History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
According to Kipling, the British Empire was the last resort of Englishmen who could not stand conditions at home.
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
The study of history can distract us from pressing modern problems, but failing to study it is much worse.
John Buchan — novelist, wartime spymaster, and Governor-general of Canada — was also a historian in his own right, and the editor-in-chief of the multi-volume Nations of Today just after the Great War. In his introduction, Buchan picked up on George Santayana’s famous warning that ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’.
In 664, a council at Whitby decided to align the traditions of the Northumbrian Church with those of Rome and Constantinople.
In 634, monk Aidan established a monastery on the ‘holy island’ of Lindisfarne in Northumbria. Aidan taught King Oswiu’s chaplains the traditions of the monastery founded by Columba, an Irishman, on Iona in western Scotland; but Oswiu’s Queen came from Kent, and her chaplains kept the Roman ways brought by St Augustine to Canterbury. At last, Oswiu could stand the bickering no more.
The night before the Comte de Lavalette was to be executed, his wife Émilie came to visit him with a proposal that left him speechless.
Antoine, Comte de Lavalette, had been Napoleon’s Adjutant, and his wife Émilie had been maid of honour to Josephine. After Napoleon’s fall, Antoine was arrested by the Ultra-Royalists and on November 21st, 1815, sentenced to death. He realised that hopes of a reprieve were an illusion when a female warder burst into his room weeping and kissed his Legion d’Honneur medal. Émilie had already reached the same melancholy conclusion.
In the family of Samuel Pepys, the Feast of the Epiphany was kept with music, cake and quaint traditions.
Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Epiphany, is kept on January 6th each year and marks the end of the Christmas season. Samuel Pepys, never one to miss the opportunity for a glass of good cheer and some venison pasty, took care to make a family party of it — even if his duties as paymaster for the Treasury meant a slow start to the festivities.
In 1720, Welsh promoter William Howell opened a pleasure garden at Belsize House, but the pleasures drew the magistrates’ frowns.
In 1722, the pleasure gardens at Belsize House near Hampstead were raided by constables on the orders of horrified magistrates, as being a den of gambling, lewdness and riot. It had all started innocently enough two years earlier, after an enterprising Welshman named William Howell obtained a lease on the stately house and gardens.