Historians From England

"The idea of the court sustained Richard, and he sustained it, at vast expense. He surrounded himself with courtiers who stood to gain from his largesse, and who therefore flattered and praised him as he wished. He experienced his court – his day-to-day life of hunting, or feasting, or games – as the place where the king’s will was enacted without question, and he believed that this was as it should be. But beyond his court circle all was very different, in ways which Richard seems not to have understood."

"Once again, the viewer is made to recognize the sheer glory of kingship, its otherworldly status, and Richard’s distance from his subjects. This majesty is revealed by the actual events of Richard’s life and death to have been empty at its heart."

"It took a particular genius and a great deal of luck to make war pay, and Richard had neither."

"This is no Henry VIII to command obedience by sheer force of personality; rather, Richard’s image enacts kingship itself, around a curious void. As an individual, he is absent from the portrait; as king, he is presented for our veneration."

"Richard’s difficulties were many, but the essence of his personal feelings seems to have lain in the confluence of these two great ideas – the divinity of kingship and the perfection of peace – because for Richard, ‘peace’ in the sense that he valued it meant the complete obedience of every subject to the will of the king."

"And then the English Ministrels blew aloud their Trumpets, and sounded their Pipes, and other Instruments of Martial Musick, and Marched furiously to meet the Scots. Now to each Battail of English, were two Wings of chosen Archers, who shot this day so thick, and so home, that the Scots could by no means maintain their Order: So that the Englishmen of Arms and Footmen enter'd in among them, and beat them down by Heaps. Yet still the Scots fought valiantly; and while the Lord Archibald Douglas liv'd, kept the Field with great Courage; tho' much to their Loss: But when they saw him struck thro' the Body with a Spear, they began to flee for safeguard of their Lives, tho' to very little purpose. For when the Scotch Valets and Pages saw the Discomfiture, they ran away upon the Spur, with their Masters' Horses to save themselves, taking no Care for their Masters. But when the English men of Arms saw that, they leap'd on their Horses, and follow'd the Chace with great Fury; then were the Scotch men trodden down on all sides, their display'd Banners fell'd to the Ground, all torn and hack'd in pieces; and many a good Habergeon bathed in the Owners' Blood. Yet frequently did the Scots gather together in Companies to dispute the point with their Pursuers; but still they were discomfited. And thus, says my Author (M.S. vet. Ang. in Bibl. C.C.C. c. 224), it befell as God would, that the Scots had that day no more Power nor Might against the English, than twenty Sheep would have against five Wolves."

"Rex Angliæ procedit armatus, vexillum draconis terribile præfertur expansum, clangor tubæ post regem movet exercitum. Refulsit sol in clipeos aureos et resplenduerunt montes ab eis; ibant caute et ordinate, et sine ludo res agebatur. Griffones, e diverso, clausis januis civitatis, armati stabant ad propugnacula murorum et turrium nihil adhuc metuentes, et ejaculabantur incessanter in hostes. Rex, qui nihil melius novit quam expugnare civitates et evertere castra, permisit primo pharetras eorum evacuari, et sic demum per suos sagittarios, qui præibant exercitum, primum fecit insultum. Sagittarum imbre cœlum tegitur, protensos per propugnacula clipeos mille tela transfodiunt, nihil contra pilorum impetum poterat salvare rebelles. Relinquuntur muri sine custodia, quia nullus potuit foris prospicere quin in ictu oculi sagittam haberet in oculo."

"Et dum transivimus per villam de Peronne muratam, quam propè relinquimus à sinistris nostris, comperimus equites Gallicani exercitûs se offerentes de villâ versùs nostros, ut nos fortè ad infra jactus hostiles et nocumenta traxissent; sed oppugnantibus equitibus nostris citò terga verterunt, oppidum repetentes. Et postquam pertransivimus villam, quasi ad milliare, invenimus vias mirabiliter tritas per Gallicanum exercitum quasi nos in multis millibus præcessissent. Et tunc nos qui fuimus residuus populus, ut de potestatibus taceam, timentes prælium imminens, corda et oculos in cælum levavimus, clamantes intimæ considerationis vocibus, ut compateretur nostri Deus, et à nobis de suâ ineffabili pietate Gallorum violentias declinaret."

"In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe. This of course is too simple a way of describing a very complicated process, and the explanations of it can be too simple too."

"Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can assume that it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it."

"My present object is to treat of what passes under our own observation, or we are called upon to endure. For it is fitting that as new events continually occur they should be carefully committed to writing, to the praise of God; and thus, as the history of the past has been handed down to us by preceding writers, so also a relation of what is going on around us should be transmitted to future generations by the pen of contemporaries."

"The physicians and others who were present, who had watched the king all night while he slept, his repose neither broken by cries or groans, seeing him now expire so suddenly and unexpectedly, were much astonished, and became as men who had lost their wits. Notwithstanding, the wealthiest of them mounted their horses and departed in haste to secure their property. But the inferior attendants, observing that their masters had disappeared, laid hands on the arms, the plate, the robes, the linen, and all the royal furniture, and leaving the corpse almost naked on the floor of the house hastened away. Observe then, I pray you, my readers, how little trust can be placed in human fidelity. All these servants snatched up what they could of the royal effects, like so many kites, and took to their heels with their booty, roguery thus came forth from its hiding place the moment the great justiciary was dead, and first exercised its rapacity round the corpse of him who had so long repressed it. Intelligence of the king's death was quickly spread, and, far and near, the hearts of those who heard it were filled with joy or grief. In fact, King William's decease was known in Home and in Calabria to some of the exiles he had disinherited, the same day he died at Rouen, as they afterwards solemnly asserted in Normandy. For the evil spirit was frantic with joy on finding his servants, who were bent on rapine and plunder, set free by the death of their judge. O, worldly pomp, how despicable you are when one considers that you are empty and fleeting! You are justly compared to watery bubbles, one moment all swollen up, then suddenly reduced to nothing. Behold this mighty prince, who was lately obsequiously obeyed by more than a hundred thousand men in arms, and at whose nod nations trembled, was now stripped by his own attendants, in a house which was not his own; and left on the bare ground from the hour of primes to that of tierce."

"When the western nobles heard the good news about the famous champions who had set out on pilgrimage and triumphed gloriously over the infidels in the east, fighting in Christ's name, they and their relations and neighbours were inspired by the example of such achievement to a similar undertaking. Many were fired by enthusiasm to go on pilgrimage, to see the Saviour's sepulchre and the holy places. Fear of the pope's curse also forced some to go on pilgrim-age: for Pope Paschal II had publicly excommunicated and cut off from all Christendom all those who had freely taken the cross of the Lord and come back without completing their journey, unless they retraced their steps and devotedly accomplished their vows."

"And so, he who had terrified many with the sword of his tongue was himself slain with the sword: and the Scots flayed him, and divided his skin into little bits, non quidem ad reliquias, sed ad contumelias."

"In the year of our Lord 1278, a fortnight after the feast of St. John the Baptist, the king held his parliament at Gloucester and issued what is called the statute of Gloucester, containing fifteen clauses. In August he made the statute of quo warranto. Soon after he disquieted some of the magnates of the land by means of his justices, who sought to know by what warrant they held their lands. If they had no good warrant, he took possession of their lands. Among the rest earl Warenne was summoned before the king's justices and asked by what warrant he held. He produced an ancient and rusty sword, and cried, "Here, my lords, here is my warrant! My ancestors came over with William the bastard and conquered their lands by the sword, and I will defend those same lands by the sword against any, whosoever he may be, who seeks to occupy them. For the king did not conquer and subdue the land by himself, but my ancestors were his partners and helpers." Other magnates adhered to him and his argument, and went off angry and in disorder. When the king heard of this he feared for himself, and ceased from his mistaken policy. Besides, soon after the Welsh rose in rebellion, and the king had great need of his magnates. So when the king was holding a certain parliament, and the sons of the magnates were standing in his presence at vespers, he said to them, "What were you talking about while I was in consultation with your fathers?" And one answered, "You will not be angry if we tell you the truth?" "No," said the king. "Sire, we were saying this: Le Roy cuvayte nos deneres E la Rayne nos beau maneres E le Quo Waranto Sal mak wus al to do." [The king desires our money, The queen our manors too, The writ of "By what warrant" Will make a sad to-do.]"

"The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler; the retainers of the great lords adhered to him; and even though the lords themselves were present with the English king in body, at heart they were on the opposite side."

"Explaining why he was the first English king to be deposed is in many ways easier than explaining why it took twenty traumatic years to happen. Edward faced challenges that would have tested the abilities of any king; his singular quality was the talent he possessed for alienating those who could have helped him to overcome them."

"Ultimately, however, it was Edward’s inability to fulfill the two overriding obligations of a medieval king – to administer the law without partiality, and to defend his realm – that lay at the heart of his tragedy. This was a very personal failure, the collapse of the moral authority of Edward’s kingship, a resounding endorsement of Aristotle’s much-quoted dictum that a ruler who could not control his private passions would not be able to control his kingdom."

"Edward’s pride in his army – ‘such as has never been seen in our time, or in the times of our ancestors’ – shows that despite twenty years’ experience of campaigning in Scotland he still had not learned from his mistakes."

"Edward’s triumph in 1321-2 gave him the opportunity to establish a strong and responsible rule in England.…England ached for peace, and for the first time since his accession Edward could govern on his own terms. It was an opportunity spectacularly squandered."

"As so often, a quick war was followed by a slow peace."

"The Gaveston years, 1307 to 1312, set the course of English politics for a decade. Soul-baring and humiliating for the king, they stripped him of his regal mystique and spread a poison through the arteries of the body politic that proved ineradicable as long as Edward occupied the throne; they brutalized and militarized political society; they gave rise to a reform programme that became the touchstone for baronial opposition; and they fatally undermined the English position in Scotland."

"These were the men – the earls, bishops and barons – with whom a medieval king had to establish a modus operandi. It was his inability to do so that lay at the heart of Edward II’s failure."

"Seeing Robert Bruce mounted on ‘a little palfrey’, Sir Henry de Bohun the nephew of the Earl of Hereford, sought immortality by charging directly at him, but when a blow from Bruce’s axe split his head in two he was obliged to settle for mortality."

"What was disturbing was the dichotomy between Edward’s behavior and his almost Olympian view of kingly office. The latter he learned from his father, but whereas Edward I acknowledged (albeit reluctantly) that there were in the end limits to kingly power, his son seems to have been unable to conceive of opposition to his will as anything other than disloyalty. Edward II was enormously stubborn. He was also devious and untrustworthy, continually making promises he had no intention of keeping. He evidently saw nothing wrong in such behavior: it was his birthright, his prerogative."

"The grimly inventive repertoire of punishments meted out by both sides during Edward’s reign proclaims it as an age of visceral hatred and almost unparalleled savagery within the English ruling class. Before 1312, no English earl had been executed since 1076; after 1330, it would be nearly sixty years until another was condemned for treason."

"That there was a tendency for strong and successful kings to be succeeded by weak and unsuccessful ones is one of the commonplaces of medieval English history: Edward I was followed by Edward II, Edward III by Richard II, Henry V by Henry VI, and so on."

"Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes."

"The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years."

"Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons."

"More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821. Admittedly, many have titles like Napoleon’s Haemorrhoids and Napoleon’s Buttons, but there are several thousand comprehensive, cradle-to-grave biographies too."

"Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come."

"On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). ‘Twigs were collected and stewed,’ records an historian of the siege. ‘Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city’s laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. ‘Today it is so simple to die,’ wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. ‘You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. ‘Human meat is being sold in the markets,’ concluded one secret NKVD report, ‘while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins.’"

"Essentially a compromise between Roman and common law, the Code Napoléon consisted of a reasoned and harmonious body of laws that were to be the same across all territories administered by France, for the first time since the Emperor Justinian. The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading. The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society. Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution"

"It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensively violated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops into the industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated a demilitarized zone. Had the German Army been opposed by the French and British forces stationed near by, it had orders to retire back to base and such a reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler the chancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven with guilt about having imposed what was described as a ‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowed the Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed."

"Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire."

"Dunkirk was to hold out until the day on which all the Allied troops in the pocket who could embark to Britain had done so. Ramsay and the British Government initially assumed that no more than 45,000 troops could be saved, but over the nine days between dawn on Sunday, 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday, 4 June, no fewer than 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued from death or capture, 118,000 of whom were French, Belgian and Dutch. Operation Dynamo – so named because Ramsay’s bunker at Dover had housed electrical equipment during the Great War – was the largest military evacuation in history so far, and a fine logistical achievement, especially as daylight sailings had to be suspended on 1 June due to heavy Luftwaffe attacks."

"Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain’s 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain’s 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack. The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea."

"Had his son and successor resembled him in character and ability a despotic autocracy might have been established which would have altered the whole history of English constitutional history, and it is questionable whether we owe a greater debt to the strength of Edward I, which curbed the baronial oligarchy, or to the weakness of Edward II, which shook the power of the throne and saved England from a despotism."

"Law, considered historically, may be divided into two branches, Theory or Legislation, and Practice or Administration."

"In the first place it must be borne in mind that before the extinction of its independence Wales was a geographical expression rather than a nation."

"The theoretical supremacy of the king in legal matters was so far practical that his prolonged absence, in Gascony, Wales or Scotland, usually coincided with the periods of greatest lawlessness."

"The workings of the mysterious influence of heredity present few greater puzzles than the characters of the English kings. It is indeed strange that Edward I should have been the son of the pious but incapable Henry III and father of the equally incapable Edward II."

"There may have been some connection between his convalescent vow of crusade and the arrest by his orders, in May 1287, of all those enemies of the Christian faith, the Jews, in England. Their subsequent release on payment of a fine of 20,000 marks is evidence that he did not allow religion to interfere with business principles."

"The renewal and confirmation of their charters granted to many towns under Edward I, as in all other reigns, so far from being a mark of his favor may with equal justice be read as reminders to the citizens that they held their privileges by grace of the crown—a grace for the continuation of which they had to pay."

"That it was the king’s intention to govern the parts of Wales that were now under his control with justice and gain the goodwill of the inhabitants cannot be doubted. There is also reason to believe that he was in some considerable measure successful so far as the common people were concerned, but the chieftains and petty lords were too long accustomed to that form of license which they called liberty to accept the restraints of English law even if administered with strict impartiality, and from what we know of contemporary English officials in their own country we may feel fairly sure that cases of maladministration and oppression were not lacking."

"The most famous and popular of all English saints, St. Thomas of Canterbury, could not be ignored but Edward does not seem to have shown any great affection for him and one cannot help feeling that he was too conscious of the parallel between Becket and his own troublesome archbishops to display any great devotion towards the martyr."

"The Prince, now at the end of his seventeenth year, had been with his father on the last Scottish campaign and had on several occasions acted as his father’s representative but seems already to have been showing signs of the frivolous and unworthy character which distinguished him in later life, and the evidence of these characteristics accumulates rapidly during the next few years even before they are exposed to the fierce light that beats upon a throne."

"No more was heard of the proposal for this extraordinary extension of popular control, but the attacks on the Treasurer, instigated by Winchelsey, were renewed a year later when Sir John de Lovetot accused him of infringements of most of the Ten Commandments and of a few other offences, such as simony, which had been overlooked by the compilers of the Decalogue. As a result Treasurer was suspended and compelled to pay a visit to the papal court, where, after he had been well fleeced, his innocence was established in June 1303. By way of showing his own zeal for the good governance of the Church the Pope at the same time authorised the slandered Treasurer to bestow benefices upon two of his nephews who had reached the mature ages of ten and twelve years respectively."

"Faithfulness to those whom he had once admitted into the rather narrow circle of his friendship was, indeed, a mark of his character. Those whom he had once found loyal and capable as ministers, soldiers or diplomats retained, as a rule, his confidence to the end."