EVENTS: On this day in 1815, a few hours after their forces had defeated the French at the Battle of Waterloo, the Prussian Field marshal Blücher embraced the Duke of Wellington and, knowing no English and scarcely any French, summed up the day’s events with “Mein lieber Kamerad, quelle affaire!”. As Winston Churchill wrote in his History of the English-speaking Peoples: “This brief greeting was greatly to Wellington’s laconic taste.”
In 1429 the English were defeated by Joan of Arc at Patay; in 1583 the first life insurance policy, on the life of William Gybbons, was issued in London; in 1812 the United States declared war against Britain; in 1982 Roberto Calvi, who had been chairman of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London; in 1996, as the US Senate’s Whitewater committee issued its final report, Republicans and Democrats remained divided over whether the Clintons had committed any ethical breaches; in 1999, at a summit in Cologne, the Group of Seven countries agreed to waive $70 billion in debts owed by poor countries.
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BIRTHS: As Leader of the House of Commons in 1821, Lord Castlereagh excused the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 on the ground that the crowd “had not . . . consisted of moderate reformers, assembled for temperate discussion. They were a great mass assembled for purposes of intimidation and in order to bring on a revolutionary movement.” Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was born in Dublin on this day in 1769.
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Alphonse Laveran, pathologist and Nobel laureate (1907) who discovered the parasitic cause of malaria, born in Paris, 1845; Edouard Daladier, Prime Minister of France 1933, 1934 and 1938-40, born in Carpentras, France, 1884; Jeanette MacDonald actress and singer, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1903 ; Sammy Cahn, lyricist who co-wrote many songs for Frank Sinatra, born in New York, 1913.
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DEATHS: A powerful voice for the working class, William Cobbett recorded the plight of recruits to King George III’s Army in his autobiographical Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament (1830): “Many of them deserted from sheer hunger. They were lads from the plough-tail. I remember two that went into a decline and died during the year, though when they joined us they were fine hearty young men . . . The whole week’s food was not a bit too much for one day”. Cobbett died in Guildford, Surrey, on this day in 1835.
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Rogier van der Weyden, Flemish painter, died in Brussels, 1464; Samuel Butler, author of The Way of All Flesh, died in London, 1902; Roald Amundsen, Norwegian polar explorer who was the first to reach the South Pole, the first to sail through the North-West Passage in the Arctic and one of the first to cross the Arctic by air, was lost in an aircraft over the Arctic Ocean in 1928; Douglas Jardine, Surrey and England cricket captain, died in Montreux, Switzerland, 1958; Ethel Barrymore, actress, died in Hollywood, California, 1959.