History

Our weak island fortress

1066 and All That got it wrong. We’ve been invaded lots of times david horspool

I recently ‘did the rounds’ at Deal Castle.

That, the nice English Heritage people told us, was where the phrase originated. The castle, built in 1540 to a design personally approved by Henry VIII – which may explain why its plan looks like a Tudor rose – has three floors, and the basement is called The Rounds.

From here, soldiers would patrol in conditions that were probably cold and dank – to judge by our experience on a benign spring day – ready to fire on enemies through the embrasures.

In fact, the name of this part of the castle probably derives from the phrase – current at the time, according to the OED – to describe a sentry walking his beat, rather than the other way round.

But as we stumbled through the castle passages, lit only by the authentic glow of our mobiles, history, not etymology, was on my mind.

Deal was one of three castles built on the south coast as artillery forts, ready to repel a French, Imperial or combined invasion. That seemed possible after the Pope excommunicated Henry in 1538.

In the event, neither the French nor Emperor Charles V got their act together for long enough to launch an invasion.

The hottest action Deal Castle ever saw was during the Civil War, when it was besieged. In 1940, primed again against invasion, it received a direct hit from a German bomb. The bomb took out the handsome Captain’s House, built in the 18th century, when the castle was becoming more of a coastal country retreat than a line of defence.

Deal’s picturesque obsolescence – a state barely interrupted in its near-five centuries of existence – might seem a fitting analogy for the country. After all, doesn’t everyone know that, after 1066, England was never successfully invaded (nor were Wales and Scotland, except by the English)?

Sellar and Yeatman put it best in 1066

Henry’s reaction was to invade from France with a few troops, landing first at Pevensey Bay, where William the Conqueror had come ashore. He then sailed up the east coast and landed at Ravenspur near Hull, where he gathered an army which eventually put him on the throne.

The tactic was so successful that when Edward IV found himself in exile, he too invaded at Ravenspur. And he announced that, like Henry IV, he was interested in restoring his claim only to his family inheritance, not to the crown.

You could say that, as neither Henry nor Edward fought a battle against his direct rival, these invasions don’t count. Or perhaps, despite the fact that both were planned in foreign courts, you require more of a foreign element for a ‘real’ invasion.

In which case, I give you Henry VII. His invasion was planned in a foreign court (France) with significant foreign participation. And a man with a very slim claim to the throne triumphed over his rival by defeating and killing him in battle.

Ah, but Henry VIII was British – a concept with very little meaning at the time; his enemies made a big deal of his being Welsh.

In which case, how about William III? As foreign as you like, he arrived with an enormous fleet and marched on London. And he did fight his direct rival, James II, in 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne. There, James II earned the unfortunate Irish name Séamas an Chaca, James the Shithead.

So the next time one of those headlines about this or that ‘invasion’ of our sceptred isle is doing the rounds, may I advise the wise words of Brenda from Bristol?

‘Not another one!’

Stone circles: Deal Castle, 1540

and All That: ‘The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.’

Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt explained why, in terms memorable enough to be used to advertise Typhoo tea and Jaguar cars: ‘This fortress built by nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war, /… This precious stone set in a silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall / Or as a moat defensive to a house’.

British (or English) impenetrability over a millennium could be explained by Shakespeare’s natural advantages or Henry VIII’s scout-like determination to Be Prepared. Except that we haven’t really been all that impenetrable.

Take that scene in Richard II where Gaunt makes his famous speech. The action that follows is presented as a piece of internal politics – a bad king, Richard, being replaced by a good one, Gaunt’s son Henry IV.

But what put Henry on the throne was an invasion. In 1399, after his father’s death (ie directly after the time when Gaunt’s speech about England’s impregnability is set), Henry was in exile, banished a year before. Richard now made his sentence banishment for life. David Horspool is author of Alfred the Great (Amberley Publishing)