The Mules are Splendid Company: One Man's Experience of WWI Africa

This book is based on the letters that Thomas Wilson, a civil engineer from the Borders of Scotland, wrote during the first World War while he was serving in East Africa.

The Mules are Splendid Company: One Man's Experience of WWI Africa

This book is based on the letters that Thomas Wilson, a civil engineer from the Borders of Scotland, wrote during the first World War while he was serving in East Africa.

‘At this my extreme age’

Heywood’s last years in exile in the Netherlands are the subject of this penultimate chapter. It looks at his encounter in Mechelen with the English agent (and fellow author) Thomas Wilson, and the plaintive letters that he wrote to Lord Burghley in its aftermath. It traces Heywood’s struggles for financial security after the confiscation of his lands and revenues following his flight into exile, and charts his harrowing experiences during the religious upheavals in Antwerp where he had sought safe haven with his son Ellis in the house of the Jesuits. His final escape to Louvain and the deaths of Ellis and Heywood himself within months of each other in 1578 bring the story of the playwright’s life to an end. ‘Merry’ to the last, Heywood reputedly jested on his deathbed, once more evoking the example of More, who had gone to the scaffold jesting with his captors.

Afterlife (Modern Era)

Chapter 34 focuses on Demosthenes’ reception in the modern era. It was Cicero and Quintilian who made sure that Demosthenes will never be forgotten. The praise that they heaped on Demosthenes’ style made it possible for him to always remain a figure to conjure with. Plutarch established the status of Cicero and Demosthenes as the twin fathers of oratory. The article first considers how Demosthenes emerged as a central topic in political discussions during the modern period, as seen in the first English translation of the Olynthiacs and the Philippics by Thomas Wilson. It then examines how, from Wilson onwards, Demosthenes’ fortunes became largely intertwined with the fortunes of Athenian democracy itself, and particularly how his association with liberty and opposition to tyranny propelled Demosthenes into the limelight of American Revolutionary rhetoric. It also describes how Demosthenes became an important figure in popular culture.