Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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649

A Dream of Independence

In 1877, John Bright told a meeting of the Manchester India Association that he had wanted to put India on the path to independence nearly twenty years before.

In 1858, government of India’s various Presidencies in Madras, Bombay, Bengal and other centres was taken out of the hands of the East India Company and vested in the Crown — or as John Bright put it, ‘a Governor-General and half-a-dozen eminent civilians in the city of Calcutta.’ Nineteen years later, he told a meeting in Manchester that he had wanted it done very differently.

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Picture: Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.

650

The Repeal of the Corn Laws

Richard Cobden realised that John Bright, overcome with grief after seeing his young wife die, needed something worthwhile to live for.

The Corn Laws of 1815, designed to protect English farmers from overseas competition, drove up the price of basic foods and plunged working families into poverty. John Bright, then working in his father’s Rochdale mill, joined Richard Cobden’s repeal campaign on September 10th, 1841, as he sat mourning his young wife Elizabeth, ‘lying still and cold in the chamber above us’.

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Picture: Photo by Elliott and Fry, from the National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

651

St Margaret of Scotland

When Malcolm III, King of Scots, met Princess Margaret of Wessex, he knew at once that he had found a woman capable of setting an example to a whole nation.

Following the Norman Invasion in 1066, Prince Edgar, whose claim to the throne was at least as strong as William of Normandy’s, allied with King Sweyn II of Denmark (who also had a decent claim) to unseat William. However, the crafty William bought Sweyn off at the last moment, leaving Edgar and his sisters little option but to flee into Scotland.

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Picture: By William Hole (1846-1917), via the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

652

Deep River

Berwick Sayers tells how his friend, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, set out on his last voyage.

Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him his wife Jessie and two children, and a treasury of tuneful and often innovative music that is beginning to be appreciated again today. A close family friend, Berwick Sayers, tells of his last hours.

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Picture: © Matt Brown, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

653

The Battle of Gettysburg

Two years into the American Civil War, the Union army responded to a dispiriting defeat at Chancellorsville with a decisive and historic victory at Gettysburg.

The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. Yet it came hard on the heels of a bruising defeat at the hands of General Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville, and the great issues that hung upon the American Civil War were, for a few days, very much in the balance.

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Picture: © Steven C. Berger, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

654

The Gettysburg Address

Following a decisive victory in the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln urged his supporters to make sure that liberty’s advantage was not squandered.

The Battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. On November 19th, US President Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the battlefield cemetery. He rightly guessed that the battle had turned the American Civil War; but in thinking that ‘the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here’ he was touchingly mistaken.

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Picture: © Henry Hartley, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.