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George Canning warned the Commons to be very careful about their plans for reform.
In 1820, republican reformers called for the way MPs were elected to be standardised, and for the composition of the Commons to reflect modern society. But George Canning – MP for Liverpool, irreverent rhymester, and illegitimate son of an actress – had little wish for any system crafted by career politicians to favour their own well-bred clones.
John Bright declared it was time stop fighting wars around the world for ‘British interests’.
On January 13th, 1878, John Bright MP assured his constituents in Birmingham that reports of an imminent Russian invasion of Europe were utter delusion. Some in the Commons said that sending troops to aid Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War (now a year old) was in the ‘British interest’, but Bright reminded them how the Crimean War in 1853-56 had achieved nothing but a million dead young men.
Faced with a choice between silence, dungeon or exile, William Cobbett chose exile — and then had to make sense of it.
In March, 1817, English radical William Cobbett fled to the US, in the belief that he was about to arrested for his cheap, popular and highly critical digest of Parliamentary news, the Political Register. A few months later, he wrote back home to his supporters from his Long Island farm explaining how, as an expat, he would balance his divided loyalties.
In August, 1775, King George III responded to the news of rebellion in the American colonies.
On April 19th, 1775, British troops confronted an uprising of American colonists in Lexington and in Concord, Massachusetts, and the American War of Independence began. Many at home urged the Government to come to some mutually acceptable compromise, but on August 23, King George III of England issued orders for a clampdown on all support for the rebels.
We all want our politicians to be clever men, but being cunning isn’t the same as being wise.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, declared himself one of the Country Party, a loose and cross-bench federation of MPs speaking up (so they said) for the country as a whole, and not only for the elite only. In 1738, he wrote The Idea of a Patriot King for the benefit of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in which Bolingbroke distinguished between two kinds of politician.
The diplomat’s task is to see the best in other peoples, not to scold them for their failings.
François de Callières, a diplomat in the service of King Louis XIV of France, believed that those posted to overseas embassies should not only show but feel respect for their host country. Given the way that all of us now live in one another’s pockets through the internet, and our much-vaunted democratic government, everyone should heed his advice, for we are all diplomats now.
American journalist and poet WC Bryant numbered Richard Cobden MP among the world’s statesmen, not our politicians.
William Cullen Bryant was one of nineteenth-century America’s great men. For many years he served as editor of the New York Evening Post, and was a popular ‘fireside poet’. He was also active in politics, an opponent of slavery who threw his weight behind the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. His praise for England’s Richard Cobden, for an American edition of his writings, was quite an accolade.