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17th July, 2018 in Biography & Memoir, History
On 24 March 1603 the 69 year old Elizabeth I died, bringing to an end her ‘golden’ Elizabethan age and the Tudor dynasty. James VI of Scotland, the son of her former rival Mary, Queen of Scots, was named her heir, and the Stuart era began, bringing England and Scotland under the…
4th May, 2018 in Biography & Memoir, History, Military
400 years since the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, John Matusiak discusses King James I of England and VI of Scotland’s relationship with one of the bloodiest conflicts in European history. The moral aversion to warfare so glibly evinced by most modern-day leaders was h…
17th January, 2018 in Biography & Memoir, History
In January 1648 a measure was passed declaring that the two Houses would ‘make no further Addresses or Applications to the King’ and ‘receive no more any Message from the King’. To complete Charles’ isolation from power, it was also made treasonable for anyone else to apply…
25th October, 2016 in History
Death figured prominently in the Tudor psyche, as it did throughout contemporary European, and this outstanding example of a memento mori, or ‘reminder of death’, could not embody more aptly both the transience and potentially agonising end of any sixteenth-century…
18th December, 2015 in Biography & Memoir, History
As the power brokers of the next reign span their webs and hovered solicitously in the background, Henry VIII’s ailing body had deteriorated steadily throughout January 1547. Some thirty-eight years earlier, he had ascended the throne of England, the epitome of health and vitalit…
18th December, 2015 in Biography & Memoir, History
For far too long now, the full scale of Henry VIII’s misdeeds and miscalculations has been largely hidden from public view – mainly, it seems, beneath the copious skirts of his six wives, all of whom, both individually and collectively, have received far more than their fair shar…
