Last Friday marked the 250th anniversary of the Shot Heard Round the World. This was the first musket shot of the American Revolution, fired across the old North Bridge near Lexington. No one knows who shot first, the British regiment on one side of the bridge or the Minute Men on the other. But everyone knows what came of it — the birth of a great nation and the perseverance of another. Today, America is still rising after twice this century rejecting malevolent suicidal leadership. While Great Britain embraced it and is thus collapsing fast.
The tragedy affects not only the island’s population but all people like me who revere the country’s history and literature dating back a thousand years before the United States existed, indeed leading to its foundation. I’ll always have indelible mental images and lines from British fact and fiction:
King Arthur rousing his Knights of the Round Table (6th Century). Beowulf swimming deep into the lair of Grendel’s Hag mother (8th Century). King Alfred hiding in the swamp from the savage Danes yet dreaming of uniting England as a Christian nation (878 AD). King Henry II calling for the murder of Thomas Beckett (1170) — “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” King John either signing the actual Magna Carta (1215) or cursing the legendary Robin Hood. King Henry V at the Battle of ...
