Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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193

The Doom of the Danaides

By day Danaus had to watch his fifty unhappy daughters marry their fifty cruel cousins, but the wedding night was yet to come.

The fifty daughters of Danaus, a mythical ruler dwelling on the banks of the River Nile, are chiefly remembered for murdering all but one of their fifty husbands on their wedding night, and for the hopeless doom to which the stern rulers of Hades put them. And yet what mortal, knowing the girls’ whole story, could not feel pity for them?

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Picture: © kladcat, via Penn Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

194

The Siege of Saint-James

Henry VI’s campaign to confirm himself as King of France looked to be in trouble after the Duke of Brittany switched sides.

In 1425, England’s Henry VI and France’s Charles VII were still fighting the Hundred Years’ War for the French crown. That October, John V, Duke of Brittany followed his brother Arthur’s example and backed Charles. The Earl of Salisbury and other English generals replied with raids on Brittany from their base at Saint-James in Normandy, and by February, Arthur could see that brother John needed help.

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Picture: © Voshubert65, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

195

George VI to Elizabeth II

The final part of this series is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II, the country’s longest-serving monarch and arguably the most popular in our history.

Below is a brief overview of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the country’s longest-serving monarch and one of the most popular in our history.

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Picture: By Bill Ingalls, NASA, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

196

Fuel of Freedom

Victorian economist Alfred Marshall argued that it was no accident that free societies and coal-powered industries are found together.

In 1878, Alfred Marshall, one of the most influential British economists of his day, looked back over a hundred years of social progress. For some, the French Revolution (1789) was the key, for some the Communist Manifesto (1848). But Marshall believed that what had liberated the people and raised their standard of living to new heights was not political idealism, but coal and steam.

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

197

A Tail of Woe

Reynard the Fox was mortified to hear his efforts to rescue Isegrim’s wife from a frozen lake had been misinterpreted.

In his landmark 1481 translation of political satire ‘Reynard the Fox’, William Caxton told how the animals gathered at Stade near Hamburg to charge Reynard with a catalogue of shocking crimes, and how the wily Fox emerged without a stain on his character. The allegation underpinning the whole story was that Reynard had tried to force his attentions on Erswynd, wife of Isegrim the Wolf.

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Picture: © Peter Trimming, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

198

‘If They Can Stand It I Can’

However loud his critics shouted their disapproval, Abraham Lincoln would neither deprive them of free speech nor change his opinions.

In 1864, as the American Civil War progressed, talk in Washington had turned to how rebellious Confederate States ought to be handled should the Union win. President Lincoln’s appeals for reconciliation were brushed aside by supporters of the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, a cock-a-doodle-do of victory designed to give Washington sweeping powers.

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Picture: Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Source.