A Blythe Epiphany

...now with more curry

Thursday, February 18, 2010

History is crazy, man!



One of the places we're excited to visit while in Scotland is the Culloden Battlefield. In addition to the historical reasons to visit such a place, Culloden figures prominently in a series of books that my mother and I (and now possibly my father) have been reading. I wanted to brush up on the history a bit before we get there, so I know what I'm looking at, so I've been doing a little reading. Tonight, that reading blew my mind. Read on, and you'll find out why.

From Undiscovered Scotland's Culloden feature page:

The Jacobites reached Derby on 4 December 1745. It was becoming clear that support from English Jacobites was not emerging as Charles as hoped. And it was becoming equally clear that the French were not going to invade in a timescale that would be of any help to Charles' Jacobite army. Meanwhile Government armies were gathering and the military situation looked increasingly bleak.

Charles Edward Stuart met with his key advisers in what is today the upstairs room of a Derby pub through most of 4 December. Charles was all for pressing on to London: the majority wanted to retreat to Scotland. Charles finally angrily accepted the need to retreat as night fell. The Jacobites began their retreat from Derby on 6 December 1745. What none of them knew was that the Welsh Jacobites has risen in support of them, and others in Oxfordshire were on the point of doing so. Neither did they know that London was in panic and that George II's court was packing his belongings onto ships on the Thames ready to flee to the Continent.

It has been said that had the Jacobites pressed on, George II would have fled; that the English and French would have avoided a further 70 years of conflict; that the English would not have had to raise taxes in the colonies to pay for the French wars; and that the Americans would have had no cause to fight a war for their independence. And, arguably, the French revolution would not have happened. The world might have been a very different place but for a closely argued decision taken in the upstairs room of a pub in Derby one dark winter's evening in December 1745.


Wow.


So basically, if they'd had phones back then, the world would have been a very different place.






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