469
After two punishing years rising to the top of the East India Company’s armed forces in India, Robert Clive could not spare the time to go courting.
By the end of March 1752, Robert Clive was lonely and exhausted. He had almost single-handedly relieved the fortress at Arcot from a French siege, and then captured two French forts at the head of a band of five hundred raw recruits no other officer would agree to command. As he listened to his friend Edmund Maskelyne reading snatches of his letters from home, a resolution formed in his breast.
Picture: By Nathaniel Dance-Holland (1735-1811), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted March 25 2021
470
A mean-spirited dog denies to others what he has no appetite for himself.
Lucian of Samosata (?125-180+) left us the earliest known reference to the fable of the dog in the manger, when he told a barely literate bibliophile who never lent out his books that “you neither eat the corn yourself, nor give the horse a chance”. Here is how Roger L’Estrange told the tale in the days of Charles II.
Picture: Attributed to Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873), from the National Trust via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted March 24 2021
471
Highwayman Claude Du Vall robbed a carriage on Hampstead Heath in the most courteous manner imaginable.
Claude Du Vall (1643-1670) was brought over to England by Royalist exiles shortly after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, as a stable-hand. He rose to footman under Charles Stewart, 3rd Duke of Richmond, but fell into debt through drinking, and embarked on a new career as a highwayman. Yet Du Vall was ever a gentleman, and in all the carriages he robbed, he apparently never shot anyone...
Picture: By William Powell Frith (1819-1909), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain. . Source.
Posted March 22 2021
472
It was not just his own family that wanted to know what Samuel Crompton was doing by night in his quaint Bolton workshop.
In 1779 Samuel Crompton, who came from a family of Bolton weavers, developed the ‘spinning mule’ — so called because it was a hybrid of two existing machines for spinning cotton thread, the spinning jenny and the waterframe. He kept his invention secret, but the quantities of superfine yarn he released onto the local market excited the envy, curiosity and resourcefulness of his rivals.
Picture: © Alexander P. Kapp, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted March 22 2021
473
During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Horatio Nelson decided it was time to turn a blind eye.
Horatio Nelson lost his right eye in battle off Corsica in 1793, and his right arm at Tenerife in 1797. Undeterred, and now a Rear Admiral, he was in the line of fire again at Copenhagen on April 2nd, 1801: a vital action, as Denmark was hampering England’s efforts to fend off invasion from Napoleon’s France. By lunchtime his Commander-in-chief Sir Hyde Parker, some way behind, was getting anxious.
Picture: From Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted March 20 2021
474
Cuthbert, struck down by plague, was vexed to find that his brethren had been praying for him all the previous night.
When the monastery at Ripon was founded in 661, Cuthbert served there under Abbot Eata. Eata clung loyally to a peculiar and not very accurate way of dating Easter borrowed from Ireland, and three years later King Oswy, who preferred the calendar used in Canterbury, Rome and the East, appointed Wilfrid in Eata’s stead. Cuthbert returned to the Abbey at Melrose in the Scottish borders.
Picture: © David Dixon, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted March 19 2021