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Richard I thought a veteran Crusader and conqueror of Saladin could handle a few French peasants.
Richard the ‘Lionheart’ is best remembered today as the King of England during the time of Robin Hood, an association made for us by Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Ivanhoe’. He was an inspiring general in the Third Crusade, courageous and ruthless, but his death was testimony to the caprices of Fortune.
Jacques Cartier made history and made friends along the St Lawrence, but then threw all that goodwill away.
In the Spring of 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St Lawrence River (so he named it) to Stadacona, near what would soon after become Quebec, and then further upriver to Hochelaga, which he named Montreal. Everything went well until winter came, for which the French were hopelessly unprepared.
William the Conqueror’s chaplain used to tell this story to those who doubted his master’s claim to the English crown.
In 1063, against the advice of King Edward the Confessor, Harold, son of Earl Godwin, crossed the Channel to Normandy. There, young Duke William welcomed him with a degree of warmth that was faintly troubling. William made of Harold his especial friend, and shared with him his ambition to be named Edward’s heir. Would Harold help him? William asked, and Harold mumbled something vague.
Benjamin Disraeli revealed the secret behind holding one’s place at the top of Parisian society.
In February 1860 the new Cobden-Chevalier treaty was announced, a breakthrough free-trade deal with France, and a new era in Anglo-French relations. An especially vocal opponent of it was MP and novelist Benjamin Disraeli; so when John Bright rose in the Commons and read aloud this passage from Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), he drew a good deal of laughter.
Whenever Charles Dickens felt his exhausting workload was starting to take its toll, he knew just what to do.
Charles Dickens corresponded regularly with a Swiss friend whom he had met in Lausanne, a M. de Cerjat. In one of his letters, written from his home near Rochester in Kent, Dickens shared with his friend the secret of his remarkably industrious working life — frequent trips to France.
The diplomat’s task is to see the best in other peoples, not to scold them for their failings.
François de Callières, a diplomat in the service of King Louis XIV of France, believed that those posted to overseas embassies should not only show but feel respect for their host country. Given the way that all of us now live in one another’s pockets through the internet, and our much-vaunted democratic government, everyone should heed his advice, for we are all diplomats now.
The night before the Comte de Lavalette was to be executed, his wife Émilie came to visit him with a proposal that left him speechless.
Antoine, Comte de Lavalette, had been Napoleon’s Adjutant, and his wife Émilie had been maid of honour to Josephine. After Napoleon’s fall, Antoine was arrested by the Ultra-Royalists and on November 21st, 1815, sentenced to death. He realised that hopes of a reprieve were an illusion when a female warder burst into his room weeping and kissed his Legion d’Honneur medal. Émilie had already reached the same melancholy conclusion.