The Spectator’s Notes | 2 July 2005

The renewed interest in Our Island Story on its centenary takes me back to the first history book I read. It is called A Nursery History of England, by one Elizabeth O’Neill who was, I now see but did not notice at the time, covertly sympathetic to Catholicism (Mary, Queen of Scots was ‘not vain like Elizabeth, and she was very kind’, Guy Fawkes was ‘brave in his way’). The book has two colour illustrations filling each left page and two corresponding stories on the right. We used to pore over the nastier scenes like the burning of Cranmer and people clamping handkerchiefs to their faces during the Great Plague, and these remain my dominant mental impression of these events. Indeed, horrible incidents are never shirked, though the information that the Romans were ‘very rough with [Boadicea’s] two daughters’ underplays the rape of the Iceni. In the manner that perhaps inspired the authors of 1066 and All That, the book is always very anxious to establish whether or not a famous figure was good, kind and brave, which is what children want to know (poor Edward II’s only mention is that he was ‘lazy and cowardly’). Lord Nelson rightly gets a whole page, a picture of him refusing to see the signal at Copenhagen and another of his death at Trafalgar. Nelson was ‘very brave and very lively. He was a little thin man, and was often very ill, but when he was telling his soldiers how to fight he forgot everything else.’ And here is why the fighting happened: ‘…there was a great French soldier called Napoleon, who wanted to make all the other countries do what the French people told them. He won many great battles, but the English people made up their minds to fight him, and keep England and the other countries free.’