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I met Harold Macmillan, who links me to lots of people, including Thomas Hardy who knew and corresponded with Frederic Harrison.
Probably there were a myriad other links between Macmillan and Harrison, but as Harrison's books were published by the family publishing firm Macmillan & Co I think it very likely that Harold Macmillan met Harrison himself. After all, he knew well other famous authors whom the family firm published, like Hardy, Kipling and Conrad.
In any case, Harrison died in 1923 and it is possible that in the 1980s I met someone else who met him.
Harrison went up to Oxford in 1848 where he met Martin Routh, who was then still President of Magdalen College, despite having been born in 1755.
When Routh was a little boy he met an old lady who, as a girl, saw King Charles II walking his spaniels in Magdalen Grove.
I, who this morning read the news about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, am either five or six removes from the King of England who hid in the royal oak tree with Henry Wilmot to avoid being found by the Parliamentarian soldiers below, tried and executed, following the Battle of Worcester in 1651.
Charles made Wilmot Earl of Rochester in 1652. He was the father of the poet, whose peccadillos Charles always forgave for his father's sake.
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