I’ll come to all the controversies in a moment. But on one level, the story behind The Woman King is actually pretty simple. As its producer, the former Hollywood actress Maria Bello, has explained, she came up with the idea a few years ago after visiting the West African republic of Benin. There she had learned about a regiment of immensely fierce female warriors called the Agojie, who fought for the Kingdom of Dahomey in the 18th and 19th centuries. Entirely predictably, European travellers, missionaries and slave-traders called them “Amazons” — and since few of us can resist a story about terrifying statuesque Amazons, Bello was immediately struck by their cinematic potential. And with Marvel’s Black Panther having proved that there’s an enormous international audience for stories with sword-wielding black heroes, Sony executives agreed with her. So far, so uncomplicated.

What of the plot? Again, not very complicated. Historical epics usually tend to be pretty melodramatic, with impossibly admirable heroes and fiendishly cruel villains, and The Woman King is no exception. To cut a two-and-a-quarter-hour story mercifully short, we are in Dahomey in the 1820s. King Ghezo, played by John Boyega, is basically a decent fellow, at least by the standards of warrior kings in turbulent times. He depends on Viola Davis and her regiment of Amazons, not least against his neighbours, the Oyo, whose murderous, rapacious leader is in league with Portuguese slavers.

There are various familial goings-on of the “Luke, I am your father” quality, but we don’t really need to get into them now. Does one apparently orphaned character turn to be the daughter of another? I’m not saying. Anyway, in an entirely unpredictable development, some of the goodies are taken prisoner. Equally unpredictably, the king is reluctant to stake everything on a risky rescue mission. So in a twist that nobody could possibly have imagined, Viola Davis defies orders and leads an expedition to save them anyway. (You may think you’ve seen this before, but you haven’t, because it wasn’t set in Africa when you did see it before, so this time it’s completely different.) So what happens? Well, I don’t want to spoil it. Are they all slaughtered where they stand? Does the film end on a startlingly low note? Or do the goodies win the day? You’ll have to see it yourself to find out.

The producers claim, as they always do, that The Woman King is “based on true events”. And in fairness, they’re not entirely wrong. There certainly was a kingdom of Dahomey in the 19th century: proud, independent, fiercely aggressive — and that’s putting it mildly. The historian Stanley B. Alpern, author of the definitive English-language history of the Agojie, calls it a state “dedicated to warfare and slave-raiding…with the king controlling and regimenting practically every aspect of social life”. One of those kings was indeed called Ghezo. And the Agojie definitely existed, too. As an excellent essay for the Smithsonian magazine explains, they were probably founded around the turn of the 18th century, and boasted some 6,000 female warriors who “raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and slashed off resisters’ heads to return to their king as trophies of war”.

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So were they as intimidating as the film suggests? Even more intimidating, actually. Forbidden from sleeping with men, the Agojie were recruited when young and forced to undergo the kind of military training that would turn most of us into conscientious objectors. One British traveller described how they were forced to scramble across dense thickets of acacia thorns, without anything to protect their feet from bleeding.

Other tests were designed to desensitise them to the horrors of combat. Every year, according to the Smithsonian, “new recruits of both sexes were required to mount a platform 16 feet high, pick up baskets containing bound and gagged prisoners of war, and hurl them over the parapet to a baying mob below”. And in perhaps the most horribly memorable detail, a French officer called Jean Bayol watched as a teenage recruit called Nanisca, “who had not yet killed anyone”, was brought before a captured young man whose hands were bound. According to Bayol, she “swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk. … She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.”

Nice. It was this Nanisca, by the way, who seems to have inspired the name of Viola Davis’s character. She ended up her days fighting the French, cutting the head off an artillery officer before being shot down in her turn. It was what she would have wanted. Of course plenty of historical films romanticise their terrifyingly violent heroes, as anybody who has seen Gladiator or 300 will attest. Such is the nature of storytelling. The problem for The Woman King, though, is that Dahomey wasn’t just a violent society; it was a violent slave-trading society. Hence the tsunami of controversy.

Although we’re always been told that slavery is a terribly difficult and complicated subject, the history behind all this is actually pretty straightforward. Slave-trading was enormously important, if not essential, to the kingdom of Dahomey. As the Brazilian historian Ana Lucia Araujo has pointed out, Dahomey’s expansion was exactly contemporary with the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, Dahomey seized and controlled the port of Ouidah, one of the most important hubs in the entire network. From here, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million African captives were forcibly embarked on ships for the New World.

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And although this was a story in which European slave-traders played a leading role, the women warriors of Dahomey were hardly innocent. Quite the reverse. As Araujo notes, The Woman King opens with a scene in which the Adojie attack a neighbouring village, killing the men but chivalrously sparing the women. This is pure fiction, though. In reality, she writes, “the soldiers of the Dahomean army (both women and men) would take the healthy, younger villagers as prisoners and walk them to Dahomey’s capital, Abomey”. Here some would become local slaves, others butchered in human sacrifices. But “most would be transported to the coast, where they would be sold, and board slave ships sailing to the Americas, especially Brazil”.

This isn’t the only distortion of the truth. In the film, King Ghezo is persuaded to end Dahomey’s reliance on European slave-traders and embrace palm-oil production instead. But this is nonsense. Indeed, to his neighbours, the idea that he and his Amazon warriors were reforming liberators would have seemed downright obscene. In reality, Ghezo was as brutal and self-interested as any European imperialist. When he seized the throne in 1818, one of his first acts was to punish his family rivals by selling them into slavery. And for much of his reign he actively resisted pressure from Europe to end the trade in human beings, since by the 1830s and 1840s the British were vigorously trying to stamp it out, even blockading his coastline with Royal Navy ships.

Does all this matter? Maybe not. To repeat: all historical films turn fact into fiction. If you go to Hollywood for your history, that’s your problem, not theirs. Addressing her critics in Variety, Viola Davis insisted that a movie is just, well, a movie. “If we just told a history lesson, which we very well could have, that would be a documentary,” she said bluntly. “Unfortunately, people wouldn’t be in the theaters.” As for John Boyega, he fell back on the kind of impenetrable gibberish for which actors have long been admired across the world. “Art can live in a moral or immoral space and could sometimes just be about shining a light on human nature, history, and the reality of that conflict,” he said gnomically. “So, for me, including that just shows that there is a way in which we can embrace stories that accept the fact that humanity is not perfect, while also being entertaining and something you can learn from.”

What does that mean? I suspect we will never know.

But because it’s Africa and it’s slavery, some people don’t see this as a trivial matter at all. A month ago the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, mastermind of the crazy “1619 Project” to rewrite all American history around the theme of slavery, issued an ominous warning that she was looking forward to seeing “how a movie that seems to glorify the all-female military unit of the Dahomey deals with the fact that this kingdom derived its wealth from capturing Africans for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade”. The New Yorker, poring over the film’s many distortions, condemned it as not merely “muddled” and “disingenuous” but a “cynical distortion of history”.

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And on Twitter, the usual suspects have been out in force, pitchforks at the ready. In a way it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on; merely to enter the lists is to expose yourself to charges of heresy. So when Ana Lucia Araujo, expert on the slave trade at Howard University, ventured online to discuss a book about another African warrior queen from Angola, and made the mistake of using the word “deported” to describe the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic — well, that was the end of her. “The absolute caucasity of this person!” thundered one of her critics — himself, judging by his picture, distinctly Caucasian. Academics, eh? “What an absolute clown show!” read one reply. Well, you said it.

At heart, then, the story of The Woman King isn’t really a story about Dahomey in the 19th century, but one about the wildly hysterical racial politics of America in the 21st. I haven’t even got into the fact that the actress Lupita Nyong’o, who was originally supposed to be in the film, went to West Africa, made a documentary about the slave trade, broke down in tears when she discovered the Agojies’ involvement in slavery — and then pulled out of the film. Nor do I have time to get into the unbridled joy of the American Right at the spectacle of so many Hollywood liberals and academic nutcases tearing one another to shreds about a film about slavery. “Few of the governments extinguished by European colonialism,” exulted one writer in the National Review, “so richly deserved to be destroyed as Dahomey’s”. I bet he wouldn’t dare say that to John Boyega, though.

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Am I bothered by the film’s distortion of history, then? Well, perhaps a little. Films do matter. Given its enduring legacy in former slave societies such as the United States and Brazil, it would have been much better to tell the story of slavery in a careful, nuanced way, instead of reducing it to a cartoonish, wildly distorted, risibly woke melodrama of heroes and villains. And if the filmmakers had had the courage to tell the true story of Dahomey — a story in which bold, independent African women were sometimes just as cruel and exploitative as the most vicious Portuguese sea-captains — then it might have encouraged their viewers to move beyond the infantile goodies-and-baddies view of imperial history that’s become so common today.

All the same, I’m not going to get too exercised about it. Shrieking and shouting about Hollywood films is never a good look. They come and they go, and most ordinary viewers are far too sensible to take them seriously. Let the lunatics rage on Twitter. The rest of us know it’s only a movie.

Look more closely, though, and Cecco’s scientific credentials start to unravel. Although nothing excuses the inquisitors who sent him to his terrible death, it is important to understand why they acted as they did. It turns out that Cecco was teaching demonology to his students at Bologna: his lectures were full of references to binding immaterial beings.

Even more damning, according to an inquisitor, he cast the horoscope for Jesus of Nazareth, noting that the Messiah’s poverty and suffering were written in the stars. To assert that God himself was subject to astrological influences sounds like an unforgivable heresy, but in fact Cecco was forgiven. Stripped of his lectureship and heavily fined, he nonetheless escaped with his life. Only after a second offence, in Florence a couple of years later, was the full force of the law brought to bear.

Cecco owes his fame entirely to his execution, which enabled 19th-century historians to laud him as a martyr for science. However, not only was he more magician than scientist, the manner of his death is unique among medieval astrologers.

You will search in vain for records of scientists being arraigned by the inquisition in the Middle Ages, and even occultists like Cecco were rarely condemned until after their death. (The most notorious instances of inquisitors clashing with natural philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, date from the 1600s and even these cases are very far from straight conflicts between science and religion).

The surprising truth is that the medieval Church was generally supportive of science and mathematics. For example, it ensured these subjects were compulsory for students who wanted to graduate to the higher faculties at university, especially if they wanted to become theologians.

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The universities themselves were a medieval invention. They were structured as self-governing corporations that could set their own internal rules and did not rely on royal or ecclesiastical patronage. Universities became adept at playing off secular and sacred powers against one another. When the Bishop of Paris banned the works of Aristotle in the early 13th century, the new University of Toulouse began advertising for students who wanted to study those very books.

It wasn’t long before the pope rescinded the ban and there is little evidence anyone took much notice of it anyway. Besides which, if things became intolerable a university could simply up sticks and move elsewhere. In 1209, an Oxford student murdered his mistress before making himself scarce; the townsfolk strung up his housemates in revenge, so a large group of masters and students felt it sensible to decamp to a town deep in the East Anglian marshes. Thus, was the University of Cambridge born.

The science of the Middle Ages was based on ancient Greek antecedents, especially the philosopher Aristotle, the astronomer Ptolemy and the mathematician Euclid. This legacy was seasoned with learning from the Islamic world, including commentary on Aristotle by the Andalusian Muslim Averroes and algebra using Arabic (actually Indian) numerals.

The first translation of Euclid’s Elements had been made from an Arabic version while the Latin edition of Ptolemy’s great synthesis of astronomy retained its Arabic title of Almagest. The Greek and Islamic inheritance meant that people in the Middle Ages were well aware that the earth is a sphere and even had a reasonable idea of how big it is.

The myth that the medieval papacy insisted that the world is flat appears to date from the 17th century, when Protestants used it as an example of Catholic backwardness. Indeed, our modern conception of the Middle Ages as a dark age of superstition is largely an invention of Protestant authors such as Francis Bacon and Pierre Bayle.

In reality, the Middle Ages saw technological breakthroughs such as spectacles and the mechanical clock, as well as the adaptation of eastern inventions like paper, the compass, gunpowder and printing. Far from being a closed society, medieval Europe welcomed outside influences and did its best to improve on them.

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In the field of theoretical science, many of the most notable developments took place at the universities. The thousands of students attending Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Cologne, Bologna and elsewhere needed teachers, and their fees provided a steady income for those wanting to devote their lives to science or mathematics.

The result was a flowering of scientific speculation in the fourteenth century that challenged the dominance of Aristotle. For instance, at Merton College, Oxford, a group of scholars developed mathematical techniques to describe moving objects. The earliest of their number, Thomas Bradwardine, who went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, derived a formula that enabled him to calculate the speed of a body in accordance with the theories of Aristotle.

The formula is wrong because Aristotle’s mechanics is also in error, but the use of an algebraic function to describe the physical world was a novel idea. Other Merton mathematicians discovered a means of calculating the distance travelled by a uniformly accelerating object. This formula was later adopted by Galileo, without attribution, as a core part of his own work on falling bodies.

Meanwhile, Jean Buridan, rector at the University of Paris, set out to show that it is not physically possible to show that the earth is rotating. In other words, from our standpoint, we can’t tell whether the globe is moving or the heavens are turning around us.

He compared the situation to a boat floating along a calm river. When observing a stationary vessel, it isn’t possible for a passenger on the boat to tell whether he is moving or the other vessel is. We are all familiar with a similar experience when on board a train that has stopped at the station, next to another train that is leaving. Buridan’s arguments about relative motion were later used (again, without attribution) by Nicolas Copernicus to explain why we cannot directly detect the earth orbiting the sun.

Buridan also developed the concept of impetus and showed that, in the absence of friction, once an object has been set in motion, it should keep going forever. This was true of the planets, he thought, which should continue their orbits around the earth for eternity once God had given them the requisite shove at the moment of creation. Buridan’s theory of impetus, which anticipated Isaac Newton’s First Law, challenged Aristotle’s dictum that all moving objects need something else to move them.

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The Church looked upon this work benignly. Mathematics was considered good training for young minds that needed to be raised from mere ephemeral concerns before they were fit to contemplate divine truths. Science was valuable because medieval people thought of the world as God’s handiwork. To study it was a way of glorifying its creator.

A useful metaphor, picked up by Galileo, was to speak of God having written two books — the Bible and nature. As they both had the same author, they could not conflict and the Church had nothing to fear from science properly practised.

Science also provided a useful bulwark against heresy. The most feared sect of medieval heretics, the Cathars of southern France, claimed that the material world was the work of the devil. The Church encouraged its missionaries to use the wonders of nature as proof that the universe was created by God and that the Cathars were mistaken to dismiss it as evil.

Premodern science always served an agenda, and things were no different in the Middle Ages. No one was pursuing the disinterested study of nature; even Jean Buridan, when noting that the planets needed nothing except an initial impetus from God to keep them moving, sought to dismiss the spirits with which the likes of Cecco D’Ascoli populated the sky. By disenchanting the world, science reinforced monotheism.

Historians of science compare the role of medieval natural philosophy to that of a handmaiden, serving theology. Despite the subservient position, this afforded scientific practitioners a degree of protection and allowed them to advance theories that turned out to be essential to the work of famous figures like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Far from being cowed by the Church, medieval natural philosophers could explore new concepts that, perhaps unintentionally, laid the foundations of modern science.

This image has been perpetuated by a string of films, plays and novels, swelling the ranks of Mary’s ardent fans worldwide. The latest Hollywood production, released in the UK in January with Saoirse Ronan as the charismatic lead, took Marymania to new heights.

But the truth is far removed from this beguiling image. Yes, Mary was dogged by tragedy in her life, but much of this could have been avoided if she had shown greater wisdom and restraint. In contrast to Elizabeth I, the Queen of Scots ruled with her heart, not her head. This led her to make a series of catastrophic decisions that would lose her the crown — and her life.

The seeds of Mary’s disastrous reign were sown in early childhood. While her cousin Elizabeth learned the hard way — neglected by her father, declared a bastard, and often in danger of her life — Mary was the pampered princess, surrounded by flatterers and attendants who met her every need and taught her to accept queenship as a matter of right. This may have brought Mary short-term happiness and security, but it did little to equip her for the monumental task that lay ahead.

Whereas Elizabeth had had a tortuous path to the throne of England, Mary had inherited the crown of Scotland at just six days old upon the death of her father, James V. At the age of five, Mary was betrothed to François, Dauphin of France and son of King Henri II, and spent the rest of her childhood at the French court, where she became the focus of adoring attention.

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All of this meant that Mary grew up to be rather arrogant, and that she was likely to one day add France to her crowns gave her an even greater sense of invincibility. Moreover, she had long been taught to believe in her right to the English throne. She was the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, and even though Henry VIII had excluded his elder sister’s descendants from the succession, Mary paid little heed to this. It was this fact, more than any other, that would set her on a collision course with Elizabeth — with calamitous results.

In April 1558, Mary and the Dauphin were married; in November, they received the news that Elizabeth was now Queen of England, and Mary wasted no time in asserting her claim to the English throne. The very day after Elizabeth’s accession, she and her new husband began to style themselves King and Queen of England and included the English royal arms in Mary’s shield.

This dealt her relationship with Elizabeth a fatal blow. As the 17th century historian William Camden observed: “Hereupon Queen Elizabeth bore secret grudge against her, which… could not be extinguished but by death.”

The following year, Mary and François became rulers of France upon the death of his father King Henri II. But Mary’s triumph was shortlived: her sixteen year-old husband François died suddenly the following year, and any hopes that Mary might have cherished of holding onto power were soon dashed when her formidable mother-in-law Catherine de’ Medici was declared Regent of France. Mary’s return to Scotland in August 1561 signalled the end of her life as a pampered princess. But, fatally, she failed to appreciate that fact.

Scotland was a less hospitable climate in every respect, dominated by rapacious and ruthless nobles who viewed their queen with barely concealed disdain. In stark contrast to her English cousin, Mary felt completely unable to assert her authority without a husband to guide her. She therefore soon began casting about for a suitable candidate.

Her choice could not have been worse. Henry, Lord Darnley, was the son of the Earl and Countess of Lennox and, like Mary, a grandchild of Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII. Tall, good looking and charismatic, Darnley’s royal blood was not the only thing that appealed to Mary. She seems to have fallen head over heels in love and soon took this “long lad” as her husband. As well as defying the expressed wishes of her cousin Elizabeth and thus destroying the fragile alliance between their two countries, Mary’s rash decision also proved her to be an appalling judge of character.

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Arrogant, feckless and vain, Darnley was a singularly unsuitable choice as consort. Even Mary’s ambassador Sir James Melville, who was usually effusive in his praise of her, lamented: “No woman of spirit would make choice of such a man.” Elizabeth’s ambassador in Scotland, Thomas Randolph, concurred: “This Queen in her love is so transported, and he grown so proud that to all honest men he is intolerable.” But Mary was blinded by sexual attraction and declared her new husband “the lustiest and best proportioned long man that she had ever seen”.

It was not long before Darnley made enemies of the powerful Scottish lords who dominated Mary’s government. Even his wife soon came to realise her mistake in marrying him. Within months of the wedding, Randolph reported: “I know now for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth Darnley and all his kin.” But there was no going back now, particularly as Mary was pregnant with Darnley’s child.

Matters came to a head when Darnley ordered Mary’s beloved secretary, David Rizzio, to be dragged from her presence and stabbed to death in an adjoining room. He then kept his heavily pregnant wife a virtual prisoner.

The birth of a son in June 1566 strengthened Mary’s resolved to be rid of her troublesome husband and she began openly conspiring with a group of Scottish Lords. They included the Lord High Admiral of Scotland, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell. When Darnley was murdered in February 1567, Bothwell was the prime suspect.

Incredibly, three months later Mary scandalised the world by taking Bothwell as her new husband. Whether he had forced her into marriage or she had formed a passionate attachment to her second husband’s murderer will never be known for certain. Either way, the marriage was a telling indication of Mary’s deeply conventional views of queenship. She believed that the only way for a woman to rule effectively was by submitting to the direction of male advisers.

One of Elizabeth’s ambassadors to Scotland remarked that Mary had no confidence in her own intellectual ability, but was content “to be ruled by good counsel and wise men”. While Elizabeth was a shrewd political operator who dominated her government, Mary would sit in council meetings quietly sewing as her advisers debated the issues at hand. She justified her latest marriage on the basis that the unrest within her country “cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man”.

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The man she had chosen was far from being an equal partner. Domineering, aggressive and deeply scornful of women, Bothwell forced Mary to submit meekly to his will. It was not long before he alienated the powerful lords of the political establishment, who staged a coup to oust both him and the queen.

Mary was taken captive in June 1567 and during her imprisonment at Lochleven Castle she miscarried Bothwell’s twins. On 24 July she was presented with the deeds of abdication and told she must sign or face death.

But if Mary lacked judgement, she did not lack courage, and in May the following year she staged a daring escape from Lochleven. Together with a small band of supporters, she fled south to Dumfries. Realising that to turn back would almost certainly mean death, the beleaguered Queen of Scots chose to throw herself upon the mercy of her cousin, Elizabeth.

It would prove another catastrophic decision. Mary could have returned to France, where she still had powerful allies. Instead, she revealed her political naivety by taking her English cousin’s assurances of affection and support at face value. When Elizabeth showed her true colours and made the fallen Queen of Scots her prisoner, Mary was both shocked and outraged. Over the next few weeks, she bombarded her cousin with long and impassioned letters, all pleading with her to honour her promise of support.

If she had been more politically savvy, Mary would have appreciated that it was too dangerous for Elizabeth to release the woman who had been her greatest threat since the beginning of her reign. But while she eventually resigned herself to the fact that the English Queen was going to keep her captive, Mary was far from content to accept it.

During the long years ahead, Mary would involve herself with numerous Catholic plots and rebellions aimed at murdering Elizabeth and putting her Scottish cousin on the throne. For the most part, Mary employed just enough discretion to avoid conviction, but by 1586 she had lost patience.

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When a group of Catholic gentlemen led by Antony Babington established a channel of communication with Mary, she encouraged their plans to assassinate Elizabeth and make her Queen of England. Little did she know that all her messages were being intercepted by her cousin’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, who was patiently waiting until he had enough evidence to condemn her.

On 17 July, Mary wrote to Babington, endorsing his suggestion that the English Queen be “despatched” by a group of noblemen. “Set the six gentlemen to work”, she urged. She had as good as signed her own death warrant.

Mary was found guilty of high treason on 25 October 1586; there could only be one punishment, but Elizabeth found the idea of putting a fellow queen to death abhorrent. After weeks of delaying tactics, she reluctantly bowed to pressure from her council and ordered Mary’s execution.

The former Queen of Scots went to the block on 8 February 1587 at Fotheringay Castle. Determined to go down in history as a tragic heroine, she wore scarlet, the colour of martyrs, and made an impassioned speech from the scaffold. The cult of Mary was born.

The following year, Phillip II of Spain launched the Armada in Mary’s name. For centuries afterwards she enjoyed the reputation of a great Catholic martyr, blighted by ill fortune and deprived of her throne — and her life — by a staggering miscarriage of justice. While it is true that the Queen of Scots had suffered great misfortune during her life, the real tragedy was that most of it had been of her own making.

Tracy Borman is a best selling author, historian and broadcaster specialising in the Tudor period. Her books include Elizabeth’s Women: the hidden story of the Virgin Queen.

We conducted it in a chivalrous fashion. And We Won It. Knighted historians have denounced me for saying so, but the common idea of that war in modern Britain is a vague belief that we went to war in 1939 to save the Jews of Europe.

Of course no historian says this. Nobody who knows anything at all about the war could possibly believe it. As it happens, we did not in fact save most of the Jews of Europe, or make any great efforts to do so once we knew they were being murdered. But then, most people don’t really know anything about the war.

Where was Narvik? Did we really attack the French fleet? Why did Danzig matter? What are the Ardennes? What happened at Tobruk? How on earth was HMS Hood sunk so easily? Why did the USA take so long to enter the war? Why weren’t we invaded in fact, as we have been so many times in fiction?

How come we ended up in alliance with the monster, Stalin, if our cause was freedom and civilisation? Why did we send all our gold to America? Did we get it back?

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The whole story is a bafflement of obscurity and confusion. Most of us just know the legend, which more or less requires us not to think, or study the matter. Let’s just have another book about codebreaking geniuses at Bletchley Park or brave Special Operations Executive agents parachuted into occupied France.

Or perhaps another film about the Dunkirk evacuation, which entirely glosses over why our army, bereft of equipment worth billions, was standing up to its armpits in salt water on the French coast. And the newspapers print the legend. And the publishers print the legend. And TV shows the legend.

TV’s latest excursion into this Churchilliad is a drama called World on Fire. It features a number of plucky and intrepid characters, several of them quite Left-wing — for this is after all an anti-Nazi war, which was therefore surely Left-wing. But here come the contradictions again, which I doubt the BBC will bother with very much: it was not so Left-wing at the start, if you happened to be a Communist, hamstrung by Stalin’s 1939-41 alliance with Hitler.

And much of it is set in Poland, at that time a military dictatorship which had recently taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and where anti-Semitism was common, even if not officially encouraged. We are invited to sympathise with one character’s fury at Britain’s inaction as the Nazis prepare to invade. Yet most British people at the time were baffled by our alliance with Poland, and Britain never had any intention of doing anything serious about it, lacking the offensive forces needed to do so.

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The historical vagueness and confusion in the scenes which follow is astonishing. I doubt whether one in a hundred of those watching could find Danzig on a map, or know why its Polish Post Office was so important in 1939 (A clue. Danzig at that date was so overwhelmingly German by population — 98% — that the Polish Post Office was one of the very few pieces of Polish real estate in the city).

I personally was puzzled to see, in late August 1939, young Polish men shown apparently volunteering to join their country’s army in its hour of need, as they would already have been under arms. Poland, which though poor and poorly-equipped and not as big a military power as it liked to think, was not unwarlike, and had maintained a two-year compulsory military service requirement since the 1920s.

This misty lack of clarity about checkable facts is, in my view, a direct result of the wilful ignorance we have imposed on ourselves, rather than make an honest examination of the origins and aims of that war. Asked why we signed a treaty with Poland, I doubt one British person in 100 could tell you. Asked what British troops were even doing in North Africa, where there was so much fighting, they cannot really explain.

You will hear stuff about the need to defend the Suez Canal, in fact rendered almost useless throughout the war by our inability to control the Mediterranean. Or there will be the need to defend “the oilfields”, by which is meant those in Iraq, a vast distance from North Africa.

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In fact, how is it that a war which began very much in the heart of Europe so quickly spun into lots of small pieces on the far side of the world? Why, for four years of a six year war, from Dunkirk to D-Day, were British soldiers not in direct contact with the main body of the main enemy, Germany?

Why, if the peril of invasion was so great in 1940, did that invasion never happen? Would you be surprised to know that in 1940 Germany did not possess, or build, a single landing craft? Or that its naval chiefs were strongly against any attempt to mount such an invasion, which was never seriously prepared?

We rightly condemn the horrors of the Blitz, especially on poor Coventry. How come almost nobody has heard of any German city bombed, in a morally dubious way, by the Allies — except Dresden in February 1945, which even the most bellicose person accepts may have been going a bit far? In fact from 1943 to 1945, we deliberately bombed working-class German civilians in their homes in dozens of German cities, killing hundreds of thousands.

As for our endorsement, at Potsdam, of a colossal and extremely violent ethnic cleansing of central Europe after the war, it is perhaps the least known major event in human history. To know of these things is to be unable, any more, to listen to the legend in the same way.

Yes, it was good that we won and they lost. Yes, our enemy represents an appalling unequalled evil. No bad deed done by us could possibly obscure or cancel the evils of the Third Reich, or be equated with them. But the unique evil of the Nazis does not wholly blot out lesser evils on our side.

This bleak realisation has been a loss for me, for as a child I loved the legend, and kept a place for it in my heart well into adulthood. It was only when it was repeatedly used as a sort of exemplar for modern wars of choice that I began to wonder about it.

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In the end I grew tired of being told that every crisis was a new Munich and every petty foreign despot was a new Hitler, from Manuel Noriega to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I grew even more tired of being told that people such as Anthony Blair and George W. Bush were the inheritors of Winston Churchill.

And I grew sick of being told that, as an opponent or critic of voluntary war, I was the modern version of Neville Chamberlain — or worse. And because I was dismayed by the use to which the legend was being put, I eventually examined the legend and found it wanting.

But we are on the dangerous edge of things here. If you mention doubts about the World War Two myth, you are quite likely to be falsely accused of several severe misdeeds. You will immediately be told that you are a defeatist who thinks we should have made peace with Berlin in 1940. I am no such thing, and have never written a syllable to suggest that I am. Yet I find that people just assume it to be so, of anyone who departs from the cult of unmixed heroism and virtue. As it happens, I think Churchill’s greatest action was to refuse to talk to Hitler in 1940, and I believe that a peace with the Third Reich would have been a crime and a mistake.

I am filled with admiration for those who fought and took appalling risks to fight the war. I should be, as my father was one of them, spending long months on the “Worst Journey in the World”, the Russian convoys between Scapa Flow and Murmansk. Knowing what I know about that theatre of war (my father seldom spoke about it, but suggested some reading so that I could learn from others), I doubt whether most present-day British people (including me) would even have been prepared to set out, let alone endure what happened on the way.

Though my father died more than 30 years ago, I recently devoted some months to obtaining the British medal which was eventually issued to those who took part in this very severe theatre of war. It arrived, at length, in a cheap plastic case, very inferior to those in which modern civilian honours are presented. This seemed in a way to symbolise the contrast between the grandeur of what we believe and the pinched, stretched and weary truth about what actually happened.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday and author of The Phoney Victory: Britain’s World War Two Illusion (Tauris)

The public’s perceptions of the trial have been shaped and coloured by films, plays and TV dramas — as well as by glancing references in newspaper articles, dropped names and conversational asides, all of which make up the currency of popular culture.

The episode’s urtext was Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s play, Inherit the Wind, which was turned into a 1960 movie directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Spencer Tracy. The trial generated at least three further feature films, including a remake of Inherit the Wind, and four or five made-for-television docudramas. The film Planet of the Apes, in which the intolerant orangutan religious authorities refuse to listen to the scientific evidence of their connection to mankind, as presented by the liberal chimpanzee scientist, was a clear allusion to the event.

If one were to frame a composite picture to capture the impression of the trial passed to the following generation, it would look something like this: an earnest, high-minded young schoolmaster, John Scopes, who reads widely and keeps abreast of intellectual progress, decides to teach his pupils about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which is by now more than 60 years old and is accepted by biologists as scientific fact.

Scopes is motivated by a commitment to the welfare of the young minds in his charge. He is determined to give them an education founded on truth, rather than superstition. He obtains a set of textbooks and starts teaching evolution.

The pupils are gripped and want to learn more. However, Scopes’s initiative falls foul of a fusty, outdated law that forbids the teaching of evolution and requires him instead to teach the creation story set out in the Bible; this Scopes knows to be wrong because fossil evidence, combined with what he has read in Charles Darwin’s book, proves that the world is many millions of years older than a literal reading of the Book of Genesis allows.

But Scopes is also up against powerful interests, politicians and clergymen of reactionary disposition who feel very threatened, Darwin’s work being radically subversive of their source of authority and power. The issues at stake are academic freedom, freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, and supremely, the claims of scientific truth to a place at the top of the epistemological tree.

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The case comes to court, where a thrilling duel of wits ensues between two of the finest trial attorneys in the land. For the defence steps forward the urbane Clarence Darrow, representing science and progress. For the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, the epitome of a fast-fading order, in outlook and attitude somewhat similar to one of the more hardline figures on today’s evangelical Christian Right.

To begin with, it seems the prosecutor has the edge. The jury are simple country folk, and he plays to their natural conservative prejudices. Darrow, by contrast is a big city boy, and his slick ways elicit the jury’s suspicion.

Soon, the tables are turned. Bryan had hoped to put Darwin on trial, but the wily Darrow has put the Bible on trial instead. Not only that — he has put the prosecutor on the stand. The old man makes an almighty fool of himself trying to explain how God made the world in six days.

As the young schoolmaster comes blinking into the sunlight having been thoroughly vindicated, his young pupils swarm around him. Now they can go on to become research chemists or geneticists. Heck, the geeky one with the specs might even win the Nobel Prize. For sure, anyone with a broadly liberal outlook stands with Scopes and is firmly of the Darrow persuasion.

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But almost everything we think we know about the Scopes trial turns out to be untrue. Scopes wasn’t really a science teacher: he was the high school’s football coach and only covered science when the regular teacher was away. He probably never actually taught his class about evolution at all. Scopes gave a number of conflicting accounts: that he did teach the lesson; that he set a chapter of a textbook as homework, but never taught evolution in the classroom; and, most credibly, that he had made the whole thing up. For the trial itself was a cynical contrivance.

The plot had been hatched around a table in Fred Robinson’s drugstore by a group of Dayton businessmen. One of them had spotted an advertisement in a city newspaper placed by a pressure group wanting to find a community willing to challenge the law forbidding the teaching of evolution.

Robinson, who styled himself “the hustlin’ druggist”, and his fellow small- town boosters, spotted a commercial opportunity. A spectacular trial in Dayton would pull in visitors from all across the United States, who would spend more dollars in local shops, hotels and restaurants every day the trial was in progress than local residents spent in a month.

John Scopes was invited to meet the business leaders on 5 May 1925. They made their pitch: he was a young man, 24- years old, with nothing to lose. He could become famous. They would see to it that whatever the outcome, no harm would come to him. He would be doing the whole community a favour. Scopes agreed, saying that he disapproved of the law anyway. Arrangements were made for the young teacher to confess to teaching a class about evolution in breach of Tennessee law.

The relevant statute, known as the Butler Act, was not a fusty old one. In fact the Governor had signed it into law only two months previously. The Tennessee House of Representatives had passed the bill by 71 votes to 5; the state Senate endorsed it 24 votes to 6. These margins reflected the Butler Act’s enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee — and there was good reason for that.

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At this time almost everyone who considered themselves ‘progressive’, including everyone who considered themselves a ‘Darwinist’, strongly supported the-then rampant eugenics movement. In rural Tennessee, folks may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwin’s theory of evolution, nor of his cousin, Francis Galton’s related, but pseudo-scientific theory of eugenics; but they knew the progressives who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them “imbeciles” and “defectives” and would sterilise them if they got half a chance.

More than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised under eugenics laws passed by 33 states. It wasn’t just low IQ that established someone as likely to have a dysgenic effect: a history of heavy drinking, or conceiving a child out of wedlock, were enough to mark someone down as a “moral imbecile”.

Neighbouring Virginia would witness vast sweep operations where road blocks were set up and teams of sheriffs’ deputies dragged whole families away to be put under the knife. But Tennessee held out, refusing ever to pass any compulsory sterilisation statute, and the people of the state distrusted the progressives. They understood that they didn’t just view southern hillbillies with contempt, they despised God and the Bible, too — and now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. The Butler Act would put a stop to that nonsense.

The textbook John Scopes pretended to have used to teach his class about evolution was George Hunter’s A Civic Biology, a work that was consistent with the scientific orthodoxy of its day. That is to say, it was strongly influenced by scientific racialism and eugenics.

Hunter, like Charles Darwin before him, believed the several races of man had travelled different distances down the evolutionary road. Way out in the vanguard was the refined Caucasian; lagging at the rear was the significantly less evolved African type, with other races somewhere in-between.

Scopes accepted this doctrine of white supremacy. In preparing for the trial he had visited one of the scientists who, in 1906, had supported the exhibition of a Congolese Pygmy in a cage at New York’s Bronx Zoo, alongside an orangutan and a gorilla, as living proof of Darwinian evolution, presenting him as a transitional form between ape and human, the so-called ‘missing link’.

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Hunter’s biology textbook was also scathing about what the author perceived as a feckless underclass that drank too much and lived off handouts. Compulsory sterilisation was his preferred solution.

As the town’s business leaders had hoped, the trial did pull in thousands of visitors. Dayton got its spectacle. The area around the courthouse soon began to resemble a carnival. A troupe of live monkeys cavorted on the courthouse lawn. More than two hundred journalists turned up, two of them all the way from England.

The man they had come to see perform, William Jennings Bryan, was certainly no prototypical Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. In fact, he was more of a Bernie Sanders. Bryan had been Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state and was three times the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States.

He was by some way the most politically Left-wing Democrat ever to receive the party’s nomination. The scourge of Wall Street bankers and big business, Bryan argued for a minimum wage and subsidies for poor farmers. He demanded the nationalisation of key industries such as the railroads, and the telegraph and telephone services. He was a radical populist and also a devout Presbyterian.

Since the defence admitted that Scopes had breached the statute, the only line left to pursue was to demonstrate that the creation story in Genesis was intrinsically risible. But when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in Dayton, he did not inflict the comprehensive humiliation that posterity somehow remembers. He was evidently surprised by the answers he got when he pressed the witness on key points relating to the age of the world. Bryan may have been a fundamentalist, but his fundamentalism turned out to have its shades of grey.

The six days God had taken to create the world were not necessarily 24-hour days, Bryan explained. They might well have lasted millions of years, even hundreds of millions of years. Science and the Bible were not mutually exclusive. For the court, this answer meant that Darrow’s inquisition had no real evidential value and the judge swiftly brought it to a close.

Darrow and Scopes had failed to win the central argument on which the case turned. The jury took only nine minutes to reach their verdict: John Scopes was guilty as charged. The judge slapped the schoolmaster with a hefty fine. Which only goes to show that history is sometimes written — or re-written — by the losers.

Dennis Sewell is the author of The Political Gene; How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics

Now, my medieval Latin is no great shakes, but unless I’m missing something, this nameless petitioner is wrong on a number of counts. First, as any constitutional pedant will tell you, it isn’t the Magna Carta, just Magna Carta, because Latin doesn’t use articles like the and a. Second, the document doesn’t actually have any clauses — in its original form, it was just continuous text.

The clauses have been added on in later versions to make it more comprehensible. And finally, rather importantly, Magna Carta says nothing at all about storming Parliament, which didn’t exist yet, and didn’t have its own building — rather a prerequisite for being stormed — for another 300 years.

In fact, the words usually referred to as Clause 61 set out how 25 Barons may confiscate the property of the king if he defies them (with a special exemption for the Queen and the royal children, who retained the dubious privilege of remaining the King’s property whatever he did).

And yet I understand why this petitioner made his mistakes. He has soared to the Premier League of our national pastime of misremembering Magna Carta: what it was for, what it achieved, and what it means today.

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Magna Carta, a treaty signed at Runnymede by King John in 1215 at the behest of his barons, is part of our national myth. Salisbury Cathedral (which owns one of the four original copies from that year) describes it as a “symbol of justice, fairness and human rights”. Lord Denning, a respected judge from the olden days when judges were respected, called it “the greatest constitutional document of all times — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

Oh how charming, and comfortable it is, to imagine that Britain invented human rights and freedom from tyranny. It fits with such a delightful story about England, the Mother of Parliaments and the champion of democracy. It’s the tale told in that ghastly standard historical text of the post-war era, Our Island Story, recently republished after a campaign by a bunch of people who believe the sole purpose of our school system should be indoctrinating every child in the fantasy of English exceptionalism.

But Magna Carta is not the foundation stone of freedom. It was a peace treaty on victor’s terms, establishing an oligarchy of the barons, satisfying their narrow interests and protecting their property from an overbearing king. Read through the text and you won’t find any uplifting prose about the value of humanity: no “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; no “all men are created equal.”

Instead you’ll find a section compelling the removal of all fishing weirs from the rivers of England. You’ll find new laws to prevent Jewish moneylenders from claiming their debts. Rules are set out on how guardians should manage land for any heirs too young to do it themselves. A whole paragraph is devoted to making sure someone called Gerard d’Athee — along with all his relatives — is thrown out of the country as soon as possible.

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Magna Carta specifies that no town should be forced to build bridges over rivers, and that the Royal household will no longer take wood for the castle without consent. Magna Carta is page after page of score-settling by grumpy barons, on everything from the return of hostages to the establishment of standard measures of wine, ale and corn (not imperial measurements, traditionalists will be disappointed to hear, but the “London quarter”.)

Of course, there are good bits. Taxes, after Magna Carta, required consent, and couldn’t be imposed by royal fiat. In the document, the King pledges not to “sell, deny or delay right or justice”. The document includes the beginnings of the principle of jury trial when the King promises not to “proceed with force” against anyone except “by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land”.

But Magna Carta also establishes legal principles that we should shudder at, most notably that no man can be imprisoned on the testimony of a woman, unless it’s for the murder of her husband. All these new freedoms and legal protections apply to free men, and free men alone. Villeins, merchants, and women are clearly lesser subjects. All are to be judged only by their equals: there is no question of challenge to the feudal hierarchy.

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All this can be forgiven. There is no reason why Magna Carta, written in 1215, should have anything other than medieval sensibilities and prejudices at its heart. It’s only a problem when we try to pretend that these few hundred words of Latin make Britain, or England, the inventor of freedom and justice — an old democracy which has a right to lecture others who learnt about human rights so much later than we did.

Magna Carta did not give us a democracy or anything approaching universal human rights. Magna Carta did not prevent decades of state-sponsored, religiously motivated persecution, as we oscillated between Catholicism and Protestantism. Magna Carta did not prevent a civil war. Magna Carta did not stop us having constitutional prejudice against Catholics built into our laws until the 21st century. It didn’t stop us deporting British citizens to the Caribbean after 60 years of life in the UK. It’s just a fusty old bit of Latin, full of the prejudices and preoccupations of its time.

We are a young, imperfect democracy, not an old one. Our citizens have had an equal right to vote for only 91 years. That’s nothing to be ashamed of: I love my country, and there is much to love about it. But we’re still making mistakes, and still working on getting freedom right. So marching around the world smugly declaring that we invented freedom 800 years ago doesn’t just do a disservice to history. It distracts us from our obligation to keep reforming, and keep improving, our system of government.

That petitioner was right: our Parliament has let us down. But we don’t need to storm it. We do have the right of lawful rebellion, and it’s our right to vote. Let’s hope we vote in a new Parliament that’s as ready for change as King John was back in 1215.

A man of remarkable and ruthless achievements — victor of the Civil Wars, first to unite Britain and Ireland, the first commoner to be Britain’s Head of State and architect of a global empire — Cromwell remains an elusive figure.

Most of the public will have heard of him and some will know of his role in the trial and execution of Charles I, but both Cromwell and his turbulent age have little purchase among the British people, unlike, say, the Tudors or the Victorians. It is as if France knew little of its Revolution or America nothing of its Founding Fathers. Yet what a fascinating character he is.

As Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658, Cromwell managed to hold together a fractious and fragile alliance of politicians and soldiers. He was at heart a conservative committed to hierarchy and order, which met with the approval of most MPs, who were of Presbyterian bent and sought an established church, albeit one without bishops. But, an Independent in his religious views, Cromwell was also genuinely committed to liberty of conscience, which allied him with the “Saints” of the army, who, guided to victory by divine providence, believed England an elect nation, the new Israel.

Cromwell would die with this alliance still in place. But it was dependent wholly upon his personal authority and, having refused to accept the offer of Crown made by civilian MPs, in part because of the army’s opposition — “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again”, he told Parliament in 1657 — the possibility of a smooth succession grounded in the Ancient Constitution of King, Council and Parliament became ever less likely.

And so Cromwell’s son Richard inherited the tenuous title of Lord Protector but not the loyalty of his father’s allies. Soon after, Charles II was restored, and Britain’s experiment in republicanism was over.

The figure who had made it possible was a manic depressive of relatively humble beginnings, who had proven himself a military leader of genius and a pragmatic politician whose Parliaments were a perpetual disappointment.

Impossible to pin down, he was a man of considerable personal tolerance. When John Biddle, a distinguished, though controversial, biblical scholar, had come under suspicion for denying the Trinity, the Protector had intervened personally to save the life of a man he thought “full of modesty, sobriety and forbearance, no ways contentious”. Banishing Biddle to the Scilly Isles in October 1655, Cromwell allowed him “a hundred crowns per annum for his existence”.

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Though Cromwell was more concerned with political order than religious toleration when the crux came, his personal interventions in private religious matters were striking. Quakers were released on his instruction, and the trial and brutal punishment of the Quaker James Nayler in 1656 made Cromwell question the political role of his Major-Generals. Cromwell paid for the funeral of the Anglican Archbishop Ussher at Westminster Abbey in April 1656. He also refused to restrict admission to Catholic services at the Venetian ambassador’s residence and was friends with the aristocratic Catholic Kenelm Digby, whose father had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Despite his dour “warts and all” image, the Protector was something of an aesthete. Cromwell and his family moved into the suite of rooms that had served as the Royal Apartments in Whitehall in April 1654, probably after a rushed — and expensive — renovation, for they had been neglected since Charles I left London in January 1642. John Embree, Cromwell’s surveyor-general, spent more than £10,000 a year on refurbishments throughout the duration of the Protectorate, a sum comparable with the Stuarts’ annual expenditure.

Clement Kinnersley, Cromwell’s keeper of the wardrobe, was lavish in his spending. Between February and November 1654 he paid out more than £12,000 on such items as a bed for the Whitehall apartments, “after the Indian fashion”, most of which had been part of the royal collection, along with an array of paintings and tapestries. Whitehall, after all, was part of the public face of the regime, where ambassadors and emissaries from across Europe would seek an audience with Cromwell. Whatever the ideology of the Commonwealth, it would seek to offer similar splendour to its allies and rivals across the Continent.

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Hampton Court, built on the Thames to the west of London by Henry VIII’s chancellor Cardinal Wolsey, was Cromwell’s weekend retreat, where he would gather his family and closest allies. Its renovation was a challenging project, with leaking roofs and negletced garden, but Cromwell and Embree had ambitions for the site. A huge marble fountain was brought from Somerset House to become the focus of Cromwell’s private garden. Originally commissioned as the centrepiece of an assembly of classical figures, like the Banqueting House, it was designed by Inigo Jones for Charles I in the 1630s.

This “Diana Fountain” could hardly be less puritanical in its symbolism, decorated with nymphs, dolphins and sea monsters, the supporting cast to a statue of the goddess Diana atop. The Puritan Mary Netheway was appalled by “those monstres” and wrote to the Protector to remind him that that “while the altars of the idols remained untaken away in Jerusalem, the wrath of God continued against Israel”.

The tapestries at Hampton Court, a particularly expensive form of decoration, are far from puritanical, depicting the sinful, adulterous figures of Vulcan and Venus. Those in the aptly titled Paradise Room went even further in their dabbling with morally dubious narratives, celebrating the Triumphs of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Cromwell’s collection of paintings was no less decadent in its themes. Gentileschi’s Besabe, or Bathsheba washing herself, was unlikely to fulfil puritan requirements of decorum, while Andrea Schiavoni’s Madonna and Child with St Elizabeth and Luca Cambiaso’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary were deeply Catholic devotional works, which sat ill with Cromwell’s professed Calvinism.

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Cromwell loved music. The Royalist Antony Wood reported that the Protector especially enjoyed works by John Hingston, who had trained two boys to accompany him in “Mr Deering’s printed Latin songs for three voices”.

Chamber music was popular, usually in the form of a consort of viols, always a sociable form of conversational music making, with its inwardly circular arrangement of players, though a new instrument from the Continent, the violin, also made the occasional appearance. Wind bands were accompanied by organs, including one removed on the instructions of the Protector from Magdalen College, Oxford to Hampton Court, where Cromwell employed a Mr Farmulo as his own “virginal musician”.

Much of this will come as a surprise, though what remains least understood about Cromwell is, perhaps, his conservatism, which often dragged him into conflict with his more radical supporters. Above all, it was Charles I, his head turned by the new ideology of European absolutism, who was the innovator. Cromwell preferred to hold to some form of the Ancient Constitution — though he bowed to “cruel necessity” on more than one occasion, for none of his Parliaments came close to his ideal. Nor, ultimately, did his nation, which he had hoped was rather more saintly than it actually was. In that, he has a more recent historical parallel.

Consider this: an East Anglian, nonconformist, philosemite, suspicious of, though not fundamentally opposed to, monarchy; a unionist uncomprehending of Ireland, a courageous advocate of military action, who left considerable problems of succession to those who came after them? It appears that Margaret Thatcher was cut from similar cloth to the Protector. And it may take just as long for a statue near Parliament to be raised to her.

It’s not quite clear why Anne has often been misremembered as a self-made woman of humble birth. Perhaps it’s the appeal of a rags-to-riches story. Or perhaps the gravity-defying rise of low-born men like Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell has been silently projected onto Anne. From modest and mean origins to monarchy itself, Anne becomes a Tudor Cinderella (albeit with a far from fairy-tale end).

So we’re told that her paternal great-grandfather was a cloth-merchant — which is accurate, in much the same way that it is accurate to describe Sir James Dyson as a man who sells vacuum cleaners. Geoffrey Boleyn, too, had a knighthood to match.

Anne’s father, Thomas, was of sufficient gentry status to marry Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, later second Duke of Norfolk and Elizabeth Tilney, former lady-in-waiting to Queens Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth of York (this was not an imaginative period for naming).

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Thomas Boleyn was himself made a Knight of the Garter in 1523 — before Anne caught Henry VIII’s eye — for his own service to the king as his “squire of the body”, as an ambassador to the French court, and as a member of the king’s council. Anne had privilege.

Then there’s the idea that Anne was young and beautiful — for surely she must have been to attract a king.

We don’t know exactly when Anne was born. It wasn’t until 1538 that it became obligatory to keep the sort of parish records of baptisms, marriages and funerals that would give approximate dates of births for all, including the girls.

But even by the late 16th century, the antiquarian William Camden recorded that Anne had been born in 1507 — making her 19 when Henry noticed her, 26 when he married her, and not yet 30 when she died. Remember Catherine Howard’s youth (and overlook Katherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr) and you can start to create a narrative of Henry liking his women green. The 1507 date also fits with the origin-myth favoured by the country’s foremost Anne Boleyn tourist attraction, Hever Castle, for it means that she was born there.

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But there is independent evidence that makes an alternate date — 1501 — seem much more convincing. An autographed letter survives from Anne to her father, sent from the court of Archduchess Margaret of Austria, while at Tervuren in modern-day Belgium in 1513 or 1514. The orthography (for which she begs excuse) is unorthodox, but everyone’s was in the 16th century. The elegant secretary hand, however, is manifestly not that of even a careful six- or seven-year-old: here is the writing of a young woman, on the cusp of teenagehood.

Which means that the relationship between Anne and Henry began when she was 26 (relatively old for a woman of her status to be single in the 16th century), they married when she was 33, and she died at 36.

Nor did Henry fall wildly in love with the beautiful Anne Boleyn at first sight. Though our first record of her at the English court is in March 1522, the king’s interest in her can be dated to around 1526. And the four-year delay was only in part because his dance card was already full (when he rode out to joust in 1522 bearing the motto, elle mon cœur a navera — “she has wounded my heart” — he may have had a Boleyn girl in mind but, famously, the other one, Anne’s sister, Mary). The other reason he took a while to notice her is that Anne was not a conventionally good-looking woman.

We only really know this from the documentary evidence. Despite the familiarity of various reproductions of a portrait of Anne wearing a round pearl-trimmed hood, black and sable gown, and the now-famous ‘B’ pendant, none of them can be dated with any certainty to her lifetime. Our best guess is that they are copies of a lost original painted from the life, and their production during the reign of her daughter, some 50 or 60 years after Anne’s death, may explain why some seem to have been prettified.

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The Venetian diplomat Francesco Sanuto described Anne as “not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised”. Anne’s dark hair was unfashionable, although even Sanuto also noted Anne’s dark and sparkling eyes.

This does not mean we should believe, however, the propaganda of Nicholas Sander, a Jesuit writing under Elizabeth I, from whom we get the following report of Anne: black hair, sallow skin as if “troubled with jaundice”, six fingers on her right hand, a projecting tooth, and a large wen — a boil or cyst — under her chin. There is no evidence contemporary to Anne’s life to support anything he says except the colour of her hair and her tanned skin.

Finally, there’s the fable that Anne Boleyn was executed on charges of witchcraft, as well as incest and adultery.

In her trial indictment, Anne was certainly charged, and later found guilty, of incest (with her brother), adultery (with five men including her brother), and conspiring the king’s death. The latter charge was crucial, as it was the only one carrying the death penalty, under the 1534 Treasons Act by which it was treason to imagine the death of the king in words. But of witchcraft there is no sign.

The source for this misremembrance comes, I think, from the 19th-century translation of a letter from Eustace Chapuys, the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to the English court, to the Emperor Charles V, in which he reported an, at least, fourth-hand account that Henry had told “someone” that he had married Anne “seduced by witchcraft”.

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There’s no corroborating evidence that Henry ever said anything of the sort, and even Chapuys’s original letter uses the word sortilèges, which could mean sorcery — but could also carry the sense of having been “bewitched” by someone — no literal magic necessary.

The American historian Retha Warnicke further stirred the cauldron by suggesting that Anne had given birth in 1536 to a “deformed foetus” — her take on an account by Sander (again) that Anne had miscarried “a shapeless mass of flesh”. Warnicke argued that 16th-century observers would have concluded from this that Anne was a witch.

Anne miscarried at three-and-a-half months, so the foetus was hardly likely to have looked much like a full-term baby, and our source was once again writing at the remove of half a century — but, more pertinently, the appearance of a miscarried baby has never been cited in any early modern witchcraft trial I’ve ever heard of. It’s a sexy theory — and pure bunkum.

The truth is all far more mundane. Anne was a high-born woman, whose family pedigree brought her into Henry’s circle. It was her conversational wit and elegant cosmopolitanism that attracted Henry, not any great youth or beauty or magical ability. The privilege of her birth aside, she was an everywoman and we prefer the heroines of history to be something more than ordinary.

Suzannah Lipscomb’s latest book, The Voice of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc, is available from Oxford University Press.

Yet even with these variations, the overall story is plain. Average living standards (in terms of food consumption, ownership of goods, and life expectancy) improved very slowly, if at all, over the millennia; any fluctuation around that relatively low level was due to climate, disease, population growth and political conditions.

A historic change came only with the Industrial Revolution, the shift from an “organic” to a “mineral” economy — from one reliant on muscle, wind and water to one using the power of coal and later oil — that raised global living standards at a previously unimaginable rate, with the good and bad consequences that we know.

Pioneering this change was early Victorian or “Dickensian” England, and so one might think that we would remember it as a time of epoch-making success: instead I don’t think it is controversial to say that we generally think of it as a time of grim suffering and oppression.

Historians have long been aware of a paradox: that while productivity rose over the crucial period of the Industrial Revolution, living standards did not. Working hours greatly increased. Women and children worked more intensively. Yet real wages barely shifted — by only 4% between 1760 and 1820. Food prices rose and diet deteriorated. Health and hygiene in industrial cities worsened. Infant mortality was high, and life expectancy low, and both actually deteriorated. In 1841, average life expectancy at birth was 41.7 years — comparable with much of Africa in the 2000s.

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People’s physical condition as measured by their heights fell to one of its lowest ever levels, and showed marked difference between classes – over 5 inches difference between rich and poor boys in 1790. It would seem that industrialization amounted to stunted and damaged lives for generations of ordinary people.

This could of course be explained by assuming that the new industrial working class was simply exploited and downtrodden by a combination of a ruthless landowning ruling class and a hard-faced capitalism. Traditional rights had been lost, and with them status and culture: craftsmen ruined by mechanization, cottagers deprived of their access to common land. The new towns were vast slums, where small wage increases were offset by disease, overcrowding and unstable employment.

This grim image was perpetuated over the generations. Blake bequeathed a memorable if inscrutable phrase: “dark satanic mills”. Tory democrats, most famously Disraeli in Sybil: or the Two Nations (1845), were not far behind: in his lawless and savage fictional town of Wodgate, “swarming thousands lodged in the most miserable tenements in the most hideous burgh in the ugliest country in the world”. Dickens himself left perhaps the most memorable vignettes, such as Coketown in Hard Times (1854).

Friedrich Engels wrote in the 1840s a harrowing account of The Condition of the English Working Classes, published in English only in the 1890s, when it had a powerful impact on early socialist historians such as Barbara and Lawrence Hammond, who popularized a dark vision of what they called “The Bleak Era” in which the poor were trapped in “smoke and squalor” by means of a “class war” fought against them by the rich. In the 1960s, E.P. Thompson, in perhaps the most influential single work of English history of modern times, similarly dramatized the tragedy of “the English working class”.

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Is this, then, the truth about “Dickensian poverty”? Is our grim collective memory simply a reflection of reality?

There are some fundamental retouches that need to be made to the picture. The population of Europe was rising at an unprecedented rate, and that of England rose fastest of all, from 8.6 million in 1801 to 17 million in 1851 — an increase of 98%, with the highest ever recorded growth in 1811-21 (16% in a decade). Around 40% of this population was under 15, comparable with much of Africa today. The total urban population, already the highest in Europe, increased three-fold.

London more than doubled, making it by far Europe’s biggest conurbation. In the 1820s alone, Manchester grew by 47%, West Bromwich by 60%, and Bradford by 78%. In any previous age, this would have led to a catastrophic fall in living standards. But in Dickens’s time it did not, even by comparison with poorer parts of the world in our era: GDP per head in Britain in 1840 was 50% higher than in Africa in the early 2000s.

A growth in productivity and new industrial employment prevented disaster: if living standards hardly improved, they did not collapse. English wages, already very high by world standards, remained so. In most of continental Europe, where living standards did indeed deteriorate as the population boomed, real wages dropped to half or a third of those in England. The visiting French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville thought that “the English poor appear almost rich compared to the French poor”.

But what about living conditions? Were they not appalling? Given the explosive growth of the towns and cities, some were. But Engels’s famous denunciation of the filth of Manchester, which he described as the “degradation” of a new industrial proletariat, was in fact something quite different: the overcrowded slums of pre-industrial Manchester failing to cope with an influx of Irish refugees.

What Engels was really describing was what poverty would be without an industrial revolution, with Irish refugees living in conditions more like rural poverty. Of course, his aim was political, as was that of the Hammonds, who blamed the ruling class for the sufferings of the poor: “the disinherited peasants that are the shadow of its wealth … the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its pleasures … the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and pride.” Thompson’s sympathies were similar.

So to a degree were those of Dickens. But again, if we take a comparative view, it is hard not to conclude that Dickens’s contemporaries were less heartless and incompetent than he shows them. Infant mortality in 1839 was 151 per 1,000 in England (comparable with that of Afghanistan in 2010); but in France it was 160, in Belgium 185, and in southern Germany 285.

So is there another vision of Dickensian poverty? Yes, if we look more carefully. The industrializing economy coped with huge population rises, and from around 1850 there were substantial increases in real wages and mass consumption. The exploding towns were unhealthy (though so were ancient cities), but less so than elsewhere. The British state, contrary to conventional assumptions, was unusually interventionist in sanitary and workplace regulation.

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Most important of all, poorer people were helping themselves, in families, workshops, neighbourhoods, churches and pubs, where friendly societies and trade unions were born, and where a new society and culture was being created. The real place on which Disraeli based his hell-hole Wodgate was Willenhall, a Black Country lock-making town. But Disraeli, drawing on an official report, left out the Sunday Schools and chapels, and the finding that despite industrial pollution “the inside of the poorest houses is [often] perfectly clean”.

Poor people also had rights to financial help under the Poor Law, and were quick to stand up for them by applying to Overseers of the Poor and, if dissatisfied, appealing to the magistrates. Tocqueville was scandalised to see old men, unemployed labourers and pregnant girls doing so unblushingly before the Justices of the Peace.

Poor people themselves did not necessarily share the pessimism either of contemporary upper-class commentators or of later historians. The rural poor, especially young people underemployed in over-populated villages, found in towns and factories an escape from dependency, chronic poverty and exclusion from adult life and marriage. However risky and accident-prone, a move to town meant more regular work, money in their pockets, freedom, the chance of family life, and exciting new social and cultural opportunities. Judging from their own writings, many working people felt not only that they were living in a rapidly changing world, but that it was changing for the better.

Typical was a Wiltshire carpenter, John Bennett, looking back later in life on his rural childhood in the 1790s: “what troublesome times we had during my bringing up,” whereas today “the working classes in my opinion, was never so well off”.

There was, however, a bitter irony. The traditional and relatively humane Poor Law, which has been described as the biggest system of wealth redistribution in the world, was slashed by reformers in 1834. This caused huge suffering and discontent, memorably evoked by Dickens, but the authors of this disaster were not black-hearted Tory reactionaries, but high-minded Liberal modernisers — brought to power by the Great Reform Act of 1832.