Richard killing Tudor’s standard bearer at Bosworth
Five hundred and twenty-eight years ago, almost to the day, the Wars of the Roses came to an end in beautiful countryside near the town of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. A man called Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond won a great battle there, ending 331 years of rule by Plantagenets. The date of this post is Sunday, 11 August. The date of this great battle was 22 August, 1485. (more…)
Herbert Asquith in 1908 / an.wikipedia.org
Britain’s industrial revolution was in the eighteenth century, and followed into the nineteen and twentieth. She became super-powerful and rich, but apart from a handful of mine and factory owners, and those estate owners who had anything left to maintain, most workers lived in indescribably poor circumstances in Britain – worst of all in the nineteenth. Thank God for the reformers, the artist Hogarth and Charles Dickens. They showed the great industrial cities as they were – filthy, over-crowded, smelly, fog-ridden, unhygienic and socially divided.
The National Insurance Act was passed to everyone’s surprise by Asquith’s Liberal administration in 1911. It was the first Act of its kind, but it was soon to be copied by most other countries with a strong enough government to see it through, for it was revolutionary indeed. (more…)
Treaty 1814 / ebay.com
Just eighteen months separate two important agreements reached in the city of Paris. After the Allies (Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia) had at last defeated Napoleon, a pact was made with France which, considering the awful damage done to most of Europe, was perhaps over-generous. (more…)
Chester Nimitz / history.com
May and June 1942 saw two tremendous conflicts on the high seas in which the opposing fleets did not actually see each other or exchange salvoes. They were aircraft-carrier-based battles in the Pacific. The first, fought in the Coral Sea (4-8 May, 1942) ended in one carrier sunk on either side, plus another gravely damaged. The opponents were the United States and Japan. (more…)
Lord Salisbury / gatesofvienna.blogspot.com
Kind Hearts and Coronets is probably the best and blackest of the British 1950s comedies written for the screen. The film tells the story of an illegitimate boy who grows up determined to become a Duke, because his biological father is an aristocrat who refuses to help or even recognise the boy’s poor mother. And become a Duke Dennis Price does, by killing off eight members of a ducal family (all played by a spectacular Alec Guinness) who must be dispatched for him to acquire the title. Each of his victims is called ‘Gascoyne’. It is very likely that the film’s screenwriter was thinking of a certain marquesate when he wrote this name, precisely the Gascoigne-Cecils, one of whom was called Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. (more…)
The young Emperor Mitsuhito / nndb.com
Meiji means enlightened rule, and this was shown throughout the reign of the Japanese Emperor Mitsuhito, ruling from 1868 to 1912. After the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a powerful group of Samurai decided (in January 1868) that the shogunate (‘federal’ rule by warlords) must be abolished as old-fashioned and unprogressive, and that power must be returned to the Emperor. (more…)
General Hoche, mostly responsible for putting down the White Terror /nndb.com
In my fifty years in education I have found little evidence of this historical peculiarity being taught in schools and universities. Teachers have even put on a blank expression when I mention The White Terror, or worse, demand to know if I am inventing things. That ordinary French people should feel the need for revenge after years of ill treatment and worse from the French Revolutionaries and especially the Jacobins has proved too much for many educators. They spend hours and days explaining every detail about the first serious socialist revolution in History, but are not interested in an inevitable reaction, perhaps because it has nothing to do with Socialism but a great deal to do with Realism. (more…)
William II, Emperor of Germany (the Kaiser) came on a visit to England in 1908, and stayed for a while with Colonel Stuart-Wortley. After one of their conversations the latter wrote a letter/ article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper revealing what the Kaiser had said to him, no doubt after a fulfilling luncheon. (more…)
Count Camilo Cavour / nndb.com
Camilo Benso Cavour was born in 1810, a Piedmontese aristocrat whose name and mother language were French. It is interesting to note that both Cavour and Garibaldi (q.v.) spoke incorrect Italian. Trained in journalism, Cavour was editor of the newspaper Il Risorgimento by the time he was thirty-seven. (more…)
What Grand Fleets used to look like / en.wikipedia.org
Why ‘curious’? Because the first was agreed between Britain and Germany only fourteen years before the outbreak of a world war, the first of its kind. And the second was signed only four years before the next one. (more…)