The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
In 1680, Samuel Pepys sat down with Charles II to record how, many years before, a bold double-bluff saved the King from Cromwell’s men.
Following defeat at Worcester on September 3rd, 1651, King Charles II (who was just twenty-one at the time) reluctantly fled to France, stumbling in disguise towards the south coast, never more than a step ahead of Cromwell’s men. In 1680, the King looked back in the company of Samuel Pepys on those anxious days, and what happened one famous night at Boscobel House in Shropshire.
During his tour of England in 1782, Karl Philipp Moritz dropped in on the House of Commons, and thought the histrionics in the Chamber better than any play.
In 1782, German tourist Karl Philipp Moritz visited the Commons chamber, and heard Viscount Feilding rebuke Charles Fox, the Foreign Secretary, for wanting to make war hero Admiral Rodney a Lord: had the Rt Hon. Gentleman not recently declared Rodney’s second-in-command, Admiral Hood, unworthy even of a seat in the Commons? Fox’s despatch-box-thumping reply whetted Moritz’s appetite for more.
In the opening lines of The Cuckoo Clock, Mrs Molesworth paints a word-picture of a house so old that Time itself seemed to have stopped.
The Cuckoo Clock (1877), a children’s story by Mrs Mary Louisa Molesworth (published under the pen-name of Ennis Graham), tells of a little girl named Griselda who is brought to live with her two aunts. There she becomes fascinated by a cuckoo clock upon which the happiness of the timeless old house is said to depend, and which proves to be a very unusual cuckoo clock indeed.
Lord Cromer, a former Consul-General of Egypt, expressed his frustration at politicians who set too much store by Foreign Office briefings.
In an Introduction to Sir Sidney Low’s study of Egypt in Transition (1914), Lord Cromer (1841-1917), former Consul-General of Egypt, humbly recalled how momentous decisions were taken by men who knew next to nothing about the peoples and societies they were dealing with. But more dangerous by far were the decisions taken by men who had been thoroughly briefed by the Foreign Office.
When it opened in 1901, the Uganda Railway still wasn’t in Uganda, and Westminster’s MPs were still debating whether or not to build it.
Two years after Uganda became a British Protectorate in 1894, work began at Mombasa in British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) on a railway inland to Uganda. Thanks to African terrain and British bureaucracy, when Winston Churchill published the following assessment of it in 1908 the meandering line terminated at Kisumu, 660 route-miles away but still short of the Ugandan border.
Almost nine years after Oliver Cromwell’s army drove him from England, King Charles II returned at their invitation, and John Evelyn was there to see it.
On May 29th, 1660, King Charles II rode into London, nine years after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester and exile to the Continent. The King’s return was witnessed by diarist John Evelyn, who had fought for the Royalist cause. He too had endured exile, in France and in Italy, and since his return to London had chafed under Cromwell’s self-righteous nanny state.