To me, gothic architecture is proof that modernity is too smug by half. Nothing we have built is remotely as beautiful as this pinnacle of medieval artistry and engineering, and very little even tries. Which is especially amazing given the advanced materials and techniques we possess that means very little of our construction falls down through overly ambitious design. Unlike, say, the spire of Ely Cathedral which bit the mud on February 13, 1322.

Many years ago I read a splendid engineering book for the lay person called Structures, or, Why Things Don’t Fall Down. And I can honestly say I have never looked at the world the same way since. I have been evaluating everything from bridges to docks to sausages and blades of grass differently since reading James Edward Gordon’s 1978 classic. And it helped me appreciate how in the high Middle Ages clerics, builders and designers overcame the natural tendency of stone to sit in sturdy piles including in the early medieval Romanesque style, and sent it soaring into the heavens through innovations critically including the flying buttress.

Mind you, I have also never forgotten his statement that as builders became more and more ambitious, the question with the cathedrals was increasingly not whether the nave collapsed but when. There are things you just can’t do with stone. Including our Peace Tower, incidentally. Much as I like it, there’s an element of deceit there because it relies on steel to assume a shape stone cannot take or, more precisely, cannot retain.

Back to Ely Cathedral, a Saxon abbey from 672 AD subject to such unwelcome attention of various Vikings that it had to be refounded in 970, and was then gradually demolished and rebuilt by the Normans. (Oh, and can I mention that Abbot Simeon, put in charge of the major Norman project, was 89 when he took the abbot’s job and 90 years old when the work began? Not everybody died young and squalid in those days.) Meanwhile the church just kept getting more and more magnificent as the years went by, beginning Romanesque and ending Gothic, and eventually they overreached. But the result can teach us a lot.

The original plan was for a "cruciform" tower like that at Winchester. But a lot of things can happen in a couple of centuries especially if you’re building a vast stone cathedral in damp wet fenlands. Like the ground settling ominously as you go. And then your crucial cruciform tower tumbling down in ruins. Which it did beginning late on February 12.

After various observations not all of which may have conformed to the ideal of monastic life, those in charge decided rather than putting it up again and warning people not to linger in it they would instead create a unique octagonal tower that is not just broader and stronger but also a spectacular achievement that still draws visitors seven centuries later.

So yes, the Middle Ages had spectacular artistic vision and a bold willingness to experiment, to dare, and to adapt in response to failure with yet more brilliant innovation. I do not think anything we build today will even be around in 700 years, let alone be worth looking at if it is.

Let us not jeer lightly at this magnificent civilization and its sublime buildings from our office cubicles, brutalist concrete highrises and plastic suburbs.

Perhaps only the sort of person who would make a documentary on Magna Carta would care that on February 12 of 1689 the "Convention Parliament" declared that in fleeing the country, crossing the English Channel to France, King James II had abdicated. Or perhaps not, if you’re still reading this second sentence. In which case I hope you’ll agree that it shows a remarkable devotion both to the practical reality of self-government and to the legal formalities that give effective and lasting shape to the passion for liberty.

We are of course in Glorious Revolution territory here. And getting rid of yet another would-be tyrant Stuart had created significant problems of the sort discussed by Jean-Louis de Lolme in his neglected masterpiece The Constitution of England, in that the entire British system was focused on the monarch not as anything remotely approaching an absolute ruler but as the formal locus of the powers of government. And therefore the refusal of the monarch to play his appointed role made a mess of the formal machinery of state.

James was of course wrong to believe that, given his technical powers and duties, he could stop the government from operating by taking his football and going straight home or, to be precise, throwing the Great Seal used to summon Parliament into the Thames river. Parliament could and did meet anyway. But he did create for them a rather complicated question as to why exactly, and how exactly, they could act outside precedent without themselves creating a precedent of arbitrary rule.

In this crisis the Parliamentarians did two important things. First, they decided that given the extraordinary circumstances they were not merely an ordinary parliament but, for the purposes of straightening out the Constitutional mess, a "convention," that is, a meeting of the English nation with the power to make fundamental arrangements on behalf of we the people. Second, they debated at length whether the throne was in fact vacant.

William of Orange, who had helped chase James away by landing in some force at the invitation of leading Englishmen (who rallied larger armies to his side) and who was married to James’s responsible Protestant daughter Mary, played an important and responsible role here by refusing simply to seize the throne even though everyone who mattered understood that he was to be king. But how and why?

Some Whigs argued that by his "social contract" with the English people William was now king by popular consent. (Others wanted a "republic" in the sense of a government with no monarch rather than its proper meaning of a government of laws not men. But they were few and far between.) Meanwhile some Tories held that the departure of Mary’s wretched father had not left the throne vacant but rather immediately and automatically made her Queen, leaving her husband beside the throne not on it. Still others maintained that James had left the country without leaving the throne so what was needed was a Protectorate and maybe at some point restoration of a (har har) repentant James.

Parliament began to hack through this tangle by declaring in January that England was a Protestant kingdom and only a Protestant could be king, disposing of James and his new son. And while this resolve sounds bigoted to modern ears, like the protection of the right to arms in the 1689 Bill of Rights only for Protestants, a long association of Catholicism with disregard for Parliament gave it some plausibility at the time. But while it determined who was not king, it left the question of who was king or queen suspended in mid-air.

In February the Commons said the king had abdicated. But the Lords said there was no such thing as abdication in common law and that if James was no longer king Mary automatically was. However they soon folded, mostly because it was clear that Mary would not rule without William and Mary’s also Protestant sister Anne would not accept the throne in place of either or both. They proposed that William and Mary should both reign, which the Commons accepted on condition that William alone should rule.

On that basis, and on their acceptance of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law, William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. William then dissolved the Convention Parliament and summoned a new one, which turned the acts of the former into proper law by passing Acts then signed by a monarch.

It might all seem like jiggery-pokery or theatre. But it mattered enormously to be sure that the rule of law was somehow being upheld even under circumstances where procedure could not run through normal channels, and not simply to accept things because everybody agreed they should happen or nobody dared speak up. Including, it turned out, this precedent of a legislature or specially elected assembly becoming a convention representing the people if the executive put itself outside the law.

For instance in Britain’s 13 colonies in the 1770s. And while it might seem the Convention Parliamentarians would have cause to regret their precedent given its used in the American Revolution, the fact is that George III was behaving toward his North American subjects very much as James II had toward his British ones. And in creating a robust extraordinary precedent for dealing with a rogue executive they helped the Anglosphere preserve self-government and liberty under law in the 1680s and the 1770s.

To return to the topic of weddings that bring tears to your eyes, and again a royal one, would you cry if the king insisted on marrying you without telling anyone? Or might you just flee instead?

I have a feeling Anne Boleyn did neither on November 14, 1532 when she tied the knot surreptitiously with the dreadful Henry VIII. Anne was clearly in over her head, an ominous phrase in this context. But the young woman (we aren’t sure how young; she may have been born in 1501 or 1507) appears to have been a clever and confident schemer who wrongly thought she knew exactly what she was doing.

They were publicly married on January 25, 1533, leading to a ruckus of which you may have heard. The new Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, formerly the Boleyn family chaplain, declared the marriage null and void on May 23 of that year and, five days later, mysteriously changed his mind. Henry VIII could do that to you.

And to himself; when Anne proved unable to give him male heirs he had her convicted of high treason, as well as adultery and incest and perhaps witchcraft, by a jury that included her own uncle who lived to tell the tale largely, one suspects, because she did not (along with five men framed as her lovers). Cranmer then conveniently realized Anne’s marriage had been invalid after all. Gosh.

Henry had married Anne secretly because the Pope was still trying to figure out whether to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. (And when it became public excommunications flew.) So he wanted to have things both ways. And Anne ought to have realized that when Henry VIII thinks he’s using you and you think you’re using him, he’s right.

So I don’t have a lot of wedding advice to offer women other than don’t make the bridesmaids wear seafoam green. (They don’t have to look awful for you to look nice and nobody will ever wear that outfit again.) But I would urge you to reject any suitor who proposes that you marry him and move into his bed without mentioning it to anybody.

Especially, and I cannot stress this too strongly, if his surname is Tudor and his title is King.

With the 100th anniversary of Canada's great victory at Vimy Ridge fast approaching, I'm delighted to announce that the book version of my documentary The Great War Remembered is now available for purchase.

The First World War was the defining event of the 20th century, shaping the modern world in ways we still feel very strongly today. Modern technology and logistics created unprecedented slaughter, and partly as a result the long, bitter, bloody conflict undermined faith in Western civilization. But it was a necessary war and the Allies did win it, with pivotal contributions from Canada, which "found itself" in the war and especially at Vimy, not just as a nation, but as a free nation determined to defend liberty under law.

It is appropriate that we remember the costs of the war and lament the loss and the missed opportunities. But we should also remember, and celebrate, the determined spirit that stood up to aggression on behalf of a way of life well worth defending even at this terrible cost.

Order your copy today and take a timely, fresh look at an often misunderstood conflict central to the modern world.

p.s. American and international shoppers should purchase directly through Amazon.

p.p.s. We also have the Kindle version available, here.

On January 24 of 1908, in what does seem a vanished era of tranquility and earnestness, Robert Baden-Powell organized the first Boy Scout troop. But those days were not as tranquil as they seem, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are still enormously popular, and the mission of forming character is not as obsolete as some might suppose.

To begin with, Baden-Powell formed the Scouts in the wake of the (Second) Boer War, which had proved far more challenging for the British army than anticipated and which concluded less than a decade and a half before the outbreak of World War One. During the conflict then-Colonel Baden-Powell became a hero for his successful conduct of the defence of Mafeking, aided by the Mafeking Cadet Corps formed by Lord Edward Cecil.

Deeply impressed by the Corps, Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boys, based on his earlier Aids to Scouting, a brief guide to military scouting and wilderness survival that, he noticed, was exceptionally popular with boys. A huge success, currently the fourth best-selling book of all time, its tone might seem outdated. But the spirit of self-reliance, duty and cheerfulness it inculcated clearly helped Britain and Canada win World War I.

The scouts have changed enormously since 1908, mostly in good ways. Baden-Powell’s sister Agnes created the Girl Guides just two years later (after a group of girls showed up at the first Scout Rally in 1909 in uniform and informed Baden-Powell they were the "Girl Scouts," a commendable exhibition of initiative that evidently struck "B-P" as he is sometimes known as favourably as it does me. Agnes also created the Brownies (originally Rosebuds) for younger girls while Baden-Powell’s wife took over as president of the Girl Guides in 1920.

Among other changes, the uniform has been adapted over many decades for greater practicality as well as a not necessarily beneficial greater casualness. And at least some branches have dropped God from their pledge. But while one must I suppose move with the world, not too far or too fast. And sometimes one must stand against the world.

So it is worth reading the words of Baden-Powell, then nearly 80, at the Scouts’ 1937 World Jamboree, in the shadow of Hitler in a world in which racial prejudice was taken to be so normal one faced ostracism for not sharing it. The Scout uniform, B-P declared proudly, "hides all differences of social standing in a country and makes for equality; but, more important still, it covers differences of country and race and creed, and makes all feel that they are members with one another of the one great brotherhood".

Surely that surprisingly modern sentiment casts a different and more favourable light on the supposedly stuffy, naïve, chauvinistic and even jingoistic "stiff upper lip" tally ho chaps ambiance of Edwardian England. Just as the scouts’ methods for promoting self-reliance and cooperation simultaneously is strikingly up-to-date for something from that vanished era.

So here’s a confession. I have never read Scouting for Boys. But I think I’m the worse for it, and intend to track down a copy.

On this date in 1901, Edward VII was proclaimed king after about a million years as Prince of Wales. OK, not a million. But 60. Then he became king because Victoria died which left almost everybody heartbroken. And in 1910 he died after eight years on a throne he waited decades for.

His reign was not entirely uneventful. Nor indeed was his Princeship of Wales. Evidently "Bertie", as his family always called him, had a very good time indeed as heir to the throne, with actresses, noblewomen and professionals including at a Paris establishment with custom furniture now on display in a museum, which definitely did not amuse his mother, including the bit where he was almost named as respondent in a divorce suit by an MP and did have to testify in the case.

Victoria blamed her husband Albert’s rising from his sickbed in 1861 to visit and reprimand his son over a singularly indiscreet indiscretion with an actress for causing Albert’s death from typhoid just two weeks later, and once wrote to Edward’s older sister that "I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder." But Edward also pioneered royal appearances doing things like opening the Thames Embankment and the Tower Bridge.

As King he not only presided over a widening of the social circle around the royals and a refurbishing of public ceremonies, and a needed modernization of the army and navy following the Boer War. He also supported and promoted a far-sighted rapprochement with France while distrusting his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, and gave his name to a languid but elegant era in which Britain’s decline from its once-unchallenged world dominance military, economic and cultural seemed only a gentle hint borne on a breeze rippling the leaves on stately oaks and beeches lining manor drives.

Then he died fairly young at 68, more than slightly unthin, and is remembered today as who was that guy after Victoria that wasn’t still king when the Great War started? To which the answer, surprisingly, is also that he was the guy saved from then generally fatal appendicitis right before his coronation by a pioneering and surprisingly modern-sounding surgical procedure of draining pus through a small incision.

An event on January 20, by contrast with much of the rubbish cluttering up the pages of history, was no mere incident. On this date Simon de Montfort, leader of a baronial revolt against the hapless profligate King Henry III of England, summoned a parliament to legitimize his claim to control England. And to strengthen his position against his fellow barons as well as that of the rebels generally, he brought in the common people as full participants.

They were not, perhaps, equals in every sense early on. But they sat alongside the nobles and clerics and took part in the debates and the votes. And what is remarkable is that over the next couple of centuries instead of being squeezed out they continued to gain power and respect, including getting their own separate house within a century with control of its own affairs and primacy on money bills. And people mock the Middle Ages.

The nobles and clerics may generally have been displeased to find knights and burgesses tramping mud into the place. But as the various parliament-like entities throughout Europe succumbed to absolutist monarchs over the next three centuries, the wiser among them must have reflected that the deep roots of the English parliament among the actual people of England were a major reason it, and it alone, survived and flourished, becoming ultimately more powerful than the monarchs as the commons chamber came to dominate the lords.

There is much more to be said about it, including the possibly happy chance that early on the English parliament divided not into three estates as in France, with separate noble and clerical houses, but into two, the mucky-mucks and the ordinary Joes and eventually Janes. And that Montfort’s own motives may have been less than entirely pure, as his conduct was (not least in his vicious anti-Semitism, at once opportunistic and apparently heartfelt). But he deserves respect for what he did.

So does the political culture of the English, and the habits and actions of countless English men and women great and small, through which liberty under law went from success to success despite its challenges. Indeed, though Montfort himself perished horribly later in 1265 at the battle of Evesham where his corpse was nastily dismembered, when his conqueror Edward succeeded his father Henry III and became Edward I, he himself summoned parliaments to which he too invited commoners and to which he reluctantly but decisively surrendered power over taxation.

The history of mankind would be enormously different had representative government not taken hold in England. It is far from established universally and faces challenges even in its Anglosphere heartland. But it is a standing example, invitation and sometimes reproach to all regimes and people everywhere that lack it. And while a great many things contributed to its remarkable history, including the countless again great and small who made Magna Carta a reality and defended it down through the years, Montfort’s innovation of including the common people as full members of Parliament was an important turning point.

Without it things would almost certainly have been different and worse, then and later, there and elsewhere including of course in Canada.

Does a wedding bring tears to your eyes? Well, here’s one that should. On January 18 of 1486 Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster, ending the Wars of the Roses, and cementing the Tudor claim to the throne. Romantic, no?

No indeed. It was apparently in fact a happy marriage whose members grew to love one another. But it was initially all about politics, from Henry’s pledge to marry her in 1483 to his efforts to weasel out to his reluctant agreement to go ahead. Henry was an intelligent and affable man, but clever, devious and ruthless. (When his son Arthur died in his teens, Henry was evidently at least as upset about the prospects for his dynasty as for the death of his child.)

Also, he had no real claim to the throne unless you count his own assertion "by right of conquest" from, characteristically, the day before he won the Battle of Bosworth field in which Richard III was killed, thus retroactively making everyone who had fought for the rightful king a traitor. He didn’t kill them all at once. But with Henry you never knew.

Except this thing that you did know. He was only a "Lancaster" in a tenuous sense on his mother’s side and a fraudulent one on his father’s. His mother was a great-granddaughter of Edward III’s brother John of Gaunt, founder of the Lancaster dynasty, but via John’s mistress not his wife (and to be very pedantic, Richard II had legitimized those children by Letters Patent but Henry VI had then declared them ineligible for the throne using the same device, so surely either both count or neither). Meanwhile Henry’s grandfather Owen Tudor had secretly married the French widow of Henry V but was not thereby catapulted into the legitimate line.

In fact Henry’s wife had a far better claim to the throne than he did as a daughter of Richard III’s brother Edward IV even if Richard was a usurper. Yet Henry deliberately had himself crowned before their marriage, and she was not invited to be queen regnant as she had an almost incontestable claim to do though perhaps not the desire, having seen various members of her family die or simply vanish to keep them from the throne or get them off it.

The one thing that really made Henry king was that, although no warrior himself, he cleverly managed his affairs so that those who opposed him were defeated in battle, executed or otherwise caused to become not alive. And though his dynasty did produce one outstanding if scary monarch in the person of Elizbeth I, the rest were scary without being outstanding or, in the case of Edward VI, ineffectual.

England being England, they found a way to make it all work. But I’m still a fan of Richard III, and Henry VII’s marriage does nothing to change that view.