On July 12 Scotland became part of England. Not entirely and not for the last time. Because I refer to the occasion in 927 when King Constantine II of Scotland accepted the overlordship of Athelstan the Magnificent, along with King Hywel Dda of Deheubarth, Ealdred of Bamburgh and King Owain of Strathclyde.

I like the story partly because I think it’s revealing that England could have had a king deservedly called “the Magnificent” during what are habitually pilloried as “the Dark Ages.” Athelstan was the grandson of Alfred “the Great” (ditto). And after a contested succession he went on to be not just king of Wessex but, it is generally agreed, the first King of England. And when you consider the impact of excessive political fragmentation on national security and therefore on culture including learning, surely it’s good that England was unified.

As for Athelstan himself, he does actually seem to have been magnificent. Not just in his geopolitical accomplishments but as a ruler. His councils included members from all over, not just local favourites, and were attended by Welsh rulers as well as his own subjects. They produced important legal documents and focused on the suppression of robbery and disorder. Athelstan was also a very pious man, founding churches and collecting relics. His court, like that of his grandfather, was a centre of learning. And he played an important role in European politics.

In the end it didn’t really “take”. His 15-year reign from 924-27 as King of Wessex and 927 to 939 as King of the English was followed by a reasonable period of peace and prosperity through that of his nephew Edgar the Peaceful (959-975 but the fourth king after Athelstan), famously rowed on the Thames by roughly eight kings to symbolise his overlordship. But the combination of Aethelred the Unready’s treacherous weakness and renewed Danish invasions meant a very troubled 11^th century. His conquest of the last Viking kingdom in England in 927 was followed by revolts including one on his death that re-established Viking rule until the final reconquest in 954. And for that matter the submission of Constantine II only brought about seven years of peace on the chronically turbulent English-Scottish border although Constantine’s revolt failed thanks to Athelstan’s decisive victory at Brunanburh, while Scotland later became independent and did not rejoin England decisively until 1707, something many Scots now unaccountably seem to regret.

The fact that the Danes came back and Aethered made a right mess of their return is not an indictment of Athelstan. Instead his reign is one more proof of Faulkner’s dictum that history isn’t was, it’s is. The desirability of a united, indepedent United Kingdom, and the difficulty of attaining and preserving it, is very much with us to this day.

Unlike Athelstan or any other leader remotely likely to be dubbed “the Magnificent” now or by posterity, I can’t help noticing.

Here’s an unhappy anniversary. On July 11, 1940, “Vichy France” was created. Formally the French State or État français, it was the Hitler’s-gun-to-your-head successor to the hapless Third Republic. I don’t see what else French politicians or citizens could have done at that point. But what a bitter pill to swallow.

Nominally the Vichy regime controlled all of France, though the northern part was occupied by German troops and, after the Allies landed in French North Africa in November 1942, the rest was occupied by the Germans and, even more humiliating, the Italians. The president was Philippe Pétain, erstwhile hero of Verdun but always a pessimistic man, and the slogan was “Travail, Famille, Patrie” which I’ve always felt pretty much amounted to you’d better work or the Nazis will shoot your family so pretend this is your homeland. (Among other things, the Germans kept some 2 million French POWs as slave labour hostages and obviously they would not have hesitated to kill them.)

Pétain himself seems to have regarded the 1940 defeat and establishment of Vichy as a chance to reverse the liberalism of the 1930s, such as it was, cracking down on the independence of women, unions and businesses, and instituting central planning. I once heard a surprisingly plausible conspiracy theory about the poor French military performance in the Battle of France, that the generals were aiming for temporary setbacks to discredit those miserable liberal politicians, create an authoritarian regime and then recoup their battlefield losses. If so it was an appalling miscalculation. But it’s kind of creepy that Pétain rather proceeded as though it had worked, apart from the bit where Hitler captured Paris.

Meanwhile ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen seem to have felt, by and large, that Vichy was the best chance they had to preserve at least some autonomy given the catastrophe. So here’s the hard part.

Suppose you’re French in June 1940. What do you do. Ideally you are privately busy joining La Résistance or “Résis” even though the French government had never allowed their citizens the right to bear arms and only realized too late that they needed it (a story for another day, on which see www.arighttoarms.com). But obviously you can’t tell a Panzer tank sorry, go away, I’m part of the Underground. So you have to sign an armistice on terms the Germans dictate, or accept the armistice, and pretend to back the resulting government. And then you have to seem to collaborate. But before you know it, you are collaborating. A tactic becomes a strategy and suddenly it becomes reality. A nasty case in point is the oily Pierre Laval, a Third Republic leftist who made a slick transition to Prime Minister of Vichy from 1942-44 and was shot after the war.

Vichy France did collaborate with the Nazis in the persecution of Jews, both as official policy and in some cases from private conviction. After the war a lot more people joined the “Résis” than were ever part of it during the conflict. But what else can you do besides keep your head down and go along with what’s happening, albeit unenthusiastically? Yet how can you do it? Unless you are a genuine anti-Semite and possibly an ideological sympathizer with Naziism, it’s a horrifying dilemma (and if you are, you’re just horrifying).

In June 1940 the war was lost and if you were in a position of power you had a very real moral obligation to surrender to prevent a lot more killing before the Germans found someone who would surrender to stop it. Then you had to govern the way they told you so they didn’t start killing people again. Except to govern the way they told you meant killing people, including Jews, opponents of Naziism and pretty much the people you least wanted to kill. Once you’re on that slippery slope, I don’t see where or how you get off. But how do you not get on it?

Well, the obvious answer is don’t lose the war. Since I don’t see a less obvious one, the lesson is don’t be caught unprepared. Don’t dismiss people who sound the alarm about national security as warmongers, and insist on spending all the money on left-wing causes that undermine the economy, social cohesion, and a sense that your society is worth defending.

Which uncomfortably is not just a lesson for France in 1940.

I’m sure it was a glorious affair. There are probably monuments. People dream of revenge, I imagine, and insist that their side was right all along. But when I hear that July 10 is the date, in 1882, when Chile suffered its final military defeat in the War of the Pacific, fought between autocrats for bird poop in a desert, when 77 men were annihilated by over 1,000 Peruvians, I just feel sadness. How often humans kill one another for nothing.

As regular readers will know, I am profoundly grateful to those who have fought, died and killed for liberty over more than 2000 years, from Salamis to Rochester Castle to Yorktown to Juno Beach. Our documentary The Great War Remembered insists that World War I too was a necessary war, fought valiantly under difficult circumstances.

Well, necessary from the Allied point of view. There is something glorious in war, not in the childish rah rah sense but in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things when duty calls. But for every noble battle to be fought, there have to be people on the other side whose cause is deplorable. Many of them doubtless deserve better, and served through delusion or compulsion. Even in World War II there were German soldiers who were not bad people, among the dead as among the survivors. But war is never glorious from a grand perspective because without aggression defence would not be needed.

Then there are those wars that are fought for shabby or loathsome regimes on both sides, leaving piles of bodies, the good and the bad, the kind and the cruel, the dutiful and the mean, without a cause on either side worth celebrating. To me the Battle of La Concepción on July 10 1882 is very firmly in that category.

The fact that many of the Peruvians were armed with spears does nothing to improve my opinion of the combatant governments. We don’t even get swords? You can’t afford swords but you think it’s important to fight another strongman over greed and vainglory? And lose?

You see, Chile did win the war, by the way, and seized the Atacama desert and its valuable guano deposits from Peru and Bolivia. But was anybody better off for it?

It does not mean no wars are worth fighting. We need to recognize the exceptions because they include all those in defence of the Anglosphere. But it does mean that no war is worth fighting on both sides, and most are not worth fighting at all. With guns, with swords or with pointed sticks.

Let’s hear it for Canada, land of freedom. Hip hip… silence? Yeah. I get that a lot. But Canada was founded in liberty and July 9 marks the date that we lived up to that ideal in a way many others tragically did not. Specifically, Upper Canada abolished slavery. In 1793. The first British colony to do so.

Now it may seem rather a cheap piece of sanctimony since there weren’t any slaves. But there were. Not a whole lot. It wasn’t South Carolina. But it also wasn’t a very populous place. And it was attracting Loyalists coming north with their slaves. It may seem an improbable “what if” for Canada to become a major slave-owning society. But it could have been nipped in the bud in Virginia nearly two centuries earlier if individuals had acted differently. And here they did.

Including John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and a long-time abolitionist including as a British MP. It was he who pushed the measure against active resistance. And it is worth noting that the small Legislative Assembly (the elected lower house, as you doubtless recall) that passed the measure had at least six slave-owners among its 16 members. These were people who belonged to the same relatively narrow social circle. And yet they did vote to get rid of an institution from which their friends and colleagues benefited and that they supported.

It was also an institution of which the British government and the monarchy still approved. William Wilberforce was still more than a decade away from persuading Britain’s parliament to abolish the slave trade, and it was not until 40 years after Upper Canada acted that slavery was abolished throughout the empire through the Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies blah blah blah that received Royal Assent 28 August 1833 and took effect 1 August 1834. (Some former British colonies in what became the northern United States had moved to get rid of it as soon as they rebelled; others in what became the south went tragically in the other direction.)

It may disappoint purists, of whom I am generally one including on this issue, that Upper Canada’s An Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Terms of Contracts for Servitude within this Province, whose title arguably needed editing, did not immediately abolish slavery. Instead it said those slaves already here would remain slaves until they died, but no new slaves could be brought in, and children born to female slaves after the act passed would be free at 25. But it must be said that abolition was a difficult cause and perhaps the compromise made passage possible at all.

It may disappoint others to learn that Simcoe, as a British MP, had described slavery as an offence against Christianity. How dare he be motivated by a transcendent creed emphasizing the dignity of all human beings in acting to abolish an institution that violated that dignity? Whereas I ask in genuine bewilderment how so many Christians could have defended slavery in so many parts of the world. And how many otherwise sincere believers in liberty could have done so including Thomas Jefferson.

Also, at the risk of being wildly politically incorrect, I have to note that slavery was practiced among many First Nations until its abolition throughout the British empire in 1834. And that it was not abolished in Lower Canada, a.k.a. Quebec, until August 1 1834 and thanks to the British Parliament.

Still, let’s cheer again. Canada was in many important ways long true to its tradition of freedom. But on this particular point Upper Canada’s government acted to preserve and enhance that heritage in a way that perhaps should not stand out but does even among the free societies of the Anglosphere.

For those of you who enjoy my It Happened Today feature, the ebook for August is now available on Amazon as well as our Selz store. Free for monthly subscribers (pledge here - please note Patreon works in US dollars), $2.99 otherwise.

If you missed the ebooks for June and July, they are also available (June, July).

On July 8 of 1099 some 15,000 starving Crusaders marched piously around besieged Jerusalem to, one imagines, the bewildered amusement of its Muslim defenders. It was a predictably pitiful culmination to a pitiful venture though with one unexpected twist.

It began with an appeal from Pope Urban II for Western Europeans to go help the Christian Byzantine Empire, which was under relentless attack by the Seljuk Turks. (Muslims often portray the Crusades as an unprovoked attack, a totally unjustified attempt by Christians to get back by force things Muslims had innocently seized by force. But even in the narrow sense it is untrue.)

Whatever else it was, the First Crusade was poorly organized. Various waves of soldiers and hangers-on showed up in uncoordinated fashion over several years unreasonably short of equipment, discipline, unity, supplies or all of the above. The “People’s Crusade” under Peter the Hermit was lucky even to reach the Holy Land. Or not, given how they were slaughtered once they did.

Other crusaders then wandered in, having massacred Jews along the way. But they forgot to bring food. They nevertheless managed to capture Nicaea in Anatolia after a long siege, and behaved reasonably well. They then marched on to Jerusalem. Or trudged or something. Including bickering.

It took them two years to cross the few hundred miles in between. On the other hand, they did pick up something dramatic along the way. Plague. Some are also credibly reported to have engaged in cannibalism. Even though they only ate pagans, it’s hard to believe it’s the sort of thing Urban II had originally intended.

Finally in early June 1099 they staggered to within sight of the walls of Jerusalem. Short of food, water, hope or reinforcements, demoralized, quarreling and weak in numbers as well as physically as individuals, fearing a Muslim relief expedition might arrive at any moment, they decided on an immediate assault for want of a more plausible plan.

It failed, of course. And then a priest had a vision, or said he did, that if they fasted then marched round the walls barefoot the city would fall, more or less on the Joshua-Jericho model.

Well, I guess it’s easy to fast when you have no food. And a lot of them were probably running out of decent footwear. So they decided what the heck, let’s. After fasting for three days they did, doubtless to pointed fingers, laughter and jeering from the walls, winding up at the Mount of Olives where Peter the Hermit, who was still alive and still around, preached to them.

So here’s the weird bit. The bickering factions then made up and, hearing that the feared relief expedition was headed their way from Egypt, they threw themselves into another desperate attack on July 13. And two days later they took the city.

The First Crusade did end rather badly, at least in that the Crusaders massacred many Muslim and also Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem. And although they managed to establish a variety of Crusader states, and build the famous castle at Krak, in the end they did not manage to hold any territory there in the face of relentless Muslim counter-counterattacks.

Still, this successful starving-barefoot-march-outnumbered-attack-like-maniacs plan proves one thing. The old saying at my chess club long ago that a bad plan is better than no plan, because with a bad plan you can get lucky, applies far more widely than just in chess.

Oh, and it includes really terrible plans as well as merely bad ones.

So how’s sharia law working out? I ask because it’s now been 36 years since it was introduced in Iran on July 7 1980. Not so good, huh?

In the heady days after the Iranian revolution it seemed, as it often does with revolutions, that heaven on earth was within reach if only sufficient political will could be found. Moreover it was an Islamist revolution, the first such in the modern world, and the temptation to create heaven on earth by brute force is tragically common with those.

We can easily forget that until Khomeini came along, the typical Third World revolution even in the Muslim Middle East was secular nationalist socialist rather along Soviet lines. Now the Bolsheviks had their own weakness for trying to drag people into paradise in chains, as Khrushchev perceptively lamented in retirement. But the Iranian experiment was of a different sort.

The Bolsheviks aimed to transform human existence by altering the material conditions. The Khomeinists wanted to reach down your throat, grab your heart and squeeze it until you were a better person. And they’ve been at it for some two generations now.

I submit that the result has been awful. It has made a mess of the economy, which maybe isn’t meant to matter to purists. But it has happened partly because utopians are chronically belligerent and thus Iran has been unable to get along with its neighbours or the world, messing up its trade relations and impairing mobility.

Iranian foreign policy has also been a failure in the narrow sense that it has not managed to dominate the Middle East. Through Hezbollah and other proxies it has made a great deal of mischief. But even if you put aside the malevolence of its aims, its methods have on the whole been a flop.

Socially it has also been a bust. Among other things, a much underreported development is the plummeting birth rate in Iran, what someone called the slamming shut of the Muslim womb. Iran experienced rapid population growth in the first few decades after the revolution, but is now well below replacement rate. And (though we in the West should perhaps not throw stones) that’s a telling sign of people who have lost a sense of purpose to the point that they no longer consider life a gift, worth passing on.

In a way it’s not surprising. Khomeini was a grim character who famously said “there is no fun in Islam” and then went out of his way to make sure it came true. The agenda was to make life bleak and miserable and it worked. On the other hand, the promise was of a regenerated society. And I think by now we’re entitled to say that part did not work and isn’t going to.

Perhaps it’s a trite conclusion. But if we’re really into evidence-based decision-making, even at the expense of multiculturalism in its more aggressive relativist form, it’s worth commenting that once again, the anti-Western way of life works less well than our own.

On this date in history, July 6, Thomas More wasn’t executed at the Tower of London in 1535. As many other people weren’t; we just visited the place and there’s a surprisingly short, if impressive, list of people who lost their heads within its walls including three queens. But inasmuch as More was executed nearby at Tower Hill on that day, it’s rather splitting hairs while they lie on necks to quibble about the location. When Henry VIII wanted you gone, you generally went.

I don’t like that man. I really don’t. He trumped up various charges against More and eventually got him for treason, before a jury doubtless informed in advance of what would happen to them if they were so foolish as to acquit. Instead they convicted him in 15 minutes. But More’s real crime was denying that Henry was the Pope of England. And without being Roman Catholic I feel that More had a point. Nobody had noticed that the King of England was head of the Church in the preceding 800 years. And if Henry’s first wife had had a son, he wouldn’t have noticed it himself. I really think he was an awful person on all sorts of counts.

Including that we’ve visited quite a few other places in England that Henry’s thugs destroyed as part of this business of making himself head of the church so he could dump his first wife for the one he then executed. The first one, I mean. These include Evesham Abbey, where bits of Simon de Montfort are buried (see our Magna Carta documentary for details). You’d think a man proud of being “Defender of the Faith” would hesitate to plunder and trash a place of worship that had stood, and grown, for well over 800 years.

You’d also think a man sworn to uphold the law would on dissolving various charitable foundations return the land and assets to those who had contributed them or to their heirs, as the law requires, instead of pocketing them himself. At least, you’d think so if you hadn’t met Henry. If you had, you’d probably find your collar suddenly feeling very tight on all sorts of occasions.

Then there’s Winchester Cathedral, a lovely building that houses the bones of various very long gone monarchs including Egbert of Wessex, Alfred the Great’s grandfather, Aethelwulf of Wessex, Alfred’s father, and Canute, along with Canute’s wife Emma of Normandy who had earlier been married to Aethelred the Unready, along with Eadred, Eadwig and some Johnny-come-latelies like William II. But they are “Displaced in mortuary chests” because they were buried in an extensive complex of monasteries that, again, Henry’s bullies smashed up and knocked down just because.

Even if you hate Rome, surely the persistence of worship in a place over eight centuries commands a certain respect for the impulse toward the transcendent in humans that they represent even if you think the people there got bits of the dogma wrong. And when a king’s remains have been at peace in such a place for more than half a millennium, especially one generally respected like Eadred, it seems vain and vulgar, if not sacrilegious, to knock down his mausoleum and disturb his bones.

At least it does to me. Henry VIII felt very differently. Far from standing in awe of tradition, and respecting the long devotion such places represented almost from the dawn of post-Roman Christianity in Britain, and the courage and principle of those who stood up for a law higher than that of mere mortals, Henry had them knocked down just as he had More killed, and the shrine and bones of Thomas a Becket destroyed, lest men should remember another man been martyred four centuries earlier for defying another King Henry in the name of the independence of the church, a.k.a. freedom of religion.

It should have been Henry VIII getting the axe on July 6, not More. It really should have.