8th February

'A dead woman bites not' said Lord Grey with astonishing perspicacity. He was talking about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a pleasant enough woman who was never known to have bitten anybody, even when alive. She was beheaded on this day in 1587 at the castle of Fotheringay (now a ruin) on the reluctant orders of her cousin, Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England. The two never met, despite that scene in the film where Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson have a go at each other with riding crops) and Elizabeth instantly regretted having it done.
What did it achieve? Nothing. The Stuarts got the throne of England after all, giving rise to Ramsay MacDonald, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the West Lothian Question.
Who knew?

In other news ...
The Boy Scouts of America was founded today in 1910, along the lines of the British movement of two years earlier set up by Colonel Robert Baden Powell, the hero of Mafeking. Isn't it a pity that his book Scouting for Boys is so widely misunderstood today and the mafeking is strictly contrary to EU regulations.
On the other hand, the Colonel's penchant for wearing rather fetching day dresses is widely accepted now on both sides of the Atlantic, drag though it is.

22nd January

In his diary entry for this day in 1924, George V wrote, 'Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama [that's Queen Victoria to you and me] died. I wonder what she would have made of a Labour government.'
What indeed? She might have been quite tickled that the new Prime Minister was Ramsay MacDonald, a crofter's son from the Heelands, a part of the country she adored. On the other hand she is on record as saying that Irish terrorists should be lynched and women campaigning for the vote should be horse-whipped, so who knows?

In other news ...
Time for another 'Bloody Sunday'. This was the third or fourth given that name and it happened in St Petersburg 107 years ago. about 1000 people marched to the Winter Palace to protest to the Tsar, Nicholas II, about the appalling conditions in his country. They were led by Father Gapon who was himself a government spy. They were all unarmed and carried icons and portraits of Nicholas who they saw as their father. a panicky Guard commander ordered his troops to open fire and the blood of at least half the crowd stained the snow. The irony of all this? Nicholas wasn't even there.