Warfare was the fact of life in Britain from the reign of Henry VII to that of George II. Nobody who lived on these islands could escape it. It is estimated that, between the battles of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Culloden in 1746, 1.2 million people died as a direct result of warfare in Britain and Ireland. During the sequence of civil wars that ran from 1638 to 1660, 4.5 per cent of the English population, 9.2 per cent of the Scottish, and 20.6 per cent of the Irish population were killed. These were catastrophes far greater than the First World War (in which 2.61 per cent of the total British population died) and more terrible even than the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s.
Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt boasted that England was a ‘demi-paradise’ circled by a sea which cut it of from other nations— but that was not true.
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