War Myths

Stories Not Always What They Seem

Hastings, Agincourt, WWII and other great British tales. Actually, the truth or picture, can be a little different.

Every nation has its favourite tales from the past, but how accurate are they? So let's cast a critical eye over some of the more notorious British legends.

Events in history like the "Norman Conquest" the "Glorious Revolution" and the "American Revolution" is history that has become rooted in national myth.

At the Battle of Agincourt, English forces defeated the numerically superior French. It is a victory that lives on in the popular imagination thanks to the speech delivered on the eve of battle by the monarch Henry V.

Take The Norman Conquest In 1066

Good Saxons versus Bad Normans, with an arrow as the clincher. To every English school child it evokes a Saxon hero, Harold, and a French villain, William, who met and fought at the Battle of Hastings.

The outcome, we are told, was decided by an arrow in Harold's eye. But history that is old is seldom commonly related with the truth. Harold, son of Godwin, was an Anglo-Dane with no claim to the throne beyond Edward's deathbed blessing.

William was no Frenchman, he descended from the Norse warrior Rollo and was granted Normandy by the French king Charles the Simple in 911. He, too, had no claim beyond the late King Edward's apparent, but earlier, blessing.

Harold And William Both Of Viking Descent

To cap it all, Harold's death was even more gruesome than we are led to believe. His eye-injury is hardly true, especially when he was hacked to pieces and was so mutilated that his mistress, the charmingly named Edith Swan-Neck, had to be summoned to identify his remains.

There are claims that King Harold was defeated by William the Conqueror two miles away from the official battlefield at the town of Battle. If this is correct, then what we have been led to believe is a myth.

As one wanders around the fields and lanes of Crowhurst in East Sussex, it's not easy to picture this place as being where one of the bloodiest and most decisive clashes in British history were fought.

But according to new research, Crowhurst may have a darker and more violent history than its placid modern-day appearance may suggest.

Two miles away in the town of Battle, by contrast, it's hard to escape reminders that this has long been thought of as the site of the clash. Tourists throng towards the visitor centre with its interactive displays.

In the grounds of the abbey is a marker at the spot where King Harold was supposedly killed by an arrow in his eye, or ridden down by a Norman knight, depending on your interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry.

The village of Crowhurst and its surrounding fields which, it is now believed, was the real site of the Battle of Hastings. It placed a foreign ruler on England's throne, and led to the transformation of the national culture and language.

It's a development that appears to have taken Crowhurst by surprise. Almost a millennium down the line there are now echoes of a more violent past in this settlement than the military history of the Middle Ages suggests.

England's Triumph

At The Battle Of Agincourt 1415

"For England, Harry and St George" ranks with Trafalgar and Waterloo in the annals of English arms. It was the climax of English success in the French wars.

But, England was unable to hold in peace what it had won in war. Henry V was recognised by the Burgundians and most of Europe as the King of France. Ironically, he was the first who was believed not to have spoken French.

Henry returned to London to a hero's welcome, with the city aldermen coming to meet him at Blackheath and escorting him for five hours to London Bridge. Marrying the French Queen Catherine, which supposedly ended the 100-Years War.

But then it took five years for the French to finally capitulate at the treaty of Troyes in 1420, and for Henry to enter Paris in triumph.

Worse, England was unable to hold in peace what it had won in war. Henry could not stay in Paris and keeping an army on mainland Europe was expensive.

In 1422, he succumbed to the battlefield curse of dysentery and the glittering new empire fell upon the shoulders of his 10-month-old son. A mere seven years after Agincourt, war broke out.

The Battle Of Bosworth Field

It was the battle of the "Wars of the Roses" the civil war between the House of Lancaster and the House of York that raged across England in the latter half of the 15th century.

Fought on 22nd August 1485, the battle was won by the Lancastrians. Their leader Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, became the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty by his victory and subsequent marriage to a Yorkist princess.

His opponent Richard III, the last king of the House of York, was killed in the battle. Historians consider Bosworth Field to mark the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, making it one of the defining moments of English history.

The Battle of Bosworth, which proved decisive in bringing the Tudors to the English throne, has been claimed by a number of sites. The exact location of the Battle of Stow on the Wold, the last major skirmish of the English Civil War, has also been widely contested.

The Glorious Revolution 1688

The revolution was glorious. The Catholic James II, "dismal Jimmy" as Nell Gwynne called him, came to power in 1685, but lasted a mere three years before fleeing to France in what came to be called the "Glorious Revolution".

James's flight and his replacement by the Protestant William of Orange was viewed as an example of pragmatic, bloodless reform, in contrast to the current and future convulsions elsewhere in Europe.

William of Orange's legacy is still revered by many The truth is a little different. It was bloodless only because James capitulated.

William's Dutchmen invaded illegally and with main force, from a land with which England had only recently been at war. He brought a huge fleet of 463 ships and some 40,000 men.

Parliament had not requested such an invasion, and the King clearly hadn't. The "invitation" from six peers and a bishop was constitutionally irrelevant, illegal, and it was treacherous.

England was attacked by a foreign ruler to seize a legitimate monarch. The invasion was clearly treasonable but, as the saying goes, "if treason prosper, none dare call it treason".

American Revolution 1774-83

The American colonists had nothing to lose but their chains was the term being branded about. But the 'American War of Independence' began as nothing of the sort.

It was essentially an argument between loyalist and radical British subjects over trade and taxes, only gradually acquiring the rhetoric of civil rights and liberties. And Even today that argument is mired in prejudice.

London protested that a derisory sum of £1,400-a-year in revenue was being gathered from the 13 American colonies to pay for having been rescued by Britain from French autocracy in the Seven Years War.

To call this rescue "absolute despotism", as the Americans did, was absurd. The protested Stamp Acts were imposed throughout the empire, as were other trade restrictions, while the colonists enjoyed their own assemblies and were for the most part self-governing organizations.

As a colony with self-governing rights, America was far better treated than Ireland.

World War II 1939-45

Myth: Britain Won World War II

World War II, devastated half the globe, killing an estimated 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians. Instant histories of the war, not least Winston Churchill's own, depicted it as Britain being isolated and alone against the might of Germany.

Churchill sat alongside Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta conference, but was Britain's role; alone against the might of Germany overstated? This was true but only for a period in 1941-1942, when little fighting was done.

By the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, it was actually America and Russia, or Shall we say, Roosevelt and Stalin who divided the world.

Compared with the global total, British losses were comparatively modest. Some 375,000 service personnel were killed, just over half the number lost in World War I, and 60,000 civilians had died in the German air raids.

Some 2% of the total war deaths were British, against 65% that were Soviet. The huge numbers of USSR troops and the might and power of America won the war, of that there is little doubts with Britain as something of an also-ran.

That's the way it looks to some historians; and then there are the others who know, it was the Royal Navy that defeated the German Navy without any help from the Americans or the Russians.

And there was the United Front of the British Commonwealth Forces who also landed on the beaches at Normandy and fought side-by-side in the jungles and deserts of the world with Britain against the enemies of freedom.

In the devastated half of the globe; there were many countries where neither the Americans nor the Russians fought; but Britain and its Colmmonwealth Allies did. They fought in the Pacific where it is agreed the Americans won the Pacific war.

It was the British and her Commonwealth Navies that took arms to Russia; she never came and got the the weapons she needed herself. Without British aid she could never have won the war in the Eastern Europe.

Looking at statistics Britain does look like an also ran, but when you balance out the achievements of Britain and her Commonwealth allies, then they can all proudly hold their heads up high.

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