Cromwell dissolving the Long Parliament, 1653 . . . . . . . . . 116 Nelson's Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805 . . . . . . . 144 The British Squares at Quatre-Bras, 1815 . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 The British in India: A native prince receiving the decoration of the order of the Star of India from Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 {9} A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER I The remotest fact in the history of England is written in her rocks. Geology tells us of a time when no sea flowed between Dover and Calais, while an unbroken continent extended from the Mediterranean to the Orkneys. Huge mounds of rough stones called Cromlechs, have yielded up still another secret. Before the coming of the Keltic-Aryans, there dwelt there two successive races, whose story is briefly told in a few human fragments found in these "Cromlechs." These remains do not bear the royal marks of Aryan origin. The men were small in stature, with inferior skulls; and it is surmised that they belonged to the same mysterious branch of the human {10} family as the Basques and Iberians, whose presence in Southern Europe has never been explained. When the Aryan came and blotted out these races will perhaps always remain an unanswered question. But while Greece was clothing herself with a mantle of beauty, which the world for two thousand years has striven in vain to imitate, there was lying off the North and West coasts of the European Continent a group of mist-enshrouded islands of which she had never heard. Obscured by fogs, and beyond the horizon of Civilization, a branch of the Aryan race known as Britons were there leading lives as primitive as the American Indians, dwelling in huts shaped like beehives, which they covered with branches and plastered with mud. While Phidias was carving immortal statues for the Parthenon, this early Britisher was decorating his abode with the heads of his enemies; and could those shapeless blocks at Stonehenge speak, they would, perhaps, tell of cruel and hideous Druidical rites witnessed on Salisbury Plain, ages ago. {11} Rumors of the existence of this people reached the Mediterranean three or four hundred years before Christ, but not until Caesar's invasion of the Island (55 B.C.) was there any positive knowledge of them.