Born: Jean Sylvain Bailly, distinguished astronomer, 1736, Paris; James
Fenimore Cooper, American novelist, 1789, Burlington, New
Jersey; John, Lord Campbell, chancellor of England, 1779, Cupar-in-Fife.
Died: Philip of Austria, father of Charles V, 1506 Sir Thomas Overbury, poisoned in
the Tower, 1613 Lady Arabella Stuart, 1615; Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, eminent
statesman, 1643, Youghal; Sidney, Earl of Godolphin,
premier to Queen Anne, 1712, St. Albans; Abbe Terrasson, translator of Diodorus
Siculus, 1750 General Lazarus Roche, French
commander, 1797, Wetzlar; William Huskisson, distinguished politician and
economist, killed at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester
Railway, 1830; I. K. Brunel, eminent civil engineer, 1859, Westminster.
Feast Day: St. Nicomedes, martyr, about 90. St. Nicetas, martyr,
4th century. St. John the Dwarf, anchoret of Scotch
St. Aper or Evre, bishop and confessor, 5th century. St. Aicard or
Achart, abbot and confessor, about 687.
ROMANCE OF THE LADY ARABELLA
Although Lady Arabella Stuart plays no very prominent part amid the public
characters of her time, her history presents a series of
romantic incidents and disasters, scarcely surpassed even by those of her
celebrated relative, Mary Queen of Scots. She was the daughter of
Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, younger brother of Lord Darnley, and stood thus
next in succession to the crown, after her cousin, James VI,
through their common ancestor Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, and
grandmother, by her second marriage with the Earl of Angus, to Lord
Darnley.
Brought up in England, Arabella excited the watchful care and jealousy of
Elizabeth, who, on the king of Scotland proposing to marry her
to Lord Esm� Stuart, interposed to prevent the match, and afterwards imprisoned
her, on hearing of her intention to wed a son of the Earl of
Northumberland. Meantime she formed the subject of eager aspirations on the
continent, the pope entertaining the idea of uniting her to some
Catholic prince, and setting her up as the legitimate heir to the English throne.
Among her suitors appear the Duke of Parma, and the Prince of Farnese; but it
would seem that the idea which prevailed abroad of her
predilections for the old religion was quite unfounded. Shortly after the
accession of James I, a clumsy conspiracy, in which
Sir Walter Raleigh is said
to have been concerned, was formed for raising her to the
throne. It proved quite abortive, and does not seem to have been shared in by
Arabella herself, who continued to live on amicable terms with
the court, and had a yearly pension allowed her by James.
At last, about 1609, when she could not have been less than thirty-three years of
age, she formed an attachment to
William Seymour, son of Lord Beauchamp, and a
private marriage took place. On this being discovered, Seymour
was committed to the Tower for his presumption in allying himself with a member of
the royal family, and his wife was detained a prisoner in
the house of Sir Thomas Parry, in Lambeth. The wedded pair, nevertheless, managed
to correspond with each other; whereupon, it was resolved
to remove Arabella to a distance, and place her under the custody of the bishop of
Durham. Her northward journey commenced, but, either
feeling or affecting indisposition, she advanced no further than High-gate, where
she was allowed to remain under surveillance, in the house
of Mr. Conyers. A plot to effect her escape was now concocted on the part of
herself and Seymour.
The subsequent mishaps of this ill-starred couple read like a tale of romance.
One afternoon she contrived to obtain leave from her
female guardian at Highgate to pay a visit to her husband, on the plea of seeing
him for the last time. She then disguised herself in man's
clothes, with a doublet, boots, and rapier, and proceeded with a gentleman named
Markham to a little inn, where they obtained horses. On
arriving there, she looked so pale and exhausted that the ostler who held her
stirrup, declared the gentleman would never hold out to
London. The ride, however, revived her, and she reached Blackwall in safety, where
she found a boat waiting. Mr. Seymour, who was to have
joined her here, had not yet arrived, and, in opposition to her earnest
entreaties, her attendants insisted on pushing off, saying that he
would be sure to follow them.
They then crossed over towards Woolwich, pulled down from thence to Gravesend,
and afterwards, by the promise of double fare, induced the
rowers to take them to Lee, which they reached just as day was breaking. A French
vessel was descried lying at anchor for them about a mile
beyond, and Arabella, who again wished to abide here her husband's arrival, was
forced on board by the importunity of her followers. In the
meantime, Seymour, disguised in a wig and black cloak, had walked out of his
lodgings at the west door of the Tower, and followed a cart
which was returning after having deposited a load of wood. He proceeded by the
Tower wharf to the iron gate, and finding a boat there lying
for him, dropped down the river to Lee, with an attendant. Here he found the
French ship gone; but, imagining that a vessel which he saw
under sail was the craft in question, he hired a fisherman for twenty shillings to
convey him thither.
The disappointment of the luckless husband may be imagined when he discovered
that this was not the ship he was in quest of. He then made
for another, which proved to be from Newcastle, and an offer of �40 induced the
master to convey Seymour to Calais, from which he proceeded
safely into Flanders. The vessel conveying Arabella was overtaken off Calais
harbour by a pink despatched by the English authorities on
hearing of her flight, and she was conveyed back to London, subjected to an
examination, and committed to the Tower. She professed great
indifference to her fate, and only expressed anxiety for the safety of her
husband.
To the end of her days Arabella Stuart remained a prisoner. She died in
confinement in 1615, and rumours were circulated of her having
fallen a victim to poison; but these would seem to have been wholly unwarranted.
Such unmerited misfortunes did her near relationship to the
crown entail. Her husband afterwards procured his pardon, distinguished himself by
his loyalty to Charles I during the civil wars, and,
surviving the Restoration, was invested by Charles II with the dukedom of
Somerset, the forfeited title of his ancestor, the Protector.
FIRST BALLOON ASCENTS IN
BRITAIN
The inventions and discoveries ultimately proving least beneficial to mankind,
have generally been received with greater warmth and
enthusiasm than those of a more useful character. The aeronautical experiments of
the Montgolfiers and others, in France, created an immense
excitement, which. soon found its way across the Channel to the shores of England.
Horace Walpole,
writing at the close of 1783, says:
'Balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody.' While some
entirely disbelieved the accounts of men, floating, as it were,
in the regions of upper air, others indulged in the wildest speculations. The
author of a poem, entitled The Air Balloon, or Flying
Mortal, published early in 1784, exclaims:
'How few the worldly evils now I dread,
No more confined this narrow earth to tread!
Should fire or water spread destruction drear,
Or earthquake shake this sublunary sphere,
In air-balloon to distant realms I fly,
And leave the creeping world to sink and die.'
Besides doubt and wonder, an unpleasant feeling of insecurity prevailed over
England at the time. The balloon was a French invention:
might it not be used as a means of invasion by the natural enemies of the British
race! A caricature, published in 1784, is entitled
Montgolfier in the Clouds, constructing Air Balloons for the Grande Monarque. In
this, the French inventor is represented blowing
soap-bubbles, and saying:
'0 by Gar, dis be de grand invention. Dis will immortalise my king, my country,
and myself. We will declare the war against our enimie;
we will made des English quake, by Gar. We will inspect their camp, we will
intercept their fleet, and we will set fire to their
dock-yards, and, by Gar, we will take Gibraltar, in de air-balloon; and when we
have conquer de English, den we conquer de other countrie,
and make them all colonie to de Grande Monarque.'
Several small balloons had been sent up from
various parts of England; but no person, adventurous
enough to explore the realms of air, had ascended, till Vincent Lunardi, a
youthful attache' of the Neapolitan embassy, made the first
ascent in England from the Artillery Ground, at Moorfields, September 15, 1784. It
was Lunardi's original intention to ascend from the
garden of Chelsea Hospital, having acquired permission to do so; but the
permission was subsequently rescinded, on account of a riot caused
by another balloon adventurer, a Frenchman named De Moret. This man proposed to
ascend from a tea-garden, in the Five-fields, a place now
known by the general term of Belgravia. His balloon seems, from an engraving of
the period, to have resembled one of the large,
old-fashioned, wooden summer-houses still to be seen in suburban gardens; and the
car was provided with wheels, so that it could, if
required, be used as a travelling-carriage! Whether he ever intended to attempt an
ascension in such an unwieldy machine, has never been
clearly ascertained.
The balloon, such as it was, was constructed on the Montgolfier, or fire,
principle�that is to say, the ascending agent was air rarefied
by the application of artificial heat. De Moret, having collected a considerable
sum of money, was preparing for an ascent on the 10th
of August 1784, when his machine caught fire, and was burned, the unruly mob
revenging their disappointment by destroying the adjoining
property. The adventurer, however, made a timely escape, and a caricature of the
day represents him flying off to Ostend with a bag of
British guineas, leaving the Stockwell Ghost, the Bottle Conjuror, Elizabeth
Canning, Mary Toft, and other cheats, enveloped in the smoke of
his burning balloon.
The authorities, being apprehensive that, in case of failure, Chelsea Hospital
might be destroyed in a similar riot, rescinded their
permission; but Lunardi was, eventually, accommodated with the use of the
Artillery Ground, the members of the City Artillery Company being
under arms, to protect their property. When the eventful day arrived, Moorfields,
then an open space of ground, was thronged by a dense mob
of spectators; such crowd had never previously been collected in London. As the
morning hours wore away, silent expectation was followed by
impatient clamour, soon succeeded by yells of angry threatenings, to be in a
moment changed to loud acclamations of applause, as the balloon
rose majestically into the air. Lunardi himself said:
'The effect was that of a miracle on the multitude which surrounded the place,
and they passed from incredulity and menace into the
most extravagant expressions of approbation and joy.'
Lunardi first touched earth in a field at North Mimms; after lightening the
balloon, he again rose in the air, and finally descended in
the parish of Standon, near Ware, in Hertfordshire. Some labourers, who were
working close by, were so frightened at the balloon, that no
promises of reward would induce them to approach it; not even when a young woman
had courageously set the example by taking hold of a cord,
which the aěronaut had thrown out.
The adventurer came down from the clouds to find himself the hero of the day. He
was presented at court, and at once became the fashion;
wigs, coats, hats, and bonnets were named after him; and a very popular bow of
bright scarlet ribbons, that had previously been called
Gibraltar, from the heroic defence of that fortress, was now termed the Lunardi.
By exhibiting his balloon at the Pantheon, he soon gained a
large sum of money; and the popular applause might readily have turned the head of
a less vain person than the impulsive Italian.
Mr. Lunardi's publications exhibit him as a vain excitable young man, utterly
carried away by the singularity of his position. He tells
us how a woman dropped down dead through fright, caused by beholding his wondrous
apparition in the air; but, on the other hand, he saved a
man's life, for a jury brought in a verdict of Not guilty on a notorious
highwayman, that they might rush out of court to witness the
balloon. When Lunardi arose, a cabinet council was engaged on most important state
deliberations; but the king said: 'My lords, we shall
have an opportunity of discussing this question at another time, but we may never
again see poor Lunardi; so let us adjourn the council, and
observe the balloon!'
Ignorance, combined with vanity, led Lunardi into some strange assertions. He
professed to be able to lower his balloon, at pleasure, by
using a kind of oar. When he subsequently ascended at Edinburgh, he affirmed that,
at the height of 1100 feet, he saw the city of Glasgow,
and also the town of Paisley, which are, at least, forty miles distant, with a
hilly country between. The following paragraph from the
General Advertiser of September 24, 1784, has a sly reference to these and the
like allegations.
'As several of our correspondents seem to disbelieve that part of Mr. Lunardi's
tale, wherein be states that he saw the neck of a quart
bottle four miles' distance, all we can inform them on the subject is, that Mr.
Lunardi was above lying.'
Lunardi's success was, in all probability, due to the suggestions of another,
rather than to his own scientific acquirements. His
original intention was to have used a Montgolfier or fire balloon, the inherent
perils of which would almost imperatively forbid a
successful result. But the celebrated chemist, Dr. George
Fordyce, informed him of the buoyant nature of
hydrogen gas, with the mode of its manufacture; and to this information Lunardi's
successful ascents may be attributed. Three days before
Lunardi ascended, Mr. Sadler made an ineffectual attempt at Shotover Hill, near
Oxford, but was defeated, by using a balloon on the
Montgolfier principle.
It is generally supposed that Lunardi was the first person who ascended by means
of a balloon in Great Britain, but he certainly was not.
A very poor man, named James Tytler, who then lived in
Edinburgh, supporting himself and family in the humblest
style of garret or cottage life by the exercise of his pen, had this honour. He
had effected an ascent at Edinburgh on the 27th
of August 1784, just nineteen days previous to Lunardi. Tytler's ascent, however,
was almost a failure, by his employing the dangerous and
unmanageable Montgolfier principle. After several ineffectual attempts, Tytler,
finding that he could not carry up his fire-stove with him,
determined, in the maddening desperation of disappointment, to go without this his
sole sustaining power. Jumping into his car, which was no
other than a common crate used for packing earthenware, he and the balloon
ascended from Comely Garden, and immediately afterwards fell in
the Restalrig Road. For a wonder, Tytler was uninjured; and though he did not
reach a greater altitude than three hundred feet, nor traverse
a greater distance than half a mile, yet his name must ever be mentioned as that
of the first Briton who ascended with a balloon, and the
first man who ascended in Britain.
Tytler was the son of a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, and had been
educated as a surgeon; but being of an eccentric and erratic
genius, he adopted literature as a profession, and was the principal editor of the
first edition of the Encyclopredia Britannica. Becoming
embroiled in politics, he published a handbill of a seditious tendency, and
consequently was compelled to seek a refuge in America, where he
died in 1805, after conducting a newspaper at Salem, in New England, for several
years.
A prophet acquires little honour in his own country. While poor Tytler was being
overwhelmed by the coarse jeers of his compatriots,
Lunardi came to Edinburgh in 1785, and was received with the utmost enthusiasm.
His first ascent in Scotland was made from the garden of
Heriot's Hospital, and the cause down at Ceres, near Cupar, in Fife. The clergyman
of the parish, who witnessed. his descent, writing to an
Edinburgh newspaper, says:
'As it' [the balloon] ' drew near the earth, and sailed along with a kind. of
awful grandeur and majesty, the sight gave much plea-sure
to such as knew what it was, but terribly alarmed such as were unacquainted with
the nature of this celestial vehicle.'
A writer in the Glasgow Advertiser thus describes the sensation caused by
Lunardi's first ascent from that city:
'Many were amazingly affected. Some shed tears, and som fainted, while others
insisted that he was in compact with the devil, and ought
to be looked upon as a man reprobated by the Almighty.'
The hospitality and attention Lunardi received in Scotland seems to have
completely turned his weak head. When publicly entertained in
Edinburgh, and asked to propose a toast, he gave, 'Lunardi, the favourite of the
ladies!' to the infinite amusement of the assemblage. His
last appearance in End land, previous to his return to Italy, was as the inventor
of what he termed a water-balloon, a sort of tin
life-buoy, with which he made several excursions on the Thames.
OPENING OF THE
LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY
One of the 'red-letter' days in the history of railways, a day that stamped the
railway-system as a triumphant success, was marked by a
catastrophe which threw gloom over an event in other ways most satisfactory. The
Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the first on which the
powers of the steam-locomotive for purposes of traction were fully established. On
the Stockton and Darlington line, formed a few years
earlier, traction by animal power, by fixed engines, and by locomotives, had all
been tried; and the experience thereby obtained had
determined George Stephenson to recommend the locomotive system for adoption on
the Liverpool and Manchester line.
When this railway was in progress, in 1829, the directors offered a premium of
�500 for the best form of locomotive, to be determined by
public competition, on conditions very clearly laid down. In October of that year
the contest took place; and Mr.
Robert Stephenson's
locomotive, Rocket, carried off the prize against Mr. Hackworth's
Sanspareil, and Messrs Braithwaite and Ericsson's Novelty. A period of eleven
months then elapsed for the finishing of the railway and the
manufacture of a store of locomotives and carriages.
On the 15th of September 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway
was opened with great ceremony. The
Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert
Peel, Mr. Huskisson, and many
other distinguished persons were invited. Eight locomotives, all built by Robert
Stephenson, on the model of the Rocket, took part in the
procession. The Northumbrian took the lead, drawing a splendid carriage, in which
the duke, Sir Robert, and other distinguished visitors
were seated. Each of the other locomotives drew four carriages; and the whole of
the twenty-nine carriages conveyed six hundred persons.
They formed eight distinct trains; the first one, with the more distinguished
guests, having one line of rails to itself; and the other
seven following each other on the second line. The procession, which started from
Liverpool about eleven o'clock, was an exceedingly
brilliant one, with the aid of flags, music, &c. and the sides of the railway
were lined with thousands of enthusiastic spectators.
The trains went on past Wavertree Station, Olive Mount Cutting, Rainhill Bridge,
the Sutton Incline, and the Sankey Viaduct, to Parkhurst.
Here it was (seventeen miles from Liverpool) that the trains stopped to enable the
locomotives to take in water; and here it was that the
deplorable accident occurred, which threw a cloud over the brilliant scene. In
order to afford the Duke of Wellington an opportunity of
seeing the other parts of the procession, it was determined that the seven
locomotives, with their trains, should pass him; his carriage,
with the Northumbrian, being for a while stationary. Several gentlemen alighted
from the carriages while the locomotives were taking in
water. Mr. Huskisson, who was one of them, went up to shake hands with the duke
and while they were together, the Rocket passed rapidly on
the other line. The unfortunate gentleman, who happened to be in a weak state of
health, became flurried, and ran to and fro in doubt as to
the best means of escaping danger. The engine-driver endeavoured to stop the train
in time, but without success; and Mr. Huskisson, unable
to escape, was knocked down by the Rocket, the wheels of which went over his leg
and thigh. The same locomotive which had triumphed at the
competition, now caused the death of the statesman.
The directors deemed it necessary to complete the remainder of the journey to
Manchester, as a means of showing that the railway, in all
its engineering elements, was thoroughly successful but it was a sad. procession
for those who thought of the wounded statesman. He expired
that same evening.
Mr. Huskisson was born March 11, 1770. In 1790, he first entered government
service, as private secretary to the British ambassador at
Paris. In 1793, he was appointed to an office for managing the claims of French
emigrants in 1795, Under Secretary of State for War and the
Colonies; in 1804, Secretary of the Treasury; and in 1807, he resumed the same
office, after a short period in opposition. In 1814, he was
made Chief Commissioner of Woods and Forests; in 1823, President of the Board of
Trade and Treasurer of the Navy; and in 1829, Secretary of
State for the Colonies. He had thus, during about forty years, rather a varied
experience of official life. Mr. Huskisson, in the House of
Commons, was not a speaker of any great eloquence; but he is favourably remembered
as having advocated a free-trade policy at a time when
such policy had few advocates in parliament.
