Indeed, Campion was considered so dangerous that Elizabeth I’s government was willing to rip a hole through the law to ensure his defeat, a tear that was never fully mended. He so terrified the authorities that the divisions he caused can be felt still; nor is it an exaggeration to say that the hunt for Campion and the profound paranoia it provoked is one of the reasons Ireland is still divided.

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The fugitive was a staggeringly successful man whose achievements were built entirely on education. The son of a printer, he came from the artisan middle class, the same class that produced the great writers of the Elizabethan Renaissance, including, of course, William Shakespeare. Like them, Campion lived by his wits. He won scholarships to attend Oxford University, and there he was offered a fellowship at the newly built St John’s College.

During the 1566 Oxford state visit, before royal dignitaries and university academics, Campion impressed the young Queen Elizabeth with his debating skills, and the Earl of Leicester told the ambitious young man: “the Queen and I will provide for the future”.

Yet, like John Henry Newman centuries later, he threw away his academic career because he could no longer accept the authority of the Church of England; he left, first for Ireland, then for reconciliation with the Catholic Church in France, and training for the priesthood with the jesuits in Rome.

We find it hard to understand religion as a motive in 2019, even though we know intellectually that it is still vital to many. One way of parsing Campion’s momentous decision is to see it as a matter of personal integrity; it is very hard to consent to something that you believe is being foisted on you by authority, when your consent is motivated by nothing except fear of that authority.

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Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy conflated the monarchic with religious authority, and was to cause trouble for the next 200 years. By the time of Campion’s conversion, Catholics in England faced intense pressure, and most historians would now argue that the Elizabethan regime was only slightly less inclined to persecution than that of Mary Tudor.

The 1559 Act of Uniformity had abolished Mass and restored the 1549 second Protestant prayerbook as the only permissible form of worship. Accurately described as “the religion of nobody imposed upon everybody”, it made no pretence of religious pluralism. There was one religion. One.

To Catholics, the Protestant prayer book was almost blasphemous; to Protestants, the Catholic Mass was fake. There was no middle ground. Parishes were required to destroy all remnants of Catholic piety: stained glass, statues, paintings, illustrated prayer books and Bibles, crucifixes. The now-bare parish churches might also be surrounded by the ruins of what had once been the monasteries.

When Campion first arrived in Oxford, the city was damaged by the depredation of abbeys which had been central to the provision of learning, including the once-vast Osney Abbey. Duke Humfrey’s library, built by Henry V’s cultured younger brother over a century earlier and by far Oxford’s greatest collection of literature, had been despoiled by Edward VI’s commissioners who had destroyed every book bar two. The carnage here, and across the country, was vast, and nobody knows or will ever know what was lost.

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The gentry who supplied members of Parliament had every incentive to support the Protestant regime. After all, most had been enriched by monastic lands. Under the new queen, this class – represented in government by the Cecil family – sought to tighten its grip on any remaining Catholics. In 1563, Parliament further extended the Oath of Supremacy to everyone in holy orders, lawyers, MPs, schoolmasters, and all university graduates.

Refusal to take the oath a second time was punishable by death. Catholic books printed in Europe cited numerous petty examples of penalties imposed on the faithful: death for bringing in a crucifix to church; death for bringing in “a silly pair of beads” or a medal, or a devotional Agnus Dei. This was conscious government policy; Machiavellian, if you like.

Another young man from the same class as Campion became his shadow, literally and figuratively. This was Anthony Munday, dramatist and spy. Also the son of a bookseller, Munday made his way to Rome, from where he reported in a series of pamphlets on the secrets of the English College, intended to horrify readers back home. “We might judge Rome to be hell itself”, he claimed in one such booklet.

The elect Protestant nation was massively expanding its spy network, and the English College at Rome, like other continental seminaries, was awash with agents pretending to be Catholic sympathisers. Many came from grammar schools, from the same rising class as Campion, and had been intended for the Elizabethan church.

Over the course of the 1580s Munday doubled down, going from betraying those who saw him as a friend to working as an intelligencer for Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe, a well-to-do gentleman best known for keeping a private rack in his front room for use on any Catholics who fell into his hands without a warrant, exemplified the abeyance of any normality in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign.

But it was the perceived threat of Edmund Campion that led to the creation of the spy network.

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The Privy Council letter of 1 December 1580 stating that the queen intended to “make some example of [Jesuits] by punishment, to the terror of others”, the Proclamation of 10 January 1581, ordering the arrest of Jesuits, and the statute which made it treason to convert the queen’s subjects to “the Romish religion”: together these amounted to a declaration of war on the Jesuit mission.

Campion returned to England knowing that he was probably going to his death, in May 1580. He was there primarily to administer the sacraments to the Catholic faithful, and an underlying agenda was the reconversion of other laypeople to Catholicism. There was no indication that he had any intention of rebelling or of carrying out any violence against the Queen.

Campion could be a formidable enemy. On 27 June 1581 printed copies of his Rationes Decem – arguments against the validity of the Anglican Church – were secretly spread over the benches of the Oxford University church of St Mary, before the convocation at which student supplicants for degrees were required to defend their theses.

However, the Elizabethan security state caught up with him eventually, aided by one of their many pseudo-Catholic spies. The informant, a man called George Eliot, had served in a number of Catholic households by befriending the female servants, and was said to be a convicted rapist and murderer who had bargained his way out of jail by promising to inform on his former Catholic acquaintances.

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Once Campion was seized his case became more than just an ordinary trial but about government display of power. Forced to ride through London, his hands were tied and his feet bound under his horse’s belly, while on his hat was the inscription “THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT”. When he arrived at the Tower he was at first placed in the “Little Ease”, where a prisoner could neither stand nor lie stretched out. The Privy Council ordered that if he refused to answer he should be racked.

Sir Edward Coke, solicitor general, declared torture “directly against the common laws of England”, but it was officially used from 1540 to 1640, and 81 warrants for torture were issued by the Privy Council, 53 during the reign of Elizabeth. Torture was not practised as systematically as it was on the continent – witches, for example, were not in general subjected to torture in England – but the very fact that it was sanctioned by the Privy Council was bound to have an effect, and it is usual for the use of torture to spread once it has been legitimised.

In Campion’s case, four torture warrants were issued, and he was treated with particular violence, so that “he did hang by his arms and feet only” on the rack. When required to raise his hand at his arraignment to take the oath, he was unable to lift his arm, and those present noted his bandaged hands, concluding that nails had been thrust between his fingernails and the flesh. Topcliffe had not yet created his favourite method of torture, which was hanging a prisoner by the hands in gauntlets or manacles, an agonisingly painful procedure and one that left no marks. It may be, however, that he was inspired to do so by the obvious visibility of Campion’s torture on his body.

Not only was the law on torture reformulated, but the interrogation and questions to which Campion was subjected were too, and here the key point was the one termed the “bloody question”, devised by Burghley: which side would the defendant support if Catholic armies landed in England? The question was not intended to elicit useful information, but to be unanswerable. It was designed to trap Catholics, to prove that they were not persecuted solely for religious matters. Campion was duly convicted.

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It was cold and rainy on 1 December 1582, but there were people lining the streets all the way from the Tower, and at Tyburn a crowd that stretched further than the eye could see as Edmund Campion and two other priests were drawn on hurdles to die. The state’s effort to control the situation began to go wrong when Campion mounted the scaffold, and the hangman placed the noose around his neck.

The condemned turned to the immense crowd and began to preach, reminding everybody involved that they stood within the sight of God; God’s eye trumped the eye of the state. Campion kept on praying, for “Elizabeth your Queen and my Queen, unto whom I wish a long quiet reign, with all prosperity”. The crowd wailed and groaned as Campion’s body dropped into the empty air. The executioner tried to cut the rope so that he could butcher Campion while he was still alive, but Lord Charles Howard, with drawn sword, drove him back. Campion was hanged till he was dead, and only then disembowelled and quartered.

Elizabeth’s claim that she had no wish to open windows into men’s souls was disingenuous. It is a peculiarity of Catholicism that it requires public rites of worship, and cannot be practised alone and in secret. As the remaining Catholics’ ability to practise their religion at all was increasingly a hanging matter both for them and for the priests who administered the sacraments, it became more or less inevitable for their opinions to harden against the regime that sought to entrap and beleaguer them.

At the same time, the regime’s increasing intolerance motivated Catholic powers to intervene on behalf of English Catholics, entrenching the positions of both sides. Eventually something in the region of 350 individuals were executed, and a mindset created that led to the deaths of many more, including those who perished in prison, the many accused under the witchcraft statutes and those who died fighting for the Catholic Stuart kings.

If the Jesuit mission had lacked Campion’s celebrity leadership, it might be that the Elizabethan government might not have panicked. They were, after all, frighteningly certain that they held the moral high ground, and also very sure of themselves intellectually. But the fact that a man they themselves believed to be brilliant had converted to Catholicism and was willing to defend it against any Protestant called that certainty into question.

It followed that in order to prove themselves the elect nation, they had to weaponise their own Protestantism, succeed against the Irish and against residual Catholics in England, wipe out all traces of this stubbornly defiant national past. It’s possible that without Campion, Elizabeth’s relative leniency might have continued for longer, and therefore there might have been no rebellion in Ireland, no Elizabethan Secret Service, and perhaps no gunpowder plot.

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It’s arguable that even the Civil War might have been delayed. But as it was, Campion terrified the government, and that terror led to long-term consequences for all the British kingdoms. This weaponised split in the body politic led to the English Civil War, with its six-figure death toll, and to Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland, and then to the Exclusion Crisis, the Battle of the Boyne, the Jacobite uprisings and the Gordon riots.

Nor is this history irrelevant to the current divisions in the United Kingdom.

The two ideas of nationhood espoused by Brexiteers and Remainers also continue a tradition, with Brexiteers reflecting the beliefs of the Elizabethan state in their insistence that patriotism involves separation from other powers and authorities. Their idea that England is an elect nation with a special destiny is also the direct outcome of the propaganda and legislation created by their Elizabethan forebears.

Remainers, on the other hand, have a more porous and an arguably humbler vision for the nation state as one among many such entities. That division arising from the first Elizabethan age has in many ways come to mark the divisions in English society still present more than four centuries later.

The Iron Age queen Boudica looms large in myth. She is revered as an awesome figure of female rage, a military leader raising an army against the occupying power of the Roman Empire, an avenger of men’s sexual violence and patriarchal entitlement, a bringer of justice fuelled by pain and anger, a native subject who refused to be ruled by a foreign invader. She is a symbol of resistance against colonialism and slavery.

At the time of Boudica’s rebellion, Britannia had been occupied by the Romans for less than 20 years. King Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe, had acquiesced to Roman rule after the previous Emperor Claudius’s invasion in AD43 and a failed local rebellion four years later. Prasutagus accepted and adopted Roman ways and gave the Empire duties, loans, tithes and taxes from his people – including fees the Iceni had to pay to bury their own dead.

Then, in AD 60, Prasutagus died and left only half his estate to the new emperor, the notoriously cruel Nero, giving the other half to his daughters. In retaliation, the Romans plundered the household of his widow Queen Boudica’s household; she was flogged, her relatives enslaved and her daughters gang-raped. She and her tribe erupted in rebellion, and the Romans soon found themselves facing a general uprising.

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Yet there is scant evidence that Boudica definitely existed, as I discovered when I was commissioned by a publisher to write a fictionalisation of her rebellion. I grew up on Manda Scott’s thrilling series of novels and on the television series starring Alex Kingston as the red-haired heroine. But looking at the actual (meagre) evidence presented by historians such as Richard Hingley, Christina Unwin, Marguerite Johnson, Nic Fields and Vanessa Collingridge opened my eyes.

There is almost no contemporaneous evidence from 60-61AD, the time of Boudica’s rebellion, identifying her as the revolutionary leader. The story of the Iceni tribe can be pieced together from some archaeological evidence, including fragments submerged in the molten matter produced by the scalding, decimating heat of the rebels’ fires in the Roman towns of Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans) and Londinium (at that time a small, emergent outpost). There then followed a final battle against the Romans, led by general Suetonius Paulinus, but the exact location of this remains a mystery.

We don’t even know if Boudica — which simply means “Victory” — was her given name or a symbolic epithet, although there were certainly other Iron Age women leaders, such as Cartimandua of the northern Brigantes. The mythologising accounts we have of Boudica come from two later classical commentators, Tacitus (whose father-in-law had been an imperial governor in Britain) and Cassius Dio.

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It is these men — stalwarts of the Roman Empire themselves — who contributed unwittingly to the powerful image we have of her today, although they were written with quite the opposite intention. Boudica’s muscular frame, weaponry, mane of reddish-gold hair, glinting jewellery, flowing clothes and rousing speeches, delivered standing on her war chariot, are their inventions. These classical men tried to depict Boudica as an unnatural and uncouth barbarian she-devil but actually made her impressive to later readers, although their accounts were not rediscovered until the Renaissance humanist period.

Boudica’s achievement had been to unite a number of tribes, assembling a great horde of fighters that included the neighbouring Trinovantes, considered the most powerful in Britain. Together, they poured down through Camulodunum, Verulamium and Londinium, sacking and burning as they went. Some of the classical accounts of their massacres — such as those of women mutilated and impaled lengthways on stakes — are outlandish and cannot be proven either way. But there is no doubt about the level of physical destruction. The fires were thought to have reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. And Boudica’s army was so fierce that the Roman administrator, Catus Decianus, fled rather than face her.

The three towns Boudica’s army struck had symbolic power as imperial administrative centres, settlements for former Roman soldiers built on co-opted lands, as well as Romanised natives who had adopted the dress and habits of their colonisers. Although they might have been enjoyed by retired soldiers, they were not actively defended by the military, with the exception of a small retinue of troops slaughtered inside Claudius’s temple in Camulodunum.

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Although there are no contemporary verifications, the practicalities of moving an army of hundreds of thousands of fighters – and their families — across such distances suggests that Boudica’s campaign lasted several months, rather than weeks. By now, Emperor Nero would have known about it, and Suetonius Paulinus was under pressure to act against the barbarian upstarts.

Suetonius had been in Wales and now travelled to meet Boudica’s forces, with the full might of the Roman army behind him. The Romans were practiced technical fighters, excellent at strategy, calm, well-horsed and well-armoured, with expertly-built weaponry including arrows and spears, daggers and swords, as well as rounded full-body shields. Despite being outnumbered by Boudica’s fighters, they were simply a better war machine. They took up a position uphill of Boudica’s army, which was now squashed between the Romans and their own carts, laden with plunder, possessions and relatives.

That Boudica killed herself with poison cannot be verified, although it once again corroborates the myth of this warrior queen preferring death to ignominy and dishonour. The Romans took their revenge, seizing the rebel tribes’ valuable horses and plunder, torching the settlements and slaying the Iceni and those who had fought with them. They re-militarised the occupation, building and populating forts across their territory.

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In the decades to come, the Romans would continue to bed in their occupation, and it wasn’t until nearly 400 years later that the land was finally rid of the empire and the colonisers left. Boudica’s rebellion in the early days was singular in its ferocity. It is its gendered aspect, I believe, which compels and fascinates many women who identify with her raw rage — as I do. The uprising failed, but it was indicative of the fact that the Romans’ presence in Britannia was never really easy, no matter how many towns they developed (among them Gloucester, Bath and York). They failed to take Caledonia — Scotland — and had to keep constant military vigilance against the tribes – tribes just like those that Boudica led.

Boudica occupies a unique place in the tale of early Britain: she is the native warrior who fought back against foreign invaders, the once obedient vassal who decided death was better than more dishonour, the anti-imperial, anti-slavery activist who got radical the moment things got personal. Of course the idolisation of Boudica, especially strong in the Victorian era, has usually glossed over Britain’s global infamy as slavers and colonisers running an empire that dwarfed Rome in size.

She has also been interpreted as a testament to a wronged woman’s zeal and a symbolic warning that a formerly compliant wife and mother is capable of any feat in defence of her family. The implication is that this is a nation that cannot be subjugated, co-opted or annexed by occupying forces and would never submit to the humiliation and violation of imperialism; that this island may be small, but has the guts to defend itself against anyone who dares to subdue it.

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Boudica’s war gave the Roman empire a hard jolt and served — I have no doubt — as an inspiration to the countless other tribes, settlements and occupied people that resistance, protest and fighting back were righteous and valuable. Without her, Britannia would be seen as just more territory to be easily conquered by the Roman war machine. Yet after her rebellion, Britannia was seen as a troublesome outpost of the Roman empire, one which required constant vigilance due to repeated acts of rebellion.

It cemented a national image that is both double-edged and enduring: the Brits as hard-drinking, easy-fighting hooligans, self-righteous, proud, eccentric, patriotic and defiant. That can be interpreted in any number of ways. Indeed Boudica has since the Victorian period been taken up very strongly by Britons of all politican and cultural persuasions: by suffragettes, abolitionists, imperialists, freedom fighters, feminists, pagans and others. Because so little is truly known about her, she has retained her mystique and stands as a universal and timeless symbol of the wronged woman lost to history.

It is this obscurity and mystery that drive people to endlessly rediscover her. She inspires me as a woman who refused to take abuse, internalise her anger or accept the perpetrations and humiliations of those in power. Her anger was her expression and her fuel. She required that she and her daughters be revenged and their rapists punished. Thousands of years later, I want the same thing.

When my generation was growing up half a century ago, we were taught the basics of history in terms of heroic British figures painting the planet pink. So we were told about “Clive of India”, whose battles consolidated our rule of the sub-continent that became the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. We learned of Cecil Rhodes’s ambition to draw a “ribbon of red” to subjugate citizens from Cape Town to Cairo. And of other colonial heroes such as James Wolfe, the daring conqueror of Quebec, and “Kitchener of Khartoum”, who seized Sudan after initial setbacks.

Such teachings drove home the belief that there was something glorious about our imperial past, that we should be inspired by the idea that our island nation once ruled one-quarter of the world’s land. Never mind that Rhodes was a grasping racist and Clive looted India.

Today our honours system still clings to this imperial past. The Queen clutches on to the Commonwealth. And many of her subjects fall for the fantasy our empire was more benign than rivals for all the bloodshed, the concentration camps, the destruction of cultures, the famines, the pillaging and the repression. Polls have found a majority of Britons saying we should take pride in our colonialism, while a much smaller number believe that seizing other countries might be a source of national shame.

Politicians love to wrap themselves in a cloak of imperial nostalgia as they pretend Britain still rules the waves. Gordon Brown argued that Britain should stop apologising for its colonial past. As prime minister, David Cameron stood in Amritsar, scene of the horrific 1919 massacre, and said we should “celebrate” imperial achievements.

Boris Johnson went even further, saying “the continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” Liam Fox claimed Britain was “one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history”.

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The enduring strength of such delusions — especially among older generations such as mine, although still fostered by nostalgic films and television shows — lies behind corrosive myths of British exceptionalism that fed into the toxic Brexit debate. It was even referred to by certain Whitehall officials as “Empire 2.0”.

So my history-maker is a remarkable man whose name is little known in Britain today, yet who was a political pioneer at Westminster, a role model for our multi-racial society and who helped shape one of the most crucial debates of modern times.

Dadabhai Naoroji was the first Asian MP elected to Parliament, a Liberal who made his initial appearance in the House of Commons in 1892 as William Gladstone returned to power. To place this achievement in context, bear in mind there were only four non-white MPs elected before a Labour quartet arrived in parliament in 1987 — and they were the first for more than half a century. Now there are four in our latest cabinet.

By the time that Naoroji won his seat, he had already been a professor, a businessman and founder of the Indian National Congress, later the party of Mahatma Gandhi and independence. Yet when he first stood for Parliament in 1886, losing in Holborn, the Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury said that England was not ready to elect a “black man”.

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His success holds immense symbolic importance given the more recent arrival of millions more Asians and other peoples to transform and revitalise our nation. He was a progressive politician who supported votes for women, abolition of the House of Lords and pensions for old people, aided in his parliamentary work by a young man called Muhammed Ali Jinnah, later the controversial founder of Pakistan.

But three years later, Naoroji lost his Finsbury seat, failed to win another in Lambeth at a subsequent contest and then returned to his birthplace of Bombay where he died in 1917 (five years before my own father was born in the same city, now Mumbai).

Yet what makes this Parsi intellectual such an important figure is not his brief role in British politics, nor even his promotion of issues such as female emancipation and free schooling, but his influence in challenging conventional wisdoms of colonialism that still cling to our country today. At the time even The Manchester Guardian, in an editorial responding to his electoral triumph, claimed that Westminster’s rule over much of the world was so noble “it has an open ear for every appeal that reaches it from India and… it knows no difference between the people of Bengal and the people of Lancashire”.

Naoroji pointed out the truth: Britain was abusing, crushing and pillaging countries such as his own with a brutal imperialism built on racism. Back when he was born, in 1825, a private firm ruled over 200 million people, the East India Company having plundered a successful civilisation that, according to one estimate, accounted in the 18th century for a bigger percentage of global GDP than the whole of Europe. As its rule faltered, ending after a revolt that my teachers called “The Indian Mutiny”, the new rulers followed a similar pattern of extortion to enrich their nation. As Lord Salisbury himself declared: “India must be bled.”

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Naoroji, nicknamed “The Grand Old Man of India”, played a key role in countering the prevailing view of white superiority and firing up the fight for independence, little knowing that Britain would bungle this in such tragic style when it finally arrived in 1947. He even mentored Gandhi.

Most importantly, he pointed out that London’s colonial rule was imposing poverty by stealing India’s riches while deliberately undervaluing its labour.

His landmark 1901 book, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, outlined the “drain of wealth” theory, highlighting how even the costs of occupation were funded by the over-taxed and oppressed Indian citizenry. This exposed the giant gap between liberal talk in London and the cruel realities of the British Empire.

The impact on Africa of the same arrogant interventionism by Britain and other European powers was even more destructive, as cultures, traditions and political systems were wrecked. So many people were sent into slavery that the population of the continent remained static for 150 years instead of doubling, as demographers believe might have been expected without such barbarism.

Even after Britain abolished slavery, the traders and owners were given compensation worth £13 billion at today’s prices – but nothing went to the victims. Yet economists say the impact can still be detected in modern poverty patterns. Meanwhile historians have shown the appalling tactics used to kill, maim, torture and imprison people as Britain tried to cling on in Kenya, inflaming divisions that still torment that east African nation.

Our empire was a system of repression based on brutality, greed, theft and white supremacy – and Naoroji pointed out this truth. His theories have been picked up by modern writers such as Shashi Tharoor in his brilliant polemic Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Yet they are brushed aside by most Britons, since our country has failed to confront its tawdry past. William Easterly, the economist and aid sceptic, even argued that Britain invented “development” as a substitute for its racist imperialism – and certainly our aid policies smack of a haughty form of neo-colonialism.

Sadly we have not had the courage to challenge the enduring myths of our “benevolent” empire — and this myopic vision of our history leads directly to the morass of Brexit, fostered by fantasies of exceptionalism, that is now tormenting our nation. How much better if we had listened to this sage.

Historic turning points are not uncommon – maybe every century or so something happens to change the fate of countries and even continents: wars, collapses of empires, economic crises. Think of the fall of the Roman Empire, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, the Mughal invasion of India, the Russian revolution.  

But changes affecting the whole planet are much rarer and usually slower: the agricultural revolution, the spread of metal use, the Black Death, the Industrial Revolution, which, even after 250 years, is not quite complete.  

Changes such as these are slow processes that can rarely if ever be ascribed to individuals. What we might call global events are quite modern – short-term human actions that have a world-wide effect. Perhaps the first of these was the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), a barely remembered episode that Winston Churchill called “the true first world war”. 

In a sense, it is the only world war – the only global conflict involving all the great European powers that began outside Europe, was fought primarily for extra-European aims, and whose consequences were greatest beyond Europe. Playing a crucial role in that event was William Pitt: arguably the first Englishman to affect the history of the world.  

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The Seven Years’ War was, in part, another of those Central European dynastic conflicts that punctuated the Age of Enlightenment. So far, so familiar. But the conflict drew in France, as the ally of Austria, and Britain, as the ally of Prussia. This made the war global. 

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had pitted Britain against a much larger and more powerful France. Overseas trade and the possession of colonies had become both the means and the end of this conflict: both countries needed to channel the profits of trade – in sugar, textiles, spices, tobacco, coffee, tea and slaves – into their European struggle. France and Britain were rivals in the Americas, Asia and Africa in what has been called the Second Hundred Years’ War.  

A perceptive French diplomat wrote: “The discovery of the New World has transformed the political system of Europe. Once, land forces made the destiny of states, but since a century ago Neptune’s trident has become the sceptre of the world.”

For this reason, the first clashes, well before war was declared in Europe, came in North America (where in 1754 a British colonial force commanded by young George Washington slaughtered a small French patrol) and on the seas (where the British navy seized 300 French merchant ships) – well before France and Britain came to blows in Europe.

Things then went disastrously for Britain. The naval base at Minorca was captured by the French. In Bengal, France’s ally the Nawab captured the British post at Calcutta (leading to the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ incident). French troops invaded New York and Pennsylvania. The army in Hanover commanded by George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, was forced to capitulate. Widespread food riots broke out at home. One British politician lamented that “we are undone at home, by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are no longer a nation. I never saw so dreadful a prospect.”

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Enter William Pitt, who was appointed a secretary of state briefly in 1756, aged 48, and again, from June 1757 to October 1761. Pitt was an early example of a coldly professional populist politician – able, wrote a colleague, to “deny his own words with an unembarass’d countenance”.

An unstable maverick, often in poor health, he stood as a “Patriot”, purporting to represent the interests of the nation against the Hanoverian elite, and glorying in the sarcastic label “the Great Commoner”. His heedlessly destructive and implacable ambition made him a man whom it was sometimes safer to have inside than outside the tent. His power depended on swaying the House of Commons by bombastic, rambling but often brilliant oratory. 

When he took over a major part of the direction of the war, his popularity enabled him to persuade parliament to increase British involvement on the Continent, landing troops in France and reinforcing the bloody struggle in Germany, which ironically he and other Patriots had strenuously opposed as only serving the interest of the Hanoverian monarch. He persuaded parliament to borrow and spend unprecedented sums of money on the war, and this was crucial to victory.

Finally, he was able to communicate an indispensable sense of boldness and determination. While this has arguably been exaggerated, it certainly frightened the French, who ascribed Britain’s sudden run of successes to him alone. Their loathing was a back-handed compliment – as a French foreign ministry report put it:

His ambition is not wealth, for he despises it, and is incorruptible, but power. An extreme Republican in a moderate Monarchy, he wishes above all to be patriotic, or at least appear it, to be the favourite of the people. Mr Pitt, insolent to his sovereign, in France would end his days imprisoned in Mont Saint-Michel; in Russia, would have made a revolution, or had his tongue torn out and perished under the knout.

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Whatever the role of luck, Pitt was in charge when the tide turned decisively, and Britain enjoyed in 1759 its ‘Year of Victories’: at Minden in Germany, in India, in North America with the capture of Quebec, and with the destruction of the French navy at Quiberon Bay. Pitt wanted to go further, and resigned when his colleagues drew back.

Nevertheless, the end of the war marked a decisive global shift. France had lost its position in North America and India – as it turned out, for good – and its primacy in Europe began to wane. The global balance of power was set for at least 150 years.  

What if things had gone the other way? A French Raj in India? The dominance of ‘New France’ in North America? In trading terms, France would have outstripped Britain. The Industrial Revolution might have been still-born. The French Revolution would probably never have happened.

France was well placed – better placed than Britain – to become the world’s first hegemonic power. French would have become the first global language. France might easily have become what General de Gaulle later hoped for – a country of 100 million people. But Pitt, that lonely unstable hypochondriac, had his moment, and he left his mark on the world for good and ill.  

Robert Tombs is co-author of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2007)

The current Tory leadership contest is sheer agony – especially for those of us able to call to mind the calibre of some of those who have steered the party and the country in times gone by. There’s one man, in particular, whose influence on Britain and the wider word was – and continues to be – immense. And yet his name isn’t lauded like say, Churchill or de Gaulle. History seems rather to have written him off. But without him, our lives might have been very different. I’m thinking of Harold Macmillan.

Let’s begin with his more trivial achievements – well, relatively trivial. In 1956, Macmillan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was looking for ways to dampen down inflation by cutting consumption. In that year’s budget, he introduced a government-backed savings vehicle which paid out no interest but instead offered investors the chance to win a tax-free prize every month. Sixty or so years later, over 20 million people in the UK own well in excess of £30 billion worth of Premium Bonds.

A fair few of those people will also live in a house originally built in the years following the war. Some of those buildings, of course, went up during the pioneering Labour government that led Britain between 1945 and 1951. But even more of them were constructed under the Conservative government that followed it – and which ran the country for 13 years until 1964.

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That government’s first Minister of Housing – the man to whom many believed Churchill had given a poisoned chalice by asking him to achieve the seemingly impossible target of 300,000 properties a year – was (yes, you’ve guessed it) Harold Macmillan. Via some judicious deregulation, he not only helped the construction sector reach the target but helped it do so far earlier than expected.

Before that success, many of his colleagues had written Macmillan off, regarding him, indeed, as something of a political oddity and a personal failure (his impressive military record in WWI and diplomatic role in WWII notwithstanding).

Westminster’s worst kept secret was that his wife had been conducting an affair with his Conservative colleague, Bob Boothby, since the 1930s. And during that decade, Macmillan himself had earned a reputation as a disturbingly unconventional thinker on economic and social policy, writing volumes such as The State and Industry (1932), Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Unity (1933), The Next Five Years (1935), and, perhaps most famously, The Middle Way (1938). All of them championed the idea that governments should take greater responsibility for the economy as well as, more generally, the welfare of the population as a whole.

Meanwhile, Macmillan’s family business, in which he played an active role, was publishing John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory – probably the most influential book on economics of the 20th century. It is credited with helping to convince post-war policy makers that, via the management of demand by fiscal and monetary means, they could prevent a return to the unemployment which blighted Britain (and other countries) in the thirties.

It became increasingly clear after 1945, that the Conservative Party was going to have to reconcile itself to the public’s demand for a more activist state – one that would provide both economic growth and increased social security. And so Macmillan’s long-held beliefs looked rather more prescient. So, too, did his opposition to appeasement, which, along with that of Churchill, Eden and others, later helped to avert the charge that the entire Conservative Party had effectively given Hitler what he wanted.

As a result, and given his successful ministerial record under Churchill, it came as no surprise that, in April 1955, Eden having finally managed to winkle the grand old man out of Number 10, Macmillan was named Foreign Secretary. Later that year, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Macmillan’s elevation to the Premiership just over a year later in January 1957, however, did come as something of a shock to those not in the know. It had a great deal to do with an event that is often quoted nowadays (in the same breath as Brexit) as one of the most disastrous and humiliating episodes for a British government in recent memory – the 1956 Suez crisis.

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It might be going too far to assert that, without Macmillan, Eden would never have gone with the idea that Israel should invade Egypt in order to provide a pretext for Britain and France to snatch back the Suez Canal. But Macmillan’s enthusiasm for the plan, and his misplaced confidence that US President Dwight Eisenhower (whom he had got to know well during the war) would tolerate the operation, certainly did nothing to dissuade his colleagues from going ahead with it.

It is undoubtedly true, though, that it was Macmillan’s rapid realisation that the otherwise relatively successful intervention would have to be called off, not least in order to prevent a diplomatic disaster turning into economic chaos, which convinced those same colleagues to stop it in its tracks.

It was also Macmillan who, unlike, his rival Rab Butler, was able to convince his furious fellow Conservative MPs that the government could recover from the affair – one of the main reasons the party turned to him rather than Butler when Eden resigned.

Supermac – as he came to be dubbed – turned out to be right. Not only did he manage to repair relations with the US, later striking up a friendship with the much younger Jack Kennedy, but at the 1959 election – one unusual for being fought in the autumn rather than the spring or summer – he increased the Conservative Party’s overall majority to over 100.

This he did by persuading voters (who he famously said “had never had it so good”) that it was the architect and guarantor of their burgeoning consumer affluence, establishing the template later used to similarly devastating electoral effect by Margaret Thatcher in the loadsamoney 1980s. But he also did it by refusing to countenance the public spending constraints demanded by his supposedly proto-Thatcherite Treasury team, whose resulting resignation in January 1958, Macmillan, with his characteristic ‘unflappability’, dismissed as “a little local difficulty”.

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In hindsight, this may have been unwise – though not nearly as unwise as his fateful decision in 1960 to commission Dr Beeching to write his report which resulted in the closure of a third of Britain’s rail network, cutting off hundreds of towns and villages from one of the most environmentally-friendly (if costly) forms of transport.

But it was surely in defence and foreign affairs that Macmillan made his biggest and most lasting contribution. He played a role in Cold War efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons but also secured the Polaris weapons system for the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. He effectively admitted that Britain’s imperial game was up and then set a course firmly for decolonisation with his ‘Winds of change’ speech in February 1960.

And, of course, after trying to establish the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as a counter to the EEC, Macmillan swiftly came to the realisation that the UK had no alternative but to join the bigger bloc, initiating its first of three eventually successful accession applications to what is now the EU.

Whether that 40-plus years of membership is about to end – and end in tears – who knows? What we do know, however, is that without Harold Macmillan, Britain and the world might well have looked very different.

In August 2014, I stood at a rally in Trafalgar Square, watching a friend’s four-year-old daughter dancing joyfully around the lion statues in a tartan dress. We Londoners were there to ask the people of Scotland, ahead of the independence referendum: please stay. The thought that part of my country – a part of my heritage – might be split from us, broke my heart.

We won that referendum. But since then, unionism has gone out of fashion in our Brexit-induced culture war. That inconvenient border in Northern Ireland has inspired leaders of the (now ironically named) Conservative and Unionist Party to turn their back on history. Conservative party members, polls suggest, don’t care about Scotland and Northern Ireland or their place in our union. They just want Brexit, at any cost.

In the absence of any decent leadership on our nation’s unity in today’s politics, I want to pay tribute to a unionist hero, Queen Anne. She brought the nations of Scotland and England together under a shared government for the first time in 1707: she helped shape the political legacy our leaders are now trashing.

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It’s time to reclaim Queen Anne’s reputation, which has been unfairly traduced by the Oscar-winning film, The Favourite. Olivia Colman, who played the ailing monarch, gave a glorious performance, and a wonderful acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, which rightly claimed her place as a national treasure. But Queen Anne was not a demented, childish old sot, and fiction should not replace history in our national consciousness.

More importantly still, we need to make unionism fashionable again – if not for Queen Anne’s sake, then for our own.

Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702, replacing William III, who had ruled alone since the death of his wife Mary (Anne’s sister). It is a wonder she accomplished anything during her 12 years as Queen, given what she had lived through by the time of William’s death.

She is often referred to as “childless” because, by the time she died, she had no heir. But this is an extraordinary contortion of the truth. Anne lived through seventeen pregnancies, and was mother to nineteen babies, only one of which survived infancy. Seven miscarriages, two of twins. Five stillborn babies, at least two of which had lain dead inside her for over a month. Two babies who died within hours of birth. Two little girls carried off by smallpox before their second birthday. And one, Prince William, who was born with hydrocephalus. He suffered from ill health throughout his childhood, and died from pneumonia less than a week after his 11th birthday, with his mother holding vigil at his bedside until she passed out from exhaustion.

If I had lived through a tenth of the adversity that confronted Queen Anne, I’m not sure I’d have got out of bed each day. Perhaps she was a tiny bit crazy. She was certainly obese, had failing eyesight, and could barely walk. But to live through loss on an unimaginable scale, to battle on through disability, and still to govern? These are accomplishments that should not be ignored. And Anne did not just govern: she governed well.

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Queen Anne was always considered too weak to be a decent monarch, even in her own time. But the evidence shows she was diligent, patient, and capable. Her first speech to Parliament, on her accession to the throne, was admired for its insight and skill – foregrounding her patriotism and Englishness, and building instant popularity. Anne worked hard, despite her ill health. She met with ministers daily, attending more Cabinet meetings than any of her predecessors. It was only 50 years since the end of the Civil War: the absence of disputes between the monarch and Parliament should not be considered a sign of her weakness, but a sign of judgement and a willingness to help settle in these new constitutional arrangements, by respecting them.

The Acts of Union were her greatest legacy. In her first speech, she declared it “very necessary” to conclude a union between England and Scotland, two nations that had shared a crown since 1603 but were still governed separately.  It was essentially to prevent the Scots from choosing a different monarch and taking a different political direction.

In 1705, fresh negotiations were opened between England and Scotland, which concluded in 1706, and were followed by the Act of Union in 1707. This granted Scotland – still reeling from the financial collapse of the Darien scheme to start a colony in Panama – access to England’s domestic and colonial markets. It also protected the Scottish Presbyterian church, and separate legal system, allowing Scotland to retain much of its separate identity within a supranational structure.

I’m not starry eyed about the history of these islands. Too often England sought to obscure other national identities, and subjugate or abuse the peoples of Scotland, Wales and Ireland rather than share sovereignty with them. But at the heart of unionism is the idea that peoples with differing senses of their national identity might, nevertheless, be willing to share a government, to the benefit of all.

 Anne’s leadership enabled us to establish a system of government which permitted that, establishing a political union which has lasted longer than any other in global history.  It’s an idea worth saving; an idea worth celebrating.

Unionism stands opposed to the narrow nationalism that is dominating politics these days. We are increasingly in thrall to the idea of self-determination: the idea that every people must be able to govern itself, alone, without the interference of anyone who defines their identity differently.

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But self-determination is the wrong idea for an age of complexity. Nations need to work together in the common interest, whether it’s to govern multi-national corporations, fight cross-border crime, or combat climate change. And there’s no such thing as a pure national identity, where everyone is of a single tribe. We are complicated people, and getting more complicated, as migration transforms the demographic landscape of almost every country on earth.

That’s what I’ve always loved about being British: the acceptance of a complicated, trans-national identity. I was born in England; I spent half my childhood in Wales. My father is Scottish, and my mother traces her heritage to England, Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands. I have roots in every one of our nations, with a smattering of continental Europe for good measure, and this always struck me as exactly what it meant to be British. Britishness is not an ethnic identity: it’s a civic one, where all are welcome.

For Queen Anne, unionism was simply about holding together Scotland and England. In our era, it needs to be bigger, if it is to counter the seductive call of ethnic nationalism in an age of diversity. But, as the proud inheritors of the world’s oldest political union, we should have the confidence that Britain can lead the way. In our age of complexity, this is the kind of identity politics we need to build: where we can be all things, and one.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

So wrote Isaac Newton in a letter to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke. But what appears to be an eloquent appeal to humility is anything but. Ironies drip from its layered meanings like custard from a vanilla slice.

The context is one of rivalry. As so often, the two men were in dispute as to who had thought of an idea first. Newton was downplaying the issue by suggesting that all progress is largely owed to achievements of our forebears – so why squabble over the little that the living might add to the sum total of human knowledge?

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Some scholars interpret Newton’s reference to ‘giants’ as a sly dig at the physically unimposing Hooke. Certainly, there’s the implication that seeking recognition for the originality of one’s ideas is the petty obsession of small men. But that’s all rather convenient for Newton, whose high reputation – though hardly undeserved – has been enhanced by having other people’s achievements attributed to him.

Appropriately enough, the shoulders of giants line is not really his. In fact, it dates back to the Middle Ages (and perhaps earlier to ancient Rome) Here’s the 12th-century version (attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury):

“Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

But there’s a bigger irony here. Hooke, Newton and the other ‘natural philosophers’ of their era were so much more than inheritors of an ancient tradition. In fact, they stood at the beginning of something wholly new – the great endeavour that we today call science.

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Nullius in verba was the motto of the Royal Society founded in 1660. It means ‘on the word of no one’ – a rejection of argument by authority in favour of evidence obtained by experiment.

This was a profound break with the past. For the first time in the history of thought, the dwarves had permission to not only stand upon the shoulders of giants, but also – if the evidence required it – to topple them over. It was a scientific revolution – the Scientific Revolution, in fact.

It’s hard to over-estimate Hooke’s role in all of this. Indeed, he spent much of his life (and centuries thereafter) being under-estimated. As a mere curate’s son from the Isle of Wight, he was of humble birth and modest means. Nevertheless, in 1653, at the age of 18, he managed to secure a place at Oxford.

His intellectual and practical talents won him various roles in service to scholarly gentlemen, including the founders of Royal Society. In 1661, Hooke was appointed as the Society’s curator of experiments, a role in which he worked with skilled craftsmen to develop the technology on which scientific progress really does depend – telescopes, microscopes, vacuum pumps and many other scientific instruments.

While others looked on, he got his hands dirty – doing more than anyone to ensure that science in its formative years stayed honestly experimental.

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He was a great theoretician as well a great experimentalist. What we now call Boyle’s Law of gases and Newton’s First Law of Gravitation can be more fairly attributed to Hooke – as are the engineering principles that allowed Christopher Wren to build the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Some of his more speculative ideas foreshadowed the scientific knowledge of much later times – the theory of evolution, plate tectonics and the study of how memory is formed.

Hooke did get credit for naming the ‘cells’ that are the building blocks of living creatures – which he observed through the microscopes he invented. In 1665, he published Micrographia, in which his brilliant drawings gave the general public with their first view of life at the microscopic scale. It was, quite rightly, a sensation – Hooke had unveiled a hidden world and in the process invented popular science.

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The following year, something else of great importance was ignited – the Great Fire of London. Raging over four days it consumed almost everything between Temple Bar in the west and the Tower of London in the east. It did, however, stop just short of Gresham college – HQ of the Royal Society and home of Robert Hooke.

The college was commandeered by the Corporation of London. The fellows of Royal Society decamped to the safety of Oxford, but Hooke was asked to stay. Faced with greatest challenge in the Corporation’s history, it was him they turned to for help.

City fires were a perennial danger in medieval and early modern Europe, but the conflagration of 1666 was on a scale that would not be exceeded until the 20th century. Witnessing the extent of the devastation, a despairing Samuel Pepys feared that London would never be rebuilt.

Over 13,000 houses were destroyed, 87 churches, the medieval St Paul’s cathedral, the Royal Exchange, three city gates and much else. Though 80,000 people were homeless, their houses weren’t quite razed to the ground, but lying in heaps of rubble that obliterated the streets. Even today, the country would struggle with such a disaster, so how did the fragile government of a deeply divided Restoration England, surrounded by enemies, cope?

The answer is that they just got on with it.

With astonishing rapidity the key decisions were made and stuck too. Schemes to reshape the city around grand radiating boulevards or a grid-like pattern of streets and avenues were swiftly drawn up and just as swiftly rejected. Rather than pre-empting the future development of Paris or New York, London chose to remain London – but a better version of London.

The established street pattern was retained, but key thoroughfares widened and the steepest gradients ameliorated. Property rights were respected, but replacement buildings had to be constructed out of brick and stone. Tenants paid for the reconstruction of their homes, but landlords accepted decades of greatly reduced rents. It was one of the great compromises of history – reconciling tradition and modernity.

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All very wise and farsighted; but while Hooke played his part in the counsels of the mighty, he was also on the ground making things happen. Indeed, before the scorched earth had even cooled, he and his helpers were out on the streets (or what used to be the streets) clearing away rubble and physically staking out the outlines of the new city that would rise from the ashes.

His tireless work helped settle disputes – securing support for the realignment of street plans and boundaries through meticulous surveying and scrupulous accounting. And if that weren’t enough, he found time to design several of the City’s new churches and other grand buildings (including the help he provided to Wren on St Paul’s ).

With Wren he also designed the Monument to the Great Fire of London – which is similar in form, but older and taller than the better known Nelson’s Column. In a typically Hookean flourish the Monument incorporated a zenith telescope, while the new cathedral was equipped with an observatory.

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How much of a difference did Robert Hooke make in his life? If he’d succumbed to his frail health as a child how much of a hole would that have left in the subsequent history of science and London?

Hooke, his towering intellect allied to superlative craftsmanship and relentless effort, was throughout his career a unique and vital link between theory and practice, idea and experiment, thought and action.

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I don’t think it too fanciful to suppose that he greatly accelerated both the progress of science and the reconstruction of London. Furthermore, his twin achievements compounded one another – catalysing the emergence of England as a world power.

He deserves a more prominent place in our national story than he’s received. Indeed for most of the three centuries following his death in 1703 he was all but written out. Newton, who became President of Royal Society (also in 1703), played a part in that – and possibly the mysterious disappearance of Hooke’s portrait. It is only in much more recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars like Alan Chapman, Lisa Jardine and John and Mary Gribbin that his true greatness has been rediscovered.

It was Chapman who described him as “England’s Leonardo”. Hooke is worthy of the comparison, but it’s a shame that he needs to be compared to anyone. He should be remembered for his own sake – a giant who stands in no one’s shadow.