This man was functionally the king of England from 1216 to 1217.
His name was Louis.
And he was the prince of France. And later the king of France, Louis VIII. Without him, England would probably have enacted the Magna Carta entirely differently, and ended up a completely different place. And yet no one even bothers to list him as a king of England. Or indeed mention him.
This sexy bastard landed on the south west coast, near Torquay, on the 5th November 1688, with 15,000 troops. By December he was King of England, having overthrown the distinctly less protestant James II, with the entirely essential assistance of much of the English ruling class.
His name was Willem.
He was also the Prince of Orange, and quite distinctly Dutch. William III of England, William II of Scotland, and William III of Orange. Without him, and the curtailment of royal power that followed his enthronement, England would probably be an entirely different sort of democracy - perhaps even not a Constitutional Monarchy. And yet most people treat 1688 as a mild alteration of the nature of the state, as opposed to the half invasion/half revolution that it was. If they've even heard of the Glorious Revolution - which would imply quite a lot of effort on their part, as its not taught in schools beyond a passing reference or two.
This is not the sort of man who would bother to
take over a country without invading it at least once...
What the hell is up with the history curriculum that we get taught about what types of monkey brains the Aztecs used to eat, but not that several nations of Europe have repeatedly, and successfully, invaded England over and over again, often making it a substantially more progressive, liberal place in the process? Our kings and queens have been Norse, French, German (or rather, Hannoverian), Dutch and half a dozen other things besides, for well over a millennium now, and before that they were German again, and before that regional and under the auspices of Italians. The British populace is largely German, French and Viking, with a liberal dash of every other country in the world, and its historical heterogeneity is pretty much the entire reason the country is awesome. The Flemish, the Huguenots, the 20th Century (and earlier) emigrants from the Colonies - these are the people who periodically came in, integrated, and made the country so successful. Back in the medieval era, even the bloody monks who formed the back bone of the early English agricultural revolution were from the mainland. The Angevin empire was half in bloody France, and, seeing as it was being run by French(ish) kings, was more accurately a largely French empire half in bloody England. And yet we're taught about a British (or rather Anglo-Saxon, so German) king being shot in the eye by a Norman (So Franco-Viking) one's archers - which has no actual contemporary historical basis, incidentally - and nothing much else until World War 1. That the reality is that we've been European and culturally diverse for two thousand years is completely ignored, in favour of less interesting bollocks.
Why, i ask you, must people insist on making history both dull and misleading, when it is so patently interesting? I mean, only really to me, and some guys in tweed jackets, but still...
I'm sure much the same applies in both Malta and the US. Especially that bit where they were both founded by Dragons, which no one ever seems to mention in the history books that i've read.
