Pedant's Revolt Fallacies Page

Queen Elizabeth I had wooden teeth

The sixteenth-century Virgin Queen was known for having a sweet tooth. Consequently, she finished up with practically no teeth at all. In Elizabeth I, Alison Plowden quotes contemporary German lawyer Paul Hentzner blaming the English predisposition to bad teeth on ‘their inordinate fondness for sweetmeats’. Nor did it help that Elizabethan dental care was practically nonexistent. Elizabeth Jenkins explains in Elizabeth the Great that ‘teeth were cleaned by rubbing them with a cloth inside and out,’ and she records that ‘the Queen's New Year gifts included holland tooth-cloths, edged with black and silver.’

The rot set in, so to speak, in Elizabeth I's middle years when her looks, though regal, were spoilt by decaying teeth. In his 1597Journal, French ambassador, André Hurault de Maisse describes Queen Elizabeth's teeth in 1596 as ‘very yellow and unequal, compared with what people say they were formerly, and on the left side less than the right. Many of them are missing’. A consequence of her poor state of teeth, according to Maisse, was that ‘one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly.’

A problematic lisp was not the worst of it. She also suffered from crippling bouts of toothache. In Elizabethan times, it appears that worms were considered not only the cause but also the cure for toothache. Elizabeth's London by Liza Picard quotes Thomas Hill’s 1568 work The Profitable Art Of Gardening, in which he suggests that powder of burnt rosemary wood was just the job to ‘make the teeth white and flee [drive out] the worms in them’. She also refers to John Hollybush’s unique recommendations in his 1561 A Most Excellent and Perfect Homish Apothecary, that toothache should be treated with ‘grey worms… pierced together with a bodkin [needle]’.

One episode of toothache pained Queen Elizabeth for two months. Historian and biographer John Strype records in his 1701 work Life and Acts of John Aylmer that it ‘forced her to pass whole nights without taking any rest’. The Queen would not agree to extraction since she was ‘afraid of the acute pain that accompanied it’, and was persuaded only after Bishop Aylmer nobly volunteered to have one of his own teeth extracted, so that she could see ‘the pain was not so much, and not at all to be dreaded’.

By the time the Queen had reached her sixties, Plowman quotes Hentzner describing what teeth she had left as ‘black’. In The Excruciating History of Dentistry, James Wynbrandt quotes a witness in 1602, when the Queen was nearly seventy and at the end of her reign, commenting that she was ‘still ... frolicy and merry, only her teeth showeth some decay’. From eyewitness testimony, it seems clear that Elizabeth was clearly stuck with her own visibly rotting teeth, and she certainly hadn’t requested the fashioning of a right royal pair of wooden teeth.

False teeth weren't invented until the eighteenth century and, until the advent of denture fixative, individual false teeth were purely for appearance and would have had to have been removed for eating. In the sixteenth-century, rolled-up wads of cloth were generally employed to disguise the gaps. Wynbrandt’s witness reveals that Elizabeth ‘when she cometh in public … putteth many fine cloths into her mouth to bear out her cheeks’. Plugs of rolled cloth used to fill toothless gaps could have resembled plugs of wood and so given rise to the myth.

Regular trips to the dentist don't seem such a bad option now when one considers the alternative.

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Historical fallacies not included in the book:

The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on Bunker Hill

Bunker Hill was the first major battle of the American Revolutionary War. In June 1775, British redcoats occupied Boston, Massachusetts. The American colonials, with a force of 1,600 men, decided to fortify Bunker Hill, which overlooked the harbour. In An Encyclopedia of Battles, David Eggenberger claims that they built their fort on Breed’s Hill ‘by mistake’. It was lower and easier to fortify but Encyclopćdia Britannica suggests that many historians regard this as 'an indefensible decision’, since Breed's Hill was ‘less impregnable’. The New Oxford American Dictionary edited by Erin McKean confirms that the battle 'was actually fought on nearby Breed's Hill’.

A force of 2,400 redcoats was sent, according to A Dictionary of World History edited by Edmund Wright ‘to take the heights’. Battle mistakes were made on both sides: an Express [Dispatch] sent the following day reveals that during the battle, orders to relieve fatigued colonials were ‘mistaken for a direction to retreat’. The colonials were ‘exposed to the fire of the enemy’, ‘sustained our principal loss’, lost the hill and 450 men. Eggenberger states that the British ‘had the opportunity to turn the retreat into a disastrous rout’ but halted the pursuit ‘at the base of the peninsular’. The redcoats may have won Breed’s Hill but as the Oxford Companion to Military History records that the lost was huge: ‘over 1,000 casualties, 40 per cent of the attacking force’. After the battle, neither side found much to celebrate. The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military states that only later did the colonials regard the decision to fight there ‘as more than a misguided adventure’. Eventually, they drew solace from the fact that the mighty British redcoats might not be so indomitable after all.

The battle became know as the Battle of Bunker Hill because the Express stated that ‘fifteen hundred of the Provincials went to Bunker's-Hill, in order to intrench there.’ Britannica records that the battle of Bunker Hill is commemorated with a monument, which confusingly, is situated on Breed’s Hill.

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Alfred Nobel invented nitroglycerine

Experimenting with explosives is dangerous hobby. Nineteenth-century Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero came up with an interesting compound in 1846. Graham West writing in Innovation and the Rise of the Tunnelling Industry relates Sobrero findings: ‘a tiny quantity put on the tongue produced a severe headache.’ Sobrero also found that ‘a small quantity administered to a dog killed it‘. The compound was nitoglycerine. After Sobrero sustained what J. Michael Bishop writing in How to Win the Nobel Prize describes as ‘a severe facial injury’ from experimenting with the substance, he rather lost interest in it.

Despite the obvious dangers of the new compound, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, as West confirms was 'the first person to try to manufacture nitroglycerine’. Nobel's development of explosives and his later establishment of the Nobel Prizes (including the Peace Prize) often strikes a jarring note with many. It's true that in 1864 the compound blew up several people including, according to E.M. Tansey writing in the Oxford Companion to the Body, Alfred's younger brother. Physical shock can cause it to explode. For this reason there followed, West says, ‘a series of spectacular and devastating explosions both on board ship and onshore.’ In 1866, Nobel solved the problem by modified the manufacturing process and producing dynamite (from the Greek word dynamis meaning power), which was just as effective at blowing things up but much safer to transport.

In 1888, when one of Nobel's elder brothers died, a French newspaper mistakenly believed that the deceased was Alfred and headlined him, according to Bishop, as a ‘merchant of death’. Nobel, a bachelor and essentially a pacifist, took the chance to attempt to set his posthumous reputation to rights and bequeathed the vast wealth accrued from manufacturing explosives to found the now highly esteemed Nobel Prizes. The world was suitably delighted -- with the possible exception of his relatives who, rather than becoming fabulously wealthy, had to content themselves with simply being proud members of the family of the great philanthropist, Alfred Nobel.

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In World War I, angels assisted the Allies at the Battle of Mons

In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, British and French troops were forced into retreat by a powerful German offensive. Fortunately, a heavenly host was on hand to supervise this -- apparently. Near Mons in Belgium apparitions of the Archangel Michael, angelic troops and guardian angels were sighted. The world-renowned historian A.J.P. Taylor in his work The First World War remarks that it was the only British battle ‘where supernatural intervention was observed, more or less reliably, on the British side’.

Brigadier-General John Charteris in his memoirs, At GHQ, published in 1931, records in his letter home dated 5 September 1914 how rumours that ‘the Angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress.’ On 11 February 1915, he surmises that ‘some religiously minded man wrote home that the Germans halted at Mons, AS IF an Angel of the Lord had appeared in front of them.’ Charteris suspected that ‘the letter appeared in a Parish Magazine, which in time was sent back to some other men at the front. From them the story went back home with the ‘as if’ omitted, and at home it went the rounds in its expurgated form.’

David Clarke writing in his definitive work The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians reveals that there were ‘no authentic first-hand accounts’ of these apparitions. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud writing in A Dictionary of English Folklore agree that ‘none is a first-hand eyewitness report’. Charteris hadn’t been far wrong since it would appear that the rumours originated in a fictional first person narrative published on 29 September 1914 in The Evening News.

The invented tale, entitled The Bowmen, penned by Welsh newspaper leader-writer Arthur Machen, was not labelled as fiction. It was inspired, as Machen explains in the 1915 introduction to the book version, by ‘the awful [real life] account of the retreat from Mons’. Machen’s fictional tale told of how ‘St George .... brought … Agincourt Bowmen to help the English’ at the battle of Mons. In his story, Machen described nothing more graphic than ‘a long line of shapes, with a shining about them.’ After publication, the editor of The Occult Review wrote asking ‘whether the story had any foundation in fact.’ Machen told him that ‘it had no foundation in fact of any kind or sort’, and thought nothing more of it.

Machen was then asked by an editor of a parish magazine to write a short preface ‘giving the exact authorities for the story’. Machen reiterated that the tale was ‘pure invention’. The editor wrote again, ‘suggesting -- to my amazement -- that I must be mistaken, that the main "facts" of The Bowmen must be true, that my share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical [truthful] history’. Machen goes on to explain that his ‘light fiction’ had been ‘accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts’.

The story took hold in the public imagination: St George and the bowmen where sidelined in favour of a heavenly host since, as Machen points out 'in the popular view, shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels’. He believed ‘the bowmen of my story have become "the Angels of Mons"‘.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that Charteris’s letter pre-dates the publication of the story. Clarke reveals that ‘the absence of an original letter referring to the Angels of Mons among the Charteris collection leads me to conclude that the testimony provided by him dates not from 1914, but from 1931.’ Simpson and Roud reveal that Charteris ‘amplified his contemporary notes from his recollections, so his dating cannot be relied on’.

Clarke adds that ‘while there is no evidence that the nascent Propaganda Bureau was directly involved in the creation of the Angel of Mons, military intelligence may have played a role in keeping the story alive.’ Clarke points out that post World War I stories about the Angels of Mons are ‘at best apocryphal and at worst outright lies’. Clarke agrees that ‘Machen was indeed correct when he claimed there was not a single piece of contemporary evidence for the “Angel of Mons” that could be dated before the publication of The Bowmen’. Nevertheless, Machen’s flight of fancy managed to entrench itself firmly into the mythology of World War I and is still trotted out regularly as solid fact.

Thomas ŕ Becket is the correct spelling of the saint’s name

The turbulent priest of the twelfth century was the son of a London merchant. He rose to be royal chancellor then archbishop, only to be brutally bludgeoned to death in his own cathedral because of some rash words spoken by his erstwhile best buddy King Henry II. The words are generally said to be ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ However, twelfth-century monk Edward Grim, who sustained an arm injury attempting to protect Becket, claims in his 1180 biography, Vita S.Thomae (Life of Saint Thomas) that the King actually said ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!' This sounds more like a general moan than a demand for bloody retribution.

Possibly the perpetrators never intended murder: William Holden Hutton writing in his nineteenth-century work St Thomas of Canterbury explains that it was reported that his assailants dragged him ‘that they may kill him outside the church, or carry him away a prisoner, as they afterwards confessed’. However, Becket ‘could not be forced’ and this led to his violent death.

As to the spelling of his surname, there have been claims that it has been ‘dumbed down’ for modern scholars. Yet, in Canterbury Pilgrimages, H. Snowden Ward reveals that ‘there is no contemporary authority’ for the surname ŕ Becket. Ward explains that ‘the surname Becket or Beket was applied to his father … Gilbert Becket, the Norman son of a Norman settler who came from Rouen.’ In Thomas Becket, history professor Frank Barlow agrees that ‘Thomas’s father, Gilbert was of Norman birth and ancestry.’ Barlow suggests that Beket, could be a diminutive of the French ‘bec’, which ordinarily means ‘beak’, but in Normandy also ‘beck’ or ‘brook’.

What’s more, Barlow agrees that ‘there is no evidence that Gilbert’s son ever employed the name.’ He adds that ‘when it was used of him, it was probably in derision, an allusion to his non-noble origins.' He suggests that after Becket ‘left his birthplace he was Thomas of London until he could qualify his name by his office’. F. Donald Logan writing in A History of the Church in the Middle Ages backs up this view stating that ‘in only three cases are contemporaries recorded as speaking of him as Becket.’ Logan agrees that ‘he was generally referred to as Thomas of London, Thomas the Chancellor or Thomas the Archbishop.’

Barlow suggests that the later addition of the ŕ was a ‘post-Reformation invention perhaps imitated from Thomas ŕ Kempis’. Logan agrees that the addition was ‘a later unfortunate confection’.

It would appear that the name of the merchant’s son, rather than being dumbed down, was ‘dolled up’ with a mystical ŕ for several hundred years and has now simply returned to its original status.

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In World War II, Singapore fell to the Japanese because the British guns faced the wrong direction

During World War II, in February 1942, Japanese Lieutenant General Yamashita Tomoyuki aka the Tiger Of Malaya succeeded in conquering Malaysia by capturing the garrison at Singapore, which held more than 100,000 British and Empire troops. This was a humiliating defeat for the British forces not least because the Singapore garrison had been labelled impregnable. Yamashita, short of ammunition, avoided a frontal assault and directed his troops to bicycle round the back of the island. This strategy is said to have succeeded because the fine British coastal guns faced permanently out to sea and could not swivel to face inland. Richard Holmes writing in The Oxford Companion to Military History quotes Winston Churchill referring to it as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British military history.’ Nowadays, anything not directed where it should be, is likened to the guns of Singapore: facing the wrong direction.

Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn writing in Did Singapore Have to Fall claim that ‘veterans and civilians who escaped from Singapore in early February 1942’ are responsible for spreading the myth. Indeed, one volunteer soldier noted that the Buona Vista battery of two fifteen-inch guns ‘never fired a shot’. The Times reporter Ian Morrison writing in his 1942 work Malayan Postscript echoed this belief claiming that the guns ‘were embedded in concrete and could not be turned to point inland’. He added that ‘most of them were never fired’. Likewise Edwin Glover journalist for the Malaya Tribune in his 1949 work In Seventy Days stated that the ‘sixteen-inch guns ... would not be brought into play in the case of a landing from Johore’. He adds that ‘to the best of my knowledge these guns never fired a shot’ since they ‘were pointing the wrong way’. Even, Churchill's 1951 War Memoirs include a telegram from Field Marshal Archibald Wavell admitting that ‘many [guns] can only fire seawards’ and admitting that ‘Singapore defences were entirely constructed to meet seaward attack.’

The evidence seems damning however, Military History edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker points out that ‘all the major sea-coast artillery did, in fact, traverse a full three hundred and sixty degrees.’ The Pacific War author Alan J. Levine agrees that the guns ‘had all-round traverse; the naval base they defended was on the “back” side of the island, facing the mainland’.

The Oxford Companion to World War II points out that ‘the guns could be traversed to fire inland’ but ‘they did not have the ancillary equipment or correct ammunition for land warfare’. Gordon B. Greer writing in World in Conflict agrees stating that ‘if the Singapore big guns had been placed to fire north and supplied with more appropriate ammunition, they would still not have been very useful.’ Greer explains that ‘light artillery pieces and automatic weapons’ where what was needed to repel the invading forces. Anthony Shaw writing in World War II Day by Day explains that after the invasion, ‘well-equipped and experienced’, the inexorable Japanese troops continued to push southward 'many by bicycle'.

The faulty placement of British guns during the fall of Singapore turns out to be nothing more than a convenient myth. Holmes reveals that the military failure had a far more familiar cause: ‘a pre-war defence policy which failed to balance commitments with resources'. (And, possibly a dearth of anti-bicycle weaponry.)

Mothering Sunday originated as a church festival for honouring mothers

There are three possible origins for the term Mothering Sunday. During the Middle Ages, the custom developed of allowing apprentices and those in service to visit their mothers on the fourth Sunday of Lent. The Oxford Book of Carols edited by Dearmer, Williams and Shaw includes a secular carol of about 1450, arranged by George Hare Leonard, titled Mothering Sunday. It tells how ‘It is the day of all the year … when I shall see my mother dear / And bring her cheer, A-mothering on Sunday.’ Royalist officer Richard Symonds’s 1644 Diary records that ‘Every Midlent Sunday is a great day at Worcester, when all the children and god-children meet at the head and cheife of the family and have a feast. They call it the Mothering-day’.

Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud writing in A Dictionary of English Folklore record that some authorities claim that the term comes from a church custom in which ‘parishioners went in procession at mid-Lent to visit their Mother Church’. Ronald Hutton writing in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain says that this medieval rite ‘remains unproven’ but adds that ‘the records of Lichfield apparently show such processions until the Reformation.’ Hutton adds that it is ‘unclear’ whether there was ever a connection between going a-mothering and visiting one’s mother-church. Simpson and Roud agree stating that ‘given the regional nature of the family-visit Mothering Sunday it seems unlikely that there is a connection between the two.’

As Simpson and Roud explain, the term Mothering Sunday has gradually been superseded by Mother’s Day. This term originated when Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia, USA ‘persuaded [US] Congress, in 1913, that the second Sunday in May would be dedicated to honouring mothers and motherhood.’ Mother’s Day, claim Simpson and Roud, become ‘popular from the 1950s onwards’. Hutton confirms that the ‘regional tradition … has been reinvented.’

The Church festival held on the same day is Laetare Sunday also known as Refreshment Sunday. It is also suggested that Mothering Sunday is so called because of a reference in the traditional epistle for the day from Galatians. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (edited by John Bowker) both cite the relevant verse as Galatians 4:26, which reads ‘Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.’ (Interestingly, Encyclopaedia Britannica cites verse 4:27: ‘Be glad, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth and cry aloud.’ I suppose that’s another way of looking at it.)

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Lucrezia Borgia indulged in poisoning, incest and orgies

Lucrezia Borgia’s name is synonymous with ruthlessness yet, the most infamous member of the notorious Borgia family was the least villainous. In Renaissance Italy, the Borgias were renowned for murdering their way up the social ladder. These were dodgy times: Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia were the illegitimate children of notorious Pope Alexander VI. Lucrezia is said to have poisoned numerous husbands. She is also said to have slept with her brother and her father, the pope, and attended orgies at the Vatican.

The Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women explains that before Lucrezia was twenty-two 'she was twice engaged to be married to Spanish noblemen and three times actually married to Italian princes in order to further her father's political advancement.’ Her first marriage was to the Lord of Pesaro who angered the pope by changing his political allegiance. In 1497, the pope annulled the marriage claiming that Pesaro was impotent. The following year, Lucrezia married the Duke of Bisceglie who was murdered a couple of years later for also changing allegiance.

In Criminal Poisoning, forensic scientist John Harris Trestrail reveals that ‘Lucrezia …probably never killed anyone.’ Trestrail reveals that her brother, Cesare ‘was responsible for dozens of murders that used poison as the instrument’. In 1501, Lucrezia’s final marriage was the Duke of Ferrara with whom she lived a quiet life with her eight children. The worst thing the Oxford Dictionary of English accuses her of is establishing herself ‘as a patron of the arts’.

As for the charge of incest, in The Life of Cesare Borgia, Rafael Sabatini’s 1913 work suggests that first husband Pesaro 'answered the odorous reflections upon his virility by a wholesale charge of incest against the Borgia family’. In 1501, the rumours escalated when Lucrezia was spotted with a mysterious toddler. Sabatini reveals that two successive papal bulls recognized the child first as the illegitimate son of Cesare and then her father, the pope and a ‘quadam Romana’ [a certain Roman woman]. Maria Bellonci writing in Lucrezia Borgia describes the mystery as ‘insoluble’.

As for the charge of attending orgies: the Pope's Master of Ceremonies, Johann Burchard writing in his Diarium of 1501 reports that one Sunday evening Cesare gave a supper party in his apartment in the Palace of the Vatican, 'with fifty decent prostitutes’. They ‘danced with the servants and others there, first fully dressed and then naked’. A form of x-rated It’s A Knockout followed: ‘lampstands … were placed on the floor … and chestnuts strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up as they crawled in and out amongst the lampstands.’ The guests then enjoyed themselves with the prostitutes and, according to Burchard, last man standing won a hat. (Credit where credit's due.) Burchard reveals that ‘the pope … and Lucrezia were … present to watch.’

Lucrezia's evil reputation crystallised three centuries later, in 1833 when French author Victor Hugo penned a sensational play titled Lucrece Borgia. The following year, Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti pinched the lurid plotline and made it into an opera in which serial killer, Lucrezia becomes annoyed with passing revellers who remove the B from her coat of arms transforming ‘Borgia’ to ‘Orgia’. Lucrezia does not appreciate the joke, poisons them and belatedly finds out that her long-lost son is among their number. Donizetti’s ‘original’ new opera did well until Hugo got wind of it, at which point Donizetti was obliged to rewrite it as La Rinegata. I suppose a sensational new opera featuring infamous patron of the arts, Lucrezia Borgia wouldn’t have gone down quite so well.

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Pocahontas rescued and married adventurer John Smith

Along with Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Prince Charlie, this is one of the greatest love stories that never was. Pocahontas was the favourite daughter of chief Powhatan. (The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature reveals that Pocahontas was really named Matoaka, which meant ‘Little Snow Feather’. Pocahontas was simply a nickname that meant ‘mischievous one’.)

English adventurer John Smith arrived in the New World in 1607. In A True Relation of Such Occurences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia dated the following year, Smith describes the natives as accommodating. Pocahontas gets one mention as ‘a child of tenne yeares’ who ‘much exceedeth any of the rest’. A couple of years later, early colonist William Strachey landed in Virginia and comments in The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, (published in 1612), that she was ‘a well featured, but wanton [mischievous] yong girle …of the age then of eleven or twelve yeares’ telling how she would ‘wheele [cartwheel], naked as she was, all the fort over’. In a 1617 letter to Queen Anne, reproduced in Benjamin Bussey Thatcher’s 1832 work Indian Biography (Volume I), Smith tells of how her ‘compassionate pitifull heart … gave mee much cause to respect her’.

In Smith’s later works, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles dated 1624 and The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africke and America dated 1629 (written in the third person) he recounts how the Indians ‘dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines’. Smith describes how ‘Pocahontas the King’s dearest daughter’ came to the rescue ‘when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne vpon his to saue him from death’. While the Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women states ‘research has shown that for the most part his stories were true,’ it also points out that, since Smith had no knowledge of the Algonquian language, it’s also possible that he completely misunderstood the situation. ‘Powhatan may simply have been forcing Smith into a ritual gesture of submission to show his own people that the newcomers were accepting him as their overlord.’ John Everett-Heath writing in the Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names suggests Smith’s account was ‘probably fictitious’. J. Frederick Fausz’s contribution to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians suggests that Smith was more valuable to the chief alive and it is ‘virtually certain that his life was never in danger’. The chief was most likely ‘adopting Smith as his “son”’. As to Smith’s relationship with Pocahontas, The Oxford Companion to United States History edited by Paul S. Boyer points out that ‘there are no grounds for thinking their relationship amorous.’

Fausz explains ‘Pocahontas played a key role as a mutually trusted intermediary, conveying food, gifts, and important messages back and forth.’ In 1614, she was converted to Christianity, renamed Rebecca, and married to English colonist John Rolfe. However, as A Dictionary of World History explains, this was less of a love-match and mostly to ‘cement Anglo-Indian relations’. As Everett-Heath explains, Pocahontas/Rebecca was then received at the court of King James I/VI and Queen Anne in London in 1616. The Penguin Dictionary reveals that ‘the tavern near St Paul's Cathedral where she stayed was renamed the “Belle Sauvage” in her honour.’ Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Millennium Edition explains that, tragically ‘she died off Gravesend on 21 March 1617, aged about 22, when about to return to Virginia.’ Penguin adds that ‘she was buried in the local church, St George's, though the exact site of her grave has been lost.’ However, a memorial tablet is displayed in the chancel.

Perhaps Pocahontas would be better remembered as Smith in his memorial letter to Queen Anne states: ‘next under God … the instrument to preserve this colonie from death, famine and utter confusion.’