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.
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.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden believed British politicians supporting the slave-owning American South had been led a merry dance.
Richard Cobden MP had considerable sympathy with the Confederate States in the American Civil War of 1861-1865, as he regarded Washington as arrogantly meddlesome and corrupted by big business. But in 1863 he held up a report from the US Congress and told his Rochdale constituents that the South’s politicians had forfeited any right to an Englishman’s goodwill.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden offered a startling analogy for the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republicans won the US general election in 1860, prompting eleven slave-owning southern States to declare independence. Some in Westminster sympathised, saying the national result did not reflect the majority of southern voters – but Richard Cobden was scornful.