Are you a master of history? The answers
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Your support makes all the difference.Have you managed to roll with the Romans and not been confused by the Etheldreds and Ethelfriths? Could you tell your Lambert Simnel from your Perkin Warbeck?
Were you as learned as the Tudors? Or were you more of an Old Pretender? Time to find out - here are the answers to our history quiz. No peaking until you've answered the questions, mind!
Strange moments in English history; what were...
- The War of Jenkins’ Ear was a war with the Spanish in 1739, so called because Sea captain Robert Jenkins claimed to have had his ear cut off by a Spaniard, the wrinkled organ being waved in parliament.
- The barebones parliament was a religious assembly summoned by Cromwell to replace the Commons, named after a preacher member Praise-God Barbon.
- The Battle of the Bulge was the German counter attack in Ardennes at the turn of 1945.
- The Black hole of Calcutta was a basement where 123 Europeans were suffocated at the command of an Indian nawab in 1756.
- The Cato Street conspiracy was a plot to assassinate the cabinet, 1819, foiled at the last minute.
- Grand Remonstrance was a set of 200 radical demands from the House of Commons to Charles I, 1641.
- Peterloo Massacre was a peaceful demonstration in St Peter’s field in Manchester dispersed by troops leaving 15 dead and 600 injured.
- St Brice’s Day Massacre was Ethelfred’s slaughter of the Danes in East Anglia in 1002, in responce to yet another Danish attack.
- The Battle of Quatre Bras was a skirmish between Napolean and Wellington, two days before Waterloo.
- The Rye House plot was a plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York
- The Gordon Riots was when 60,000 peple rampaged through London in anti-catholic riots in 1780 instigated by a mild government measure to relieve Irish hardship. 200 dead.
- The Boston tea-party was in 1773, when one main tax remained in America: tea. When the East India company was relieved of the duty, and rival tea merchants, mostly smugglers, dressed up as Indians and tossed the tea into Boston harbour.
On the battlefield...
- The Battle of Agincourt, 25 October 1415 – England won!
- The campaign to drive German army out of Belgium, 1914. WWI ended November 1918.
- The Battle of Waterloo, 1815
- The coming of the Vikings, c 800
- The German surrender in Africa, November 1942
- Francis Drake. No, but he destroyed much of Philip’s Battle fleet in April 1587.
Kings and Things...
- Oliver Cromwell, instructing the artist who was to paint him
- Richard ‘the Lionheart’ desperate to finance his obsession with the Crusades
- Lady Jane Grey, executed by Mary Tudor
- King Charles I before his execution for treason on 30 January 1649
- Charles II speaking of his mistress Nell Gwyne.
Politics and people...
- Prime minister William Gladstone
- The Act of Union, 1707
- They were burned out after a massive series of social reforms
- George W Bush on Tony Blair
- The slave trade
Reputations; who was known as...
- Isabella, estranged wife of Edward II known for her love of brutality
- The Duke of Wellington for the shutters he had to put over his windows during the Reform Act campaign
- Henry II’s mistress
- Ethelred – the name refered not to his youth but to his incompetence
- Mary Tudor, so named because of her brutal campaign against protestants
- Margaret Thatcher
- James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham
- William II, so named for his ruddy complexion
- Charles II
- Edward I – the inscription on his tombstone
The common people; who said the following, and whom or what were they describing...
- Peasants' revolt leader John Ball, 1381
- King George V on the general strikers, May 1926
- Duke of Wellington on the newly reformed house of commons, 1833
- Margaret Thatcher on socialism
- Lloyd George
The burdens of government; who said what to whom, and why...
- New Prime Minister James Callaghan to Harold Wilson, 1976, just prior to the IMF bailout
- Horace Walpole after the so-called annus mirabilis of 1759 when the French had been driven from most of Canada and virtually all of what is now the USA
- He was setting up the NHS
- Henry VIII when infatuated with Anne Boleyn
- Elizabeth I in the last oration of her reign
God and men...
- Pope Gregory in 576 seeing two blond-haired slaves in a market place and being told they were Angles
- A group of catholics protesting against the Henry VIII’s seizure of church revenue in 1536. Brutally suppressed with 250 exemplary executions
- Henry II of Thomas a Becket - crisply retranslated as, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’
- The Pilgrim’s Progress
- Dismissed former Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, having been summoned by Henry VIII to the Tower
Why were these places famous (or infamous)...
- 1746 battle ended jacobite rebellion with brutal efficiency and forced Bonnie Prince Charlie into exile.
- Religious centre where the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels was created, 698
- Where Alfred the Great beat the Danish king
- Alfred the Great’s capital – planned on a Roman grid pattern that still exists today
- William the Conqueror’s victory over Harold, 1066
- King John is forced to sign the Magna Carta, 1215, a document that underpins civil liberties in a rule of law. He immediately afterwards got the Pope to annul it
- Site of Edward the II’s defeat by Robert the Bruce in 1314 – the most humiliating defeat of an English army on British soil since Hastings
- Site of the new palace built by Henry VII and named after his old Yorkshire title. Stingy he was but he realised Monarchs needed splendour
- One of 60 notorious ‘rotten boroughs’ to be abolished in the 1832 Reform act
Dire warnings; who said the following, and what were they describing...
- Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, at the outbreak of the first world war, August 1914
- A helpful, official announcement from The Bank of England, 1931
- PM Chamberlain on the Munich Agreement 1938
- Shelley describing the then foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh in an anti-government poem which could not be printed for fear of imprisonment, 1819
- James I on the newly-popular habit of tobacco smoking
Ententes cordiales, or perhaps not...
- Henry V
- 1363
- Mary Tudor, 1558, on the loss of the final bit of French territory under English control
- As an alliance to contain Germany
- Entry into the common market
Unhappy endings; horrible deaths abound in English history
- Harold
- The Duke of York in actually one of the less bloody events of the War of the Roses, 1460
- Guy Fawkes and the other gunpowder plotters
- Plague-stricken London in 1665 - 100,000 estimated dead, 1/5 the population
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