The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Sir Charles Lucas looked back at the role of the Government, the military and private enterprise during three centuries of British adventure overseas.
To end the six-volume ‘Oxford Survey of the British Empire’, Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas looked back over the history of England’s overseas adventures from time of Queen Elizabeth I to the end of the Victorian Age. He concluded that there had been three quite distinct eras, and began by looking at the character of our enterprise during the upheavals of the seventeenth century.
An attempt to pay down the National Debt provoked a frenzy of financial speculation.
In 1711, a new joint stock company called the South Sea Company was announced, akin to the successful East India Company (1600) and Hudson’s Bay Company (1670). In 1719, it was awarded the job of paying off the national debt, promising investors eye-catching returns for upwards of £1000 per share, and sparking a frenzied optimism among investors that copycat companies were happy to share in.
A good knowledge of history is essential if we are to understand words such as liberty and democracy.
In his introduction to a series of studies on world history, John Buchan (1875-1940) recalled that the great historian Lord Acton had uncovered as many as two hundred definitions of ‘liberty.’ A study of history, said Buchan, is the only way to untangle these various definitions — as it is for other catchwords of our own day such as ‘democracy’ and ‘populism.’
Charles II was thinking about handing Bombay back to the Portuguese, when an Indian rebel stepped in.
The great cities of Madras and Calcutta sprang up from the energy and enterprise of British merchants, but Bombay’s history was different. It was a gift from the Portuguese, and for some years it looked as if the beneficiary, Charles II, would be only too pleased to give it back.
When Lord Cochrane went to a fancy dress ball in Valetta, his costume nearly got him killed.
In February 1801, Thomas Cochrane took HMS Speedy to Malta in search of supplies. Also on the island was a regiment of French Royalists, allies in the French Revolutionary Wars against the Government that had assassinated King Louis XVI; but allies or not, they found Lord Cochrane’s sense of humour a little too sans-culotte.
Between 1536 and 1539, King Henry VIII’s government divided up the Church’s property amongst themselves and left a trail of devastation.
In 1534, Henry VIII declared political and religious independence from Rome; but two of his closest friends, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, his Chancellor, defied him and were executed. What followed has left a more lasting and visible mark on the country than any other event in English history, and we must let Charles Dickens recount it at length.