Myths That Shaped Our History

From Magna Carta to the Battle of Britain

Simon Webb

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473895959
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Folklore e mitologia

"Simon Webb's eminently readable book may draw gasps of horror, disbelief, or disdain... a mind-blowing and fascinating journey through history." — On: Yorkshire Magazine All nations and peoples have a body of legendary tales and semi-historical episodes which explain who they are and help to define their place in the world. The British are no exception, and in this book, Simon Webb explores some of the most well-known episodes from British history; stories which tell the British about themselves and the country in which they live. Examining these events in detail reveals something rather surprising. In every case, the historical facts are greatly at variance with what most British people think that they know about such things as the Battle of Waterloo, Magna Carta, the suffragettes, and so on. Indeed, in many cases the reality is precisely the opposite of what is commonly believed. For example, the Battle of Waterloo was not a victory for the British army, Magna Carta did not set out any rights for ordinary people and the suffragettes delayed, rather than hastened, the granting of votes for women. This book shows that much of what the British believe about their history has been either grossly distorted or is just plain wrong; revealing some of the misconceptions which are held about famous incidents from the nation's past. In each case, the truth is far richer and infinitely more interesting than the version learned by schoolchildren. These myths, for that is what they essentially are, reveal as much about the way that the British people like to see themselves now as they do about what happened in the past.

Chapter 1

Magna Carta 1215: ‘The great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty’?

Britain was not founded or created at any particular moment, nor was there any event which marked definitely its becoming a nation, such as the signing of a declaration of independence. Instead, the British have the Magna Carta. Before Magna Carta, there are a few memorable dates such as 55 BC and 1066 AD, along with a handful of notable kings such as Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror and Richard the Lionheart. These rulers seemed to do pretty much as they pleased. From 1215 onwards though, following King John placing his seal on the great charter which the barons presented to him, we know that we have been living in a nation where the rule of law is paramount. Even the monarch is bound by the law to respect the rights of his or her subjects.

Most of us think that we know the story of the Magna Carta, how the barons grew tired of King John’s arbitrary rule and the way in which he was riding roughshod over ancient liberties and oppressing the common people. They put together a set of principles, including habeus corpus, which guaranteed that from then on every person in the kingdom would have the right to a fair trial and nobody could be detained without a just cause. In fact if there is one thing most people know about Magna Carta, it is that it stops people being locked up without recourse to the courts. Isn’t that what habeus corpus is all about? That the Magna Carta was actually a reactionary document, specifically devised to deny ordinary people any rights and to reverse progressive changes made in the law some years earlier, sounds shocking and even absurd to modern ears. Before going any further, it might be helpful to look at the popular image of the events at Runnymede 800 years ago, just to remind ourselves of what we think we know about the matter. In other words, before examining the historical fact, let us look first at the myth, as we have received it today.

Our ideas about the Magna Carta are usually drawn not from historical or contemporary sources, but rather from a nineteenth-century reimagining of what took place at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. The version of Magna Carta with which we are most of us familiar might not inaptly be called a romantic narrative or, less charitably, a Victorian fairy story. The affection which the Victorians developed for Magna Carta, and which led to their creating an alternative version of reality, had two chief origins, one romantic and the other a desire to mask the brutal realpolitik of colonial exploitation.

As the less attractive aspects of the Industrial Revolution, by-products such as urban slums and ugly factories with their chimneys belching forth smoke, became increasingly plain to see, there were attempts in nineteenth-century Britain to create an imaginary past. This showed, to begin with, in a revival of Gothic architecture: new buildings such as railway stations and law courts were designed in a conscious effort to hark back to another age. Even provincial town halls were tricked out to look like cathedrals or fairy-tale castles. The Palace of Westminster in London, more commonly known as the Houses of Parliament, is a magnificent example of what became known as the Gothic Revival style of building. The towers and pinnacles of this iconic building were deliberately designed to look archaic and centuries out of date. Later on, there was a craze for everything to do with the Middle Ages. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists was founded. They and their followers turned out paintings of an idealized medieval world, much of it based upon the legends of King Arthur and his court at Camelot. The Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, turned the medieval epic of Mallory’s Mort d’Arthur into verse and dedicated the Idylls of the King to Queen Victoria. She and her husband posed for paintings and statues in which they were depicted in fancy dress to represent historical figures from the medieval period. Landseer, for example, painted them as the fourteenth-century monarchs Edward III and Queen Philippa. Illustration 1 shows a sculpture of Victoria and Albert as medieval monarchs.

The uncertainties of the Victorian Age found an antidote in the supposedly more pious and chivalrous era between the Norman Conquest and the Tudors. Life in those days was portrayed as being gentler and having more noble values than those of the counting house and wharf, rampant commercialism being blamed for many of the ills of nineteenth-century society. There was a yearning for a pastoral way of life, before industry had taken over and the cities of Britain expanded to bursting point and beyond. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement fixed upon the fourteenth century as the epitome of this vanished golden age, designing wallpaper, furniture and textiles to fit in with this fantasy world.

It was as part of this romantic movement that Magna Carta emerged as a talisman or touchstone which symbolized all that was good about England and, by extension, Britain. Instead of the preoccupation with the mercenary and mercantile world of trade which characterized Victorian Britain, the myth grew that there had once been a time when ideals of justice and concern for the rights of ordinary men and women had been the motivating force in the country’s history. Powerful men in those days had been prepared to go to war with the king to ensure that the liberty of his subjects was respected and that everybody was entitled to redress in the courts and protection from unjust imprisonment and so on. This version of events was enthusiastically taken up by artists and writers and we cannot do better than look at one or two examples from the time to see how the Magna Carta became known to everybody in nineteenth century Britain as the country’s supreme creation, which was destined to be Britain’s gift to the whole world.

Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome, is known today as a light-hearted comic novel about the misadventures of a group of middle-class men taking a short holiday by hiring a boat and rowing up the Thames from Kingston towards its source. Apart from the farcical anecdotes for which the book is famous, there are a number of descriptive passages about historical events, including the signing of the Magna Carta. Jerome’s take on what took place at Runnymede eight centuries ago encapsulates the myth at which we are looking. The barons are fierce protectors of the rights of the general populace and force King John to accede to their demands on behalf of the people of England. He is reluctant to do so, wishing to hang on to his autocratic rule:

But the heart of John sinks before the stern faces of the English fighting men, and the arm of King John drops back onto his rein, and he dismounts and takes his seat in the foremost barge. And the Barons follow in, with each mailed hand upon the sword-hilt, and the word is given to let go. Slowly, the heavy, bright-decked barges leave the shore of Runnymede. Slowly against the swift current they work their ponderous way, till, with a low grumble, they grate against the bank of the little island that from this day will bear the name of Magna Charta Island.

And King John has stepped upon the shore, and we wait in breathless silence till a great shout cleaves the air and the great cornerstone of England’s temple of liberty has, now we know, been firmly laid.

One almost imagines this seminal incident from English history being depicted in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, so vivid is the imagery. We turn now to a quintessentially English poet of roughly the same era to give his version of the meaning of Runnymede. Kipling’s Reeds at Runnymede was commissioned for C. L. R. Fletcher’s A History of England. This book was written for children, thus ensuring that the rising generation in Edwardian Britain would imbibe the Magna Carta myth in its purest and most distilled form. It would be tedious to quote this poem in its entirety, but a few extracts will give the flavour of the thing:

When through our ranks the Barons came,

With little thought of praise or blame,

But resolute to play the game,

They lumbered up to Runnymede,

At Runnymede, at Runnymede

Your rights were won at Runnymede!

No freeman shall be fined or bound,

Or dispossessed of freehold ground,

Except by lawful judgement found,

And passed upon him by his peers,

Forget not after all these years,

The Charter Signed at Runnymede.

The marvellous and almost surreal notion of all those medieval barons ‘playing the game’, like boys in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, is an enchanting one! Illustration 2 shows King John signing the Magna Carta. Of course, as any schoolboy knows, he actually placed his seal upon it, rather than signing his name.

Magna Carta had of course been known to politicians and lawyers for centuries, but it was the Victorians who brought it to the forefront of the national consciousness, so that by the end of the nineteenth century, most people in the country had heard of it and were aware of its supposed significance. Throughout the twentieth century, this universal familiarity became entrenched, so that in 1959, when an episode of the radio comedy series Hancock’s Half Hour was broadcast, Tony Hancock’s immortal line, ‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’, was seen as wildly amusing. The joke only works of course if everybody listening may be assumed to know at the very least that Magna Carta was a document and not a person.

There was a little more to the propagation of the idea of the Magna Carta as some kind of bill of rights than met the eye. It was not just a handful of artists and writers peddling the story of the sturdy barons standing up to a bad king who were responsible for the myth taking off in such a spectacular fashion that even now, almost 200 years later, we still cling to this weirdly distorted view of history. All the romanticizing of the medieval period and the fetishisation of the Magna Carta itself had a strong business end to it, that was used to justify imperialist expansion, not only by the British in India and Africa, but also by the United States as they spread their influence west across their own country and then over the Pacific Ocean.

There is a great irony in the idea of the Magna Carta being exploited for the purposes of colonialism, particularly since the admiration accorded to it had been inextricably bound up in the vision of a chivalrous past, before the modern world became obsessed and preoccupied with industry and trade. Nevertheless, that is precisely what happened. Burgeoning industrial nations essentially require two things: sources of cheap raw materials and ever-expanding markets for their manufactured goods. Colonialism provided Britain with both. Palm oil, wood, rubber and gold were transported from Africa and in return the products of factories in Birmingham and Sheffield were exported and sold to colonists and natives. It was upon the profit from these transactions that Britain’s prosperity during Queen Victoria’s reign was founded. Put like this, colonialism sounds, as indeed it was, like the systematic exploitation of the weak and powerless by the strong and unscrupulous. This was an unpalatable view for the respectable Victorians – few of us wish to see ourselves as tyrants and oppressors. So it was that the myth of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ came into being, the dishonest claim that occupying and looting the lands of others was some kind of philanthropic enterprise. In both Britain and America, a soothing fiction was devised to assuage the consciences of those who would otherwise baulk at theft and the expropriation of property on an industrial scale. It was to the Magna Carta that those responsible for this self-delusion turned.

The thesis advanced on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean was that white people, especially the British and Americans, had somehow acquired a sacred mission to bring light and the benefits of civilization to those whose skin was darker or more sallow than the average European. In America, this fraud went by the name of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and it was first outlined by the journalist John L. Sullivan in 1845 when he wrote of ‘Our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us’. In short, the ideals of Magna Carta, that is to say democracy and the rule of law, gave America carte blanche to seize any territory they wished to occupy, on the grounds that their own political and social system was manifestly or obviously better than any which might be encountered during this expansion west. Later on in the nineteenth century, this drive west continued across the Pacific until America was imposing its ideals of liberty on nations such as the Philippines, which lay on the edge of the South China Sea.

The American acquisition of the Philippines in 1898, following the Spanish-American War, prompted Rudyard Kipling to write a poem which endorsed the American attitude and also, by implication, that of the British as they forced their way south into Africa. The name of this poem, The White Man’s Burden, has become notorious as summing up all that was wrongheaded about the Victorian world-view. Dated 1899 and containing a dedication to, ‘The United States and the Philippine Islands’, it begins

Take up the White Man’s burden -

Send forth the best ye breed -

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ needs

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild -

Your new-caught, sullen peoples

Half devil and half child.

Two things immediately strike us when reading this opening verse (there are a further six, with which I shall not burden the reader). The first is the overt claim that colonization, specifically that being undertaken by America at that time but by implication also Britain’s similar actions, is undertaken for the benefit of the indigenous inhabitants of whichever land is so favoured. Talk of the ‘burden’, along with references to ‘exile’, ‘serving’ and ‘heavy harness’ make this perfectly clear. The aim of the enterprise is to raise up those who are less civilized than Britain and America and teach them to live by our values. What are these values? Why, they are none other than those that we imagine to be found in the Magna Carta; individual liberty, freedom of speech, trial by jury and so forth.

The second point which we observe is the contemptuous way that the natives of the Philippines are dismissed as ‘fluttered folk and wild’ and also, ‘half devil and half child’. It is plain that the values and ideals of the ‘White Man’ cannot fail to be superior to any beliefs held by such people. In this way, the act of transmitting Western values by invading and occupying hot countries laying closer to the equator than our own, becomes not an exercise in rapacity and greed, but rather a noble crusade to raise up those less fortunate than ourselves. It was here that the Magna Carta came in very useful indeed. Illustration 3 shows the ‘White Man’s Burden’, as John Bull and Uncle Sam struggle to carry black and Asian people towards civilization.

We have so far looked at the myth of Magna Carta, that is to say the mistaken view which most of us have of it. It is time now to look at what the Magna Carta actually was. If it was not a sacred text guaranteeing ordinary citizens rights under law and protecting them from tyranny, then what was it? To understand that, we must look at the age which produced it and try to work out the motives of those who put it together. Let us begin with that great icon of British values, habeus corpus, which literally means in Latin, ‘You have the body’. This is the legal principle which protects us from arbitrary arrest and unlawful imprisonment by the government. It was much discussed when Tony Blair’s government was trying to increase the length of time for which suspected terrorists were being held. It was hoped to be able to extend their detention without trial to ninety days, whereupon many people, both inside and outside Parliament, raised the cry of ‘Habeus corpus’ and the proposal was defeated.

The first thing we need to know is that habeus corpus does not really have anything at all to do with Magna Carta. It originated fifty years earlier, in 1166, the very year that King John was born. The monarch at that time was Henry II and when he came to the throne in 1154, England was recovering from a civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Mathilda. Both sides had hired mercenaries and when the war ended, these men became robbers and brigands, threatening to cause a complete breakdown of law and order throughout the whole country. Many barons ruled their lands as though they were answerable to no one, not even the king. There was also the problem of what amounted to a parallel realm operating within Henry II’s kingdom. This was the Church. In the twelfth century, a sixth of England’s population were clergy of one sort of another, including many monks and nuns. The Church was jealous of its special status and tried to prevent the Crown from having any jurisdiction over the clergy.

Henry was determined to reassert royal authority over everybody in the realm, whether barons or bishops. How this worked out as regards the clergy may be seen in the unfortunate death of Thomas á Becket in 1170. When he found that he was dealing with a particularly recalcitrant Archbishop of Canterbury, one who was determined to defend the rights of the Church, Henry simply had him murdered. Dealing with the barons was more tricky, because Henry had no wish to precipitate another civil war and the barons were fiercely protective of what they saw as their ‘rights’. Eroding the power of the barons would need to be done by more indirect methods. One way of achieving this end was by establishing a new legal system, whereby judges appointed by the king himself travelled around the country, dispensing justice.

At the beginning of Henry’s reign, in the aftermath of the bitter civil war, some of the barons had built castles without permission and were behaving as though they were a law unto themselves, inflicting punishments or imprisoning people according to their individual whims. After moving against these men, who threatened the unity of the realm, the king set about reforming the law through declarations such as the Assize of Clarendon in 1166 and the Assize of Northampton, ten years later. These set out a new series of rules which wrested power from the barons and placed it in the hands of the king’s judges, who would travel around the country dispensing justice. This was a very unpopular move with the barons; reducing their authority as it did.

In the humorous classic 1066 And All That, it is said that the barons had many important duties, one of which was ‘keeping up the Middle Ages’. This was in fact no more than the literal truth, because keeping up the Middle Ages was precisely what the barons wished to do. The idea that the way in which society was then constituted might in any way be imperfect was anathema to the English nobility. When King John continued the process of depriving them of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Introduction: The Meaning of Myth
• Chapter 1 Magna Carta 1215: ‘The great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty’?
• Chapter 2 The Battle of Agincourt 1415: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’
• Chapter 3 The Spanish Armada 1588: ‘Mars and Neptune seemed to attend him’
• Chapter 4 Mutiny on the Bounty 1789: ‘I have been in hell for weeks with you.’
• Chapter 5 The Battle of Waterloo 1815: ‘The nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’
• Chapter 6 Florence Nightingale in Scutari 1854–1855: ‘A Lady with a Lamp shall stand, In the great history of the Land’
• Chapter 7 The Suffragettes 1903–1914: ‘Votes for Ladies’
• Chapter 8 The Golden Age of Edwardian Britain 1901–1914: ‘La Belle Epoque’
• Chapter 9 British Generals of the First World War 1914–1918: ‘Lions led by Donkeys’
• Chapter 10 The Battle of Britain 1940: ‘So much, owed by so many, to so few’
• Endword
• Bibliography
• Plate section