Featured
The Duke of Argyll was pleasantly surprised to find one of his gardeners reading a learned book of mathematics - in Latin.
Edward Stone (1702-1768), mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and the man who gave us aspirin, was self-taught. His story reminds us that the purpose of education is not to tell us what to think, but to give us the tools we need to think for ourselves.
Nearly seventy years after his death, the roguish laird still cast a spell over the farm-folk of the Highlands.
In 1803, William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their friend Samuel Coleridge travelled to Scotland, taking in beautiful Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. They begged bed and board from a startled Scottish farmer, and at breakfast the following morning (it was Saturday August 27th) the Macfarlanes told them in their slow English about Rob Roy.
Unlike some of his fellows in Westminster, Scottish statesman Henry Dundas made no attempt to make himself sound more ‘English’.
Henry Dundas (1742-1811) was one of Georgian Britain’s most influential Scottish statesmen, who served officially in William Pitt’s cabinet as Home Secretary, President of the Board of Control, Secretary of State for War, and First Lord of the Admiralty, but unofficially as ‘The Uncrowned King of Scotland’. Some fellow MPs from north of the Border tried to blend in with our English ways, but not Dundas.
At sixty-seven, Alexander Forbes rode to war with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and over a decade afterwards was still a hunted man.
In 1688, King James II (who was also James VII of Scotland) unwillingly abdicated in favour of his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, Prince of Orange. Many who had sworn loyalty to James felt obliged to support the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and at the age of sixty-seven Alexander, 4th Lord Forbes, of Pitsligo in Aberdeenshire, found himself a fugitive from justice.
The Scots paid a heavy price for honouring their ‘Auld Alliance’ with France.
In September 1513, King James IV of Scotland found himself torn between ties of family and obligations of state. He chose the latter, and on a cold and lonely field in Northumberland, James and thousands of his loyal subjects paid dearly.
King Philip V of Spain sent a second Spanish Armada against Britain, but it suffered much the same fate as the first.
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forbade Philip V of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV of France, to claim the French throne. But his chief minister, Italian cardinal Giulio Alberoni, egged him on, triggering the ‘War of the Quadruple Alliance’.