This traditional Iberian Duchy assumed royalty in 1442 but only when one of the interminable rows with neighbouring Spain impressed John IV enough to actually sit on the throne, thus founding the dynasty, was it accepted as a fact by the rest of Europe. Previously, John had been the 8th Duke of Braganza. It was 1640. (more…)
The French (and later the Spanish) royal house descends from a Capet – Louis IX (The Saintly). As such it was absolutist and conformist in ideology, and dedicated to the extension of France in other territories and maintaining her influence.
The last king of the Valois dynasty was Henry III; Henry of Navarre (‘Paris is worth a Mass’) became Henry IV of France and established the Bourbon dynasty. His son was Louis XIII and his grandson was the Sun King himself, Louis Quartorze (Louis XIV). (more…)
Leopoldo de Gregorio, Marqués de Esquilache was born around the beginning of the 18th century, perhaps 1700? He became that most difficult of objects – a Spanish politician – and was made Minister for War and Finance when Charles III (Carlos Tercero) was on the throne.
At that time Naples was a part of Spain and Leopoldo was sent there to be Minister of Finance by 1759. He returned to Spain where he bravely tried to introduce reforms, especially in the Spanish fiscal system, a permanent bugbear. It is still a bugbear today. (more…)
Lidice was a Czechoslovak mining village not far from Prague. As a community it had no importance, but the Nazis needed to make an example of somewhere, following the assassination in May of Reinhardt Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters. Heydrich and his driver and car were blown up on a street in Prague in 1942. Czechoslavakia had been the first state to be invaded and occupied by Hitler’s armies, and Heydrich, a brute, was Prague’s military governor and head of the Gestapo secret police. (more…)
Charles André Joseph-Marie de Gaulle was born in 1890. His family was privileged and conservative, as can be denoted by the de in his name; also devoutly Roman Catholic. He was naturally educated at a Jesuit school and went straight to the French military academy at St-Cyr. As a junior officer he fought with distinction and valour in the Great War.
Probably because of his superior attitude, never popular with senior officers, he was still a colonel in 1940 when he was already fifty years old. He wrote a number of important treatises on military and historical subjects, and was a great admirer of the tank as a promising method of waging war. (more…)
Only two Queens have been monarchs of Scotland, and one of them actually reigned as the official Queen of Scotland for twenty-five years before being betrayed by the Scots themselves and was finally beheaded by the English Queen Elizabeth – though she blamed her chief minister for the sad death of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had already been Queen of France too.
The other Scottish queen was known as the Maid of Norway, christened Margaret, who ‘ruled’ for only four years. She was an infant queen, granddaughter of Alexander III, and the only child of his daughter Margaret who died at birth. The father was King Erik of Norway, which explains the child’s nickname. When Alexander died in 1286, Margaret was the only direct survivor of the Scottish line of kings. The politicians betrothed her in 1289 (when she was three) to the infant Prince Edward, first Prince of Wales and son of Edward I of England, known as ‘The Hammer of the Scots’ by historians, and as ‘Longshanks’ by Mel Gibson. Luckily for the little girl she died at sea on the way from Norway to Britain at seven years of age. I say luckily because nothing was happy about the life of the young Edward (q.v.), who as Edward II made a mess of everything, married a charming French lady whose nickname (well deserved) was ‘The She-Wolf of France’; Edward preferred the social company of male favourites, and ended his life in prison, possibly murdered in a peculiarly horrible manner (sodomy by red-hot poker) as suggested by his own wife and her lover, Mortimer. In the 13th century, thrones and the nobility inspired little else but jealousy, incest, robbery and assassination. (more…)
The luxurious Savoy Hotel on the Embankment in London was constructed in the 19th century more or less where another famous house had stood until it was burnt down by a furious London mob. That house was called the Savoy too, and it was built by a man important in British history called John of Gaunt (q.v.), a son of Edward III who became Duke of Lancaster and the richest man in England. The hoi polloi burnt the Savoy to the ground because they had been told John of Gaunt was planning to take the throne from Richard II, a grandson of Edward III.
The name Savoy is ancient, and comes from an alpine area in what is now Switzerland and France. It existed from the middle part of the 11th until the 19th century under that name. (more…)
Mel Gibson leading the clans
I have been asked by a tolerable number of ‘fans’ if I could list the historical errors made by Mr Gibson in his odd film Braveheart. This is a Hollywood film supposedly made as a biopic of William Wallace, who met a nasty end after challenging the English. He was certainly a patriot and Mel got that part right. I had to watch the whole dreary spectacle of crass mistakes again, but I put on a braveface and summoned a braveheart, and here are some of things I spotted: (more…)
Disraeli was born in 1804, one year before the battle of Trafalgar. He was a son of Jewish parents converted to Christianity. Certainly not the first or only writer who went gladly into politics, he published his first novel, Vivian Grey, at twenty-two. The book was a success, but Disraeli is better known for two novels written about politics – Coningsby (1844) and Sybil a year later. One can detect a distinct note of Romantic Toryism in all three books, which are severely critical of industrial development or progress.
He joined the ‘Young England’ movement, which claimed to disapprove of social equality or reform, and became its leader. Almost at once he attacked Sir Robert Peel’s free trade policies, and ensured that the people knew who he was and what his ideas were. He attracted attention, partly because of his flamboyantly Jewish, saturnine looks at a time when Britain was as anti-Semitic as any other European country. He was a splendid public speaker, and known for his quick wit. When his wife asked him what he thought about the enormous house where they had both just been entertained during a ‘Friday to Monday’ visit, a house owned by a great magnate, he replied ‘our host and his house are very cold, in fact the warmest thing I found during our visit was the champagne.”
When the followers of Peel left the House of Commons, Disraeli became its Conservative Party leader, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Derby’s minority governments in 1852 and 1858/8. It was he who pushed through the 1867 Reform Bill, showing that he had much changed from his callow youth.
The Queen with Disraeli / firstartgallery.com
When Derby resigned in 1868 Disraeli became Prime Minister, shocking many anti-Semites on both sides of the Commons and the Lords. He was quickly defeated in the same year in a general election and certain Englishmen heaved a sigh of relief, but Disraeli was from being squashed. In 1874 he became PM again and stayed PM until 1880. By then he had become a favourite of Queen Victoria, with whom he was always gallant. He also knew the Queen loathed his chief rival William Ewart Gladstone, an Old Etonian. The truth is that Disraeli only consolidated reforms already started by Gladstone, though he preferred not to mention this to the Queen his admirer.
Gladstone, Disraeli’s opponent and the Queen’s bête noir / kingsacademy.com
When shares in the proposed Suez Canal became (secretly) available, Disraeli decided Britain ought to be at least half-owner (with the French) of this enormously important sea link between the Mediterranean and the Orient nut time was short and he knew how long it would take to talk Parliament into making a decision; he used his friendship with the (London-based) Rothschild, who advanced the cash needed immediately, at very low interest; Britain became half-owner of the Suez Canal. The House of Commons, at first shocked by the presumption, grudgingly accepted the brilliant move as a fait accompli.
Meanwhile Disraeli’s popularity with Queen Victoria had not waned in the least, especially when he proposed that she should become Empress of India (1876). Having made his queen Empress, Disraeli went off to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 where he greatly contributed towards European peace after the war between Russia and Turkey in the Balkans. Then suddenly things changed: to the Queen’s dismay, Gladstone and the Liberals defeated him in 1880, and much to her chagrin he retired to the beautiful house (Hughenden Manor, shown above) he had bought for his family. Within a year he was dead, but not before becoming Lord Beaconsfield.
The Queen’s favourites throughout her long life were Melbourne (her first PM), and Disraeli; her bêtes noirs were Peel and (though he affected not to notice), Gladstone.
Witch-hunting, of one type or another, has always been a popular spectator sport. Gypsies, Jews, witches, Catholics, Recusant Catholics, Protestants, homosexuals – everybody has been through it during the centuries. What happened to ‘village scolds’ (women who talked too much) in rural Britain for at least eight centuries was less harmful than burning of course, but being ducked repeatedly in a pond full of refuse and the odd dead animal if the poor scold was unlucky, cannot have been good for either morale or health. What occurred in rural Massachusetts was so awful Arthur Miller wrote an exceedingly successful stage play about it, called The Crucible – not a play for the faint-hearted. (more…)