Infinite Wisdom

"Our hopes must rest on the God of battles who hath assured us that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong."

La Triviata

• Richard III’s traveling bed, later found to have substantial sums in gold coin concealed in the woodwork, was for many years preserved at the Blue Boar Inn, in Leicestershire, where the king slept his last night (August 20-21, 1485), and is now to be found in the nearby Donnington-le-Heath Manor house.
• Campaigning in the Rhineland in 1794, Joseph Werck, a French trumpeter, captured the town of Rinthal single-handedly, by infiltrating the Austrian lines and sounding their assembly call, followed by their retreat, which caused the garrison to decamp.
• At a peace conference with his Turkish opponent in 1739, Field Marshal James Keith, a Scot in Russian service, was startled when, upon the conclusion of the proceedings, the Pasha addressed him in his native Erse, he too being one of many other exiled fellow-countrymen serving as a mercenary, and as it turned out actually came from the very same village.
• One day in 1738, Vatican officials were unable to locate Pope Clement XII, who ultimately turned up in the kitchen, taking a break from trying to put the Church’s convoluted finances on an even keel by making macaroons,.
• On April 12, 1945, hearing of the death of President Roosevelt, the inmates of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, who had been liberated only the day before, held a memorial service in his memory.
• Since a direct reference to death was considered ill-omened, until the end of the Russian Empire, the passing of the tsar was announced with the words, “The Emperor has bidden you to live long.”
• In 1750 the Duke of Cumberland, Captain-General of the British Army, granted a pension of £30 a year to Hannah Snell, then about 27, in compensation for wounds received at the Siege of Pondicherry in 1748, when she was serving in disguise as a marine aboard HMS Swallow.
• Reportedly, not long after the fall of Napoleon, the elegantly attired Duke of Orleans, seeking to demonstrate that the restored Bourbons had the common touch, visited a military hospital to comfort sick and wounded troops, only to be brought up short when a old soldier said, “My lord, when I was at Jaffa, sick of the plague the Emperor condescended to take me by the hand, but he did not wear gloves.”

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