445
During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Horatio Nelson decided it was time to turn a blind eye.
Horatio Nelson lost his right eye in battle off Corsica in 1793, and his right arm at Tenerife in 1797. Undeterred, and now a Rear Admiral, he was in the line of fire again at Copenhagen on April 2nd, 1801: a vital action, as Denmark was hampering England’s efforts to fend off invasion from Napoleon’s France. By lunchtime his Commander-in-chief Sir Hyde Parker, some way behind, was getting anxious.
Posted March 20 2021
446
Cuthbert, struck down by plague, was vexed to find that his brethren had been praying for him all the previous night.
When the monastery at Ripon was founded in 661, Cuthbert served there under Abbot Eata. Eata clung loyally to a peculiar and not very accurate way of dating Easter borrowed from Ireland, and three years later King Oswy, who preferred the calendar used in Canterbury, Rome and the East, appointed Wilfrid in Eata’s stead. Cuthbert returned to the Abbey at Melrose in the Scottish borders.
Posted March 19 2021
447
While inspecting troops in Colchester for duty against Napoleon, the Duke of York came upon one man who gave new meaning to the word Veteran.
In September 1811, during the Napoleonic Wars, George the Prince Regent and his brother Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, were reviewing the troops of the Eastern Command on Lexden Heath, near Colchester, when they spied an elderly man wearing a uniform from a bygone age and perched on an aged pony. They asked the division’s commander General John Pitt, Earl of Chatham, what he was doing there.
Posted March 17 2021
448
Plutarch tells us how Alexander the Great came to bond with Bucephalus, the mighty stallion that bore him to so many victories.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, probably written early in the second century, compares the characters of various great men of classical Greece and Rome. Among them is Alexander the Great, the young King of Macedon who in the latter part of the fourth century BC conquered cities and peoples from Egypt to India. His horse was Bucephalus, a mighty stallion that took some conquering too.
Posted March 16 2021
449
Nothing seemed likely to stop Napoleon Bonaparte from conquering Europe, but one little fellow slowed him up a bit.
The Battle of Castiglione in northern Italy, on August 5th, 1796, was a resounding victory for Napoleon Bonaparte over the Austrian Empire. The general, who at that time was still serving the French Republic, read Helen Maria Williams’s account of his Italian campaign and told her later ‘that he would answer for the truth of all that she had reported’ — including, presumably, this poignant little scene.
Posted March 15 2021
450
William Wordsworth looks back on a life of disappointments and regrets, and finds in them reasons to be thankful.
William Wordsworth wrote The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind to account for his decision in 1799 to bury himself in Cumbria’s Lake District and devote himself to poetry. Here, Wordsworth reflects on the way that the disharmonies of our past life — our regrets and pains and disappointments — form a melody that would be less beautiful without them.
Posted March 14 2021