians,
Roman forces in Britain included Treverans (from around Trier, including what is now
Luxembourg) and Nervians (from the area that is now Hainaut and East Flanders). A
very fine example of a Roman military tombstone (pictured; copyright Ross Trench-
Jelicoe) shows a cavalryman riding over a defeated BriFsh warrior, carrying his severed head in his right hand. This
is just such a Treveran auxiliary. The Belgic Gauls that Julius Caesar had conquered in the first century BC were, by
the first century AD, integrated into the Roman army and were helping to subjugate other peoples.

The centuries of Roman rule eventually produced a Romano-BriFsh culture in Britannia. Amphitheatres and sewers
were built in the ciFes, which were linked by Roman roads. One of the best-preserved amphitheatres is at Caerleon,
in South Wales, but it is not by any means the only one. The stretch of the A2 between Canterbury and Rochester
covers what was once a Roman road and is not unique (although it is much rarer in England than in Italy or France
for modern roads to follow Roman roads). Villas doWed the countryside, with such Roman adornments as mosaics.
In 2020 a previously unknown mosaic was excavated at Rutland in Leicestershire (see “Encountering Achilles: The
Story of the Rutland Mosaic”, University of Leicester YouTube Channel).

The end of Roman rule came around 400, when the legions were withdrawn to fight wars on the ConFnent and
the Britons were lee to organise their own defence. Germanic seWlers were soon colonising Britain. These seWlers,
tradiFonally labelled Angles, Saxons and Jutes, came from the Frisian, Saxon and Danish shore of the North Sea.
CollecFvely they are oeen referred to as Anglo-Saxons. The word ‘English’ comes from ‘Angle’, but in the CelFc
languages the English are called ‘Saxons’ (Sassen, Sassenach). It is worth noFng in parenthesis that the French use
of ‘anglo-saxon’ to mean the contemporary English-speaking world in general leaves out millions of Celts and other
ethniciFes that the word does not include in English usage and so can seem offensive to those whose idenFFes
have developed in opposiFon to the English. It can also seem comical to English speakers (as though the
Francophone world should be referred to as ‘le monde gaulois’). This French use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ should be avoided
in English, in preference for more neutral terms such as ‘English-speaking’ (the recent coinage ‘Anglosphere’ has
problems of its own).

Around the Fme that Roman rule in Britain ended, a powerful confederaFon of CelFc
tribes in what is now Scotland was formed, idenFfied in historical documents as
Picts. This name derives from the Roman word for ‘painted’, suggesFng that the
‘Painted People’ dyed or taWooed their bodies (they boiled woad to produce a blue
dye, but the origin of the claim that they used this to paint their bodies is uncertain).
They themselves lee liWle in the way of wriWen records, but plenty of stone carvings
(one pictured) and other remains for archaeologists to puzzle over. The centre of
PicFsh power was on the east coast; the west coast was being seWled by Gaels from
Ireland, known as the ScoF. Just as ‘English’ derives from Germanic seWlers, the
English word ‘Scotland’ derives from the name of seWlers from Ireland (they
themselves called Scotland ‘Alba’, sFll the word for Scotland in Scots Gaelic, with
other CelFc languages using similar words; the iniFal kingdom of the Scots invaders was known as the kingdom of
Dal Riada). That the original ‘Scots’ were Irish invaders is a fruinul source of historical confusion. Legendary
histories have the Scots annihilaFng the Picts and taking their land, turning Pictland into Scotland, but more recent
scholars see it as more likely that Picts and Scots merged, with royal marriages between the two peoples not being
uncommon. The ninth-century PicFsh ruler Kenneth MacAlpin was long held to have been the first king of Scotland,
but the historical basis for this claim is not very strong. If it was not Kenneth himself who united Scots and Picts in
one kingdom, it was certainly the dynasty he founded: the earliest reliable menFon of a ‘king of Scotland’ refers to
his grandson.

Two other elements went into the composiFon of the medieval kingdom of Scotland: a Romanised BriFsh kingdom
known as the kingdom of Strathclyde, culturally close to the Welsh, that straddled what is now the western end of
the English-Scoosh border (Cumbria in England and Galloway in Scotland), and Lothian, in south-eastern Scotland,
which was long part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.

According to later half-legendary accounts, the first Germanic seWlers in Britain were mercenaries, invited over by
Romano-BriFsh rulers in the immediate aeermath of Rome’s military abandonment of Britannia to help defend
their territory against the Picts. These mercenaries were led by the two brothers Hengist and Horsa (names
meaning Stallion and Horse: one clue that the history might have incorporated ancestral myths), and they were
allowed to seWle in Kent in return for their military service. Soon they began taking more territory, and within a
few decades there were Anglo-Saxon seWlements all up the east coast of what had been Roman Britain, and they
were spreading inland. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled aeer 870 (so more than 400 years later):

449. Hengist and Horsa, invited to Britain by the BriFsh king VorFgern to aid the Britons, landed at Ebbsfleet.
455. This year Hengist and Horsa fought against VorFgern at Aylesford, where Horsa died.
457. This year Hengist and Aesc defeated the Britons at Crayford and took all of Kent into possession.

The Angles and Saxons founded several kingdoms in what is now England. These varied in number and extent over
Fme, but the classic version of them is the ‘Heptarchy’, a set of seven kingdoms:

- the kingdom of Kent (now the county of Kent)

- the East Saxon kingdom (now the county of Essex)
- the South Saxon kingdom (the historic county of Sussex, now divided into East Sussex and West Sussex)
- the West Saxon kingdom (Wessex: the counFes of Berkshire, Hampshire, Somerset, Dorset; in Thomas
Hardy’s novels ‘Wessex’ is a ficFonal county in the West Country)
- the kingdom of the East Angles (East Anglia: Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire)
- Northumbria (England north of the Humber: Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, and what is now
Lothian in south-eastern Scotland)
- Mercia (across the Midlands).
BriFsh rulers conFnued to control Wales, and Devon and Cornwall (in south-west England) far longer. Wales itself
was divided into a number of Fny kingdoms, with the first ‘king of all Wales’ being Hywel Dda in the mid-tenth
century.

The centuries of Saxon rule across what is now England established a new society in the
BriFsh Isles, with its own customs, laws and insFtuFons, and its own language, Old English,
which was closely related to Frisian. It was a warrior society, and one of its main
insFtuFons was the mead hall, where a king or war leader would feast and reward his
warriors (with gies of gold and weapons), and where stories would be told of gods and
ancestral heroes, as well as of more recent baWles and disasters. The long Old English
poem Beowulf, about just such an ancestral hero, also contains scenes describing the
feasts, boasts and songs in a king's great hall. The best-known Anglo-Saxon remains are
those from a royal burial at SuWon Hoo in East Anglia, displayed in the BriFsh Museum.
Most iconic is the SuWon Hoo helmet (pictured). The first discovery and excavaFon of the
tomb is dramaFsed and ficFonalised in the 2021 Nenlix film The Dig.

As the English were converted to ChrisFanity another insFtuFon became important: the
monastery or minster (meaning a major public church staffed by monks). The Britons had
already become ChrisFans under the later Roman Empire, but made no aWempts to share
the Faith with Saxon invaders (who in any case had no interest in the religious beliefs of
defeated enemies). Only aeer a king of Kent married a ChrisFan Frankish queen was there a
good opening for the preaching of ChrisFanity to the English. Monks from Rome arrived in
Kent and founded the church of Canterbury, now the primaFal see of the worldwide Anglican
Communion. Monks from Ireland (which had been converted by BriFsh missionaries, most
famously St Patrick) spread ChrisFanity in Scotland and Northumbria. Within a generaFon or
two of the Angles and Saxons converFng, English missionaries were preaching in Frisia and
Germany. One of them, Willibrord, founded the abbey of Echternach.

The Northumbrian monk Bede, who lived in the eighth century, wrote a Historia
ecclesiasFca genFs Anglorum (“Church History of the English People”), describing the
beginnings of English ChrisFanity. It is one of the best known of all medieval histories.
Bede, who once stated “I have always delighted in reading and wriFng and learning and
teaching”, was also famous in the Middle Ages for his wriFngs about chronology (which
promoted the system of counFng years from the birth of Christ, a system not widely
applied before him but now used on every conFnent) and for his biblical commentaries.
In Dante's Divine Comedy he is one of the figures met in Paradise. His tomb is in Durham
Cathedral. His EcclesiasFcal History is the first clear statement that while there were
several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, there was also a unifying sense of Englishness, an
“English people” (so these were recognisably all English kingdoms, disFnct from BriFsh
or Irish kingdoms).

About 60 years aeer Bede’s death, in 793, monasteries and seWlements around the English coast began to be
aWacked by marauders from Scandinavia, a type of pirates now generally known as Vikings. In Fme these raids led
to Viking conquest and seWlement of parts of eastern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Viking heritage is not much
emphasized in England, but much more is made of it in Shetland and Orkney, both of which remained Scandinavian
almost to the end of the Middle Ages, when they became part of the Kingdom of Scotland through a deal with the
King of Denmark. There is also more made of Scandinavian heritage in Dublin, a city that was founded as a Viking
port and developed first into a slavers’ camp and then into the capital of the Norse Kingdom of Dublin. In the ninth
and tenth centuries, a number of forFfied ports were centres of Viking power in Ireland: Wexford, Waterford, Cork
and Limerick, as well as Dublin itself. The independence of these Viking enclaves was ended by the Irish king Brian
Boru in the BaWle of Clontarf, early in the eleventh century, uniFng Ireland unFl a single ruler.

In England the main locaFon that celebrates its links with early medieval Scandinavia is York, which was once the
capital of a Scandinavian kingdom in northern England. The last Viking king of York, murdered in 954, was the
evocaFvely named Eric Bloodaxe, but the archaeological record is of a mercanFle city, filled with Scandinavian
craesmen and traders, rather than of the brutality one might expect from the Viking stereotype. The Jorvik Viking
Centre, built in the 1980s to recreate the “experience” of Viking York, was one of the first (and one of the most
successful) of a new type of “immersive” educaFonal tourist aWracFon, and there is an annual Viking FesFval with
much the same purpose.

The king of Wessex who managed to prevent Scandinavians from conquering all the English kingdoms was Alfred
the Great. In 878 he defeated the invading Danes in the BaWle of Edington. The leaders of the Danish army agreed
to be bapFsed and to limit their seWlement to northern and eastern parts of England, an area that later became
known as the Danelaw. The kings of Wessex and Mercia ruled the areas to the west and south. Had Alfred failed,
what is now called England might instead have been called Daneland. Alfred built new forFficaFons and new ships,
but also encouraged the producFon of literature in English. Bede’s EcclesiasFcal History was translated from LaFn,
as were various important Roman ChrisFan wriFngs, such as Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care and Boethius’s
ConsolaFons of Philosophy. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun in Alfred’s reign and conFnued to be updated
for over 200 years.

An earlier Anglo-Saxon king of note is Edmund, a ninth-century king of East Anglia, who was Fed to a tree and shot
full of arrows by Viking invaders. Edmund was regarded as a ChrisFan martyr and was a widely venerated royal
saint in the Middle Ages, effecFvely the patron saint of England unFl St George became popular, leading to plenty
of songs, stories and works of art featuring him. His tomb gave its name to the East Anglian town of Bury St
Edmunds (the “Bury” part of which is a version of “burg” or “borough”, not of the verb “to bury”). Another Anglo-
Saxon king that most educated people will have heard of is the eleventh-century Ethelred the Unready, whose
policy in dealing with Danish pirates was to pay them to go away and, when that failed to work in the long term,
to organise a massacre of Danish seWlers. It was during his reign that an English army was destroyed by Danes in
the BaWle of Maldon (famous from an Old English poem).

Under Alfred the Great’s descendants as kings of Wessex, the whole of England was brought into one kingdom, a
process that ended about fiey years aeer Alfred’s death. This Kingdom of England included areas where Danish
cultural influences were strong, and in 1015 a Dane managed to become king of England. This was Canute (Knud
in Danish). He was also king of Denmark and Norway, briefly making England part of a North Sea empire. Canute
and two of his sons were followed as king of the English by Edward the Confessor, the last member of the royal
house of Wessex, who had spent Fme in exile in Normandy. Edward had no children, and made his cousin, William,
Duke of Normandy, his heir. When Edward died, however, an Anglo-Danish nobleman called Harold Godwinson
took over as king. In response the king of Norway and the duke of Normandy both invaded to try to claim the
English crown. Harold defeated the Norse invaders at Stamford Bridge, near York, but then had to hurry to the
south coast to fight the Normans, where he died in baWle against them at HasFngs. Duke William would come to
be known in English as William the Conqueror. That the BaWle of HasFngs was in 1066 is just about the only date
in English history that can be regarded as universal common knowledge.

The Norman Conquest produced two unique historical sources: the Bayeux Tapestry, and the Domesday Book. The
first is a long, embroidered illustraFon of the history of the Conquest, from Edward promising the throne to William,
to Harold’s death in the BaWle of HasFngs. The Domesday Book was a sort of census of who owned the land in
England, and what resources were on it, compiled in 1087 for William the Conqueror so he could have an overview
of exactly what it was that he had conquered. It was such a detailed account that it was compared to the Day of
Judgment (“Doomsday”). It enables amateur historians to find out what was in their locality almost a thousand
years ago with a level of detail that is impossible for any other medieval kingdom, making it one more strand tying
the English to their past in an unusually strong way.
 Chapter 2 The Middle Ages

The Norman Conquest had a profound long-term impact on English society and on the English language. A
landowning class of a few thousand English and Anglo-Danish thegns was replaced by a few hundred mostly
Norman barons (with a handful of Bretons and Flemings who had helped in the Conquest). Many of these men
married English wives (widows or daughters of previous owners of the land) to make their claim to what they had
taken more secure. The ruling class was very quickly ethnically integrated, but spoke Norman French instead of the
English that most commoners spoke. Some people have seen the lasFng importance of class in English society as
a result of this very clear division in Anglo-Norman society. More certain is that as a result of the Conquest, English
gained a substanFal number of words of Norman French origin, such as peasant, villain, peWy, forest and cry.
Lawyers and judges spoke a technical language known as Law French, which introduced judge, jury, assize, plainFff,
warrant, and many other terms. One of the reasons for the divergence of Scots from English is that Scotland, which
was not conquered by the Normans, did not have a French-speaking aristocracy in the way that England did –
although over Fme there were elements of this in Scotland too.

Bishops, barons, and boroughs were the three orders of society that had a duty to support and advise the king.
When they all agreed, things could run smoothly. When they fell out, crises would ensue.
One of the most spectacular cases of such a falling out led to the murder of Thomas Becket.
A friend of King Henry II, he had first served him as chancellor and then been the royal
nominee as archbishop of Canterbury. The king expected to have a good working
relaFonship with an archbishop who was his own friend and owed his advancement to royal
favour. Then Becket excommunicated some of the king’s knights without asking the king's
permission, and the dispute about this soon escalated into a wide-ranging debate about
the relaFonship between Church and Crown, involving acrimonious meeFngs of English
bishops, and declaraFons by popes and by the theologians of the University of Paris. In
1170 Thomas was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four of Henry’s knights. The king
had gone too far: revulsion at the archbishop's murder forced him to downplay his claims
and go through a ritual of public penitence. The archbishop was soon regarded as a saint and his tomb became an
internaFonal pilgrimage shrine.

While Canute’s empire had drawn England into a Scandinavian realm, the Norman Conquest oriented the rulers of
England towards ConFnental Europe, and in parFcular towards France. Many Norman lords held lands both in
Normandy and in England. In the century aeer the conquest, marriage alliances between the house of Normandy
and the rulers of Anjou and later of Aquitaine brought almost all of western France under the rule of the kings of
England. In 1128 William the Conqueror’s granddaughter MaFlda married Geoffrey of Anjou, and historians
subsequently came to refer to the English royal dynasty from then unFl the end of the Middle Ages as the
“Plantagenets” (from Geoffrey’s nickname, “plante de genêt”): they were the most powerful aristocraFc family in
France alongside being the royal family of England. The kings of France only ruled a small patch of land centred on
Paris, and in the tweleh century were effecFvely the third most powerful men in France, aeer the kings of England
and counts of Flanders. Understandably resennul at being overshadowed in his own kingdom, in 1204, the king of
France managed to seize Normandy – a disaster for the presFge of John, king of England, who did everything in his
power to regain control of the duchy. In 1214 John sent armies to western France and to Flanders, to support the
Emperor OWo IV and the count of Flanders in their war against the king of France. All this effort was wasted,
however: the king of France kept Normandy, and Fghtened his control over Flanders.

King John’s recourse to every possible method to extract money for his campaigns made him one of the hate figures
of English history (see, for instance, the Disney version of the Robin Hood story). All orders of society felt that he
had infringed on their tradiFonal rights. To give just one example, the king was regarded as the guardian of the
widows and orphans of his barons, supposedly acFng like a parent to them. John took to marrying off the land-
owning widows and orphans under his care to his friends and supporters, as a way to reward the laWer without
having to spend his own money or give his own land. This someFmes meant a loss of status for the widows and
orphans, since John's supporters were not always of the same rank as their brides. Furthermore, the prelates, great
lords, and wealthy towns of the kingdom owed the king their support and advice, but what if the king wasted their
support and ignored their advice? Aeer a year of civil war, a document was drawn up describing all the liberFes
and rights the king was obliged to respect, including his obligaFon to listen to his subjects' advice, and the king was
forced to raFfy it at Runnymede, an island in the Thames, on 15 June 1215. This document was known as Magna
Carta (the Great Charter).
It includes sFpulaFons like: ‘No widow shall be compelled to marry, so long as she prefers to live without a
husband...’; ‘No village or individual shall be compelled to make bridges at river-banks, except those who from of
old were legally bound to do so’; ‘Neither we nor our bailiffs shall take, for our castles or for any other work of
ours, wood which is not ours, against the will of the owner of that wood’ ; and ‘Let there be one measure of wine
throughout our whole realm, and one measure of ale’. Aside from such specific concerns, Magna Carta establishes
the principle that the king has a duty to listen to advice, and to call men together to give it (providing the foundaFon
on which the first parliaments would later be built): ‘for obtaining the common counsel of the kingdom ..., we will
cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, severally by our leWers; ... for
a fixed date, ... and at a fixed place’. It also requires royal recogniFon of the principle of the rule of law: ‘No freeman
shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon
him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’ ; ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will
we refuse or delay, right or jusFce’ ; ‘We will appoint as jusFces, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs only such as know
the law of the realm and mean to observe it well.’ The intenFon was at heart conservaFve: the charter was not an
aWempt to establish new rights, but to set down in wriFng how people thought the system was supposed to have
worked in the past, before King John’s innovaFons.

Because a rebel army had forced the king to concede the charter, rather than it being freely granted, it was annulled
as soon as the king was safely away from them. But several Fmes in the reign of John’s son, Henry III, it was reissued
in various forms, remaining the best statement of what private and public concerns the great men of England felt
the king had no right to interfere with. It also remained a constant point of reference for later criFcs of royal power,
and has a semi-legendary aura as the foundaFonal document not only of the BriFsh consFtuFon but also of the
American concept of ciFzens’ rights and limited government. Magna Carta is not as unique as people in the English-
speaking world oeen think (Brabant’s Joyous Entry was comparable, to give just one example), but it is the only
medieval charter of its kind that sFll has some legal force.

Since the Conquest, kings of England had moved about a lot, someFmes spending more
Fme on their lands in France than in England, and when in England holding court at various
locaFons (with Winchester a parFcular favourite). Henry III centralised his rule in London,
rebuilding Westminster Great Hall as one of the biggest roofed
spaces in Europe and beginning the transformaFon of
Westminster Abbey (originally an Anglo-Saxon foundaFon) into
a structure in the new Gothic style to enhance royal authority.
He had as much trouble as his father with barons who were
sensiFve to royal encroachment on their freedom.

The most famous of these barons was Simon de Monnort, earl of Leicester. There is now
a university in Leicester, De Monnort University, named aeer him. Aeer leading a
rebellion against the king, Simon in 1265 summoned a parliament that for the first Fme
included elected representaFves of the common people alongside the ‘archbishops,
bishops, abbots, earls and greater barons’ sFpulated in Magna Carta. This was not what we would think of as a
democraFc system: the only commoners allowed to take part in poliFcal processes were those who owned land,
but they no longer needed to belong to the clerical or noble estate. It was an innovaFon that the Crown did not
recognise or imitate unFl Edward I called a parliament on the same basis in 1295 (the ‘Model Parliament’ since it
served as the model for later parliaments). The dark side of the consFtuFonal developments pioneered by De
Monnort and by Edward I was that both combined greater consultaFon of the people with strict measures against
those who were thought of as alien: De Monnort expelled the Jewish community from Leicester; Edward expelled
the Jews from England. From 1290 unFl 1656, it was illegal for Jews to be resident in the kingdom (which does not
mean no Jews lived in England, only that if any did, it was without legal status).

The reason that Edward called the Model Parliament was to pay for the preparaFons
for war with Scotland. He had already subjugated all of Wales to his authority by a series
of campaigns there in the 1270s and 1280s, and had built a chain of great castles in
North Wales to maintain his power. Over a century later there were aWempts to
reassert Welsh independence from the kings of England, with Owen Glendower (or
Owain Glyndŵr) leading a revolt and in 1404 having himself crowned as prince of
Wales. The revolt was defeated by 1413 and Glendower mysteriously disappeared. English control of Wales was
reaffirmed.

Because Wales was much fought over in the late Middle Ages but has been largely free of wars and revoluFons
since, it is one of the best places in the world to see medieval military architecture. Unlike in other places, there
was never an urgent need to either destroy or modernise forFficaFons. The medieval wars of Wales gave rise to
the song Men of Harlech, one of the unofficial anthems of Wales, which many associate with Owen Glendower’s
revolt. The official anthem of Wales is Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of Our Fathers), and another unofficial anthem
is Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer, also known as Bread of Heaven or Cwm Rhondda, which has been sung not
only at rugby matches but also at royal weddings and at Princess Diana’s funeral.

Since King John, the kings of England had borne the Ftle ‘Lord of Ireland’, although any control they had there was
tenuous. With Edward they acquired the Ftle ‘Prince of Wales’ for their crown princes. According to popular story
(but not reliable history), the Welsh made their peace with Edward on condiFon that he appoint a prince of Wales
who had been born in Wales and did not speak English; Edward agreed to do this, and awarded the Ftle to his own
son, newly born in Caernarfon Castle and not yet speaking at all. The heir apparent to the throne of the United
Kingdom sFll bears the Ftle Prince of Wales (currently Charles III’s eldest son, William).

During the ‘Great Cause’ of the Scoosh royal succession in 1290–1292 (brought on by the deaths of Alexander III
of Scotland and his only living direct descendant, his granddaughter Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’), the rival
claimants turned to Edward for mediaFon. He accepted, but once they had sworn to abide by his decision he
declared that only those who recognised him as their overlord would be considered eligible. As a result, he was
the first king who, at least in name, had some sort of overlordship over the whole of Britain and Ireland.

Edward’s aWempts to control Scotland led to a series of campaigns there that earned him the nickname “Hammer
of the Scots”. William Wallace, a leader of Scoosh resistance to Edward’s overlordship, was captured and executed
in 1305. The Wallace Monument, a massive tower built in 1869 outside SFrling, where he won a baWle,
commemorates him as a naFonal hero (hWp://[Link]). Both he and his monument
are among the symbols of Scoosh idenFty.

The Scots re-established their independence in the reign of Edward's son, Edward II.
Led by Robert Bruce they destroyed an English army in the BaWle of Bannockburn
(24 June 1314) and forced the king to ignominious flight.
This Scoosh victory is a key event in Scoosh naFonal consciousness, and is
celebrated in the twenFeth- century folksong Flower of Scotland, now the unofficial
naFonal anthem that can be heard at rugby or football matches when the Scoosh
naFonal team is playing. The DeclaraFon of Arbroath, which a number of Scots lords sent to the Pope in 1320 to
explain why they were fighFng the English, is perhaps the most sFrring medieval expression of a desire for naFonal
independence, containing the words:

As long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any condiFons be subjected to the lordship of the
English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighFng, but for freedom alone, which no
honest man gives up but with life itself.

Bruce’s brother led a Scoosh invasion of Ireland – not to conquer the island for the Scots, but to weaken English
power there. It was only under the Tudors that the English crown again
extended its authority in Ireland on any scale. Edward II's son, Edward III,
refocused the English monarchy from expanding its power in the BriFsh Isles
to rebuilding its power in France. When the king of France refused to
recognise him as heir to the lands in western France that had belonged to
English kings for close to two hundred years, he responded by refusing to
recognise the king as ruler of France. He himself was more closely related
to previous French kings, but in the female line, which his rival claimed
disqualified him from the succession. The king of England's claim to the
French succession was in contenFon between the rulers of England and
France from 1336 to 1453, a period known as the Hundred Years' War
(though war was not in fact constant throughout these years). English people learn about the baWles won by English
kings — PoiFers, Crecy, Agincourt — but have only a vague idea that losing the war despite winning all these baWles
has something to do with Joan of Arc. The chronice of the war by Jean Froissart, a naFve of Valenciennes who had
been a servant of the countess of Hainaut, is among the great historical texts of Europe.

Two events punctuaFng this period of 117 years that everybody knows at
least by name are the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt. The Black Death
was a pandemic that arose in Central Asia and struck Europe in the 1340s. It
reached England and Wales in 1349, and Scotland and Ireland in 1350, killing
over a third of the total populaFon. The plague became endemic, with new
outbreaks recurring unFl 1665. One of the effects of this massive
demographic shock was to make labour scarce and land cheap. This put
peasants in a good posiFon to improve their incomes and their rights,
something that lords were very keen to prevent. One upshot of the aWempts
of landowners to use parliamentary legislaFon to assert their customary
privileges was an army of angry peasants from Essex and Kent marching to London and lynching a number of
unpopular officeholders. The king, a young Richard II, went out to parley with the peasants’ leader, Wat Tyler,
whose insolence so angered the lord mayor of London that during the conference the mayor drew his sword and
struck Tyler dead. A cry of “They have killed our leader!” went up from the peasant army, and the young king rode
out to the rebels and declared, “I will be your leader!” The peasants went home assured that the king was on their
side, only to be rounded up and hanged later, when it was more convenient. In a society where posiFon was largely
based on birth, the slogan aWributed to the peasants, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the
gentleman?” can be construed as a radical statement of fundamental human equality: ulFmately all are descended
from the same ancestors.

The most famous baWle of the Hundred Years' War is the BaWle of
Agincourt, fought at Azincourt on 25 October 1415. Henry V had besieged
and taken Harfleur, in Normandy, and was marching towards Calais, and
home, when he was overtaken by a much larger army of French knights.
Relying heavily on longbows and fighFng on foot, Henry’s army made short
work of the French knights, who were crowded together too closely to
manoeuvre and got bogged down in the mud. The duke of Brabant and
Luxembourg, who fought on the French side, was taken prisoner and then
killed (late in the baWle the king ordered all prisoners killed, not having
enough men to guard them effecFvely: something that patrioFc accounts
have tended to gloss over). It was a seemingly decisive English victory,
making it all the more of a puzzle how England came to lose the war. The
baWle is best known not from history but from Shakespeare, since it is
central to his play Henry V, with Henry giving sFrring speeches during the
siege of Harfleur (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”) and before the BaWle of Agincourt (“We few, we
happy few, we band of brothers”). In the years aeer Henry V’s death the English posiFon in France deteriorated,
so that by 1453 only Calais was lee of England’s conFnental possessions. It was not long before the English were
busy fighFng one another.

Between 1455 and 1485 the English nobility was involved in a bloody series of coups and civil wars known
collecFvely as the Wars of the Roses. The name comes from the badges of two rival houses: the white rose of the
House of York, and the red rose of the House of Lancaster. Both lines were descended from
Richard II’s uncle, John of Gaunt, one of the most powerful men in fourteenth-century England.
The royal succession passed back and forth between the two houses with the fortunes of war:
the Lancastrian Henry VI was king 1422–1461 and 1470–
1471, with the Yorkist Edward IV reigning 1461-1470 and 1471-1483. Edward IV was to have
been followed by his son, Edward V, but the child went missing before the coronaFon, and his
uncle became Richard III (1483–1485). Then the opponents to the Yorkists were rallied by
Henry Tudor, an obscure Welsh nobleman with Lancastrian connecFons. In 1485 Richard was defeated and killed
at the BaWle of Bosworth, the last English king to die in baWle. This event is convenFonally taken to mark the end
of the Middle Ages in Britain. Henry married Edward IV’s daughter, uniFng the Lancastrian and Yorkist lines, and
founded a new dynasty as Henry VII (1485-1509), the Tudors replacing the Plantagenets who had been in power
since the tweleh century. He symbolically united the red and white roses in the Tudor rose (pictured). Like Henry
V’s Agincourt campaign, the Wars of the Roses are beWer known to the general public from Shakespeare's history
plays and from subsequent romanFcisaFons in ficFon than from history books. (These parFcular Shakespeare plays
are now perhaps most accessible in the BBC television adaptaFons as the series The Hollow Crown, producFons
which show the visual influence of Game of Thrones at the height of its popularity – a story itself clearly influenced
by the history of the Wars of the Roses: the names Stark and Lannister, for example, are thinly disguised versions
of York and Lancaster.)

Richard III, who became a caricature of evil in Tudor dynasFc propaganda, was best known for presumably having
had his brother’s children murdered in the Tower of London so that he could take the throne himself. Even today
people can become surprisingly heated about whether or not Richard III was really that nasty. He is certainly one
of Shakespeare’s most vivid villains. Richard III was much in the news through the 2010s because his body, hurriedly
buried aeer the BaWle of Bosworth in 1485, was rediscovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012. Aeer years of
closely reported studies on his remains (including DNA tesFng of his descendants, such as the television actor
Benedict Cumberbatch), he was reburied with grand ceremony in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

Further down the social scale from the feuding members of the different branches of the royal family was the
Paston family, who belonged to the East Anglian gentry. Several of the men in the family were lawyers, and one a
member of parliament, which meant they had responsibiliFes that took them away from home for long periods,
especially to London, leaving their wives or other relaFves to manage their property in East Anglia. Unusually, a
considerable part of the fieeenth-century correspondence between various members of the family survived, and
from the late eighteenth century onwards selecFons of the Paston leWers have been published in a variety of
ediFons, most recently in 2004. Like the Vindolanda tablets, they give a unique sidelight on the period in which
they were wriWen. They even include the oldest surviving ValenFne’s leWer in English, wriWen by Margery Brewes
to her future husband, John Paston, in 1477.
 Chapter 3 Tudors and Stuarts

The Tudors were a Welsh family, and aeer three generaFons (Henry VII, his son Henry VIII, and Henry VIII’s three
children: Edward, Mary and Elizabeth) their dynasty came to an end and was replaced by the Scoosh royal family,
the Stuarts. It is someFmes said that Richard III was the last English king of England (although people someFmes
say the same of Harold Godwinson, who died in 1066 and was in any case half Danish).

The period of Tudor and Stuart rule was one of rapid and traumaFc change. The two periods that English children
are most likely to learn anything about in school are the two World Wars of the 20th century, and the poliFcal and
religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the ReformaFon and the English Civil War
provide the central stories. The period is probably best known to the general public, however, from films and
television rather than from histories. The reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s great rival, Mary Queen of
Scots, have all provided maWer for costume dramas of varying historical accuracy and probability. They are also
popular seongs for historical novels and romances, as is the Stuart period.

Intellectually, the sixteenth century was the period of Renaissance Humanism, the most
famous English contribuFon to which was Thomas More’s Utopia (printed in Louvain in
1516). This was a LaFn account of a ficFonal
meeFng between More, in the Low Countries to negoFate a trade treaty on behalf of
the merchants of London, and a traveller returned from a newly discovered island where
the islanders had built the most perfect society human reason was capable of. Scholars
sFll debate whether More meant his island to be a raFonalist ideal or a saFre of the
limits of human reason (or indeed a combinaFon of the two). Either way, by imagining
a human society on the basis of abstract principles rather than exisFng models, Thomas
More had invented a new literary genre – the utopia – and provided an adjecFve,
‘utopian’, for any abstract aWempt to reimagine society. By profession More was a
lawyer, and in 1529 he became Lord Chancellor (effecFvely head of the English judiciary)
under Henry VIII.

Henry VIII

The one thing that everybody knows about Henry VIII is that he had six wives. His first
wife was a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. As a teenager she had been married
for a few months to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, who died young. Because marrying his
brother’s widow came dangerously close to being incest, a papal dispensaFon had been
obtained to allow the wedding. Later, when Catherine had given him a daughter (Mary)
but no son, and his amorous aWenFon was wandering, Henry would come to think that
his lack of a son was divine punishment for him having married his brother’s widow. He
asked the pope to annul the marriage, arguing that the previous pope had had no
authority to allow it. Aeer lengthy and complex negoFaFons the pope refused to annul
Henry and Catherine’s marriage, so Henry declared himself head of the Church in
England, and had his new church dissolve his marriage for him. He also got Parliament to
pass a law making it treason to deny the Royal Supremacy (as the king’s headship of the
church was called). Before the end of his reign, it had become treason to ‘imagine the
king’s death’. Although Henry ruled in despoFc ways, he used Parliament as a tool of royal
policy, strengthening the insFtuFon while other rulers (in France, Spain, and elsewhere) were weakening the
medieval parliamentary systems they had inherited.

It was for failing to support Henry’s divorce and for declining to subscribe to an oath upholding royal supremacy
over the Church that Thomas More was declared a traitor and beheaded. The usual punishment for treason was
to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but More was treated with comparaFve leniency. Thomas More was canonized
as a Catholic saint in 1935, but the story of the destrucFon of a great intellectual and a powerful judge because he
refused to go against his conscience speaks to people of all religious backgrounds. It inspired the Oscar-winning
film A Man for All Seasons (based on a play by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay for The Mission).

The iniFal impact of the Protestant ReformaFon in Britain was in the face of official disapproval. One of the best-
known early Protestants was William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament
into English. He worked in Antwerp, because no new bible translaFon could be produced in England without special
permission from the English bishops. In 1536 he was burned at the stake in Vilvoorde as a hereFc. His crime was
not, as is oeen stated, translaFng the Bible, since unlike in England that was lawful in the Low Countries, but rather
being a high-profile Protestant, which Charles V had made a felony.

By his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Henry had another daughter (Elizabeth). The marriage only lasted three years
before Henry had Anne put to death on charges of adultery with a list of suspects that included her own brother.
There is reason to think that Henry was becoming paranoid at this stage, and that Anne’s love life was not as
complicated as painted. His third wife, Jane Seymour, gave Henry a son (Edward), but died in the process. Henry’s
fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, was a German noblewoman and the marriage was purely poliFcal. By the Fme she
arrived in England the poliFcal situaFon had changed, and Henry (who might have kept her on as queen if she had
been preoer, rather than what he described as a ‘Flemish mare’) declared the marriage void. The fieh wife, a
preWy but flirty young noblewoman, was executed for adultery. His sixth wife outlived him. The first two marriages
are the most important, because Henry’s divorce lay at the root of considerable poliFcal and religious changes, and
the legiFmacy of two subsequent queens (Mary and Elizabeth) depended on which of Henry’s first two marriages
was considered valid (they could not both be).

The wider impact of Henry’s breach with Rome was not immediate but became far-reaching. The man who
implemented Henry’s changes in government, including the government of the church, was Thomas Cromwell,
who made himself very unpopular in the process. The award-winning novel Wolf Hall (now also a TV series) rewrites
the history of the period to portray Cromwell as a sympatheFc statesman, rather than an opportunist accessory to
an increasingly tyrannical Henry. Partly for religious moFvaFons and partly simply to raise money, Henry had all the
monasteries in England and Wales closed down and their assets transferred to the Crown (a process known as the
DissoluFon of the Monasteries). Monks who co-operated were awarded pensions and posiFons in Henry’s new
church; nuns just got pensions. A few dozen monks and abbots were hanged for being un-co-operaFve, as an
example to others. Eventually Henry turned on Cromwell too, and had him beheaded.

Many of the great medieval monasFc buildings fell into decay. Some vanished,
others can sFll be visited as picturesque ruins. The Crown quickly sold off monasFc
lands, and many monastery buildings became private houses, so it is possible to
find places with ‘Abbey’ or ‘Priory’ in the name that have for centuries been stately
homes rather than monasteries (the ficFonal Downton Abbey is now perhaps the
most famous example). Others fell into ruin (such as Whitby Abbey, pictured),
gradually mouldering away, and being plundered for building materials, unFl the
RomanFc movement came to regard them as picturesque remnants that ought to be preserved.

The closing of monasteries and the changes to tradiFonal religion were especially unpopular in the North of
England, leading to a mass armed protest called the Pilgrimage of Grace, which the government regarded as a
rebellion. The demands of the protesters included restoring the monasteries, having parliament hold a session in
the North, and dismissing Thomas Cromwell from the Council. Aeer the king had promised to summon a northern
parliament the protesters dispersed to their homes, and a couple of hundred were later rounded up and killed as
rebels. There never was a parliament in the North (although in January 2020 Boris Johnson’s government did briefly
float the idea of relocaFng the House of Lords to York).

Henry was personally opposed to the Protestant ReformaFon that was gaining ground during his reign, wanFng to
keep things as much as they had been before the break with Rome, only with himself in charge instead of the Pope.
However, his need to find servants and ministers who would support his policies of creaFng a naFonal church and
closing the monasteries created openings for a more Protestant Church of England. During the short reign of the
child-king Edward VI, the Church of England became much more consciously Protestant, with a new, official liturgy
that for the first Fme was in English: the Book of Common Prayer. One of the key architects of this liturgy was
Thomas Cranmer, the first Anglican archbishop of Canterbury. Through the later growth of the BriFsh Empire,
Anglicanism (which in the United States became the Episcopal Church) developed into a religious denominaFon
with parishes and dioceses on every inhabited conFnent, and the Archbishop of Canterbury as the most senior of
its bishops (royal control of the Church of England does not now extend to Anglican or Episcopal churches beyond
England – not even to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland).
The Common Prayer issued under Edward VI was, by law, to be the only religious service allowed to take place in
England, and aWendance was to be compulsory except for those who were sick or travelling. As a majority of English
people heard its words every week, the Prayer Book became an important influence on the style of literary English.
So too did the English Bible, on which more later. There were popular protests against these changes, in the West
Country amounFng to a full-scale rebellion, but these were bloodily suppressed. Conversely, in East Anglia and the
south-east there were some signs of genuine popular support for ProtestanFsm.

The tradiFonal fesFve calendar had half a year of fasts and great feasts, running roughly from late November to
May: Advent, the Twelve Days of Christmas (from the evening of 24 December to 6 January), Lent (for 46 days
before Easter), the Easter Season (for five weeks beginning on the Sunday aeer the first full moon of springFme
and ending with Pentecost). In the late Middle Ages an extra feast, Corpus ChrisF, was added aeer Pentecost. This
celebraFon began in Liège and was decreed for England by Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury. Music,
art, poetry, performance (liturgical, processional, theatrical) and popular fesFvity had clustered around these
devoFons and occasions. Some towns organized processions or pageants of biblical drama for parFcular feasts —
most famously the York ‘Mystery Plays’. Other tradiFons were simpler. Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash
Wednesday (the beginning of Lent) is tradiFonally known as Pancake Day in England. In Italy, France, Spain, Belgium
and parts of Germany, these cultural and popular tradiFons conFnued into modern Fmes. In Britain, for the most
part, they came to be a relic of the Middle Ages, and while some of the popular tradiFons survived (in the
celebraFon of Halloween and Pancake Day, for example), the connecFon with high culture and the liturgy was
broken. Performances of biblical drama were banned, the liturgy was rewriWen, statues and painFngs were
destroyed, and medieval books were dispersed and the paper put to other uses. The ReformaFon produced the
greatest cultural disconFnuity in English history since the Norman Conquest.

Under Queen Mary (the daughter of Catherine of Aragon) England officially became Catholic again, and Thomas
Cranmer was one of over 200 people executed as a hereFc during Mary’s short reign. In popular history all she is
really remembered for is burning Protestants and losing Calais, the last bit of France under English rule. Her
innovaFons and achievements as the first queen to rule the kingdom of England are forgoWen to all but specialist
historians. Mary was married to Philip II of Spain, and in some histories the Spaniards are blamed for the policy of
burning Protestants, but there was nothing like the Spanish InquisiFon in England. The courts relied on hereFcs
being turned in by their neighbours, not hunted out by inquisitors. The first history of the persecuFons in Mary’s
reign was wriWen by John Foxe, whose Book of Martyrs (the actual Ftle was Acts and Monuments of these laWer
and perilous days) became part of the official version of history set forth in her successor’s reign. It was one of the
best-known books in Britain, going through numerous ediFons up to the end of the nineteenth century, and was
taken to demonstrate just what nasty things foreign Catholics would do to good Protestant English men and women
if they ever got the chance.

Elizabethan England

Under Elizabeth (the daughter of Anne Boleyn) there was a new break with Rome, and Elizabeth had Parliament
pass a new Act of Supremacy to declare her supreme governor of the Church in England. Religious legislaFon
passed by parliament as the Act of Uniformity created a legal obligaFon to aWend the services of the Church of
England every Sunday, and prohibited any alternaFve religious services. Anglican services followed the new Prayer
Book issued in 1559, based on Cranmer’s earlier Book of Common Prayer. In 1563 a statement of doctrines for the
Anglican Church was issued, the Thirty-Nine ArFcles.

The Anglican compromise was to create a church that did things that looked Catholic (with vestments and formal
ceremonies) while saying things that sounded Protestant (and in the vernacular rather than in LaFn). Most people
duFfully obeyed the laws, but by the end of Elizabeth’s reign there were substanFal and organised minoriFes who
saw the Church of England as either too Protestant or not Protestant enough. Various types of Protestants are
grouped under the term Nonconformist, while Catholics who refused to aWend Anglican services are referred to
as Recusants (from the LaFn for ‘to refuse’). By 1570 it was officially treason to be a Catholic priest ordained aeer
1559, and from 1585 it was a hanging offence to help or hide a Catholic priest. To give just one example, Margaret
Clitherow, a butcher’s wife from York, was crushed under a door for refusing to plead “guilty” or “not guilty” to a
charge of hiding priests. Hiding places for clandesFne clergy, known as “priest holes”, can sFll be found in some old
country houses. The most important Protestant Nonconformists of Elizabeth’s reign wanted a more ‘purely’
reformed church (like the Calvinist churches of Geneva, Holland or Scotland), and are oeen called Puritans. Other
Nonconformist denominaFons developed alongside them – most notably BapFsts and CongregaFonalists in the
late sixteenth century, Quakers and Unitarians in the seventeenth century, and Methodists in the eighteenth
century. All of those who would not take part in Anglican worship were persecuted to varying degrees by the
Anglican establishment, and suffered various civil disabiliFes (such as not being able to sit in parliament or on town
councils) unFl the early nineteenth century.

One of the biggest challenges for the Tudor monarchs was controlling
Ireland. Since the Middle Ages, kings of England had claimed the Ftle
Lord of Ireland, technically holding Ireland as a fief from the Pope. In
1541 Henry declared himself King of Ireland and started taking steps
to be full and effecFve ruler of the island. Ireland was already peopled
by two communiFes: the descendants of medieval Anglo-Norman
seWlers, living according to English law and customs, primarily in and
around Dublin and a few other coastal towns (much like the Viking
enclaves of the early Middle Ages); and the original Irish, inhabiFng
the rest of the country, living according to their own tradiFons. The area around Dublin was known as the Pale,
giving rise to the idiom ‘beyond the pale’ for outrageous behaviour. Neither group was keen to have the English
crown tell them what to do, especially with the new laws on religion. The English government’s soluFon was
‘plantaFon’: turning over Irish land to new seWlers from England, who would owe their loyalty to the crown.
Elizabeth fought wars in Ireland in 1579-1583, followed by the PlantaFon of Munster, and in 1593-1603, followed
by the PlantaFon of Ulster. In 1607 the leaders of Irish resistance in Ulster, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory
O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, fled abroad – first to Louvain and then to Rome. This Flight of the Earls is generally
taken to mark the end of the power of the tradiFonal Gaelic aristocracy in Ireland.

Less violent was the incorporaFon of Wales into the English state: while Magna Carta had sFll specified that suits
in Wales should be seWled according to Welsh law, Henry VIII had had Parliament pass a statute imposing English
law and the English language in Welsh law courts. Only those who spoke English would be appointed to public
offices in Wales, so the gentry and upper middle classes came to speak English in order to qualify for royal
preferment, while those with no such ambiFons conFnued to speak Welsh. This created the same sort of linguisFc
division by class as had existed in England aeer the Norman Conquest, but now with English as the elite language
rather than French.

Henry VIII had sFll fought wars with Scotland, but even Elizabeth intervened in Scoosh affairs, encouraging
Protestant rebels against her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. When Mary was forced to flee to England, Elizabeth
kept her imprisoned for years and then had her head chopped off – not the customary approach to visiFng royalty,
even when hosFle. The ousFng of Mary enabled the establishment of a CalvinisFc Church of Scotland north of the
border, a more purely ‘Reformed’ body that regarded the Catholic-looking pracFces of the Church of England (such
as liturgical vestments, or bishops and their cathedrals) with some suspicion. The differences between the Church
of Scotland and the Church of England would be a source of trouble once the two kingdoms, with their different
naFonal churches, came under one crown aeer Mary’s son, James, succeeded Elizabeth on the English throne.

Besides sending armies to Ireland and supporFng rebels in Scotland, Elizabeth also meddled in ConFnental affairs,
supporFng the Protestants in the Wars of Religion in France, and in the Dutch Revolt, in 1585 sending her favourite
(and rumoured lover) the Earl of Leicester to command an army against the Spanish in the Low Countries. English
pirates like Francis Drake, with secret government support, were also making a habit of plundering Spanish colonies
in the Caribbean and South America (even though England was not officially at war with Spain). In 1577–1580
Drake became the first English explorer to circumnavigate the globe, sacking Valparaiso on his way up the Pacific
coast of the Americas. When he returned to England he was knighted by the Queen aboard his ship, the Golden
Hind (a replica of which is now moored on the Thames in London), rather than punished for his piracies. In 1585
Sir Walter Raleigh tried to establish an English colony in the Americas. The seWlement on Roanoke Island (now in
North Carolina) was found abandoned in 1590 and nobody knows what happened to the colonists. His exploraFons
and advice would eventually lead to a successful colony in Virginia (so named for the unmarried Elizabeth’s
reputaFon as a ‘Virgin Queen’).

The term ‘BriFsh Empire’ entered the English language in the Elizabethan age. John Dee, the most famous wizard
of the Fme (he had been consulted when fixing the date of Elizabeth’s coronaFon), seems to have been the first
to use it. Richard Hakluyt’s Principall NavigaFons, Voyages and Discoveries (1589) took it as read that King Arthur’s
dominance over northern Europe established a precedent for the overseas extension of English royal power.
Hakluyt was not alone in taking Arthurian legend for history: the leading historical work of the Fme, William
Camden’s Britannia (1586), regarded Arthur as a historical figure. It was not unFl Richard Verstegan published his
ResFtuFon of Decayed Intelligence in AnFquiFes (Antwerp, 1605) that the Germanic origins of the early English,
and disconFnuity between Roman Britain and early England, replaced the ficFon of Arthurian Englishness. It is
suggesFve that this debunking was only published aeer the Tudor dynasty had come to an end, and outside
England even then.

In response to Elizabeth’s involvement in the Netherlands, on top of all the other provocaFons, Philip II of Spain
decided to invade England. In 1588 the Spanish Armada sailed from Spain to the Channel where it was then
supposed to convoy Philip’s army from Flanders over to England. Before the fleet could link up with the Army of
Flanders it was dispersed by the English navy, and aeer sailing around the BriFsh Isles to regroup in the AtlanFc it
was destroyed by a freak hurricane. There are sFll Armada wrecks in the waters off the west coast of Ireland. The
commemoraFve medals struck to celebrate the English victory bore the inscripFon “God blew and they were
scaWered”. Nineteenth-century historians took the view that the outcome proved the English had always had a
beWer navy than anybody else, and downplayed the importance of the weather. In the sixteenth century, the wind
being on England’s side was taken as a sign of divine support, and was emphasized accordingly. Drake and Raleigh
both served in the campaign, Drake as captain of a ship and Raleigh as a naval advisor to the government.

During the Armada campaign, Elizabeth famously declared to English troops mustered at Tilbury, “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!”
 Queen Elizabeth’s reign was later looked back on as something of a golden age, due to the
victories against the Spaniards, the beginnings of English worldwide trade and exploraFon,
and the cultural importance of the Elizabethan stage, with William Shakespeare as its most
famous writer. It is hard to exaggerate the cultural importance of Shakespeare in the
English-speaking world – perhaps even greater in the United States than in the United
Kingdom. His poetry is regularly read and studied in schools, and his plays are sFll widely
performed, as well as providing inspiraFon for adaptaFon to the screen, in prose ficFon,
and in other media. Shakespeare’s stories, developed in masterfully poeFc language, are
about very basic human drives (love, fear, ambiFon, jealousy, revenge) and spectacular events (wars, murders,
witchcrae, ghosts, fairies). As has been menFoned above, with regard to John of Gaunt’s death speech from
Richard II and the baWle speeches from Henry V, some passages from Shakespeare have passed into BriFsh self-
definiFon. Shakespeare is also, of course, a figure in world literature, whose works have inspired writers and arFsts
of every naFonality. TranslaFons and adaptaFons abound in every part of the world.

Jacobean period

Elizabeth had never married and had no immediate heir (she had flirted with the Earl of Leicester, but when his
wife was found dead in suspicious circumstances, at the boWom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck, it would
have been poliFcally inexpedient to marry him). She had also outlawed any public discussion of the succession. As
a result there was considerable doubt about whether the transiFon to a new dynasty would be peaceful. In 1603,
when James VI of Scotland became James I of England almost without incident, that seemed a miracle in itself.
When a plot to blow up Parliament with the King inside it was foiled, this was seen as confirmaFon that James’s
rule was divinely ordained. The failure of the Gunpowder Plot, in 1605, is the most famous non-event in BriFsh
history. It is sFll celebrated with fires and fireworks every year on Bonfire Night (5 November).

Two of the most influenFal books in the English language were published during James’s reign: the first ediFon of
the collected plays of William Shakespeare, printed in 1623 (James had nothing directly to do with this volume,
although he had been a patron of Shakespeare’s acFng company), and the King James Bible, printed in 1611. The
new bible translaFon was produced directly on the king’s orders, by six teams of Anglican scholars, two each
working in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster. This was the official version of the Bible in English for the next 300
years, and it had a tremendous impact on the English language. Books are not the biggest influences on how
language changes, but among influenFal books these two are without doubt the most important for modern
English. Both are sources of numerous fixed collocaFons that have become idiomaFc expressions, as well as
providing familiar quotaFons, and shaping noFons of prose style and elevated register.

James saw himself as uniFng the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, and gave himself the Ftle King
of Great Britain; but the English parliament never approved that style, and in law he remained the king of Scotland
separately from king of England and Ireland. In Ireland he furthered the policy of plantaFon, but with Scots seWlers
in Ulster, forming the basis of the present-day Ulster Scots community (on which more below).

The first lasFng BriFsh colonies in the Americas also date from James’s reign. While many of the early colonists
(parFcularly in Virginia) were seeking to beWer their fortunes, many others (such as the “Pilgrim Fathers” who
seWled in New England) were moFvated by Puritan religious beliefs, leaving what they regarded as an insufficiently
‘purified’ England to be able to live more strictly Protestant lives in the New World. This was to have a lasFng
influence on American culture. To give just one example, Harvard University, the oldest insFtuFon of higher
educaFon in the US, was founded in 1636 to train New England’s clergy. In popular culture, there is greater
awareness of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s that were inspired by Puritan anxieFes about how sin, division
and dissent conFnued to threaten their new society, and which inspired Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.

Civil War

James passed on to his son and successor, Charles I, the sense that God had made him king, and that his desFny
was to unite England, Ireland and Scotland. This sense of divine ordinaFon made it hard for Charles to compromise
with the English parliament, and he tried to rule without parliament for most of the 1630s. It also encouraged him
to pursue policies to unify his kingdoms. The king’s aWempt to impose bishops and Anglican liturgy on the Church
of Scotland was parFcularly resented, and in 1638 Scoosh opponents to these policies drew up a NaFonal
Covenant – a solemn undertaking before God that the signatories would resist and reject such changes to their
Reformed church order. Those who signed, and their followers and parFsans, would be called Covenanters. In 1639
the Bishops’ War began, with Covenanters facing off against royal forces, and Charles found himself in need of
money. In 1640 he had to call a parliament in England to vote taxes to pay for his army. This was the first parliament
to have met in almost a decade, and it refused to help the king against the Scots. The Irish then rebelled too,
massacring Protestant colonists (an event added to later ediFons of the Book of Martyrs). The English parliament
did agree to fund a royal army for Ireland, but only if parliament itself was given the power to command the army.
This was not one of the customary powers of parliament. In response the king in 1642 declared his opponents in
parliament traitors and rebels, and raised his standard against them.

The King of England was now at war with the English Parliament, in a conflict known
as the English Civil War. It is one of a series of wars within and between different parts
of the BriFsh Isles known collecFvely as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-
1655). They are obsessively studied by BriFsh historians, provide the backdrop to
countless historical novels and romances, and on any given weekend hundreds of
people will dress up as soldiers or camp-followers from the period and re-enact
baWles. Eventually Charles was defeated, declared a tyrant, and in January 1649 put
on trial and beheaded. That the representaFves of the people should treat a king as a criminal was an event that
shocked Europe and forever changed the status of the English monarchy: no future king could regard himself as
above the law.

As a result of the power vacuum lee by the king’s execuFon, one of the parliamentarian generals, Oliver Cromwell,
became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England: in effect a military dictator of an English republic. He
subjugated Scotland aeer having put down the rebellion in Ireland so bloodily that
he is sFll remembered with biWerness in Irish history. Notoriously, aeer the Siege
of Drogheda (1649) he had the city’s defeated defenders put to the sword, as well
as any Catholic priests that could be found in the town, and allowed his troops to
rampage with impunity (killing or harming an unknown number of civilians). He
wrote to Parliament in jusFficaFon that “I am persuaded that this is a righteous
judgement of God on these barbarous wretches”. Conversely, he was long
regarded by English liberals as a hero of English and Protestant liberty for opposing
royal despoFsm and establishing freedom of worship for Nonconformists. In 1899
a statue of him was set up outside the House of Commons, rallying the Liberal
vote but creaFng a public relaFons disaster in Ireland (which was then part of the
United Kingdom). In England itself, there was a paradoxical mixture of liberty and
repression. Under Cromwell theatres and the celebraFon of Christmas were
prohibited as ‘ungodly’, and Elizabethan laws against Catholics (which Charles had
applied very selecFvely) were acFvely enforced. The Anglican Church was
disestablished, and many cathedrals vandalised. But all types of Protestants were
allowed freedom of worship, and Jews were officially readmiWed to England.

RestoraFon

By the Fme Cromwell died people were keen to have Charles I’s son as king, and in 1660 the monarchy was restored
under Charles II, the Anglican Church was re-established, and a new ediFon of the Prayer Book
was put out which remained the standard unFl the 20th century. It included a commemoraFon
on 30 January of Charles, King and Martyr, which was removed in 1859 but is sFll celebrated in
some churches. One of the services in the Prayer Book, choral evensong, has been a parFcularly
strong influence on English musical tradiFons. Aeer 1660 theatres could again be opened
(Charles II himself was rather keen on actresses). Non-conformists were again persecuted,
although now with prison and the pillory rather than the execuFons seen in Elizabeth’s reign. A
new Protestant sect, the Quakers, came in for parFcular harassment. This was the period in
which the persecuted BapFst John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress (1678), an allegorical
adventure story about the dangers beseong the soul, which for two centuries was one of the
most popular books in the English language. In Scotland a much more rigorous approach was
taken to enforcing conformity to the royal will in maWers of religion. The Covenanters, whose movement had begun
as a protest against the imposiFon of bishops and the Prayer Book, conFnued to put up resistance, despite having
fought against Cromwell for Charles II’s restoraFon. Armed rebellions in 1666 and 1679 were followed by almost a
decade that Scoosh Presbyterians remember as “the Killing Time”.

It was during Charles II’s reign that the Royal Observatory was built at Greenwich (where the meridian was to be
established). This was part of the new presFge given to the physical sciences, which made great advances in this
period thanks to a number of figures, best known among them Sir Isaac Newton, who framed the laws of moFon
and the universal law of gravitaFon, as well as making important contribuFons to mathemaFcs and opFcs.

Glorious RevoluFon

Charles II was succeeded by his brother James II. James had become a Catholic, but was a widower with two
Protestant daughters. As king he tried to force through religious toleraFon, allowing non-Anglicans to enter the
universiFes and to be appointed as public servants and as army officers. His high-handed approach, which included
imprisoning un-co-operaFve Anglican bishops, was resented by the Anglican establishment, but they were
comforted by the thought that James would be succeeded by his Protestant daughter Mary, who was married to
William III, Prince of Orange. When James remarried and had a son, the prospect of a Catholic succession energized
opposiFon to his rule. In 1688 William of Orange invaded Britain. The commanders of the army sent to oppose him
switched sides, and the Dutch army marched up to London, occupied the capital, and decreed marFal law. This
was the last successful invasion of England, but in English history books it is not treated as an invasion at all – more
as a sort of rescue mission. James II went abroad to regroup, and William and Mary declared themselves joint king
and queen. Parliament decreed that by leaving the country James II had implicitly surrendered the crown, and
issued the Bill of Rights, explicitly limiFng royal power (making it a sort of second Magna Carta). They also decreed
freedom of religion for all ChrisFans except Catholics. It is sFll legally impossible in the United Kingdom for anyone
in line to the throne to become a Catholic or to marry a Catholic (if they do, they are automaFcally no longer in
line for the throne).

In 1690 James II returned to the aWack, landing in Ireland with French support
and raising an army there. Central to the historical idenFty of the Ulster Scots
community is their resistance to a Catholic king with an Irish army, and their
deliverance by a Protestant prince of the House of Orange. The Siege of Derry,
in which the apprenFce boys shut the gates to prevent James’s army from
entering the city, is commemorated each year. So too is the BaWle of the Boyne,
where William defeated James. This is a public holiday in Northern Ireland,
“Orange Day”, and there are associaFons called Orange Lodges that organise marches each year to commemorate
the baWle. Members are called Orangemen.

The change of regime that brought William and Mary to power is called the Glorious
RevoluFon because it was relaFvely peaceful in England. In Ireland it involved a series of
armed conflicts known as the Williamite Wars. In Scotland the change of government was
not as bloody as in Ireland, but sFll involved some violence, most notably the Glencoe
Massacre, when government soldiers tried to wipe out Clan MacDonald of Glen Coe for
failing to meet the deadline to swear loyalty to the new regime.

Union

The Scoosh state at this Fme was failing economically. A venture to establish a Scoosh colony at Darien, in the
Strait of Panama, had failed and bankrupted the government. In 1706 the Scoosh and English parliaments agreed
a Treaty of Union, which came into force in 1707. By this act, England and Scotland became the United Kingdom
(Ireland was sFll ruled from Dublin as a separate kingdom with its own parliament, but under the English Crown).
The Scoosh state was saved from bankruptcy, and free trade was ensured between Scotland and England. The
Scots retained their own established church (the Church of Scotland), their own educaFon system and their own
legal system, including their own system of nobility and lordship. In other respects the two countries were to be
ruled as a single kingdom, with a single parliament in Westminster. Those lamenFng Scotland’s loss of
independence could sneer that while Scotsmen could not be conquered, they could be bought.
Jacobites

William and Mary, childless, were succeeded by Mary’s sister (James II’s other daughter), Queen Anne, recently
portrayed on film in The Favourite (which makes no claim to be historically accurate). During her reign the quesFon
of the exact relaFonship between parliamentary power and royal dynasFc succession led to the development of
two rival ‘parFes’ in Parliament: the Whigs (from a Scoosh word for bandit) who emphasised liberty for property-
owners and Protestants and limitaFons on the power of the Crown, and the Tories (from an Irish word for bandit)
who emphasised loyalty to the Stuart dynasty and the maintenance of tradiFon and of Anglican supremacy: in
many ways the division replicated the divisions of the English Civil War but by more peaceful means. This
development of parliamentary parFes itself changed the nature of government: in 1710 the ministers leading
Queen Anne’s government resigned together because they were unable to get parliament to support their policies,
and they were replaced with a group of Tory ministers who did have the support of parliament. While it is now
normal in parliamentary democracies for a government that is unable to gain the support of parliament to resign,
it was a novelty 300 years ago.

At Queen Anne’s death, Parliament offered the crown to George of Hanover, as George I, a distant relaFve of the
royal family who was safely Protestant. They passed over much closer relaFves in order to ensure that a Catholic
could not rule. This brought Stuart rule in the BriFsh Isles to an end, replacing them with the Hanoverians. That
the royal line of Scotland and Ireland should be altered in London was not everywhere accepted. Even in some
parts of England, parFcularly in the West Midlands and the North-West, many people thought that the throne
should have passed to James II’s son— James III as he was known to his supporters, or more widely as “the
Pretender” (meaning ‘claimant’, but reinforcing the shie in meaning towards ‘somebody making false claims’).
James’s supporters were known as Jacobites, from Jacob, a form of the name James.

In 1715 there was an unsuccessful revolt in Scotland to put James on the throne.
Many parFcipants escaped into exile rather than submit to Hanoverian rule. In 1745
this was followed by another aWempt led by James III’s son, Charles Edward Stuart
(“Bonnie Prince Charlie”, or “the Young Pretender” – pictured). Militarily, the main
strength of JacobiFsm was in the Scoosh Highlands. The ’45 had a real chance of
succeeding, or at least of reaching London, but in the end the Jacobite army was
forced back to Scotland and finally defeated on Culloden Moor in 1746, in the last
baWle fought on BriFsh soil. The Prince himself had to flee, and wandered through
the Highlands in disguise, being hidden by his supporters (most famously Flora
MacDonald, who at one point disguised him as her maid), unFl he was able to escape
to France.

Once Jacobites were no longer a serious threat to the Hanoverian establishment, they were very soon repackaged
in senFmental ficFon and popular history as misguided heroes fiercely loyal to a doomed cause (a process
exemplified in Sir Walter ScoW’s 1817 novel Rob Roy). The aeermath of the ’45, with Hanoverian troops occupying
and pacifying the Highlands, building military roads, searching for fugiFve Jacobite leaders, and suppressing
expressions of tradiFonal Highland culture, is the seong for the novel Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
– a classic of what would now be called the ‘young adult’ genre – and for the recent television series Outlander.
The original version of the Skye Boat Song (first published 1884, and adapted as the theme music for the Outlander
series) recalls Bonnie Prince Charlie’s brief crossing to Skye, with Flora MacDonald, to evade capture, and the song
My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean is oeen taken to refer to his exile.

In the decades aeer the ’45, the social and poliFcal significance of the Highland clans was broken, and large areas
that had been farmed by smallholders were cleared of humans to make way for grazing sheep. Considerable
numbers of ordinary people emigrated to England, to North America, or to the Caribbean, in a process of
depopulaFon, known as the Highland Clearances, that conFnued well into the nineteenth century (when Australia,
New Zealand and South Africa also became desFnaFons). Robert Burns’s poem Auld Lang Syne (now one of the
best-known songs in the world) is about the separaFon of childhood friends by emigraFon, and the 1865 painFng
The Last of the Clan shows an old man and his granddaughter remaining on shore as the final remnant of a
community broken up by such processes.
 Chapter 4 Imperial and Industrial Britain

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Britain became the first industrial naFon and the largest imperial power
known to history. The legacy of both of these developments is sFll very strong.

Property and privilege

The greatest work of art of the eighteenth century was the country house or stately home: an aristocraFc dwelling
that showcased architecture, landscaping, gardening, interior design and
furniture- making, complete with silverware, libraries and art collecFons. Many
are now tourist aWracFons, and even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
it was good manners for such a house to be open to respectable sightseers when
the family was away. This is a key plot point in both Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.

In Britain, aristocracy as a legally defined status with special privileges (such as siong in the House of Lords) covered
a much smaller group than in most places on the ConFnent. The enormous power and wealth that was
concentrated in these few hands led to a style of life that has always fascinated, while the manoeuvres required to
secure a family’s wealth and its conFnuity has inspired considerable imaginaFve art (such as the 2008 film The
Duchess, or the 2024 Nenlix series The Gentlemen). A much larger body of lesser landowners known as “gentry”
would on the ConFnent have been considered minor nobility, but in the BriFsh system counted as commoners,
and dominated the House of Commons. Although not sharing the privileges of the aristocracy, they were socially
not strongly disFnguished from them. This meant that there was rather more social mobility in Britain than in, for
example, ancien regime France or Spain. There was an easy alliance of the aristocracy with the gentry and with
wealthy financial families (those acFve in banking, insurance and investments). Anybody with property could aspire
to be considered a “gentleman”; no genealogical test or legal change of status was required.

GenFlity was based on property, and for those who failed to respect property this was a harsh period. The number
of crimes for which the punishment was hanging increased fourfold over the course of the eighteenth century,
mostly by punishing ever more crimes against property with death by hanging, a development someFmes know
as the Bloody Code. A new punishment also became common as an alternaFve to hanging: penal transportaFon.
Convicted criminals would be shipped to the Americas (especially the Caribbean) or to Australia to serve their
sentences there as labourers.

Empire

In the eighteenth century Britain became a truly global power in compeFFon with France, especially during the
Seven Years War (1756–1763), known in America as the French and Indian War (which provided the seong for the
first great American novel, The Last of the Mohicans, published 1826). The BaWle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759
brought French Canada under BriFsh rule. The BaWle of Plassey in 1757 enabled the East India Company to take
control of the tax apparatus of Bengal, aeer which it gradually extended its poliFcal power across more of India.
The EIC servants governing India were more concerned with profit than with good governance, and Company
misgovernment in Bengal led to a major famine in 1770. The BriFsh government would eventually take over the
government of India directly in 1858, aeer a disastrous rebellion against Company rule known in most BriFsh
histories as the Indian MuFny, but in India as the First War of Independence. Queen Victoria, whose long reign
(1837-1901) coincided with the apogee of BriFsh global power, in 1876 took the Ftle Empress of India.

More peacefully, though not enFrely without violent incident, James Cook charted the Pacific on three voyages
between 1768 and 1779, securing BriFsh rule in Australia and puong Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand more securely
on the map. He is oeen mistakenly thought to have “discovered” Australia and New Zealand; in fact the first
Europeans to see them had been Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century, but they had not charted them fully, or
done much about them – and of course both were already inhabited by the descendants of much earlier
discoverers. The ‘First Fleet’ carrying BriFsh convicts to establish a penal colony in Australia arrived in January 1788
– the beginning of European seWlement in the AnFpodes.

The first major setback to the growth of the BriFsh Empire was the 1776 rebellion of the colonists on what is now
the east coast of the United States. The American RevoluFonary War was a failure for those loyal to the Crown, but
later historians saw even that as a triumph of BriFsh colonists fighFng against a Hanoverian monarch in the spirit
of BriFsh liberty. The presidenFal form of government established by the American ConsFtuFon is broadly similar
to the BriFsh parliamentary system of government, but does have a few significant differences. In parFcular, the
separaFon of powers between execuFve and legislaFve branches of government mean that a President, who is
both head of state and head of government, can remain in power even without the support of Congress, while it
would be unthinkable in Britain for a Prime Minister to remain in government without the confidence of the House
of Commons. One of the similariFes lies in their use of the ‘first past the post’ or ‘winner takes all’ electoral system,
which tends to encourage the dominance of two parFes, with governments alternaFng between them rather than
being coaliFons of mulFple parFes (in contemporary Britain, the two main parFes are Labour and the
ConservaFves; in the US the Democrats and the Republicans). In the modern world almost all democracies favour
either a parliamentary system like the United Kingdom (with a monarch or a president as formal head of state but
a prime minister with parliamentary support leading the government) or a presidenFal system like the United
States (with a directly elected president who is both head of state and head of government, but legislaFve power
held by a separately elected assembly).

Britain retained its colonial presence in Canada and in the Caribbean or West Indies (the Bahamas, Barbados,
Jamaica, etc.). During the French RevoluFonary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), Britain gained control
of places that had previously been ruled by the French (such as MauriFus) or the Dutch (such as Cape Colony, the
beginnings of what is now South Africa). Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the early twenFeth
century, BriFsh rule was extended across much of Africa, including what are now The Gambia, Ghana and Nigeria
in West Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe in southern Africa,
and Sudan in northern Africa. What are now Namibia and Tanzania were taken from the Germans during the First
World War. Almost all these former parts of the BriFsh Empire have poliFcal and legal systems modelled on BriFsh
insFtuFons.

The force that held this far-flung Empire together was the Royal Navy. This was the pre-
eminent military body of the nineteenth century, unrivalled aeer HoraFo Nelson led it
to victory against the combined French and Spanish fleets in the BaWle of Trafalgar
(1805), which made a Napoleonic invasion of Britain or Ireland an impossibility. Nelson
died in the baWle, but his order of the day — “England expects that every man will do his
duty” — passed into legend. Trafalgar Square in London, and Nelson’s Column towering
over it, commemorate his achievement. (The Russell Crowe film Master and
Commander, based on a series of historical novels, gives some idea of the current
popular image of the Royal Navy in Nelson’s day.)

The East India Company had run Britain’s tea trade with China since the seventeenth
century. The main problem they faced was finding something the Chinese would buy in
return, to stop the trade from becoming a drain on cash. The soluFon was to finance the trade in tea by selling the
Chinese opium from Bengal. In Britain opium was primarily a painkiller, drunk in an alcohol suspension called
laudanum that could be bought from any pharmacy (and to which Coleridge, for one, developed an addicFon); in
China it was smoked as a drug. When the Chinese government decided to combat widespread drug addicFon in
southern China by banning the opium trade, the Royal Navy was given instrucFons to stop the Chinese from
interfering with BriFsh shipping (even in Chinese ports) – the BriFsh government could not afford to lose the
revenues from the customs duty on the tea trade that was financed by the opium trade. This led to what are known
as the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60), the upshot of which was that Britain first gained possession of Hong
Kong, and later various concessions along the Chinese coast (in Canton, Shanghai, etc.), through treaFes effecFvely
forced on the Chinese government at gunpoint. Most of these concessions were abrogated aeer the Second World
War, but Hong Kong remained a BriFsh possession unFl 1997.

Despite the loss of the American colonies that formed the United States, by the end of the nineteenth century
Britain was at the heart of a truly global empire, comprising a fieh of the world’s surface and a quarter of the
world’s populaFon, from Canada and the Caribbean to West Africa, South Africa and East Africa, across the Indian
subconFnent into South-East Asia (Burma, Singapore, Malaysia) to the trading ciFes of the Chinese coast, and to
the anFpodean islands of Australia and New Zealand. This has made English a world language, and established
parliamentary insFtuFons on every ConFnent. The memory of Empire is now contested: a poll carried out in the
UK by YouGov in 2014 found that 59% of those surveyed thought the Empire was something to be proud of,
although the descendants of those who were ruled over as imperial subjects would seldom share that view, oeen
being more aware of the violence of imperial rule.
Industry

One part of Britain’s rise to world power status was due to it being at the forefront of
industrialisaFon. Coal, iron and cloth were the three industries that were central to the
Industrial RevoluFon. The beginnings of industrialisaFon came with the use of mechanical
power (at first derived from waterwheels) to spin and weave fabrics. Then the use of steam
power to drive engines was added, including the engines of locomoFves and steam ships. Iron,
and later steel, were used in the construcFon of engines, machinery, ships, railway tracks, and
new types of building. SmelFng required coal (or coke derived from coal), as did steam
engines. Coalmining was important in South Wales, the West Midlands, the North of England,
and Lowland Scotland. CoWon mills predominated in Lancashire and woollen mills in Yorkshire;
shipbuilding in Belfast, Glasgow and Newcastle; ironworks and steel mills in South Wales and
Sheffield; engineering works in the West Midlands (Birmingham and the Black Country).
Industrial heritage is an important part of modern BriFsh ideas of naFonal idenFty, especially
in the areas that played leading roles in industrialisaFon.

Early industrialisaFon had relied on water for power and canals for transport. In the nineteenth century steam
power and railways came to the fore. For the first Fme in history, people could safely travel faster than a horse
could gallop. The first commercial railway was between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830. Soon they were being
built all over the country. In 1866 the first lasFng trans-AtlanFc telegraph cable was laid (aeer two short-lived cables
had failed). Thanks to submarine telegraphy, for the first Fme in human history, a message could be sent across
the ocean faster than a boat could carry it – literally at the speed of lightning.

Britain was the first country in the world in which more of the populaFon was employed in manufacturing than in
agriculture, and in which more of the populaFon lived in towns than in the countryside. In the long run this would
mean a higher standard of living, but in the short term it oeen meant pauperisaFon. Skilled workmen, whose only
resource was their labour, found themselves unable to compete with machines, and the owners of the machines
oeen preferred to hire women or children for low wages. One response – not an effecFve one – was to smash
machinery to prevent it from taking men’s work. Such machine-breakers were called Luddites (a word sFll used for
those who resist technological change). Smashing industrial machinery was soon added to crimes for which those
guilty could be hanged.

Many factory owners were only interested in keeping wages low, but some thought it was in their own best interest
to ensure that their workforce was happy and healthy. Some of these more philanthropic employers built factory
towns to provide decent housing, with community acFviFes to provide recreaFon (New Lanark, in Scotland, is the
classic example). By the end of the nineteenth century it was widely accepted that trade unions benefited both
workers and employers, but earlier in the century courts could regard it as criminal conspiracy for workmen to
form trade unions to negoFate collecFvely, let alone to go on strike – in the minds of some judges, such acFviFes
were too close to blackmail. In 1834, a group of men from the village of Tolpuddle were sentenced to penal
transportaFon for having formed a union of agricultural labourers. In 1836 these ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ were
pardoned aeer a campaign of protests and peFFons on their behalf – one of the earliest examples of successful
mass peaceful protest. From 1838, the CharFsts were a mass movement for democracy, demanding that the vote
be extended to all working men, even those who did not own property, and mostly agitaFng by the same peaceful
methods of mass peaceful demonstraFon and peFFon (although demonstraFons could someFmes become riots,
and an armed aWempt to break CharFst leaders out of prison in South Wales in 1839 came to be known as the
CharFst Rebellion or Newport Rising). Another new form of organisaFon was the co-operaFve, which in its modern
form began in Rochdale in 1844 (the world’s first co-operaFve store is now a museum).

Irish famine

Ireland had been reluctantly joined to the United Kingdom in 1801, to Fghten BriFsh control of the island aeer a
rebellion in 1798, inspired by the American and French RevoluFons, had been brutally put down. In the 1840s,
when potato blight destroyed the crop on which most Irish peasants subsisted, the authoriFes in London were
slow to respond, seemingly not realising how urgent the crisis in Ireland was. Grain grown in Ireland was even being
shipped out of the country while the Irish poor were starving. As the Irish naFonalist journalist John Mitchel wrote
(and he was sentenced to penal transportaFon to Bermuda for ‘sediFous libel’ for wriFng such things):

They behold their own wretched food melFng in roWenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden
ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England . . .

Liberal economic principles suggested that the government intervening in economic processes would only store
up trouble for the future. The best way to help the Irish was thought to be to encourage them to emigrate, so that
the populaFon in Ireland would no longer surpass the island’s resources. To the starving Irish, it could easily look
as though the BriFsh government was conspiring to get rid of them, either by hunger or by emigraFon. The failure
to respond effecFvely to the Irish potato famine of the 1840s prevented the union of Britain and Ireland from ever
becoming a happy one. The misery of this period is remembered in public monuments throughout Ireland, and in
the unofficial anthem The Fields of Athenry. A NaFonal Famine Museum was established in 1994.

Robert Peel

During the Napoleonic Wars a set of laws called the Corn Laws had been passed to protect BriFsh agriculture.
These kept the price of grain arFficially high, ensuring that farmers stayed in business. As industrialisaFon
progressed, both industrial workers and factory owners came to see this as a bad thing: cheaper grain would mean
cheaper bread, and less pressure on wages. For the powerful landowners who dominated the BriFsh
Establishment, lower grain prices meant lower incomes, and maintaining the established order was the goal of
most Members of Parliament. Liberal poliFcians agitated for the repeal of the Corn Laws, but it was only during
the Irish Famine, when the ConservaFve Prime Minister Robert Peel became convinced that free trade was in the
naFonal interest, that the laws were repealed. Factory owners and workers regarded Peel as a hero who had put
the naFonal interest ahead of his party’s interest, and statues and monuments were put up in his honour, while
the owners of farmland regarded him as a traitor to the established order.

One of Peel’s earlier achievements, in 1829, was the creaFon of a professional police force with an ethos that
emphasized service to the public (rather than repression of disorder). This was in part due to the revulsion caused
in 1819 by the Peterloo Massacre, when the yeomanry (a volunteer miliFa of local property-owners) had charged
the crowd at a demonstraFon in favour of the universal franchise held in St Peter’s Field, Manchester. As a result
of this, BriFsh police officers do not carry lethal weapons as part of their uniform. The ‘Peelian Principles’ of public
service are sFll the dominant ideal of BriFsh policing, even if the reality someFmes falls short of them.

Parliament reformed and rebuilt

In 1832, with the Great Reform Act, Parliament was updated to match changes that had taken place in society since
the late Middle Ages: ciFes that had grown up without parliamentary representaFon were given MPs, and medieval
towns that had decayed into Fny villages lost their standing as parliamentary boroughs. From 1828 Protestant
Nonconformists enjoyed full civil liberFes, from 1829 Catholics could vote and be elected to Parliament (a reform
that had been promised during the negoFaFon of the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, but had repeatedly been
delayed), and the main impediment to Jews siong in Parliament was removed in 1858. VoFng was sFll restricted
to men who paid a certain level of property tax, but this changed in 1867, when the RepresentaFon of the People
Act changed the law so that any man over the age of 21 who was the head of a household became enFtled to vote.

In 1835 the Houses of Parliament themselves had caught fire and were rebuilt in a Gothic Revival style as the
building seen today, with the famous clock tower generally known as Big Ben (but now officially named the Queen
Elizabeth Tower). There is a painFng of the fire by J.M.W. Turner, one of the best-known painters in the history of
BriFsh art. London was quickly outgrowing its infrastructure, and especially its sewers. In the summer of 1858 the
stench of sewage and other polluFon in the Thames became so overpowering that Parliament had to suspend its
session – an event known as the Great SFnk. Embankments were built on the Thames to prevent high Fdes from
washing sewage into the streets and there was massive investment in the infrastructure of water supply and
sewage (keeping the two carefully disFnct). The London familiar to Dickens was being transformed into something
more like the London of today.
 Chapter 5 TwenFeth century Britain

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the demand to extend the franchise to all adult men, even those who
were not heads of households, became more insistent, as did the demand that the vote be given to women too.
The pressure for greater self-determinaFon in Ireland, establishing ‘Home Rule’ for domesFc affairs while keeping
the island part of the BriFsh Empire internaFonally, had become inescapable but were not universally supported:
miliFas were being formed to fight both for and against the implementaFon of such plans. Any plans to respond to
these demands were interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-1918 (subsequently known as the First
World War).

Today, BriFsh historical awareness is dominated by the events of the twenFeth century, parFcularly as they relate
to the two World Wars. As the history of the First World War is well known, and is part of general European history,
there is no need to rehearse it here. Suffice it to say that three-quarters of a million UK troops died in the course
of the war. Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme became bywords of slaughter. Canadians disFnguished
themselves in the baWlefields of France and Flanders. So did Australians and New
Zealanders (iniFally serving together in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps –
ANZAC), although their main cultural memory is of the Gallipoli Campaign, in Turkey –
these naFons’ first experience of modern warfare. Every year, on the Sunday closest to
11 November (Remembrance Sunday), and on 11 November itself (ArmisFce Day), the
dead of the First World War, and all subsequent wars, are remembered. (Australia and
New Zealand keep Anzac Day, 25 April.) In Britain, the most important of the many
ceremonies of remembrance is that held on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph in
Whitehall. Around 11 November it is very common to see people wearing a red paper
poppy to commemorate the war dead and show their support for the Royal BriFsh
Legion (a charity that helps veterans).

Irish independence

At Easter 1916, in the middle of the First World War, a group of Irish naFonalists proclaimed the Republic of Ireland
in Dublin and tried to seize control of key locaFons in the city. The BriFsh Army responded to the Easter Rising by
bombarding central Dublin. The rebellion was suppressed and the ringleaders were arrested and, for the most part,
promptly executed by firing squads. Most Irish people were appalled at the rising, but the BriFsh response to it
turned public sympathy against the government. In 1918 the general elecFon in Ireland saw the breakthrough of
the naFonalist party Sinn Fein, whose members had sworn never to sit in the Westminster parliament and instead
held their own illegal parliament in Dublin. In 1920–1921 there was a War of Independence in Ireland that was
ended when the BriFsh government agreed to seong up the Irish Free State (semi-independent within the BriFsh
Empire) for all of Ireland except the six northern counFes with large Ulster Scots populaFons, where the majority
wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom. This was followed by a Civil War (1922–23) between those Irish
naFonalists willing to accept this and those who saw it as a betrayal of the ideal of a fully independent republic
covering the whole island of Ireland. Major films set in this period of Irish history are Michael Collins (1996) and
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006); there are also the two seasons of the Irish TV series Rebellion (2016,
2019), currently available on Nenlix.

In 1937 the Irish Free State adopted a new consFtuFon that effecFvely made it an independent country, and in
1949 it fully and formally became the Republic of Ireland (Northern Ireland sFll being part of the UK). During the
Second World War, the Irish Free State remained neutral but the government decreed a State of Emergency and
interned radical naFonalists to prevent them provoking a BriFsh response that might drag Ireland into the war on
the German side.

The arFcle of the Irish consFtuFon idenFfying the naFonal territory as ‘the whole island of Ireland’ was removed
only in 1999. In the intervening years, Irish naFonalists could claim that the existence of Northern Ireland was an
illegal occupaFon of Irish territory, while unionists could claim that the Republic illegally laid claim to part of the
United Kingdom. This made relaFons between Britain and Ireland somewhat awkward.
Votes for women

Before the First World War was over, in February 1918, an Act of Parliament was passed that
gave the vote to every BriFsh man (or subject of the Empire living in Britain) over the age of
21, and to all BriFsh women over the age of 30 who owned property or held a university
degree. This was not equal representaFon, but it was a big step towards it. The first general
elecFon in which women voted and stood for elecFon took place in December 1918. For the
decade before the war, suffrageWes had campaigned for votes for women, someFmes with
violent protests. The Pankhursts (mother and daughters) were the leading figures in the
campaign. Most famously, in 1913 the acFvist Emily Davison died of injuries resulFng from
running out in front of the king’s racehorse during the Derby. Some of the myth-making about
the campaign can be gauged from the 2015 film SuffrageWe.

Second World War

Although the BriFsh Army and the Royal Navy fought all around the world during the Second World War
(parFcularly in North Africa, South-East Asia, Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries), the popular memory
of the war is as an air war. In the BaWle of Britain, the German Luewaffe bombed BriFsh airfields and ciFes (a
procedure known as the Blitz – from the German Blitzkrieg); the Royal Air Force (RAF) did its best to stop them.
The manoeuvrability and relaFvely easy handling of the Spinire fighter plane (meaning pilots could be trained
quickly), a supply of refugee pilots from Europe (parFcularly Czech and Polish, but also Belgians and others), and
the development of radar to give the RAF advance warning of German raids, meant that the BriFsh had an
unexpected advantage. Later, BriFsh bombers aWacked German ciFes, iniFally to destroy military infrastructure but
later simply to do as much damage as possible (most notoriously to Dresden). The morale-boosFng speeches of
the warFme Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, are familiar to anybody with ears, and have provided many famous
turns of phrase, of greatest relevance here his statement in 1940 that: ‘Upon this baWle depends the survival of
ChrisFan civilizaFon. Upon it depends our own BriFsh life, and the long conFnuity of our insFtuFons and our
Empire.’

To this day, Britons’ percepFons of themselves and their country are shaped by the fact that the United Kingdom
remained free of Nazi occupaFon, and played a major role in liberaFng much of Western Europe (‘We who either
defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free when otherwise it would have been in chains’, as
Margaret Thatcher put it in 1979). In 2002, when the BBC held a poll to idenFfy the ‘greatest ever Britain’, Churchill
easily came first.

Five giants

During the Second World War, a report on Social Insurance and Allied Services was drawn up for Parliament by the
economist William Beveridge. It is usually known as the Beveridge Report, and it provided the framework for the
post-war welfare state. The key principle is: ‘All people of working age should pay a weekly naFonal insurance
contribuFon. In return, benefits would be paid to people who are sick, unemployed, reFred or widowed.’

The purpose, in Beveridge’s view, was to combat the most urgent of five evil
social forces (referred to in language reminiscent of Pilgrim’s Progress or The
Hobbit as ‘five giants’) that prevented people from reaching their full
potenFal: Want (lack of income), Ignorance (lack of educaFon), Squalor (lack
of sanitary dwellings), Disease (lack of health care), and Idleness (lack of
employment). The post-war government led by Clement AWlee (Prime
Minister 1945–1951), which was the first Labour government, tackled all
these social problems in various ways. It was an effort that AWlee, quoFng
William Blake’s Jerusalem, referred to at a Labour Party conference as “building Jerusalem”.

In 1944 Churchill’s warFme government had passed an EducaFon Act that was implemented by the post-war
Labour government: universal, free secondary educaFon was made available, compulsory to the age of 15, with
selecFon at the age of 11 into one of three streams: grammar school, technical school, or secondary modern
school. Each school day was to begin with ‘an act of worship’ known as school assembly, in which all the pupils of
the school would gather to hear a few inspiring or encouraging words (‘worship’ in pracFce being a flexible
concept). The main weakness of the system established was that very few technical schools were established,
leaving those who did not get into grammar school at 11 no choice but a secondary modern educaFon. (In the
1970s this ‘triparFte’ system was abolished in favour of comprehensive schools, which were supposed to provide
beWer opportuniFes for social mobility but have not done.)

The pre-war slums were to make way for council flats and council houses – increasingly with running water, gas
cookers, electric lights, and flush toilets. A million new homes were built between 1945 and 1950, some by local
councils and some by private investors. Whole towns were put up beyond the Green Belt round London (the best
known of these ‘new towns’ are Stevenage and Milton Keynes).

The biggest investment was in health: the NaFonal Health

Service (NHS) was set up, providing medical care that is free at
the point of treatment (paid for through taxaFon and naFonal
insurance, not directly by paFents, with no need for insurance
companies or mutual socieFes to cover medical costs). This is
the most socialisFc system of health care in Europe, and is
something most BriFsh people are immensely aWached to. A
poll carried out by the market research organisaFon Ipsos MORI in the summer of 2016 found it to be the single
thing that BriFsh people were most proud of in their country. Unemployment (or ‘idleness’) was the hardest of the
five giants to tackle. Economic planning for full employment was not always the most economically effecFve way
of running companies, and it is widely thought to have delayed the modernisaFon and damaged the
compeFFveness of BriFsh industry.

NaFonalisaFon

Besides the welfare state, much of which survives in some form in spite of recent efforts by ConservaFve
governments, the other main pillar of Labour policy in 1945–51 was the naFonalisaFon of industry. The key sectors
of the economy (energy, transport and heavy industry) were brought under government control, by means of
government agencies or state-owned corporaFons such as the NaFonal Coal Board, the BriFsh Electricity Authority,
BriFsh Gas, BriFsh Railways, BriFsh European Airways, the Iron and Steel CorporaFon of Great Britain. These have
almost enFrely vanished since 1981. The training of professional managers – to replace the oeen amateurish
approach of family-owned businesses – was the purpose of the BriFsh InsFtute of Management (founded 1947).

NaFonalisaFon also extended beyond heavy industry. In 1946 the Arts Council of Great Britain was set up to
subsidise the visual and performing arts. The NaFonal Trust had been founded in 1907 as an NGO, to preserve
vanishing aspects of BriFsh rural life (old post offices, farms, castles); from 1945 it had a statutory charter to take
over and run country houses as public museums — a form of land naFonalisaFon acceptable to the owners. The
NaFonal Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (1949) provided the legal framework for the establishment of
NaFonal Parks (the first in the Peak District and the Lake District) where working-class people from the ciFes could
enjoy the countryside without first having to find the owner and ask permission (or risk being chased off). The
common scam of claiming to represent the landowner in order to demand a fee with threats of prosecuFon for
trespassing became a thing of the past.

End of Empire

The Second World War had as good as bankrupted the United Kingdom, which only survived financially thanks to
a massive loan from the United States. Nevertheless, BriFsh people conFnued to think of their country as a world
power, alongside the US and the Soviet Union. Indian independence was ceded in 1947, with the country
parFFoned into India and Pakistan (which at first included Bangladesh); but even with the loss of India, Britain
remained a major imperial power for another decade. That ended in 1956, with the Suez Crisis. In that year, France
and Britain responded to the EgypFan government’s naFonalisaFon of the Suez Canal by geong Israel to invade
Egypt and then invading themselves under the pretext of separaFng the EgypFan and Israeli forces to safeguard
internaFonal traffic through the canal. Nobody consulted the Americans, and when the Americans made it clear
that they would not support the policy that Britain and France were pursuing, the UK had to drop the plan enFrely,
withdrawing from Egypt in a hurry (without even telling the French first). The ConservaFve Prime Minister of the
Fme was forced to resign for having lied to Parliament. That BriFsh foreign policy now depended on American
approval was a shocking realisaFon for many people, and government lies shaWered public trust in naFonal
insFtuFons.

Britain was the world’s third nuclear power, and Windscale was the world’s first nuclear power staFon for civilian
purposes (although, unwisely, there were aWempts to use it to develop atomic muniFons on the side). In 1957 the
overheated reactor caught fire, denFng Britain’s ambiFons to lead the world in nuclear energy and to keep up with
the US and the USSR in atomic weaponry. The independent nuclear arms programme was cancelled, and the UK
henceforth bought its atomic bombs from the US.

In 1960 the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, recognised the growth of anF- colonialism in Africa in a speech given
in Cape Town in which he used the phrase “the wind of change is blowing through this conFnent” (popularising
the expression “winds of change”). This signalled the beginning of BriFsh withdrawal from Empire in Africa,
which was mostly completed by 1970.

Two events of the early 1960s are oeen taken to symbolise changing aotudes not only to sex but also towards
social deference. In 1960 Penguin Books printed the first BriFsh ediFon of Lady ChaWerley’s Lover, a novel that had
been banned in Britain since the 1930s but could be purchased in France, and were charged with obscenity; in the
subsequent trial (Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd.; otherwise known as the Lady ChaWerley Trial), they were found not
guilty on the basis that the book had arFsFc merit and was therefore exempt from the obscenity legislaFon. The
decision opened the door to explicitly sexual content in art and literature, but the biggest memory of the trial was
how ludicrous the prosecuFng barrister had seemed when asking the members of the jury, “Is it a book that you
would even wish your wife or servants to read?” The second blow to trust in the moral example of the
establishment came in 1963, when it emerged that back in 1961 John Profumo, Minister for War (one of the junior
ministers in the Ministry of Defence), had had an affair with ChrisFne Keeler, a nightclub dancer and model who
had also been sleeping with a Russian diplomat. Profumo had then lied to Parliament about it, and when this
became apparent he was obliged to resign in disgrace. The naFonal security angle of the Profumo affair gave
newspapers an excuse to cover the scandalous sex life of ChrisFne Keeler’s circle, which included other influenFal
“Establishment” figures. (These days no such excuse would be necessary.) The result was an undermining of any
moral authority the Establishment might sFll have had, and the beginning of the BriFsh press’s long and intrusive
obsession with celebrity seks scandals.

The Troubles

In the 1960s a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland emerged, claiming equality for the Irish Catholic
community that had long lived as second-class ciFzens in the province. The tradiFon of Orange marches celebraFng
the anniversaries of past victories such as the BaWle of the Boyne was not purely folkloric: it enabled large numbers
of Protestant men to march through Catholic neighbourhoods making a great deal of noise with drums and fifes,
making sure that the Catholic populaFon were well aware of who was in charge. Any challenge to the desirability
of such marches were met with two arguments: it was the tradiFonal route, so part of the cultural heritage of the
marchers; and ciFzens should have the right to walk down any public road without local interests creaFng ‘no go’
areas for them.

The Catholic civil rights movement of the 1960s turned the second argument against the Orangemen, organising
marches that reclaimed public space for Catholic grievances. When they tried to protest in tradiFonally Protestant
neighbourhoods, however, the public authoriFes oeen stopped or rerouted their marches with a heavy police
presence. In 1969 this sparked rioFng in Derry, and the police were unable to restore order. The BriFsh Army was
sent to Northern Ireland. In 1972, BriFsh paratroopers opened fire on a civil rights march, causing 14 deaths. This
incident, known as Bloody Sunday, made it seem that the BriFsh state was at war with the Irish Catholic community,
reinvigoraFng Republican terrorism. (Only in 2010 did the BriFsh government officially accept responsibility for the
killings.) In the following decades, Northern Ireland saw a series of shooFngs, car-bombings, and other murders in
violence between different extremist gangs, both Republican and Unionist. This conflict is known as “the Troubles”.

From 1972 to 1998, Republican terrorists on several occasions planted bombs in ciFes in Northern Ireland and in
mainland Britain. In 1984 the Prime Minister narrowly escaped death when the Provisional IRA set off a bomb in
the hotel she was staying in for the ConservaFve Party Conference in Brighton. Some measure of peaceful
negoFaFon between Republican and Ulster Unionist extremists was only achieved in the 1990s, during the
premierships of John Major and Tony Blair, through cross-border agreements with the Republic of Ireland.
The Thatcher RevoluFon

Over the course of the 1970s, the BriFsh economy came close to collapse. Unemployment and inflaFon were both
out of control. In 1976 the government had to apply to the IMF for a loan – a situaFon more typical of developing
countries than of advanced economies. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power promising to get Britain working
again, and then decided to focus on reducing inflaFon, even though the policy chosen (restricFng the supply of
money) was certain to make unemployment even worse. In 1981 there was rioFng in many of the poorer areas of
major ciFes (London, Manchester, Liverpool). Thatcher was at that point the least popular Prime Minister since
opinion polls had been invented.

This all changed in 1982, when the military dictator running ArgenFna decided to invade the Falklands, which had
been lee nearly defenceless by BriFsh budget cuts. Thatcher’s strong response in fighFng the Falklands War
restored her popularity. It also empFed the Treasury. In the aeermath, she began selling off the state’s assets:
naFonalised industries were privaFsed, sold to companies or to private investors, giving government funds a
temporary boost; people living in council houses were given the opFon of buying them cheaply, creaFng a much
wider class of small property owners. It was something of a lucky thing for Thatcher that her government also
coincided with a period of high revenues from North Sea oil, as well as investment in the City of London of dollars
from other oil naFons.

Since the 1940s, economic policy had been set in consultaFon with industrialists and trade unions. Thatcher was
not interested in helping industrialists who could not help themselves (her policies were good for bankers and
investors, but not for manufacturers); and she was determined to break the power of the trade unions: rather than
“social partners” she regarded them as “the enemy within” (a leeist fieh column seeking to implement socialism
while bypassing democraFc insFtuFons). In 1984 the government provoked the lee-wing NaFonal Union of
Mineworkers into a year-long industrial dispute, the miners’ strike, which lee the union, one of the most powerful
in Britain, defeated and humiliated. During the strike, one confrontaFon between the striking miners and the police
was so violent that it came to be called the BaWle of Orgreave, and the police force responsible was later obliged
to pay compensaFon for the injuries caused. In 1986 Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of The Times, similarly
humiliated the printers’ unions during what was known as the Wapping dispute (Bill Bryson, who worked at The
Times as a subeditor during the dispute, describes his experience of it in his Notes from a Small Island). The post-
war model of social consultaFon ended in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

At the end of the decade Thatcher again became widely unpopular through the introducFon of the “community
charge”, a standard rate of local tax charged on every household using local public services (such as refuse
collecFon). Because it was charged on the basis of being registered as living somewhere, regardless of income, it
was seen as a poll tax (the type of tax that had sparked the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381). It replaced “domesFc rates”,
a local tax which had only been charged on the owners of housing, not on their tenants. This shie from local
services being provided to all at the expense of those who owned property, to being provided at a flat rate paid by
all users, aWacked mechanisms of social solidarity that went back to Victorian social reforms. Massive protests
against the new tax degenerated into the Poll Tax Riots of 1990.

The 1990s

Although the poll tax made Margaret Thatcher unpopular in the country, what ulFmately brought her down in
1990 was disgust among her government colleagues at her populist and intransigent posiFons on European
unificaFon. The ConservaFve Party chose the more moderate and mild-mannered John Major as Thatcher’s
successor. In 1992 he signed the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union. Later that year he won a
general elecFon in which more votes were cast for the ConservaFve Party (over 14 million) than in any elecFon
before or since. Nevertheless, the peculiariFes of the UK’s ‘first past the post’ elecFon system meant that he had
only a narrow majority in the House of Commons, and his premiership was dogged by EuroscepFc ‘rebels’ in his
own party making life difficult for the government in parliament.

As Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Major had taken Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism,
the precursor to the Euro, but in September 1992 the government was forced out again on Black Wednesday by
speculaFon against the pound, which drove down the value of the currency, cosFng the naFon over £3 billion. This
damaged the credibility of Major’s pro-European policy. It was to try to show that he could be ‘tough on Europe’
that in 1994 he vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene’s appointment as president of the European Commission – doing Britain
no good and arguably some harm in the process. A series of scandals discredited the ConservaFve Party as a whole,
and in 1996 maWers came to a head with the EU ban on BriFsh beef, even though the BriFsh government insisted
BriFsh beef was safe. Since the 1980s, Bovine Spongiform EncephaliFs (BSE), popularly known as ‘Mad Cow
Disease’, had been epidemic in BriFsh beef farms. BSE is a brain disease that was transferred from sick sheep that
had been ground into protein to be included in caWle feed. Humans eaFng infected beef can develop a form of
brain deterioraFon known as Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD). Since there is no accurate way of determining
whether this is present before symptoms show, one consequence is that up to the present nobody who lived in
Britain in the 1980s is allowed to donate blood in Belgium. The idea that England’s naFonal dish, roast beef, had
been poisoned, and that the government had tried to cover the fact up, destroyed any chance of the ConservaFves
winning a fieh elecFon in a row.

In May 1997 ‘New Labour’ came to power under Tony Blair, who had reinvented the Labour Party not as the party
of naFonalisaFon: he had revised the most socialist aspect of the party’s consFtuFon, Clause IV, in 1995, so that
there was no longer a commitment to “public ownership of the means of producFon”. Most poliFcians of all parFes
by this Fme agreed that some measure of government intervenFon is desirable in managing the economy and
providing social support to individuals and families, but that too much intervenFon could be damaging both for
the economy and for society. The main point of disagreement between them was just how much or how liWle
intervenFon would be most desirable or most effecFve, with Labour wanFng relaFvely more and ConservaFves
relaFvely less. Blair’s Labour Party was rebranded as the the party of sincerity, authenFcity, and caring, in contrast
to what had widely come to be seen as a hypocriFcal and uncaring ConservaFve Party.

The public hysteria surrounding the death of Princess Diana in August 1997 provided full scope for Blair to display
these qualiFes. Although Blair became notorious for poliFcal ‘spin’, his government introduced a number of
substanFve reforms: the devoluFon of power to a Scoosh Parliament in Edinburgh and a Welsh Assembly in Cardiff;
the modernisaFon of the House of Lords; the streamlining of the legal system and the establishment a Supreme
Court independent of Parliament; improving childhood poverty figures, partly by introducing tax credits for parents
and low earners; finalising a peace deal in Northern Ireland on the basis of cross-border co-operaFon with the
Republic of Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement; and deploying BriFsh troops for intervenFons to protect human
rights in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. All of this was tarnished by Blair’s eagerness to take Britain into the 2003 Iraq
War.

The 2010s
The series of Labour governments headed first by Tony Blair and then by his successor (and former Chancellor of
the Exchequer) Gordon Brown came to an end in 2010, in the first general elecFon aeer the 2008 financial crisis.
To this day, ConservaFve commentators can be heard blaming Labour policy for a banking crisis that was global in
scope and began in the United States. Once in power, the ConservaFve priority was to reduce government spending
and government debt through a policy known as ‘austerity’. They had not quite obtained a majority in the House
of Commons, so unusually had formed a coaliFon government with the Liberal Democrats, a much smaller
grouping that had been the third largest party in the UK unFl the Scoosh NaFonal Party shot to popularity in
Scotland.

Government subsidies for public services were radically reduced, and people were encouraged to be more ‘self
reliant’ by organising provision of social support through chariFes and local associaFons rather than state agencies.
University tuiFon fees rose to over £9,000 per year: the Liberal Democrats had entered the elecFon with an
undertaking not to increase university tuiFon fees, but chose to compromise that commitment to follow their
larger coaliFon partner’s lead. The result was a complete loss of what popularity they had.

Brexit

The United Kingdom’s relaFonship with the European Union has always been unusual. In a speech given in Zurich
in 1946, Sir Winston Churchill had called upon the leaders of Western Europe “to recreate the European fabric, or
as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, safety and freedom.
We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” When European leaders began to do exactly this, however, the
UK remained outside, focused on its global empire, joining neither the European Coal and Steel Community (1952)
nor the European Economic Community (1957). When the decolonising UK did aWempt to join the EEC, in the
1960s, it was twice rebuffed with a French veto (much to the annoyance of the Belgians and the Dutch, in
parFcular). It was only in 1973 that the UK became a member, raFfying its membership with a referendum in 1975.

Margaret Thatcher had campaigned for EEC membership in the 1975 referendum, but she had very clear ideas
about how European integraFon should work: trade should be as free as possible but cooperaFon should be
arranged between naFonal governments, with the role of supranaFonal insFtuFons (European Parliament,
European Commission, Court of JusFce) minimised. When Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission,
proposed a ‘social charter’, so that the protecFon of social and employment rights would keep pace with the
mobility of labour, Thatcher reacted with horror. In 1990, the stridency of her opposiFon to the Delors
Commission’s push for greater European integraFon (which would lead to the 1992 Maastricht treaty) led her
colleagues in government to force her out as leader. She had already negoFated a rebate on the UK’s contribuFons
to EU budgets, and refused to join the Schengen Area (abolishing passport controls between members) or the
Exchange Rate Mechanism (a precursor to the Euro). Her successor, John Major, would opt out of the social chapter
in the Maastricht Treaty.

Over the course of 40 years, the newspapers in the UK (parFcularly the Daily Telegraph, as well as most tabloids)
tended to report on the EU as a meddlesome foreign insFtuFon, imposing ‘rules’ on Britain. At the same Fme,
poliFcians blamed any unpopular policy on the requirements of EU membership, even policies they had themselves
voted for, or even proposed, in EU insFtuFons. There was never any concerted aWempt to explain to the BriFsh
public what the reasons or benefits of membership might be (and to have undertaken any such effort would in all
likelihood have been presented in the press as an aWempt at ‘propaganda’ or ‘indoctrinaFon’). In the years of
austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008, there was a rapid increase in the popularity of the ‘UK
Independence Party’, which promised to restore naFonal pride and wealth by leaving the EU. In the 2014 elecFons
for the European Parliament they did beWer than any other BriFsh party.

There was no chance of Ukip geong a member elected to the BriFsh parliament in Westminster, but in the BriFsh
electoral system of ‘first past the post’ (FPTP, see above) Ukip could shave away enough ConservaFve votes to
create a threat to the ConservaFve ability to gain a majority in Parliament. The formaFon of a coaliFon government
in 2010 was a very unusual event in BriFsh poliFcs, where the FPTP system usually gives one main party, either
Labour or the ConservaFves, enough MPs to form a government without having to form a coaliFon (the converse
of this is that the two main parFes are themselves in a sense coaliFons of different interests and elements: with
the Labour Party mainly divided on just how socialist to be, and the ConservaFve Party long divided over European
Union membership). To steal anF-EU votes back from Ukip, David Cameron promised in the 2015 elecFons that a
ConservaFve government would hold a referendum on conFnued UK membership of the EU. This worked, and he
was able to form a government with a ConservaFve majority. While he would have to keep his promise to organise
a referendum, he was confident that this could be won, and that whatever the outcome it would unify the
ConservaFve Party and take the wind out of Ukip’s sails.

On 23 June 2016 the BriFsh electorate was asked ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European
Union or leave the European Union?’ A narrow majority (just under 52%) voted to leave, and a substanFal minority
(just over 48%) voted to remain.

The main arguments in favour of leaving fell into three broad categories: the economy, immigraFon, and
sovereignty. Economic arguments include the views that membership of the EU costs too much and the money
spent on membership should be spent on other prioriFes (such as the NHS – a suggesFon made by Boris Johnson
on the side of his campaign bus), and that membership of the Single Market restricts the UK’s ability to make
independent trade deals with global partners outside the EU. Counter-arguments are that the cost of membership
more than pays for itself through the benefits to the economy of single-market membership, while the UK’s
aWracFveness to global partners (such as Japanese car manufacturers) is considerably enhanced by being a
gateway to the European single market: leaving the EU would leave the UK weaker in the global economy.

Arguments from immigraFon claimed that free movement of labour within the European single market had led to
an influx of Poles and Romanians working in low-paid jobs, pushing down wages for BriFsh-born workers and
puong pressure on housing and public services. There is a small element of truth to such concerns, but they could
easily be addressed within the exisFng system. Reduced public services are more a result of the ‘austerity’
government of 2010-2015 than of overcrowding by foreigners. StaFsFcs have repeatedly shown that while EU
migrants might temporarily put pressure on resources in some areas, their overall economic impact is very clearly
a net benefit: they pay far more in taxes and social security than they cost in social provision. Neglected during the
campaign was the fact that the NHS depends very heavily on recruitment from outside the UK, parFcularly of
nursing staff – partly because the BriFsh government has cut funding for medical training within the UK. LimiFng
EU migraFon would directly threaten the funcFoning of the NHS.

Sovereignty is an abstract poliFcal principle, but arguments under this heading boil down to a sense that decisions
affecFng the UK should be taken in the UK, and that the decisions of BriFsh courts should not be subject to revision
by foreign jurisdicFons. An addiFonal concern was that it was undemocraFc for decisions affecFng people in the
UK to be taken by bodies the people of the UK had not elected (specifically, the European Commission –
downplaying the role of elected BriFsh representaFves in the European Parliament and of members of the BriFsh
government in the Council of Ministers). The UK had taken a leading role in the creaFon of the single market and
in the enlargement of the EU to Poland and Romania – two of the achievements that some of those arguing to
leave the EU were angriest about. What it means for a country to be independent, or for a government to be
accountable to the people and subject to the rule of law, are vital quesFons to a funcFoning democracy, but in
pracFce these were boiled down to slogans about ‘bendy bananas’ and about controversial decisions of the
European Court of Human Rights (which is not an EU insFtuFon anyway).

Aside from these arguments, which at least have a shadow of a relaFonship to the facts, there was also a secreFve
campaign of scaremongering and misinformaFon on social media (visible only to those targeted) that included
claims such as that Turkey would soon be joining the EU, giving Europe a common border with Iraq and Syria; that
the EU was a mechanism to fulfil Hitler’s ambiFons of a Europe dominated by Germany; that the EU was a way for
foreign socialists to impose state control through an ‘EUSSR’; that the terms of the Lisbon Treaty would make it
impossible to leave aeer 2020, so this was the only chance to escape becoming part of a nascent European
superstate, in which a European army would replace the BriFsh Army; that experts explaining the benefits of EU
membership were all in the pay of the EU so could not be trusted to be objecFve.

The simplest argument for leaving the EU was that Britain had made tremendous sacrifices to liberate much of
Western Europe from Nazi tyranny during the Second World War (and acFvely opposed Soviet tyranny during the
Cold War), but now found itself having to comply with regulaFons decided upon by foreign bureaucrats. The
suggesFon is that a tragic reversal had taken place, in which Britain had fought to free others only to find herself
deprived of freedom, and that those allowing it to happen were traitors to their country. This was a surprisingly
effecFve mischaracterisaFon of the fact that a sovereign Britain had chosen to cooperate with free and democraFc
European allies to create a shared framework which in fact stops far short of what Churchill had called for in 1946:
“a kind of United States of Europe”.

When the referendum result came in, David Cameron resigned, leaving the BriFsh government paralysed over the
summer of 2016. He was eventually succeeded as parliamentary leader of the ConservaFve Party (and hence as
Prime Minister) by Theresa May. May’s government claimed that the UK’s relaFonship with the EU was a treaty
relaFonship with foreign governments, making its renegoFaFon essenFally a maWer of execuFve privilege
(somewhat contradicFng the ‘leave’ argument that membership had taken away BriFsh sovereignty). The Supreme
Court of the UK, however, ruled that parliamentary sovereignty meant that parliament must have the final say on
how the relaFonship was renegoFated, binding the government to seek parliamentary approval before noFfying
the EU of the UK’s intenFon to leave and to raFfy any withdrawal agreement reached. The right-wing Daily Mail,
which had supported the movement to leave the EU, reacted with an extraordinary front-page headline describing
the judges of a sovereign BriFsh court as “enemies of the people” for having upheld the consFtuFonal sovereignty
of the BriFsh parliament.

Both the right-wing media and Theresa May herself had fallen into the trap of describing the outcome of the
referendum as “the will of the people” (ignoring the 48% who had voted the other way). The effecFve but vague
three-word slogan of the Vote Leave campaign had been “Take back control”. Aeer May’s iniFally meaningless
slogan “Brexit means Brexit”, her advisers draeed something that encapsulated the three main arguments for
leaving: “We’re going to take back control of our money, our borders and our laws.” But arguments made during
the referendum campaign were contradictory: would the UK be closing its borders more Fghtly, or becoming more
open to the global economy? Should the UK remain a member of the European single market, like Norway, or
simply have a free trade agreement, like Canada? While there was a narrow majority in the country in favour of
leaving, subsequent developments showed that there was no majority in parliament for any specific form of
leaving.
Theresa May had spoken in favour of remaining within the EU during the referendum campaign, but as Home
Secretary in David Cameron’s government her main emphasis had been on reducing immigraFon (laying the basis
for what became the Windrush Scandal, with people who had arrived from the Caribbean as children decades
before were deported for not being able to prove they had immigrated legally). She seized the chance to restrict
European freedom of movement. By doing this she painted herself into a corner: if there was to be no freedom of
movement, there could be no membership of the EU single market, effecFvely ruling out the “Norway model” or
“soe Brexit” that a number of prominent leave campaigners had argued for before the referendum. The three main
points she needed to negoFate with the other EU member states to be ready for the UK to leave were how much
money the UK government sFll owed for the EU budgets it had agreed to before the vote to leave, what the status
of European ciFzens in the UK and of UK ciFzens in other EU countries would be aeer leaving, and how the border
between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was to be kept open once it became an external border of
the EU.

The first two issues were seWled through negoFaFon, but the sFcking point was the Irish border, which had gone
virtually unmenFoned in the referendum campaign. The Good Friday Agreement that had ended the Troubles in
Northern Ireland is both an internaFonal treaty between the UK and the Republic of Ireland (with the United States
as co-guarantor), and part of the BriFsh consFtuFon (laying out how government and ciFzenship in Northern
Ireland are to funcFon, and what the BriFsh government’s obligaFons are with regard to the people of Northern
Ireland). It gives the people of Northern Ireland the right to hold a BriFsh or an Irish passport, or both, according
to their own preference (meaning that even with the UK leaving the EU, in one part of the UK people will sFll have
the right to EU ciFzenship as Irish ciFzens). During the Troubles, official crossing points on the border between
Northern Ireland and the Republic – the infrastructure of Ireland’s parFFon – had been targets for Republican
terrorists and were transformed into militarised checkpoints. Under the Good Friday Agreement, the border was
to be open, and May quickly promised there would be no ‘hard border’ in Northern Ireland.

Keeping this promise was difficult. To guarantee an open border in Ireland, May’s government eventually agreed a
‘backstop’ with the EU: when the UK lee the EU, Northern Ireland would remain within the European Customs
Union unFl the future relaFonship had been negoFated. But this was vetoed by the DemocraFc Unionist Party
(DUP). In order to improve her posiFon in parliament, May had called a general elecFon in 2017. Rather than
increase her majority, this had actually cost her the slender majority she had, and she was only able to remain in
power thanks to an agreement with the DUP, a party from Northern Ireland dedicated to maintaining the union
with Britain. The DUP insisted that whatever terms the UK lee the EU under should apply to Northern Ireland
equally, with no “customs border in the Irish Sea”. This forced May into the posiFon that the whole of the UK would
remain in the Customs Union unFl the future relaFonship with the EU had been renegoFated. Three Fmes she
took this deal to parliament for raFficaFon and failed – the first Fme by the largest margin of votes that has ever
defeated a government moFon. This is hardly surprising: to leave the EU while remaining within the Customs Union
would mean to give up the ability to shape EU decisions while sFll being bound by them. Neither ‘leavers’ nor
‘remainers’ were willing to agree to this, and with parliament and government deadlocked, May resigned in July
2019 and Boris Johnson took over as ConservaFve leader (and therefore also Prime Minister).

Johnson had no more parliamentary support for his version of Brexit than May had had for hers and he sought to
circumvent parliament enFrely by suspending (technically ‘proroguing’) parliament for over a month from
September to October 2019, in what looked remarkably like a government coup against parliamentary sovereignty.
Cases were brought under English and Scoosh law to challenge the legality of this, and surprisingly the High Court
of JusFce for England and Wales decided that it was a “proceeding in parliament”, essenFally a poliFcal maWer,
and so not subject to a court decision, while the Court of Session in Edinburgh found that it was an execuFve acFon
subject to legal review by the courts. On 24 September 2019 the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
unanimously decided that the prorogaFon had not been lawful, so parliament again met in a tense atmosphere in
which any trust between the House of Commons and the government had been badly compromised. In October,
the ‘Irish backstop’ negoFated by May was renegoFated to leave only Northern Ireland subject to European
customs regulaFons unFl a new trade deal could be struck. This created obligaFons on companies acFve in
Northern Ireland that effecFvely amount to having a customs border with the rest of the UK (the DUP’s dreaded
“customs border in the Irish Sea”), but without actually calling it that. New elecFons were held in December, in
which Johnson won a clear majority of seats (365) on 43.6% of the naFonal vote. This enabled him to form a
government and pursue his own preferred form of Brexit.
The UK lee the EU on 31 January 2020, entering into a ‘transiFon period’ unFl 31 December 2020, so that in terms
of current obligaFons and requirements nothing had yet changed since the 2016 vote. The Withdrawal Agreement
set out how the UK would leave the EU, but not what the future relaFonship would be. This would be governed by
a Trade and CooperaFon Agreement (TCA) that was concluded in December 2020, just a week before the transiFon
period expired. The TCA provides for zero tariffs and zero quotas on trade. While there are no tariffs, there is
addiFonal paperwork and there can be delays while checks are carried out to ensure that goods being moved from
the UK to the EU meet rules of origin and safety requirements. The UK was supposed to insFtute checks on goods
moving the other way in 2022, but unFl 2024 repeatedly delayed doing so, saying it would be too disrupFve to
supply chains.