British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
On realising that he had the edge on his rivals, music publisher John Brand moved quickly to secure one of Haydn’s peerless Quartets.
A contributor calling himself ‘A Constant Reader’ submitted this story to the Musical World in 1836. He declared that he could vouch for the truth of it, as he had heard it from ‘the originator,’ music publisher John Bland (1750-1840), who was still alive at the time and in a position to refute it. He never did, and the story found its way into Carl Ferdinand Pohl’s influential biography and thence into musical folkore.
Aeneas Anderson, who accompanied Lord Macartney on Britain’s first embassy to China, shared a tale illustrating the Qianlong Emperor’s notion of fair play.
In 1792-93, George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney, led England’s first embassy to China. The Emperor was obstructive throughout and haughtily declined King George III’s invitation to trade. ‘We entered Pekin like paupers’ wrote Macartney’s valet, Aeneas Anderson; ‘we remained in it like prisoners; and we quitted it like vagrants.’ But his farewell to his readers was intended to leave a favourable impression.
Kings of Norway educated in England drew on the experience of English clergy to establish Christianity in their own land.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Norway’s Christian kings had close ties to Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, to Novgorod and Kiev, the chief cities of Rus’, and above all to England. The authorities in Rome chafed at it, wanting Norway to look to Germany and France instead; but for over two hundred years the bond with England was too strong to break.
Richard Price argued that the true patriot does not scold other countries for being worse than his own; he inspires his own country to be better than it is.
In 1789, Non-conformist minister Richard Price preached a sermon urging fellow Englishmen to welcome the stirring events in Paris on July 14th that year. Only John Bull’s patriotic prejudice, he said, prevented him from admitting that what was happening was a mirror of our own Glorious Revolution of 1689, and he enlarged on what a more generous love of country, a Christian duty, should look like.
Edmund Burke expressed his frustration at the arrogance of politicians who have no regard for our Constitutional heritage.
As France descended into chaos and bloodshed in the unhappy revolution of 1789, Edmund Burke urged his fellow MPs to examine their responsibilities. An English statesman is entrusted by the People with helping them to make their country better, and they want neither the statesman who is too timid to change anything, nor the statesman who is so arrogant as to smash everything up.
Ann Sancho would be in better health, said her husband, if she did not worry quite so much about him.
Several years after his death, some letters of Ignatius Sancho, a grocer trading from King Charles Street in London and a former slave, were presented to the public in the hope of demonstrating that he was a writer quite as accomplished as many a native English literary man. In this extract, dated October 24th, 1777, he talks (as he often does) about his wife Ann.