History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Kings of Norway educated in England drew on the experience of English clergy to establish Christianity in their own land.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Norway’s Christian kings had close ties to Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, to Novgorod and Kiev, the chief cities of Rus’, and above all to England. The authorities in Rome chafed at it, wanting Norway to look to Germany and France instead; but for over two hundred years the bond with England was too strong to break.
Richard Price argued that the true patriot does not scold other countries for being worse than his own; he inspires his own country to be better than it is.
In 1789, Non-conformist minister Richard Price preached a sermon urging fellow Englishmen to welcome the stirring events in Paris on July 14th that year. Only John Bull’s patriotic prejudice, he said, prevented him from admitting that what was happening was a mirror of our own Glorious Revolution of 1689, and he enlarged on what a more generous love of country, a Christian duty, should look like.
Edmund Burke expressed his frustration at the arrogance of politicians who have no regard for our Constitutional heritage.
As France descended into chaos and bloodshed in the unhappy revolution of 1789, Edmund Burke urged his fellow MPs to examine their responsibilities. An English statesman is entrusted by the People with helping them to make their country better, and they want neither the statesman who is too timid to change anything, nor the statesman who is so arrogant as to smash everything up.
French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the USA in the 1830s, and found a degree of contentment that he rarely found in Europe.
Alexis De Tocqueville went to the USA in 1831, to see for himself how the former colony’s experiment in Constitutional liberty, now almost fifty years old, was working out. His own experience in Europe was that no government could hold back the destructive forces of democracy once they had been unleashed, but he found that in America some of those forces were kept under restraints stronger than any law.
In 1932, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession, the Jam Sahib brought vanished days back to Nawanagar with a lavish hand.
In 1932, Colonel His Highness Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji, Jam Sahib of Nawanagar (Jamnagar), celebrated his Silver Jubilee. Lord Irwin, the outgoing Viceroy, had pushed hard for democracy and efficiency, and the Jam Sahib had overseen the development of a modern and prosperous State. But the man remembered by English cricket fans as the swashbuckling ‘Ranji’ showed he was an Indian prince too.
In the year that Ranjitsinhji put aside his bat to concentrate on being the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, journalist A. G. Gardiner looked back on his dazzling career.
In 1907, Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji Jadeja (1872-1933) triumphantly ascended the throne of Nawanagar (Jamnagar) in India, twenty-three years after the bitter disappointment of seeing a rival displace him. It was not part-time work, so in 1912 Ranji called ‘stumps’ on his spectacular career in English cricket, and A. G. Gardiner of ‘The Star’ bade him an affectionate farewell.