Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
James calls Fr Huddleston to his brother’s deathbed, ready for a most delicate task.
As King, Charles II was officially the Head of the Church of England, an ever-so-modern, Protestant church. But like his father before him, and his brother James, his sympathies lay with the older Roman ways, and in 1685, lying in his bed at Whitehall Palace and facing his last hours on earth, he had an agonising decision to make.
The fate of the British army hung by a thread in May 1940, but ships large and small, military and civilian, came to the rescue.
Just months into the Second World War, the bulk of the British army was holed up in Dunkirk in May 1940 with nowhere to run. In one of the great what-ifs of history, Adolf Hitler hesitated, handing the Royal Navy a week in which to mount a famous rescue mission.
Loyal subjects of King James II continued to fight his corner after he, and any real hope of success, had gone.
The ‘Jacobites’ were loyal to King James II (who was also James VII of Scotland), the Roman Catholic king deposed by the English Parliament in 1688. James took refuge with Louis XIV in France, who saw restoring a grateful James to the English throne as a way to gain control of the world’s most powerful navy.
Queen Victoria assured her subjects that there were no second-class citizens in her eyes.
After the Indian Mutiny in 1857, some Indians were concerned that Britain intended to force them to convert to Christianity. However, Victoria reassured them that (in contrast to some Indian religions and laws) forcible conversion and ‘second-class citizen’ are both concepts alien to the British constitution.
Abdul Karim’s rapid rise in Victoria’s household made him enemies.
When Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901) acquired a motherly affection for a lowly Indian clerk, her servants and her ministers were united in their resentment. But for a lonely widow weary of the flattery of courtiers and fascinated by the ‘jewel’ in Britain’s crown, Abdul Karim was a godsend.
King Philip V of Spain sent a second Spanish Armada against Britain, but it suffered much the same fate as the first.
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forbade Philip V of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV of France, to claim the French throne. But his chief minister, Italian cardinal Giulio Alberoni, egged him on, triggering the ‘War of the Quadruple Alliance’.