The English Channel keeps the French at bay and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch.
Trade taxes pay for the navy the navy allows unhindered trade. Despite – or perhaps because of – this turbulent history, Britain is an engine driving the scientific and cultural advancement of northern Europe: turmoil fuels creativity.Īs an island nation, Britons have always looked to, as Shakespeare puts it:īritain’s strength lies at sea, but in trade and colonisation as much as naval power. Nonetheless, the exiled James Stuart has sympathisers, the Jacobites, throughout Britain. A short, vicious war in Ireland put paid to any chance of a Catholic Stuart restoration.
Less than 15 years ago, the hated Catholic James II was forced into exile in the Glorious Revolution and a Protestant monarchy restored. The new nation has been through a century of unparalleled turbulence: an unwelcome joining of Scotland and England religious strife civil wars an executed king military dictatorship a populist monarch restored and the overthrow of a second king. Great Britain is not a natural creation, but the marriage of separate kingdoms and peoples.
