The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The concept of dieting would have been alien to our 17th century forbears. In those days, the plumper you were, the better. Plumpness indicated wealth and class, and women aspired to be plump and white, rather than thin and tanned as is the fashion now. The 17th...
On 30th January 1649 parliament cut off Charles I’s head. A year later the ‘king’s crown’, dating from the early Tudors, was ‘totally broken and defaced’. Charles’s father King James had called it ‘the symbol of a people’s love’. Parliament valued it at £1,100. The...
Author's Note: This morning (Sat 9th January, 2021) on Radio 4 I heard ‘On this day in 1799 William Pitt introduced Income Tax for the first time, in order to fund the war against Napoleon.’ Fact: on 9 January 1799 this country was at war with the French Republic, and...
In the early hours of 11th January 1645, King Charles I’s soldiers shadowed Abingdon, led by his nephew Prince Rupert. In the endgame of the English Civil War, the town had become a symbolic milestone; to finally capture it would resuscitate the royalist cause after a...
Fiction and other works of imagination have an insidious way of working their way into history. Stories that ring true, that look true, that appeal of our prejudices, become ‘fact’. I have uncovered several examples of this form of historical truthiness in which...
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true? Yes it is true, and it is one reason why a subject is worth returning to again and again. Each generation brings new insights to the past – or at least they should! It amazes me...
With his wife, Anne Bolyen, in the Tower, Henry VIII considered every detail of her coming death, pouring over plans for the scaffold. As he did so he made a unique decision. Anne, alone amongst all victims of the Tudors, was to be beheaded with a sword and not the...
10 Minute Tudors Leanda's series of 10 minute podcasts on: Soundcloud or Podbean
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I’m careful not to get too trapped in any one period! My particular interest is in individuals – often quite ordinary people - who find themselves cast into an extraordinary situation. I use their story to...
It was approaching midnight and the snow-capped peaks of the Roumeli Mountains in Greece could be seen gleaming in the moonlight. The American Liberator aircraft circled Mount Giona a couple of times before Eddie Myers gave the signal to jump. A few seconds later, he...
