History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
A sportsman and an officer lays a wager that he can make a trigger-happy Irishman go barefoot in public.
It is a familiar scene: the legendary gunslinger in the saloon, the young upstart ragging on him, and a table of fellow-gamblers urging the reckless boy to think better of it. In this case however, it all took place in a coffee-house in Georgian London, and the upstart was a middle-order batsman for the MCC.
With the Lambert Simnel affair not yet forgotten, another boy claims to be the rightful King of England.
After Henry Tudor seized the crown in 1485, he could take some comfort in the fact that his most credible rivals, Edward IV’s sons Edward and Richard, had been murdered by their uncle Richard III. But as their fate was only a rumour, they became magnets for impostors, first Lambert Simnel in 1487, and in 1491 the rather more dangerous Perkin Warbeck.
While the besieged citizens of Novgorod huddled for protection in the city gaol, Archbishop John remained in his cathedral to pray.
After the death of his father Yuri Dolgoruky, Prince of Kiev, in 1157, Andrey Bogolubsky, Prince of Vladimir, Rostov and Suzdal, began to pursue his dream of ruling all Rus’. He drove Prince Mstislav II from Kiev in 1169, and in February 1170 a little matter of unpaid tribute gave him an excuse to besiege Mstislav’s son Roman in the historic city of Veliky Novgorod.
The first battle of the English Civil War was a cautious affair, but rumours persisted that it went on long after it had finished.
The Battle of Edgehill in Warwickshire on October 23rd, 1642, marked the opening exchanges in the English Civil War. It was indecisive, and neither side could have foreseen the military coup in December 1648 that would lead so quickly to a brief Republic. Indeed, following the skirmish King Charles was more interested in paranormal activity.
It is one of the world’s most recognisable works of art, and a symbol of God’s blessing on all Christian Rus’.
The Theotokos of Vladimir is an icon of Mary embracing her child Jesus, which came to Kiev from Constantinople in the 1130s. Not only has it become one of the world’s most recognisable works of sacred art, but on several occasions it has been credited with delivering the Christians of Rus’ from seemingly inevitable disaster.
A fiery fanatic wins support for the suppression of Christianity in its very cradle.
The Apostle St Paul had been given the name Saul by his parents, after the first King of Israel, but he changed it to Paul in honour of his Roman patron Sergius Paulus, a Proconsul of Cyprus, whom Saul brought to Christianity. Saul’s own conversion, in about AD 33 to 36, had been altogether more dramatic.