History Today

David Mitchell introduces a seventeenth-century politician who hoped to see the art of government reduced to an exact science, free from “the noise and dirt of party strife.”

Neville Williams profiles Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk (1538-1572), a great territorial magnate, commanding fanatical affection and wielding an influence that was little less than absolute.

C.V. Wedgwood recounts the circumstances the Earl of Arundel’s Embassy to Germany in 1636 as recounted in William Crowne’s Diary, the Earl’s letters and other contemporary sources.

Bernard Pool describes how the diarist was determined, in the interests of the Navy and for his own satisfaction, to strike the best possible bargain for the Crown.

Despite being denounced by Huxley as a man who used high gifts to discredit humble seekers after truth, David Newsome writes of how this Victorian prelate has also been acclaimed as the greatest bishop of his age.

John Andrew Boyle describes how, in the early thirteenth century, the Mongol hordes devastated Turkestan and Persia, where the grandson of Genghis Khan founded a dynasty.

Cyril Falls describes how, from the problems left by the Balkan Wars, sprang the greater catastrophe that overwhelmed Europe in 1914.

R.J. White describes how all sorts and conditions of men, at every stage of transition of a rapidly changing society, crowded the early-nineteenth-century scene.

Few who met Napoleon Bonaparte failed to find him fascinating as well as formidable. Felix Markham portrays the Emperor as his Marshals, Ministers, servants and family saw him at the height of his power. 

J.C. Barry looks at how the Thirty-Nine Articles, defining the doctrine of the Church of England, were drawn up by a Convocation that met in London in the 16th century.