“When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottom boats and his Grande Army, he was told, ‘There are bitter weeds in England.’” ­­- Winston Churchill

There was certainly one bitter weed, and he had already sacrificed one arm and his sight in one eye defending his country.  His name was Horatio Nelson, Vice Admiral of the British Navy, and this week (Oct. 21) in 1805 he led the most important naval victory in British history when the 27 line-of-battle ships under his command defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet of 33 “flat-bottomed” ships under the command of French Admiral Pierre Villeneuve at the Battle of Trafalgar.

In ensuring a British victory, Nelson not only prevented France’s Emperor Napoleon from invading Britain with his 130,000-man “Grande Army,” Nelson also ensured a “Pax Brittanica,” in which British naval supremacy, which would last for the next 100 years, gave Europe, and much of the British Empire, a measure of stability not previously enjoyed.

To be sure, Nelson did not defeat Napoleon — that would take another battle a decade later (at Waterloo in the Netherlands) — but he did prevent Napoleon from becoming master of Europe.  Napoleon had long considered Britain the chief obstacle to his controlling the European continent, and had thought that if he could command the English Channel just long enough to send an invasion fleet from Boulogne to the English coast, his Grande Army would easily destroy any defending army the British could muster.  The only thing in his way was the British Navy, which for years had been watching Napoleon’s every move and had engaged in a quasi-blockade of every port in Europe in which French warships were docked.

Finally, frustrated and impatient, Napoleon ordered Villeneuve, whose ships were off Spain’s coast at Cadiz, to “break out” of the blockade and sail for England, but near Cape Trafalgar off the Spanish coast Nelson was waiting, and his battle instructions to his crew were very simple.  “England expects that every man will do his duty.”

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I have written before of Christopher Columbus’s historic sea voyage, which commenced this week (Aug. 3) in 1492.  Hoping to discover a shorter shipping route from Europe to China, India and Asia’s Spice Islands, he actually — totally inadvertently — discovered “The New World” of the Americas when he landed on what are now the Caribbean islands of the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

One reason Columbus landed many thousands of miles from his intended destination was his rather unique thinking about the size and shape of planet Earth.  For years, conventional wisdom said that Columbus was prescient in thinking the world was not flat, but round, and not small, but large.  Yet the truth is that most European scholars in 1492 believed the world was both round and large, while Columbus believed it was small — and pear shaped.

Pear shaped or no, his conception of the Earth’s size led him to conclude that the distance between western Europe and eastern China was entirely navigable, even though in the 15^th Century most experts agreed with the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes, who had concluded as far back as the Third Century that the Earth’s circumference was approximately 25,000 miles (talk about genius, he was off by about 100 miles!).  That meant the distance between Spain, where Columbus would begin his voyage, and his intended destination in Asia was about 15,000 miles, a journey no ship built in 1493 could possibly make.

Columbus, an experienced sailor who had often sailed the eastern Atlantic, thought Eratosthenes, a landlubber academic, had miscalculated.  Columbus based this belief not only on the intuitive sense of size and distance that he had gained on his many voyages, but also on his belief that a degree of longitude represented a distance of just under 57 miles (in fact it is closer to 69 miles).  By multiplying the 57-mile figure by the number of degrees in a circle, 360, he calculated that the Earth’s circumference was less than 20,500 miles.

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In the summer of 1917, Great Britain’s King George V had something of a public relations problem.  His country was at war with Germany — World War I as it would be known — and the fighting was so fierce, and British casualty rates so high, that King George’s British subjects were increasingly resentful of all things German.

Including German names, which was unfortunate for King George since his full name and title was King George V of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.  As George well knew, few names sounded more German than that, although the Prince and Princess of Hesse and by Rhine, and the Prince and Princess of Schleeswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenberg came close.  Those were actual people, and they were the well-known cousins of King George V.  They also were British subjects.

And so this week (July 17) in 1917 George V wisely issued an Order in Council (legislation in the king’s name by the Privy Council) that changed his and his family’s dynastic name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor, a name taken from England’s most famous castle, Windsor Castle.

From then on, all male descendants of Queen Victoria, whose marriage to Prince Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha gave George V his original German name, would carry the name Windsor.

But George’s Order said nothing about female descendants, meaning that any female who ascended to the British throne was free to reclaim her German dynastic name.  And as it happened, in 1952 King George V’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, became Queen Elizabeth II.  Sensibly, Elizabeth II — keenly aware that just seven years earlier Britain had fought another world war against Germany — quickly issued her own Order in Council declaring that it was her “Will and Pleasure that I and My children shall be styled and known as the House and the Family of Windsor, and that my descendants who marry and their descendants, shall bear the name of Windsor.”

It has been the House of Windsor ever since.

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