History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Leopold Mozart was eager to win the hearts of the English, and thought he knew just the way to do it.
In 1763-64, Leopold Mozart spent fifteen months in England with his daughter Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’) and son Wolfgang, who turned nine during the visit. Leopold was much taken with King George III and Queen Charlotte, who treated the Mozarts like family, and he told his friend Johann Lorenz von Hagenauer, an Austrian businessman, that he was eager to win the affection of the English people too.
French economist Jean-Baptiste Say recalls a time when an ounce of prevention might have saved many pounds of cure.
Jean-Baptiste Say was a French businessman and economist, an authority on Adam Smith and champion of free markets who in 1804 resigned in protest from Napoleon’s dirigiste government. He told the following story to show that ‘economy is inconsistent with disorder’.
Former slave Ignatius Sancho complained that Britain was denying to Africa the free trade and Christian principles she so badly needed.
In 1778, Ignatius Sancho (1729-1782) wrote a letter to Jack Wingrave, son of his friend John, a London bookseller. Jack’s experiences in Bombay had prejudiced him against the locals, but Sancho reminded him that Britain had promised her colonies free trade and Christian principles, and given them neither.
In 1775, London’s high-handed exploitation of her colonies for tax revenue began to look like a very expensive mistake.
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) saw thirteen British colonies in North America win independence as the United States of America. For too long, they had sweated in a wretched trade zone created to fill London’s Treasury with gold and line the pockets of her cronies, and it was time for it to stop.
John, Duke of Montagu, that irrepressible prankster, identified a sad-faced soldier in the Mall as the perfect mark.
John, Duke of Montagu (1690-1749), was notorious for his practical joking. This might be little more than squirting people with water or putting itching powder in the guest bed, but sometimes it took on a grander conception.
Horace Walpole, a loyal patron of Vauxhall pleasure gardens, visits newly-opened rival Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.
Richard, Viscount Ranelagh, opened the formal gardens of his house next to the Chelsea Hospital to the public in 1742. Horace Walpole was there the very next evening, but told his friend Horace Mann that he still preferred the older (and more rumbustious) pleasure gardens at Vauxhall.