French Revolution
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘French Revolution’
Marguerite, Lady Blakeney, is powerless to intervene as her husband Sir Percy walks into a trap.
Marguerite St Just, now Lady Blakeney, has followed her husband Sir Percy to France after discovering that that amiable idiot is none other than the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel, responsible for saving so many from the guillotine — including, she hopes, her brother Armand. Concealed behind a curtain in a dirty Calais café, she watches in horror as Citizen Chauvelin draws his net tight around the heedless aristocrat.
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.
Edmund Burke warned that the French Revolution could have a devastating effect on British and European culture.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) regarded the fates of England and France as closely intertwined, and consequently the catastrophic events of the French Revolution in 1789 made him afraid for England. If France falls into tyranny and moral decline, he warned, it will be that much harder for England to resist going the same way.
Young Thomas Cochrane learned early on that for a sailor, making a pet of a parrot could be surprisingly hazardous.
In 1793, the new French Republic declared war on Britain, and the Admiralty sent HMS ‘Hind’ to Norway to flush out any French privateers preying on our Baltic trade. Captain Alexander Cochrane’s crew included first lieutenant Jack Larmour, and also our author, the captain’s nephew Thomas, then a seventeen-year-old midshipman.
The simple folk of Brittany know what it means when a nobleman calls himself godfather to an unknown infant.
Rafael Sabatini’s ‘Scaramouche’ is the tale of Andre-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer of no great convictions who becomes caught up in the French Revolution of 1789 through loyalty to a friend. The novel opens by placing Moreau against his family background — a difficult matter, though Breton gossip thinks it has got it all worked out.
William Pitt complained that European politics offers only a choice of inhospitable extremes.
In 1793, Prime Minister William Pitt spoke about the French Revolution and the recent assassination of King Louis XVI. He reminded the country how fortunate Britain was to possess a Constitution designed to prevent the country lurching from one extreme politics to another.