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In 1720, Welsh promoter William Howell opened a pleasure garden at Belsize House, but the pleasures drew the magistrates’ frowns.
In 1722, the pleasure gardens at Belsize House near Hampstead were raided by constables on the orders of horrified magistrates, as being a den of gambling, lewdness and riot. It had all started innocently enough two years earlier, after an enterprising Welshman named William Howell obtained a lease on the stately house and gardens.
Posted July 3 2023
134
On a countryside ramble in West Sussex, William Cobbett finds the weather turning against him.
William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) was a best-seller in its day, a travelogue of his wanderings through England’s green and pleasant land, and a diary of his meetings with farmers and their families. August 2nd, 1823, found William atop Duncton Hill as he made his way across the South Downs from Petworth to Singleton in West Sussex, looking up at an ominous sky.
Posted June 29 2023
135
In 1692, a girl of fourteen was left to defend her father’s manor from angry Iroquois raiders.
In 1672, the Count de Frontenac came to Canada as governor of the French settlers around Montreal. He built good relations with the Iroquois by casting himself as father to their nation, but the French found him high-handed and in 1682 King Louis XIV of France recalled him. His replacement, the Marquis de Denonville, treated the Iroquois barbarously and provoked reprisals which Frontenac, restored in 1689, struggled to contain.
Posted June 25 2023
136
On the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 24th, 1497, Venetian navigator John Cabot claimed North America for the King of England.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and was hailed as the first European to see the Americas. But this was not North America, the region where the great English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States would later rise. That was discovered — or rediscovered, since the Vikings had been there long before — five years later in 1497.
Posted June 24 2023
137
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem about a suicidal cavalry charge during the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th, 1854.
In 1853, Britain, France and Turkey went to war with Russia. On October 25th, 1854, during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea, Lord Raglan ordered a cavalry brigade to raid some small hill-top gun emplacements. Somehow the orders got garbled. What Lord Cardigan read was an order to lead 670 lightly-armed horsemen straight at the main body of the Russian army.
Posted June 22 2023
138
Richard Cobden deplored the way that politicians in Britain justified their wars abroad by portraying other countries as barbarous and backward.
In 1856, Chinese authorities in Canton arrested twelve sailors on a ship out of Macau that was flying British colours, albeit without a current licence. The sailors were released but the British went ahead and bombarded Canton for three weeks anyway, saying that force was all the Chinese understood. Richard Cobden protested in the House of Commons.
Posted June 21 2023