History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
In 917, King Edward embarked on a swashbuckling tour of the midlands, and brought their towns under one crown for the first time in five hundred years.
In 917, King Edward the Elder, successor of Alfred, King of Wessex, summoned his royal troops and began a campaign to secure the loyalty of towns beyond his father’s realm, many of which had long been under Viking control. He broke first the power of Northampton and Huntingdon, followed by Colchester and Cambridge; and then it seemed as if all England opened up before him, flower-like.
The tighter the US Government’s stranglehold on dissent grew, the harder Daniel Webster fought for freedom of speech.
In 1814, the USA was still embroiled in the War of 1812 with Great Britain. Many citizens of east coast States were dismayed, holding that the war was wrecking the economy for no demonstrable gain. President James Madison’s pro-France hawks in Washington responded by trying to silence critics as traitors, but young Daniel Webster, recently elected to Congress as Member for New Hampshire, was defiant.
Edmund Burke told the House of Commons that the American colonies’ refusal to be dictated to by Westminster was the very spirit that had made the Empire great.
In 1766, Parliament truculently reasserted the right to tax and regulate Britain’s thirteen American colonies. The Americans were allowed no MPs in the Commons, but they had many friends, and barely a month before those first shots rang out in Lexington on April 19th, 1775, Edmund Burke warned the Government not to try to crush the manly English spirit that made Americans so independent.
Classical Greece has been an inspiration to every generation because she stands for the triumph of liberty and reason over prejudice and power.
In 1808, William Mitford (1744-1827) published a History of Greece, of which Thomas Macaulay was far from uncritical; but it prompted him to reflect on the hold that classical Greece continues to exercise over us all. We speak of it mostly in terms of fine buildings and grand oratory, of places of learning or gatherings at Court, but the real glory of Athens, said Macaulay, does not lie there.
The supreme arts and literature of ancient Athens all sprang from the State’s refusal to interfere in the life of the citizen.
In 1808, William Mitford (1744-1827) published a History of Greece to the death of Alexander in 327 BC. A recurrent theme of his narrative was a horror of the kind of popular politics for which Athens is famous, and his conviction that stability comes from a close-knit group of elder statesmen keeping the country on a tight rein. Macaulay completely disagreed.
John Bright told his Birmingham constituents that if Britain was indeed a great nation, it was because her public was contented and not because her empire was wide.
After John Bright MP criticised British imperial policy in India, saying it was too much about the glories of empire and too little about the condition of the people, a Calcutta newspaper scolded him and reminded him solemnly of the greatness of Rome. But Bright was unrepentant, and speaking to his constituents in Birmingham on October 29th, 1858, he brought his lesson closer to home.