Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (9 page)

F
ollowing the death of George V in January 1936 his immensely popular son succeeded him as Edward VIII. But trouble was brewing and the old king had himself forecast that his son would reign for less than a year. After an unhappy childhood Edward, upon becoming Prince of Wales, had pursued a series of affairs with married women before becoming infatuated with Wallis Simpson, already divorced from an American and in a shaky marriage to her second husband, a British businessman called Ernest Simpson. Although the affair was widely publicized in the foreign press news of it was suppressed by British newspaper proprietors at a time when deference to royalty was the norm. In the autumn of 1936 Edward tried, with little success, to persuade the government of Stanley Baldwin that he could marry the now newly-divorced Wallis. He received little support, some of it coming from an embarrassing quarter: Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. On 1st December 1936 the Bishop of Bradford, Alfred Blunt, referred to the coronation ceremony as ‘a solemn, sacramental rite’. Sections of the press seized upon this speech, interpreting it, quite wrongly, as a deliberate admonishment of the king’s affair and the story broke with astonishing speed. On 10th December Edward abdicated and took the title of Duke of Windsor. He and Wallis married in France in 1937 and lived abroad for the rest of their lives, occasionally embarrassing their family and the British government, not least by visiting Hitler in October 1937 as war approached. Edward died in 1972 and his wife in 1986. They are buried side by side in the royal mausoleum at Frogmore, in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

H
enry II, who reigned from 1154–1189, is chiefly remembered for the murder of archbishop Thomas à Becket. Despite this blemish on his rule, he should rather be remembered as one of England’s greatest kings and the creator of our system of justice. It was Henry’s idea to send judges from Westminster to all parts of his kingdom to administer the king’s justice at Assize Courts before returning to Westminster to compare notes with other judges. In this way a set of common principles was developed both in applying the law and determining sentences. This came to be known as the Common Law, the system which now applies throughout much of the world, including the Commonwealth and the United States.

Henry’s problem was that a separate, and much milder system of justice, known as Canon Law, applied to offending clergymen, known as criminous clerks. Their cases were heard, and sentences determined, by bishops’ courts, and a clergyman accused of a serious crime like murder or rape had a much better chance of escaping severe punishment in a bishop’s court than a royal court. Moreover, since anyone with a rudimentary ability to read could claim the protection of the bishops’ courts it meant that many who weren’t ordained clergy could escape justice. The system deteriorated to a point where anyone who could read (or memorize) the opening words of Psalm 51 — ‘Have mercy upon me O Lord according to Thy loving kindness’ — was considered to be a candidate for trial in the bishops’ courts. Becket resisted Henry’s attempts to bring criminous clerks to justice within the royal courts, but this was forgotten when Becket was brutally murdered by some of Henry’s knights in Canterbury Cathedral in late 1170. Canon law survived in a few matters into the 19th century. But Henry had a point!

K
ing John and Henry VI are both strong contenders for the title of ‘England’s worst king’. Though innocent of persecuting Robin Hood, King John (reigned 1199–1216) was an oppressive king who deserved the uprising of nobles that led to Magna Carta. But one of his most inhumane acts led directly to the creation of Cambridge University.

In 1209 a young woman died in Oxford, possibly murdered by three students. We shall never know because King John ordered that they be hanged without a trial. In protest the authorities closed the university. Some of the more enterprising students made their way to a small market town in the East Anglian fens and thus Cambridge University was born.

Two and a half centuries later the devout Henry VI (reigned 1422–61 and 1470–71) decided to found a new college. Henry was concerned that Oxford had a reputation for heresy since John Wycliffe (1329–1384), Master of Balliol College, had studied the Bible and concluded that some of the church’s doctrines were questionable. Henry was a deeply religious and orthodox man so he founded his new college, King’s College, in Cambridge instead. To clear the site for his college he destroyed a church which was used by two existing colleges, Clare and Trinity Hall. To placate them, he granted the colleges the use of a nearby church called St Edward King and Martyr and, as a bonus, made it a Royal Peculiar which was outside the jurisdiction of the local bishop. Consequently it was possible to hold theological debates there without interference and in the following century it became a centre for discussion of the works of Martin Luther and thus the principal focus of heretical debate in England. Three of the leading ‘Protestant’ thinkers who debated there were Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley who, in the reign of Queen Mary were burnt at the stake back in Oxford, where it had all started.

There is no evidence that this event ever occurred, whether in the garden of the Temple church or elsewhere, but it was taken up by Sir Walter Scott in his now largely forgotten historical novel Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829) in which the expression Wars of the Roses was first used and from there it made its way into history books and legends. The roses were, however recognized as significant by the first Tudor king, Henry VII, a descendant of the Lancaster line, who ended the civil war by defeating the Yorkist Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. Henry married the daughter of Edward IV, Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the warring factions, and adopted as his heraldic symbol the Tudor Rose. This rose, unknown to botany, is a white rose set into a red rose. To this day, the sovereign is styled the Duke of Lancaster, regardless of gender
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F
ought in 1645 in Northamptonshire, Naseby was one of the critical battles of the English Civil War and destroyed the army of Charles I. The victory of the Parliamentary forces was ensured by a decisive cavalry charge led by Oliver Williams.
Oliver Williams?
Yes, indeed. Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540) was Henry VIII’s chief minister until he fell out with the king over Henry’s disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves. He was executed in 1540 but in the meantime had ensured that his family was well provided for. His elder sister had married a Welshman called Morgan Williams who came originally from Glamorgan but had set up business as an innkeeper in Putney. Thomas ensured that Morgan, and his son Richard, received substantial landholdings in Huntingdonshire which had been confiscated from Ramsey Abbey during the dissolution of the monasteries. Richard, out of gratitude to his uncle, changed his name to Cromwell and this was adopted by his son Henry and his grandson Oliver. Throughout his life Oliver Cromwell sometimes referred to himself as ‘Oliver Williams alias Cromwell’.