Kipling's British History Trivia Quiz

Answer: Command me not to go

The plight of the centurion ("I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?") mirrors that of some Britons in Kipling's imperial days. Many British settlers were undoubtedly intent on getting rich and then getting out, but there were others (especially, perhaps, in India) who came to love their adopted country, its customs and its people, and to feel more at home there than in a rapidly changing Britain which they rarely saw.

Hence the centurion pleads to be allowed to live out what is left of his life in the only land that he can call home. Portus Itius, by the way, is Boulogne.

Answer: The granting of Magna Carta by King John

Kipling's is the conventional view of Magna Carta as the foundation of English liberties. The charter was sealed at Runnymede in 1215.

Answer: James VI of Scotland & I of England

James was one of the first to attack the habit of smoking in his "Counterblast to Tobacco." His other writings included "Demonologie," arguing for the reality of witchcraft, and he probably wrote "The True Law of Free Monarchies," setting out the doctrine of the divine right of kings. His son, Charles I, was beheaded in 1649.

Answer: Dutchmen

Commercial and colonial rivalry between the British and the Dutch led to naval wars in 1652-54, 1665-67 and 1672-74. In the end they were indecisive, but in the 1660s the Dutch sailed up the Thames and Medway and burned British ships at their moorings. Thanks to corruption and mismanagement in government, the British could not repel the attacks.

Answer: A musket

"Brown Bess" was the nickname given to the musket used by British troops in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Besides the battles of Blenheim and Ramillies in the War of the Spanish Succession, the poem also commemorates the musket-toting Britons' triumphs in India, Canada and the Napoleonic Wars: somehow the American Revolution is overlooked.

Answer: Bunyan

"The Holy War" was John Bunyan's last major work. Like his better known "Pilgrim's Progress," it is an allegory: it tells of the war between Emmanuel (Christ) and Diabolus (the Devil) for the city of Mansoul. Kipling, writing his poem in 1917, saw World War I as a holy war and Bunyan's work as prophetic.

Answer: Napoleon Bonaparte

The "lullaby" portrays Napoleon's seemingly insatiable ambition and his rise and fall. "How far is St Helena from a fight in Paris street?" "How far is St Helena from the field of Austerlitz?" "How far is St Helena from an Emperor of France?" "How far is St Helena from the capes of Trafalgar?" "How far is St Helena from the Beresina ice?". "How far is St Helena from the field of Waterloo?" "How far from St Helena to the gate of Heaven's grace?"

Answer: Sudan

It's difficult for many of us to read poems like "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" or "Gunga Din" today: they strike us as, to say the very least, patronizing and insensitive. None the less, Kipling's admiration for the Sudanese is genuine and heartfelt. The early success of the Sudanese supporters of the Mahdi in the 1880s was a blow to British pride.

Answer: Field-Marshal Lord Roberts

Frederick Sleigh Roberts had a distinguished military career in India, Afghanistan and South Africa. Kipling's Cockney poem praises his firm but fair discipline, his strategic sense, his modesty and his concern for his troops.

Answer: The Boer War

"The Absent-Minded Beggar" was written to encourage the British public to contribute to a fund for the support of the families of British troops. The fund raised a quarter of a million pounds (nearly £20,000,000 in early 21st-century money). "Stellenbosch" attacks the incompetence of over-cautious commanders. Waterval was a Boer camp for British prisoners of war.