FOREWORD

Winston Churchill once explained that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Behind the joke, he understood a simple truth. So did Adolf Hitler, who insisted that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough. Yet another European soldier-politician, Napoleon Bonaparte, was also aware of it when he defined history as a series of untruths people have agreed upon.

What all three knew was that history is not a hard science. It is much more soft and yielding, capable of being defined and shaped—or distorted and falsified—by those who live it, or those who tell it. 

There are, of course, fixed historical facts. For instance, in 1215, the barons forced King John to agree Magna Carta. In 1533, King Henry VIII broke from Rome. No one is going to dispute these dates. However, scratch deeper into the surrounding events, and things become less certain. 

Take Magna Carta. It is one of the world’s most famous documents—the West’s charter of liberty and democracy. Except it wasn’t. John and the barons disowned it within nine weeks and threw it in the bin, where it lay unused and irrelevant for centuries. Our modern image of its significance was only invented in the 1600s, when it was resurrected and dubiously hoisted as a battle standard for the will of the people against tyranny.

Or take Henry’s break from Rome, and the transformation of English religion finished by his children, Edward VI and Elizabeth I. We now know many of the changes were implemented with state terror and violence—the Tudors effectively massacred their people into a new religion. And yet, the Tudor spin machine constructed its story of Henry the benign Renaissance spiritual liberator so well that it is still taught in schools around the world. 

In fact, a lot of the history we learn turns out to be only half the picture. Worse, some of it is just plain wrong. There are so many examples. People learn that Constantine the Great made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in AD 313. He didn’t. Theodosius I did in AD 380. Everyone knows that Christopher Columbus discovered North America. Except he didn’t. He never even set foot there. He found a few islands in the Caribbean, parts of Central America, and the eastern tip of Venezuela, but had no idea North America even existed. 

The list of myths we honour as history is enormous. Sometimes we are being purposefully misled. Other times we mislead ourselves, seeing only what we want. 

My first history teacher fought in the Battle of Britain. Dozens of lovingly-assembled and painted model Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmitts, Stukas, and the rest hung on invisible cotton threads from the ceiling of his classroom. Looking up instantly transported me to sunny rural airfields in 1940, where gangs of young men puffing pipes were scrambled into the air for the dogfights of their lives. Only in later life did I find out that he had been a flight instructor. It wasn’t his fault we all thought he was a fighter ace. We simply saw what we wanted. 

Many of the stories in this book are about setting the record straight. Or, at least, presenting another perspective. They first appeared in The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, designed to give historical context to contemporary events or anniversaries. 

I have rewritten some of the titles, and there is a list at the back of where and when each article first appeared. I have left the content of the stories unchanged. 

I hope you enjoy them, and that—in their own way—they show history to be so much more than we think. 

DKS

London

December 2015