Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
The Israelites turn to Deborah for help after twenty years under the harsh rule of King Jabin and his stern general Sisera.
Deborah was the fourth of the Judges, a series of prophets who ruled Israel when they first entered Canaan, their Promised Land. The message of their stories was that if Israel turned from God to worship the gods of the nations, then God would let the kings of the nations have their way until Israel repented.
In 655, the future of England as a Christian nation hung by the slenderest of threads.
Following the conversion of Ethelbert, King of Kent, in 597, one after another the Kings of England’s kingdoms were baptised; Sigeberht of the East Angles even resigned his crown to his brother Anna, in order to become a monk. But Cenwalh of Wessex remained unmoved, as did his brother-in-law Penda, mighty lord of Mercia.
Charles II was thinking about handing Bombay back to the Portuguese, when an Indian rebel stepped in.
The great cities of Madras and Calcutta sprang up from the energy and enterprise of British merchants, but Bombay’s history was different. It was a gift from the Portuguese, and for some years it looked as if the beneficiary, Charles II, would be only too pleased to give it back.
At sixty-seven, Alexander Forbes rode to war with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and over a decade afterwards was still a hunted man.
In 1688, King James II (who was also James VII of Scotland) unwillingly abdicated in favour of his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, Prince of Orange. Many who had sworn loyalty to James felt obliged to support the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and at the age of sixty-seven Alexander, 4th Lord Forbes, of Pitsligo in Aberdeenshire, found himself a fugitive from justice.
Japan’s first Shogun owed his life and his rise to power to a spider and two harmless doves.
This tale from Japanese history tells how Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), a contemporary of Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, rose to power and became the first of the Shoguns, military dictators who sidelined the Emperors and wielded supreme authority in Japan until 1868.
After King Edward the Confessor died childless, Europe’s princes stepped forward to claim the prize of England’s crown.
When King Edward the Confessor died in 1066, he left no clue as to who was to succeed him; or rather, he left too many. Within months, no fewer than four credible claimants had presented themselves, and two were formidable foreign lords, King Harald of Norway and William, Duke of Normandy.