The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The politicians of Novgorod, angry at Moscow’s interference, thought they would teach her a lesson by selling out to Poland.
In 1471, even as England was being torn apart by the Wars of the Roses, the little republic of Novgorod was rent by its own bitter divisions. The meddling of upstart Moscow in their historic city had become insupportable, and many in the Veche, Novgorod’s civic Council, cried that independence could be achieved only by submission to the King of Poland.
Back in the days of the prophet Samuel, so the story goes, a grandson of Trojan hero Aeneas brought civilisation to the British Isles.
Geoffrey of Monmouth (?-1155) was residing in Oxford when, in the 1130s, he wrote his majestic History of the Kings of Britain, in which he entrances us with tales of Merlin and Arthur. He also seized on a throwaway remark in the ninth-century chronicle History of the Britons, that ‘The island of Britain derives its name from Brutus, a Roman consul’, to romance the following tale.
A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
Harrison Weir was a Victorian artist, engraver and illustrator who specialised in drawing animals, especially songbirds. He was also mad about cats (in 1871 he organised the world’s first cat show) and assumed, naturally enough, that his two passions were incompatible. He discovered, however, that he could not have been more wrong.
Edmund Burke tore into the directors of the East India Company, accusing them of doing less for the country than India’s mediaeval conquerors.
In 1783, Edmund Burke urged the House of Commons to strip the East India Company of its administration of India, arguing that the Mughal Emperors and other foreign conquerors had done more for the people than the Company seemed likely to do. His blistering attack on the Company’s record repays reading, as it applies just as well to modern aid programmes, interventions and regime changes.
After the East India Company quieted the Maratha Confederacy in 1805, Harsukh Rai looked forward to a new era of good government.
After the Second Maratha War (1803-1805), the East India Company had complete control over the Maratha Confederacy, an alliance of kingdoms in modern-day Maharashtra. Much has since been written in criticism of the English in India, but little of it cuts to the heart, or (as he might put it) mantles the English cheek with the blush of shame, quite like Harsukh Rai’s guileless optimism.
After its prime minister signed the Maratha Confederacy over to the East India Company, the member states rose up in a body.
In 1796, Baji Rao II became Peshwa (prime Minister) of the Maratha Confederacy. When Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, one of the Confederacy’s four kingdoms, learnt that Baji Rao was behind the murder of a relative, he thrashed him at the Battle of Poona in 1802; but Baji Rao exacted spectacular retribution by signing the whole Maratha territory over to the East India Company. Holkar did not leave it there.