King John signs the Magna Carta …
Charles Wooley in 60 Minutes mode
Two important anniversaries happened this month but if historical significance is to be judged by contemporary headlines, television news and tweets then maybe they weren’t so important after all.
It wouldn’t even surprise me if this is the first heads up you’ve had on the subject. It is 800 years since the signing of Magna Carta (the Great Charter) at Runnymede on the Thames in June of 1215 and 200 years since the defeat of the French Dictator, Napoleon, at Waterloo in Belgium in June of 1815.
Is your mind already wandering? Sit up and pay attention because both of those events were essential to the shaping of the world you live in today.
But now ask yourself, do you like the world you live in today?
Whether you do or don’t might determine whether these events were ‘good things’ or ‘bad things’. These days when it comes to hIstory there is a big ‘I’ in the word. It’s all about us. We are presumably living with the consequences of the process and so why, if we are to care at all, shouldn’t we be entirely subjective about it?
When I learned history in another age, at ‘The Mayfield Primary School of Hard Knocks’ in Launceston we had no right of opinion. Magna Carta and Waterloo were, beyond doubt, ‘good things’.
When King John the First of England signed Magna Carta, we learned it was ‘good’ because that marked the beginning of the long (though grudging) transition of power from arbitrary Monarchy to the Courts of Law and thus to the People.
In my own grim scholastic history, Tasmanian kids got beaten for not knowing stuff some teachers mightn’t know today; dates like 1215 and 1815 …
When the Duke of Wellington defeated the French commander, Napoleon, it was ‘good’ because it was a triumph of English Speaking Peoples over the French and of Democracy over Tyranny. All of which must be a ‘good thing’. Right?
In my own grim scholastic history, Tasmanian kids got beaten for not knowing stuff some teachers mightn’t know today; dates like 1215 and 1815. So, had I precociously raised the point in class about Waterloo, that Britain wasn’t even a democracy in 1815 because only a minority of men, and no women at all, had the vote, I would have been in strife.
In Launceston’s once notorious juvenile detention centre, aka Mayfield Primary, the appropriately named ‘Miss Wieldon’ would have caned me mercilessly for revisionism. “Shut up, it’s in the book!”
‘Happy the country with no history’, runs some obscure proverb.
Happier the school kids too, I reckon.
No wonder no-one knows much history. All those boring names and dates. Why bother?
Worse, we live in an age where something called “Relativism” rules. That’s to say there are no absolutes. Nothing can be said to be certain or even true any more, because it all depends on your angle of view, and how you personally feel about it, even if you are a dummy.
Regarding the events of the 26th of January 1788, I learned that Australia’s First Settlement was a ‘good thing’ because apart from the terrors of the Mayfield Gulag, our lives seemed pretty good and we had won two world wars and the Ashes and were the greatest nation on earth. Though, never forgetting the words of the song we were forced to bellow at assemblies:
“Although I dwell in this fair clime
I am a Britton all the time.”
Nowadays of course, it’s not all so clear as that. Historical revision tells us to feel somewhat guilty, that not everyone was a winner in January 1776, when the Union Jack was run up the pole into an unpolluted Australian sky.
It’s an historical dilemma. Might things have been better, aside from (obviously) gastronomically, if the French with their higher regard for native peoples had won at Waterloo and gone on to colonise Australia?
Then, piling doubt on doubt, after watching the ABC’s “The Killing Season” you might even think the long and painful journey from Runnymede to Democracy was hardly worth the effort.
Just for the record here, people, Albert Einstein indirectly started this ‘it-all-depends-where-you’re-watching-from’ relative view of everything.
Idle twentieth century philosophers extrapolated the miserable notion that nothing is provably better than anything else from his General Theory of Relativity and somehow it caught on.
Add nuclear weapons to this profound sense of historical uncertainty and we don’t have a lot to thank Einstein for. Or maybe we do. It all depends on your point of view.
King John 1 came from the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ school of thought where the King was God’s appointed guy on earth. You couldn’t argue with that, which was the problem.
The Barons, who forced him to sign Magna Carta, were generally a drunken load of greedy, self-serving, small-time potentates, who wanted to gain advantage by getting a bigger share of the action. (See it all a bit like a Premiers Conference).
As for Waterloo it was a close run thing …
Of course if the nobility could have foreseen that all of this would eventually destroy the power of the whole aristocracy, give every man and woman an equal vote, and facilitate the rise of Facebook and the Bogan, then those Barons would have stayed well away from Runnymede that balmy summer afternoon in 1215.
As for Waterloo, back in 1815 it was a close run thing. Had Napoleon won, Europe would have been united under an iron rule.
With all those petty, squabbling monarchies abolished, the seedbed for future nationalistic strife would have not existed and the carnage of World War 1 might just have been avoided.
But then, historically speaking, where would we be today without Gallipoli and Simpson and his donkey?
Maybe quite happily quaffing the best Nouveau Hollandaise Vin Rouge and chomping on truffles and canapés, oysters and pate.
Much like now actually. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered you about History in the first place …
