Britain

Hume dismissed his own most original book as immature work and asked to be judged by his later writing instead, a request modern scholars have quietly overruled.

The story of Bacon dying after stuffing a chicken with snow to test refrigeration comes from a biographer known for embellishment, while his own secretary's account says only that he caught a lung ailment.

Newton spent enormous private effort on alchemy that never appeared in his published work, and his own students found his lectures so unengaging that he reportedly cut them short whenever no one showed up.

Locke argued natural rights belonged to everyone while personally profiting from colonial ventures tied to slavery, a contradiction historians still weigh rather than explain away.

1688

He told a fellow negotiator he might have just signed his own death warrant, and eight months later, on a rural road in his own county, he had.

He negotiated the deal that made him briefly one of Britain's most popular prime ministers, and a single book published the same year Hitler invaded France was enough to make his name a byword for weakness ever since.

Cromwell described the mass killing at Drogheda as righteous divine judgment in his own words, leaving little room for historians to soften what he believed he was doing.

1096

England's most celebrated medieval king spent perhaps six months of a ten-year reign actually in England, a fact twentieth-century historians turned into a damning verdict before more recent scholars pointed out he had an entire continental duchy to defend as well.

1707

1763

1694

1940

Nearly sixty thousand British soldiers became casualties on the first morning alone, the worst single day in the army's history, and the ground gained by the time the offensive stopped four months later measured under seven miles.

Only four in every hundred Londoners actually used the Underground as a shelter, which means the famous image of a city sheltering together night after night describes a small minority of the people who lived through it.

1583

1854

1997

1916

Historians still cannot agree on what to even call this war, and that disagreement over the name reflects a genuine, unresolved argument over what actually caused it.

1688

Official records counted eight deaths; one historian argues the real number, once you count the poor nobody bothered to record, could run into the thousands.

Food kept leaving Ireland by ship while roughly a million people starved, a fact that turns the argument over this famine less into what happened and more into what to call it.

1997

A war named for its length actually ran on and off for a hundred and sixteen years, and its opening dispute was less about the French crown than about who an English king had to bow to as a landlord.

1857

Economists call the switch to steam and factories the most important event in human history since farming began, yet historians still argue whether ordinary workers were better off for a century after it started.

Fewer than one percent of Scots were Catholic by 1745, which makes the romantic image of a Highland Catholic uprising sit badly against who actually filled the Jacobite ranks.

2005

Britain forcibly relocated a million Malayan villagers, used a herbicide the Americans would later study for Vietnam, and still calls the counterinsurgency that resulted a doctrinal success.

2017

1938

William's claim to England rested on a promise and an oath that no English source ever mentions, only the accounts written by the side that won and needed a justification.

Britain went to war in 1839 partly to force China to keep buying a drug its own commissioner had just burned twenty thousand chests of, and historians still argue over whether opium was really the cause or just the convenient pretext for a wider fight over market access.

1921

1713

1988

1680

1660

Britain's bill for winning a war fought on five continents came due in its American colonies, which makes this war's real ending arguably the Revolution it helped provoke a decade later.

1912

1802

1783

1998

The chronicle that gives us most of what we know about the Viking raids was written by the side that eventually won, which is part of why its numbers for enemy fleets and armies do not entirely agree with each other.

Even Hobbes's own mother's name was lost to record, and much of what fills that gap comes from a biographer known for mixing solid research with credulous anecdote.

William rewarded some of the men responsible for lynching a Dutch statesman with money and high office, a detail his own defenders have never quite managed to explain away.

Voters who had just won the war under him removed him from office within weeks of victory, a rejection that fits awkwardly beside the near-unanimous later verdict that he was among the greatest prime ministers Britain ever had.