The Regency
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The Regency’
Michael Faraday’s tour of Europe included a ‘picturesque’ multicultural event on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
In November 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte, smarting from his humiliating Retreat from Moscow, was waging war across Europe. This did not stop Sir Humphry Davy (who called him ‘the Corsican robber’) going to Paris to receive the Napoleon Prize, or young Michael Faraday from going with him, and afterwards they went on to the Kingdom of Naples, then under French control.
Some likened tax-and-spend to a refreshing shower of rain, but for William Cobbett the rain wasn’t falling mainly on the plain man.
William Cobbett castigated the Government for overtaxing employers, and then congratulating themselves on handing out a little welfare to the underpaid and unemployed while pocketing the difference. Better, Cobbett said, to stop the job-killing taxes, so the working man can have a fair crack at dignified independence.
Oldham’s firebrand MP William Cobbett rips into the the City of London for blocking economic and political progress in India.
In 1813, the East India Company held a Government-sponsored monopoly over all trade between London and her colonies, but a history of scandals and mismanagement led to calls for free trade. The City of London objected strongly in a Commons debate in January 1813, and William Cobbett MP could hardly believe his ears.
Napoleon’s six-year-long campaign (1808-1814) to bring Spain and Portugal into his united Europe was frustrated by Arthur Wellesley.
Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of the French in 1804, with the aim of bringing order to the chaos of a disunited Europe through his ‘Napoleonic Code.’ Spain initially welcomed Napoleon’s vision, but when his true ambitions became clear the Spanish appealed for help from Napoleon’s most powerful enemy: the United Kingdom.
For two centuries, human traffickers had stolen English men, women and children for the slave-markets of the Arab world.
In the Barbary states of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli in north Africa, part of the Ottoman Empire, slavery was the norm, and – much as the comforting breadth of the Atlantic did for English slave-owners – the use of European Christians rather than their own brethren allowed Muslims to ease their conscience.
The engineer put his own life on the line for the safety of his fellow-workers in the coal industry.
Cornish Professor of Chemistry and multi-award-winning scientist Sir Humphrey Davy invented a safety-lamp for mines in 1815; but up in Newcastle, colliery employee George (‘Geordie’) Stephenson (1781-1848) was already working on his own design – as if his life depended on it.