Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
When Ambassador Molesworth criticised the government of Christian V, the Danish king cried ‘off with his head!’.
Christian V, King of Denmark and Norway from 1670 to 1699, was a great admirer of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV of France, and sought to emulate the glory of Louis’s court, his ‘divine right of kings’ and his absolute power of government. Over here, though, Parliament had thrown out James II in 1688 for doing the same, and his replacement William III gathered that in England no one was beyond criticism.
Edmund Burke explained to the Duke of Bedford that in politics there is very great difference between change and reform.
In 1789, the leaders of the French Revolution promised liberty, equality and fraternity to the downtrodden people of France, and Francis Russell (1765-1802), 5th Duke of Bedford, admired them for it. But Edmund Burke warned him that to France’s new elite, righting the wrongs of the poor was infinitely less exciting than the chance to conduct a relentless socio-economic experiment on the peoples of Europe.
Facing defeat at the General Election of 1812, Henry Brougham stood before the voters of Liverpool and made a spirited defence of liberty’s record.
In the 1812 General Election, Henry Brougham (pronounced ‘broom’) was one of two Whig candidates hoping to represent Liverpool. On the night before they went to polls, he addressed supporters with a last-minute plea to redouble their efforts, reminding them that Parliamentary democracy, the abolition of slavery and even peace in Europe all depended on their determination to keep fighting for liberty.
In 1840, Secretary at War Thomas Macaulay treated the Union Jack like a bully’s visiting card, but backbencher William Gladstone believed it deserved better.
In 1840, the British Government, outraged at Peking’s crackdown on the smuggling of opium by British merchants from Bengal, declared war on the Chinese Empire. On April 8th, William Gladstone rose in the Commons to denounce the Government’s belligerent attitude, deploring the execrable drug traffic and taking exception to the way Secretary-at-War Thomas Macaulay wrapped it in the Union Jack.
In 1840, the British Government declared war on the Chinese Empire over their harsh treatment of drug smugglers from Bengal.
The Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 were a miserably low point in British history, as Jawaharlal Nehru makes painfully clear in this passage. Opium grown in India was smuggled into China by British merchants to feed the addiction of millions of Chinese, until the problem became so bad that the Chinese imperial government was obliged to step up efforts against the smugglers.
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.