The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
When King George IV tried to divorce Queen Caroline with maximum embarrassment, her barrister warned that two could play at that game.
IN 1820, George, Prince of Wales (who had been Regent for his father since 1811) became King George IV. At once he began divorce proceedings against his estranged wife Caroline, who was living in Italy, and boasted he would expose her private life to public ridicule. Defence counsel Henry Brougham delicately reminded the House of Lords that George had a secret that would rock the monarchy — were it made public.
Facing defeat at the General Election of 1812, Henry Brougham stood before the voters of Liverpool and made a spirited defence of liberty’s record.
In the 1812 General Election, Henry Brougham (pronounced ‘broom’) was one of two Whig candidates hoping to represent Liverpool. On the night before they went to polls, he addressed supporters with a last-minute plea to redouble their efforts, reminding them that Parliamentary democracy, the abolition of slavery and even peace in Europe all depended on their determination to keep fighting for liberty.
In 1840, Secretary at War Thomas Macaulay treated the Union Jack like a bully’s visiting card, but backbencher William Gladstone believed it deserved better.
In 1840, the British Government, outraged at Peking’s crackdown on the smuggling of opium by British merchants from Bengal, declared war on the Chinese Empire. On April 8th, William Gladstone rose in the Commons to denounce the Government’s belligerent attitude, deploring the execrable drug traffic and taking exception to the way Secretary-at-War Thomas Macaulay wrapped it in the Union Jack.
In 1840, the British Government declared war on the Chinese Empire over their harsh treatment of drug smugglers from Bengal.
The Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 were a miserably low point in British history, as Jawaharlal Nehru makes painfully clear in this passage. Opium grown in India was smuggled into China by British merchants to feed the addiction of millions of Chinese, until the problem became so bad that the Chinese imperial government was obliged to step up efforts against the smugglers.
Seventeenth-century poet and statesman Edmund Waller reflects on the benefits of advancing years.
A great deal is made today of the advantages of youth in benefiting society. Edmund Waller, a poet who sat in the Commons for over fifty years, was no less impressed by the advantages of old age — which not only renew our usefulness for this world, but also ready us for a better one.
Vice is a fact of life, wrote Pope, and God can even bring good out of it; but vice is never a virtue and in tackling vice together we make our society stronger.
In his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope has been reflecting on the part played in society by folly and vice. There is vice and virtue in every man, he says, and human life is like a canvas of blended light and shade: but if vice ought to excite pity and friendship rather than judgment and anger, that should not dupe us into thinking that society can survive if we turn vices into virtues, and virtue into a vice.