Apologies again for the ‘break in service’, have had a mid/late-life crisis – details to anyone interested but for the moment sufficient to state ‘no fool like an old fool’.
Last Monday saw the first of my five-week (short course) W.E.A. course on the English Civil Wars, 1642-1651, sometimes known as the Wars of three Kingdoms as military struggles took place in Scotland and Ireland as well as England. A couple of class members challenged me to make this ‘dry’ topic interesting, while I made it clear that no way could such a huge topic be covered comprehensively in just a five-session course. A vital factor in the plan for session one was class discussion. fortunately they rose to the occasion and the consensus at the end seemed to be that the session had gone well/ok.
The vital issue of making some superficial comparisons between historic civil wars (e.g. French, Russian) and the current one in Syria with the English Civil Wars we didn’t get to, so that will be starting point tomorrow evening.
Picture above shows Anthony Van Dyke’s painting of the execution of Charles I, 30th January, 1649. Van Dyke was a ‘royalist’, consideration of the reliability of picture evidence generally stimulates good discussion.
On a separate note when I take my dog out last-thing we go to a small local car park so she can wander a bit off the lead. About two months ago (if that) discovered a recently dead rabbit and stoat some distance apart in the grass. Don’t know what had happened, a stoat can kill a rabbit but hardly a rabbit a stoat (maybe the rabbit had a Cromwellian fighting spirit). Neither mortal remains were subsequently moved and now the two sites show little or no trace of the original creatures, their ‘component bits’ having returned to earth to be utilised by successive life-forms. If the mortal remains of Charles Stuart had been laid-out on Hampstead Heath the same would eventually have happened, it is Nature’s way – or indeed the remains of any one of us.
The promised further consideration of Burton Constable Hall will, I hope, follow soon.