397
Though Arthur Clough had discovered that to be your own man was a long and toilsome path, it was not a path without hope.
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned a desirable Fellowship at Oxford owing to his doubts about the Church of England. Shortly afterwards he was appointed Principal of University Hall in London, an ecumenical and supposedly more open-minded institution, but here too Clough found he was expected to think as his new colleagues did. Lonely, silent and depressed, he nevertheless clung on to hope.
Posted May 21 2021
398
When Richard I heard that the town of Verneuil in Normandy was under threat, he made a vow that few could be expected to take so literally.
On March 20th, 1194, Richard I returned to England after two years of captivity to Leopold of Austria, with whom he had quarrelled on the Crusades. Richard’s brother John, who had tried to keep him locked up as long as possible, fled to the protection of Philip II of France; but barely a month had passed before Richard quitted his capital yet again, and was on his way back to Normandy.
Posted May 20 2021
399
Richard the Lionheart told Philip, the martial Bishop of Dreux, to decide whether he was a bishop or a knight.
During the Third Crusade, Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais, spread the rumour that Richard the Lionheart had procured the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat; and after Richard was taken prisoner in Austria in 1192 he tried to make his detention as long and unpleasant as he could. In 1197, three years after his release, Richard stumbled across an opportunity for payback.
Posted May 20 2021
400
The British Empire’s hostile breakup with India should have taught everyone two things: money cannot buy love, and power does not command respect.
In his Memoirs (1954) the Aga Khan Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah (1877-1957) regretted the breakdown of esteem between Englishmen and Indians in the early twentieth century. Novelist W. Somerset Maugham found in this a lesson for the emerging Power of the 1950s, the United States of America: a lesson not to make the same mistake the British Empire made.
Posted May 15 2021
401
Two of the Victorian Age’s most distinguished historians locked horns over the question of whether historians should be nice.
In 1887, historian Mandell Creighton published the third volume of his monumental study of the Papacy. Fellow historian Lord Acton, a Roman Catholic troubled by the recent declaration of Papal Infallibility, criticised him for being too soft on the crimes of the Popes: the historian who easily excuses the tyrants of the past, he warned, may also hire himself out to excuse the tyrants of the present.
Posted May 14 2021
402
When the young Aga Khan visited London in 1898 he was presented to Queen Victoria, and found her cultural sensitivity deeply touching.
In February 1898 the Aga Khan, then twenty, left Bombay for Europe. After some days enjoying life on the French Riviera he travelled on to Paris and London, and there in the glorious and bewitching Imperial capital he was presented at Windsor Castle to Queen Victoria herself. It was an intimate affair: only himself, his friend the Duke of Connaught and the Empress, now approaching her eightieth birthday.
Posted May 13 2021