History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Politicians who demand that everyone in the country unite behind their vision of society are standing in the way of real progress.
In the 1680s, many feared that after Charles II died his brother James would take England and Scotland into a European league of Roman Catholic kingdoms, led by Louis XIV of France. Algernon Sidney could not see how countries and peoples so diverse could possibly require the same laws, or how anyone would think such hidebound uniformity could lead to progress.
Edward III enticed over-regulated Dutch textile workers across the Channel with the promise of English beef and English beauties.
In the days of Edward III (1327-1377), English wool was the finest in Europe; but as we knew no more what to do with our wool (wrote Thomas Fuller) than the sheep that wear it, we exported it raw to the Continent and imported the finished cloth at a high price. Lesser men might have imposed taxes, subsidies or price controls to balance the economy, but Edward had a much better idea: some healthy competition.
Henry VII made sure that he had eyes and ears wherever they were needed to put an end to thirty years of political conspiracy.
King Henry VII, so Sir Francis Bacon tells us, aspired to be held in awe by his subjects, rather than in love. To this end he employed spies not only in the courts of his European neighbours but also in England, and kept abreast of all that was going in his own court by compiling private notebooks in which the words and deeds of every courtier were carefully recorded.
In the days of Henry VIII, eminent Scottish historian John Major looked back to the reign of Richard the Lionheart and sketched the character of legendary outlaw Robin Hood.
In his Historia Majoris Britanniæ (1521), the eminent Scottish historian John Major (1467-1550) reflected at length on the life of King Richard I. Then all of a sudden he began to speak of Robin Hood (or Robert, as he called him), thus becoming the earliest authority we have for the tradition that Robin was a contemporary of Richard and John.
King Henry VIII was riding out with Queen Catherine one May Day, when they found themselves waylaid by Robin Hood and two hundred archers.
At the close of the reign of Elizabeth I, historian John Stow (1525?-1605) looked back over the May Day celebrations in the time of her father Henry VIII. Those were the early, happier years (1515 by Stow’s reckoning) when Henry still rode out with his Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon, and before the country was thrown into turmoil and bloodshed by the English Reformation.
Sir Richard Steele takes up arms against the kind of wit who thinks you can be as nasty as you like provided you make people laugh.
One day, a shy young man addressed a stranger and was handed a withering put-down. A thoughtless onlooker was highly amused, but Richard Steele was full of righteous indignation. You may mock mankind, he said, but not men; never take aim at the weak, and never be witty in anger. And he fell to musing on what makes a good satirist.