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E U R O P E A N N A T I O N S
GREAT BRITAIN
A REFERENCE GUIDE
FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE PRESENT
Richard S. Tompson
Frank J. Coppa, General Editor
Great Britain: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present
Copyright © 2003 by Richard S. Tompson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact:
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New York NY 10001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tompson, Richard S.
Great Britain : a reference guide from the Renaissance to the present / by Richard S. Tompson.
p. cm. — (European nations series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8160-4474-0
1. Great Britain—History—Bibliography. I. Title. II. Series. Z2016.T66 2003
[DA30] 941’.003—dc212002192540
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
CONTENTS
Foreword |
iv |
Introduction |
v |
History of Great Britain |
1 |
EARLY BRITAIN |
3 |
THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES, 1399–1509 |
11 |
BRITAIN REFORMED, 1509–1603 |
20 |
BRITISH REVOLUTIONS, 1603–1707 |
33 |
A NEW SOCIETY, 1707–1850 |
45 |
THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1850–1914 |
56 |
WORLD POWER, 1899–1945 |
69 |
DECLINE AND DEVOLUTION SINCE 1945 |
83 |
Historical Dictionary A–Z |
97 |
Chronology |
429 |
Appendices |
489 |
MAPS |
491 |
GENEALOGIES |
501 |
ENGLISH SOVEREIGNS FROM 899 |
511 |
UNITED KINGDOM PRIME MINISTERS FROM 1721 |
515 |
Bibliography |
517 |
Index |
526 |
FOREWORD
This series was inspired by the need of high school and college students to have a concise and readily available history series focusing on the evolution of the major European powers and other influential European states in the modern age—from the Renaissance to the present. Written in accessible language, the projected volumes include all of the major European countries: France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia, as well as other states such as Spain, Portugal, Austria, and Hungary that have made important intellectual, political, cultural, and religious contributions to Europe and the world. The format has been designed to facilitate usage and includes a short introduction by the author of each volume, a specialist in its history, providing an overview of the importance of the particular country in the modern period. This is followed by a narrative history of each nation from the time of the Renaissance to the present. The core of the volume consists of an A–Z dictionary of people, events, and places, providing coverage of intellectual, political, diplomatic, cultural, social, religious, and economic developments. Next, a chronology details key events in each nation’s development over the past several centuries. Finally, the end matter includes a selected bibliography of readily available works, maps, and an index to the material within the volume.
—Frank J. Coppa, General Editor
St. John’s University
IV
INTRODUCTION
Great Britain is the largest offshore island in the North Sea. Geography helps to explain its history, its internal structure, and its relation to the world outside. Britain was for centuries the destination or target of continental migrations and invasions—Roman, Saxon, Christian, and Scandinavian. From about A.D. 1100 there was a period of five centuries of struggles with French, Spanish, and papal powers on the continent. By A.D. 1600 there were clear signs of political, religious, and economic independence in Britain. These were accompanied by a reversal of the flow of power and influence, and a British empire took shape in the 17th century, with outposts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. That great international enterprise grew in size and strength until the 20th century, and then it rapidly shrank. As the empire contracted, the British entered a new stage of relations with Europe, joining that continent’s new community structure in 1972 and fitfully enlisting in the new institutions of Europe from then on.
While engaging in these long phases of international relations, the countries and peoples within Britain were constantly evolving and defining themselves. It was over four centuries after the end of Roman occupation before centralized kingdoms emerged in England and Scotland (A.D. 850–900). Wales, on the other hand, was ruled by tribal leaders, as was Ireland; both were subjected to English intervention and eventual domination. Scotland, on the other hand, was able to survive a period of “wars of independence” in the early 1300s. While England built a wealthy and centralized kingdom by 1400, it took 300 years more to assert English power firmly over its near neighbors.
By the end of the 20th century there were two major measurements of the importance of British history: first, in the evidence of the many British “exports” that spread across the globe; and second, in the complex and contradictory position of Britain in the world. The major exports were represented by emigrants, the English language and literature, and institutions of government. Beginning in the age of the American rebellion, there was rapid population growth in Britain. The increase continued through the 19th century, and by 1900 the number of people who had emigrated was greater than the entire population of Britain in 1801. These emigrants and exiles carried British influence in their luggage and in their lives. They used a language which became a universal medium before the end of the 20th century. With that language came a literary heritage of immense power, with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens. The British migration paralleled the construction of empire. And in
V
vi Great Britain
that enterprise political and legal institutions, shaped primarily in England, were exported to the colonies. Even in places where the colonists later rejected the authority of the crown, their parliaments and statutes and their form of courts and common law typically survived as the essential fabric of government.
But the British Empire did decline and almost disappear. In its finale, this once mighty institution was transformed. Perhaps the experience of defeat in America in 1781 gave Britain a sense that imperial losses could be profitable. For from that situation, the once-dependent colonies became a stalwart and powerful ally by the 20th century. Indeed, there developed what some called a “special relationship”—a cultural and political alliance of unusual closeness. Also, in the course of the century after the American revolt, the more mature, white-dominated British colonies evolved into “dominions” of the crown, with virtual independence in domestic affairs. African and Asian peoples did not receive the same treatment. Nevertheless, those colonial peoples were encouraged by the grants of autonomy made to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. When Britain and the United States proclaimed as their war aims “self-deter- mination of nations” (1918) and “four freedoms” (1914), the road to liberation seemed to be open.
The British formal title is “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” This name was created in 1922 with the foundation of the Irish Free State, itself a dominion government. That event ended a period of over seven centuries of English rule of Ireland. Ironically, in the years since 1922 the leaders in Northern Ireland have fought to maintain union with Britain. But elsewhere, the trend was all in the opposite direction. The vestiges of empire are visible today in the Commonwealth of Nations. Originally made up of the dominions, the Commonwealth met at first in colonial conference and formed imperial committees during World War I. After the war the dominions insisted on looser ties, which were ratified by statute in 1931. By 1957 the adjective “British” was dropped from the name of the Commonwealth, and it became an international organization for trade and other relations.
As Britain forged new relations with its commonwealth nations in the aftermath of World War II, there also had to be new ties to Europe. The destruction of Germany in 1945 brought terrible misery to much of the continent, and the ambition of one of her conquerors—the Soviet Union—was to take advantage of that weakness. Western Europe was fortified by aid from the United States (the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank) and a new joint military force in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). By 1957, in the Treaty of Rome, a new idea of European cooperation was adopted. But Britain declined full participation at first, out of a concern for her historic trade partners in the empire and commonwealth. This position was reversed in 1972 when Britain joined the Common Market. Still, Britain remains deeply divided as to her relation with Europe.
Great Britain has always included a group of linked national histories. For many years these were overshadowed by English rule and English history. In the last century the histories of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have gained
Introduction vii
greater prominence. Meanwhile the United Kingdom has had vital and changing relations with Europe and the world, especially the United States. Thus in Britain we can see an array of shifting national and imperial identities. Britain’s history is our key to understanding the roots of the culture and institutions which have had such enormous influence around the world.
—Richard S. Tompson
HISTORY OF GREAT BRITAIN
EARLY BRITAIN
Britain is both a geographical entity and a political idea. The space has been searched, excavated, and mapped with great thoroughness. Archaeology can now explain much about the earliest habitation and the evolving cultures of prehistory and the early years of the historical era. The political past is far harder to describe, because of the rarity of written evidence and other clues.
The record on the ground tells us of inhabitants who built remarkable stone monuments and equally remarkable stone dwellings. These prehistoric people are known to have been present from the end of the ice ages; they began a succession of cultures that probably spanned 10,000 years. The later cultures began to use bronze and to practice agriculture (starting around 4000 B.C.). With the Iron Age (from 700 B.C.), Britain was soon inhabited by incoming peoples loosely referred to as Celts, who originated in central and eastern Europe. These tribes had warrior-kings whose hill-forts were centers of tribal government. An agrarian people, they used iron swords and worshiped nature gods that were described by Roman observers. Substantial physical evidence of their existence can be found in all parts of Britain.
ORIGINS OF BRITAIN
The idea of Britain as a political entity is an abstraction beyond the imagination of the tribal king. It is clear that no central rule was in place either before or after the Roman occupation. The many small, pre-Roman tribal kingdoms formed shifting alliances, and some of them survived as subjects of Roman rule. The first Roman contact came with the invasion by Julius Caesar in 55–54 B.C. The occupation by the Roman legions lasted from A.D. 43 to 406. In the empire’s wake, a long turbulent period of upheaval followed, with many invasions and many realignments, again featuring tribal units that sometimes merged into larger allied groups. The one common element for Britain, Ireland, and all of Europe was the spread of Christianity. This conversion began in the later days of the empire, and it was maintained in Ireland but snuffed out by Germanic invaders of Britain (A.D. 400–600). There was no central political authority for nearly 500 years after the end of Roman occupation. The meager political record consists of a few chronicles and rare commentary, plus some later king lists that named the predecessors of medieval rulers, far into the distant and mythical past.
3
4 Great Britain
The Roman conquest was most advanced in the area roughly corresponding to modern England. Much of Wales and Scotland was controlled from garrisons but not completely subdued by the invaders. The northern frontier was marked by Hadrian’s Wall, which ran 73 miles across the narrow isthmus between the Tyne and the Solway Firth. On the western frontier, Roman garrisons in Wales and Cornwall marked limits of imperial rule. Beyond these boundaries the native Celts maintained their tribal rule and culture. Their cousins inside the Roman-occupied territory became known as “Britons”—that is, Celts whose culture had merged with the Romans. From the end of the fourth century, the imperial structure began to break down, and it was lost in the early years of the fifth century. It was then that new invasions of Angles, Saxons, and other continental peoples began. They overran much of the former Roman zone but failed to penetrate some frontier areas. Numerous Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms took shape in the sixth and seventh centuries. In that period they were converted to Christianity by twin missions: in the north by the Irish Celtic church (Iona in Scotland and Lindisfarne in northern England) and in the south by the Roman church, via Canterbury. The first contemporary history by the monk Bede in Northumbria was called the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (A.D. 731). In Bede’s day a set of seven kingdoms (called the “heptarchy”) ruled most of Anglo-Saxon England. They were probably the result of mergers of many smaller tribal groups. In the early eighth century, Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and East Anglia were the most powerful kingdoms. Kingdoms rose and fell, and the most powerful ruler was sometimes known by the name “Bretwalda,” literally a “wide-ruler” or an over-king. But still there was no unified Britain.
The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms became the target of Viking raids and invasions between A.D. 793 and 870. The result was the defeat of all of them except Wessex, which, led by Alfred the Great, began the process of reconquering the land that would become “England.” Alfred could only begin the process, and it took nearly a century before a form of unified rule evolved under later Saxon kings. One of the main obstacles was the large settlement of Vikings across central and northern England, known as the “Danelaw.” Edgar, king of Wessex and Northumbria, held an imperial coronation at Bath in 973, and later in the year, on the river Dee at Chester, he was rowed in a boat by eight sub-kings, including the rulers of Scotland, Strathclyde and Gwynedd. The ceremonial acknowledgment of Edgar’s lordship may have been temporary, but it was early evidence of English unification. That unity was tentative and short-lived, for by the end of the century there were more Scandinavian invasions, leading to Cnut of Denmark’s conquest and rule of a united England. The period of Danish rule lasted from 1016 to 1042, followed by restoration of the Anglo-Saxon king Edward (the Confessor, ruled 1043–66).
NORMANS AND ANGEVINS
After Edward’s death and the very brief rule of King Harold, there were two powerful invasions in 1066: the Norwegians in the north and the Normans in
Early Britain 5
the south. Although Harold defeated the king of Norway, the Norman invasion succeeded. William the Conqueror (1066–87) wiped out most of the AngloSaxon nobility and introduced a new aristocracy. The conquest linked feudal lordship to strong existing royal institutions, so the Normans were able to create a powerful and centralized English (or Anglo-Norman) kingdom. But the first half-century of Norman rule also produced a cross-channel empire with divided objectives. The English unit was strong and centralized, and it was fortified against its Welsh and Scottish neighbors. There was hereafter no ready way to assimilate all of Britain; the English would dominate them for nine centuries, but assimilation and a unified culture and society lay a long way ahead.
Scotland had an even cloudier early history, with little documentation before the 12th century. The prehistoric people called “Picts” were contemporary with the Romans, and they were joined in the sixth and seventh centuries by Irish invaders (called “scotti”—whence the name Scotland). Also, parts of Scotland were inhabited by Britons (Strathclyde) and by incoming Angles (Lothian) and Vikings. The mission of the Irish (Celtic) church greatly assisted unification around 850. Scottish kings followed the custom of tanistry, or inheritance by near male relatives. This provided ample opportunity for royal bloodshed. King Malcolm (1005–34) killed a number of tanists, and his grandson Duncan succeeded him, only to be murdered by Macbeth (1040). He in turn was slain by Malcolm III (1058), the king who faced the new Anglo-Norman regime in England. He successfully resisted the Norman advance in the 1060s, although the next two centuries saw considerable movement of Anglo-Normans into the south of Scotland.
Wales was made up of a collection of small tribal groups. Here Britons (Celts) spoke one form of Celtic language and had much in common with kin in Cornwall and Brittany, with whom they shared cultures and engaged in trade. Wales itself was hilly, remote, and poor. It was isolated by the Norman conquest when William I created frontier earldoms (Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford), which were granted extensive powers and made responsible for defense of the border. This arrangement assured both subordination and separation for Wales.
Monmouth was on the southern Anglo-Welsh border, an area that was the home of a churchman named Geoffrey. In 1136 Geoffrey wrote the most compelling story about Britain in all of the middle ages, The History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae). He lived and taught for much of his life in Oxford (before there was a university there), and he was a singular champion of the Britons. A mixture of myth, romance, and history, his book was one of the most popular works in the Middle Ages, with nearly 200 copies of the manuscript still in existence. Geoffrey claimed that he translated the story from an old book written in Welsh (which has never been found). He told of Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas of Troy, who came to Britain around 1200 B.C. From him a line of kings was traced down to the last British ruler, Cadwallader, who was defeated by the Saxons in the seventh century. One of the high points in Geoffrey’s narrative was the story of Arthur, king of the Britons and heroic leader of the ancestors of the Welsh, whose return to power was prophesied by the seer Merlin. The real significance of Arthur’s story did not lie in British polit-
6 Great Britain
ical history, however. This mythic figure, of prophetic birth and prodigious valor, was a cultural stereotype for the age of chivalry. He was thus adopted by continental writers and went on to a long literary life over the next five or six centuries. But as a British political figure, Arthur represented a ruler who could legitimize native aspirations in the void that was British political history. The real world of the 12th century saw very different tendencies.
Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth died, the throne of England was reclaimed by Henry of Anjou in 1154. The grandson of Henry I and great-grandson of William the Conqueror assumed the throne that had been bequeathed to his mother and contested by another prince. When Henry II restored his family’s rule, he also brought back the cross-channel empire and the French orientation of William the Conqueror. This again made British interests secondary to continental ones, a condition that would endure until the 15th century. Henry had earlier married Eleanor of Aquitaine and thus enlarged the royal domain. But she and the four sons she bore him caused endless political turmoil.
England in the 1150s was a source of wealth, and its tax revenues probably were its most appealing feature to continental rulers. This wealth might be directly exploited through the exactions of feudal overlords, but from the 12th century the process of exploiting that wealth became entangled with critical legal developments: the birth and growth of a common law dispensed by royal judges; the tradition of petitioning the Crown, which issued charters of liberties; and the summoning of councils to approve taxes and other measures, which eventually produced the institution of parliament.
The king’s authority was supported by the church, but he was subject to church authority. In the 12th century there was a major clash between the authority of the pope and that of the Holy Roman Emperor, a dispute that echoed through all royal courts. The issue was whether the pope or the secular rulers controlled the appointment of bishops—a source of continuing tension in the Middle Ages. There were many other points of friction between clerical and lay leaders. Henry II had a dispute with his archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, which ended in a particularly grisly episode. Four of the king’s knights murdered Becket, and while the king denied giving the order, he did public penance for the crime. In the wake of this event, Henry made his famous expedition to Ireland (1171), mainly to discipline his vassal, the earl of Clare, who seemed to be assuming too much power there. But Henry also carried a papal bull vesting him with the power of lordship in Ireland.
Henry’s son Richard I (1189–99), known as the Lion Heart, succeeded to the throne of England, but he spent five years on crusade (and in captivity) and five more in wars on the continent. His youngest brother John succeeded him (1199–1216). Due to the loss of Normandy in 1204, John spent more time in England, but his harsh rule brought resistance and, in turn, the issue of charters to the church, to the city of London, and eventually to his barons in 1215. A large proportion of that document, the “Great Charter” (Magna Carta) was reissued some years later under John’s son Henry III.
Henry III managed his inherited territories with indifferent success. He faced a strong French king, Philip II, and he encountered resistance in Wales, Scotland,