After the kingdoms of Great Britain were absorbed into the Roman Empire, the promises of prosperity and civilisation came only to a favoured few.
When the kingdoms of Britain joined the Roman Empire – some willingly, some not – their peoples found that it brought great benefits. Unfortunately, most never got to experience them. City-dwellers fared well and lived comfortably, if they were good Romans, but everyone else existed for their convenience.
In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh’s first attempt to found an English colony in the New World failed, but two years later he was keen to try again.
In 1584, an exploration party of two ships organised by Walter Raleigh came back and told Elizabeth I that ‘Roanoak’, Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, would make an excellent English colony. The following year, Raleigh (now Sir Walter) sent out hundred and eight settlers as founding fathers but a year later they came home. So in May 1587, Raleigh tried again.
At the height of the Inquisition, King Philip II of Spain sent a glorious fleet against England to bring the nation back to his Church.
When Mary I of England died in 1558, her devoutly Catholic widower Philip II of Spain felt he should have inherited her crown. Instead it went to Mary’s Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, who gave asylum to Dutch Protestants suffering under Philip’s Spanish Inquisition, harassed his Atlantic trade, and in 1587 executed her most plausible Catholic rival, Mary Queen of Scots. A year later, Philip took drastic action.
Shortly before the American Civil War, an attack by pro-slavery militants on the city of Lawrence prompted John Brown to try to clean up Kansas.
As the United States of America lurched towards the Civil War, the State of Kansas found herself torn into two. Two rival ‘governments’ sprang up, each with its own capital, one for a Slave-owning state and one for a Free state. In 1861, Kansas declared for the Union but it had been a close-run thing and some of her sons had not been too nice in their methods.
Two years into the American Civil War, the Union army responded to a dispiriting defeat at Chancellorsville with a decisive and historic victory at Gettysburg.
The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. Yet it came hard on the heels of a bruising defeat at the hands of General Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville, and the great issues that hung upon the American Civil War were, for a few days, very much in the balance.
The Battle of Lewes in 1263 took place just a few miles from the Battle of Hastings two centuries before it, and was arguably as important.
Henry III (r. 1216-1272) allowed extravagance and extortionate taxation to drive his noblemen to the brink of rebellion. When in 1258 he did as his father John had done, and signed the Great Charter only to break it soon after, civil war beckoned. Yet the conflict proved a blessing, for as American historian David Montgomery explains, it led to ‘government by the people.’
When King Henry III’s barons turned up to his council wearing full armour, he realised he had to mend his ways.
When King John died in 1216, England was in civil war. A series of cool-headed regents for John’s nine-year-old son Henry III steadied the kingdom, but when Henry took over from them in 1236 he immediately undid all their good work. His spending was so lavish (he tried to buy Sicily) and he levied such cruel taxes to fund it, that his barons longed for the days when Henry had left government to them.