Alex R. Myers introduces the conciliatory and resourceful, hard-working and generousthe brother of Henry V, who was both an able soldier and a gifted Regent of France. Even his treatment of St. Joan by contemporary standards seems neither harsh nor dishonourable.
From the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes Penry Williams, State Lotteries were a regular feature of English government finance first introduced by Queen Elizabeth I.
In August, 1373, a large and slow-moving English army set out to march across the heart of France. Their expedition lasted for five months and covered nearly a thousand miles, much of it through hostile and almost unknown country. Alfred Burne explains why it was considered a resounding feat of arms, even by the French themselves.
On August 2nd, 1100, the harsh, violent, cynical ruler, who was the second Norman King of England, mysteriously met his death while hunting in the New Forest. W.L. Warren asks: was it by accident or conspiratorial design, or was he the victim of a pagan fertility cult?
Critics of Cromwell, both British and foreign, have long continued to “find what they were looking for” in the records of his career and character. Some have denounced him as a hypocritical tyrant; others have described him as the finest type of middle-class Englishman. Once at least, writes D.H. Pennington, he has been acclaimed as “the greatest Englishman of all time”.
With his “great and majestic deportment and comely presence Cromwell himself was fully equal to his new dignities as Lord Protector. Not so, writes C.V. Wedgwood, all the members of his household; his wife was accused of squalid parsimony, and his younger daughters of undue frivolity.
Francis Watson delights in Defoe's inimitable personage not only as the hero of one of the greatest of all adventure stories, but “as the portrait of an Englishman, a representative of the contemporary middle class, with a Protestant stimulus to hard work, founding a new age of commercial, industrial and political development.”
Caesar once crossed the Thames on the back of an animal previously unseen by Britons. Here, C.E. Stevens assesses just how much of a historical anomaly this pairing was.
Albert Makinson assesses the rival party claims of Lancaster and York, which afforded the pretext for a blaze of plebeian discontent and patrician lawlessness that filled England for the next one hundred and fifty years with a profound horror of civil war genealogy of the ruling family, and fewer still in the principles of parliamentary democracy.
J.P. Kenyon profiles William III, of whom Hallam said: “It must ever be an honour to the English Crown that it has been worn by so great a man.”
