Great Tales From English History (3 page)

‘Our troops,’ admitted Caesar, ‘were shaken, and they failed to show the same dash and enthusiasm as they did in land battles.’

But then the standard-bearer of the 10th legion leapt down into the waves, brandishing high the silver eagle that was the symbol of the favour in which the gods held the regiment. Dressed in a wild-animal pelt, with the snarling head of a lion, bear or wolf fixed to the top of his helmet, the standard-bearer was guardian of the legion’s morale. While the eagle remained upright, the legion’s honour lived.

‘Jump down, men!’ cried the standard-bearer, ‘unless you want the enemy to get your standard! You will not find me failing in my duty to my country or my leader!’

According to Caesar, the Roman footsoldiers were transformed by the gallantry of the standard-bearer. Crashing down into the water after him, they fought their way up the shingle to regroup and form the disciplined lines of shields, spears and swords that made up the basic Roman battle formation. The Britons withdrew, and Caesar sent home news of a mighty victory. When his report reached Rome, the Senate voted an unprecedented twenty-day holiday of celebration.

But the Roman conqueror then spent less than twenty days in Britain. A storm wrecked many of his ships, so Caesar headed smartly back to France before the weather got any worse. Next summer, in July 54
BC
, he tried again, with redesigned landing craft whose shallow keels could be driven through the waves and up on to the beach. With more cavalry than at their first attempt, the Romans were able to secure their beachhead, march inland and cross the River Thames, fighting off hit-and-run attacks. The Celtic chiefs that Caesar managed to corner offered the conqueror their allegiance. But once again the winter storms threatened, and the Romans had to hurry back to France. This time the Senate did not call a holiday.

Julius Caesar was one of the megastars of Western history. Tall and sharp-featured, with the thinning brushed-forward hairstyle immortalised in countless marble statues, he was a man of extraordinary charisma. A brilliant general, he fought off his rivals to gain control of the entire Roman Empire before being murdered by opponents of his absolute power. Later Roman emperors tried to borrow his glory by calling themselves Caesar, and his memory has been perpetuated into recent times by the German and Russian titles of Kaiser and Czar.

In 45
BC
he reformed the Western calendar. Known henceforward as the Julian calendar, this used the device of the leap year to keep the earthly year in pace with the sun. The month of July is named after him, as is the Caesarean method of delivering babies, deriving from the story that his mother died while giving birth to him and that he had to be cut out of her womb. Ever the self-publicist, he is famous for his declaration ‘
Veni, vidi, vici
’ - ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ - after his victory at Zela in central Turkey in 47
BC
, and he conveyed a similar message of triumphant conquest when writing the history of his two brief trips to Britain. Describing events in words had made the historical record more vivid and accurate in many ways - but words clearly provided no guarantee that history would now become more truthful.

AD
1-33

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the Holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

S
UNG AT RUGBY MATCHES AND PATRIOTIC
occasions like the Last Night of the Proms, the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ has become England’s unofficial national anthem. Its uplifting lines conjure up the wild idea that Jesus Christ himself, ‘the Holy Lamb of God’, set foot in England at some moment during his thirty-three years on earth. If Pytheas the Greek and Julius Caesar could make it from the Mediterranean, why not the Saviour?

It could not possibly be. If Christ had had the time and means to travel the five thousand miles all the way from Palestine across Europe to England and back again in the course of his brief life, it would certainly have been recorded in the Gospels. And would not Christ himself have referred to the great adventure somewhere in his teaching?

The myth has entered the folk memory sideways, through the fables inspired by Joseph of Arimathea, the rich disciple who provided the tomb for Christ’s body after the crucifixion. The Gospels tell us quite a lot about Joseph (not to be confused with Christ’s father, Joseph the carpenter). A well respected member of the Sanhedrin, or Supreme Council of the Jews, Joseph had kept secret his dangerous conversion to the message of Jesus. It was only a man of such standing who could have gone to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, and asked for Christ’s dead body.

But over the centuries - and we are talking of more than a dozen centuries - extra exploits were attributed to this substantial and intriguing character. Joseph is said to have been one of the disciples who travelled to northern Europe preaching the gospel. He was credited with founding the first monastery in Britain. Other tales supposed that he had made his wealth in the metals trade, and had been in the habit of visiting the south-west in search of Cornwall’s tin and Somerset’s high-quality lead. It was even imagined that Joseph was the uncle of the Virgin Mary, and therefore the great-uncle of Christ, and so might have brought the boy along on one of his business trips to the region.

In 1502 came the first mention of a living relic that might lend some substance to these extraordinary tales - a hawthorn bush growing at Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. Blossoming unusually around Christmastime, in the depths of winter and on Christ’s birthday, it was known as the Holy Thorn and was said to have been planted by Joseph of Arimathea himself when he stuck his staff into the ground and it took root. It was further said that Joseph had cut his staff from the same bush as Christ’s crown of thorns - and modern botanists have established that the Glastonbury thorn, a pinkish-flowered hawthorn known as
Crataegus monogyna praecox
, is indeed a plant that originated in the Middle East. It blooms in Glastonbury to this day and the first sprig of blossom is ceremonially cut and presented to the Queen, who keeps it on her desk over Christmas.

In 1808, at the height of Britain’s bitter wars against Napoleon, the artist and poet William Blake pulled together the elements of the various Jesus and Glastonbury legends to create the poem that we now know as ‘Jerusalem’. Blake was a mystic and a radical, then making his living in a grimy engraving workshop in the sooty slums of London, where he dreamed of angels. He abhorred what he memorably described as the ‘dark satanic mills’ of industrial Britain, and he nursed the vision that a shining new society might be built. Jerusalem in our own day may be a sadly afflicted and tragically unholy place, but to Blake it was something glorious:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green and pleasant land.

Two centuries later during the horrors of World War I, when the flower of Europe’s youth was being slaughtered in the trenches of northern France, the composer Hubert Parry set the visionary words to music. The first time the stirring strains of ‘Jerusalem’ were heard in public was at a ‘Votes for Women’ concert in 1916, setting the note of reform and regeneration that the anthem retains to this day.

Let us say it one more time - we can be as sure as the sun rises that Jesus Christ did not set foot in Glastonbury, or anywhere else in England. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea is not history. But over the centuries the story would play its part in inspiring history. In words and music, ‘Jerusalem’ gives wing to the sense of hope and shared endeavour that a community needs if it is to believe in itself - the vision of a national spirit as clean and pure as England’s beautiful green countryside. Things may be good, but let us not get complacent - ‘better must come’.

AD
43

A
FTER CAESAR’S HASTY DEPARTURE IN
54
BC
, it was more than ninety years before the Romans tried to conquer Britain again - and when they eventually landed, they made the most of their triumph. In ad 43 the forty-thousand-strong army pushed resistance aside as it rolled up through Kent to the Thames, where the men were ordered to halt. The emperor Claudius wanted to catch up with them, and he duly arrived in splendour for the advance into modern Colchester, the principal British settlement of the south-east. The Roman victory parade featured a squadron of elephants, whose exotic appearance must have been greeted with amazement as they plodded through the Kent countryside.

Swaying a dozen feet above the ground, the club-footed but canny Claudius proudly claimed Colchester as the capital of Rome’s latest province. Straight streets were laid down, with a forum and amphitheatre, and the showpiece was a high, rectangular, white-pillared temple. Roman veterans were given land around the town, in the centre of which rose a statue of the emperor. With firm chin, large nose and slicked-down hair, the statue made Claudius look remarkably like Julius Caesar.

Claudius was considered a rather comical character by his contemporaries, who secretly mocked his physical handicaps. His dragging right foot was probably the result of brain damage at birth - his head and hands shook slightly - and he had a cracked, throaty and scarcely intelligible voice which, according to one of his enemies, belonged ‘to no land animal’. But as someone who had often found himself in the hands of doctors, he had a high regard for healing. He managed a soothing tone when dealing with the local chieftains of Britain, acknowledging that they had rights. He honoured them as ‘kings’ - which, in turn, boosted his own status as their emperor. Then in ad 54 Claudius died, to be succeeded by his stepson Nero, whose name would become proverbial for wilfulness and cruelty.

AD 61