Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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559

A Nation of Shopkeepers

The great French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte protested that in calling England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ he had paid us a compliment.

‘The English are a nation of shopkeepers’ intoned Napoleon Bonaparte, offending many English politicians including Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822. But as the great General, by now exiled on the island of St Helena, told his personal physician Dr O’Meara, he had meant it as a compliment. The English, he said, should stop trying to be French.

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Picture: © Peter K. Burian, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

560

Through Russian Eyes

After a visit to England in 1847, Aleksey Khomyakov published his impressions of our country and our people in a Moscow magazine.

Russian landowner Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860) paid a visit to England in 1847. He subsequently sent a letter to a Moscow journal in which he relayed his impressions of England and the English, at a time when relations between the two countries were strained over Afghanistan and Turkey. In 1895, John Birkbeck summarised Khomyakov’s commentary for those who knew no Russian.

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Picture: From the Illustrated London News (December 4, 1847), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

561

What It Is to Be a King

Alexander, who had just taken the bath intended for his vanquished enemy Darius of Persia and was now eating Darius’s supper, was interrupted by a commotion in the camp.

It is November 5th, 333 BC. Aided by his fast friend Hephaestion, the young King Alexander of Macedon in northern Greece has just defeated Darius III, King of Persia, at the Battle of Issus on the modern-day Turkish-Syrian border. The first thing he did after taking possession of the enemy camp was to go to the hot bath prepared for Darius. ‘So this’ he laughed as slaves poured in fragrant salts ‘is what it is to be a king!’

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

562

Ranulf’s Tooth

As he sat in his guest room at Durham Abbey, Ranulf de Capella could think of nothing but finding someone to rid him of his painful toothache.

Reginald of Durham was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham from about 1153 until his death some forty years later. The Abbey church housed the coffin and body (untouched by time, despite being regularly opened to view) of seventh-century miracle-working bishop St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and from the steady stream of pilgrims who came to visit the shrine Reginald collected a fund of amazing tales.

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

563

The Royal Oak

In 1680, Samuel Pepys sat down with Charles II to record how, many years before, a bold double-bluff saved the King from Cromwell’s men.

Following defeat at Worcester on September 3rd, 1651, King Charles II (who was just twenty-one at the time) reluctantly fled to France, stumbling in disguise towards the south coast, never more than a step ahead of Cromwell’s men. In 1680, the King looked back in the company of Samuel Pepys on those anxious days, and what happened one famous night at Boscobel House in Shropshire.

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Picture: By Isaac Fuller (1606–1672), via the National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: ? Public domain.. Source.

564

Better than a Play

During his tour of England in 1782, Karl Philipp Moritz dropped in on the House of Commons, and thought the histrionics in the Chamber better than any play.

In 1782, German tourist Karl Philipp Moritz visited the Commons chamber, and heard Viscount Feilding rebuke Charles Fox, the Foreign Secretary, for wanting to make war hero Admiral Rodney a Lord: had the Rt Hon. Gentleman not recently declared Rodney’s second-in-command, Admiral Hood, unworthy even of a seat in the Commons? Fox’s despatch-box-thumping reply whetted Moritz’s appetite for more.

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Picture: By Liborio Prosperi (1854–1920), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.