Well I wouldn’t count on that, Mike. I refer to the reported prediction of Michael an Gof that he would have "a name perpetual and a fame permanent and immortal" despite, or because of, having his head stuck on a post after losing the Battle of Deptford Bridge on June 17 1497.

Now there’s always some smart aleck in the class who not only knows who he was but has a T-shirt with him on it. But I’m betting the person in question is Cornish. Because Michael an Gof was a Cornish blacksmith (which is rather prosaically what an Gof means in that tongue; his actual name was Michael Joseph or, to avoid angry letters in Cornish, Myghal Josef) who led a revolt against Henry VII’s excessive taxation to pay for an invasion of Scotland to put an end to the claim of “Perkin Warbeck” to be king of England.

As I’ve written elsewhere, if you happen to be called Perkin it’s probably not wise to lunge for a crown. It’s just not that sort of name. Now Warbeck actually claimed to be Richard of York, younger brother and equally dead sibling of Edward V, murdered according to Shakespeare by Richard III but very possibly by those appalling Tudors. But Henry VII crushed and killed him, as he did many other people, in his own ruthless and successful lunge for a crown.

As you gather, I don’t like the Tudors. I think they were illegitimate rulers both in the legal and moral sense, other than Elizabeth I, who was scary but mostly in a good way. And lots of people at the time felt the same way, including the Cornish rebels who felt that England attacking Scotland, and one usurper going after another, was nothing to do with them and they shouldn’t have their pockets picked.

They marched on London to mention it to the king, and suggest he get rid of the corrupt counsellors who had led him astray in such matters. And so they gathered themselves and their petition and marched east, swelling in numbers from 6,000 to 15,000 and getting rowdier as they went. Eventually they headed for the notoriously turbulent southeastern region of Kent, only to be rebuffed, and intercepted on their way back west at Deptford, now part of Greater London, and beaten badly. Casualty figures vary widely and are all unreliable, but it was an ugly and one-sided business.

Especially for an Gof and his key associate Thomas Flamank, who got the old hanged, drawn and quartered treatment although in an act of mercy they were hanged until dead before the other festivities ensued ending with their heads on pikestaffs on London Bridge.

It is fair to say that they had not thought it through properly, from the reception Henry Tudor was likely to give them to preparations for actual battle. And an Gof isn’t exactly remembered, not even as “what an Gof”. The fact that his name was adopted by “a Cornish nationalist extremist organization” doesn’t really count given that the vast majority of readers probably didn’t know they even had those. But I will say this.

Like a great many notable figures in Anglosphere history, he was motivated not by greed or ambition but by legitimate resistance to state oppression, particularly the exaction of taxes without representation. The Cornish really had long ago, in the reign of Edward I, been promised exemption from certain kinds of taxation without the approval of their own “Stannary Parliament” (yes, it comes from the Latin for “tin” and that’s how important the stuff was in Cornwall from classical into medieval times), and Henry VII had brushed aside both the promises and the Parliament.

In that sense, Michael “whose head is that?” does belong in the august company of such people as Edward Coke and George Washington. Even if his capacity for planning did not equal theirs.

On this date in 1779, June 16, Spain didn’t capture Gibraltar. As it didn’t on many other days from the time the British bagged it in 1704 down to current petty harassment. But also for more than 1300 consecutive days after June 16 1779 and not for want of trying. Thank goodness.

If you’re wondering why Britain, which is off the north coast of France, owns Gibraltar which is off the south coast of Spain, the answer goes back in part to the War of the Spanish Succession and in part to the dog-eat-whatever nature of geopolitics. It was actually captured by an Anglo-Dutch force on behalf of a Hapsburg claimant to the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles. But in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht ending that war Charles did not get the throne and Britain decided to keep Gibraltar just in case.

It was a very wise decision in retrospect and indeed at the time. British control over the entrance and exit to the Mediterranean was vital to the stability and security of the free world for centuries and never more so than during the darkest days of World War II, when Gibraltar in the hands of Franco not Churchill might have changed the outcome disastrously.

Grabbing it back in 1704 was certainly opportunistic. But hey, you never know. Including when a genocidally anti-Semitic madman will take over a major power and try to conquer the world. I know it sounds unlikely. But it could happen. And the rulers of Spain at that point were on their own rampage; at stake in the War of the Spanish Succession was control of both France and Spain by a single monarch

The actual siege of Gibraltar was a messy business featuring the usual slaughter, starvation, scurvy and misery. But also remarkable resilience on the part of the garrison, of the same sort that the British would exhibit in the trenches of World War I and between 1939 and 1945. And the decision of the French and Spanish to try to grab Gibraltar back while the British were busy with their American revolt, and possibly invade England while they were at it, was at least as opportunistic as the original British move to take Gibraltar and in service of despotism rather than liberty.

The Spanish are still annoyingly trying to get it back, despite the manifest and repeatedly expressed desire of the inhabitants to be independent in domestic matters and subject to Britain in foreign ones and the fact that Spain has never been as well-governed as Britain and often appallingly worse.

The garrison who withstood the siege from June 24 1779 to February 7 1783, including the “Grand Assault” on September 18, 1782, may sometimes have wondered what it was all about. But they never flagged in their devotion to duty and, looking back, we can be extraordinarily grateful that they didn’t given how improbably high the stakes were later revealed to be.

Incidentally at one point partial relief was brought to the garrison by ships under the command of Admiral George Rodney, a brilliantly innovative tactician though evidently quite an obnoxious man; in the critical stage of World War II the aging British battleship Rodney named for him played an important role in Britain’s great stand including the hunt for Bismarck, during which Rodney became the only battleship in history to torpedo another battleship for what that’s worth. And before I stop digressing, Rodney was one of the Nelson-class battleships nicknamed the “Queen Anne’s Mansions” for a block of flats in London or the “Cherry Tree Class” because they were meant to be bigger but were “cut down” by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. I think that particular sense of humour has always been part of British resilience for which we should all, again, be grateful.

According to George Bernard Shaw, “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.” Which brings me to Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, copilot of the first-ever manned flight on November 21, 1783, in a hot air balloon. What could go wrong?

Well, I could have the wrong date for my “It Happened Today.” But I don’t, because the actual answer to my question is that barely a year and a half later he was killed in… a hot air balloon, along with one Pierre Romain, who achieved mortality by sharing the distinction of being the first known victim of an air crash with Rozier.

Arguably the latter wasn’t a good candidate for life insurance anyway. Earlier, he had tested the flammability of hydrogen in the most obvious way anyone could think of, namely to take a big mouthful, blow it across an open flame, and bid a fond farewell to his eyebrows.

I’m all for courage and daring. But I personally prefer to have a parachute and, I don’t know, asbestos eyebrows? A face mask? No wait. I know.

Judgement. That’s what you need.

And a parachute.

Great news! My new ebook of It Happened Today features for the month of July, is now available for purchase on Kindle (or through our store), for $2.99.

Patrons and monthly subscribers get a free copy, along with other free and exclusive content. Click here to become a patron, starting at $1/month (please note: pledges are in US dollars).

Ah, the wonders of the television age. Including the mighty computer. On this date, June 14, in 1951, the world’s first real commercial computer was dedicated. Yes, dedicated. UNIVAC. By the U.S. Census Bureau. At last the government could really keep track of citizens.

It would be in the United States, paradoxically the world’s most free and prosperous nation and also its most progressive one. The world had already seen “computers” in the sense of things that computed things, including a mechanical one in 17^th century France and Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” which suffered the twin drawbacks of being mechanical not electronic (based on a loom, of all things) and never being completed for want of money. But he had worked out the basic principles of programming. Just at about minus 3 Hertz.

By the 1920s the mighty International Business Machines Corporation had pretty keen punch-card systems. And I’m not being sarcastic. The ingenuity it took to make things work without microchips should not be underestimated. But by 1939 there actually was an electronic digital computer, the non-famous Atanasoff-Berry Computer or “ABC” that could solve up to 29 simultaneous equations with 29 variables. Which my Excel software would scoff at. But can you do it without aid? ABC could.

Then by 1946 there was ENIAC, or “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator” (arguably they needed the PR guy who came up with ABC), for a mere half-million bucks, about 2,400 cubic feet, with 17,000 vacuum tubes and 6,000 switches you plugged and replugged to program it. Man, you wouldn’t want to have to hunt down a coding error in that mess. Oh, and it weighed more than 30 tons. Not exactly your laptop or even your father’s. But don’t laugh. Then came UNIVAC, at a blistering 1,000 calculations per second and a mere eight tons. And transistors in the 1950s, integrated circuits in the 1960s, microchips, the Internet, Bluetooth, smartphones holding which we walk into fountains while gaping at stupid videos, Siri and Cortana and YouTube and headless cheetahs at a speed almost impossible to grasp.

Try it this way. It was less than half a century from those behemoths to my first laptop. And its 286 chip now seems about as mighty as UNIVAC, or for that matter Babbage’s Analytic Loom. But look how fast things moved. By now we’re seeing 3D printed buildings (yes, you read that right, in the United Arab Emirates) and soon holographs, robots with genuine people personality and any number of other horrors.

The ingenuity is staggering. But the trajectory is profoundly worrisome, especially as progress speeds up at increasing speed. It is to be wondered at. But not necessarily in the good way so many people unthinkingly hail progress.

In my view, some day we’ll miss the TV age. Heck, we’ll miss TV. That’s how bad it is.

Quick. Who is Britain’s oldest ally? You don’t get to answer if you’ve watched my documentary The Great War Remembered. Or if you’re from there. But odds are you’re not because it’s a fairly small country not ranked among the global heavyweights. The answer is (drum roll please)… Portugal.

The Treaty of Windsor creating the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance was made so long ago it wasn’t even Britain but England that signed it in 1386, updating a document from 1373. And it helped both. Portugal of course had fairly simple strategic problems through much of its history, even when it was an empire. OK, one fairly simple strategic problem. Spain. Which did actually contrive to swallow Portugal between 1580 and 1640, interrupting but not destroying the alliance.

England had more complicated problems. But Spain was one of them, from the time that the Hapsburgs threatened to dominate Europe from Spain to the time that Napoleon threatened to dominate Europe including Spain. And indeed the Portuguese did contribute on the Western Front in WWI after the Germans attacked their African possessions, thus having their own military cemetery near Neuve Chapelle with tombstone after tombstone reading “Soldado Portuges Desconhecido”.

Portugal did not enter World War II because they and the British agreed that doing so would bring Spain in on the other side which would have been disastrous for both. But Portugal did grant the British naval bases in the Azores.

If you like dynastic things, you will be happy that John of Gaunt, son of Edward III and father of Henry IV of England, married his daughter Philippa to King John I of Portugal in 1387 and thus the Portuguese royals in the Age of Discovery were part-English even if the nobles did find Philippa rather strait-laced by their standards. And it’s also noteworthy that the English had even helped the Portuguese reconquer parts of their land from the Moors in the 12^th century. Some friendships endure even in geopolitics.

Nowadays the UK and Portugal are both in NATO and unlikely to go to war together except as part of that alliance. But it’s nice that some things last.

Oh, this alliance also helped bring the world port. Which is a lot more than you can say on the positive side about most diplomatic agreements.

Speaking of sacks, which I was in yesterday’s item, June 12 is the date when General James Wolfe successfully attacked a vital French position at… Lighthouse Point. Oh. What a dull name.

He is of course famous for successfully attacking a vital French position at Quebec City, dying in victory in what the oil paintings suggest was a singularly languid manner. His contribution at the Plains of Abraham to the triumph of British liberty under law in the future Canada didn’t just make him a huge embarrassment to the politically correct. It also tends to obscure the fact that he was a person, not just a name on a plaque, an officer of courage, determination and boldness whose military career lasted longer than one battle and a lucky musket shot.

He was present at Culloden Moor in 1746, where his refusal to shoot a wounded Fraser clan helped earn him the respect of the Highlanders he would command at the Plains of Abraham. And he was there when the British attached Louisburg, which commanded the entrance to the St. Lawrence, with the rank of brigadier, under the dreaded Jeffrey Amherst (yes, he of the smallpox blankets). William Pitt the Elder was in the process of saving Britain’s bacon in the Seven Years’ War and this was a pivotal strategic thrust in North America, opening the way to Quebec City.

The Royal Navy managed to blockade and defeat the French fleet in the Mediterranean so they could not defend Louisburg from the water as they had in 1757. And the British mounted a significant operation especially for those days, sending 150 transports and 40 men-of-war carrying almost 14,000 mostly regular force soldiers.

Bad weather delayed the amphibious landing until June 8, and the French nearly pushed it back except a boatload of Wolfe’s light infantry established a sheltered beachhead and he redirected the rest of his division in behind it. On June 12 Wolfe followed up by leading 1200 picked men to seize vital Lighthouse Point, an unoriginal name for a point predictably commanding the harbor entrance, and Louisburg was doomed.

It took weeks to grind the fortress down, including a key raid on the last remaining French warships in which the future explorer James Cook was involved. The French threw in the towel on July 26. And with it in British hands, though it was too late to attack Quebec itself, the British were able to mop up various French positions in the future Atlantic Canada. And indeed the next year Louisbourg was the key staging point for Wolfe’s attack on Quebec. Meanwhile, just in case the politicians gave it back to France again, the British went about blowing the massive fortress up bit by bit, which took until 1760.

Nowadays of course we wish they hadn’t. It’s much better to have things in authentic historical condition. Including perhaps our appreciation of Wolfe, who might have been carried to great heights by the same qualities that carried him ashore at Louisburg, to Lighthouse Point, and finally up the heights to Quebec City where he lost his life at age 32.

On June 11 Troy was sacked in 1184 BC. Unless it was on some other day in a different year. Assuming it happened.

The June 11 1184 BC date comes from Erastosthenes. Who was, um, the guy who said Troy fell on June 11 1184 BC. No wait. I googled and it turns out he was the chief librarian at Alexandria in the late 3^rd century BC who invented geography and made the first, and remarkably accurate, measurement of the circumference of the Earth. And he was nicknamed “Beta” because… but I’m getting off topic.

The point is, we don’t know much about Troy if you’re looking for precise historical dates. Erastosthenes couldn’t google it and the details have been lost in the mists or sands of time though modern archeology not only confirms that it existed but says Erastosthenes’ general dating is not unreasonable. As for the specific day, well, it had to be some day and June 11 is as likely or unlikely as any other. But Troy was clearly a flourishing Bronze Age city, a major trade centre, and it went under in the eruption of Iron Age people into the Mediterranean whose impacts included a temporary loss of writing in Greece itself.

Doubtless the story has grown with the telling. As Tim Severin of The Jason Voyage and others says, places never get smaller as they enter into legend. Nor, indeed, do wars get shorter or heroes less formidable. So the siege probably didn’t last 10 years, summon all the heroes of Greece to behave deplorably in an unjustified war or any of that.

Actually I shouldn’t call the war unjustified from the Greek point of view. At least not the legendary one. Supposedly it was triggered by the abduction of Helen, so beautiful her face launched a thousand ships. (Thus for those who love excessive mathematical precision, a millihelen is the unit of beauty needed to launch one ship.) And if they weren’t just looking at her face, well, why dwell on such things?

The point is, the Greeks were keeping their word to rally to a colleague, Menelaus, whose wife had been carried off. But the Trojans, to whom some of the romance of lost causes attaches and gives the war its mythological resonance, were defending a guy who was up to no good.

I do think the lasting appeal of the war somehow lies in the fact that you kind of don’t want either side to lose. But you know one has to, and that certain heroes will bite the dust every time you read it. If indeed you can get through the Iliad’s repetitive forests of bronze-tipped spears and other repetitive rhetorical devices. And the fact that gods and men alike tend to behave in ways that serve as useful cautions about various vices human and Olympian but hardly as role models throughout. Achilles, for instance, is a spear-proof brat and bully.

It has been said that the Odyssey, a story that arose from the Iliad’s aftermath, which is itself a peculiar mishmash of foolish and knavish actions that rather wanders like its hero, is the first significant celebration of monogamy, that Odysseus and Penelope’s loyalty to one another is what holds the story together and keeps our attention on it. To be sure, Odysseus’ adventures along the way include “romantic” ones but at the end of the day, or night, he always laces up his sandals and says “Gotta get back to the wife” and in the end he does. Whereas the Greek gods are a shocking bunch of petty cruel and vengeful knaves throughout both tales, except perhaps Athena in the Odyssey though of course she is part of the trio whose bickering over the golden apple leads to Paris being asked to judge, foolishly accepting, choosing Aphrodite and getting Helen bewitched into falling for him in return.

As for the Romans claiming to be founded by Aeneas wandering after the fall of Troy, well, it is second only to Brutus of Troy coming to Britain in the phooey department.

And yet for all that the Trojan Horse, Cassandra, Achilles sulking in his tent and having as well as being a heel and all that that remains with us, or did until recently, in part from a feeling that, as a writer in Chronicles magazine put it a quarter century ago, “We are as Hector on the walls of Troy with Andromache and always have been. Only the Crystal Palace and all those nineteenth-century trust funds ever assured us otherwise.”

It is not, as I think I’ve made clear, a place in which I would want to stand on all kinds of grounds from the injustice of the war to the fickle quality of the supposed gods on both sides. But there is this: Hector is willing to stake all on a lost cause in which he believes. And there is an irresistible and commendable romance in the quality of not calculating who has the big battalions and sliding over to that side at an opportune moment.

In that sense at least, the fall of Troy is sad, whenever it happened and however far it fell.