The great <i>IoS</i> history quiz answers

Here are the answers to The Independent on Sunday's Great History Quiz.

Strange moments

1. War with the Spanish in 1739, so called because an English sea captain, Robert Jenkins claimed to have had his ear cut off by a Spaniard

2. A religious assembly summoned by Cromwell to replace the Commons, named after a preacher member Praise-God Barbon

3. The German counter-attack in the Ardennes at the turn of 1945

4. A basement where 123 Europeans were suffocated at the command of an Indian nawab, in 1756

5. A plot to assassinate the Cabinet, in 1819, foiled at the last minute

6. A set of 200 radical demands from the House of Commons to Charles I, 1641

7. A peaceful demonstration in St Peter’s Field in Manchester dispersed by troops – 15 dead, 600 injured

8. Ethelfred’s slaughter of the Danes in East Anglia, 1002, in response to yet another Danish attack

9. Battle between Napoleon and Wellington, two days before Waterloo

10. Plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York

11. 60,000 people rampaged through London in anti-Catholic riots in 1780 instigated by a mild government measure to relieve Irish hardship, 200 dead

12. In 1773, one main tax remained in America: tea. In protest at taxation without representation a group of men boarded an East India Company ship and tossed the British tea into Boston harbour.

On the battlefield

1. The Battle of Agincourt, 25 October 1415;

2. The campaign to drive the Germansout of Belgium, in 1914 (the first World war finally ended on 11 November 1918)

3. Battle of Waterloo, 1815

4. The coming of the Vikings, c800

5. The German surrender in North Africa, November 1942

6. Francis Drake. No, but he destroyed much of Philip’s battle fleet in April 1587.

Kings and things

1. Oliver Cromwell

2. Richard “the Lionheart” desperate to finance the Crusades

3. Lady Jane Grey, executed by Mary Tudor

4. King Charles I before his execution for treason on 30 January 1649

5. Charles II speaking of his mistress Nell Gwyn.

Politics and people

1. Prime minister William Gladstone

2. The Act of Union

3. They were burned out after a massive series of social reforms

4. The foreign slave trade.

Reputations: Who was known as...

1. Isabella, estranged wife of Edward II

2. The Duke of Wellington for the shutters he had to put over his windows during the Reform Act campaign

3. Henry II’s mistress

4. Ethelred;

5. Mary Tudor, because of her brutal campaign against Protestants

6. Margaret Thatcher

7. James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham;

8. William II

9. Charles II

10. Edward I – the inscription on his tombstone.

The common people: Who said... and who or what were they describing?

1. Peasant’s revolt leader John Ball, 1381

2. King George V on the general strikers, May 1926;

3. Duke of Wellington on the newly reformed House of Commons, 1833

4. Margaret Thatcher on socialism

5. Lloyd George

The burdens of government: Who said – to whom – and why?

1. New Prime Minister James Callaghan to Harold Wilson, 1976, just before the IMF bailout;

2. Horace Walpole after the so-called annus mirabilis of 1759 when the French had been driven from most of Canada and virtually all of what is now the USA

3. He was setting up the NHS

4. Henry VIII when infatuated with Anne Boleyn

5. Elizabeth I in the last oration of her reign.

God and men

1. Pope Gregory in 576 seeing two blond-haired slaves in a market place and being told they were Angles

2. A group of Catholics protesting against Henry VIII’s seizure of church revenue in 1536. Brutally suppressed with 250 exemplary executions

3. Henry II of Thomas Becket – crisply retranslated as, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

4. The Pilgrim’s Progress

5. Dismissed former Chancellor Thomas Wolsey having been summoned by Henry VIII to the Tower.

Why were these places famous (or infamous)?

1. 1746 battle ended Jacobite rebellion with brutal efficiency and forced Bonnie Prince Charlie into exile

2. Religious centre where the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels were created, 698

3. Outside Chippenham where Alfred the Great beat the Danish king Guthrum, 878;

4. Alfred the Great’s capital – planned on a Roman grid pattern that still exists

5. William the Conqueror’s victory over Harold, 1066;

6. King John is forced to sign the Magna Carta, 1215, a document that underpins civil liberties in a rule of law. He immediately afterwards got the Pope to annul it;

7. Site of Edward II’s defeat by Robert the Bruce in 1314 – the most humiliating defeat of an English army on British soil since Hastings

8. Site of the new palace built by Henry VII and named after his old Yorkshire title

9. One of 60 notorious “rotten boroughs” to be abolished in the 1832 Reform Act.

Dire warnings: Who said... and what were they describing?

1. Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, at the outbreak of the First World War, August 1914

2. A helpful, official announcement from The Bank of England, 1931;

3. PM Neville Chamberlain on the Munich Agreement 1938

4. Shelley describing the then foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh in an anti-government poem which could not be printed for fear of imprisonment, 1819);

5. James I on the newly-popular habit of tobacco smoking.

Ententes cordiales – or perhaps not...

1. Henry V

2. 1363

3. Mary Tudor, 1558, on the loss of the final bit of French territory under English control

4. As an alliance to contain Germany

5. Entry into the Common Market

Unhappy endings

1. Harold

2. The Duke of York in one of the less bloody events of the War of the Roses, 1460;

3. Guy Fawkes and the other gunpowder plotters

4. Plague-stricken London in 1665 (100,000 estimated dead, 1/5 of the population).