| By the time Queen Victoria celebrated he Diamond Jubliee in 1897 some seventy Wars, Expeditionary Campaigns or Punitive Raids had been fought in her name “When she died almost four years later her forces were battling in South Africa. Not a single War, Campaign or Punitive Campaign was waged in defence of Britain. Britain had built warships for Americans in Rebellion against the US Federal Government and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone,the son of a man who had owned 2,500 Black Slaves had publicly praised the Rebel “President” Jefferson Davis. When not themselves using lethal weapons upon their fellow humans, the British were selling them. Some years later, the slaveholder’s heir William Gladstone announced it was his destiny to “Pacify Ireland” , a country which had not attacked another in the previous thousand-plus years. And nobody seems to have seen the irony. The summary of the martial endeavours of Victoria’s forces is from a book based on a BBC Series called “Empire” and subtitled “What Ruling The World Did to the British”. WHAT BRITAIN DID TO THE WORLD IT RULED is all around us, particularly where wars, sectarian mayhem, excuses for further British martial exercise and lucrative contracts for arms and armour, terrestrial, seaborne, airborne and communication technology are on offer, and spin doctors and legal sycophants can enrich themselves without hazarding anything heavier than their immortal souls. I’ll give the book’s author Jeremy Paxman credit though, because he explains how the British Empire got under way. He writes of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who persuaded the first Queen Elizabeth to let him cross the Atlantic to found the first English colony in America:- “The characteristics of this founder of empire – visionary enthusiasm and slippery opportunism – occur time and again in the people who brought so much of the world under British rule” Gilbert was certainly a hard enough nut for this voyage into the unknown, having shown utter ruthlessness during the campaign to put down in England’s first (and perhaps its last) major colony, Ireland. As a military governor he gave no quarter and accounts of the war there talk of supplicants being made to approach him through an avenue of severed heads. It was in the Irish colony too that Gilbert had learned the practice of “planting” settler communities. Gilbert was a half-brother of Walter Raleigh, the first of many robbers of Irish lands, who asset-stripped them of the forests for the following three centuries The Gladstone Coat of Arms showed a severed Negro Head, celebrating the family talent for pacifying the Lesser Breeds. |
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