Stories
The legends of the clans.
253 stories carried down the centuries, the founding episodes, the feuds, the famous escapes, the moments around which a family decided to remember itself. Read in order, or jump to the country.
England
Henry V at Agincourt
1415House of Plantagenet
On the morning of Friday the twenty-fifth of October 1415, the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, on the wet ploughed-and-newly-sown ground between the small French villages of Azincourt, Tramecourt and Maisoncelle in the Pas-de-Calais, the twenty-eight-year-old King Henry V of England, the second Lancastrian-Plantagenet monarch, gave the morning's address to his exhausted, malnourished, dysentery-weakened English army of approximately six thousand archers and one thousand five hundred men-at-arms, drawn up across a narrow eight-hundred-yard front between two patches of woodland on the line of the road from the village of Maisoncelle to the small castle of Azincourt. The English army was three days' march out of Harfleur on the long retreat to the safety of Calais, was eighteen days late, was outnumbered by the French royal army facing them across the muddy ploughed-field on the strict modern count of approximately three to one (approximately twenty thousand French men-at-arms, including the cream of the French chivalric nobility), and had been judged by every English-and-French observer of the morning to be on the verge of catastrophic defeat. Across the next three hours of the Saint Crispin's Day battle, the English longbow archers under the personal field-command of Sir Thomas Erpingham and the dismounted English men-at-arms under the King's own command broke the French cavalry charges on the narrow front, channelled the French heavy infantry into the deep mud where they were cut down by the second-and-third-rank English archers, and produced one of the most-celebrated single one-sided military victories in the long history of the European Middle Ages: approximately four hundred English dead against approximately seven thousand French dead, including the Constable of France, the Admiral of France, three Dukes, ninety Counts and over fifteen hundred knights of the French gentry. The victory at Agincourt is the central single military moment of the long Plantagenet-and-Lancastrian Hundred Years' War, the high-water mark of English continental military reach in the late Middle Ages, and on the strength of Shakespeare's 1599 play Henry V and its famous Saint Crispin's Day speech (we few, we happy few, we band of brothers) the central single English military memory of the medieval period.
The Stanley intervention at Bosworth
1485Stanley
Late in the morning of Monday the twenty-second of August 1485, on the small ploughed-and-marsh field of Bosworth between the villages of Sutton Cheney, Stoke Golding, Shenton and Dadlington in the south-west of Leicestershire, Thomas Stanley, fifty-year-old Lord Stanley and the stepfather of the Lancastrian-Tudor claimant Henry Tudor, sat on the open field with his army of approximately three thousand Cheshire-and-Lancashire Stanley levies arrayed on the rising ground to the north of the engagement-field, and held the position through the opening two hours of the battle between Henry Tudor's outnumbered Lancastrian army of approximately five thousand and the larger Yorkist royal army of approximately ten thousand under the reigning King Richard III of England. Lord Stanley's brother Sir William Stanley sat on the parallel rising ground to the south with the second Stanley levy of about two thousand five hundred men. Both Stanley brothers had refused to commit to either side in the morning's deployment in spite of the King's standing instruction to Lord Stanley (King Richard III was holding Lord Stanley's eldest son George Strange as a hostage at the Yorkist royal camp). At approximately eleven in the morning, with the battle hanging on the small cavalry charge Richard III had launched personally against Henry Tudor's bodyguard at the centre of the field, Sir William Stanley committed his levy in a flank charge against the King's cavalry that broke Richard's small bodyguard formation, brought down Richard in person on the slopes above Redemore Plain, and ended the Plantagenet dynasty in twenty minutes of close-quarters fighting. By tradition, the crown of Richard III was found in the thorn-bush near the King's body by Lord Stanley personally and was placed by him on Henry Tudor's head on the field of victory. Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII on the spot. The earldom of Derby, created within the year by Henry VII as the reward for the Stanley intervention, has been held in the senior Stanley line continuously since.
Bishop Fisher at Tower Hill
1535Fisher
On the morning of the twenty-second of June 1535, on the scaffold at Tower Hill, John Fisher, seventy-six years old, Bishop of Rochester since 1504, theological tutor to the young Henry VIII, chancellor of Cambridge University since 1504, recently elevated by Pope Paul III to the cardinalate (his red hat had been sent from Rome but never reached him), was beheaded by axe for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy of 1534, which required every subject of Henry VIII to acknowledge the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Fisher had refused on the canonical grounds that the Pope was the head of the Church of Christ and that no temporal prince could supersede the spiritual authority. He had been a prisoner in the Tower for fourteen months. He went to the scaffold on foot from his Tower chamber, supported by two yeomen of the guard because he could not walk unaided; he had refused food in his last week to weaken himself sufficiently that the axeman's stroke would not be impeded by his vigour. The tradition of London held that the head, by the order of Henry VIII, was set on a spike at London Bridge for two weeks but did not, by the testimony of three contemporary chroniclers, decay or change colour; the head was removed on the king's orders on the second of July and thrown into the Thames, two days before Sir Thomas More followed Fisher to the same scaffold on the sixth of July.
Catherine Howard's last night
1542Howard
Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk and a cousin of Anne Boleyn, who had been executed for treason at the same end of the same Tower yard six years earlier. She had been queen for fifteen months. She was, by the historical balance, between sixteen and twenty years old, and very probably nineteen. Charges of pre-marital intercourse with Francis Dereham and adulterous intent with Thomas Culpeper had been brought before the Council in November 1541. She was attainted by Parliament in February 1542 without a trial. On the evening of the twelfth of February 1542, by Eustace Chapuys's account written to Charles V, she asked the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Gage, to have the executioner's block brought to her room so that she might rehearse the laying of her head upon it. The request was, by the practice of the Tower, granted. She was beheaded the next morning at seven o'clock on Tower Green by a single stroke of the axe.
The Battle of Affane
1565Butler
On the eighth of February 1565, on the open ground above the ford at Affane on the lower Blackwater River in County Waterford, the Anglo-Irish house of Butler (under Thomas, tenth Earl of Ormond, called Black Tom, in his thirty-fourth year) met its hereditary rival house of FitzGerald (under Gerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond) in what is, by the reckoning of every careful Irish historian, the last private battle fought between two great noble houses on Irish soil. About two thousand men were on the FitzGerald side, fewer on the Butler. The Butler line broke the FitzGerald centre by the standard cavalry charge across the ford; the FitzGerald wing under James FitzMaurice was broken on the riverbank; Desmond himself was captured wounded and brought to Kilkenny Castle. The two earls were summoned to court at Greenwich within the year. Queen Elizabeth, in person, by the tradition recorded in James Ware's De Hibernia of 1654, asked the captive Earl of Desmond, in front of the assembled court, on what grounds he had fought a private battle without her royal commission. Desmond, by the same tradition, answered: May it please your Majesty, we fought it without our own. The remark was preserved as the example of Anglo-Irish wit; Elizabeth held the two earls in close confinement in London for the next eighteen months until they would compose. The Affane battle was the last private noble pitched battle on the island.
John Davis sights the strait off Greenland
1585Davis
On 7 June 1585 the Devon-born navigator John Davis sailed from Dartmouth with two small barks, the Sunshine (50 tons) and the Moonshine (35 tons), and a combined complement of forty-two men, on a commission from the Muscovy Company merchant William Sanderson and the Cambridge geographer Adrian Gilbert to find the North-West Passage to Cathay. Davis was about thirty-five, an experienced Devon coastal pilot trained on the Newfoundland cod-banks, and (uniquely among the Elizabethan navigators of the period) able to compute lunar-distance longitude from a bound-tables-and-cross-staff method that he had taught himself across the 1570s Devonshire coastal-pilot decade. He reached the south-east Greenland coast on 19 July 1585, named the headland Cape Farewell, sailed up the western coast across late July and early August, and on 6 August 1585 entered the straits between Greenland and Baffin Island that have carried his name ever since as the Davis Strait. Three further voyages followed (1586, 1587, the 1588 cancelled-by-the-Armada-mobilisation expedition) and the Davis chart of the strait, published by Edward Wright in his 1599 Certain Errors in Navigation, was the senior English-language chart of the north-Atlantic-and-Greenland navigation for the next hundred years.
Burghley and the Babington Plot
1586Cecil
Across the summer of 1586, in the small Secretariat office in the south-west tower of Whitehall Palace, William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, sixty-six years old, the Lord High Treasurer and senior Privy Counsellor of England, working in close concert with his protégé and successor as Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, brought to its conclusion the eighteen-month intelligence operation that became known as the Babington Plot: the Catholic conspiracy of Anthony Babington and his fellow gentleman-conspirators to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and to replace her on the throne with Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic claimant who had been Elizabeth's prisoner in England since 1568. The operation Walsingham ran on the Babington circle through the spring and summer of 1586 (the famous Phelippes-cipher decryption of the Babington letters smuggled out of Mary's confinement at Chartley Castle through the bunghole of the beer-barrels delivered to the household by the Walsingham-controlled agent Gilbert Gifford, the so-called bunghole letters of June and July 1586) produced the documentary evidence of Mary's personal signed approval of the assassination plot. The evidence was laid before Burghley at Whitehall on the seventeenth of August 1586. Burghley ordered the arrest of Babington and his thirteen co-conspirators on the fourteenth of August (Babington was apprehended in St John's Wood by Walsingham's men on the same evening); the conspirators were tried and convicted at Westminster Hall in September; the convicted were hanged, drawn and quartered at St Giles's Fields on the twentieth and twenty-first of September 1586. Mary was brought to trial at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on the fourteenth of October 1586 under the special commission of forty-six peers and Privy Counsellors that Burghley had personally constituted; the commission convicted her on the twenty-fifth of October on the strength of the Phelippes-decrypted Chartley letters; she was executed in the great hall at Fotheringhay on the eighth of February 1587. The Babington Plot trial-and-execution, conducted under Burghley's careful constitutional-and-judicial management across the eighteen months of the operation, was the central single state-security operation of the Elizabethan period and set the institutional template of the modern English security service for the next four centuries.
Effingham and the Armada
1588Howard
On the evening of the seventh of August 1588, while the Spanish Armada under Medina Sidonia lay at anchor off Calais waiting for the Duke of Parma's army to come down from Flanders, the English fleet of Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral, sent eight fireships into the anchored line at midnight. The Spanish cut their cables and ran north before a south-westerly. The English fleet under Howard, with Drake on the Revenge, Hawkins on the Victory, Frobisher on the Triumph, gave chase up the Channel through the morning of the eighth. At the action off Gravelines that day they broke the Spanish line, drove four ships ashore on the Flemish coast, and pushed the rest into a North Sea where the wind would carry them around the top of Scotland and break a third of them on the Irish coast. Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham, was fifty-two years old, a Catholic in religion in a Protestant fleet, the cousin of the queen, and the man whose decision not to anchor inshore at the Isle of Wight on the third of August had kept the Spanish from a deepwater harbour in southern England.
William Lee and the stocking frame
1589Lee
In the autumn of 1589, in the upstairs parlour of the parsonage at Calverton in Nottinghamshire, the Reverend William Lee, twenty-six years old, a recently ordained Cambridge curate of the village living, finished the construction of a wooden hand-operated knitting machine of his own design: a frame on which a row of about a hundred small barbed-needle hooks (eight per inch, the fine-gauge stocking density) could be brought down through a row of weft yarn, loops drawn through previously formed loops, and a row of stocking knit in a single motion. The machine, by every later assessment of the textile-history scholars (Charles Singer, Stanley Chapman), is the first complex mechanical loom-and-needle device in European industrial history and the foundational machine of the modern knitting industry. Tradition holds that Lee had developed the machine because he was, in his courtship, distracted by the rapid hand-movements of his fiancée when she was knitting; the folk-attribution of the courtship-motive is, by the nineteenth-century antiquaries, probably apocryphal but is attested in the local Calverton tradition since at least the seventeenth century. Lee travelled to London in 1589 to seek a Crown patent from Elizabeth I; the queen, by the court tradition, refused the patent on the grounds that the machine would impoverish her hand-knitters. Lee took the machine to France in 1604 under the patronage of Henri IV, who granted him a French patent and pension; Henri's assassination in 1610 cut off the support, and Lee died in Paris a few years later in obscurity.
Will Adams summoned to Edo
1600Adams
On the morning of the twelfth of April 1600, the Dutch trading ship De Liefde (one of the five ships of the Mahu-De Cordes Pacific Expedition of 1598 from Rotterdam, the only one of the five to survive the Pacific crossing) made landfall at Usuki on the east coast of Kyushu in southern Japan, with about twenty-four surviving Dutch and English crew of the original hundred-and-ten. The pilot-major of the ship, William Adams, thirty-six years old, Kentish-born, formerly a Royal Navy pilot in the Drake Spanish-Armada campaign of 1588, was the only Englishman of the surviving crew. The ship was held by the Bungo daimyo; the surviving officers were summoned to the court of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the of the five-regent Council of the Toyotomi minority, who would within six months become the shogun of Japan) at Osaka on the fifteenth of May 1600. Ieyasu, by his curiosity about the European arrivals and by his strategic-political interest in European shipbuilding-and-mathematical-navigation expertise, kept Adams in Japan; he was made a hatamoto (a samurai retainer of the shogun) in 1605, given an estate at Hemi near Yokosuka in Sagami province, and the Japanese name Miura Anjin (the pilot of Miura). He was never permitted to leave Japan. He married a Japanese wife (Oyuki, daughter of a samurai family of the Edo road-station, no children of his first English marriage to Mary Hyn at Stepney; two children, Joseph and Susanna, by Oyuki). He died at Hirado on the northwest coast of Kyushu on the sixteenth of May 1620, fifty-six years old. He is the model for John Blackthorne in James Clavell's Shōgun (1975) and the 1980 NBC television series and the 2024 FX-Hulu series of the same name. The real story is the slow assimilation of the first Englishman in Japan into the service of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Mary Ward founds the Institute at Saint-Omer
1609Ward
In the autumn of 1609 the Yorkshire Catholic Mary Ward, twenty-four years old, daughter of the Catholic recusant Ulrick Ward of Mulwith and Newby and Ursula Wright of Plowland, founded at the Flemish exiled-English Catholic colony of Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands the first uncloistered women's religious order in the post-Reformation Catholic Church. The new Institute (the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the Jesuit-male-order model) was founded on the principle that English Catholic women refugees from the post-1559 Elizabethan recusancy crisis could form an active, mobile, teaching-and-pastoral religious community rather than enter the contemplative cloistered orders that were the only female religious option available under the post-Tridentine reform legislation. The foundation was the senior post-Reformation development in the history of Catholic women's religious life and is the foundational moment of the modern Catholic women's apostolic religious congregations that run from Saint-Omer 1609 through to the Sister-of-Mercy and Daughter-of-Charity female religious orders of the nineteenth century.
Henry Hudson and the discovery of Hudson Bay
1610Hudson
On the morning of Friday the third of August 1610, on the North-Atlantic at the approximately-60-degrees-north latitude west of the Resolution-Island coast at the eastern-entrance of what is now the Hudson-Strait, the approximately-forty-five-year-old English navigator Henry Hudson, the master of the small fifty-five-ton English-bark Discovery on the Company-of-Adventurers fourth-voyage in search of the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean, sailed his Discovery vessel into the narrow Hudson-Strait between the Baffin-Island and the Labrador-Peninsula on the strength of his personal-conviction that the westward-running tidal-current on the Strait-eastern-entrance indicated a large-westward-running ocean-passage beyond. The Discovery sailed westward across the four-hundred-mile Hudson-Strait across August-and-early-September 1610, emerged on the second-of-August into the vast inland-sea (the Hudson Bay, approximately one-thousand-mile-long and five-hundred-mile-wide Arctic-Canadian inland-sea) that Hudson named for his Discovery-Company-of-Adventurers patron the merchant adventurer Sir Dudley Digges (the original-name Digges-Bay was renamed Hudson-Bay across the subsequent-Royal-Society-and-Hudson's-Bay-Company nomenclature-tradition), and across the September-1610 period sailed south down the east-coast of the Hudson-Bay to the southern-Hudson-Bay James-Bay region. The Hudson-Bay 1610 discovery is the foundational moment of the Canadian-and-British North-American Arctic geographical record and the foundational European-discovery of the vast inland-sea that has carried Hudson's name continuously since.
The Globe burns during Henry VIII
1613Shakespeare
On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of June 1613, the King's Men were performing a new history play, All Is True, later known as Henry VIII and probably co-written by Shakespeare and the younger John Fletcher. In the first act of the play, at the masque entry of King Henry into Cardinal Wolsey's banquet, the company fired theatrical cannon, the chambers used for noise and spectacle. The wadding from one of them, paper or rag, lodged in the thatch above the gallery. The audience saw a wisp of smoke and went on watching the play. By the time anyone in the yard registered fire, the roof was alight in a ring. The Globe Theatre, the wooden O that had hosted the first performances of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, was on the ground within an hour. Nobody was killed.
Holy Trinity and the grave curse
1616Shakespeare
Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon, kept its dead under the chancel and the nave; when the church ran out of space, the sexton dug up older bones and moved them to the charnel-house in the churchyard. William Shakespeare, who held a half-share of the Stratford parish tithes and had the right to chancel burial, did not want his bones moved when his time came. He was buried inside the church under a flat ledger stone on the twenty-fifth of April 1616. The four lines cut on the slab read: Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yt moves my bones. Whether he wrote them himself is unrecoverable. The threat held. The slab has not been lifted in four hundred and nine years.
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
1623Shakespeare
By 1622, six years after William Shakespeare's death, eighteen of his thirty-six plays had never been printed in any form. They existed only as the company's prompt-books and as the drafts the company called the foul papers: paper, ink, the playhouse's only copies. A single fire would have erased Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and a dozen others from the world. The two men who saved them were John Heminges and Henry Condell, both of them senior actors of the King's Men and personal friends of Shakespeare's, who spent the better part of two years assembling and editing the manuscripts at the Jaggard print shop in Barbican. The book they put together is the First Folio.
De Motu Cordis
1628Harvey
In the autumn of 1628, at the press of William Fitzer in Frankfurt am Main, William Harvey, fifty years old, the physician to Charles I of England and the fellow of the College of Physicians of London, published a Latin octavo of seventy-two pages titled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals). The publication had been deliberately set abroad to avoid the English ecclesiastical-licensing scrutiny that would have applied at the London presses. The book was about twenty thousand words. It demonstrated, by the combination of dissection-evidence, standing animal-vivisection observation of valves, standing quantitative-arithmetical estimate of the blood-volume the heart pumps per hour, and logical deduction, that the arterial and venous systems are a closed circulation driven by the pump of the heart, in which the same blood passes through the body about a thousand times a day. The classical Galenic doctrine of two separate systems (the venous system originating in the liver, the arterial system originating in the heart, the blood consumed at the tissues and continuously replaced from food) had been the operating model of European medicine for fourteen hundred years. Harvey's book overturned it. The reception was slow (Harvey himself, by his later remark to John Aubrey of c.1650, had not in his lifetime had a single English-physician colleague accept the thesis in full); the acceptance was complete within forty years of Harvey's death.
Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General
1646Hopkins
Between March 1644 and the spring of 1647, in the small parishes of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Matthew Hopkins, a Manningtree lawyer in his early twenties, self-styled Witch-Finder General, conducted the largest English witch-hunting campaign in history. Working with a team of assistants (the Manningtree witch-pricker John Stearne, the searcher Mary Phillips, and several others), and at a fee of twenty shillings per parish plus expenses, Hopkins moved through about twenty East Anglian market towns and was directly or indirectly responsible for the executions of, by the careful modern count of the East Anglian witch-trial historian Malcolm Gaskill, between three and four hundred women. The campaign was conducted during the Civil War period when the Assize-circuit machinery had broken down and the local borough sessions were running cases under the 1604 Witchcraft Act with reduced central oversight. The pamphleteering pushback (John Gaule of Great Staughton's Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches, 1646, was the key counter-text) and the return of the Assize-circuit caught up with Hopkins by the spring of 1647. He retired to Manningtree, wrote a self-defensive pamphlet (The Discovery of Witches, 1647), and died of tuberculosis at Mistley near Manningtree on the twelfth of August 1647, twenty-seven years old. The English witch-hunting tradition substantially closed within a generation of Hopkins's death; the last English witch execution under the 1604 Act was Alice Molland at Exeter in 1685.
George Fox at Pendle Hill
1652Fox
On a morning in the summer of 1652, on the summit of Pendle Hill in eastern Lancashire (a long flat-topped sandstone ridge of 1,827 feet that dominates the country between the Ribble valley and the Yorkshire Dales), George Fox, twenty-eight years old, a Leicestershire weaver's apprentice who had been an itinerant religious seeker for the past six years across the English midlands and the north, climbed alone to the top of the hill and experienced, by his own account in his Journal (begun the next year and completed in the form by 1675), a vision of a great people to be gathered across the valleys below him. The vision was the pivot of his ministry. He came down off the hill, walked north-west to Sedbergh in the West Riding the following week, addressed a thousand-person preaching gathering of unsettled Seekers (a Lancashire-Yorkshire Calvinist-Anabaptist congregation under the ministry of Francis Howgill) at Firbank Fell on the thirteenth of June 1652, and gathered to himself the first formal congregation of what would, within two years, be called the Religious Society of Friends (or, in the courtroom-derogatory term, Quakers). The Quaker movement spread through the north-west and across the Atlantic by 1670; the Friends in 2025 had about 380,000 active members worldwide, with a strong concentration in Pennsylvania (where William Penn's 1681 grant of the colony of Pennsylvania was the foundational Quaker political project).
You have sat too long for any good you have been doing
1653Cromwell
On the morning of the twentieth of April 1653, in the Chamber of the House of Commons at Westminster, Oliver Cromwell, fifty-four years old, the Lord General of the Commonwealth armies, walked in to the sitting of the Rump Parliament (the fifty-three Members of Parliament who had remained after the 1648 Pride's Purge of the Long Parliament), sat down on a back bench for about ten minutes in silence, stood up, made a speech of about ten minutes' duration in which he attacked the members for their self-interest and failure to enact the legal-and-religious reforms the Commonwealth had been promising for four years, called in a file of musketeers under his Colonel Worsley, and physically dismissed the Members from the Chamber. The climax of the speech, the most-quoted parliamentary line in modern British history, was the peroration: you have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! The Mace (the symbol of parliamentary authority), Cromwell ordered removed with the line what shall we do with this bauble? The Rump Parliament was dissolved. The Barebones Parliament of nominated members sat for six months. The Instrument of Government of December 1653 established the Protectorate with Cromwell as Lord Protector. The English Commonwealth ran for the remaining five years of Cromwell's life and one further year under his son Richard, before the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660.
The plague year and the apple
1666Newton
In the summer of 1665 the plague took London and Cambridge in the same season, and the colleges sent the undergraduates home. Isaac Newton went back to his mother's house at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, where he had been born in the year his father died, and stayed for most of two years. He was twenty-two. He had read mathematics for one year. In the orchard at Woolsthorpe, by the tradition his niece Catherine Conduitt told to William Stukeley in 1726, he watched an apple fall from a tree and asked himself, in earnest and not for a moment, why it should fall straight down rather than sideways or up. The notebook from those two years contains the binomial theorem, the method of fluxions, the first formulation of the inverse-square law of gravity and the decomposition of white light. Cambridge calls them the anni mirabiles. Stukeley's account is the only first-hand source for the apple, and Stukeley wrote it down sixty years after the fact.
Lord William Russell on the scaffold
1683Russell
On the morning of the twenty-first of July 1683, on a public scaffold in the open ground of Lincoln's Inn Fields in central London, William Russell, Lord Russell, eldest son of the 5th Earl of Bedford, forty-three years old, Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire, principal organiser of the Whig opposition to the succession of James Duke of York to the Crown, was beheaded for high treason. The charge arose from the Rye House Plot, a Whig conspiracy of June 1683 to ambush Charles II and James on the road back from Newmarket to London at the Rye House in Hertfordshire. Russell had not been at the meetings where the assassination had been discussed, and the Whig defence, before and after the trial, was that he had been concerned only with the parliamentary opposition to the Catholic succession and not with the plot. He was convicted at the King's Bench on the thirteenth of July on the evidence of the perjured informer Lord Howard of Escrick. The execution was politically deliberate: Charles II wished to make a Whig example. The political consequence was the temporary collapse of the Whig opposition through the rest of Charles's reign and the accession of James in 1685. Russell was rehabilitated by Parliament in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution; his attainder was reversed and his family lands restored. The Whig succession movement of the next century, which culminated in Walpole and the political settlement of 1688–1714, was built on the explicit political martyrology of Russell and his fellow Rye House victim Algernon Sidney.
Halley's question
1684Newton
In August 1684 the astronomer Edmond Halley rode up to Cambridge on a question that had been arguing the Royal Society into a circle for eighteen months. If the planets are pulled toward the Sun by a force that diminishes with the square of the distance, what shape would their orbits take? Robert Hooke had said an ellipse and could not prove it. Christopher Wren had offered Halley a forty-shilling prize for the proof. Halley took the question to Newton, who had spent the years since Woolsthorpe in retreat from the world. Newton answered him at once. He had calculated it. He could not, on the spot, find the paper. He sent it down to London three months later as a nine-page treatise, De Motu Corporum in Gyrum, and Halley, reading it on a bench at the Society in November, sat very still for ten minutes before going to find the President.
The accession of George I at Greenwich
1714House of Hanover
On the afternoon of Saturday the eighteenth of September 1714, on the Thames waterfront at the small Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich five miles east of central London, the fifty-four-year-old Hanoverian Elector and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg Georg Ludwig, the Lutheran-Protestant German prince of the Holy Roman Empire who had been named heir to the British throne after Queen Anne by the English Act of Settlement 1701 on the strength of his maternal-descent from James I through his mother Sophia of Hanover, landed at the Greenwich royal-waterfront from the Royal Yacht Peregrine (the crossing-vessel of his crossing-fleet from the Hanoverian-Helvoetsluys-departure-port across the six-week North-Sea-crossing-and-Dutch-stopover-and-North-Sea-second-crossing journey from the Hanover capital), was received at the Greenwich royal-waterfront by the senior English Privy-Council-delegation under the 1st Earl of Wharton (the Lord Privy Seal) and the 1st Earl of Halifax (the First Lord of the Treasury), and was formally acknowledged by the Privy Council as the King George I of Great Britain, the first-monarch of the Hanoverian-Dynasty that would rule the United-Kingdom continuously for the next 187 years across the six Hanoverian monarchs from George I to Queen Victoria. The Greenwich landing of the eighteenth of September 1714 was the foundational-moment of the Hanoverian-Dynasty in Britain, the formal-acceptance of the 1701 Act of Settlement constitutional-arrangement that had brought the Lutheran-Protestant German-Hanoverian dynasty to the British throne, and the constitutional-precedent that fixed the Protestant foreign-dynastic-succession on the English-and-Scottish constitutional-framework that survived into the modern-Windsor-dynasty.
The Elegy at Stoke Poges
1750Gray
Between the autumn of 1742 and the late summer of 1750, in the upstairs back-parlour of his mother's house at West End Cottage, Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire (a small village three miles north of Slough), Thomas Gray, the thirty-four-year-old Cambridge-fellow son of a London scrivener, working at intervals over eight years, composed a thirty-two-stanza poem on the burial of the rural poor in the parish churchyard of St Giles Stoke Poges. The poem, titled Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, was finished in June 1750. Gray sent the manuscript to his friend Horace Walpole, who circulated it in manuscript through the literary London of the summer of 1750. The piracy threat of an imminent unauthorised printing in the Magazine of Magazines forced Gray to publish through the reputable bookseller Robert Dodsley on the fifteenth of February 1751. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard sold through eleven editions in the first two years, was, by Samuel Johnson's 1781 Lives of the Poets, the most quoted poem in English, and was, by General James Wolfe's report to his fellow officers in the boats descending the St Lawrence on the night of the twelfth of September 1759 (the night before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham), the piece Wolfe recited to his junior officers with the remark: gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow. The churchyard at Stoke Poges remains the reading-pilgrimage site of late-Georgian English-literary tourism.
Howell Harris and Trefeca
1752Harris
On the morning of the eighteenth of August 1752, in the small parish church of Talgarth in eastern Brecknockshire (the Welsh county on the southern edge of the Black Mountains), Howell Harris, a thirty-eight-year-old former schoolmaster of nearby Trefeca who had been the principal lay-evangelical preacher of the Welsh Methodist Revival of the previous fifteen years, formally founded a Christian commune at his family farm at Trefeca, three miles outside Talgarth. The Trefeca Family, as the community would call itself for the next twenty-one years, was a deliberately experimental Christian community of about a hundred and twenty people at peak, organised around shared work, common worship, and the printing of Welsh-language religious literature on the country's first Welsh-Methodist press, set up at Trefeca in 1758. The Family lived under Harris's direct guidance until his death in 1773. By the assessment of every careful Welsh church historian, Trefeca was the institutional pivot of the Welsh Methodist movement of the eighteenth century, and the model from which every later Welsh dissenting community drew. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the great English Methodist patron, took Trefeca as the model for her own connection's preachers' college and built her Trevecca House at Talgarth in 1768 next door.
Samuel Johnson and the Dictionary
1755Johnson
On the fifteenth of April 1755, in the print-shop of the Strand publisher William Strahan, the two-volume folio A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, A.M. was published. The Dictionary, about forty-three thousand entries with approximately one hundred and fourteen thousand illustrative quotations from English literature, had been the nine-year solo lexicographical work of Samuel Johnson, then forty-five years old, the Lichfield-born grub-Street writer of London (1738), the Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), the Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), and the twice-weekly Rambler essays (1750–52). The Dictionary was the first English-language dictionary to apply to English the scholarly philological method that the Académie Française had applied to French in its 1694 Dictionnaire. Johnson worked at his Gough Square house at the rate of about a column-and-a-half a day with six amanuenses; the project ran nine years against the Académie Française's eight teams of forty-academicians-each working for forty years to produce the equivalent French work. The publication-eve correspondence between Johnson and the belated patron Lord Chesterfield (who had snubbed Johnson at the 1747 outset of the project and had attempted to claim patronage in the 1755 publication month) became the foundational document of the modern English-literary independence from aristocratic patronage. The Johnson Dictionary remained the standard English-language dictionary until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.
H4 and the Longitude Prize
1761Harrison
On the eighteenth of November 1761, in the cabin of HMS Deptford lying at anchor at Spithead, John Harrison's son William, thirty-three years old, climbed aboard with the silver pocket-watch H4, the fourth and final marine chronometer designed by John Harrison (1693–1776), the Yorkshire carpenter who had spent the previous forty-eight years on the problem of finding longitude at sea. The Board of Longitude, by the Longitude Act of 1714, had offered a reward of £20,000 to anyone who could devise a method for determining a ship's longitude to within half a degree (about thirty miles at the equator) on a voyage from Britain to the West Indies. H4 was, by the test of the Deptford's eighty-one-day voyage to Port Royal in Jamaica, accurate to within five seconds over the voyage (the equivalent of about one and a half miles of longitude). The Board took thirteen further years and three more trials to formally award the prize; Harrison received £8,750 in 1773 and the remainder by direct Parliamentary grant of 1773 after the personal intervention of George III, on the principle that the Board had withheld the prize unjustly. Harrison was eighty by the time he received the payment. The marine chronometer is the foundational navigational instrument of the modern age.
Edward Stone and the willow bark
1763Stone
On the twenty-fifth of April 1763, in the rectory at Chipping Norton in north Oxfordshire, the Reverend Edward Stone, sixty-one years old, the vicar of Chipping Norton since 1745, completed a five-page letter to the Royal Society of London titled An Account of the Success of the Bark of the Willow in the Cure of Agues. The letter reported Stone's six-year clinical-empirical study of about fifty Chipping-Norton-and-surrounding-parishes patients suffering from the ague (the eighteenth-century term for malaria, then endemic in the fenland country and the Oxfordshire valley parishes) to whom Stone had administered dried-and-powdered bark of the white willow (Salix alba) in twenty-grain doses three times a day. About forty of the fifty patients reported significant fever-reduction and recovery within five-to-fourteen-days; ten reported no effect. Stone had been led to the willow-bark trial by the late-mediaeval doctrine of signatures (the folk-pharmaceutical convention that plants growing in marshy fever-country must, by Providence, contain the cure for the fevers of that country). The Royal Society published Stone's letter in the Philosophical Transactions of 1763. The active ingredient (salicylic acid in the bark, later salicin in the 1828 Munich-laboratory isolation by Johann Andreas Buchner) was the foundational substance of the 1897 Bayer-laboratory synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid, marketed as Aspirin from 1899. Aspirin is, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century pharmaceutical historians, the most-consumed manufactured drug in human history.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
1768Wright
In the spring of 1768, in his studio at 28 Queen Street in Derby, the thirty-three-year-old Joseph Wright completed the oil painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm). The painting shows a itinerant natural-philosopher demonstrating a vacuum experiment to a domestic audience of about seven adults and three children in the late-evening lamp-light of a provincial English house. The vacuum experiment in progress is the air-pump-with-a-glass-globe-and-a-cockatoo, in which the natural-philosopher slowly evacuates the air from the globe and the cockatoo in the globe begins to suffocate; the natural-philosopher can, by re-opening the tap, save the bird. The question of the painting is the moment of the experiment at which the natural-philosopher chooses whether to re-admit the air or to let the cockatoo die for the edification of the audience. The painting is, by every careful judgment of the Enlightenment-art-history (Ronald Paulson, David Solkin, Stephen Daniels), the foundational image of the eighteenth-century English-Enlightenment-encounter-with-experimental-science: the Wright canvas is, in plain reading, the British civilian-domestic version of what Wright had been seeing on his trips to Liverpool and Birmingham among the Lunar Society Enlightenment circle of Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton and Joseph Priestley. The painting was bought by Dr Benjamin Bates of Aylesbury in 1768 for £210; it was sold at auction in 1863, bought by the Tate Gallery in 1929, and is, since 1986, in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, where it has hung continuously.
Reynolds founds the Royal Academy
1768Reynolds
On the morning of the tenth of December 1768, at a small private audience in the King's Closet at Buckingham House (the precursor of Buckingham Palace), Joshua Reynolds, forty-five years old, the most successful London portrait painter of the previous decade, was presented to George III by Sir William Chambers (the king's architect) and a deputation of twenty-two London artists, with the draft Instrument of Foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The Instrument established the new academy under the patronage of the Crown, the first state-supported English visual-arts institution, with thirty-six founding members (the Royal Academicians), a teaching schools for young artists, an annual exhibition open to non-members, and the presidency to be elected by the Academicians. The king signed the Instrument the same morning. The Academicians elected Reynolds as the first President at the inaugural meeting at Lambe's Auction Room, Pall Mall, on the fourteenth of December 1768. Reynolds held the office for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He delivered the fifteen Discourses to the Royal Academy schools on the principles of art over the twenty years of his presidency, the foundational English-language treatise on the theory of painting.
Botany Bay, first contact
1770Cook
On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1770, HMS Endeavour under Lieutenant James Cook RN brought up off the south-east coast of New Holland in a wide bay he would within the week call Sting-Ray Harbour and within the month re-name Botany Bay for the unprecedented haul of new plant specimens his botanist Joseph Banks took up its tidal flats. As he came ashore on the south side of the bay in the pinnace with Banks, Solander and a marine guard, two Gweagal warriors of the Dharawal nation stood up on the beach and showed they would not let the boat land. Cook called to them. They did not understand. He fired a musket-ball over their heads. They threw a spear at the boat. He fired small-shot at the leg of the elder warrior, who threw a second spear. The two retreated to the trees. The British landed in deserted shallows. Cook spent eight days in the bay. He went round the bay to the encampments and left presents in them. The encampments stayed empty as long as he was on the coast. The first British landfall on the eastern coast of Australia began with two spear-casts and two musket-shots and an empty beach.
Iron-Mad Wilkinson and the first cylinder
1775Wilkinson
On the morning of Thursday the fourth of May 1775, at the New Willey ironworks at Broseley in Shropshire, the forty-six-year-old Cumbrian iron master John Wilkinson (called by his contemporaries 'Iron-Mad' for his conviction that every artefact, vessel and structure that could be made of iron should be made of iron) delivered to the Scottish steam-engineer James Watt (then forty, working on the Lunar Society circuit out of Birmingham as the technical partner of the Birmingham toy manufacturer Matthew Boulton) the first precision-bored cast-iron steam-engine cylinder ever produced. The cylinder, fifty inches long and eighteen inches in internal diameter, had been bored on the new Wilkinson boring machine patented at Bersham the previous January (Patent No. 1063 of the twenty-seventh of January 1774, 'A New Method of Casting and Boring Iron Guns or Cannon'), which rotated the workpiece around a fixed cutting head mounted on a heavy iron bar passed through the bore: the principle, transferred from cannon-boring to engine-boring at Watt's request, produced an internal cylindrical surface true to within the thickness of an old sixpence (about one sixty-fourth of an inch) over the full fifty-inch length. The first cylinder was installed in Wilkinson's own New Willey blowing engine, the air-pump that drove the blast furnace, in the spring of 1776. The engine ran. The Watt separate-condenser steam engine, demonstrated in Glasgow in 1765 but commercially unbuildable for the decade after because no English foundry could bore a cylinder accurately enough to hold the steam pressure against piston-blowby, was at that moment a commercial proposition. The Boulton-and-Watt firm at Soho, Birmingham, took out its first commercial orders by the end of 1776. The Industrial Revolution, in the specific sense of the long century of high-pressure-steam manufacturing, dates from that cylinder.
Patrick Henry: Give me liberty or give me death
1775Henry
On the afternoon of Thursday the twenty-third of March 1775, in the wooden-frame Second Virginia Convention assembly-hall of the small St John's Episcopal Church on Church Hill in Richmond on the James River in the colonial-British-Crown-Colony of Virginia, the thirty-eight-year-old Hanover County-born Virginia colonial-lawyer and Second-Virginia-Convention delegate Patrick Henry, on the closing-floor-debate of the Convention's resolution-to-arm-the-Virginia-Colonial-Militia in advance of the expected armed-confrontation with the British-Crown-authorities, gave the closing-floor-speech of approximately twelve minutes that has been universally remembered ever since as the central single pre-American-Revolution pro-independence rhetorical-moment. The closing line of the Henry-speech (I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!) became the foundational American-Revolutionary-rhetorical line and is on the foundational-American-political-text inventory beside the Declaration-of-Independence-1776 and the Federalist-Papers-1787. The Henry-speech-resolution-to-arm-the-Virginia-Militia carried the Convention-vote on the twenty-fourth-of-March-1775 by the 65-to-60 narrow-Convention-majority, brought the Virginia-Colony into the pre-Revolutionary armed-militia-preparation across the spring-of-1775, and was the foundational-Virginia-Colonial-precedent for the Second-Continental-Congress armed-resolution of the summer-of-1775 and the Declaration-of-Independence-of-the-fourth-of-July-1776.
Kealakekua Bay
1779Cook
On the morning of the fourteenth of February 1779, Captain James Cook RN, on his third Pacific voyage with HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery, came ashore at Kealakekua Bay on the western coast of the island of Hawaii to retrieve a cutter stolen during the night by a chief of the bay. He had a marine guard of nine men and the intention of taking the local king, Kalaniʻōpuʻu, hostage in his cabin until the cutter was returned, a method that had worked for him in eight previous theft incidents in the Pacific. By misunderstanding, by the failure of the strategy, by the chief's reluctance and his retainers' alarm, by news that arrived on the beach at the wrong moment of a Hawaiian killed by a British boat in the next bay over, the situation collapsed. Cook was struck on the head from behind in the surf, fell on his face, and was killed by clubs and daggers in shallow water. Four marines died with him. He was forty years old. His remains were treated with the highest Hawaiian honours, the bones distributed among ranking chiefs as a man of mana, and many of them eventually returned to the Resolution in a parcel for sea-burial. The third voyage continued under Charles Clerke and made it home to Deptford on the fourth of October 1780, sixteen months after his death.
Gilbert White at Selborne
1789White
In the autumn of 1789 the London publisher Benjamin White & Son (the family firm of the author's youngest brother) issued The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton, a quarto of about 470 pages, by the Reverend Gilbert White, sixty-nine years old, curate of the small Hampshire village where he had been born and would die. The book was the edited collection of 110 letters, written over twenty-three years (1767–1788) to the antiquary Daines Barrington and the zoologist Thomas Pennant, on the wildlife, geology, climate and antiquities of a single parish. White had observed Selborne and its three miles of surrounding country every day of his adult life: the swifts under his eaves, the harvest-mice in the corn-stooks, the migration patterns of swallows (a question he settled empirically against the 18th-century belief that swallows hibernated in pond-mud). The book has been continuously in print since 1789, has gone through over three hundred editions, and is, by every careful judgment of natural-history writing, the foundational text of English-language nature writing and the model for every later naturalist's parish-record from Richard Jefferies to Robert Macfarlane.
Cavendish weighs the Earth
1798Cavendish
Across the months of August 1797 to May 1798, in the small purpose-built shed at the back of the garden of his Clapham Common house at the south-western edge of London, the painfully shy sixty-seven-year-old natural philosopher Henry Cavendish, the second son of Lord Charles Cavendish and grandson on the maternal side of the 2nd Duke of Kent, conducted the systematic series of seventeen torsion-balance measurements that became universally known ever since as the Cavendish Experiment: the first direct laboratory measurement of the gravitational force of attraction between two ordinary objects of known masses, and the foundational experimental result of modern gravitational physics. The torsion-balance apparatus (originally designed by the Reverend John Michell, the Cavendish family's late Cambridge friend and a fellow Royal Society Fellow, and bequeathed to Cavendish at Michell's death in 1793 with the working tools and the requirement to complete the apparatus and conduct the measurements) consisted of a six-foot wooden rod suspended horizontally at its midpoint by a fine steel torsion wire, with two two-inch lead spheres of approximately 1.6 pounds each at the rod's ends; two large twelve-inch lead spheres of approximately 350 pounds each were positioned by a separate suspension system close to the small spheres, and the gravitational attraction between the small spheres and the large spheres produced a small but measurable rotation of the suspended rod that could be observed through a telescope at the small angular-deflection scale Cavendish had marked on the rear wall of the shed. The seventeen measurements across the nine months gave a value for the average density of the Earth of approximately 5.48 times the density of water (the modern accepted value is 5.51), and on the strength of the geometry of the apparatus and the known radius of the Earth produced the first direct laboratory value for Newton's gravitational constant G of approximately 6.74 times ten to the minus eleven cubic metres per kilogram per second squared (the modern accepted value is 6.67). The Cavendish Experiment is the central single experimental measurement of late-eighteenth-century physics and the foundational laboratory result on which every subsequent value of the mass of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the universe has been built.
The Battle of the Nile
1798Nelson
On the evening of the first of August 1798, having chased Bonaparte's invasion fleet across the Mediterranean for ten weeks and missed it twice, Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson found the French battle fleet under Vice-Admiral Brueys anchored in line in Aboukir Bay on the Egyptian coast east of Alexandria. The wind was favourable. The light was failing. Brueys had not believed Nelson would attack at dusk in shoal water on an unsurveyed coast. Nelson did. Captain Foley of the Goliath led half the British line through a gap between the head of the French line and the shoals to take the French from the inshore side. The French were caught between two fires. At twenty-two minutes past ten the French flagship L'Orient, 120 guns, blew up. Eleven of the thirteen French ships of the line were taken or destroyed. Bonaparte's army was stranded in Egypt. The Mediterranean closed against France for the remainder of the war.
The young Rothschild arrives at Manchester
1798Rothschild
In the third week of October 1798, on the wet autumn evening of the eighteenth of October, the twenty-one-year-old Frankfurt-Judengasse textile-trader Nathan Mayer Rothschild, third son of the Frankfurt court-banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, alighted from the coach from Hull on the cobbled forecourt of the Bridgewater Arms coaching-inn in High Street, Manchester, with a small leather travelling-trunk, a banker's draft for the equivalent of approximately twenty thousand pounds in his coat pocket, the small private cipher his father had instructed him to use in correspondence between himself and the family bank at the Judengasse, and instructions from his father to establish a small cotton-and-textile export business at Manchester on the family's behalf. He spoke at the moment of arrival a few sentences of English (the language he had been taught by a private tutor at Frankfurt across the previous six months under his father's instruction), no Lancashire-dialect Manchester English (which he would acquire across the next eighteen months on the warehouse floor), no contemporary contacts among the Manchester cotton-merchant establishment (the small but powerful community of Manchester-Quaker and Manchester-Nonconformist cotton-merchant houses that controlled the spinning-and-weaving export trade), and the personal direction that he was to settle into the Manchester cotton trade as a junior independent merchant on the family's capital and develop the business across the next several years. He set up the small cotton-trading office at 25 Brown Street in the central Manchester warehouse district within three weeks of arrival, took the first wholesale cotton-purchase order at the Manchester Royal Exchange on the eighth of November 1798, and across the next decade built from the small Brown Street office the largest single textile-export business in the north of England, the foundation of the modern Rothschild international business that he would relocate to London in 1809 to establish NM Rothschild & Sons at New Court.
Count Rumford founds the Royal Institution
1799Thompson
On the afternoon of 7 March 1799 the Massachusetts-born Anglo-American physicist Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, forty-six years old, signed the prospectus of the Royal Institution of Great Britain at the Soho Square house of the Royal Society President Sir Joseph Banks. The prospectus, drafted by Rumford across the previous six weeks, set out the proposal for a public-science institution at the centre of London that would combine a research laboratory, a popular-science lecture theatre, a library and a mechanical-workshops school for the artisan-and-tradesman class of the British capital. Fifty-eight subscribers paid fifty guineas each on the Soho Square afternoon to establish the foundation endowment; the Royal Institution opened at 21 Albemarle Street, Mayfair on 7 March 1800, the London public-science institution that ran the career of Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, John Tyndall, James Dewar and George Porter across the next two and a quarter centuries.
Trafalgar and “England expects”
1805Nelson
On the morning of the twenty-first of October 1805, twenty-seven British ships of the line under Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson met thirty-three French and Spanish ships of the line under Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles de Villeneuve about twelve miles west-north-west of Cape Trafalgar on the south-western coast of Spain. Nelson signalled his fleet at 11:45, England expects that every man will do his duty. The action that followed lasted five hours and broke the combined fleet, eighteen of the enemy taken or sunk, none of the British. At about a quarter past one, on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory with the Redoutable yard-arm to yard-arm with him, Nelson was hit by a musket-ball fired from the Redoutable's mizzen-top by a French marine. He was carried below. He died at twenty past four, in the cockpit, with the Victory's surgeon Beatty and his chaplain Scott and his flag-captain Hardy beside him. The signal that ended the threat of a French invasion of Britain.
Sir John Moore at Corunna
1809Moore
On the afternoon of the sixteenth of January 1809, on the high ground above the port of Corunna in north-western Spain, Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, forty-seven years old, the Glasgow-born commander of the British army in the Peninsula, was hit in the left shoulder by a French cannonball during the rearguard action that covered the embarkation of his fifteen-thousand-strong army onto the Royal Navy transport fleet in the harbour below. The army had marched two hundred and fifty miles in retreat across Galicia in the previous three weeks, harassed by Marshal Soult's army of twenty-five thousand, in mid-winter, in shoes that had given out on the second week. Moore had fought the rearguard action at Corunna to hold Soult off the embarkation. The ball took him below the left clavicle, shattered the rib-cage, and lodged near the spine. He was taken back to the officer's billet in the town and died at about nine in the evening. His last words, by his ADC Captain John Hardinge: I hope my country will do me justice. I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice. The army embarked successfully overnight and reached Plymouth on the twenty-second of January. Charles Wolfe's poem The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna (1817), with its opening line not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, became the schoolroom-memorised piece of nineteenth-century English-language military elegy.
Rothschild and the Waterloo news at New Court
1815Rothschild
At approximately six o'clock on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-first of June 1815, at the small London commercial counting-house of NM Rothschild & Sons at New Court in St Swithin's Lane in the City of London, the thirty-seven-year-old Frankfurt-born financier Nathan Mayer Rothschild received from his private express-courier Rothworth of Ostend the brief handwritten note from his Brussels agent Salomon de Rothschild that the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-Allied army had decisively defeated the French Imperial army of Napoleon Bonaparte at the small village of Waterloo south of Brussels on the afternoon of the eighteenth of June 1815. The Rothschild private-courier despatch had been carried by Rothworth from the Waterloo battlefield to Brussels on the night of the eighteenth, from Brussels to Ostend on the morning of the nineteenth, from Ostend to Dover on the small chartered packet-boat Calais Packet on the afternoon of the nineteenth, from Dover to London by Rothschild private courier-coach across the twenty-day-and-night turnpike-route along the Dover Road, and was delivered to Nathan's hand at New Court at approximately six on the morning of the twenty-first of June 1815, almost forty-eight hours ahead of the official British government Waterloo despatch from Major Henry Percy of the Wellington staff, which reached Lord Bathurst at the War Office in London at approximately ten o'clock on the evening of the twenty-first. Nathan walked from the New Court counting-house to the Stock Exchange at Capel Court at ten in the morning, took the standard merchant's position at his Stock Exchange-trading pillar, conducted across the next several hours the careful sequence of trading-and-bond-selling operations on the strength of his advance Waterloo information that have been the foundation of every subsequent legend about the New Court trading-day of the twenty-first of June 1815, and from the closing of the day's trading-and-currency operations had consolidated the family's position as the central single financial house of the post-Waterloo European order. He carried the official Waterloo confirmation personally to the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool at Downing Street at ten on the evening of the twenty-first, ten minutes after the official Percy despatch had reached the War Office, and met Liverpool on the strength of the Percy confirmation across the rest of the night.
Keats reads Chapman's Homer through the night
1816Chapman
In October 1816 the twenty-year-old John Keats, then a junior apothecary's apprentice at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, was lent by his Enfield-Academy schoolfriend Charles Cowden Clarke an early-seventeenth-century folio copy of George Chapman's 1611 translation of The Iliad (Chapman the Elizabethan-and-Jacobean playwright and Homer-translator who had completed the Iliad in 1611 and the Odyssey in 1614 on a four-decade working-translation programme of post-Marlowe English-Renaissance hellenist verse). Keats and Cowden Clarke read the Chapman Iliad through the night at Cowden Clarke's small lodgings on Clerkenwell Green from ten in the evening through to six in the morning. Keats walked home through the dawn streets to his Dean Street lodgings near Guy's Hospital, sat down at his desk on his arrival, and wrote across the next forty minutes the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (published in The Examiner of Sunday 1 December 1816 on Leigh Hunt's small Examiner-magazine editorial decision), the foundational Keats poem of the November-1816 working breakthrough that opened the four-year Keats-poetic-career period. The small Keats sonnet is now generally regarded as the foundational small fourteen-line breakthrough-moment of nineteenth-century English Romantic poetry.
Webb Ellis picks up the ball at Rugby School
1823Ellis
On a soft November afternoon in 1823, on the long sloping playing field below the Doctor's Wall at Rugby School in Warwickshire, the sixteen-year-old fifth-form pupil William Webb Ellis, the son of a deceased dragoon officer of the 3rd Light Dragoons and a clergyman's daughter from the parish of Brownsover near Rugby, in the middle of a routine school football match between the senior boys' houses (the football match of the period was a heavily-improvised kicking-and-catching code that the Rugby boys had developed across the preceding decade, with substantial regional variation between the senior public schools), in defiance of the established Rugby School rules of the time (which permitted the catching and the carrying of the ball but required the catcher to retreat behind the line he had caught it on before kicking it forward), picked up the ball with both hands, tucked it under his arm, and ran forward with it across the half-way line and into the opposition territory. The act was, by the 1880 account of his fellow pupil Matthew Bloxam (the principal contemporary witness, who set down the recollection fifty-seven years after the event in the Rugby School magazine The Meteor), with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game. The act has been universally remembered ever since as the founding moment of rugby football. Rugby School adopted the carrying-and-running variant within fifteen years; the Rugby Football Union was founded in London in 1871 on the Rugby School rules; the international game of rugby football today is played in over a hundred countries with a global participation of approximately ten million players and a Rugby World Cup audience of approximately eight hundred million viewers. The Rugby World Cup trophy, contested at four-year intervals since 1987, is the Webb Ellis Cup.
The blacking factory
1824Dickens
In February 1824, when Charles Dickens was twelve years old, his father John Dickens was arrested for debt and committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. The household goods were sold; his mother and the younger children moved into the prison itself, which was the practice; Charles was lodged in a back room in Camden Town and put to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, 30 Hungerford Stairs, on the Strand, pasting labels on pots of bootblack for six shillings a week. He worked there for, by his own account, about five months. His father came out of the Marshalsea in May. Dickens told nobody about the warehouse for the next twenty-three years. He told the autobiographical fragment to his friend John Forster in 1847. He never wrote it down for publication. The whole of David Copperfield and most of his fiction about childhood comes out of those five months in the warehouse and the back-bedroom in Camden Town.
George Green at the Nottingham windmill
1828Green
In the spring of 1828 the Nottingham miller George Green, thirty-four years old, with only one year of formal school under his belt and twenty-five years of running the family windmill at Sneinton outside the city behind him, published at his own expense a pamphlet of seventy-two pages titled An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism. The essay introduced what is now called Green's Theorem, the formal mathematical relationship between an integral over a closed region and an integral around its boundary, and Green's Functions, the technique for solving inhomogeneous differential equations from boundary conditions, that became the foundational mathematical tools of nineteenth-century mathematical physics. The pamphlet had been written in the upper room of the windmill on the Sneinton ridge above Nottingham, on stolen evenings from the day's grinding work. Fifty-one subscribers paid seven and sixpence each to put it into print. They were the only readers. Green's name was unknown to the English mathematical establishment of the period and remained unknown until William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin), then a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, came across a second-hand copy in a Cambridge bookshop in 1845, four years after Green's death, recognised what the country had missed, and put the essay back into the literature.
The Fighting Temeraire
1838Turner
On the afternoon of Wednesday the fifth of September 1838, on the Thames at Rotherhithe in east London, the ninety-eight-gun second-rate ship of the line HMS Temeraire, twenty-three years out of front-line Royal Navy service, sold by Admiralty auction to the breakers' yard of John Beatson at Rotherhithe for £5,530, was towed up the Thames from Sheerness on the Medway by two paddle-tugs to the breakers' wharf. Temeraire, launched at Chatham in 1798, had been the second ship in Nelson's weather column at Trafalgar on the twenty-first of October 1805, immediately astern of HMS Victory; she had taken the surrender of the French Redoutable and the spanish San Justo in the action that killed Nelson. By the autumn of 1838 she had been a stationary receiving-ship at Sheerness for the fifteen previous years and the Admiralty had condemned her. The tow-up the river was watched, by the Greenwich and Rotherhithe waterfront, by several thousand people. Among them, on the southern bank near Greenwich, was the painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, sixty-three years old, who sketched the tow from the waterfront in a octavo notebook. The painting that came out of the sketch, The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 (oil on canvas, 90.8 × 121.9 cm), was exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1839. Turner refused to sell the picture in his lifetime; he bequeathed it to the nation on his death in 1851. The painting is in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, where it has hung continuously since 1856 and where it was, by the 2005 BBC Today programme public poll, voted the greatest painting in Britain.
Rowland Hill and the Penny Post
1840Hill
On the morning of the sixth of May 1840, at the front counter of the General Post Office in St Martin's-le-Grand in central London, the postal clerk at the head of the queue sold to a Mr James Chalmers the first sheet of the Penny Black, the world's first prepaid adhesive postage stamp, designed by Sir Rowland Hill, the principal architect of the Postal Reform Act of August 1839. The stamp, a black engraving of Queen Victoria's profile by William Wyon, cost one penny and could be used to send any letter under half an ounce to anywhere in the United Kingdom. Until that morning, the British postal system had charged the recipient on delivery at a graduated rate by distance and weight that placed a one-page letter from London to Edinburgh at one shilling and three pence (about half a day's labourer's wages in 1839). The reform collapsed the cost to one penny flat-rate, prepaid by the sender. The volume of British post almost doubled within the first year, quadrupled within seven, and increased thirtyfold by 1900. The Penny Post is, by every careful judgment of the historians of communication, the foundational modern mass-communication reform of the nineteenth century and the template for every later postal system in the world. Rowland Hill was knighted in 1860 and given a Parliamentary grant of £20,000 at his retirement in 1864.
Newman converts at Littlemore
1845Newman
On the evening of Wednesday the eighth of October 1845, in the small-Anglican-community-house at the Littlemore village outside Oxford that John Henry Newman, then forty-four years old, the Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin at Oxford and the Anglican-leader of the Oxford-Movement Anglo-Catholic religious-revival of the 1830s-and-1840s, had built and lived in continuously since the 1842 Littlemore-retirement period, the Italian-Passionist priest Father Dominic Barberi (a Italian-Catholic priest of the Passionist-order who was on the English-Catholic-missionary circuit) received Newman into the Roman Catholic Church through the Catholic sacrament-of-conditional-baptism-and-First-Confession-and-First-Communion ceremony that took the evening into the early-morning of the ninth of October 1845. The Newman conversion at Littlemore was the foundational Victorian religious-and-intellectual event of the nineteenth-century-English religious-history, the completion of the Newman-Oxford-Movement Anglican-Catholic theological-trajectory that he had pursued across the Tracts-for-the-Times publication-and-Tract-90-controversy period from 1833 onwards, and the permanent-end of his Anglican-Church-of-England ministry. He was the most-prominent senior-Anglican to convert to Roman Catholicism in the modern English religious-history, and his conversion-at-Littlemore was the trigger for the large-scale Anglo-Catholic-conversion-wave to Roman Catholicism across the late-1840s and 1850s.
Emily and Wuthering Heights
1846Brontë
In the autumn of 1845, in the dining-room of the parsonage at Haworth, Charlotte Brontë opened her sister Emily's writing-desk in Emily's absence and read the manuscript pages of poems Emily had been keeping for nine years. The discovery led to the joint volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell under the three deliberately ungendered pseudonyms; it sold two copies. By the autumn of 1846 Emily was halfway through Wuthering Heights, the only novel she ever wrote. It was published by Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, was thought by reviewers to be the work of a violent man, and is now usually reckoned the most extraordinary single novel of nineteenth-century English fiction. Emily was twenty-nine. She had eight months to live when the book came out. She refused to go down to Halifax to consult a doctor. She died of consumption on the nineteenth of December 1848 at the parsonage, in the dining-room where she had written most of the book.
Shaftesbury and the Ten Hours Act
1847Cooper
On the evening of the eighth of June 1847, in the Commons Chamber at the Palace of Westminster, the Ten Hours Bill (more formally, the Factories Act 1847), introduced as a private member's bill by John Fielden of Todmorden on behalf of the Yorkshire Short-Time Committees and the wider factory-reform movement, passed its third reading by 145 votes to 66 and became law on the eighth of June. The Bill limited the day for women and children under eighteen in textile mills to ten hours, ending the fourteen-and-sixteen-hour mill-day of the 1830s and 40s. The senior parliamentary architect of the fifteen-year campaign was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, then Lord Ashley (he would inherit the earldom of Shaftesbury from his father in June 1851), forty-six years old at the 1847 passage, the Tory backbencher and Evangelical Anglican philanthropist who had carried the Ten Hours bills (1832, 1833, 1844) through five previous parliamentary defeats. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 is the first effective limit on industrial working-hours in any country in the world and the foundational legislative ground of the modern working-day, the eight-hour day, and the weekend. Shaftesbury continued as the Victorian factory-and-philanthropic reformer (the Lunacy Act of 1845, the Climbing Boys Act of 1875, the Ragged Schools Union, the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews) until his death in 1885.
Simpson and chloroform
1847Simpson
On the late evening of the fourth of November 1847, in the dining-room of 52 Queen Street in central Edinburgh, James Young Simpson, thirty-six years old, the Bathgate-born Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh since 1839, and his colleagues Dr George Keith and Dr James Matthews Duncan, sat down after the family dinner with a box of experimental volatile-liquid samples that Simpson had been collecting from the chemists of Edinburgh over the previous fortnight, with the intention of testing them as anaesthetic candidates by the inhalation of small quantities. Ether had been used in surgery for about a year (since the Boston Massachusetts General Hospital demonstration of October 1846) but had the disadvantages of slow induction and pulmonary irritation. The third sample of the evening was a clear sweet-smelling liquid the chemists at Duncan and Flockhart on the South Bridge had provided to Simpson on the request three days earlier: trichloromethane, or chloroform. The three doctors inhaled small quantities. Within about a minute the three were, by Simpson's later account, most happily under the influence and showing in our faces and in our conversation the effects we had been seeking. Within ten minutes all three were unconscious on the dining-room floor. Simpson came round first (about half past eleven), woke the others, made notes of the experience, and wrote up the observations the following day. He presented the paper to the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society on the tenth of November 1847. Chloroform-assisted childbirth was administered for the first time on the eighth of November to a Mrs Carstairs of Edinburgh. Queen Victoria received chloroform from John Snow for the birth of her eighth child Prince Leopold in 1853, giving the royal imprimatur to the practice and effectively closing the church-of-Scotland resistance to obstetric anaesthesia.
Charlotte alone at Haworth
1849Brontë
Branwell Brontë died at the parsonage on the twenty-fourth of September 1848. Emily died on the nineteenth of December 1848. Anne died on the twenty-eighth of May 1849 at Scarborough on a sea-trip Charlotte had taken her on in the hope of saving her. By June 1849 Charlotte was the only one of the four Brontë children left in the parsonage, with the father, the elderly servant Tabby, and a curate she would later marry. She sat down at the dining-room table where she and her sisters had walked round and round in the evenings reading their work to each other, and tried to begin Shirley. The novel, which she had started before the deaths, was the first piece of writing she had to finish in a room where no other Brontë would ever read a sentence of it again. She finished it. She finished Villette after it. She married Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died in childbed in March 1855, the last of them, aged thirty-eight.
Stonewall Jackson's flank march at Chancellorsville
1863Jackson
On the afternoon of Saturday the second of May 1863, in the Spotsylvania-County wilderness woodland of north-central Virginia, the thirty-nine-year-old Clarksburg, West Virginia-born Confederate States Army General Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson, the Lieutenant-General commanding the Second-Corps of the Confederate-Army-of-Northern-Virginia under the overall-command of General Robert E. Lee, led the Second-Corps approximately twenty-eight-thousand-soldier flank-march column across the fourteen-mile cross-country march from the Confederate-Army-position south of Chancellorsville to the extreme-right-flank-position of the Union-Army-of-the-Potomac under General Joseph Hooker on the north-western edge of the Chancellorsville-Wilderness-position, and at six in the evening of the second of May launched the massive Second-Corps-surprise flank-attack on the unsuspecting Union-Eleventh-Corps under General Oliver O. Howard from the rear-flank-direction. The Jackson-flank-attack across the evening-and-night of the second-and-third-of-May 1863 collapsed the Union-Army-of-the-Potomac right-flank, drove the Eleventh-Corps approximately two-miles back across the Wilderness, and produced the foundational Confederate-tactical-victory of the Battle of Chancellorsville (the Lee-Jackson Confederate-tactical-victory of the Battle of Chancellorsville is universally remembered as the most-brilliant Confederate-tactical-operation of the American-Civil-War and the classic-textbook example of the Napoleonic-tactical flank-march-and-surprise-attack-doctrine). The Jackson-flank-march is the central single Jackson-military-tactical-moment and the foundational tactical-history single-image of the Confederate-Army-of-Northern-Virginia.
Sir Samuel and Florence Baker on the cliff above Lake Albert
1864Baker
On the morning of 14 March 1864 the Norfolk-born hunter-explorer Sir Samuel White Baker, forty-two years old, and his Transylvanian-born wife Florence, twenty-three years old, climbed the escarpment above the Bunyoro fishing village of Vacovia and saw the expanse of fresh water of Lake Albert (the small Nyanza on the Bunyoro-Bantu naming, the Mwitanzige of the local Banyoro people) stretching out below them to the western Congo-Forest horizon. The small ten-month overland expedition from Khartoum that had brought them through the Lower Sudan, the Bahr-el-Jebel marshes, the Acholi country of Northern Uganda and the Bunyoro kingdom of King Kamurasi to the western Albertine-Rift was the senior expedition of the post-Speke-Burton 1860-to-1864 Nile-source-exploration cycle. The small Lake Albert discovery was, on the post-1864 working geographical-society assessment of the Nile-headwaters problem, the second-of-two-major-lakes (alongside the Speke 1862 Lake Victoria discovery) that the post-1864 working Nile-source orthodoxy was built on. The small Florence-Baker partnership at the escarpment moment was, on the subsequent post-1864 sentimental-Victorian-public-imagination, the senior small wife-and-husband-explorer image of the mid-Victorian senior-Geographical-Society-publication tradition.
Phillips Brooks writes O Little Town of Bethlehem
1865Brooks
On the night of Christmas Eve 1865 the twenty-nine-year-old Philadelphia Episcopal clergyman Phillips Brooks rode out from Jerusalem on horseback with the congregation of the Christ Church American Episcopal Mission to attend the midnight service at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He had come to the Holy Land on a post-Civil-War sabbatical from his Philadelphia parish at the recommendation of his bishop, was riding the five-mile descent from Jerusalem to Bethlehem through the Judean hills on a clear winter night under a substantial moon, and the impression of the Judean landscape under moonlight that he carried away from the Christmas Eve ride would three years later produce the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem (written at his Philadelphia desk in December 1868 for the small annual Sunday-School Christmas concert of the Holy Trinity Episcopal parish). The small carol, set to the Lewis Redner tune Saint Louis of December 1868 and published in the Holy Trinity Sunday School hymnal of 1869, has become the senior American-English-language Christmas carol of the post-1869 popular-Anglophone-Christmas-carol tradition.
William Booth and the Mile End Mission
1865Booth
On the evening of Sunday the second of July 1865, on the Mile End Waste open-ground at the junction of Mile End Road and Cambridge Heath Road in the East-End of London, the thirty-six-year-old Sneinton, Nottingham-born Methodist evangelical preacher William Booth, recently arrived in London from the Methodist-New-Connexion provincial-circuit, opened a tent-revival mission on the open ground outside the Blind Beggar public-house on the strength of the East-London-Special-Services-Committee invitation from the East-End-Wesleyan-Methodist evangelical-network. The tent-revival ran for the five-evenings of the second-to-the-sixth-of-July 1865 with the Booth-preaching the evangelical-Methodist conversion-message to the East-End-poor congregation of approximately three hundred to five hundred people per evening. The five-evening Mile-End-Waste tent-revival is universally remembered ever since as the foundational moment of the East-London Christian Mission, the mission-organisation that Booth-and-his-wife Catherine founded across the late-1865-and-1866 period on the Mile-End-Waste tent-revival foundation. The East-London-Christian-Mission was renamed The Christian Mission in 1869 on the expansion to the wider-London missionary-operation, and was renamed The Salvation Army in 1878 on the Booth-quasi-military-organisational-restructuring decision. The Salvation Army grew across the Booth-lifetime (1865-1912) to a worldwide Salvation-Army-organisation of approximately fifteen thousand officers and approximately a million members in over fifty countries, the foundational evangelical-and-social-welfare urban-missionary movement of the modern era.
Stanley meets Livingstone at Ujiji
1871Stanley
On the morning of Friday the tenth of November 1871, on the dusty palm-and-mango-shaded waterfront of the small Arab slave-trading town of Ujiji on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika in what is now western Tanzania, the thirty-year-old Welsh-American newspaper reporter Henry Morton Stanley of the New York Herald, at the close of eight months of overland march from Zanzibar through the German-and-Belgian-claimed-but-still-uncolonised East African interior with a small expedition of approximately two hundred porters and twenty-seven askari guards, walked through the small crowd of Ujiji locals that had gathered at the shore on news of the European caravan's arrival, picked out from the crowd the small figure of the fifty-eight-year-old Scottish-born Congregational missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone (who had been six years missing in the central African interior on his search for the source of the Nile, who was widely believed in Europe and America to be dead, and who was at this moment standing weak and ragged at the edge of the Ujiji crowd in his blue cloth cap and the threadbare oxford-grey jacket that was almost his last remaining piece of European clothing), removed his own pith helmet, walked the last twenty paces, and addressed Livingstone in the form of the famous question that has been universally remembered ever since: Doctor Livingstone, I presume? Livingstone smiled, raised his blue cloth cap in return, and replied Yes. The two men shook hands at the centre of the Ujiji crowd at approximately eleven in the morning of the tenth of November 1871. Stanley delivered the eighteen-month-old letter-of-correspondence from Livingstone's children at Newstead Abbey that he had carried in his pith-helmet hatband across the eight months of the East African march; Livingstone read it, wept openly, and embraced Stanley. The meeting at Ujiji was the central single moment of nineteenth-century European geographical journalism and the foundational event of the modern news-reporter-as-explorer tradition.
Mr Watson, come here
1876Bell
On the early evening of the tenth of March 1876, in the upstairs garret of a four-storey lodging-house at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell, twenty-nine years old, Edinburgh-born, professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, lately granted U.S. patent number 174,465 for the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, spilled a amount of dilute sulphuric acid from the receiver-cup of his experimental telephone onto the front of his trousers. He spoke into the apparatus, into the next room, the line that has been the central artefact of telecommunications history ever since. Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you. Thomas Augustus Watson, his twenty-two-year-old assistant, in the back garret with the receiver to his ear, heard the sentence over the line clearly. He came, on the run. The two men sat at the apparatus for the rest of the evening transmitting passages of the Lord's Prayer to each other, of which Watson took notes in pencil on the back of his apron. Bell's notebook entry, in his own hand, dated the tenth of March 1876, is in the United States Library of Congress.
Ruskin versus Whistler
1878Ruskin
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of November 1878, in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, the libel suit Whistler v. Ruskin came up for trial before Baron Huddleston. The American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, forty-four years old, was suing John Ruskin, fifty-nine, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and the English art critic of the nineteenth century, for libel arising from a paragraph in Ruskin's monthly pamphlet Fors Clavigera of July 1877, in which Ruskin had reviewed Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (then on exhibition at the new Grosvenor Gallery) with the line: I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. The trial lasted two days. Ruskin, who had been suffering a long-running mental breakdown since the previous spring, was unable to attend; his was represented by his counsel Sir John Holker QC. Whistler appeared and gave the memorable exchange under cross-examination about how long the Nocturne in Black and Gold had taken him to paint (two days) and what he was charging two hundred guineas for (the knowledge of a lifetime). The jury found for Whistler, but awarded him only one farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages with no costs. Whistler was bankrupted by the legal costs and lost his house at Tite Street in Chelsea; Ruskin resigned the Slade Professorship at Oxford and never returned to public art criticism. The trial is, by every careful judgment of the late-Victorian art-history, the foundational legal-and-cultural moment of modern art-critical thinking.
Morris and the Kelmscott Press
1891Morris
In January 1891, in a rented house at 16 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, two doors down from his London family-house Kelmscott House on the Thames riverside, William Morris, fifty-six years old, the Walthamstow-born poet-designer-and-socialist who had founded the Arts and Crafts movement at his 1861 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co firm and who had spent the previous five years in the Hammersmith Socialist League political-organisational work, set up the Kelmscott Press, the private-press he had been planning since the 1888 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society lecture by Emery Walker on the decline of late-Victorian commercial typography. The Press had two iron hand-presses, one Kelmscott-bespoke wood-cut typeface (the Golden Type, cut by Edward Prince to Morris's design after the fifteenth-century Nicolas Jenson Roman of Venice), and a three-man workforce: Morris himself as the designer, the compositor William Bowden, and the pressman Thomas Binning. The first Kelmscott book, The Story of the Glittering Plain by William Morris, was published in May 1891 in a two-hundred-copy edition on hand-made paper at the list-price of two guineas (about £300 in 2025 money). The Press operated until Morris's death in October 1896 and produced fifty-three Kelmscott books in total, including the monumental Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896 (the folio illustrated edition of Geoffrey Chaucer with eighty-seven Edward Burne-Jones wood-engravings, the foundational book of the late-Victorian private-press movement). The Kelmscott Press inaugurated the British private-press tradition that continued through the Doves Press (1900), the Ashendene Press (1894), the Eragny Press (1894), the Essex House Press (1898), and the Golden Cockerel Press (1920), and that produced, by every careful judgment of book-history (David Pearson, Peter Allen, Mike Phillpotts), the foundational design-revival of twentieth-century English-language book-design.
Henry Wood and the first Prom
1895Wood
On the evening of Saturday the tenth of August 1895, in the newly built Queen's Hall on Langham Place in central London, the impresario Robert Newman, thirty-seven years old, the lessee of the hall and the founder of a small private concert agency, presented the first concert of his experimental Promenade Concerts series. The orchestral programme was conducted by a twenty-six-year-old former boy-soprano of the All Saints', Margaret Street choir, Henry Joseph Wood, recently returned from a season of musical-direction at the Lyceum theatre on Wellington Street. Newman's innovation was a set of three principles: pit-of-the-hall cleared of seats to provide a promenade arena for low-cost cheap-ticket audiences; relaxed conventions of the seated concert (smoking, eating, drinking, and walking-about during the music permitted in the promenade arena); mixed programmes pairing serious orchestral repertoire (Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms) with light-music encores. The eight-week first season ran from the tenth of August to the twenty-fifth of October 1895, with about sixty concerts; the cheap-ticket audience averaged about a thousand per evening. The Proms continued under Wood's direction for the next forty-nine years (until his death in 1944); the BBC took over the financial-backing of the festival in 1927 (the BBC's first major patronage of classical music in the country). The season of the BBC Proms (now eight weeks of mostly-nightly orchestral concerts at the Royal Albert Hall from mid-July to the second Saturday of September) remains in 2025 the largest classical-music festival in the world by audience-numbers, with about six hundred thousand live attendees and a global BBC broadcast audience of about ten million.
Octavia Hill founds the National Trust
1895Hill
On the afternoon of the twelfth of January 1895, in the upstairs drawing-room of the Westminster town house of the Duke of Westminster (Grosvenor House on Park Lane), Octavia Hill, the fifty-six-year-old Wisbech-born housing-and-open-spaces reformer, together with the Reverend Hardwicke Rawnsley (the Lake-District canon and campaigner against Lakeland railway development) and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter (the senior counsel of the Commons Preservation Society since 1865), formally constituted the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty as a registered company under the Companies Act. The Trust's founding purpose, by the first paragraph of its Memorandum of Association, was to promote the permanent preservation, for the benefit of the nation, of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest. The first acquisition of the Trust, in March 1895, was a small piece of clifftop land at Dinas Oleu above Barmouth in Merionethshire, given by the donor Mrs Fanny Talbot for the public use. By 2025 the Trust owns, by the register, about 1.5% of the total land area of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (about 250,000 hectares), over 500 historic houses, a quarter of the Lake District, 780 miles of coastline, and has, by its membership register, the largest single voluntary conservation membership of any organisation in the world.
The Webbs and the LSE
1895Webb
On the evening of the fourth of August 1894, in the drawing-room of the Webb family flat at 41 Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, London, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Sidney, thirty-five, the London civil servant turned Fabian-Society researcher; Beatrice, thirty-six, the Potter-of-Standish-Cotteridge heiress and social-investigator who had spent the previous decade documenting the East-End labour-conditions), read aloud to each other the codicil to the will of Henry Hunt Hutchinson, the Derbyshire Fabian solicitor who had committed suicide three weeks earlier and who had left ten thousand pounds (about £1.5 million in 2025 money) to the Webbs jointly for the propaganda and work of the Fabian Society and the advancement of socialism in Britain. The Webbs spent the next two months considering how to deploy the bequest. Their decision, communicated to Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas at the fifth-of-October 1894 Fabian-Executive meeting, was to use the Hutchinson Trust funds to found a new university-college at London dedicated to the research-and-teaching of the social sciences (economics, political science, sociology, public administration) on the explicit principle that the British political-administrative class needed empirical-social-scientific-training rather than the traditional classical-Oxford-and-Cambridge gentleman's-education. The London School of Economics and Political Science opened in October 1895 in rented rooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi. It is, by every careful judgment of British intellectual history, the foundational institution of twentieth-century British social-democratic thought.
H.G. Wells publishes The War of the Worlds
1898Wells
In late January 1898, on the publication-day of Tuesday the eighteenth of January 1898 at the London publishing-house William Heinemann at 21 Bedford Street in Covent Garden, the thirty-one-year-old Bromley, Kent-born British scientific-romance novelist Herbert George Wells, on the strength of the three-previous-scientific-romance novels he had published across 1895-to-1897 (The Time Machine 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau 1896, The Invisible Man 1897 on the Wells-Heinemann-and-Pearson's-Magazine publishing-circuit), published the completed-volume of his fourth scientific-romance novel The War of the Worlds (the Martian-invasion-of-southern-England novel that had been serialised in Pearson's Magazine across the April-to-December 1897 nine-issue serialisation under the original-serial-title The Coming of the Martians). The War-of-the-Worlds is the foundational alien-invasion novel of the modern English-language science-fiction tradition: the Martian-tripod-machines-and-heat-ray-and-Black-Smoke invasion-narrative across the Surrey-and-Middlesex-and-London southern-English-counties geographic setting, the Wells narrator-walker reporting from the Woking-and-Horsell-Common landing-site through the Surrey-Middlesex retreat-to-London and the Whitechapel-and-Crystal-Palace London-collapse-period, the Martians' subsequent bacterial-collapse on the Common-cold-and-related-Earth-microorganism immunity-failure. The War-of-the-Worlds has been continuously in publication since 1898, has been adapted into the Orson-Welles 1938-Mercury-Theatre-on-the-Air radio-broadcast (the famous-Halloween-Eve broadcast that produced the American-public-panic on the Martian-invasion-fictional-broadcast misinterpretation), the 1953-Byron-Haskin Paramount-Pictures film, the 1978-Jeff-Wayne progressive-rock musical-album, and the 2005-Steven-Spielberg Paramount-Pictures film with Tom Cruise. The War-of-the-Worlds is the foundational template of the modern science-fiction alien-invasion narrative-genre.
The Enigma Variations
1899Elgar
On the evening of Saturday the twenty-first of October 1898, in the upstairs drawing-room of Forli (the Elgar family home on the Alexandra Road in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire), Edward Elgar, forty-one years old, the Worcestershire-born violin teacher and small-organ-recital provincial composer of moderate national reputation, came home from a long day's teaching at Malvern Girls' College, sat down at the upright piano in the drawing-room, smoked a cigar (the daily relaxation routine of the late-Victorian provincial composer), and began to improvise. The improvisation became, by the musical-historical date, the foundational small theme of the Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, the Enigma Variations. Over the next eighteen weeks, by his own letters to A. J. Jaeger of Novello's, Elgar developed the theme into fourteen variations, each titled with the initials or nickname of a member of his circle of friends in Worcestershire and Hereford. Variation IX, Nimrod, written for the publisher's editor A. J. Jaeger (the German Jäger meaning hunter, the Old Testament Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord), has, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century English-music critical reception, become the pre-eminent piece of English-orchestral elegy: it is the piece played at every state funeral in the United Kingdom since 1934, at every Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph since 1920, and at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall every November. The premiere of the Variations was at the Saint James's Hall in London on the nineteenth of June 1899 under Hans Richter; the reception was the moment Elgar moved from provincial reputation to national-composer status.
The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk
1903Wright
At ten thirty-five in the morning of Thursday the seventeenth of December 1903, on a flat strip of sand at the south end of Kill Devil Hills, a dune-and-grass settlement about four miles south of the fishing-village of Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the American bicycle-mechanics-and-aviation-pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright (Orville, thirty-two, the younger brother; Wilbur, thirty-six, the elder; both of Welsh-and-English ancestry on the paternal Wright line of the Wilbur-and-Orville great-great-grandfather Captain Daniel Wright the 1657 English-Puritan-emigrant to Massachusetts) made the first powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air flight in human history. The flight, in the Wright-Flyer-One (a twelve-horsepower-engine biplane of about six hundred pounds total weight, with a forty-foot wingspan and a pusher-propeller configuration), was made by Orville lying flat across the lower wing, hand on the pitch-control elevator, the engine running at full throttle on the launching-rail. The flight ran twelve seconds, covered about a hundred and twenty feet, reached an altitude of about ten feet, and landed safely in soft sand. Wilbur flew the fourth flight of the morning (the brothers had alternated flights all morning on the pre-arranged turn-and-turn-about) for fifty-nine seconds and eight hundred and fifty feet, the longest of the four December 17 flights. Powered controlled flight had been demonstrated.
Thomas Andrews on the Titanic
1912Andrews
At twenty minutes to midnight on the night of Sunday the fourteenth of April 1912, on the four-hundred-mile mid-Atlantic crossing between the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Nantucket Lightship, the White Star Line's new flagship RMS Titanic, three days out of Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg on her starboard bow at a position approximately three hundred and seventy nautical miles south-south-east of Cape Race, Newfoundland. Aboard the ship was Thomas Andrews, thirty-nine years old, the Belfast-born managing director and chief designer at Harland & Wolff who had been the lead naval architect on the Titanic's design through the four years of her construction at the Queen's Island shipyard on the Lagan; he had sailed with the Guarantee Group of eight Harland & Wolff engineers to observe the maiden voyage and to note any final modifications required by the ship's operational performance. Andrews went forward to the bridge with Captain Edward Smith at five minutes after midnight on the fifteenth of April, inspected the forward damage with the Captain over the next ten minutes, calculated that the iceberg had ripped a three-hundred-foot gash along the starboard hull below the waterline that had penetrated the forward five watertight compartments, and informed the Captain at twenty-five past midnight that the ship would sink in approximately ninety minutes (his actual sinking-time estimate, recorded in the Mersey Inquiry transcript of June 1912, was an hour and a half from the moment of impact). The Titanic actually sank at two-twenty in the morning of the fifteenth of April, two hours and forty minutes after the impact, and slightly longer than Andrews's estimate on the strength of the slower-than-predicted flooding through the bulkheads. Andrews spent the next two hours moving through the ship organising the launch of the lifeboats and personally escorting passengers to the boats. He was last seen alive at approximately two-ten in the morning, ten minutes before the ship went down, standing alone in the first-class smoking room on A-deck, his Harland & Wolff naval-architect's lifejacket beside him on a chair, staring at the painting Approach to the New World over the smoking-room mantelpiece. His body was never recovered.
T. E. Lawrence at Aqaba
1917Lawrence
On the morning of the sixth of July 1917, after a 600-mile camel march across the Nefud desert from Wejh on the Red Sea coast through the eastern flank of the Hejaz, Captain T. E. Lawrence of the British liaison mission to the Arab Revolt entered the port of Aqaba at the head of a force of about two thousand bedouin under Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat. The Turkish garrison, whose guns were sited to defend the port from the seaward side, had been taken from the desert side at Aba el Lissan two days earlier in a charge by Auda's horse. The garrison at Aqaba surrendered without firing on the British and Arab force coming down out of the hills behind them. The capture opened the Red Sea coast to British supply and turned the Arab Revolt from a Hejaz sideshow into a strategic flank of Allenby's Palestine campaign. Lawrence was twenty-eight years old. He had been on a camel for two months. He rode another four hundred miles, in the heat of July, alone with two bedouin escort, to bring the news to Allenby in Cairo.
Wonderful things
1922Carter
At twenty past three on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of November 1922, in the antechamber of an unrobbed Eighteenth-Dynasty royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor in Upper Egypt, Howard Carter, the forty-eight-year-old Kensington-born Egyptologist, in his sixth season of patient excavation under the patronage of George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, opened a breach in the sealed door of the inner chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamun, eleventh king of the Eighteenth Dynasty (reigned c.1332–1323 BC, died at about nineteen years of age). The tomb (designated KV62) had been sealed for three thousand two hundred and forty-five years and was the only intact royal tomb yet discovered in the Valley. Carnarvon, his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Carter's assistant Arthur Callender stood behind him at the breach. Carnarvon asked, by Carter's own published account three months later, can you see anything? Carter, by his own published account, replied: yes, wonderful things. The discovery was the most consequential single archaeological event of the twentieth century. Tutankhamun is, by every careful judgment of the Egyptological literature, the most-recognised ancient Egyptian in the world.
Cecilia Payne defends her hydrogen-stellar thesis at Harvard
1925Payne
In the spring of 1925 the twenty-five-year-old English-born Harvard astronomy graduate student Cecilia Payne completed her PhD dissertation on the spectral analysis of stellar atmospheres, demonstrating from a quarter of a million stellar spectral lines that hydrogen and helium are not minor stellar constituents (as the prevailing post-1900 astrophysical orthodoxy held) but the overwhelmingly dominant elements of the stars and (by extension) of the visible universe. The Princeton astrophysicist Henry Norris Russell, the American stellar-astrophysics authority of the period to whom the Harvard astronomy department circulated the thesis for external review, told Payne that the hydrogen-dominance conclusion was so radical that no thesis advisor would accept it and recommended she rewrite the conclusion. She inserted into the final submitted thesis the qualifying sentence that the enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar atmosphere is almost certainly not real and took the PhD on the qualified text. Four years later, in 1929, Russell published his own paper independently confirming her result, attributed the discovery to himself, and the hydrogen-dominance finding was accepted into the literature. The 1925 thesis remains, by the consensus of modern astrophysical history, the single most consequential PhD dissertation in twentieth-century astronomy.
The grocer's daughter who beat Heath
1925Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Roberts grew up above her father's grocery on North Parade in Grantham, in a household with no indoor lavatory and no hot water until she was a teenager. She read chemistry at Somerville under Dorothy Hodgkin, the future Nobel laureate, then read for the Bar in the evenings while looking for a Conservative seat. She entered the Commons for Finchley in 1959. By the autumn of 1974 the Conservative Party had lost two general elections under Edward Heath in eight months, and Heath refused to resign. The leadership challenge of February 1975 was thought to be unwinnable by the candidate the right of the party put up. The candidate the right of the party put up withdrew. Margaret Thatcher decided to stand in his place.
Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness
1928Hall
On the morning of the sixteenth of November 1928, in Court Number One of the Bow Street magistrates' court in central London, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, forty-eight years old, the Bournemouth-born novelist and poet known to her literary friends as John, sat with her partner Una, Lady Troubridge, in the public gallery as the magistrate Sir Chartres Biron read out his judgement in Director of Public Prosecutions v Jonathan Cape, Limited. Cape was the publisher of Hall's fifth novel The Well of Loneliness, published on the twenty-seventh of July 1928, the first English-language novel to take the romantic life of a self-described lesbian (the protagonist Stephen Gordon) as its central subject and to argue, in the closing pages, for the legal-and-moral toleration of the same. The Sunday Express editor James Douglas had attacked the book in his nineteenth-of-August leading-article (A Book That Must Be Suppressed) with the line I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. The Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin moved against the book under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act on the twenty-second of August. Biron, on the sixteenth of November, ruled the book an obscene libel and ordered all copies destroyed. The defence witnesses (E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Leonard Woolf, and twenty-two others) had been refused leave to testify on the grounds that no expert on questions of literature is qualified to give expert evidence on a question of obscenity. The book was effectively banned in Britain until 1949, when it was reprinted by Falcon Press; the ban was never formally lifted, and the 1949 reprint was, on a private legal opinion, not prosecuted. The Well of Loneliness has been continuously in print in English since.
Cockcroft and Walton split the atom
1932Walton
In the early afternoon of Thursday the fourteenth of April 1932, in the small high-voltage laboratory at the back of the Cavendish Laboratory in the basement of the New Museums building on Free School Lane in Cambridge, the Irish-born twenty-eight-year-old physicist Ernest Walton and his English-born senior collaborator John Cockcroft, then thirty-four, fired the world's first artificial particle-accelerator beam at a lithium-metal target and produced the first artificial nuclear disintegration in the history of physics. The accelerator (the Cockcroft-Walton voltage-multiplier circuit and the long evacuated glass column that delivered a beam of about three hundred kiloelectronvolt-energy protons against the lithium target) had been built across the previous three years on the floor of the Cavendish high-voltage room. Walton, at the controls on the afternoon of the fourteenth, watched through the small lead-glass observation window at the back of the column as the lithium target on the receiving end produced the characteristic faint blue scintillations of alpha-particle emission, the signature in the zinc-sulphide screen behind the target of the splitting of the lithium-7 nucleus into two helium-4 nuclei by the incoming proton beam. He left the observation window, walked across the basement laboratory to fetch Cockcroft, and the two men confirmed the observation across the next hour. They had artificially split the atom. The result, published in Nature on the thirtieth of April 1932 under the title Disintegration of Lithium by Swift Protons, was the foundational experimental result of modern nuclear physics, the first demonstration that one element could be artificially transmuted into another, and the central single technical breakthrough on which the Manhattan Project of 1942 to 1945 and the nuclear age of the twentieth century would rest. Cockcroft and Walton shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 for the discovery.
The wilderness years
1932Churchill
From 1929 to 1939 Winston Churchill held no government office. The Conservative leadership had broken with him over India in 1931 and was content to leave him out. He spent the decade at Chartwell, the house in Kent he had bought in 1922, building dry-stone walls with his own hands, painting, writing the four-volume life of his ancestor Marlborough, and waging, from the back-benches of the Commons, a one-man campaign of speeches and articles warning the country and the world that German rearmament under Hitler would end in war. The country mostly did not listen. The Times under Geoffrey Dawson edited him out where it could. The Foreign Office cabled Berlin assurances that he did not represent the government's view. The intelligence brief that fed his speeches, smuggled to him by junior officials and serving officers in defiance of standing orders, was the most accurate non-official assessment of German air strength in Europe. By the autumn of 1938 it was clear he had been right. He came back into the Admiralty on the third of September 1939, the day the country declared war, with the signal Winston is back sent fleetwide.
Fred Perry wins Wimbledon
1934Perry
At a quarter to six on the evening of Friday the sixth of July 1934, on the Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon, Frederick John Perry, twenty-five years old, the Stockport-born former World Table Tennis Champion who had taken up lawn tennis only five years earlier at the relatively late age of twenty, defeated the Australian Jack Crawford in the Men's Singles Final 6–3, 6–0, 7–5 to become the first British male singles champion at the Wimbledon Championships since Arthur Gore in 1909, a twenty-five-year span that had become the longest such gap in the history of the tournament. Perry won the Wimbledon Singles title again in 1935 against Gottfried von Cramm (6–2, 6–4, 6–4) and a third time in 1936 against von Cramm again (6–1, 6–1, 6–0), the three-in-a-row Wimbledon-singles record that has been matched in the seventy-four years since only by Björn Borg (1976–80, five) and Roger Federer (2003–07, five), and exceeded by no British player. He took eight Major singles championships in total: three Wimbledon titles, three US Open titles, an Australian Open and a French Open, making him at his 1936 retirement the only player in the history of men's tennis to have won all four of the modern Grand Slams (the Career Grand Slam, eventually matched by Don Budge in 1938 and confirmed as the central single benchmark of men's tennis the next year). His Wimbledon win of 1934 ended the longest male-singles drought in the tournament's history and was the central single moment of British inter-war sport.
Allen Lane and Penguin
1935Lane
In the spring of 1935, on the platform of Exeter St Davids railway station in Devon, Allen Lane, thirty-two years old, the Bristol-born publisher (a director of the Bodley Head publishing firm since 1925, his uncle John Lane's firm whose name Lane had adopted on the 1919 family deed-poll on his eighteenth birthday), waiting for the late-night sleeper-train back to London after a weekend visit to the novelist Agatha Christie at her Devon home, looked through the station newsstand for a readable book to take on the train journey and could not find one. The newsstand's fiction-stock consisted of about thirty Yellow-Books, Penny-Dreadfuls, and the railway-pulp-fiction that had been the British-railway-bookstall standard since the W. H. Smith 1848 Euston-station opening. There was no serious-literature on the Exeter newsstand at any price-point. Lane spent the train journey back to London thinking about the economic-question: could the paperback book, sold at the sixpence price-point that was the newsstand-and-Woolworths impulse-purchase range, carry serious literature into the mass-market? Within four months he had launched Penguin Books with ten initial titles (the Ariel by André Maurois, A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, Madame Claire by Susan Ertz, The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Christie, and six others), bound in three-colour Penguin-orange paperback covers, on sale at the Woolworths-and-newsagent network at sixpence (the 1935 price of a pack of cigarettes). The first ten Penguins sold a million copies in the first year. The British-paperback revolution was begun.
Mackenzie King and Canada's seven-day pause
1939King
On the third of September 1939, at 11:15 in the morning London time, Neville Chamberlain announced from 10 Downing Street that Britain was at war with Germany on the expiration of the Polish-guarantee ultimatum. Australia and New Zealand declared war the same day on the formal-imperial principle of automatic-following on the British declaration. South Africa declared on the sixth of September after a three-day parliamentary debate. Canada, alone of the Commonwealth Dominions, deliberately delayed. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the sixty-four-year-old Berlin-Ontario-born Prime Minister of Canada (Liberal, 1921–26, 1926–30, and again from 1935), called the Canadian Parliament back from recess and held a three-day debate on the question of whether Canada should declare war. The Canadian Parliament voted in favour of the declaration on the ninth of September; the formal declaration was issued by the King-in-Council on the tenth of September 1939. The seven-day pause was, by every careful judgment of Canadian constitutional historians (Eugene Forsey, J. L. Granatstein), the foundational assertion of Canadian sovereignty under the 1931 Statute of Westminster: the Canadian declaration of war was a Canadian sovereign act of the Canadian Parliament, not an automatic-imperial follow-on from the British declaration. Mackenzie King held the Prime Ministership through the war-and-post-war period and is, by every careful Canadian-political-historian, the longest-serving Westminster-system Prime Minister in history at twenty-one years and one hundred and fifty-four days.
T. H. White writes The Once and Future King at Doolistown
1939White
On 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, the Anglo-Irish writer Terence Hanbury White, thirty-three years old, declared himself a conscientious objector to the imminent war and left Stowe Ridings in Buckinghamshire (where he had been schoolmastering at Stowe School and writing) for a rented farmhouse outside Doolistown, County Meath, fifteen miles north of Dublin. He stayed at Doolistown for the next seven years through to 1946, taught himself falconry, fishing and hare-coursing on the County Meath country, and wrote across the wartime years the four-volume Arthurian retelling that the post-war publisher Collins would assemble in 1958 as The Once and Future King. The four volumes (The Sword in the Stone 1938, The Witch in the Wood / The Queen of Air and Darkness 1939, The Ill-Made Knight 1940, The Candle in the Wind completed 1941 and held over) became the senior twentieth-century English-language Arthurian retelling, the source-text for Disney's 1963 Sword in the Stone, for the Lerner-and-Loewe 1960 Broadway musical Camelot, and (through the Kennedys' adoption of the closing-line as their post-assassination political icon) the source of the post-1963 American 'Camelot' political-mythology associated with the Kennedy White House.
We shall fight on the beaches
1940Churchill
On the morning of the twenty-eighth of May 1940, the third day of his premiership, with the British Expeditionary Force surrounded at Dunkirk and the French government already sounding out terms, Winston Churchill faced the sharpest argument of his political life inside the five-man War Cabinet. The Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax wanted to ask the Italian ambassador to ask Mussolini to ask Hitler what terms he might accept for peace. Churchill argued for three days, in three War Cabinet meetings, that any approach would be the end. He carried the wider Cabinet of twenty-five on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth in a meeting at 10 Downing Street. A week later, with 338,000 men evacuated from Dunkirk, he gave the speech in the Commons that committed the country to fighting on. The thirty-six minutes that ended in the lines about the beaches and the landing-grounds and the fields and the streets and the hills, and never surrendering.
The Bailey bridge
1941Bailey
On the afternoon of the fourteenth of February 1941, in a wooden hut at the War Office's Experimental Bridging Establishment at Christchurch in Hampshire, Donald Bailey, thirty-nine years old, a civilian engineer of the Ministry of Supply, sketched on the back of a Whitehall envelope a prefabricated bridge design: a ten-foot panel of triangulated welded-steel framework, with bolted-end-pins on each side, that could be assembled by manual labour from one bank of a river without scaffolding, decking, or specialist equipment, and that could be combined in multiple panels to make a bridge of any required length and load capacity. The design solved, in a single elegance, the fundamental problem of mobile military bridging in the mechanised-warfare era of 1940 onwards: how to put a bridge across a river-or-ravine fast enough to keep up with an advancing armoured division. The prototype was tested over the River Stour at Christchurch in May 1941; the Army Council ordered the Bailey bridge into production in July; by D-Day in June 1944 the British and American armies between them had laid over fifteen hundred Bailey bridges in North Africa, Italy and France. The Bailey bridge was the bridging standard of all Western armies until late-twentieth-century replacements (the Medium Girder Bridge of the 1970s) began to displace it. By Eisenhower's 1945 assessment, the Bailey bridge was one of the three weapons that won us the war, alongside the radar and the jeep.
Glenn Miller disappears over the English Channel
1944Miller
Late on the morning of Friday the fifteenth of December 1944, at the small Royal Air Force satellite airfield of Twinwood Farm three miles north of Bedford, Major Alton Glenn Miller, forty years old, the Iowa-born American big-band leader who had been commanding the United States Army Air Forces Band in England since the summer of 1944, climbed into the back of a single-engined Noorduyn UC-64A Norseman six-seater utility aircraft for the cross-Channel flight to the small French airfield at Villacoublay outside Paris. He was travelling ahead of his Band to make the final administrative arrangements for the Christmas-Eve concert the Band was scheduled to give for the liberated American forces in central Paris on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of December 1944. The Norseman, piloted by Flight Officer John Robert Stuart Morgan of the United States Army Air Forces with Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell of the European Theatre of Operations Air Service Command as the second passenger, took off from Twinwood Farm at one-fifty-five in the afternoon, climbed to seven hundred and fifty feet under the heavy winter cloud-base, set a south-by-south-east course across the Bedfordshire winter countryside and the Kent coast and the English Channel, and disappeared. No wreckage was ever recovered. No bodies were ever recovered. The Channel weather of the fifteenth of December 1944 was at the limit of the Norseman's flying envelope; the most-accepted modern reconstruction (the 1985 investigation by the United States Air Force historian Roy Nesbit) is that the aircraft iced up in the freezing winter cloud above the Channel and went into the sea at approximately three in the afternoon, somewhere along the line between Dungeness and Cap Gris-Nez. Miller's disappearance is the single most-famous wartime disappearance in popular-music history.
The Marshall Plan speech at Harvard
1947Marshall
On the late-morning of Thursday the fifth of June 1947, at the Harvard Yard Tercentenary-Theatre at the Harvard-University-Commencement-ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the sixty-six-year-old Uniontown, Pennsylvania-born American General of the Army George Catlett Marshall, the General-of-the-Army US Army Chief of Staff who had led the World-War-Two American-Army-General-Staff through the 1939-to-1945 wartime-period and had been appointed United States Secretary of State by President Harry S. Truman on the twenty-first of January 1947 in his sixty-sixth year, gave the eleven-minute Harvard-Commencement honorary-degree acceptance-speech that has been universally remembered ever since as the foundational post-war announcement of the European Recovery Program, the thirteen-billion-dollar American-aid programme to the war-damaged-economies of Western-and-Central-Europe across the 1948-to-1952 Marshall-Plan-implementation-period that became the foundational post-war American-economic-aid programme to the recovering-European-economies. The Harvard-Commencement speech outlined the American-State-Department-proposal that the European-economies should propose a coordinated economic-recovery-programme on the strength of which the United-States-Congress would commit substantial American-economic-aid to the European-recovery-period. The European-response across the summer-of-1947 (the Anglo-French-organised European-Conference at the Quai-d'Orsay-Paris of the twelfth of July 1947, the Committee on European Economic Co-operation that drafted the September-1947 coordinated-European-economic-recovery-proposal) brought the Marshall-Plan to the Congressional Economic Cooperation Act of the third of April 1948 and the foundational 1948-1952 implementation period under the Economic-Cooperation-Administration. The Marshall-Plan remains the foundational American-economic-aid-programme in the modern-international-foreign-aid administration and was the foundational American-international-political-investment in the post-war Western-European democratic-and-capitalist-political-economic-recovery on which the NATO-defence-arrangement and the European-Economic-Community trade-and-political-integration would be built across the 1949-and-1957 institutional-foundations.
Carol Reed and The Third Man
1949Reed
From the fifteenth of October 1948 to the eleventh of December 1948, on location in the four-power-occupied city of Vienna, Sir Carol Reed, forty-two years old, the London-born British film director of Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948), shot the eight-week principal-photography schedule of The Third Man, the Graham-Greene-screenplay (commissioned by Reed and the American producer David O. Selznick over a airline-cocktail-napkin in February 1948) about a American pulp-novelist Holly Martins arriving in postwar Vienna to take up a job offered by his old-school-friend Harry Lime and discovering that Lime is involved in a racketeering operation in stolen-and-diluted penicillin. The film starred Joseph Cotten as Martins, Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt, Trevor Howard as Major Calloway, and (in a late-recruit casting that became the most-iconic cameo in British film history) Orson Welles as Harry Lime. Reed shot the Vienna sequences in the real ruined-city locations (the bombed Wiener Riesenrad ferris-wheel at the Prater, the American-zone Hotel Sacher, the Russian-zone Schönbrunn Palace, the final-chase Vienna sewers under the city), in the deep-shadow black-and-white expressionist photography of Robert Krasker. The zither score by the Viennese folk-musician Anton Karas (discovered by Reed at a Heuriger wine-tavern in the Grinzing district in October 1948 and signed on the spot for the film score) became the most-recorded film-theme of the late-1940s. The Third Man won the Grand Prix at Cannes 1949 and the Academy Award for Best Cinematography 1950. By every careful judgment of British film-history (Charles Drazin, Peter Cowie), The Third Man is the foundational British film-noir of the Cold War period.
Hunt and Hillary on Everest
1953Hunt
At twenty past eleven on the morning of the twenty-ninth of May 1953, on the south-east ridge of Mount Everest at twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet above sea level, Edmund Hillary, thirty-three, the New Zealand bee-keeper of the British Mount Everest expedition, and Tenzing Norgay, thirty-nine, the Nepalese-born sirdar of the Sherpa party, stepped onto the summit. They had been sent up from the high camp on the South Col at twenty-six thousand feet on the previous morning by the expedition's leader, Colonel John Hunt, forty-two, on the second of two summit attempts (the first, by Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans on the twenty-sixth of May, had been turned back at the South Summit at twenty-eight thousand seven hundred feet by exhausted oxygen sets). They stayed on the summit for fifteen minutes. They left behind a crucifix Hunt had given Hillary before the climb, a chocolate-bar offering from Tenzing in the Buddhist offering tradition, and a Union Jack and Nepalese flag. They were back at the South Col by the evening. The news reached London by the diplomatic-pouch telegram of Times correspondent James Morris (the future Jan Morris) and was published in The Times on the morning of the second of June 1953, the morning of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The Coronation crowds in central London learned of the first ascent of Everest as the coronation processions reached the Mall.
The Coronation of Elizabeth II
1953House of Windsor
At eleven-fifteen on the morning of Tuesday the second of June 1953, in Westminster Abbey on the Thames-side site that had been the English coronation-venue continuously since the Norman Conquest of 1066, the twenty-seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, the reigning Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth realms since the accession of the sixth of February 1952 at the death of her father George VI, was crowned Queen Elizabeth the Second of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth realms by the Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher in the thousand-year-old Coronation ceremonial of the English-monarchy. The Coronation ceremony ran approximately three hours from the Queen's procession-entry through the West Door at eleven-fifteen to the Queen's processional-exit at two-fifteen, was conducted under the traditional Coronation ceremonial that had been substantially-unchanged since the Coronation of Edgar at Bath in 973 (the Recognition-Oath-Anointing-Investiture-Crowning-Enthronement-and-Homage sequence of the English-coronation ritual), included the five-part Coronation Oath under which Elizabeth committed to govern according to the constitutional protocols of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, the Anointing under the Coronation Canopy with the consecrated chrism by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the final Imperial Crown of St Edward placed on her head at the twelve-thirty-four moment of the Crowning. The Coronation was the first-ever-televised Coronation in British history; the BBC live-television-broadcast across the 11-AM-to-5-PM ceremony-and-procession period was watched by an estimated 277 million viewers across the British and the international BBC-relayed-broadcast networks (the largest single-event-television-audience to that date in the history of the medium), and is universally remembered as the foundational-moment of the modern-televised-state-occasion in British public life.
The Matthews FA Cup Final
1953Matthews
On the afternoon of Saturday the second of May 1953 at the old Empire Stadium at Wembley, in front of a capacity crowd of one hundred thousand and a television audience of approximately ten million (the largest single sporting television audience in British history to that date, two years before the introduction of commercial television), Blackpool Football Club came from behind to defeat the Bolton Wanderers 4–3 in the FA Cup Final on the back of the second-half performance of Sir Stanley Matthews, thirty-eight years old, the Stoke-on-Trent-born right-winger universally remembered ever since for that single afternoon of the second of May. With twenty-two minutes left and Blackpool 3–1 down, Matthews took control of the Wembley right wing in a half-hour exhibition of close ball-control, late-cut crossings and supply that produced Stan Mortensen's hat-trick (the only hat-trick scored in an FA Cup Final at the old Wembley) and the eighty-ninth-minute winner from Bill Perry. The game has been remembered universally ever since not as the Mortensen Final (despite the hat-trick) but as the Matthews Final, on the strength of Matthews's third successful FA Cup Final appearance after two losses in 1948 and 1951, and on the strength of the Empire Stadium crowd's chant when the final whistle blew and Matthews was lifted onto his teammates' shoulders. The match is the central single sporting memory of the early post-war British public, and the FA Cup Final of 1953 stands as the foundational moment of the modern football-and-television relationship.
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
1955Russell
At one o'clock on the afternoon of the ninth of July 1955, in the Caxton Hall on the Westminster city-of-London side near the Houses of Parliament, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, eighty-three years old, the Trellech-Monmouthshire-born grandson of Lord John Russell (the mid-Victorian Whig Prime Minister, told on this page) and the most internationally recognised philosopher-and-public-intellectual of the twentieth century, gave a press-conference at which he read aloud the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a eleven-paragraph statement signed by eleven prominent scientific-and-philosophical-figures (including Albert Einstein, who had signed the Manifesto from his Princeton deathbed on the eleventh of April 1955 and died on the eighteenth of April, exactly four days after signing), calling on the governments of the world to acknowledge that the thermonuclear-weapons-revolution had made the traditional war-as-political-instrument doctrine impossible, and to convene a scientific-and-political international-conference to address the existential-risk of thermonuclear-war. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto led directly to the founding of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957 (the first Pugwash Conference was held at the Cyrus Eaton Pugwash, Nova Scotia, family home in July 1957, with Russell as the honorary president); the Pugwash Conferences were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. The Manifesto is, by every careful judgment of Cold War intellectual-history (Sandra Ionno Butcher, Joseph Rotblat), the foundational political-philosophical-document of nuclear-disarmament thought.
Lady Chatterley acquitted
1960Lawrence
Penguin Books published the unexpurgated text of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in Britain on the sixteenth of August 1960. Lawrence had died in 1930. The novel had been printed in Florence in 1928 and had circulated in unexpurgated foreign editions for thirty-two years. Penguin's first British printing was 200,000 copies; not one was distributed; the firm sent twelve copies to the Director of Public Prosecutions on publication day. The DPP charged Penguin under the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which for the first time allowed an obscenity defence on grounds of literary merit. The trial at the Old Bailey ran from the twentieth of October to the second of November. The prosecution called no expert witnesses. The defence called thirty-five, including E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, the Bishop of Woolwich, and a 25-year-old Cambridge don called Helen Gardner. The jury of three women and nine men returned not guilty in three hours. Penguin sold two hundred thousand copies on the third of November and three million copies in the next twelve months. The verdict ended literary censorship in Britain.
George Martin signs the Beatles at EMI Studios
1962Martin
On the afternoon of 6 June 1962, the thirty-six-year-old EMI Parlophone label producer George Martin auditioned a Liverpool four-piece beat group called the Beatles in Studio Two at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, on a recommendation from Brian Epstein, the Liverpool record-shop owner who had been trying to place the group across the previous five months. The audition produced four small recorded tracks (Besame Mucho, Love Me Do, P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why) of which Martin admitted to Epstein the same evening that none was commercially releasable as recorded. He signed them anyway, on the post-audition judgement that there was something in their personalities that the recorded material had not captured. The Parlophone contract was signed in mid-June 1962 and the Beatles' first single Love Me Do (recorded in September with Ringo Starr replacing Pete Best on drums) was released on 5 October 1962. The Martin-Beatles partnership ran continuously from 6 June 1962 to the Abbey Road sessions of summer 1969 across ten studio albums, fifteen number-one singles in the United Kingdom, and the foundational re-shaping of the post-1962 popular-music recording-studio production-tradition.
Cicely Saunders and St Christopher's
1967Saunders
On the twenty-fourth of July 1967, in the newly built fifty-four-bed hospice complex at 51–59 Lawrie Park Road in Sydenham, south London, Dame Cicely Mary Saunders, forty-nine years old, the Barnet-born nurse (Nightingale School of Nursing 1940–44, displaced from nursing by a back-injury in 1944), almoner-medical-social-worker (London School of Economics 1945–47), and physician (St Thomas's Hospital Medical School 1951–57), opened St Christopher's Hospice as the first modern academic-clinical hospice in the world: an in-patient hospital dedicated to the care of the dying, on the explicit principles of comprehensive symptom-control (pain, breathlessness, nausea, anxiety), psychological-and-spiritual-care of the patient and family, and multidisciplinary clinical-research-and-teaching. The founding-bequest of the hospice was the five-hundred-pound legacy of the Polish-Jewish-refugee patient David Tasma (a Warsaw-Jewish émigré whom Saunders had nursed at the Archway Hospital in 1948 through his terminal cancer at the age of forty, and who had left her his life-savings to be a window in your home). Saunders had spent the next nineteen years (1948–67) raising the rest of the funding, training as a doctor, developing the symptom-control pharmacology (the Brompton cocktail-protocol for cancer-pain control), and acquiring the Lawrie-Park-Road site. The hospice opened with seven patients. By 2025, the modern hospice movement that Saunders founded comprised about thirty thousand hospice institutions in a hundred and twenty countries.
Cat Stevens converts to Islam at Malibu
1976Stevens
On an unrecorded afternoon in the autumn of 1976 the twenty-eight-year-old Cat Stevens, then the best-selling English singer-songwriter of the post-Tea-for-the-Tillerman period and at the peak of a global commercial success that had run continuously from the 1970 Mona Bone Jakon album through to Numbers of 1975, swam out alone from the Carbon Beach below his rented Malibu Pacific-Coast-Highway house, was caught in an unexpected riptide that took him north of the Malibu Lagoon, and prayed (by his own subsequent account in the 1981 His Cause Is Just memoir) God, if you save me I will work for you. A small surge of unexpected current then turned and carried him back to the Carbon Beach shoreline. Across the subsequent eighteen months he read his elder brother's gift of an English translation of the Qur'an, took the shahada (the Islamic profession of faith) at the Islamic Cultural Centre Mosque in Regent's Park, London on 23 December 1977, took the Muslim name Yusuf Islam, sold his musical instruments and equipment at the Sotheby's small November 1979 charity auction for the Islamic-charity proceeds, and withdrew from the popular-music industry for twenty-eight years until his 2006 An Other Cup small return.
Life on Earth, the gorillas
1979Attenborough
On an afternoon in the late winter of 1978, in the Virunga volcanic forest of Rwanda, near the Karisoke research camp of the American primatologist Dian Fossey, the BBC natural-history cameraman Martin Saunders and the sound recordist John Pearson, working with the broadcaster David Attenborough (then in his fifty-second year and the executive producer of the Life on Earth series), filmed the thirteen-episode sequence that has become, by every careful judgment of natural-history television, the most-watched and most-influential single piece of wildlife broadcasting of the twentieth century. The sequence (Episode 12, Life in the Trees, broadcast in the United Kingdom on the twenty-second of January 1979) involved Attenborough, lying in the moss of the Virunga forest, in the close company of a wild silverback mountain gorilla family. The female of the family came up to him, sat on his foot, and groomed his hair. The male of the family stood behind her at three feet distance. Attenborough, by the planning of the script, was to have delivered a piece-to-camera summary about gorilla social structure; he abandoned the script and whispered, by the transmitted broadcast, the relationship of man and other apes is a very, very close one. There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know. The transmission, by the BBC's audit, was watched by about 500 million people across the first global broadcast cycle of 1979–80, and is, by the modern-television-historian consensus (Joe Moran, Jean Seaton), the foundational sequence of the modern conservation-television tradition.
Lady Diana Spencer's wedding
1981Spencer
At twenty past eleven on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-ninth of July 1981, Lady Diana Frances Spencer, twenty years old, third daughter of John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer, and Frances Roche, arrived by Glass Coach at the west door of St Paul's Cathedral, London, for her wedding to Charles, Prince of Wales, thirty-two, eldest son of Elizabeth II. The wedding had been announced on the twenty-fourth of February 1981. The bride's dress, designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, with its eight-thousand-pearl bodice and its twenty-five-foot ivory silk train (the longest train in royal wedding history), had been kept secret until the moment Diana emerged from the coach. Three thousand five hundred guests filled the cathedral. The television audience was, by the BBC's published audit, seven hundred and fifty million viewers across seventy-four countries; the largest single live broadcast in television history to that date. The marriage was followed by sixteen years of public scrutiny, two children (Prince William of Wales, born June 1982; Prince Harry, born September 1984), a public separation in 1992 and divorce in 1996. Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris on the thirty-first of August 1997, thirty-six years old.
The Falklands dispatch
1982Thatcher
On the second of April 1982, Argentine forces invaded the British Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The British Foreign Office had judged the islands not retakable. The First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, judged differently and walked across Whitehall in his uniform to tell Margaret Thatcher so directly. She had her decision before midnight. The British task force sailed within seventy-two hours. The campaign that followed ran for ten weeks at a final cost of two hundred and fifty-five British and approximately six hundred and forty-nine Argentine lives. The hardest single decision of the war, taken on the morning of the second of May at Chequers, was the order that allowed HMS Conqueror to torpedo the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano outside the declared exclusion zone. Three hundred and twenty-three Argentine sailors died.
Mary Robinson elected President of Ireland
1990Robinson
On the morning of Saturday the third of November 1990, in the Royal Dublin Society count-centre at Ballsbridge in south Dublin, Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, forty-six years old, the Trinity College Dublin law professor and former Labour senator, was declared elected as the seventh President of Ireland after a four-way election (Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan; Fine Gael's Austin Currie; Labour's Robinson; and the final transfer that gave her the presidency on the second count) under the PR-STV preferential voting system used for Irish presidential elections. She was the first woman elected to the office, the first non-Fianna Fáil president since 1945, and (as a civil-rights-and-divorce-and-contraception campaigning lawyer of the 1970s) the first Irish president from the progressive-feminist political tradition. The acceptance speech, given at the Mansion House in central Dublin on the evening of the third of November, contained the line that became the emblem of her presidency: Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system, and on this rocking, this Robinson rose to office. The Áras an Uachtaráin (the Phoenix Park presidential residence) lit a candle in the front-window every night of her seven-year presidency, for the Irish emigrants and the Irish diaspora abroad, a symbolic gesture she had announced in the inauguration speech and that became the most-recognised symbol of the Robinson presidency.
Norman Foster's Reichstag dome opens to the Bundestag
1999Foster
At ten in the morning of Monday the nineteenth of April 1999, on the Tiergarten waterfront edge of the Spree at the Platz der Republik in central Berlin, the newly-reconstructed glass-and-steel observation-dome that the sixty-three-year-old Manchester-born British architect Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, had designed across the 1992-to-1999 Foster-and-Partners reconstruction-and-renovation of the 1894-Paul-Wallot-designed nineteenth-century-German-Reichstag parliamentary-building (the Berlin parliamentary-building that had stood empty and ruined since the 1933 Reichstag-fire under the Nazi-arson-and-the 1945-Soviet-Red-Army-storming) opened to the first Bundestag-parliamentary-session of the post-Cold-War reunified-German-federal-parliament. The Foster-Reichstag-dome (the glass-and-steel double-spiral inverted-cone forty-metre-diameter public-walkable observation-dome that stood at the centre of the reconstructed Reichstag building, with the double-spiral ramp that admitted approximately three thousand public-visitors per day to the walkable dome-interior under the Bundestag debating-chamber below) was the foundational architectural-statement of the post-Cold-War unified-German-democratic-political-architecture: the walkable observation-dome that put the democratic-public physically-above the parliamentary-chamber where the elected-deputies debated, with the public walking-around the Bundestag debating-chamber while the Bundestag-session-proceeded below. The Foster-Reichstag-dome opened the Bundestag-parliamentary-session in the new German-federal-capital of Berlin on the nineteenth of April 1999 in the formal-Bundestag-opening-session-ceremony under the Federal President Roman Herzog and the Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and is universally remembered as the central single-architectural-symbol of the post-Cold-War unified-German-democratic-political-architecture.
Captain Phillips and the Maersk Alabama rescue
2009Phillips
On the afternoon of Sunday the twelfth of April 2009, on the Indian-Ocean approximately 240 nautical miles south-east of the Somali coastal-port of Eyl in the Gulf-of-Aden Indian-Ocean operating-area, the fifty-four-year-old Underhill, Vermont-born Massachusetts-Maritime-Academy-trained American Merchant Marine captain Richard Phillips, the Master of the Danish-Maersk-Line container-ship MV Maersk Alabama (the 17,000-TEU container-ship on the Maersk-Line Mombasa-to-Mombasa Kenya-to-East-Africa container-trade-route), was rescued from the six-day-hostage-confinement aboard the Maersk-Alabama lifeboat-number-five by the three-United-States-Navy-SEAL-Team-Six sniper-team firing from the aft-fantail of the USS Bainbridge destroyer at approximately 7:19 PM Indian-Ocean-time. The three-Somali-pirate-captors who had been holding Phillips in the twenty-eight-foot-Maersk-Alabama lifeboat were killed simultaneously by the three-SEAL-sniper single-shot kill-pattern; Phillips was extracted unharmed and was taken aboard the Bainbridge for the medical-evaluation and the post-rescue debriefing. The Maersk-Alabama rescue ended the six-day Somali-pirate hijacking-and-hostage-situation that had opened on the morning of Wednesday the eighth of April 2009 with the Somali-pirate-skiff-attack-and-boarding of the Maersk-Alabama at the 235-nautical-mile-east-of-Somali-coast operating-area. The Maersk-Alabama hijacking-and-rescue was the first-successful-American-flag Merchant-Marine-rescue from the Somali-pirate-operating-area in the modern-Indian-Ocean-piracy-era, the first-American-Merchant-Marine-vessel hijacked by Somali pirates since 1815, and the foundational American-public-recognition-event of the modern Somali-piracy-crisis on the international-merchant-shipping-trade.
Ryan Reynolds and the Wrexham takeover
2020Reynolds
On the morning of Tuesday the seventeenth of November 2020, in the pandemic-era videoconference-link between the Vancouver-Hollywood-Burrard-Inlet residence of the forty-four-year-old Canadian-American actor Ryan Reynolds and the Philadelphia-Wynnewood residence of the It's-Always-Sunny-in-Philadelphia co-creator Rob McElhenney, the joint-Reynolds-and-McElhenney American-Hollywood ownership-team formally completed the two-million-pound-purchase-acquisition of the British association-football-club Wrexham A.F.C. (the Welsh-language-Cymru-Wrexham football-club, the oldest-Welsh-football-club founded 1864 at the Wrexham Turf Hotel meeting, then competing in the fifth-tier National League at the Racecourse Ground in the North-East-Wales border-town of Wrexham), through the supporters-trust-and-Reynolds-McElhenney-joint-shareholder-purchase from the Wrexham Supporters Trust governance-body that had owned the club since 2011. The Reynolds-and-McElhenney purchase was the foundational-moment of the modern Wrexham-football-club transformation: across the next four-and-a-half years the club won the 2022-23 National League title (promotion to the fourth-tier League Two, ending the fifteen-year non-league Wrexham-tradition), the 2023-24 League Two promotion (to the third-tier League One), and the 2024-25 League One promotion (to the second-tier Championship), the three-consecutive promotions becoming the first English-football-club to achieve three consecutive promotions in succession since 1985. The Welcome to Wrexham FX documentary-series of August 2022 (the twenty-eight-episode joint-Reynolds-McElhenney Welcome-to-Wrexham FX series across the 2022-to-2024 series-run on the FX-Disney-Plus US streaming platform) became the central single sports-documentary phenomenon of the modern-Disney-Plus streaming-era, brought the Wrexham-club into the international-popular-sports-recognition, and established the Reynolds-and-McElhenney celebrity-owner public-football-club-management template that has been the foundational model for the subsequent celebrity-investor-football-club-acquisitions across the 2022-to-2024 period.
Ireland
Clontarf
1014O'Brien
In April 1014 Brian Bóramha, called Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, was seventy-three years old and twelve years into a reign that had unified Ireland under a single hand for the first time in its recorded history. The kingdoms of Leinster and Norse Dublin rose against him, summoning Hebridean and Manx and Orcadian Norse to their aid. Brian's army marched up from the south and met them on the strand at Clontarf, north of the Liffey. The battle was fought on Good Friday, the twenty-third of April. By Christian custom Brian himself could not bear arms on the day. He watched from his tent on a low hill above the field. The dynasty he founded would rule Thomond for the next six hundred years. The high kingship he had won by force did not survive him by twelve hours.
The Blarney Stone
c. 1446McCarthy
The legend of the Blarney Stone, that a kiss bestows the gift of fluent and persuasive speech, is a global tourist anchor that draws four hundred thousand visitors a year up the parapet of Blarney Castle in County Cork. The kissing tradition is no older than the 1820s. What is genuinely sixteenth-century, and what is genuinely owed to a McCarthy, is the underlying English word blarney itself: plausible verbal evasion. Cormac Teige McCarthy, lord of Muskerry under Elizabeth I, was repeatedly summoned by the Tudor administration to submit formally to the crown. He played the diplomatic correspondence as no one in Tudor Ireland played it before or after, an extended decade of courteous letters of intent, missed deadlines, plausible delays. Elizabeth, by tradition, gave him the word.
The hanging of Walter Lynch
1493Lynch
By the Galway tradition set down in print in 1820 by James Hardiman, in the year of our Lord fourteen hundred and ninety-three the Mayor of Galway, James Lynch FitzStephen, hanged his own son Walter from the upper window of his own house in Lombard Street, having sentenced him personally for the murder of a Spanish guest. The city's executioner refused to attend; the gathered crowd would not let any other man approach the gallows. Lynch did the work himself. The window, Lynch's Window, is still marked in the building, with a stone tablet bearing a crow-and-skull motif and the Latin inscription Remember death. Whether the English word lynch descends from this Galway hanging is etymologically contested. The story itself is one of the most compactly affecting in the city's chronicle.
Silken Thomas
1534FitzGerald
On the eleventh of June 1534, Thomas FitzGerald, twenty-one years old and deputy-governor of Ireland in his father's absence in London, rode into the council chamber at St Mary's Abbey in Dublin with a hundred and forty horsemen of his Kildare retainers, threw the Sword of State on the table, and renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII. He had heard a false rumour that his father had been executed in the Tower. The Geraldines of Kildare had been the effective government of Ireland for almost a century. The renunciation was, by the lights of any participant in the room, a more serious thing than a Continental noble's defiance: it was the largest private army in Ireland declaring against the king. The campaign that followed cost him his life and the dynasty its earldom.
Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig takes the peerage of Upper Ossory
1541Fitzpatrick
On Wednesday the eleventh of June 1541, in the Council Chamber of Dublin Castle, the senior Gaelic chief Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig of Ossory, in his early forties, the last reigning king of the small but ancient Leinster sub-kingdom of Osraighe (Ossory) between the Slieve Bloom Mountains and the Suir in modern County Laois and County Kilkenny, knelt before the Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir Anthony St Leger and made the formal surrender of his Gaelic-Irish royal-lordship of the Ossory territory under the new Tudor policy of surrender-and-regrant proposed by Henry VIII. He received back in the same ceremony the surrendered lands in formal Crown grant as the new English-style title Baron of Upper Ossory, the first Gaelic-Irish chief in the history of the Tudor English administration to accept the surrender-and-regrant arrangement, and on the strength of the surrender adopted the new English-style surname Fitzpatrick (the Mac of his original Gaelic patronymic Mac Giolla Phádraig translated into the Norman Fitz, with the Phádraig component retained), the unique single example in the surname-history of Ireland of a Gaelic Mac translated into a Norman Fitz. The surrender-and-regrant of 1541 was the foundational Tudor administrative-and-political instrument by which the Gaelic-Irish lordships were brought into the Crown peerage-and-tenure system across the next forty years of the Henrician-and-Elizabethan Tudor settlement, and the Mac Giolla Phádraig acceptance was the central single test-case on which the policy was demonstrated to be administratively viable.
Red Hugh's escape from Dublin Castle
1591O'Donnell
Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill, Red Hugh O'Donnell, was kidnapped at fifteen by agents of the Tudor administration off Rathmullan in Donegal in 1587. He was held in Dublin Castle as a hostage to keep his father quiet, the system of taking teenage heirs from the great Gaelic families as pupils of crown justice being systematic policy in those years. He escaped once in January 1591 and was recaptured. He escaped again on Christmas night the same year, eighteen years old, by descending into the castle's privy and walking out through the sewer. The walk through a December blizzard up into the Wicklow Mountains cost him his fellow escapee Art O'Neill, frozen to death in the snow, and his own two big toes to frostbite. He went home to Donegal a fortnight later and within two years was leading half the Nine Years War.
Hugh the Hospitable at Coll's Crossroads
1600Maguire
On the morning of the first of March 1600, on a bog-crossing at Coll's Crossroads near Mallow in north County Cork, Hugh the Hospitable Maguire, then about thirty-five years old, the chief of Fermanagh and the Maguire warrior of the Nine Years' War, met in single combat the English Marshal of Munster Sir Warham St Leger and killed him with a horse-pistol-shot to the chest. St Leger, in the same exchange, hit Maguire with a pistol-shot to the head; both men were dead within minutes. Maguire had been on a twelve-hundred-mile cavalry-raid from the Fermanagh lake-country south through Roscommon, Tipperary and Limerick to engage the English Munster garrison-force in the rear of Sir George Carew's Munster campaign of the spring of 1600. The Coll's Crossroads action was the furthest-south military penetration by the Ulster confederacy in the whole of the Nine Years' War (1593–1603); the Maguire-St-Leger mutual kill is, by every careful judgment of Irish-historiography of the period (Hiram Morgan, John McGurk), the most-romanticised single-combat death of the Tudor wars in Ireland.
Donal Cam's march
1602–1603O'Sullivan
On the last day of December 1602 a thousand O'Sullivans, men, women and children, set out from the burnt country of Beara on the south-west tip of Munster to walk to safety in Leitrim, two hundred and fifteen Irish miles north, through country garrisoned by their enemies, in midwinter. Their leader was Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare, the last Gaelic lord of the peninsula, whose strongholds had been taken one by one through the year and whose cattle had been driven off and whose harbour had been blockaded. The walk took fifteen days. Thirty-five reached the gates of Leitrim Castle. The march itself, recorded in detail in the Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium of 1621, is one of the most affecting episodes of seventeenth-century Europe.
The Flight of the Earls
1607O'Neill
On the evening of the fourteenth of September 1607, two of the great Gaelic earls of Ulster, Hugh O'Neill of Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell of Tyrconnell, with ninety of their kinsmen, household, scholars, monks, wives and children, boarded a French ship lying at anchor in the deep water of Lough Swilly off Rathmullan in Donegal. The ship sailed on the morning tide. None of them ever saw Ireland again. The Plantation of Ulster, the systematic settlement of the surrendered counties by Lowland Scots and English Protestant tenants, began on the back of the forfeitures three years later. The Flight of the Earls is the date the Irish historians take as the end of the political existence of Gaelic Ireland.
Cahir O'Doherty burns Derry
1608Doherty
On the morning of Tuesday the nineteenth of April 1608, in the small wooden-and-thatch Plantation town of Derry on the west bank of the lower Foyle, Sir Cahir Rua Ó Dochartaigh, twenty years old, the last Gaelic lord of Inishowen and one of the few O'Donnell-affiliated Gaelic chiefs the Mountjoy administration had retained on its estates after the Flight of the Earls of September 1607, rose without warning in personal revolt against the English Governor of Derry, Sir George Paulet, who four months earlier had publicly insulted him and struck him in the face at the Governor's House. Cahir took the small Culmore Fort at the mouth of the Foyle in a dawn assault on the eighteenth of April; marched the seventy Doherty fighting men on Derry through the early hours of the nineteenth; took the unwalled town in a single charge; killed Paulet personally; and burnt the town and its three hundred Plantation houses to the ground in a single night. He held Inishowen and the lower Foyle country against the response from Dublin Castle for the next ten weeks. He was killed at Kilmacrenan in north-east Donegal on the fifth of July 1608, shot in the head at close range by a single musket-ball in a small cavalry skirmish on the steep ground above the Glashagh river; his head was severed by the English captain who took the field, was sent down to Dublin, and was spiked over the Castle gate. His lands were attainted within three months. The Plantation of Ulster, formally proposed at Whitehall in October 1608 on the strength of the forfeitures, was implemented from 1610 across the six confiscated Ulster counties. The pattern of Ulster history for the next four centuries was set in significant part by the twenty-year-old O'Doherty's furious response to a personal insult on the Foyle.
Robert Boyle and The Sceptical Chymist
1661Boyle
In the spring of 1661, in the laboratory Robert Boyle had built behind the house of his sister Lady Ranelagh at Pall Mall in central London, Boyle, thirty-four years old, the seventh son of the Great Earl of Cork (Richard Boyle, the Anglo-Irish planter who had been the wealthiest man in Ireland at his 1643 death), former resident-experimenter at Oxford 1656–58 under the Cromwell government, founding member of the Royal Society (chartered in 1662, but operative as the Invisible College since 1645), completed the dialogue treatise The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes, touching the Experiments whereby vulgar Spagyrists are wont to endeavour to evince their salt, sulphur and mercury, to be the true Principles of Things, a octavo of about three hundred and eighty pages, published in London by F. Crooke in November 1661. The book, written in the dialogue form of four natural-philosophers in conversation, dismantled the Aristotelian four-element theory (earth, water, air, fire) and the Paracelsian three-principle theory (salt, sulphur, mercury) that had been the twin-foundation of European alchemy for two thousand years. In their place Boyle proposed the modern operational definition of a chemical element: a substance that cannot, by any laboratory technique then known, be reduced to a simpler form. The Sceptical Chymist is, by every careful judgment of the history-of-science (Marie Boas Hall, Lawrence Principe), the foundational text of modern Western chemistry.
The Drapier's Letters
1724Swift
Between the second of March and the second of December 1724, in the Deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift, fifty-six years old, the Dean of St Patrick's since 1713, wrote and published anonymously seven pamphlets attacking the patent granted by the British Crown in 1722 to the Wolverhampton hardware merchant William Wood for the minting of about £108,000-worth of copper half-pennies and farthings for circulation in Ireland. The pamphlets, published in the form of letters from a fictitious Dublin draper M. B. Drapier, argued by progressive escalation that the English commercial domination of Ireland was incompatible with the constitutional position of Ireland as a kingdom under the same Crown, and that the country's legal-political autonomy required the rejection of the patent. The political effect was the largest mass-popular Irish political mobilisation of the eighteenth century: by the end of November 1724, no merchant or shopkeeper in Dublin would accept Wood's coinage, the Lord Lieutenant Lord Carteret was unable to enforce its circulation, and on the eleventh of August 1725 the patent was withdrawn by the Walpole ministry in London. The reward of three hundred pounds offered by Carteret for the Drapier's identity was never claimed; the printer John Harding had been arrested in November 1724 and the grand jury under Lord Chief Justice Whitshed had refused to find a true bill against him.
Carolan's Farewell to Music
1738O'Carolan
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of March 1738, in the upstairs guest-bedroom at Alderford House, on the south shore of Lough Meelagh in County Roscommon, Turlough O'Carolan, sixty-seven years old, the Gaelic harper-composer of the early eighteenth century, in the fifty-second year of his blindness and the fifty-first of his itinerant career, lay on the bed in his last day, attended by his patroness Mary MacDermott Roe and her household, his daughter Marian, and his student-harper Charles Fanning, who had brought him to Alderford from Tempo two days earlier. He had been deteriorating in health since the previous Christmas at the Reynolds household at Letterfian. By the tradition recorded by Charles O'Conor of Belanagare (the eighteenth-century antiquarian who was Carolan's near-neighbour and is the principal contemporary source for his life), Carolan called for a cup of whiskey, drank it, was unable to swallow a second, and asked for his harp. He composed in the next half-hour, with Fanning writing down the notation, the piece he himself called Farewell to Music (Slán le Ceol). The composition is, by the musical consensus, the most accomplished of the late Carolan airs and the only piece in the Irish harp tradition to which the composer's own deathbed is the original setting. He died at about three in the afternoon.
The nine-thousand-year lease at St James's Gate
1759Guinness
On the afternoon of Monday the thirty-first of December 1759, in the small office of the Earl of Meath's land-agent in Dublin Castle Yard, Arthur Guinness, thirty-four years old, the Celbridge-born small-brewer of Leixlip in County Kildare, signed the lease that has been universally remembered ever since as the longest single commercial lease in the history of Irish-and-British property law: nine thousand years at forty-five pounds the year, for a small, derelict, four-acre brewery and yard at St James's Gate on the western edge of Dublin. The St James's Gate brewery had been disused for almost a decade; the previous brewer, William Rainsford of the Meath estate, had gone bankrupt in 1750. Guinness took the lease on the strength of a hundred-pound legacy from his godfather Archbishop Arthur Price of Cashel and a small loan from his elder brother Richard. He brewed his first cask of ale at St James's Gate the following spring. He committed in 1799, after forty years of brewing-and-export experiment, to the dark porter beer that would carry his name and would become, within a single generation, the standard against which every stout in the British Isles was measured. The brewery has been in continuous Guinness-and-Diageo operation since the first cask of 1760 and is by every modern measure the oldest single continuously-operating brewing site in the world. The original 1759 nine-thousand-year lease is preserved at the brewery; the harp of Brian Boru that Arthur's grandson Benjamin put on the bottle label in 1862 is on the coinage of the Irish Republic.
Edmund Burke and the Reflections on the Revolution in France
1790Burke
On the first of November 1790 the London publisher James Dodsley issued a octavo volume of three hundred and fifty-six pages, written by Edmund Burke, Member of Parliament for Malton, on the subject of the political experiments then in progress at Paris. The book had been written over the spring and summer of 1790 in answer to a letter from a young French acquaintance, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke whether the events of the previous year should be celebrated. Burke had at first been thought, by the Whig friends of his old age, likely to be sympathetic to the Revolution; he had spent thirty years on the Whig side of the House on the side of America in the 1770s and on the side of the Indians against Warren Hastings in the 1780s. The book changed the impression. By the end of 1790 it had sold nineteen thousand copies in seven editions; by the end of 1791, thirty thousand; by 1796, sixty thousand. Reflections on the Revolution in France is, by every careful judgment, the founding text of modern political conservatism in the English-speaking world. Burke was sixty-one years old. He had eight years to live. He spent five of them broken from the Whig caucus and taking the political-philosophical argument the book had begun out across Europe.
John Power and the distillery at John's Lane
1791Power
In 1791, in a small inn at the corner of Thomas Street and John's Lane, Dublin, James Power, a Catholic publican of Wexford-Power descent, set up a pot-still in a backyard shed and began distilling whiskey for sale in his own bar. By the time of his son John Power's death in 1855, John's Lane was the second-largest pot-still distillery in Ireland, the most consistently profitable, and the leading exporter of Irish whiskey to the British and American markets. By 1880, under the third generation of Powers, John's Lane was the largest distillery in the world by single-site output. Power's Irish Whiskey was, by the 1890s, by the assessment of the Edinburgh and London trade journals, the most respected Irish single-distillery brand and the principal commercial face of Catholic Old-English Anglo-Irish capital. The distillery is the longest-continuously-operating Irish whiskey brand still on shelves; the original John's Lane pot still no longer operates on the site (closed 1974), but Powers Three Swallows is still produced under the same name at the Midleton distillery in Cork. The label has not changed in form since 1850.
Father John Murphy at Boolavogue
1798Murphy
On the night of Saturday the twenty-sixth of May 1798, in the village of Boolavogue (Buaile Mhaodhóg in the Irish) in north County Wexford, Father John Murphy, forty-five years old, the curate of the Boolavogue parish (a Catholic parish about eight miles north-west of Gorey), led a group of about a hundred local Catholic-tenant farmers who had refused to surrender their arms under the North Cork Militia's Yeomanry-disarmament-order of the previous fortnight in the rising that became the Wexford Insurrection of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. Murphy had, until the twenty-sixth of May, been a Catholic priest of the conservative tradition who had publicly counselled his parishioners against rising; he had urged them, in the pulpit-sermons of the previous spring, to surrender their pikes-and-fowling-pieces to the Yeomanry. On the twenty-sixth, when the Yeomanry burned the chapel-and-priest-house at Boolavogue in a pre-emptive raid, Murphy reversed his position and led the counter-attack on the Yeomanry detachment at the village. The rising spread through the Wexford and Wicklow countryside in the next forty-eight hours; the Wexford rebels took Wexford town on the thirtieth of May and held the county for about four weeks. The rising was broken by the British government's Crown forces at Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June. Murphy was captured at Tullow on the second of July, tried by a military court, hanged the same day on the Tullow market-square gallows, and his body was decapitated and burnt in a tar-barrel. He was forty-five years old. The 1898 P.J. McCall ballad Boolavogue (at Boolavogue, as the sun was setting / o'er the bright May meadows of Shelmalier) became the foundational popular-historical song of the 1798 rebellion and is, by every careful judgment of the Irish popular-historical tradition, the most-sung ballad of the Irish public-political-commemoration calendar.
Lord Edward Fitzgerald at Thomas Street
1798FitzGerald
On the evening of the nineteenth of May 1798, in the upper bedroom of a house at 153 (since renumbered 151) Thomas Street in the Liberties of Dublin, Lord Edward FitzGerald, fifth son of the first Duke of Leinster, in his thirty-fifth year, the principal field commander of the Society of United Irishmen and the aristocratic figure of the planned republican rising, was arrested in his bed by Major Henry Charles Sirr of the Dublin Castle police on a tip-off from Francis Higgins (the Sham Squire) the Freeman's Journal proprietor. He was wounded twice in the struggle, killing the police officer Captain Daniel Ryan with the dagger he kept under his pillow. He was carried to Newgate Gaol on the upper Liffey quays, was attended in the gaol by his physician Dr Garnett, but the wounds turned septic; he died of fever and infection in his cell on the fourth of June 1798, six weeks before the failure of the United Irish rising at Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June. The arrest at 153 Thomas Street is, by every careful Irish republican history, the moment at which the United Irish rising lost its only commander capable of welding the geographically scattered risings into a coherent national insurrection.
The duel with D'Esterre
1815O'Connell
On the late afternoon of the first of February 1815, in a snowy field at Bishop's Court near Naas in County Kildare, Daniel O'Connell, then thirty-nine years old, the rising Catholic barrister of the Munster Bar and the principal organiser of the Catholic Association, met John D'Esterre, a Protestant member of the Dublin Corporation, in a formal duel with pistols. D'Esterre had taken offence at O'Connell's description of the Corporation, in a public meeting two weeks earlier, as a beggarly corporation. O'Connell, by his second the surgeon Sir Edward O'Connell of Lyons, refused to retract. The two men met at Bishop's Court at four in the afternoon. O'Connell hit D'Esterre at the first exchange in the right hip; the ball lodged in the bladder. D'Esterre died two days later, on the third of February 1815, at his Dublin lodgings. O'Connell never challenged or accepted another duel for the rest of his life. He wore a black silk glove on his right hand at every public function in Ireland for the next thirty-two years, in mourning for the man he had killed.
William Burke and the Edinburgh murders
1828Burke
William Burke was born at Orrery in County Cork in 1792, emigrated to Ulster as a young man, served as an officer's servant in the Donegal militia, and came to Edinburgh in 1818 to find labouring work on the Union Canal. He met William Hare in West Port, Edinburgh, in 1827. Through November 1827 to October 1828 the two men killed sixteen people in lodging-houses in West Port, mostly the lonely poor of the city, and sold the bodies for between seven and ten pounds apiece to the anatomist Dr Robert Knox of 10 Surgeons' Square for use in his teaching dissections. The murders were discovered when a body was found behind a curtain in Burke's lodgings on the morning of the second of November 1828, and Hare turned king's evidence in exchange for immunity. Burke was tried at the High Court of Justiciary on the twenty-fourth of December 1828 on a single count of murder, was convicted on a unanimous jury, and was hanged at Liberton Wynd in Edinburgh before a crowd of twenty-five thousand on the twenty-eighth of January 1829. His body was publicly dissected by Professor Alexander Monro III at the University, his skeleton hung in the medical museum of the medical school. The skeleton is still there.
Clontarf, the cancelled meeting
1843O'Connell
On the afternoon of Saturday the seventh of October 1843, on the eve of the great public meeting Daniel O'Connell had called for the next day, Sunday the eighth, on the strand at Clontarf outside Dublin (intended to draw, by the Repeal Association's planning, between five hundred thousand and one million people, the largest political assembly ever held in Britain or Ireland), the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Earl De Grey, on the personal direction of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, issued a formal proclamation banning the meeting. Peel had moved British army regiments and a battery of artillery into Dublin during the previous week. The proclamation was posted at the Pillar at four o'clock in the afternoon. O'Connell, who had been at the Repeal Association headquarters in Burgh Quay since noon, summoned the committee at five and, after two hours' debate, ordered the cancellation of the meeting on the grounds that he would not lead a peaceful assembly into the muskets of the British army. The cancellation was, by every careful reading of subsequent Irish political history, the moment at which Repeal as a constitutional movement died. O'Connell himself was tried and convicted for sedition the following year, served four months of a one-year sentence in Richmond Bridewell, and emerged a broken political force. He died at Genoa in May 1847 on a pilgrimage to Rome.
Alice on the Isis
1862O'Carroll
On the afternoon of Friday the fourth of July 1862, on a rowing-boat on the stretch of the Thames known above Oxford as the Isis, between Folly Bridge in central Oxford and Godstow village three miles upstream, the Christ Church Oxford mathematics tutor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (writing under the Latinised pseudonym Lewis Carroll), thirty years old, and his Christ Church colleague the Reverend Robinson Duckworth took out the three Liddell daughters of the Christ Church Dean Henry Liddell, Lorina (thirteen), Alice (ten), and Edith (eight), on a rowing-boat picnic. The river journey took the five up to Godstow for a late-afternoon tea on the bank. On the stretch of the river between Folly Bridge and Godstow (about an hour and a half of rowing), Carroll improvised, by Duckworth's later memoir, a extempore fairy-story for the Liddell girls about a small girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a strange country. The Alice in the story is, by Duckworth and by Alice Liddell's 1932 BBC broadcast memoir, openly modelled on the Liddell girl in the boat. At the end of the afternoon, Alice Liddell asked Carroll, on the walk back to Christ Church through the Port Meadow, Mr Dodgson, please write that story down for me. Carroll wrote out the first version of the story over the next six months in a vellum-bound manuscript notebook titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground, gave it to Alice Liddell as a Christmas present in November 1864, and on the encouragement of his publisher friend Alexander Macmillan revised and expanded it into the 1865 Macmillan publication Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Tenniel-illustrated Alice in Wonderland has been continuously in print in English since 1865, has been translated into one hundred and seventy-three languages, and is, by every careful judgment of the children's-literature historians, the foundational text of the modern English-language children's-fantasy literature.
Davitt at Irishtown
1879Davitt
On the afternoon of Sunday the twentieth of April 1879, in the small village of Irishtown on the border between Counties Mayo and Galway, on the western edge of the Plains of Mayo, Michael Davitt, thirty-two years old, the Mayo-emigrant Fenian who had served seven years' penal servitude at Dartmoor between 1870 and 1877 and who had spent the previous eighteen months organising tenant-farmer protest meetings across the western counties, convened the land meeting that is, by the careful judgment of every Irish historian since R. F. Foster, the founding event of the Irish Land War. Eight thousand tenant-farmers and small-holders from the surrounding parishes (and, by the tradition, several thousand more who could not get into the small village square) gathered to protest the impending eviction of forty cottier families by the Catholic priest Canon Geoffrey Bourke of Knock parish, who was the local landlord. The meeting was the first sustained public protest against a Catholic landlord by Catholic tenants in the nineteenth-century Irish countryside, and the political shock-effect (a Mayo-Catholic priest, in a Catholic county, faced by his own parishioners) was the moment the Land War became politically possible. Six months later, on the twenty-first of October 1879, Davitt founded the National Land League of Ireland at Castlebar with Parnell as President.
Ned Kelly at Glenrowan
1880Kelly
On the night of the twenty-seventh of June 1880, the bushranger gang of Edward (Ned) Kelly, twenty-five years old, the son of John Kelly the Tipperary-emigrant convict and Ellen Quinn of Antrim, in the third year of his outlaw career across the north-east of the colony of Victoria in Australia, attempted to derail a special police train bringing reinforcements to the village of Glenrowan, in the dry interior country two hundred kilometres north-east of Melbourne. The plan failed because the schoolmaster Thomas Curnow, held hostage with about sixty other villagers in the Glenrowan Inn, slipped out to the railway line with a candle and a red scarf and stopped the train. The siege of the inn ran from three in the morning of the twenty-eighth of June through the early afternoon. Ned Kelly was captured wounded outside the inn at first light, in his now-iconic suit of armour fashioned from the mould-board plates of agricultural ploughs, having taken twenty-eight bullets in the legs and arms. His brother Dan Kelly and the gang's other members, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, died inside the burning inn. Ned was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on the eleventh of November 1880. His last words on the scaffold, by the tradition, are recorded as Such is life. He was twenty-five.
Parnell at Ennis
1880Parnell
On the afternoon of Sunday the nineteenth of September 1880, in the market square at Ennis in County Clare, on the western seaboard of Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell, thirty-four years old, the recently elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster and the President of the Irish National Land League (founded the previous October at Castlebar by Michael Davitt with Parnell as its presiding chairman), addressed a crowd of about ten thousand tenant-farmers and small-holders on the question of how the Irish countryside should respond to land-grabbers (the tenants who took on a holding from which a previous tenant had been evicted). The speech, made without notes from a wooden platform on the eastern side of the Ennis market square, ended in the four-paragraph instruction that became the founding text of an entirely new political tactic. Now what are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? You must shun him in the streets of the town, in the shop, in the market-place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone, putting him into a moral Coventry, isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old. The word boycott, after Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, the Mayo land-agent at Lough Mask House who was the first man on the island to whom the tactic was systematically applied that same November, entered the English language within six weeks of the Ennis speech and is in the Oxford English Dictionary with the date 1880.
Conan Doyle creates Sherlock Holmes
1886Doyle
In the spring of 1886, in a upstairs back-bedroom at 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, in Southsea on the south coast of Hampshire, Arthur Conan Doyle, twenty-six years old, in his fourth year of an underperforming private medical practice (about a hundred and fifty pounds a year in fees, against the three-hundred-pound annual cost of the practice), wrote, in about three weeks, a short detective novel of about forty-three thousand words titled A Study in Scarlet. The novel introduced the character of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, London, modelled on the figure of Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's former clinical-tutor at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary 1877–81 (Bell was known to the Edinburgh-medical-students of the 1870s as the physician whose diagnostic-method was the careful-clinical-observation of small physical details that revealed the patient's recent history, occupation, and circumstances). Conan Doyle sent the manuscript to four London publishers over the summer and autumn of 1886; three rejected it; the fourth, Ward, Lock and Company, offered the twenty-five-pound outright-payment for full copyright in October 1886. Conan Doyle, by his marginal financial situation, accepted. The novel was published in the Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887 in November 1887. He never received any royalties on Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes became, by the 1890s short-stories in the Strand Magazine (the twelve-story sequence beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in July 1891), the most-published fictional character in English-language literature.
Anne Sullivan at the well
1887O'Sullivan
On the early afternoon of the fifth of April 1887, in the back-garden of the Keller family house Ivy Green at Tuscumbia in northern Alabama, Anne Sullivan, twenty years old, the Irish-American Anne Mansfield Sullivan, born at Feeding Hills in Massachusetts on the fourteenth of April 1866 to Famine-emigrant Irish-Limerick parents (her father had emigrated from Limerick in 1860), schooled at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston 1880–86, in her fourth week as the private-tutor of the six-year-old Helen Keller, the deaf-and-blind daughter of the Keller family, brought Helen out into the back-garden to pump water into a mug at the water pump beside the house. As Helen held the mug under the pumped water, Anne Sullivan spelled the finger-letter pattern W-A-T-E-R into Helen's right palm, slowly, three times. The fourth time, Helen's face changed. By Sullivan's letter to her Perkins teacher Sophia Hopkins the next day (the Sullivan-Hopkins correspondence is the primary source for the event): I see a tear come down her cheek. The word and the cool flowing thing came together. It was the key. Helen Keller, by her 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life, had her six-year-old's mind opened to the fact that the world has names: that the objects she had felt for the previous five years are not only the objects-themselves but are also the names-of-the-objects, and that the names can be spelled into her hand. The finger-spelling lessons of Anne Sullivan over the next forty-nine years (until Sullivan's death in 1936) gave the deaf-blind Helen Keller her language, her Radcliffe College education (Helen Keller, Radcliffe BA 1904, the first deaf-blind person in the world to take a university degree), her twelve published books, and her fifty-year-career as the most-recognised disability-rights advocate of the twentieth century. The water-pump in the back-garden at Ivy Green is preserved on the original spot.
Kitty O'Shea and the Parnell divorce
1890O'Shea
On the fifteenth and seventeenth of November 1890, in the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in central London, the divorce petition of Captain William O'Shea (Irish Parliamentary Party MP for Galway 1880–86) against his wife Katharine Kitty O'Shea (1846–1921, born Katharine Wood, daughter of an English-Sussex baronet) was heard before Mr Justice Sir Charles Butt. The co-respondent named in the petition was Charles Stewart Parnell, then forty-four years old, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, the effective political-architect of the Irish-Home-Rule programme and (since the 1885 election) the political-balance-of-power figure in the House of Commons between Liberals and Conservatives. The divorce-case revealed publicly the eleven-year relationship between Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, three children born to the couple, and the tacit acceptance by Captain O'Shea of the relationship in exchange for political favours from Parnell. The political-consequence of the public disclosure was, by every careful judgment of the Home-Rule historians (F. S. L. Lyons, R. F. Foster, Roy Jenkins), the political destruction of Parnell within seven weeks. The Irish Parliamentary Party split between the Parnellite minority and the anti-Parnellite majority at the Committee Room Fifteen meeting of the sixth of December 1890. Parnell married Kitty O'Shea at Steyning Registry Office on the twenty-fifth of June 1891 and died of pneumonia at their Brighton home on the sixth of October 1891, forty-five years old. The Irish Home Rule political-movement was, on the Parnell collapse, leaderless for the next twenty years.
The love that dare not speak its name
1895Wilde
On the afternoon of Wednesday the thirtieth of April 1895, in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, on the fourth day of the first prosecution of Oscar Wilde (the trial of Wilde and Alfred Taylor on charges of gross indecency under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885), cross-examined by the prosecutor Charles Frederick Gill QC on a poem written by Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde's young lover, son of the Marquess of Queensberry, whose libel prosecution had collapsed under Wilde's own action against him at the end of March), Wilde was asked to explain the closing line of Douglas's poem Two Loves, the line I am the love that dare not speak its name. Wilde's reply, given without preparation, lasted about ninety seconds and was, by every contemporary report of the courtroom, the most affecting public statement of his career. The reply earned a spontaneous round of applause from the public gallery, hissed down by the judge Mr Justice Charles. The trial nevertheless ended in jury disagreement, was retried the following month, and on the twenty-fifth of May 1895 Wilde was convicted under the Labouchère amendment and sentenced to two years' hard labour. The reply is, in its form in the trial transcript, the central rhetorical document of the modern history of homosexual rights in Britain.
Bloomsday
1904Joyce
On the afternoon of Thursday the sixteenth of June 1904, James Joyce, twenty-two years old, son of a Cork-emigrant father, then a struggling teacher and unpublished writer, walked out from Finn's Hotel on Leinster Street, Dublin, with a chambermaid he had met for the first time six days earlier, twenty-year-old Nora Barnacle of Galway. The walk took them along the south bank of the Liffey to Ringsend. The afternoon, by Joyce's later testimony to his biographer Stanislaus, was the day his real life began. Eighteen years later, on the second of February 1922, his fortieth birthday, he published in Paris Ulysses, the seven-hundred-and-thirty-page novel of a single day in Dublin, set on the sixteenth of June 1904 and following the wandering of a Dublin advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom around the city through eighteen episodes from morning to night. By the centenary of the day in 2004, Bloomsday (the sixteenth of June, every year) was being marked in Dublin as a public-cultural festival of the city, in Trieste and Zurich and Paris where Joyce had written the book, and in literary commemorations on every continent. The day Joyce had picked for his novel because it was the day he had walked out with Nora Barnacle had become the only date in modern fiction that the world reads on its own calendar.
Casement on Banna Strand
1916Casement
On the early morning of Good Friday, the twenty-first of April 1916, on the long flat sand of Banna Strand on the western coast of County Kerry, three days before the planned Easter Rising in Dublin, Sir Roger Casement, fifty-one years old, former British consular officer, knight of the realm for his humanitarian work on the Belgian Congo and the Putumayo, presently a Captain in the Imperial German service, was put ashore from the dinghy of the German U-boat U-19 with two companions (Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey) at three in the morning. The U-boat had been escorting the German freighter Aud, which carried twenty thousand rifles, one million rounds of ammunition, and ten machine guns for the Irish Volunteers, on the long passage from Lübeck. The Aud had failed to make the secret rendezvous on Easter Sunday morning at Fenit pier; the captain had scuttled her off Daunt's Rock, near Cork harbour, when intercepted by the Royal Navy. Casement, ill with malaria, exhausted, and (by his own letter to his sister Nina from prison) increasingly disillusioned with the German alliance, was found by an Irish farmer named Mary Gorman at McKenna's Fort, half a mile inland, at one in the afternoon. He was held at Tralee gaol overnight, transferred to Dublin Castle on the morning of the twenty-third of April, and taken to London by steamer the same day. The Rising began the next morning without him and without the Aud's arms. He was tried in London in June, hanged at Pentonville Prison on the third of August 1916.
Joseph Mary Plunkett's wedding at Kilmainham
1916Plunkett
Joseph Mary Plunkett, the youngest of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, poet, son of a papal count, was twenty-eight years old and dying of glandular tuberculosis when he came out of the General Post Office at the surrender on the twenty-ninth of April 1916. He had a tracheotomy scar at his throat. He had perhaps three months of natural life left to him. He had been engaged for the past year to Grace Gifford, a Dublin Protestant cartoonist who had converted to Catholicism in early 1916 with the deliberate purpose of being able to marry him. They had planned to wed on Easter Sunday, the twenty-third of April; the Rising had postponed it. Court-martialled at Richmond Barracks on the second of May, Plunkett was sentenced to death and removed to Kilmainham Gaol on the evening of the third of May. Through the late afternoon his Capuchin chaplain Father Eugene McCarthy obtained, by personal appeal to Brigadier-General Maxwell, permission for the marriage to be performed in the prison chapel that night. Grace bought the wedding ring at a shop in Grafton Street at six. The ceremony was at half past eleven at night in the prison chapel, by candlelight, with a single soldier as witness. After the ceremony she was sent home. She was brought back at two in the morning for ten minutes with the bridegroom in his cell, in the presence of a guard, the door open. He was shot in the prison yard at three thirty in the morning of the fourth of May. They had been married three hours and fifteen minutes.
The Proclamation on the GPO steps
1916Pearse
At twelve noon on Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916, on the granite steps in front of the General Post Office in Sackville Street, Dublin, Patrick Henry Pearse, thirty-six years old, schoolmaster of St Enda's and Commandant-General of the Army of the Irish Republic, read aloud, in English, the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. The Proclamation, drafted by Pearse over the previous fortnight and revised in committee at Liberty Hall on the previous Saturday, was a five-paragraph declaration that an Irish Republic had been established and that the seven signatories (Thomas Clarke, Seán MacDiarmada, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamonn Ceannt, Joseph Mary Plunkett) were the Provisional Government. The reading took about three minutes. The crowd, by the tradition of the witnesses, was thin: perhaps a hundred and fifty Dubliners walked past on the way to the Easter Monday races at Fairyhouse, most of them not understanding what was happening. Pearse himself signed the indictment of his own life with the act. He was shot at Kilmainham Gaol nine days later, on the third of May 1916.
Tied to a chair at Kilmainham
1916Connolly
On the morning of the twelfth of May 1916, James Connolly, signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, founder of the Irish Citizen Army, was carried on a stretcher from his bed at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where he had been treated for the wounds he had taken at the General Post Office during the Easter Rising, into the stonebreakers' yard at Kilmainham Gaol next door, was tied to a chair because his shattered ankle could not bear his weight, and was shot by firing party of the British Army at six minutes past three in the morning. He was the last of the sixteen leaders of the Rising to be executed at the gaol over the previous fourteen days. He was forty-seven years old. Born in the Cowgate of Edinburgh to Monaghan-emigrant parents, he had been a soldier of the King in his youth, an autodidact trade-unionist, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, organiser of the Dublin Lockout of 1913, and the only one of the seven Proclamation signatories whose interest in an Irish Republic was, before anything else, an interest in the conditions of the Dublin working class. The manner of his execution, more than any other single act of the British government in 1916, turned Irish public opinion against the union and toward the republic he had not lived to see.
Tom Clarke's signature
1916Clarke
In the late evening of Sunday the twenty-third of April 1916, in the Liberty Hall printing-room on Beresford Place at the Custom House Quay in central Dublin, the Irish Citizen Army printer Christopher Brady produced the thousand-sheet first impression of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. The Proclamation, which would be read aloud by Patrick Pearse from the General Post Office steps the following day at noon, was signed by seven members of the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The first signature, in the traditional left-most position of the most-senior signatory, was that of Thomas James Clarke, fifty-seven years old, the Hyde Park Tipperary-Limerick-emigrant-born Fenian who had served fifteen years (1883–1898) in Pentonville and Portland prisons for the Fenian dynamite-campaign of the 1880s, who had returned to Ireland in 1907, who had been the Treasurer of the IRB Supreme Council since 1910, and who was, by every careful judgment of Easter Rising historiography (Charles Townshend, Ruth Dudley Edwards), the political-organisational architect of the 1916 Rising in personal terms more than any other single figure. The Clarke-first signature on the Proclamation was the explicit IRB recognition of his senior political-organisational role. Clarke was the first of the seven Proclamation signatories to be executed at Kilmainham Gaol, on the morning of the third of May 1916.
The Treaty signature
1921Collins
On the morning of the sixth of December 1921, at twenty past two in the morning, in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, after eight weeks of formal Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations and a final twenty-four-hour stretch in which the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had presented Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and three other Irish plenipotentiaries with the now-celebrated ultimatum of immediate and terrible war if a settlement was not reached by midnight, the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland were signed by Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill on the British side and by Griffith, Collins, Robert Barton, Eamonn Duggan and George Gavan Duffy on the Irish side. Collins, by his own letter written from Hans Place to his fiancée Kitty Kiernan in the hours of the morning afterwards, signed his own death warrant. He was thirty-one years old. The settlement granted Ireland dominion status on the model of Canada, with the partition of the six north-east counties as Northern Ireland under a separate parliament, and required an oath of allegiance from Irish parliamentarians to the Crown. The Treaty was ratified by the Dáil on the seventh of January 1922 by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. The Civil War broke out in June. Collins was killed in eight months and twenty-six days.
Béal na mBláth
1922Collins
On the afternoon of the twenty-second of August 1922, eight months after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London, with the Civil War running into its eleventh week and the anti-Treaty IRA reduced to flying-column operations across south Munster, Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the National Army of the Provisional Government, drove west into his native County Cork on a tour of inspection that the local commanders had counselled him not to make. He had attended the funeral of Arthur Griffith four days earlier in Dublin. He was thirty-one years old. He had told the friends who tried to dissuade him that he would not be shot in his own county. The convoy of an armoured car, a Crossley tender of soldiers, the Leyland touring-car and a motorcycle scout was ambushed at the bend of the road at Béal na mBláth, three miles west of Bandon, at twenty minutes past eight in the evening on the way back to Cork city. Collins was hit in the back of the head by a single rifle bullet from the high ground above the road, fired by a man at long range, and was dead at the scene within five minutes. The remaining ambushers withdrew within twenty. He was the only fatality of the action.
Rory O'Connor at the Four Courts
1922O'Connor
From the fourteenth of April to the thirtieth of June 1922, in the Four Courts complex on the north bank of the Liffey in central Dublin, an anti-Treaty IRA garrison of about a hundred and eighty men under Rory O'Connor, thirty-nine years old, the anti-Treaty IRA Director of Engineering and one of the anti-Treaty figures, occupied the Four Courts as a political statement against the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith in December 1921. The Provisional Government of Ireland under W. T. Cosgrave (constituted after the Treaty's Dáil ratification of January 1922 and the formation of the new government in February) had political-tolerance for the occupation through the spring of 1922, on the Collins-Mulcahy political-judgement that any Free-State military action against the anti-Treaty IRA would precipitate Civil War. The British government, on the Lloyd-George direct political pressure of late June, demanded the Provisional-Government move on the Four Courts. The assault began at four in the morning of the twenty-eighth of June 1922 with the British-loaned 18-pounder field-artillery firing across the river from the south quays into the Four Courts walls. The Four Courts garrison surrendered on the thirtieth of June. O'Connor was taken prisoner, held at Mountjoy Prison, and was executed by the Free State Government on the eighth of December 1922 as a reprisal for the anti-Treaty assassination of the Free-State TD Seán Hales the day before. The Civil War of 1922–23 had begun.
Tim Healy at the Áras
1922Healy
On the morning of the sixth of December 1922, in the State Drawing Room of the Viceregal Lodge (the Phoenix Park residence of the former Lord Lieutenants of Ireland, which would be renamed Áras an Uachtaráin in 1937), Timothy Michael Healy KC, sixty-seven years old, the Bantry-born former-anti-Parnellite-Irish-Parliamentary-Party MP and senior King's Counsel of the Irish Bar, was sworn in as the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State by Lord FitzAlan of Derwent (the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who had held the office since 1921 and was, on the day of Healy's inauguration, retiring with the formal handover of the Viceregal Lodge keys). The swearing-in came on the formal day of the establishment of the Irish Free State under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, one year after the Treaty's signature by Michael Collins at 10 Downing Street. Healy had been chosen for the Governor-Generalship by W. T. Cosgrave's Provisional Government on the explicit principle that the office should be held by a Irish nationalist whose political-career predated the 1916 generation. Healy held the office from December 1922 to January 1928, the five-year transition through which the Free State institutions were consolidated. He died at his Chapelizod home on the twenty-sixth of March 1931, seventy-five years old.
Yeats and the Nobel speech
1923Yeats
On the evening of the fifteenth of December 1923, in the Concert Hall of the Old Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, William Butler Yeats, fifty-eight years old, the recently elected Senator of the Irish Free State (constituted on the fifteenth of January 1922) and the foundational poet of the Irish Literary Revival, delivered the Nobel Lecture upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him on the fourteenth of November 1923 for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation. The Lecture, titled The Irish Dramatic Movement, ran for about forty-five minutes. He spoke about the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, the riots over Synge's Playboy of the Western World in 1907, the role of the theatre in shaping the new Irish state, and the long argument with the previous generation of his country's nationalist movement (a movement that had, by the date of the speech, won the political independence Yeats had been arguing for in his poetry for forty years). The speech was, by his own private statement to his wife George the next morning, the most consequential public statement of his life, and the moment at which the Irish literary movement (which he had founded with seven other people at George Pollexfen's house in 1888) entered the world canon of national literatures.
Maurice Walsh and The Quiet Man
1933Walsh
In the late spring of 1933, in the upstairs writing-room of the rented cottage at Spiddal in Connemara on the Galway coast, where he had been writing for the summer holiday, Maurice Walsh, fifty-four years old, the Kerry-born Irish civil servant (Inland Revenue Excise officer at the Customs House Dublin since 1922) and the already-published Scottish-Highland-and-Irish romance novelist of The Key Above the Door (1926), completed the short story The Quiet Man, about a Irish-American emigrant who returns to a Connacht village to reclaim his deceased father's farm and falls in love with the village blacksmith's red-haired sister, Mary Kate Danaher. The story, about six thousand words, was bought by the American Saturday Evening Post for two thousand dollars (in the 1933 Depression-era American magazine market the equivalent of a major novel-advance) and was published in the February 1933 issue. The John-Ford film of the same name (1952), starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, became the foundational Irish-American romance-film of the twentieth century, won two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Cinematography), and is, by every careful judgment of Irish-American cultural-history, the most-watched film of the Irish-diaspora imaginary.
Errol Flynn in Captain Blood
1935Flynn
On the evening of Tuesday the twenty-sixth of December 1935, at the Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York City, the Warner Bros. swashbuckling-adventure feature Captain Blood opened on the holiday-week release schedule with the twenty-six-year-old completely-unknown Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn in the title role of Peter Blood, the seventeenth-century Irish-physician-turned-pirate-captain of Rafael Sabatini's 1922 historical novel. Flynn had been signed by Warner Bros. nine months earlier in March 1935 to the standard junior-stock-company seven-year contract at one hundred and fifty dollars per week on the strength of a single screen-test at the Warner Burbank lot, had been a contract-player extra in two minor Warner pictures across the spring of 1935 (a small uncredited role in Murder at Monte Carlo and the second-male-lead in The Case of the Curious Bride), and had been cast in the Captain Blood lead at the recommendation of the Curtiz casting-and-direction team only after the Warner first-choice Robert Donat had withdrawn from the production at the late-September pre-production stage on the strength of his asthma. Flynn was the second-or-third-choice replacement, was effectively unknown to the December 1935 American audience, and walked on to the Strand Theatre screen on the Boxing Day evening with no advance reputation. By the end of the two-hour-and-nineteen-minute Curtiz-directed Captain Blood the audience at the Strand had recognised the central single American Hollywood swashbuckling lead of the next decade. The film grossed $1.5 million on its release (the third-highest Warner Bros. gross of 1935), made Flynn an instant Hollywood star, established the Flynn-De Havilland on-screen pairing that would carry across the next nine films through Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and the rest of the Flynn-Warner contract.
Ich bin ein Berliner
1963Kennedy
On the morning of the twenty-sixth of June 1963, two months after a Kennedy state visit to Dunganstown in Wexford and five months before his assassination in Dallas, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, gave a nine-minute speech from the steps of the Schöneberg Rathaus, the city hall of West Berlin, on the political and moral significance of the Berlin Wall. The wall had been built by the East German government in August 1961 to stop the haemorrhage of citizens from the Soviet sector to the Western. Kennedy spoke before a crowd of about four hundred and fifty thousand West Berliners, the largest single audience of his presidency. The speech, drafted aboard Air Force One in the morning with Theodore Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy and the West German interpreter Robert Lochner, ended in the four words Ich bin ein Berliner, which Kennedy wrote out phonetically on the speech card in his own hand and which he checked with Lochner backstage in the mayor's office moments before he went out. The speech is remembered as one of the foundational documents of the Cold War. Kennedy himself remarked to Sorensen on Air Force One on the way home that they would never have another day quite like this one.
JFK at New Ross
1963Kennedy
On the late morning of the twenty-seventh of June 1963, four days after the Ich bin ein Berliner speech in West Berlin, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, brought Air Force One down at Dublin airport for a state visit to Ireland that the Department of State had advised against. He had not been expected to spend the time in his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy's small parish at Dunganstown in County Wexford. He was due, by the Department of State's draft schedule, to spend an hour at Áras an Uachtaráin, an hour with the Taoiseach Seán Lemass, and to address the Dáil; the rest of the visit was to be Limerick, Galway and Cork. He cancelled half the schedule on the morning of the twenty-seventh and went instead to the small farmhouse at Dunganstown, three miles outside the town of New Ross, where his cousin Mary Kennedy Ryan was at the kitchen door. He took his tea with her in the front parlour. He addressed a crowd of about ten thousand on the quay at New Ross at noon, in a speech he had drafted on the flight from Berlin in pencil on the back of a yellow legal pad, and which is, by the assessment of the speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, the speech that meant the most to him personally of any speech he ever gave. He was assassinated in Dallas one hundred and forty-nine days later.
Tony Ryan launches Ryanair from Waterford
1985Ryan
On the morning of Monday the eighth of July 1985, on the small commercial runway at Waterford Airport on the south-east coast of Ireland, the small fifteen-seat Embraer Bandeirante turboprop of the newly-incorporated Irish carrier Ryanair Limited took off on the inaugural commercial Waterford-to-Gatwick service, with the forty-nine-year-old Thurles-born aviation-leasing executive and majority Ryanair shareholder Tony Ryan watching from the small Waterford Airport apron. The Ryanair operation had been incorporated in November 1984 on Ryan's commercial decision (taken across the long summer-and-autumn of 1984 in his Tipperary country house outside Thurles) to challenge the Aer Lingus-and-British-Airways pooled monopoly on the Ireland-United Kingdom passenger-aviation market, on the strategic premise that the Irish-and-British regulatory framework would support a low-fare independent carrier under the 1944 Chicago Convention bilateral arrangements, and that the small under-served regional airports of the south-east of Ireland and the south-east of England could carry the foundational route network on which the operation would scale. The Waterford-to-Gatwick inaugural of the eighth of July 1985 was the central single foundational moment of modern European low-cost aviation. The airline expanded across the next forty years from the single fifteen-seat Bandeirante and the single Waterford-to-Gatwick route to the position as the largest single passenger-aviation operator in Europe by passenger-miles-flown, with the fleet of approximately five hundred and ninety Boeing 737 aircraft, the operational base at fifty-six European airports, and the annual passenger-volume of approximately two hundred million passengers per year.
John Daly wins the PGA Championship as ninth alternate
1991Daly
On the late afternoon of Sunday the eleventh of August 1991, on the difficult Pete Dye-designed Crooked Stick Golf Club outside Indianapolis, the twenty-five-year-old Carmichael, California-born Arkansas-tour journeyman professional John Patrick Daly, a complete unknown on the senior PGA Tour who had been the ninth-alternate-on-the-Monday-of-tournament-week (which is to say, ninth in the queue of players standing by for any withdrawal from the 144-player field after the qualifying tournaments had closed), drove the seven-hour overnight road-trip from Memphis to Carmel, Indiana, in his small car on the Wednesday evening of the seventh of August on the eighth-alternate-call when Brad Bryant withdrew at noon, played the Crooked Stick course for the first time in his life across the standard Thursday practice-round on the morning of the eighth (Daly had not played a single practice-round of the course before the tournament, on the strength of the late call-up), and across the four-day tournament from Thursday the eighth to Sunday the eleventh of August 1991 took the lead at the end of the first round on the strength of his prodigious driving distance (Daly carried the ball approximately 290 yards on the long Crooked Stick par-fives, the longest driving-distance on the senior PGA Tour of the year), held the lead across the second, third and fourth rounds, and finished the seventy-second hole at twelve-under-par with a three-shot winning margin over the runner-up Bruce Lietzke to take the seventy-third Professional Golfers' Association of America Championship, the central single sensational debut-win of the modern PGA Tour era and the foundational moment of the John Daly grip-it-and-rip-it Long John public legend.
Farrell coaches Ireland to the 2023 Grand Slam
2023Farrell
On the late afternoon of Saturday the eighteenth of March 2023, at the Aviva Stadium on Lansdowne Road in Dublin, in the closing fixture of the 2023 Six Nations Championship in front of a capacity crowd of fifty-one thousand seven hundred and the Saint Patrick's-weekend Irish-and-international television audience, the Republic of Ireland senior rugby union team under the head-coachship of Andy Farrell, forty-seven years old, the Wigan-born former-rugby-league international who had taken the Ireland head-coachship from Joe Schmidt at the end of the 2019 World Cup cycle and had rebuilt the Ireland senior team across the three subsequent seasons, defeated England 29 to 16 in the final round of the Championship to complete the four-from-four Grand Slam: the first Six Nations Grand Slam for Ireland since 2018, the first Grand Slam ever completed by Ireland on home soil at the Aviva, and the consolidation of the Irish position as the world-number-one rugby union team at the close of the 2022-23 season. The Grand Slam was the central single moment of the Farrell coachship of Ireland; he extended the record with the 2024 Six Nations Championship win (Ireland's first back-to-back Six Nations championships in the history of the modern competition), the world-number-one ranking through 2023 and into 2024, and on the strength of the Ireland record was selected as Head Coach of the British and Irish Lions for the 2025 tour to Australia.
Christopher Nolan and the Oppenheimer Best Picture
2024Nolan
At approximately eleven-thirty in the evening of Sunday the tenth of March 2024 at the Dolby Theatre at the Ovation Hollywood complex on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, at the ninety-sixth Academy Awards ceremony, the fifty-three-year-old Westminster-born British-Irish-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan, with his fellow producers Emma Thomas (his wife and producing partner of twenty-six years) and Charles Roven, took the stage of the Dolby to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture for the Universal Pictures historical-biographical drama Oppenheimer, the three-hour-and-one-minute biopic of the American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (released in July 2023 on the simultaneous Barbenheimer Saturday-evening double-release with Greta Gerwig's Barbie). The Best Picture Oscar was the seventh and final Academy Award of the evening for the film, after the Best Director Oscar for Nolan (his first competitive Academy Award after seven previous nominations across his twenty-five-year directing career), the Best Actor Oscar for Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the Best Original Score Oscar for Ludwig Göransson, the Best Cinematography Oscar for Hoyte van Hoytema, and the Best Film Editing Oscar for Jennifer Lame. The seven-award sweep tied the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King record of 2003 for most Academy Awards by a single film of the modern era and was the culmination of the twenty-five-year Christopher Nolan directing career.
Scotland
Stirling Bridge
1297Clan Wallace
On the morning of 11 September 1297, the English army of John de Warenne and Hugh Cressingham began crossing the Forth at Stirling on a wooden bridge two horsemen wide. The Scottish patriot army on the high ground above the river held its position and watched. Its commanders were William Wallace, the outlaw turned national leader, and Andrew de Moray, who would die of wounds taken that day. The Scottish question had no precedent for what they were about to do: Highland and Lowland infantry had not been thought capable of breaking trained knights in the field. By sunset that question had its answer.
Execution at Smithfield
1305Clan Wallace
In August 1305, after seven years of guerrilla war and near-misses, William Wallace was betrayed in Glasgow by Sir John Menteith, taken in chains across the Border, paraded through the south of England, and brought into Westminster Hall to be tried for treason. Edward I had personally insisted on the trial. A garland of laurel was placed on his head in mockery of an old prophecy that said a Scot would one day be crowned king in London. He refused to plead. The court convicted him in absence of his own defence. The four-mile drag from Westminster to Smithfield, and what they did to him there, was set down in the chronicle of Lanercost in language meant to deter.
Bruce and the spider
c. 1306Clan Bruce
In 1306 Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scots and lost two battles within four months. Excommunicated by Rome, his wife and daughter taken, three of his four brothers executed by the English king, his sister hanging in an iron cage on the wall of Roxburgh Castle, he disappeared into hiding through the winter. The Scots cause was a fugitive in a coastal cave. By tradition he watched a spider try to swing a thread of web across a gap, fail six times, succeed on the seventh, and took it for his answer. The truth attested in chronicle is leaner: a king at the end of his options went back into the field, and won.
Dalrigh and the Brooch of Lorne
1306Clan MacDougall
In the second week of August 1306, at the head of Strath Fillan on the western edge of Breadalbane near the small ford-and-monastery settlement of Dalrigh (the King's Field, in Gaelic Dail Righ), a party of about three hundred MacDougall and Comyn clansmen under John MacDougall of Lorn (Iain Bacach, Lame John) ambushed the small fugitive party of Robert the Bruce, the newly-crowned King of Scots, in the steep narrow pass between the Lochan na Bi and the river Fillan. Bruce was eight weeks out of his coronation at Scone, had been defeated by Aymer de Valence in the open at Methven on the nineteenth of June 1306, had been driven west across the Highland watershed with a remnant of his army, and was attempting to break through to Loch Lomond and the Lennox to take shipping for the Atlantic islands. The MacDougall ambush at Dalrigh nearly ended the Scottish king-in-the-making and the Wars of Scottish Independence in their first year. In the close hand-to-hand fighting at the head of the pass, three brothers of the MacDougall house, the sons of MacKeoch, fell on Bruce in person; he killed all three with his battle-axe; in the struggle the small chiselled Celtic brooch that fastened his plaid was torn loose and dropped on the ground, and one of the MacDougall fighters retrieved it from the heather after the battle. The brooch (a chiselled silver-and-rock-crystal Celtic ring-brooch of late twelfth-century Irish workmanship, three inches across, with eight settings of river-pearl) is held to this day at Dunollie Castle outside Oban by the chiefs of the MacDougalls of Lorn under the name the Brooch of Lorne, the most-famous single inherited artefact of the Scottish clans.
The heart of Bruce
1329–1330Clan Douglas
In June 1329 Robert the Bruce lay dying at Cardross. He had vowed years earlier to take the cross to the Holy Land, but the Scottish wars had kept him from it; on his deathbed he asked that his heart be cut from his body, embalmed, and carried on crusade in his place. The man who took the charge was Sir James Douglas, his closest companion in arms, called Good Sir James. Douglas wore the heart in a silver casket on a chain at his neck the next year, through France and Spain and into a foreign battle on the Andalusian frontier, where what he did at the head of a Castilian charge became the founding act of the Douglas line.
The Earl of Erroll at Harlaw
1411Clan Hay
On the morning of the twenty-fourth of July 1411, on the rising ground above the head of the Garioch, twenty miles north-west of Aberdeen, the Lowland-Norman levies of Aberdeenshire and Angus, under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, met a Highland-Hebridean army of about ten thousand under Donald, Lord of the Isles, in the most consequential battle fought in north-east Scotland in the post-Bruce century. Donald had been pressing east for the earldom of Ross. Mar's hastily levied army of three thousand had three of the great Lowland constables on the field. The High Constable of Scotland, Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, son of the second Lord of Erroll, in his fifty-first year, in his hereditary office and on his own ground, held the right wing of Mar's line. The action was, by every contemporary account, fought to a standstill on the strath of Harlaw at the cost of about a thousand dead a side. Donald withdrew north-west overnight; Mar held the field. The Lowland-speaking belt of Aberdeenshire and Angus would not be reabsorbed into a Gaelic west again. The Hay tradition has it that the day held because Erroll held the right.
The Black Dinner
1440Clan Douglas
On the twenty-fourth of November 1440, the sixteen-year-old William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, head of the Black Douglas line and the most powerful subject in Scotland, was invited with his younger brother David to dine in the great hall of Edinburgh Castle in the presence of the ten-year-old King James II. The dinner was hosted by William Crichton (the Lord Chancellor) and Sir Alexander Livingston (the Custodian of the Castle and the King's tutor), the two regents who effectively ruled Scotland during the king's minority and who had been alarmed for two years at the rising power of the Douglas earl. By the tradition of the next century, told in the chronicles of John Major and Hector Boece, a black bull's head was brought in on a silver platter as the principal dish, the symbol in fifteenth-century Scotland of imminent execution. The two Douglas brothers were seized at the table, given a hasty trial in the courtyard, and beheaded on the spot. The political effect was immediate: the Black Douglas eclipse, the rise of a new (and deliberately diminished) Douglas line under the eighth Earl. The Black Dinner is the most consistently remembered episode of medieval Scottish political violence, has produced two surviving children's rhymes (one in the eastern Border tradition, one Aberdeenshire), and was deliberately referenced by George R. R. Martin as the structural model for the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords.
Rosslyn Chapel
1446Clan Sinclair
Sir William Sinclair, third and last Earl of Orkney, founded the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew at Roslin, seven miles south of Edinburgh, in 1446. The carving programme that followed ran for forty years and produced an interior of unique density: every pillar, boss, archstone and capital crowded with foliage, angels, beasts, biblical scenes and faces, including forms some have read as American maize and aloe carved decades before Columbus. The Apprentice Pillar in the south-east of the chapel carries the building's most famous folk-story, of a master mason who killed his own apprentice with a mallet on returning from Rome to find the boy had carved the pillar from a dream. Templar and Masonic associations have been read into Rosslyn for two centuries; the chapel has carried them all and remains itself.
Patrick Hamilton at St Andrews
1528Clan Hamilton
Patrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.
The hanging at Carlanrig
1530Clan Armstrong
In the summer of 1530, James V of Scotland was eighteen years old, recently emerged from his minority and the Douglas tutelage, and intent on showing the Border country that the Scottish crown's writ ran to the West March. He sent a king's letter of safe conduct to Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, the most powerful reiver chief between Solway and Liddel, inviting him to a royal hunt at Carlanrig in Teviothead. Armstrong came as for a court, in livery, with thirty-six of his best riders and silver-mounted bridles. The king ordered them seized as they dismounted. Forty-eight Armstrongs were hanged from the trees at Carlanrig that afternoon. The ballad that came out of it is one of the central pieces of the Border tradition.
Little Jock Elliot at Hermitage Water
1566Clan Elliot
On the morning of the seventh of October 1566, on a bridle-path running west of the Hermitage Castle keep above Hermitage Water in Liddesdale on the central Scottish Border, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, then thirty years old, the Lord Lieutenant of the Marches under Mary, Queen of Scots, met in single combat a Liddesdale reiver known by the Borders by-name Little Jock Elliot of the Park, of the Elliot of Park branch of the Elliot riding-clan family. Bothwell, riding the March in pursuit of the Elliot raid-band of the previous week, came on Little Jock Elliot on the path; the two men charged each other with horse-pistols. Bothwell fired first and hit Elliot in the thigh; Elliot, falling, fired his second pistol at point-blank range and hit Bothwell three times (in the head, the left arm, and the side). Bothwell was lifted from the saddle by his escort and carried bleeding to the Hermitage keep, where he was held in a tower-room for the next eight days, not expected to recover. Mary, Queen of Scots, on the news from Jedburgh on the fifteenth of October, rode the fifty miles from Jedburgh to Hermitage and back in a single day to attend to him, and contracted, on the return ride home in heavy rain, the near-fatal fever that nearly killed her at Jedburgh through the next ten days. The Mary-Bothwell political-and-personal entanglement that began at Hermitage in October 1566 would, by the Darnley murder of February 1567 and the Mary-Bothwell marriage of May 1567, run through to Mary's deposition in July 1567 and the eventual execution at Fotheringhay in 1587.
George Buchanan, tutor to James VI
1579Clan Buchanan
From 1570 until 1578 the most distinguished Latinist in northern Europe, George Buchanan of Killearn, in his sixties, scholar of St Andrews and Bordeaux and Coimbra, formerly Principal of St Leonard's College, formerly Moderator of the General Assembly, formerly tutor to Mary Queen of Scots when she was a French princess, was the daily tutor of King James VI of Scotland in the schoolroom at Stirling Castle, where the boy-king (orphaned, abdicated for, four years old at the start of the lessons) was being raised under the regents Lennox, Mar and Morton. Buchanan beat the boy. He drilled him in Cicero, Livy, Horace and Plutarch. He drilled him in Greek. He drilled him in the De Officiis. And in 1579, when James was thirteen and the lessons were drawing to a close, Buchanan published the political treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos, on the law of kingship among the Scots, in dialogue form, which argued that kings were created by their people and accountable to them and could be deposed by them in extremity. He dedicated the book to his pupil. James spent the rest of his life writing answers to it. The dedication was, by every careful Scottish biographer of either man, the deliberate ground-laying of an argument the boy was meant to have to live with.
The left-handed Kerrs of Ferniehirst
1580Clan Kerr
The Kerrs of Ferniehirst, the Border-Kerr line whose castle stands on the Jed Water two miles south of Jedburgh, were known across the Borders from at least the late sixteenth century as a left-handed family. The tradition of the Borders, recorded in print as early as Walter Scott's Border Antiquities of 1814 and earlier in the manuscript notes of the Roxburgh kirk session, holds that the Ferniehirst chiefs deliberately trained their sons to fight corrie-fisted, left-handed, in the broadsword and in the lance, and that they built the spiral staircases of their castles turning the opposite way to the standard right-handed defensive design, so that a right-handed attacker climbing the stair would have his sword-arm against the central pillar and could not strike, while a left-handed defender coming down would have his sword-arm in the open. The staircase at Ferniehirst Castle, which still stands, turns counter-clockwise. Whether the family was actually genetically left-handed or simply trained the trait is the kind of question that produces an answer of both, by stages. The reiver tradition is unambiguous: the Kerr men of the Middle March in the sixteenth century were kerr-handed, and the word kerr-handed has entered the Scots dictionary as a synonym for left-handed, attested in print since the seventeenth century.
Mary at Fotheringhay
1587Clan Stewart
On the morning of the eighth of February 1587, in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, Mary, Queen of Scots, formerly Queen of France, claimant to the throne of England by descent from Henry VII, twice married, twice widowed, mother of James VI of Scotland (the future James I of England), in her forty-fourth year, in the nineteenth year of imprisonment in England, was beheaded by Bull, the executioner, on a black-draped scaffold raised in the hall, in the presence of three earls, the sheriff of Northamptonshire, and a small party of her own household. She had been condemned at the Star Chamber in October 1586 for involvement in the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and place herself on the English throne. Elizabeth had signed the warrant on the first of February 1587 and tried, in the days afterward, to disavow having intended its execution. The execution went forward on the morning of the eighth, the warrant carried by Robert Beale, by the Privy Council's authority. The first stroke of the axe failed to sever the neck. The second sufficed. The third was needed to sever the last sinew. As the head was lifted, the wig that Mary had been wearing came off in Bull's hand, revealing the queen's grey hair. Beneath the skirts of the gown her terrier, by the tradition of the eyewitnesses, was found alive and would not leave her body, and had to be carried out by force.
Dryfe Sands
1593Clan Maxwell
On the late afternoon of the sixth of December 1593, in the long flat saltmarsh between the village of Lockerbie and the river Annan in Dumfriesshire, John Maxwell, eighth Lord Maxwell, warden of the West March of Scotland, was overthrown and killed by the Johnstones of Annandale under Sir James Johnstone of Dunskellie, in the last great clan-versus-clan field battle on Scottish soil. Maxwell had brought up two thousand men of his own following and the West-march levies; Johnstone had raised about four hundred from his own people. Maxwell's superior numbers were nullified on the soft ground of Dryfe, where the cavalry could not deploy, and the Johnstone horse caught the Maxwell line in flank as it tried to ford the burn. Maxwell was unhorsed in the press, asked for quarter, and was killed on the wet sand by a sword-cut delivered downward across the face by William Johnstone the Galliard, a younger brother of Sir James. The cut, by the tradition of the West March, was the cut that gave the saltmarsh its second name, and was the cut that gave the modern Scots dialect of Dumfriesshire the verb to lockerbie a man: to deliver a sword-stroke downward across a man's face. The Maxwell power on the West March was broken in the next half-hour and never reassembled.
The Galliard's stroke
1593Clan Johnstone
On the wet saltmarsh of Dryfe Sands at the confluence of the Dryfe Water and the Annan, three miles north of Lockerbie in Dumfriesshire, on the late afternoon of the sixth of December 1593, Sir James Johnstone of Dunskellie, then about forty-three years old, the chief of the Johnstones of Annandale, with about four hundred of his clansmen-and-allies, broke a Maxwell host of about two thousand under John, eighth Lord Maxwell. The Maxwell column had committed to crossing the confluence under tight numerical superiority; the Johnstone horse caught it in column at the ford and rolled it back across the marsh. Maxwell was unhorsed, asked for quarter, and was killed on the wet sand by a single downward sword-stroke delivered across the face by William Johnstone the Galliard, Sir James's younger brother. The stroke is the original of the Dumfriesshire dialect-phrase to lockerbie a man, a downward sword-cut to the head, and the Maxwell power on the Western March was broken in the half-hour that followed. The feud continued in private for the next twenty years and was formally closed only in 1623 by the Privy Council.
Lachlan Mor at Traigh Ghruinneart
1598Clan Maclean
On the fifth of August 1598, on the long strand of Traigh Ghruinneart on the north coast of Islay, Lachlan Mor MacLean, fourteenth chief of MacLean of Duart, in his forty-fourth year, was killed in a feud action against the MacDonalds of Islay. The feud was over the Rinns, the western peninsula of Islay, claimed by both houses. Lachlan Mor had landed at Bunnahabhain at the head of about a thousand of his Mull and Tiree clansmen and had marched west across the island looking for the MacDonald force. Sir James MacDonald of Islay, the young chief, had assembled about six hundred men and waited for him on the strand. Tradition holds that Lachlan Mor consulted a Hebridean seeress on the morning of the action, who told him three things he must avoid that day: he must not drink from a particular well, he must not land at a particular bay, and he must not face a particular dwarf. By the tradition, he did all three. He was killed by an arrow loosed by a MacDonald retainer called Du-Sith, the black peace, a red-haired man traditionally rendered as a dwarf. His body was buried in Kilchoman churchyard, half a mile from where he fell.
The Battle of Glen Fruin
1603Clan MacGregor
In February 1603, days before James VI of Scotland departed Edinburgh to take the English throne, Alasdair MacGregor of Glenstrae led four hundred clansmen down Glen Fruin onto the lands of the Colquhouns of Luss, in a long-running cattle feud over Loch Lomond pasture. By the day's end roughly one hundred and forty Colquhouns lay dead. The widows of Luss rode to Stirling and presented the bloodied shirts of their men to the king. James, on the eve of inheriting an English crown and intent on showing the southern court a settled north, signed a Letter of Fire and Sword. The very name MacGregor was abolished. The proscription would stand for one hundred and seventy-one years.
Captain John Smith at Jamestown
1607Smith
Sometime in late December 1607, in a longhouse at the Powhatan-Confederacy capital town of Werowocomoco on the north bank of the Pamunkey River in tidewater Virginia, Captain John Smith, twenty-seven years old, the Lincolnshire-born adventurer and one of the seven councillors of the Virginia Company colony at Jamestown that had been established in May of the same year, was brought before Wahunsenacawh (the paramount chief Powhatan, in his sixties), bound, and laid on two large stones in the centre of the longhouse with the Powhatan executioners holding clubs above his head. By Smith's own account in his Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Pocahontas (the ten-or-eleven-year-old daughter of Powhatan, Matoaka in the Powhatan language) ran forward, took Smith's head in her arms, and laid her own head upon his to prevent the execution. By the modern ethnohistorical reading (Helen Rountree's standing Pocahontas's People, 1990; Camilla Townsend's standing Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, 2004), the ceremony Smith experienced was not in fact an execution but a Powhatan adoption-ritual into the tribal kinship system, in which the initiate's symbolic death is followed by the reincorporation into a new father-son relationship under Powhatan. Smith, by his initial 1608 report (A True Relation, written within the year of the events), did not mention Pocahontas's intervention; the intervention first appears in the 1624 Generall Historie, sixteen years after the events. The English colonial-American historical tradition has taken the Pocahontas-rescue story as foundational; the modern ethnohistorical reading takes it as an artefact of the 1624 publishing-context rather than the 1607 events.
Logarithms at Merchiston
1614Clan Napier
In the spring of 1614, in the upper turret of Merchiston Tower south of Edinburgh, John Napier, eighth Laird of Merchiston, in his sixty-fourth year, in the twentieth year of work on the project, finished the manuscript of Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, the description of the wonderful canon of logarithms, and sent it to the Edinburgh printer Andrew Hart for setting. The book came out in July of the same year. Henry Briggs, professor of mathematics at Gresham College, read it in London in November and crossed the Tweed in the summer of 1615 to come and see Napier at Merchiston. Within a generation the table of logarithms had taken navigation, astronomy and surveying off the arithmetic by hand, and was, by Galileo's observation in his 1632 Dialogue, the greatest invention of the last hundred years. Napier was a Lothian Protestant laird who had spent ten years on a hostile commentary on the Book of Revelation, who had patented a hydraulic screw for clearing coal pits, who had drafted four conceptual war-machines for the defence of Scotland against Spanish invasion, and whose neighbours in the Edinburgh suburbs had decided he was a wizard and his black rooster was his familiar. The most consequential mathematical work of seventeenth-century Britain came out of his turret in his late middle age.
The National Covenant in Greyfriars
1638Clan Henderson
On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February 1638, in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, the Scottish nobility and gentry gathered to subscribe a four-thousand-word document called the National Covenant, drafted by the Edinburgh advocate Archibald Johnston of Wariston and the Leuchars minister Alexander Henderson, in the third month of the country's open resistance to the Caroline-Laudian Prayer Book that Charles I had attempted to impose on the Kirk by royal warrant. The Covenant was signed by some four hundred men in the kirk that afternoon, and laid out on a flat tomb-slab in the kirkyard for the remainder of the burgh to subscribe over the next several days. Many signed in their own blood. The document was then carried in copy through every shire of Lowland Scotland, and was, by the spring, signed by the great majority of the country's adult male Protestant population. The Covenant became the constitutional pivot of the next half-century of Scottish history: of the Bishops' Wars of 1639–40, of the alliance with the English Parliament in 1643, of the Westminster Assembly, of the long defeat at Dunbar in 1650, and of the political identity of Presbyterian Scotland for two hundred years afterwards.
Inverlochy
1645Clan MacDonald
On the night of the thirty-first of January 1645, after a winter march of thirty-six hours from the south end of Loch Ness through Glen Tarbet and the high pass of the Lairig Leacach, James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, with the Highland-Irish brigade of Alasdair MacColla MacDonald and a force of about fifteen hundred men of the western clans, came down at first light on the second of February, the morning of Candlemas, on the Campbell army of Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll, encamped under the walls of Inverlochy Castle at the head of Loch Linnhe. Argyll had three thousand men. The day broke in heavy frost. The Highland charge took the Campbell line in flank and rolled it down the loch shore. Argyll was put aboard his galley and rowed for Inveraray. Fifteen hundred Campbells died, by the careful estimate of the modern historians of the action, in two hours. The MacDonalds of Clanranald, of Glengarry, of Keppoch, of Glencoe, fought beside MacColla in the centre. The single most consequential reckoning between MacDonald and Campbell of the seventeenth century was won that morning by Montrose's tactical genius and the Highland charge in winter, fifty years and ten days before Glencoe, and reads, in Highland MacDonald memory, as the inverse of Glencoe.
David Leslie at Dunbar
1650Clan Leslie
On the morning of the third of September 1650, on the open coastal ground south-east of Dunbar in East Lothian, David Leslie's Scottish Covenanting army of about twenty-three thousand was broken in two hours by Oliver Cromwell's English New Model Army of about eleven thousand, in what stands as Cromwell's most decisive open-field victory of the British civil wars. Leslie had Cromwell trapped against the sea and the supply line back to England, with starvation and dysentery running through the New Model camp; he had only to hold the high ground at Doon Hill and wait. The civilian commissioners of the Kirk attached to his army, on the night of the second, ordered him down off the high ground to engage the enemy, on the theological judgment that Cromwell's army was an army of sectaries and the Scots ought not to wait. Leslie obeyed. The deployment in low ground at the Brox Burn opened his right flank to a dawn attack which Cromwell timed to the rising of the sun off the sea. Three thousand Scots dead, ten thousand prisoners. Leslie himself escaped with the regiments of Holburn and Strachan back to Edinburgh, but the Covenanted army of the Engagement was finished. Cromwell occupied Edinburgh ten days later. The Battle of Dunbar is, by the careful judgment of the New Model's chronicler John Hodgson and of every later military historian, the single most consequential English victory in Scotland between Flodden and Culloden.
Montrose at the Mercat Cross
1650Clan Graham
On the twenty-first of May 1650, James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquess of Montrose, by general assent the most brilliant Royalist commander of the Scottish civil wars and the architect of the annus mirabilis of 1644–45, was hanged at the Mercat Cross at the head of the High Street in Edinburgh on a thirty-foot gibbet. He had been captured at Ardvreck Castle in Sutherland three weeks earlier, after the failure of his Royalist landing in support of Charles II at the head of Loch Eriboll. He was thirty-seven years old. The Earl of Argyll, his old enemy, watched from a window of the Marquess's lodging on the Royal Mile as the cart went up. The crowd that had been ordered to spit on him as he passed was, by every contemporary report, silent and weeping. He went to the gallows in a black suit Argyll had refused to let him replace with the scarlet of his Order of the Garter. He carried his copy of George Wishart's biography of him around his neck on a string, in a parchment volume bound in calf, and the gibbet rope was placed over the volume. After the execution his body was quartered, the head spiked at the Tolbooth where it remained for eleven years, the limbs sent to Glasgow, Stirling, Perth and Aberdeen. In May 1661, after the Restoration, the body parts were collected and reassembled and the funeral he had not had was held at St Giles. He is buried in the abbey of the Knights of St John, by the south transept of St Giles, ten yards from where his head had stood.
Bluidy Tam at Rullion Green
1666Clan Dalziel
On the late afternoon of the twenty-eighth of November 1666, on the eastern shoulder of the Pentland Hills above the small farmstead of Rullion Green, eight miles south of Edinburgh, the south-western Covenanting host of about nine hundred armed countrymen was destroyed by a Government cavalry force of about three thousand horse and dragoons under Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Dalziel of the Binns, in the action that closed the Pentland Rising. Dalziel, in his sixty-first year, was the soldier in Scotland under Charles II, freshly returned from fifteen years in the service of the Tsar of Muscovy in the campaigns against the Tatars and the Turks, where he had grown a long full beard he had vowed never to cut while Charles I and his cause were avenged. The countrymen had risen at Lanark over the imposition of bishops on the Kirk and the harassment of conventicle preachers; they had marched on Edinburgh, found the city closed against them, and turned south for home. Dalziel caught them at Rullion Green at sunset. The action lasted under an hour. The Covenanters who survived were taken to Edinburgh, where about forty were hanged at the Mercat Cross over the next two months. Dalziel was rewarded with the Colonelcy of the Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons (the modern Royal Scots Greys, lineally descended) and held the King's commission in Scotland for the next twenty years. He earned the by-name Bluidy Tam in the western Covenanting cottages, where it has stayed for three and a half centuries.
Rob Roy MacGregor
1671–1734Clan MacGregor
Robert Roy MacGregor, born 1671 at Glengyle on Loch Katrine, was the third son of a clan that was not legally allowed to bear its own name. He worked as a cattle dealer and grew rich on the protection trade. In 1712 a sum of one thousand pounds advanced to him by James Graham, Duke of Montrose, vanished with one of his drovers; Montrose called the loan, seized Rob Roy's house at Inversnaid and evicted his wife and children. Rob Roy declared open war on the duke. For more than two decades he raided Montrose's lands, stole his rents, and lived as an outlaw under the protection of the rival Duke of Argyll. He died at Balquhidder in 1734, aged sixty-three, having sat up on his deathbed to refuse a death he had not yet finished arranging.
Killiecrankie
1689Clan Graham
In April 1689 the Convention of Estates declared the throne of Scotland forfeit and offered the crown to William and Mary. James VII and II, lately deposed, had one party in Scotland that would not accept the change: the Highland clans. The man who raised them was John Graham of Claverhouse, recently created Viscount Dundee, called Bonnie Dundee in the country and Bluidy Clavers in the kirk. By July 1689 he had two and a half thousand Highlanders at his back, against four thousand government foot under Major-General Hugh Mackay. They met at the Pass of Killiecrankie above the River Garry on the evening of the twenty-seventh of July. The Highland charge that came down the slope decided the field in ten minutes and lost the war in the same minute.
The Massacre of Glencoe
1692Clan MacDonald
In late 1691, the British crown demanded every Highland chief swear loyalty by the first of January, on pain of fire and sword. The MacDonalds of Glencoe missed the deadline by six days through no fault of their own. In response, the government quietly authorised the destruction of the family. For two weeks 120 government soldiers under a Campbell captain were billeted as guests in MacDonald longhouses, eating MacDonald food and playing cards with their hosts under the unbreakable Highland code of guest-right. Before dawn on the thirteenth of February 1692, the captain received written orders to fall on the village. What followed is remembered as the worst breach of guest-right in British history, and the reason the MacDonalds will not sit at table with a Campbell to this day.
Paterson and the Darien Scheme
1698Clan Paterson
On the fourteenth of July 1698, on the deep-water anchorage of Leith Roads outside Edinburgh, five Scottish-built ships of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (the Caledonia, Saint Andrew, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour) sailed for the Isthmus of Panama with about twelve hundred settlers and the Scottish capital of about four hundred thousand pounds (about one-quarter of the total liquid capital of Scotland). The architect of the venture was William Paterson, forty years old, the Tinwald-Dumfriesshire-born founder (with Charles Montagu) of the Bank of England in 1694, who had spent the previous two years organising the Company's prospectus, capital-raising, and ship-fitting. The Darien colony at New Edinburgh on the Caribbean coast of Panama was meant to establish a trans-Isthmus trading entrepôt between the Atlantic and the Pacific economies. The colony collapsed within fourteen months: about a thousand of the twelve hundred settlers died of malaria, yellow fever and dysentery; the Spanish-imperial military authority refused to recognise the Scottish-Company territorial-claim; the English government, under William III's political pressure from the East India Company, refused all trading support. A second expedition of about thirteen hundred fresh Scottish settlers in 1699 produced the same outcome. The Company of Scotland lost its entire capital. The Scottish economy of the early eighteenth century was severely damaged. The Darien failure is, by every careful judgment of the historians of the Anglo-Scottish Union (T. M. Devine, Christopher Whatley), the foundational economic-political-cause of the Acts of Union of 1707: Scotland needed English economic assistance, and the English Crown needed Scottish political consent for the Hanoverian succession.
Fletcher of Saltoun against the Union
1707Clan Fletcher
In the long autumn session of the Scottish Parliament of 1706, in the Parliament House on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, fifty-three years old, the East-Lothian laird and senior intellectual figure of the anti-Union party in the Scots Estates, delivered the twenty-three speeches against the Treaty of Union with England that had been negotiated by the Scottish Commissioners with the Westminster government in the summer of 1706. Fletcher's speeches, preserved in the Defoe History of the Union and in his own Political Works of 1737, are the foundational defence of an independent Scottish polity in early-eighteenth-century political thought. The Treaty of Union nevertheless passed the Scottish Parliament by 110 votes to 67 on the sixteenth of January 1707, came into force on the first of May 1707, and dissolved the Scottish Parliament for the next two hundred and ninety-two years (until the Scotland Act 1998 re-established a devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 1999). Fletcher's most-quoted line from the 1706 speeches, I would venture to assert that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and has been the foundational maxim of cultural-political-nationalism in modern political theory.
Bobbing John raises the standard at Braemar
1715Clan Erskine
On the morning of the sixth of September 1715, in the Braes of Mar above the head of the Dee, John Erskine, sixth or twenty-third Earl of Mar (the regnal numbering depends on which catalogue), formerly Secretary of State for Scotland under Anne, formerly Tory loyalist under George I, and now suddenly the leader of a Jacobite rising, raised the standard of King James VIII of Scotland (James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender) on a hillside above his ancestral hunting-lodge at Invercauld. The flag had been brought up from London by the Earl of Linlithgow's daughter sewn into the lining of her riding-cloak. By the testimony of the Aberdeenshire factor Thomas Strachan who was on the hill, the gilt ball that crowned the standard fell off as the standard was being raised, an omen the Highland people present took for certain. Mar's army of about five thousand grew to twelve thousand by November. He held back from a decisive engagement with Argyll for ten weeks, fought the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir on the thirteenth of November (which he could have won) and the rising disintegrated through the winter. Mar was attainted, fled to France, and lived out his life in exile, an embittered Jacobite intriguer earning the nickname Bobbing John for his repeated changes of allegiance.
Duncan Forbes holds the north
1745Clan Forbes
From the August of 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart raised the standard at Glenfinnan, until the disaster of Culloden in April 1746, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session and the senior judicial officer in Scotland, sat at his country house at Culloden, four miles east of Inverness, on the strip of ground that the Jacobite army would eventually march across, and wrote letters. He wrote to Lovat, who he knew was for the prince. He wrote to MacLeod of MacLeod, who he kept on the government side. He wrote to Sleat, to Sutherland, to Cromartie, to MacDonald of Slate, to MacKenzie of Coul, to MacDonell of Glengarry. He wrote to thirty-one separate Highland chiefs in fourteen weeks. About half of them came out for the prince anyway. The other half, in part because of his letters, did not. By the careful judgment of the histories, the smaller half of the Highlands held by Forbes is the half that turned the rising into a one-army campaign rather than a two. The cost of the work was forty thousand pounds of his own private money advanced to the government, never repaid in his lifetime. He died bankrupt at Culloden House in December 1747, twenty months after the battle that took his name.
Struan joins the prince at Glenfinnan
1745Clan Robertson
On the afternoon of the nineteenth of August 1745, on the grass shelf above the head of Loch Shiel where the Glenfinnan monument now stands, Charles Edward Stuart raised the standard of his father James VIII and the Jacobite cause for the second time in thirty years. About one thousand two hundred Highland clansmen were on the hillside by sunset, principally Camerons of Lochiel and MacDonalds of Clanranald and Glenaladale and Glencoe. Among the older men in the assembly was the chief of Clan Donnachaidh, Alasdair Ruadh Robertson of Struan, then aged seventy-five, the same Robertson who had brought his clan out for the Old Pretender in 1715, who had been wounded at Sheriffmuir, who had been pardoned and returned to his estates in 1731. He had walked from his house at Struan, fifteen miles east of the head of Loch Shiel, to the gathering at Glenfinnan, in the company of about four hundred of his men. He was, by every contemporary report, the oldest man on the field. He went home to Struan with a captured English officer's coach after the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans six weeks later. The coach is, by tradition, what the prince gave him to ride home in because he could no longer walk the distance.
The Gentle Lochiel
1745Clan Cameron
In late July 1745, Charles Edward Stuart landed at Loch nan Uamh in the western Highlands with seven companions, a hundred broadswords, and no army. The chiefs he had counted on read the situation cleanly and sent him back letters of refusal. Without Donald Cameron of Lochiel, called the Gentle Lochiel for his unwillingness to send his men against odds, no one would come. Lochiel rode to Borrodale in the first days of August to talk the prince out of it. He was the most respected chief in the western Highlands. The conversation that followed at Borrodale, in a small farmhouse over a single meal, was the conversation in which the rising of 1745 was made.
The Young Pretender
1745–1746Clan Stewart
Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome in 1720, grandson of the deposed James VII and II, and grew up at the exiled court of his father in the Palazzo Muti. He landed at Eriskay on 23 July 1745 with seven companions and a hundred broadswords, and within five months had taken Edinburgh and pushed an army deep into England. By 4 December 1745 his men were at Derby, one hundred and twenty-four miles from a London in panic. The council of war the next morning was the highest point of the rising and the moment it was lost. Charles wanted to march on. His commanders did not. The retreat began the next day.
Flora MacDonald and the prince
1746Clan MacDonald
In June 1746, two months after the disaster of Culloden, Charles Edward Stuart was a fugitive in the Hebrides with a price on his head of thirty thousand pounds, the largest reward of the eighteenth century. Government patrols closed in around him on the islands of South Uist and Benbecula. The plan that came to him through an Irish Jacobite officer was to disguise him as an Irish spinning-maid and put him on a boat to Skye in the household of a young woman with a militia pass. Her name was Flora MacDonald. She was twenty-four years old. She had no political stake in the rising. The crossing made her name a synonym for the lost cause for the next two centuries.
Lord George Murray at Culloden morning
1746Clan Murray
On the morning of the sixteenth of April 1746, on the ridge above the Moray Firth at Drumossie Moor, Lord George Murray, Lieutenant-General of the Jacobite army, in his fifty-second year, the most experienced soldier in the prince's command, met his cousin the Duke of Atholl and the Irish-French chief of staff John William O'Sullivan in council an hour before first light. The Jacobite army had marched twelve miles overnight in an attempted surprise attack on the Duke of Cumberland's camp at Nairn, had failed of the surprise because the column had not made the distance, and had returned to Drumossie at three in the morning, exhausted and unfed. Murray had advised before the night march, and now advised again before the dawn, that the army was not in a fit state to fight, that the boggy ground at Drumossie was not the ground for a Highland charge against artillery, and that the army should withdraw south-west into the broken country across the Nairn River where Cumberland's cavalry could not deploy. Charles Edward Stuart and O'Sullivan overruled him. The line formed at Drumossie at half past ten. Cumberland's army arrived at midday. The Highland charge went forward at one and was broken in twenty minutes by canister and musketry. Lord George Murray escaped with his life and a rearguard of Atholl Brigade men, fought a Jacobite remnant action at Ruthven a week later, and went into permanent exile at Cleves in the Low Countries, where he died in 1760.
The Rout of Moy
1746Clan Mackintosh
In February 1746, with the Jacobite rising in retreat from Derby, Bonnie Prince Charlie was lodged for the night at Moy Hall, the seat of the chief of clan Mackintosh south of Inverness. The chief himself was a captain in a government regiment, away with his unit; his twenty-year-old wife Anne Farquharson, called Colonel Anne, had raised the Mackintosh men for the prince in his absence. Word reached the government commander at Inverness that the prince was lightly guarded at Moy. Lord Loudon mustered fifteen hundred men in the dark and set out to seize him. The night that followed was held off by a blacksmith and four men in the heather.
The last beheading on Tower Hill
1747Clan Fraser
Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was perhaps the most duplicitous magnate of his age. Born around 1667, exiled, made and unmade a Catholic and a Protestant, he had played both sides of every Jacobite crisis since 1690. He abducted his cousin's widow at sword-point and forced a marriage to secure the Lovat title. He spied for the British government and the exiled Stuart court alternately, sometimes simultaneously. In 1745 he had his son raise the Fraser clan for Bonnie Prince Charlie under his orders while himself pretending loyalty to King George. He was eighty when the soldiers found him in a hollow tree on an island in Loch Morar after Culloden. The execution at Tower Hill that closed his life was the last beheading carried out in Britain.
Hector Munro at Buxar
1764Clan Munro
On the morning of the twenty-third of October 1764, on the open ground at the village of Buxar in northern Bihar, in northern India, Major Sir Hector Munro of Novar, in command of an East India Company army of about seven thousand sepoys and one British battalion, met the combined forces of three Indian rulers (Mir Qasim, the deposed Nawab of Bengal; Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh; and Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor in Delhi) at about forty thousand. The action lasted about three hours. The Bengal sepoys under Munro's tactical handling broke the centre of the allied line by a bayonet charge through the morning mist; Shah Alam was captured; Mir Qasim and Shuja-ud-Daula withdrew up the Ganges. The Treaty of Allahabad of August 1765, signed by Robert Clive on the Company's side and the captive Mughal emperor on the other, granted to the East India Company the diwani (the right to collect the land-revenue) of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the richest province of the Mughal Empire. Buxar is, by the reckoning of every historian of the British Empire from Clive's day to ours, the battle that converted the East India Company from a trading entity into a territorial power, and is the operational moment at which the Company became the de facto government of one-fifth of the population of the world. Munro himself, born at Novar in Easter Ross in 1726, would return to Scotland a wealthy man in 1765 and sit as Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs from 1768 to 1801. The Buxar action made the Highland Scots military presence in India a fixture of the Company's administration for the next century.
Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations
1776Smith
Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in Fife in 1723, the posthumous son of the Comptroller of Customs. He held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1752 to 1764, then resigned to take a tutorship of the young Duke of Buccleuch and a salary for life on the Buccleuch estate. He spent twelve years in the small house at Kirkcaldy where his mother kept the books, walking on the strand below the house in the afternoons, writing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The book came out in two quarto volumes from William Strahan in London on the ninth of March 1776. Two months later it was clear to anyone reading it carefully that European economic argument had a new spine. Five months after that, the American colonies declared independence on the principles, in part, of the same book. David Hume read his presentation copy on his deathbed at Edinburgh and wrote to Smith that he was much pleased.
James Wilson signs the Declaration
1776Wilson
On the second of August 1776, in the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) at Philadelphia, the engrossed Declaration of Independence (the formal calligraphic copy on parchment) was laid out for the signatures of the fifty-six delegates of the Continental Congress, the formal vote on the Declaration having been taken on the second of July and the resolution finalised on the fourth of July. Among the signatories on the Pennsylvania delegation was James Wilson, born at Carskerdo near St Andrews in Fife on the fourteenth of September 1742, schooled at the University of St Andrews, emigrated to Philadelphia in 1765, and at the time of the signing one of the principal lawyers of the colony. Wilson had, in his pamphlet Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, August 1774, but written in 1768), been the first writer in the English-speaking world to argue from natural-law and contractual grounds that the British Parliament had no legislative authority over the American colonies, an argument that, in 1768, had no obvious takers and that, by the summer of 1776, was the constitutional position of the Continental Congress. He was thirty-three years old. He went on to be the intellectual force behind the federalist case at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (the long quotations from his Pennsylvania ratification speeches are preserved in Wilson's Works of 1804), to be appointed by Washington as one of the first six Associate Justices of the Supreme Court (1789), and to die, bankrupt and discredited, in a North Carolina inn in 1798.
Patrick Ferguson does not shoot Washington
1777Clan Ferguson
On the afternoon of the eleventh of September 1777, on the wooded high ground above Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania, in the opening hours of the battle that would clear the way for the British capture of Philadelphia, Captain Patrick Ferguson of the 70th Regiment of Foot, twenty-three years old, son of Lord Pitfour of the Court of Session in Edinburgh, the inventor of the breech-loading flintlock rifle that bore his name (the first practical breech-loader adopted by any European army, in his own experimental company of one hundred riflemen present on the field), saw two American officers ride past him at about a hundred yards. One was a tall man in a French-pattern hussar hat who was, by Ferguson's own letter to Lord Pitfour written four days later, probably an officer of high rank; the other was a younger officer in continental blue. Ferguson, in cover with his rifle drawn, had a clear shot. He chose not to take it. The two men rode on. The next morning, in the field hospital after a musket-ball had broken his right elbow at the second action of the day, Ferguson was told by a wounded American officer that the tall man on the bay horse had been Commander-in-Chief George Washington and his French aide the Count Casimir Pulaski. Ferguson, by his own letter, did not regret the choice. I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him, he wrote to his father, but it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty, so I let him alone.
Lord George Gordon and the Riots
1780Clan Gordon
On the second of June 1780, Lord George Gordon, third son of the third Duke of Gordon, twenty-eight years old, member of Parliament for Ludgershall and president of the Protestant Association, led a procession of about fifty thousand petitioners through Westminster to present a petition to the House of Commons calling for the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. The procession became, within a few hours of the petition being received, the worst civil disorder in London's recorded history. Over the next eight days, the worst nights being the sixth and seventh of June, organised mobs burned the prisons of Newgate, the Fleet, the King's Bench, the Clink and the New Bridewell; the houses of Lord Mansfield (Lord Chief Justice), of the Catholic Bishop of London and of two Catholic chapels; the Bank of England was held by troops on the seventh, when about three hundred rioters were killed by musketry. About two hundred and eighty-five rioters and onlookers were killed in total. About four hundred and fifty were arrested. Twenty-five were hanged. Lord George Gordon was tried for high treason at the King's Bench on the fifth of February 1781, was acquitted in February (defended by Thomas Erskine in his most celebrated jury-trial, the speech being preserved in Erskine's collected speeches as the founding speech of the modern criminal-defence bar). Gordon converted to Judaism in 1787, was sentenced for libel in 1788 to five years in Newgate (the prison the mob he had led had burned eight years earlier), and died there of typhus in 1793.
Alexander Hamilton at Redoubt 10, Yorktown
1781Clan Hamilton
On the night of the fourteenth of October 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, twenty-six years old, aide-de-camp to General Washington and former officer of the New York Artillery, led the bayonet assault of the American light infantry on Redoubt 10, the British outer earthwork on the south-eastern flank of the besieged works at Yorktown. The French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel de Deux-Ponts went in simultaneously against Redoubt 9 four hundred yards to the north. The orders to the American attacking column were that the muskets were to be unloaded, the bayonet alone was to do the work, and the column was to go in silently. They reached the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and were inside the redoubt by ten minutes past. Nine American dead, twenty-five wounded. The British defenders, Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot and seventy men, surrendered in ten minutes. The fall of the two redoubts placed Cornwallis's inner works under direct allied artillery enfilade. He asked for terms three days later. The British army of the South capitulated on the nineteenth. The American Revolution was, in operational terms, won at Yorktown by the assault on Redoubts 9 and 10 on the night of the fourteenth.
Burns and the Kilmarnock edition
1786Clan Burns
On the morning of Monday the thirty-first of July 1786, at the small printing-shop of John Wilson in the Star Inn Close at Kilmarnock in central Ayrshire, the twenty-seven-year-old Alloway-born tenant-farmer and would-be Jamaican-emigrant Robert Burns took delivery of the first printed copies of his small octavo volume Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the publication universally remembered ever since as the Kilmarnock edition. The print-run was six hundred and twelve copies on the standard Scots-printer subscriber-and-retail arrangement at the three-shillings cover-price; the subscription-list had been collected by Burns across the previous five months from the Ayrshire-and-Kilmarnock literary-and-Masonic network on the strength of the manuscript-circulation of the Burns Mossgiel-farm verse. The Kilmarnock edition contained forty-five poems and songs including The Twa Dogs, To a Mouse, To a Mountain Daisy, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Address to the Deil, Hallowe'en, and the satirical-and-religious verse-corpus of his Mossgiel-farm years 1783-86. The edition sold out the entire six-hundred-and-twelve-copy print-run within five weeks of the publication, brought Burns the substantial sum of twenty pounds in the first month, established the Burns Ayrshire-tenant-farmer reputation as the national-Scots literary voice of his generation, and persuaded him to abandon the planned Jamaican-emigration arrangement (the Burns-Hamilton-Greenock booking on the Bell brig Nancy for the Port-Antonio Jamaican passage, departing the eleventh of September 1786, that he had been committed to since the April 1786 emigration-decision under the Mossgiel-farm-failure-and-Mauchline-illegitimate-child-disgrace personal-crisis of the spring) and to take up the Edinburgh-literary-and-publishing engagement of November 1786 instead.
Admiral Duncan at Camperdown
1797Clan Duncan
On the morning of the eleventh of October 1797, about ten miles north-east of the Dutch coastal village of Camperduin in the North Sea (the coordinates approximately 52°44'N 4°34'E), the British North Sea Fleet under Admiral Adam Duncan, sixty-six years old, the Dundee-born senior Royal Navy admiral of the Revolutionary-Wars Channel Fleet, engaged the Dutch Batavian Republic fleet of Vice-Admiral Jan Willem de Winter (the French-allied Dutch-Republican fleet that had been blockaded by Duncan's North Sea Fleet at the Texel anchorage for the previous nine months in the British-naval interdiction of the planned 1798 French-Dutch invasion of Ireland). The action lasted about three hours. Duncan, against the French-navy-fashionable line-of-battle convention of the eighteenth century, broke his fleet into two divisions and steered them at right-angles into the Dutch line at two separate breaking-points, the Nelson-style tactical approach that would be applied at Trafalgar eight years later. Eleven of the Dutch sixteen ships-of-the-line were taken, including the Dutch flagship Vrijheid; Vice-Admiral de Winter was taken prisoner on the quarterdeck of the Vrijheid and surrendered his sword to Duncan in person on the British flagship HMS Venerable. The Battle of Camperdown is, by every careful judgment of the Napoleonic-naval-historians, the decisive engagement of the Revolutionary-Wars North Sea theatre and the foundational tactical-precedent of the Nelson-style line-breaking that produced Trafalgar in 1805.
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr at Weehawken
1804Clan Hamilton
By the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.
Macquarie founds Sydney
1810Clan MacQuarrie
On the first of January 1810, on the quayside of Sydney Cove on the east coast of New South Wales, Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, forty-seven years old, the Ulva-born former Black Watch officer of the American, Indian and Egyptian campaigns of the British Army, took up the governorship of the British convict colony of New South Wales (established as a penal settlement at Sydney Cove on the twenty-sixth of January 1788, on the First Fleet landing). Macquarie inherited a colony of about eleven thousand convicts and free settlers in a state of near-mutiny (his predecessor Governor William Bligh, the Bligh of the Bounty mutiny of 1789, had been deposed in the Rum Rebellion of January 1808 by the New South Wales Corps under Major George Johnston). Over the twelve years of his governorship (1810–1821), Macquarie rebuilt Sydney from the disorganised convict-camp of 1810 into the coherent colonial city of 1821: he laid out the Sydney street-grid that still defines the modern central business district, commissioned over two hundred public buildings (the Hyde Park Barracks 1819, the St James's Church 1822, the Macquarie Lighthouse 1818), founded the Bank of New South Wales in 1817, built the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains in 1814–15 (opening the Western Plains to grazing-agriculture for the first time), established the policy of encouraging emancipated convicts (emancipists) to take government office on the merit-of-service principle. He is, by every careful judgment of Australian historians (Manning Clark, John Ritchie, Anne-Maree Whitaker), the foundational governor of the modern Australia and the most influential governor of any nineteenth-century British colony. His treatment of Aboriginal Australians, particularly the 1816 Appin Massacre on the Dharawal country south of Sydney, is the contested aspect of his legacy.
Robert Ross burns the White House
1814Clan Ross
On the early evening of the twenty-fourth of August 1814, six hours after the rout of the American forces at the action of Bladensburg outside Washington, a column of about four thousand British infantry under Major-General Robert Ross of Rostrevor in County Down, in his forty-eighth year, marched into the unevacuated capital of the United States. The American executive offices, the Capitol, the Washington Navy Yard, the Treasury and the President's House (not yet called the White House) were systematically fired through the next twenty-four hours, in deliberate retaliation for the American burning of the public buildings of York (modern Toronto) on the twenty-seventh of April 1813 in the previous campaign of the war. President Madison and the Cabinet had withdrawn into Maryland the previous afternoon. First Lady Dolley Madison, in the President's House at lunchtime, was eating a meal that had been laid for the Cabinet's victory dinner; she sent word to the household to gather the silver, the crimson velvet curtains of the East Room, and the eight-foot full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from the State Dining Room (her urgent instruction was that the portrait must not be allowed to fall into British hands), and left the house at three in the afternoon. The British column entered at twenty past seven. The portrait, by the tradition of the household, was the only thing the British did not burn. They ate the laid table-meal at five past eight. They put torches to the building at half past nine. Robert Ross was killed two weeks later by an American sniper at the action at North Point, outside Baltimore, on the twelfth of September.
The clearance of Strathnaver
1814Clan Sutherland
Through the spring and early summer of 1814 Patrick Sellar, factor and lessee of the Sutherland estate to the Countess-Duchess Elizabeth Sutherland and her husband the Marquess of Stafford, supervised the eviction of about three hundred families from the inland strath of Strathnaver in the north-west of the county. The tenants were given notice to quit between the second of April and the fifteenth of May; the timber of their houses was burnt to prevent re-occupation. By the testimony of Donald Macleod the stonemason, who would write the indictment in Gloomy Memories twenty years later, an old woman called Margaret MacKay refused to come out of her house at Badinloskin and the thatch was set alight with her inside; she was carried out by a neighbour and died five days afterwards in a barn at the coast. Sellar was tried for arson and culpable homicide at the Inverness Circuit Court on the twenty-third of April 1816 and acquitted on every count. The Strathnaver clearance is one episode of the wider Sutherland Clearances of 1814–1820, in which between six and ten thousand Sutherland tenants were moved off the inland straths onto coastal crofts or onto emigration berths to Canada, Australia and the Cape; the central historical fact of the modern Sutherland surname.
The Honours of Scotland
1818Clan Scott
The Honours of Scotland, the Crown of James V, the Sceptre, and the Sword of State, are the oldest crown jewels in Britain, used to crown every Scottish monarch from Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1543 to Charles II at Scone in 1651. After the Treaty of Union of 1707 they were locked in a chest in the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle. The doors were sealed; the country was left to assume that they had been quietly taken to London or melted down. By 1818 the door of the Crown Room had not been opened in a hundred and eleven years. Sir Walter Scott, the most-read writer in Europe, petitioned the Prince Regent for permission to open it. The warrant was granted. What came out reset Scotland's image of itself.
The friction match
1827Walker
On the seventh of April 1827, on the trade-counter of his chemist-and-druggist shop at 59 High Street in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham, John Walker, forty-five years old, sold to a Mr Hixon, a local solicitor, a box of about fifty Friction Lights: small wooden splints tipped with a paste of antimony sulphide, potassium chlorate, sulphur and gum, which would, when drawn briskly between a folded piece of glasspaper, ignite. The price was a shilling for a box and threepence for the piece of glasspaper, a waterproof tube. The entry in Walker's day-book of the seventh of April 1827 reads: Hixon. 1 doz frict. lts. 1s glass papr 3d. This is the first commercial sale, by every careful judgment of the history of fire-technology, of the friction match (the Lucifer, the precursor of the modern strike-anywhere match). Walker had developed the formula at the back of his shop between 1824 and 1826. He refused, by his own statement to friends, to patent the invention on the principle that fire-on-demand should not be owned. The patent of 1829 was taken out by Samuel Jones of London on a slightly modified formula; the Lucifer trademark was Jones's. Walker continued to sell the original Friction Lights from his Stockton shop until his death in 1859.
Brigham Young: This is the place
1847Young
On the morning of Saturday the twenty-fourth of July 1847, at the head of Emigration Canyon on the eastern rim of the Salt Lake Valley in the Utah Territory of what was then Mexican Alta California, Brigham Young, forty-six years old, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, raised himself in the bed of the Mormon-emigrant wagon he had been carried in across the last fifteen hundred miles (he had been suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever and could not walk), looked down across the broad treeless Great Salt Lake basin spread below the canyon, and said, in the seven-word sentence that has carried his name in Mormon and American Western memory ever since: This is the right place; drive on. The eight-mile wagon descent to the valley floor took the rest of the day; by the evening the lead-camp of the Pioneer Company of one hundred and forty-eight Mormon emigrants had pitched the first tents on the future site of Temple Square in Salt Lake City, dug the first irrigation trench from City Creek, ploughed the first three acres, planted the first potato crop. The Pioneer Day of the twenty-fourth of July 1847 is the central single foundational event of the modern Mormon-and-Utah civilisation, the State of Utah holiday since 1849, and the only state holiday in the United States that commemorates the arrival of a religious community at its eventual home.
Colin Campbell relieves the Residency at Lucknow
1857Clan Campbell
On the afternoon of Tuesday the seventeenth of November 1857, on the small Gomti-river plain at the north-east of the city of Lucknow in the central United Provinces of British India, the sixty-five-year-old Glasgow-born British Commander-in-Chief in India Sir Colin Campbell, the senior British army-officer of the 1854-to-1857 Indian-and-Crimean campaigns, completed the Second Relief of the Lucknow Residency at the close of a fourteen-day rescue-operation in which Campbell, at the head of an approximately 4,500-soldier-and-1,000-civilian relief column from the British Cawnpore base under General Hugh Rose, fought his way across the 47-mile Cawnpore-to-Lucknow road, through the Indian-sepoy-mutineer forces blocking the approach-routes, into the central Lucknow residential and administrative compound to relieve the besieged British garrison of approximately 2,000 soldiers and approximately 1,300 women and children who had held the Lucknow Residency under siege continuously since the first Sepoy-mutineer assault of the third of July 1857 (the Lucknow siege ran for 87 days under the first British relief by Sir Henry Havelock and Sir James Outram in late September, then continued under the joint Havelock-and-Outram garrison for the further 53 days to the Campbell relief), and successfully evacuated the garrison and civilian-population through the rear-guard withdrawal across the 22 and 23 November to the British Alambagh base outside Lucknow. The Second Relief of Lucknow is the central single British military operation of the 1857-to-1858 Indian Mutiny campaign and the foundational Victorian rescue-of-the-besieged-garrison narrative that became, on the strength of the Tennyson 1879 poem The Defence of Lucknow and the G. F. Watts 1860 painting The Relief of Lucknow, the Victorian-popular-memory single-image of the 1857 campaign. Campbell was elevated to the peerage as 1st Baron Clyde of Clydesdale in 1858 on the strength of the Lucknow relief, was promoted Field Marshal in 1862, and is the senior Glasgow-Campbell military figure of the Victorian-era British army.
John Brown at Harpers Ferry
1859Brown
On the night of Sunday the sixteenth of October 1859, John Brown, fifty-nine years old, the Connecticut-born, Ohio-raised abolitionist of the Scots-Irish Brown family of New England (descended on the male side from a Cromwellian-Scots Brown emigrant of the 1660s to Connecticut), led a raiding party of twenty-one men (sixteen white, five Black) down from a rented farmhouse at Kennedy Farm on the Maryland-Virginia border into the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in western Virginia, on the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers. The plan was to seize the armoury arsenal (the US Army's principal weapons depot in the Upper South, containing about a hundred thousand muskets and rifles), to distribute the arms to the local enslaved Black population of the surrounding plantations of Loudoun and Jefferson counties, and to provoke a general slave rebellion that would, on Brown's theological reading, sweep south through the Appalachian Mountains and end the institution of slavery in the United States. The raid was militarily a failure within thirty-six hours: the Virginia and Maryland militia gathered through the afternoon of the seventeenth and surrounded the armoury engine-house in which Brown and the surviving raiders were holding hostages; the federal force under Colonel Robert E. Lee of the US Army (the future Confederate commander, then a serving US Army officer) arrived overnight and took the engine-house at dawn on the eighteenth with a twelve-marine assault under Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. Ten of Brown's party were killed; Brown himself was wounded but taken alive. The political consequence of the raid was, by every careful judgment of US Civil War historiography, the trigger of the eighteen-month sequence of political events (the 1860 election of Lincoln on a free-soil platform; the December 1860 secession of South Carolina; the formation of the Confederacy in the February 1861 Montgomery convention) that produced the American Civil War of April 1861. Brown was tried at Charles Town, Virginia, on the twenty-fifth of October 1859 for treason, murder and conspiracy to incite insurrection. He was convicted on the second of November and hanged at Charles Town on the second of December 1859.
John Brown beside Victoria
1864Brown
Prince Albert died at Windsor on the fourteenth of December 1861. Queen Victoria, forty-two years old, withdrew from public life and spent the next forty years a widow in mourning. From the autumn of 1864 the man who, more than any other, brought her out of the deepest of her seclusion was a Highland gillie of the Balmoral estate, John Brown of Crathie, son of a small farmer of Crathienaird, brought south by the household to be the queen's outdoor servant. He stayed in her service until his death in 1883. The court hated him for it, the Cabinet ministers patronised him, the press lampooned him as "the queen's stallion" in print so coarse that the Lord Chamberlain pulled it. The Queen of England wrote, in her journal of the day his obituary went to the papers, that her trust in him had been complete; that no one had ever done more for her than he had; and that in any society or any country he would have been counted a man.
Sir John A. Macdonald and the Confederation
1867Clan MacDonald
On the morning of the first of July 1867 the British North America Act came into force and the Dominion of Canada was constituted from the four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, on the basis of the Seventy-Two Resolutions agreed at the Quebec Conference of October 1864 and ratified by the colonial legislatures over the next two years. The architect of the deal, the man who had threaded its compromises between the Reformers under George Brown, the Bleus under Cartier, and the maritime delegations under Tupper and Tilley, was the Scottish-born Kingston lawyer John Alexander Macdonald, born at Glasgow on the eleventh of January 1815, brought to Upper Canada at the age of five, called to the bar in 1836, member of the legislature for Kingston since 1844. He was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada on the same morning the Act came into force, by Lord Monck the Governor-General, in the Senate Chamber at Ottawa. He held office for nineteen of the next twenty-four years.
J.J. Thomson discovers the electron at the Cavendish
1897Thomson
On the evening of Friday the thirtieth of April 1897, in the Royal Institution lecture theatre at 21 Albemarle Street in Mayfair, Sir Joseph John (J.J.) Thomson, forty years old, the Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, gave the Friday Evening Discourse on the experimental investigation of the so-called cathode rays. Across the hour of the discourse he set out the results of fifteen months of experimental work at the Cavendish Laboratory in which he had measured the deflection of cathode rays by both magnetic and electric fields, calculated the ratio of charge to mass of the rays, and concluded that the rays were composed of particles substantially smaller than any known atom. The particles (which Thomson called corpuscles and which were renamed electrons within a decade on the prior coinage of the Dublin physicist George Johnstone Stoney) were the first sub-atomic particles ever identified, and the discovery was the foundational result of modern atomic physics. The hundred-and-fifty-year-old Daltonian conception of the atom as the indivisible smallest unit of matter ended on the Royal Institution platform that evening. Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for the discovery, and the body of physics work he founded at the Cavendish across the next forty years produced seven Nobel Laureates among his direct research-pupils (Rutherford, Aston, the elder Bragg, the younger Bragg, Richardson, Wilson and Born), the largest single research-school production in the history of the prize.
Scott of the Antarctic, the last journal entry
1912Clan Scott
On the twenty-ninth of March 1912, in a small canvas tent about eleven miles south of One Ton Depot on the Ross Ice Shelf, in a blizzard that had pinned them in the tent for the nine previous days, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, forty-three years old, Captain in the Royal Navy and leader of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13, dying of frostbite, starvation and exhaustion, wrote the closing entries of the journal he had kept since the voyage south on the Terra Nova in 1910. His two surviving companions, Henry Birdie Bowers and Edward Wilson, were already dead beside him in the tent. The third member of the five-man polar party, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, had died near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on the seventeenth of February; Captain Lawrence Titus Oates, in his famous I am just going outside and may be some time, had walked out of the tent into the blizzard on the seventeenth of March, his thirty-second birthday. Scott's closing journal-line, written by the dying hand in pencil on the twenty-ninth of March 1912, has become the closing-paragraph of the British public-school heroic-failure tradition: we shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people. The search-party, under Edward Atkinson, found the tent on the twelfth of November 1912, eight months after Scott's death. The thirty-nine pencil-written notebooks of the expedition diary, the photographs by Herbert Ponting, and the geological-and-biological scientific specimens collected on the march back were retrieved with the bodies and brought home to England in 1913.
Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points
1918Wilson
On the morning of the eighth of January 1918, in a Joint Session of the United States Congress in the House of Representatives Chamber in the United States Capitol building, Woodrow Wilson, sixty-one years old, the twenty-eighth President of the United States, of Scots-Irish Wilson stock (the Wilson family had emigrated from Strabane in County Tyrone to Pennsylvania in 1807, and Woodrow's father the Reverend Dr Joseph Ruggles Wilson was the Presbyterian theologian of the American South), delivered a speech of about forty-five minutes on the United States' war-aims in the Great War (which the United States had entered in April 1917 on the Allied side). The speech set out fourteen specific points (the Fourteen Points) that the United States proposed as the basis for any post-war peace settlement: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removal of economic barriers, reduction of armaments, the adjustment of colonial claims, evacuation of Russia, restoration of Belgium, return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, frontier adjustments along clearly recognisable lines of nationality for Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Balkans and Turkey, an independent Poland, and (the fourteenth and most consequential point) a general association of nations, the precursor of the League of Nations of 1920 and the United Nations of 1945. The Fourteen Points became, by the October 1918 German request for an armistice on their basis, the formal framework of the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919.
Baird's first television demonstration at Frith Street
1926Clan Baird
On the late afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-sixth of January 1926, in the small two-room laboratory above Mr Cross's snack-bar at 22 Frith Street in Soho, the thirty-seven-year-old Helensburgh-born inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in the history of the world. The audience was about forty members of the Royal Institution and the editorial-and-scientific press of London, brought across in evening dress through the narrow Soho streets at four in the afternoon and climbing in turn the steep wooden stairway to the second-floor rooms. Baird's apparatus was a hat-stand frame strung with a Nipkow scanning-disc cut from the bottom of a tea-tray, a neon glow-lamp inside a Pyrex jar, a motor that had been the second-hand purchase of a bicycle-shop dynamo, and several yards of sealing-wax, biscuit-tin metal and string. In the back room the transmitter scanned the face of his ventriloquist's-dummy test-head Stooky Bill, then his office assistant Daisy Elizabeth Smith, and threw the image, line by line, thirty lines a frame, into the receiver in the front room where the gentlemen of the Royal Institution were waiting. The image was small, grey, flickering and recognisably human. The Times man William Day published the report the next morning, twenty-seventh of January 1926, under the headline TELEVISION: DEMONSTRATION BEFORE THE ROYAL INSTITUTION. The British Broadcasting Corporation adopted the Baird system within twenty months and made the first BBC television transmission in September 1929. The medium that became, within a single generation, the dominant single instrument of British public-and-private life was opened that January afternoon above the Soho snack-bar.
Watson-Watt and the first radar
1935Watson
On the morning of the twenty-sixth of February 1935, on a flat field at Weedon Bec, near the village of Stowe Nine Churches in Northamptonshire, an Air Ministry team under Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, scientific superintendent of the radio department of the National Physical Laboratory, demonstrated to a single Air Ministry observer (A. P. Rowe of the Tizard Committee) that a Heyford bomber flying through a beam of BBC Empire Service shortwave at twenty-five miles range produced a detectable echo on a cathode-ray oscilloscope inside an unmarked van. The flight, of two minutes, the echo, of eight miles' duration on the screen, and the corresponding deflection of the cathode-ray spot were the first practical British demonstration of what would within the year be called Radio Direction Finding and would, by the end of the decade, be called radar. The Air Ministry awarded Watson-Watt and his Slough team the immediate development funding for the system that became Chain Home, the chain of fifty British radar stations that detected and tracked the Luftwaffe formations entering British airspace through the summer of 1940. Watson-Watt was Aberdeenshire-born, the descendant of James Watt the engineer, in his forty-third year on the morning of the demonstration. Tradition holds that A. P. Rowe, on returning to London that afternoon, said to the Air Member for Research at the Air Ministry: Britain has become an island again.
R. J. Mitchell racing the Spitfire
1936Mitchell
Reginald Joseph Mitchell, chief designer at Supermarine in Southampton, was diagnosed with rectal cancer in August 1933. He had a major operation, came back to work, and refused for the next four years to slow the pace of his work on the prototype that was to be the K5054, the aircraft that would carry the company's nameplate as the Spitfire. The prototype flew for the first time at Eastleigh aerodrome on the fifth of March 1936 with Captain Joseph Summers at the controls. Mitchell stood on the grass beside the marker hut. Summers landed after eight minutes and said the now-famous line: don't touch anything. Mitchell had eleven days short of fifteen months to live. He died at his home, Hazeldene, in Southampton on the eleventh of June 1937. The Spitfire entered RAF service in August 1938. By the summer of 1940 it was the only single-seat fighter in the British inventory capable of out-turning the Messerschmitt 109. The man who designed it had been dead for three years and forty days when the Battle of Britain opened.
Sir John Anderson and the Anderson shelter
1938Anderson
On the seventeenth of November 1938, eight weeks after the Munich crisis and ten months before the outbreak of war, Sir John Anderson, Lord Privy Seal in the Chamberlain government with the portfolio for civil defence, gave the order in writing to the Air Ministry's Air Raid Precautions department for the immediate procurement of two and a quarter million pre-fabricated domestic air-raid shelters of the design submitted in October by William Patterson and Oscar Carl Kerrison of the Patterson Engineering Company at Manchester. Anderson was Edinburgh-born, fifty-six years old, in his first year out of the Indian Civil Service (he had been Governor of Bengal from 1932 to 1937), and had taken the civil-defence brief on Chamberlain's personal request a fortnight after Munich. The shelter was to be issued free to households earning less than £250 a year and at a charge to those above; it was to be of corrugated iron, sunk three feet into the back garden, with an internal capacity of six adults; it was to bear the surname of the minister responsible for the order. By the outbreak of war on the third of September 1939 about one and a half million shelters had been distributed; by the height of the Blitz in 1940 about three and a half million Anderson shelters were in service in British back gardens. Post-war damage assessments by the Home Office concluded that the Anderson shelter, properly installed and properly buried, was effective against direct blast at fifty feet from a five-hundred-pound bomb. The shelters saved, by the Home Office estimate of 1948, between forty and sixty thousand civilian lives during the air war.
ABC at the Crete evacuation
1941Clan Cunningham
From the night of the twenty-eighth of May 1941 to the dawn of the first of June, in the worst air-sea action of the Mediterranean campaign, the British Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham (Edinburgh-born, fifty-eight years old, in his third year as Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean) evacuated about sixteen and a half thousand British and Commonwealth troops from the southern beaches of Crete after the loss of the island to the Luftwaffe and the German airborne division. The fleet operated by night against continuous Stuka attack by day, lost three cruisers and six destroyers sunk, two battleships, an aircraft carrier and three further cruisers seriously damaged, and over two thousand naval personnel killed. The Royal Naval Staff in London advised on the third evening that the operation should be discontinued because the loss of ships was unsustainable. Cunningham, by the signal he sent on the night of the twenty-ninth of May to all flags of the Mediterranean Fleet, replied: it takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It would take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue. The signal is among the most-quoted in twentieth-century Royal Naval signals literature. The evacuation continued. The remaining troops on Crete were taken off, fewer than four thousand were lost.
Ian Hamilton and the Stone of Scone
1950Clan Hamilton
Just before five in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, four students of the University of Glasgow, Ian Hamilton (24), Gavin Vernon (24), Kay Matheson (22) and Alan Stuart (24), removed the Stone of Destiny, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots taken to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296, from beneath the Coronation Chair in the abbey. They broke the stone into two pieces in the lifting. They drove the larger piece north in a Ford Anglia by way of Kent, the smaller in a separate car by way of Birmingham. They had it repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, James Robert Gray, of Bath Street, and laid it on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, on the eleventh of April 1951. The Government of the day, on the advice of the Scottish Office, did not prosecute; the Stone was returned to Westminster, and in 1996 was formally returned to Scotland and is now in the Castle at Edinburgh. Ian Hamilton, who became a leading Scottish QC, said in his old age that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable.
Jim Clark wins the Indianapolis 500
1965Clark
On the late afternoon of Memorial Day, Monday the thirty-first of May 1965, on the two-and-a-half-mile rectangular oval of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the central-Indiana farm-country outside Indianapolis, in front of a capacity Memorial Day crowd of approximately three hundred and fifty thousand spectators on the IMS grandstand-and-infield, the twenty-nine-year-old Berwickshire-born Scottish Formula One driver Jim Clark, the reigning 1963 Formula One World Champion and the central single Lotus-Climax driver of the Colin Chapman Lotus team, drove the small Lotus-Ford Type 38 rear-engined mid-engined monocoque-chassis racing-car (the Chapman-Lotus single-seater specifically designed for the Indianapolis 500 across the 1963 to 1964 development programme) to the checkered-flag victory at the forty-ninth running of the Indianapolis 500, the central single American single-seater motor race of the year and the foundational race of the American Memorial Day weekend, at a race-average-speed of 150.686 miles per hour and a winning-margin of approximately two laps over the runner-up Parnelli Jones. The Clark victory was the first non-American victory at the Indianapolis 500 since the 1916 victory of the Italian-immigrant-American Dario Resta (a forty-nine-year drought in the American single-seater motor-racing record), the first victory at the Indianapolis 500 by a rear-engined mid-engined chassis (the Lotus-Chapman rear-engined Lotus 38 displaced the front-engined American Watson-Offenhauser roadster configuration that had dominated the IMS race from 1953 to 1964), and was the central single foundational moment of the modern transformation of the Indianapolis 500 from the American front-engined-roadster-tradition to the modern international rear-engined-mid-engined-monocoque single-seater format. Clark took the 1965 Formula One World Championship the same year on the strength of his six-Grand-Prix-victory record across the 1965 season, became the only driver in the modern era to win the Indianapolis 500 and the Formula One World Championship in the same season, and stands at the central single position of the modern motor-racing all-time-great-driver-rankings.
Phil Taylor takes his sixteenth World Darts title
2011Taylor
On the evening of Sunday the ninth of January 2011 at the Alexandra Palace in north London, in the final of the eighteenth Professional Darts Corporation World Darts Championship, the fifty-year-old Stoke-on-Trent-born professional darts player Phil The Power Taylor, the universally-recognised central single figure of the modern professional darts era, defeated the Dutch challenger Adrian Lewis 7 sets to 5 in the final to take his sixteenth World Darts Championship across the joint BDO and PDC sanctioning circuits (the British Darts Organisation championship 1990, 1992; the Professional Darts Corporation championship continuously 1995 to 2002 and intermittently to 2013). The sixteen-World-Championship-title record has been held by no other player in the history of professional darts; the nearest competitor on the all-time men's-darts-major-championship-list is Eric Bristow (the five-time BDO World Champion of the 1980s) and Michael van Gerwen (the three-time PDC World Champion of the modern era). Taylor's career across 1985 to 2018 included the sixteen World Championships, sixteen World Matchplay titles, two World Cup of Darts titles, the six-time BDC PDC Player of the Year, the 1990-2018 average-tournament-prize-money-record, and the central single transformative figure of the modernisation-and-mass-popularisation of professional darts as a major British televised-sport across the 1990-to-2010 period.
Justin Rose wins the US Open at Merion
2013Clan Rose
On the late afternoon of Father's Day, Sunday the sixteenth of June 2013, on the East Course of the Merion Golf Club in the Ardmore suburb west of Philadelphia, the thirty-two-year-old Johannesburg-born English professional golfer Justin Peter Rose, on the closing-eighteenth-hole approach-shot of the final round of the 113th United States Open Championship, struck the perfect 4-iron approach-shot from the difficult downhill 228-yards-out fairway lie to the elevated eighteenth-hole green, the two-putt-from-fifteen-feet par that closed the fourth-round-of-74 for the final score of one-over-par 281 across the four-round 72-hole tournament, and on the strength of the late-Sunday two-stroke leaderboard-collapse of the second-place Phil Mickelson and the third-place Jason Day across the closing-back-nine, took the 113th United States Open Championship at Merion by two strokes. The US Open win was the first major-championship-win of Rose's career and the first United-States-Open victory by an English-born player since the Tony Jacklin victory at Hazeltine National Golf Club in 1970 (the 43-year English-male-major-drought that the English-and-British golf-press had run as the decade-by-decade golf-narrative across the 1970-to-2013 period). Rose extended the 2013 US Open major-championship-win across the subsequent decade-of-his-career with the 2014 Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Open, the 2015 Olympic Gold Medal at the Rio Olympics 2016 (the first Olympic-Gold-Medal in golf since the 1904 St Louis Games on the 112-year golf-Olympic-readmission to the Olympic programme), and the 10-year continuous PGA-Tour-top-25-world-ranking from the 2013 US Open victory to his 2024 Open-Championship runner-up finish at Royal Troon.
Stand Fast, Craigellachie
TraditionalClan Grant
The war-cry of Clan Grant is 'Stand Fast, Craigellachie!', a command to rally and hold firm at the Tor of Craigellachie, the steep, birch-clad rock that rises above Aviemore at the head of Strathspey. On it the clan lit the beacon that summoned the Grants to muster, the 'burning hill' that became the chief's heraldic crest. A second Craigellachie stands some thirty miles down the river near Aberlour, and the old saying held that Grant country ran 'from Craigellachie to Craigellachie', from the rock at Aviemore to the rock on the lower Spey. The slogan outlived the musters: when Thomas Telford threw his iron arch across the Spey at the lower Craigellachie in 1814 the bridge took the clan's rock for its name, and 'Stand Fast' remains the Grant motto to this day.
The Brahan Seer
Clan Mackenzie
Coinneach Odhar Mackenzie, called the Brahan Seer, was a seventeenth-century farm worker on the Mackenzie estate of Brahan, west of Dingwall in the Highlands. By tradition his second sight came from a white stone given to him in a fairy mound, through which he saw things distant in space and time. His prophecies, collected and printed in the nineteenth century, are uncannily specific: long strings of carriages without horses between Dingwall and Inverness, sheep so numerous their bleating would be heard from Lochalsh to Drumossie, the extinction of the Seaforth line in particular detail. He was burnt in a tar-barrel at Chanonry Point on the orders of the chief's wife after he told her, when she demanded a vision, that her husband in Paris was with another woman. The detail of the prophecy he gave from the flames came to pass in 1815.
The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan
Clan MacLeod
The Bratach Sìth, the Fairy Flag, is a fragment of yellow silk perhaps two feet square, kept under glass in the drawing-room of Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye. The traditions agree: it was a parting gift from a fairy bride to a MacLeod chief, and unfurled in extremity it gave the clan victory in battle. It would work three times. After the third, it would return to where it came from. Two of the unfurlings are remembered, at Glendale around 1490 and at Trumpan in 1578. The third remains. Modern textile dating places the silk between the fourth and seventh centuries, of Syrian or Rhodian weave, older than the MacLeod surname itself. The flag's most recent moment in living history was in the summer of 1940, when the chief at Dunvegan offered to send it to Fighter Command.
Wales
Hywel Dda and the Laws
c. 945Powell
Around the year 945 the king of Deheubarth and most of Wales, Hywel ap Cadell, called Hywel Dda or Hywel the Good, summoned six lawful men of from each commote in Wales to a council at the white house on the river Taf at Whitland in Carmarthenshire. They sat for forty days and forty nights, on oath. What they produced was the first written codification of the customary law of the Welsh: a single redacted body of law that would govern Wales for the next four centuries, until Edward I imposed English common law in 1284. The Law of Hywel was Wales's first national document. It is also one of the most humane bodies of medieval law to survive anywhere in Europe.
The first Eisteddfod
1176Rees
At Christmas 1176, Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord Rhys, king of Deheubarth and the most consequential native ruler of twelfth-century Wales, hosted a competitive gathering of bards and musicians from every part of Wales at his hall in Cardigan Castle. The invitation had gone out a year and a day in advance, by formal proclamation. There were two chairs to be won, one for poetry, one for music, with prizes named. The competition has been remembered ever since as the first Eisteddfod. Eight hundred and fifty years later it is still meeting every summer in a different town in Wales, in the same competitive form, under the same kind of chair, and judged by the same metrical rules.
Cilmeri
1282House of Aberffraw
On the eleventh of December 1282, in a wood near the town of Builth Wells in mid-Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, last native Prince of Wales, was killed in a chance encounter with an English man-at-arms who did not recognise him until he had taken his head off. Llywelyn had ridden south from his Gwynedd stronghold with a escort to receive the homage of the Marcher gentry of Builth, who had sent word they would defect to his cause. He never reached them. Welsh political independence, which had survived seven hundred years of pressure from the Saxons and the Normans and the Plantagenets, ended in the wood at Cilmeri inside an hour. The country has not been native-held since.
Hyddgen
1401Glyndŵr
In the middle of June 1401, on the eastern flank of Plynlimon (Pumlumon) in the mid-Wales uplands, about ten miles east of the village of Machynlleth, Owain Glyndŵr, then forty-two years old, with a Welsh force of about a hundred and twenty mounted-and-foot men of the northern Powys-and-Gwynedd cantrefs, ambushed and broke a Flemish-English military expedition of about a thousand five hundred men under the Marcher captain Sir Edward Tudor (a distant Welsh cousin of Glyndŵr's by the Tudor-Anglesey line). The Hyddgen ambush, fought on a high marsh-pasture between the Hyddgen Brook and the source of the Wye, was the first major military victory of the Glyndŵr rebellion since the Sycharth proclamation of September 1400, and is, by every careful judgment of Welsh-medieval historiography (R. R. Davies, Gwyn A. Williams), the tactical engagement that converted the Glyndŵr rebellion from a localised Powys boundary-dispute into a national Welsh military movement. Within twelve months of Hyddgen, the Glyndŵr rebellion controlled most of Wales west of Offa's Dyke.
The Pennal Letter
1406Glyndŵr
By the spring of 1406 Owain Glyndŵr had been Prince of Wales in fact for six years. He had held parliaments at Machynlleth in 1404 and Harlech in 1405, with elected representatives from every commote of Wales. He had a French alliance with Charles VI sealed by treaty and reinforced the previous summer by a French expeditionary force that had landed at Milford Haven. From the village of Pennal near Machynlleth on the thirty-first of March 1406, Glyndŵr dictated to his clerk a letter to the king of France. It set out a complete programme for an independent Welsh state: two universities, a Welsh-speaking church, an archdiocese at St Davids, a sovereign Welsh polity. The letter survives in Paris. It is the most coherent vision of Welsh sovereignty ever written, and it is what the country would not have for another five hundred years.
Roger Vaughan dies at Edgecote
1469Vaughan
On the twenty-sixth of July 1469, in the open country at Edgecote Moor in Northamptonshire, six miles north of Banbury, the Yorkist army of King Edward IV under his Welsh marcher captains William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke) and Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower met the rebel Lancastrian-Neville force of Robin of Redesdale (a captain of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was for these months in revolt against his cousin the king). The Welsh-speaking marcher army, about ten thousand strong, was caught in the early morning by a flank attack from the Earl of Warwick's lieutenant Sir Geoffrey Gate, broke after the death of Pembroke, and was destroyed in detail through the morning. About two thousand Welshmen, principally of the Herbert and Vaughan affinities, were killed on the field. Roger Vaughan of Tretower was killed in the press. William Herbert and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were taken alive and beheaded the next day at Northampton on Warwick's order. The Welsh-language elegy Marwnad William Herbert by Guto'r Glyn, written within the year, called Edgecote the day Wales was widowed. The political consequence was the temporary collapse of Edward IV's regime, the brief restoration of Henry VI, and the Lancastrian return of 1470–71. The military consequence in Wales itself was the elimination of the generation of Herbert and Vaughan landed leadership in a single morning.
Bosworth
1485House of Tudor
Henry Tudor was a Welsh-born exile of the Lancastrian line, raised in Brittany on a French pension, the holder of a tenuous claim to the English throne through his mother Margaret Beaufort. By the summer of 1485 Richard III's two-year reign was visibly thinning at the top: the boy princes were dead in the Tower, the great Yorkist magnates were drifting. On the seventh of August 1485 Henry landed at Mill Bay near Dale in Pembrokeshire with two thousand French and Welsh exiles. He marched up through Wales under the red dragon standard of Cadwaladr, picking up men. On the twenty-second of August he met Richard on the field at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Within four hours of first light he was crowned King of England on a low rise above the field with a battle-circlet taken from his enemy's helmet.
Henry VIII and the break with Rome
1534House of Tudor
On the third of November 1534, in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster, the Act of Supremacy passed its third reading and received Royal Assent the same day. The fourteen-clause Act, drafted by Thomas Cromwell on the direct political commission of Henry VIII (the second Tudor monarch, then forty-three years old, in his twenty-sixth year on the throne), declared Henry to be the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England, dissolved the jurisdictional connection between the English Church and the Roman See that had stood since the Augustine mission of 597 (nine hundred and thirty-seven years), and gave the Crown the direct legal authority over the doctrine, the ecclesiastical discipline, and the monastic properties of the English Church. The Act was the political-legal end-point of the six-year king's-divorce-case of Henry from Catherine of Aragon (1528–34); the 1531 Convocation Submission of the Clergy; the 1532 Submission of the Clergy Act; the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals; and the 1534 Act of Succession. The political-religious consequence ran through the Tudor century: the Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536–41 (the largest single transfer of land-ownership in English history before the 1845 Irish-Land-Act-and-Famine settlements); the execution of Sir Thomas More (1535) and Bishop John Fisher (1535); the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536; the 1547 Edwardian Reformation; the 1553–58 Marian Counter-Reformation; the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement. The break with Rome is, by every careful judgment of the Reformation historians (G. R. Elton, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Eamon Duffy), the foundational political-religious event of the modern English state.
The 1588 Welsh Bible
1588Morgan
In 1567 William Salesbury and Bishop Richard Davies had published a Welsh New Testament that was largely unreadable; the Welsh was over-Latinised, the spelling inconsistent. Wales needed a complete, idiomatic Bible in its own tongue or it would lose the language inside two generations. The man who delivered it was William Morgan, the rector of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, a village on the Welsh side of the Shropshire border. He worked at the translation through ten winters in the parsonage. In 1587 he took the manuscript to London and stayed at Christopher Barker's press for over a year, correcting every sheet himself. The book that came off the press in September 1588 saved the Welsh language. Cornish, which had no Bible, has six hundred speakers today. Welsh has nine hundred thousand.
Yr Hen Ficer of Llandovery
1620Pritchard
From about 1614 to his death in 1644, the Reverend Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery in the eastern marches of Carmarthenshire, wrote in his spare time a long sequence of metrical Welsh verses, simple in form, organised in stanzas of four lines, that were intended to be memorised and sung by his parishioners as a way of fixing Christian teaching in the heads of an illiterate population. He never published them in his own lifetime. After his death, the verses were collected by his son and friends and printed at London in 1659 as Cannwyll y Cymry, the Welsh-Man's Candle. By the reckoning of the Welsh historians of print, the Cannwyll was, after the Welsh Bible of 1588 itself, the most widely owned and most reprinted Welsh-language book of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; over forty editions were printed before 1850. By the tradition of the chapel-Welsh culture of the eighteenth century, Yr Hen Ficer (the Old Vicar) was the household name for Prichard, and his verses were sung at hearths in every parish of South and central Wales for two hundred years.
George Herbert and The Temple
1633House of Herbert
On the twentieth of February 1633, on his deathbed at the rectory of Bemerton in Wiltshire, George Herbert, forty years old, the rector of the small parish for the past three years, formerly Public Orator of the University of Cambridge, formerly a Member of Parliament, sometime favourite of King James and the Earl of Pembroke (his cousin), gave his manuscript of devotional poetry to his friend Edmund Duncon and asked him to take it to Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding. Tell him that Mr Duncon shall deliver to him a little book, in which he may find a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies. Ferrar received the manuscript four days after Herbert's death on the third of March. He read it, in his own retreat at Little Gidding, and decided to publish. The Temple was printed by Buck and Daniel at Cambridge in autumn 1633. It went through eleven editions in the next forty years and is, by the careful judgment of every Anglican literary historian, the foundational text of Anglican devotional poetry.
Roger Williams founds Rhode Island
1636Williams
Roger Williams was born in London in 1603, the son of a merchant tailor of Welsh paternal extraction. He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge, took orders, and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 with his wife Mary. Within four years he had been twice charged before the Boston General Court for the radical doctrines that the magistrate had no power over conscience and that the King of England had no title to give away land that belonged to the native peoples. He was sentenced to deportation in October 1635 and ordered held in custody at Salem until the next ship in the spring. On the night of the fifteenth of January 1636, in deep snow, in fourteen weeks of an unusually severe winter, he walked out of his house ahead of the marshal who was coming to take him into custody, and into the woods south of Salem. He spent fourteen weeks of that winter under the hospitality of Massasoit and the Wampanoag and of Canonicus and the Narragansett. In June he founded a settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay, named it Providence in thanks for the deliverance, and bound it to the principle that civil authority extended to civil things only and that no person should be coerced in religion. Rhode Island was the first political community in the English-speaking world built on that principle.
Howell Davis on Príncipe
1719Davies
On the morning of the nineteenth of June 1719, on the volcanic island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea off the West African coast, the Welsh pirate captain Howell Davis, twenty-nine years old, the master of a pirate squadron (the thirty-two-gun Royal Rover, the twenty-six-gun Royal James, and a six-gun captured-Portuguese sloop), was killed in an ambush by the Portuguese garrison of the island while attempting to perpetrate a confidence-trick on the Portuguese governor. Davis had brought the squadron into the Príncipe anchorage on the fourteenth of June flying the Royal Navy ensign and claiming to be the Royal Navy commander of a anti-piracy squadron; the confidence-trick was to invite the Portuguese governor aboard for a courtesy-dinner, take him hostage, and ransom him for the trade-goods of the island's warehouses. The confidence-trick had been working for the five days. On the nineteenth, by the account in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1724, the foundational source for the Golden Age piracy), the Portuguese garrison commander had become suspicious, set an ambush on the walking-path from the anchorage to the governor's house, and shot Davis dead at point-blank range along with five of his six-man escort. The surviving pirate Bartholomew Roberts (the ship's-master of the Royal Rover, a Welsh-Pembrokeshire former slave-ship mate Davis had pressed into piracy ten weeks before at Anomabu on the Gold Coast) was elected captain of the squadron by the pirate-council the same evening. Black Bart Roberts ran the most successful pirate career of the Golden Age of Piracy for the next three years until his own death in 1722.
Black Bart off Cape Lopez
1722Roberts
On the morning of the tenth of February 1722, off Cape Lopez on the west coast of present-day Gabon, the British Royal Navy fifty-gun ship HMS Swallow under Captain Chaloner Ogle, in pursuit of the pirate squadron of Bartholomew Roberts since the mid-January, came up on the Roberts flagship the Royal Fortune (a forty-gun captured-French slaver Roberts had taken at Whydah six weeks earlier) at the Cape Lopez anchorage. Roberts, forty years old, the Pembrokeshire-Welsh former merchant-marine mate who had succeeded Howell Davis as captain of the Royal Rover squadron in June 1719 and had taken about four hundred and seventy prize-ships in the thirty-two months since, had been celebrating the overnight a successful prize-capture of the previous day. The Swallow came in under French colours, hove to at long cannon-range, and opened fire with a broadside at the eight in the morning. Roberts, on the deck of the Royal Fortune in his customary crimson silk-and-feathered hat, was hit in the throat by a grapeshot ball from the Swallow's second broadside and was dead at the foot of the mainmast within seconds. His crew, by the pre-arranged Roberts protocol on his death, threw his body overboard before the Swallow boarding-party could secure it (the protocol had been agreed by the pirate-council to prevent the public-gibbet display the Royal Navy customarily inflicted on the pirate-captain's body). The Swallow captured the Royal Fortune and the surviving pirate squadron of about two hundred and seventy-two men; about a hundred and sixty-five were tried at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast in April 1722 and seventy-four were hanged from a single long gibbet on the beach, the largest single execution of pirates in British history.
Pantycelyn and Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah
1762Williams
In the early summer of 1762, in the upstairs room of the farmhouse at Pantycelyn in northern Carmarthenshire that he had inherited from his father in 1742, William Williams Pantycelyn, forty-five years old, the hymn-writer of the Welsh Methodist revival of 1735–62, completed the Welsh-language hymn Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch (Guide me, O thou Great Redeemer in the standard English translation by Peter Williams of 1771, refined by William Williams's son John Williams in 1772; the standard English title since the eighteenth century has been Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah). The hymn was one of about nine hundred Welsh-language and one hundred and twenty English-language hymns Williams wrote between 1744 and his death in 1791, the foundational lyrical body of Welsh-Methodist congregational singing. Cwm Rhondda, the hymn-tune to which the English-language version of Guide me is conventionally sung, was composed by John Hughes of Pontypridd in 1907 for the centenary celebration of the Capel Rhondda chapel; the pairing of Williams's 1762 Welsh text and Hughes's 1907 Welsh tune is the foundational congregational hymn of the modern Welsh and Welsh-diaspora chapel tradition. Cwm Rhondda is the hymn most-commonly sung at the Welsh rugby international match before kick-off, by the Welsh-language post-1990 tradition of the Welsh Rugby Union, with the seventy-five-thousand-strong Cardiff Principality Stadium crowd carrying the three verses by heart in the original Welsh.
Richard Price at the Old Jewry
1789Price
On the evening of Wednesday the fourth of November 1789, in the meeting-house of the Old Jewry off Cheapside in the City of London, the sixty-six-year-old Welsh Dissenting minister Richard Price (born at Tynton in the parish of Llangeinor in Glamorgan on the twenty-third of February 1723) delivered to the Revolution Society of London his Discourse on the Love of Our Country, a sermon-and-political-address preached on the anniversary-eve of the 1688 Glorious Revolution and explicitly extending the principles of 1688 to the French National Assembly constituted in Paris three months before. The address closed with the Nunc Dimittis of the aged Simeon ('Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation'), applied by Price to the political dispensation of 1789 that he had spent his forty-year ministry arguing for. Edmund Burke, who had until that month been Price's parliamentary ally on the American question, read the printed sermon when it appeared in early 1790 and wrote, in direct response, the Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790), which provoked Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (March 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men (December 1790) and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (January 1792), and James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae (April 1791). The pamphlet war that came out of the Old Jewry sermon defined the next two centuries of conservative-and-liberal political philosophy in the English-speaking world.
Ann Griffiths and the hymns of Dolwar Fach
1800Griffiths
Between her Methodist conversion at Bala in the spring of 1796 and her death in childbed at Dolwar Fach on the twelfth of August 1805, Ann Thomas, married 1804 to Thomas Griffiths and known to Welsh-Methodist history as Ann Griffiths, wrote about seventy-four Welsh-language hymns in a burst of mystical-religious lyric composition that is, by every careful judgment of Welsh-language literary historians (Saunders Lewis, R. M. Jones), the foundational lyric-mystical achievement of the Welsh Methodist revival and one of the finest women's-poetic voices in any European language between Hildegard of Bingen and Emily Dickinson. Ann Griffiths could not, on the Welsh-Calvinistic-Methodist women's-pastoral practice of the 1800s, write down her hymns or have them published in her lifetime; she committed each new hymn to the memory of her servant Ruth Evans on the evening of composition. After Ann's death at twenty-nine, Ruth Evans dictated the seventy-four hymns from memory over the next twelve months to the Bala Methodist minister John Hughes (Pontrobert), who wrote them down. The collection was first printed in Welsh in 1806 in the Methodist hymn-book Casgliad o Hymnau of Robert Jones of Rhos-lan, with the eight Ann Griffiths hymns Hughes had transcribed. The rest were printed in successive editions of the Welsh-Methodist hymn-books over the next forty years.
Mary Jones and her Bible
1800Jones
In 1800, a sixteen-year-old girl from a hill farm in Snowdonia walked twenty-six miles barefoot to a Welsh market town to ask the local minister for a Bible in her own language. She had spent six years saving for it. Welsh-language Bibles in that decade were almost unobtainable; what few existed were the property of chapels and the gentry. The minister, the Reverend Thomas Charles of Bala, had three left, and three families had already spoken for them. What he decided to do that afternoon led, four years later, to the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and within a generation to the printing of scripture in over two hundred languages worldwide.
Robert Owen at New Lanark
1800Owen
On the first of January 1800, Robert Owen, twenty-eight years old, the Newtown-Montgomeryshire-born self-made Manchester cotton-manufacturer, took over the management of the New Lanark cotton mills on the upper Clyde in Lanarkshire, a complex of four water-powered mills employing about two thousand workers (about five hundred of them pauper-apprentice children of seven to twelve years old, brought up from the Glasgow and Edinburgh poor-houses on six-year indentures), which Owen had purchased the previous year from his father-in-law David Dale with two business partners. Over the next twenty-five years Owen ran New Lanark as a deliberate experiment in industrial paternalism: he reduced the day from fourteen hours to twelve and then to ten and a half; refused to employ children under ten; opened the world's first infant school in 1816 for the under-fives of the mill's workers; raised wages, built clean housing, opened a co-operative shop that sold goods at cost. The mills became the most-visited industrial site in early-nineteenth-century Europe (about twenty thousand visitors over the years, including the future Tsar Nicholas I, the Habsburg archdukes, and most of the Whig and Tory leadership of the British political class). Owen's A New View of Society (1813) and Report to the County of Lanark (1820) became the foundational texts of British co-operativism and utopian-socialist thought. He emigrated to America in 1825 to found the community of New Harmony in Indiana (which failed in 1827) and returned to Britain in 1829 to lead the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834. New Lanark is, since 2001, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Lewis Edwards founds Bala College
1837Edwards
In 1837 Lewis Edwards, then twenty-eight years old, the son of a small farmer of Penllwyn in Cardiganshire, returning to Wales after a degree at Edinburgh and a marriage to Jane Charles (daughter of David Charles of Carmarthen and granddaughter of the Reverend Thomas Charles of Bala, the same minister who had given Mary Jones his Bible thirty-seven years earlier), founded the Calvinistic Methodist Theological College at Bala, on the lake-shore in Merionethshire, in a small house that Jane's grandmother let him have rent-free. The college had three students in its first session. By 1850 it had grown to thirty. By the time of Edwards's death in 1887, after fifty years as Principal, it had trained over a thousand Welsh Calvinistic Methodist ministers, was the foremost theological seminary of the Welsh Nonconformist denominations, and had effectively shaped the chapel-Welsh culture of the second half of the nineteenth century. By the reckoning of every careful historian of Welsh Nonconformity, Lewis Edwards is the principal architect of the Calvinistic-Methodist intellectual life of Victorian Wales, and the founding figure of the Welsh tradition of theology as a serious academic discipline rather than a chapel devotion.
Michael D. Jones and Welsh Patagonia
1865Jones
On the twenty-eighth of July 1865, the converted tea-clipper Mimosa dropped anchor in the open bay of Puerto Madryn on the Atlantic coast of Patagonia, in the southern Argentine territory of Chubut, after a fifty-eight-day voyage from Liverpool. On board were one hundred and fifty-three Welsh-speaking emigrants, principally from Carnarvon, Bala, and the south-Wales mining valleys, together with a Patagonian-Spanish navigator and a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist minister. The expedition was the founding settlement of Y Wladfa, the colony, the deliberate establishment of a Welsh-speaking polity outside Britain in a country where the Welsh language and the Welsh chapel might be free of English administrative pressure. The architect of the project was the Reverend Michael Daniel Jones (1822–1898), Principal of the Calvinistic Methodist seminary at Bala, son of the Mary Jones minister Thomas Charles's successor, who had spent eight years (1858–1865) lecturing, fundraising and negotiating with the Argentine government to secure the colonisation grant. The colony was a precarious near-failure for a decade, then took root, and by the early twentieth century was a thriving bilingual community of about ten thousand. By the early twenty-first century, Welsh remains a language of about five thousand inhabitants of the lower Chubut valley, the small towns of Trelew, Gaiman, Trevelin, and the Andean foothills around Esquel.
John Hughes founds Hughesovka
1869Hughes
On the morning of 18 May 1869 the Merthyr Tydfil ironmaster John Hughes, fifty-five years old, then chief engineer of the Millwall Iron Works on the Isle of Dogs in east London, signed at the Russian Imperial Embassy at Lancaster Gate a concession agreement with Count Pyotr Andreyevich Kotzebue, governor-general of New Russia, granting the New Russia Company a thirty-year lease on coal-and-iron-ore deposits in the Donets Basin of southern Ukraine and a commission to build the first integrated iron-and-steel works in the Russian Empire. Hughes was the son of a Cyfarthfa Castle furnace foreman; he had risen through the Welsh ironmasters' world without formal schooling and had taken the Millwall position on the strength of patented improvements to gun-barrel casting and naval armour-plate manufacture. He sailed for the Sea of Azov in June 1870 with eight ships, a hundred Welsh ironworkers and their families, and the disassembled components of a complete blast furnace. The settlement he founded that summer on the empty steppe above the Kalmius river became, within thirty years, the city of Hughesovka (later Stalino, later Donetsk), the industrial-and-coalmining capital of southern Russia and (in modern terms) the contested centre of the Donbas at the heart of the 2014-onwards Russo-Ukrainian war.
Arthur Evans unearths the Throne Room at Knossos
1900Evans
On the late morning of Friday the thirteenth of April 1900, on the small Cretan-limestone hill of Kephala four miles south of the modern north-Cretan coastal port of Heraklion, in the second week of the systematic-archaeological-excavation that Sir Arthur Evans, forty-nine years old, the Hemel Hempstead-born British antiquary and Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, had begun on the twenty-third of March 1900 after his five-year purchase of the Kephala site from the Ottoman authorities (the 1894 Ottoman-Cretan land-acquisition arrangement Evans had negotiated through his Cretan-Greek intermediary Iosif Hatzidakis), the Italian senior excavator Federico Halbherr and the British junior excavator Duncan Mackenzie cleared the limestone-rubble fill from the central single inner chamber of the substantial Late-Bronze-Age palatial complex Evans had identified beneath the Kephala hill, exposed the limestone block-and-gypsum-veneer throne, the fresco-decorated antechamber, and the lustral-basin ritual-bath of the Throne Room of Knossos. The Throne Room was the central single archaeological exposure of the Evans Knossos excavation, the foundational moment of the modern field of Aegean Bronze Age archaeology, and the discovery that established the existence of the Minoan civilisation (the name Evans coined the same week from the Greek legend of King Minos of Crete) as a distinct pre-Mycenaean Bronze Age culture of the eastern Mediterranean. The Evans excavation continued at Knossos across the next thirty-one years (the full Knossos publication ran to four volumes between 1921 and 1936), produced the substantial reconstruction of the Palace of Knossos that visitors approach today through the Heraklion tourist circuit, and established the Minoan civilisation as the central single foundational culture of the Aegean Bronze Age sequence on which all subsequent Greek-Bronze-Age scholarship has rested.
Evan Roberts and the Revival
1904Roberts
On the evening of the thirty-first of October 1904, in Moriah Calvinistic Methodist Chapel at Loughor on the Burry Inlet in West Glamorgan, a twenty-six-year-old former colliery boy and blacksmith's apprentice called Evan Roberts, then a candidate for the Methodist ministry at Newcastle Emlyn, came home for the half-term holiday and asked his minister, the Reverend Daniel Jones, for permission to address the youth meeting after the seven o'clock service. Sixteen young people stayed back. Roberts spoke to them for an hour and then asked them to commit to four points: confess any known sin, give up doubtful habits, obey the prompt of the Spirit promptly, confess Christ publicly. By the end of the meeting all sixteen had stood up. He held a similar meeting the next night, and the next. Within a fortnight, Moriah was full to the doors every night. Within a month, news had spread up the coalfield, and Roberts was preaching in Aberavon, Pontypridd, Cardiff, Caernarfon. By March 1905, by the conservative count of the chapel union, about one hundred thousand new converts had been added to the Welsh Nonconformist congregations, the largest spontaneous religious revival in modern British history. The tradition of the chapels of South Wales is that, on the night of the thirty-first of October 1904 at Moriah Loughor, the country changed.
Parry sets Blake's Jerusalem to music
1916Parry
On the morning of Friday the tenth of March 1916, in the final-rehearsal at the Queen's Hall in Langham Place in central London, the sixty-seven-year-old Bournemouth-born British composer Sir Hubert Parry, the director of the Royal College of Music and the senior British composer of his generation, delivered the first public-rehearsal-performance of his newly-completed setting of William Blake's 1804 prophetic-preface verse And did those feet in ancient time (the sixteen-line Blake-preface to Milton: A Poem in Two Books) for the Fight for Right movement campaign-rally at the Queen's-Hall on the evening of the same day. The Parry-Blake setting (composed at his Knight's-Croft Rustington Sussex country-house across the early-March-1916 composition-period at the personal-request of the Fight-for-Right-movement Poet-Laureate Robert Bridges to the Parry-Royal-College-of-Music professional-friendship channel) opened with the eight-bar D-major marching-introduction-figure, set the Blake-text in the four-strophe strophic-pattern, and closed on the final Jerusalem-line modulation-to-the-major. The Queen's-Hall evening performance on the tenth-of-March 1916 was the first-public-performance of the Parry-Blake setting; the piece was universally remembered ever since by the opening-line title Jerusalem and has been continuously the central single English-language non-liturgical-anthem of the modern-era, the Last-Night-of-the-Proms Anglican-Communion Women's-Institute Labour-Party-Conference international-rugby-and-cricket Last-Night anthem of the British-and-Commonwealth public-life.
Edward Thomas at Arras
1917Thomas
At twenty past seven on the morning of Easter Monday, the ninth of April 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, in a forward observation-post just behind the front line at the Beaurains-Achicourt forward battery position outside Arras in northern France, Second Lieutenant Philip Edward Thomas of the Royal Garrison Artillery, thirty-nine years old, was killed by the blast wave of one of his own battery's six-inch howitzer shells (the shell had been fired from the battery behind him about thirty seconds earlier; the shell-burst, by an unrecorded meteorological anomaly of the windless April morning, had failed to dissipate the concussion outward and had reflected the blast back along the line of flight). The blast was strong enough to stop the watch in Thomas's pocket at 7:36 and to kill him by concussion without leaving a visible mark on the body. He was the only casualty of the battery on the first day of Arras. He had been a published poet for the previous eighteen months only; his first collection Poems would be published posthumously in November 1917 under his pseudonym Edward Eastaway. By the careful judgment of every later English literary historian (Edna Longley, Matthew Hollis), Thomas is the foundational figure of the modern English nature-poem tradition and the most-influential English-language poet of the First World War on the Hardy-and-the-Georgians side, against the trench-realism of Owen and Sassoon.
Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart
1917Owen
Wilfred Owen, second lieutenant of the Manchester Regiment, was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in June 1917 with shell-shock after fourteen days under bombardment in a flooded cellar at Savy Wood near Saint-Quentin. He was twenty-four years old. He had not yet published a poem he would later wish to be known by. On the seventeenth of August 1917 he met Captain Siegfried Sassoon, the published war-poet, who had been sent to Craiglockhart for a different reason, namely his refusal to serve any longer in protest at the war. The four months they overlapped at Craiglockhart, during which Sassoon read Owen's drafts and pushed back, were the four months Owen learned what he was. He drafted Anthem for Doomed Youth in September with Sassoon's pencilled corrections in the margins; he wrote Dulce et Decorum Est in October and rewrote it in November after Sassoon told him the framing was too genteel. He went back to the front in August 1918, was awarded the Military Cross at Joncourt on the first of October, and was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors on the morning of the fourth of November 1918. The telegram reached his mother at Shrewsbury on the eleventh of November as the Armistice bells were ringing.
Lloyd George at Versailles
1919Lloyd
From the eighteenth of January 1919 to the twenty-eighth of June 1919, the Paris Peace Conference settled the formal end of the First World War. The decisive body was the Council of Four: Georges Clemenceau for France, Vittorio Orlando for Italy, Woodrow Wilson for the United States, and David Lloyd George for the British Empire. Lloyd George, fifty-six years old, born in Manchester to Welsh parents and raised by his shoemaker uncle Richard Lloyd at Llanystumdwy, occupied the central seat in the Council and the most consequential single role in shaping the European settlement, between the French demand for security through dismemberment of Germany and the American insistence on the Fourteen Points. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Hall of Mirrors on the twenty-eighth of June 1919, was, in its principal compromises (war guilt, reparations, the Rhineland occupation, the Polish corridor), a Lloyd George document. Keynes called it Carthaginian. Lloyd George himself called it, in private, the best he could do between the two other men in the room.
Elizabeth Bowen and The Last September
1929Bowen
In the spring of 1929, in the writing-room of Bowen's Court, the Anglo-Irish Bowen family estate at Farahy near Kildorrery in north County Cork, Elizabeth Bowen, thirty years old, the only child and heir of the Bowen-family seat, completed her second novel The Last September (Constable, London, September 1929). The novel is set at a fictionalised Bowen's Court (called Danielstown) during the summer of 1920, in the final months of the Anglo-Irish War before the July 1921 truce and the December 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. The novel's nineteen-year-old protagonist, Lois Farquar, the orphaned niece of the Naylor family of Danielstown, lives through the summer of 1920 in the Big House's distorted social-routine while the IRA columns are burning Big Houses in the surrounding countryside; the novel closes with the burning of Danielstown by the local IRA flying-column in the autumn of 1920, a fictionalisation of what was, in plain reading, the Anglo-Irish-class-fate of the Bowen's-Court generation of small country-house gentry. The Last September is, by every careful judgment of twentieth-century Anglo-Irish literary criticism (Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Maud Ellmann), the foundational novel of the Anglo-Irish Big House tradition and the pre-eminent fictional treatment of the Anglo-Irish War from the Big-House side.
C. S. Lewis at Whipsnade
1931Lewis
On the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-eighth of September 1931, on the sidecar of his brother Warnie's BSA motorcycle on the road from Headington Quarry in Oxford to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire (about a forty-mile run via Aylesbury), C. S. Lewis, thirty-two years old, the Belfast-born Magdalen College Oxford English Literature fellow, completed the religious conversion that had begun on the summer night of the nineteenth of September. By his own account in Surprised by Joy (1955), the late-summer conversation he had had on Addison's Walk by the Cherwell with his fellow Magdalen fellow J. R. R. Tolkien (a devout Catholic) and Hugo Dyson (a Anglican literature lecturer) had been the philosophical-and-literary-mythological turning-point. The conversation, on a mid-September night by Magdalen Bridge between eight in the evening and three in the morning, had argued the question of whether the Christian story was, in its narrative form, the truth of which all the pagan-mythological dying-and-rising god-stories Lewis had been studying as a classicist were partial-shadowy reflections. By Whipsnade on the morning of the twenty-eighth, sitting in the sidecar in his leather-helmet, Lewis came finally to the internal-acceptance of the Christian story. The conversion of C. S. Lewis is, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century English-language Christian apologetic tradition, the foundational personal-conversion of the Lewis Christianity that produced The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), Mere Christianity (1952), and Surprised by Joy (1955).
Tredegar to the NHS
1948Bevan
On the morning of the fifth of July 1948, at Park Hospital in Davyhulme on the western edge of Manchester, Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, formally opened the National Health Service to its first patient: a thirteen-year-old girl from Salford called Sylvia Diggory, on the children's ward, with a kidney complaint. From that morning every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom had a right to medical care free at the point of use, paid for by general taxation, on a single national footing for the first time in any major industrial country in the world. Bevan was fifty years old. He had been Minister of Health for two years and ten months, in the cabinet of Clement Attlee elected in July 1945 with the platform that the country would not return to the conditions of the 1930s. The Bill establishing the NHS had been opposed by the British Medical Association, the Royal Colleges, the Conservative party, the friendly societies, the voluntary hospital movement, and parts of his own cabinet. It had become law in November 1946 and had taken twenty months to bring into operation. The model in his head, by his own statement to the House in 1946, was the Tredegar Workmen's Medical Aid Society, which had supplied medical care to the population of the Sirhowy Valley on a subscription per head since the 1890s, and which his own family had used. He said, in the speech in the Chamber on the second reading: all I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we have had in Tredegar for a generation. We are going to Tredegarise you.
Howells and Hymnus Paradisi
1950Howells
From the autumn of 1935 to the summer of 1936, in the upstairs music-study of the Howells family flat at 3 Beverley Close, Barnes, in south-west London, Herbert Howells, in his forty-fourth year, composed a Latin-language Requiem-style choral-orchestral setting of seven movements he called Hymnus Paradisi (Hymn of Paradise) in private grief for his nine-year-old son Michael, who had died at the family Sussex cottage of poliomyelitis on the sixth of September 1935 after a three-day illness. Howells refused to perform or publish the piece for the next fourteen years. By his own statement to his biographer Christopher Palmer, the work was a private working-out, between a composer and his lost son and his God; it was not for the public ear. It was Howells's fellow English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had himself lost a son and who came to look at the manuscript on a 1949 visit to the Howells flat, who persuaded him to allow the Three Choirs Festival to perform Hymnus Paradisi at the Gloucester Cathedral festival of September 1950. The premiere on the seventh of September 1950, conducted by the composer, was, by every contemporary report, the most-affecting public musical event of the immediate-post-war English-cathedral-music tradition. Hymnus Paradisi has been continuously in the Anglican choral-festival repertoire since.
Sir Gordon Richards at the Coronation Derby
1953Richards
On the afternoon of Saturday the sixth of June 1953, in front of a Downs crowd estimated by the Epsom course authorities at five hundred thousand, the forty-nine-year-old British flat-racing jockey Sir Gordon Richards (born at Donnington Wood in Shropshire on the fifth of May 1904, son of the coal miner and lay-preacher Nathan Richards) rode the bay colt Pinza, by Chanteur II out of Pasqua, owned by Sir Victor Sassoon and trained by Norman Bertie at Newmarket, to a four-length victory in the One Hundred and Seventy-Fourth Epsom Derby Stakes (one mile, four furlongs and six yards), beating Aureole (the colt of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, four days into her reign, the new Queen herself in the royal box with the Duke of Edinburgh) into second place. It was Richards's twenty-eighth Derby ride in twenty-nine years and his first Derby win; he had been knighted in the Coronation Honours announced on the morning of Monday the first of June 1953, the first jockey in the history of English flat racing to receive the honour, and the Queen had been crowned at Westminster Abbey on the Tuesday following; the Derby on the Saturday closed out the Coronation week as the public sporting occasion of the new reign. Richards rode for one more season, was thrown by the filly Abergeldie in the paddock at Sandown on the tenth of July 1954, broke his pelvis, and retired from the saddle. He had ridden, over a thirty-three-year career from 1921 to 1954, four thousand eight hundred and seventy winners, more than any English jockey of any century before him.
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