To some extent, geography is destiny (Part 1)

I’ve found myself thinking today about how geography has influenced the history of, respectively, England and Israel.

To make my point about the first, I can do no better than to quote the famous words spoken by the dying John of Gaunt in William Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act II, Scene 1), which refer to the isolated position enjoyed by the British Isles, separated from Europe by the English Channel and the North Sea:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Of course, England has scarcely been free of wars.  You only need to read Shakespeare’s own historical plays to remember that.  To choose just one example:  In 1399, after John of Gaunt died, King Richard II — who may have been mad, but was certainly ill-suited to rule — disinherited Gaunt’s son, Henry of Bolingbroke, who had already been exiled.  In response, Henry invaded England in June of that year with a small but rapidly growing force that encountered little effective resistance.  Bolingbroke deposed Richard and had himself crowned as King Henry IV.  And Richard, it is thought, was starved to death in captivity, dying at the age of 33.  (We saw his tomb, yesterday, in Westminster Abbey, where Henry V, partly hoping to atone for his father’s seizure of the throne and possible murder of Richard, had his body transferred long after his death.)

And then, of course, there was the English Civil War that deposed and eventually executed Charles I in 1649.  The Commonwealth of England, a republic led by Oliver Cromwell, was then proclaimed.  But Charles II, son of Charles I, returned to the throne in 1660.

Moreover, the waters surrounding them haven’t completely shielded the British Isles from external invasion and conquest, either.  The Romans were famously here under Julius Caesar and thereafter.  (Think of Hadrian’s Wall.)  Constantine was crowned emperor in York.  Various Viking invasions had a considerable impact, leaving behind them, among other things, scores of Scandinavian place names.  Most famously of all, of course, William the Conqueror (a Norman, just barely past being a Viking — or a “Northman” — himself) crossed the Channel and defeated poor King Harold Godwinson (another ethnic Scandinavian) at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

But Napoleon never made it here.  And neither, much more significantly, did Hitler’s Third Reich.

England’s geographical situation differs dramatically from that of Israel.  On which I’ll post a few lines later.

Posted from London, England