The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
When Elizabeth I lay dying in March 1603, England held its breath. Later generations would remember the Tudor succession as smooth, almost serene. But that is hindsight. At the time, many feared – and some expected – civil war. Elizabeth had refused to name her...
Your book After Elizabeth opens at Whitehall during the last Christmas of Elizabeth I’s reign. From a political perspective, what sort of environment was Sir John Harington walking into? He walked into a court glittering on the brink of extinction. There were dances,...
Leanda de Lisle’s biography of Henrietta Maria has burnt through the mist of four hundred years of propaganda. It pitches Henrietta at her own level. She is brought down from pious pedestals and raised up from the mire in which her reputation has often lain. With this...
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A renaissance-hunting scene opens Trevor Nunn’s 1985 film, Lady Jane. Amongst the white clad riders is Frances, mother of the future Nine Day’s Queen. When the doe is brought to bay, Frances dismounts. Soon a river of blood will run on the snow. The scene captures her...
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...
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...
