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    Hostile Encounters: That Changed the World
    Hostile Encounters: That Changed the World
    Hostile Encounters: That Changed the World
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    Hostile Encounters: That Changed the World

    By Rodney Castleden

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    About this ebook

    This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication.

    The final phase of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France coincided with the reign of England’s most charismatic king – Henry V. Within that final phase came the most famous battle of the war, the Battle of Agincourt. For the English the confrontation between the two armies in this single battle came to symbolize everything it means to be English. Read about the Battle of Agincourt along with other significant hostile encounters that changed the world.

    Contents: Caesar and Brutus, King Harold and William the Conqueror, Thomas Becket and the Four Knights, Edward I and John Balliol, The English and French Armies at Agincourt, Henry Tudor and Richard III, Gilbert Gifford and Mary Queen of Scots, The English Fleet and the Spanish Armada, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, George Washington and Lord Cornwallis, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander, Rudyard Kipling, Beatty Balestier and the Reporter

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanary Press eBooks Limited
    Release dateJul 16, 2020
    ISBN9781908698421
    Hostile Encounters: That Changed the World

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      Book preview

      Hostile Encounters - Rodney Castleden

      Introduction

      We all have encounters that change the way we think, the way we see the world, and ultimately the way we behave. It is one of the characteristics that make us human beings. A lot of these encounters are commonplace, like the encounters we have with our teachers at school, and most of us can remember moments when a teacher somehow, by telling us or showing us something, made us see things differently.

      Then there are encounters with friends, colleagues, husbands, wives and lovers, building over the course of months, years and decades to change us piecemeal in all sorts of ways. And there are fleeting encounters with strangers, maybe a brief conversation, maybe no more than a fragment of someone’s conversation overheard as they pass.

      All these different encounters, significant and insignificant alike, are woven into the fabric of our lives, changing us sometimes subtly and gradually, sometimes with dramatic suddenness, into different people. Many encounters can be creative or can be the basis on which great friendships are formed, but hostile encounters, more than any other kind of encounter, have throughout history played a major part in changing the course of events.

      In 45 bc, Julius Caesar was at the height of his military and political power. Some Romans, both aristocrats and common people, were alarmed at the emergence of Caesar’s personal dictatorship and became suspicious of his ultimate ambitions. Plotting began for his assassination which would eventually bring Caesar face to face with the young and volatile Marcus Junius Brutus in a hostile encounter that destroyed the monarchy in Rome.

      The situation in England in 1066 was explosive. The reigning monarch, Edward the Confessor, had promised his throne to two people – the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson and William Duke of Normandy. On his deathbed, Edward finally named Harold as his successor. Immediately William began planning an invasion of England to usurp Harold and claim the throne of England for himself. The Battle of Hastings was to be a fight to the death between the two men.

      One of the most hostile medieval encounters was the murder in his own cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, the greatest saint and martyr of the Middle Ages. The killers involved may have been initially unknown, but soon became notorious for their single act of phenomenal brutality and sacrilege.

      At the siege of Yorktown during the American War of Independence, there was a momentous encounter between two enormous military talents: George Washington and Charles Cornwallis. After what had been a spectacularly successful campaign, Cornwallis was defeated by the sheer genius of Washington as a commander. After his overwhelming triumph at Yorktown, George Washington went on to become the first president of the United States in 1789.

      This book is inevitably about hostile encounters experienced by people who have made their mark, famous people whose lives are a matter of record. Some are a result of a series of encounters that lead on to something momentous, while others come out of nothing such as the murder of Thomas Becket, which become notorious because of their impact on history. But as I hope the book shows, the unpredictability of human encounters is what gives them their peculiar interest.

      1

      Caesar and Brutus

      (47 bc)

      Julius Caesar (102–44 bc ) was born into an old Roman patrician family. Like other Roman aristocrats, he built his career in public life by working his way through the cursus honorum , collecting public offices of ever-increasing status over the years. Caesar was unusual in collecting so many of these status symbols – to the point where his fellow-Romans became suspicious of his ultimate ambition. He was elected pontifex in 73 bc , pontifex maximus in 63, praetor for 62. In 61 bc he was governor of the province of Hispania Ulterior and on his return to Rome he was elected consul for 59 bc . He gradually built an impressive portfolio of offices and positions, establishing his place at the forefront of Roman public life. Then he engineered his military career, spending nine years extending the Roman Empire to the west. By 56 bc he was tackling the tribes of Normandy and Brittany and in 54 bc forced a nominal and temporary surrender of south-east England. After returning to northern Italy, Caesar was recalled to Gaul to put down the rebellion of Vercingetorix.

      The senate now saw Caesar as uncomfortably powerful and called on him to resign his command and disband his army; the senate preferred to entrust power to Caesar’s rival Pompey. Caesar made the critical and dangerous decision to defy the senate. He marched his army into Italy, chasing Pompey to the south of Italy and from there to Greece. Suddenly Julius Caesar was in control in Italy and appointed dictator for a year. In 48 bc Pompey was assassinated in Egypt, not at Caesar’s instigation but on the orders of Ptolemy. Either way, the rival had been removed.

      In 45 bc, Caesar was at the height of his military and political power. Some Romans, both aristocrats and common people, were alarmed at the emergence of Caesar’s personal dictatorship. No-one really knows for certain whether Caesar aspired to further aggrandizement. He certainly claimed that he didn’t. Once, while he was travelling from Alba to Rome, some people by the roadside saluted him and addressed him as king. It was a significant step too far. Caesar saw that the rest of the crowd did not like it and he called out that his name was Caesar, not king.

      The word had a resonance then that it does not have today. In ancient Rome ‘king’ could also mean ‘tyrant’. Conversely, the title ‘dictator’ then did not have the unpleasant connotations it has today. Now, we would see ‘king’ as the inoffensive title, ‘dictator’ as the offensive one; in ancient Rome it was the other way round.

      In the senate, Caesar made rather a show of treating everyone as equals and said he should have honours taken away, not new ones added. But the idea that Julius Caesar was to be made king was circulated, perhaps by his friends, perhaps by his enemies, who wanted to see him fall. He was in a sense caught by the cursus honorum; everyone assumed that when you reached a particular level on the status ladder you would try for the next rung.

      Then the plotting began. The instigator of the successful assassination plot was Gaius Cassius Longinus. Cassius had been pardoned by Caesar for earlier disloyalty, but he felt aggrieved that he had not been offered a command in the forthcoming war against Parthia. Cassius persuaded his brother-in-law Marcus Junius Brutus to join the conspiracy. Brutus was fanatical and merciless. He had fought on Pompey’s side at Pharsalia, like Cassius, and like Cassius he had been pardoned. Julius Caesar had been more than generous to both

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