England

The failure of the Plot, writes Cyril Hamshere, forms a complex story of espionage and counter-espionage; its events caused Elizabeth I to give up all ideas of restoring Mary Queen of Scots to the Scottish throne.

James I was a firm believer in Christian unity; Dorothy Boyd Rush describes his distrust of extremists, Catholic or Protestant.

Francis Austen served throughout the Napoleonic Wars and, writes David Hopkinson, lived until the age of ninety-one; an Admiral of the Fleet.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Marjorie Sykes, the arrival of migrant labourers, who often visited the same district year after year, was a distinctive feature of English country-life.

Through the marriage of a baronet and a scrivener’s heiress, writes Francis Sheppard, the Grosvenors eventually became the wealthiest family in Europe.

Early in the 1650s, writes Alan Haynes, this intrepid noblewoman took the ‘extraordinary’ step of publishing her own poems.

Tracked down to a ‘hut in the cavern of a rock’, writes J.J.N. McGurk, Desmond met his death at the hands of fellow Irishmen.

In 1579 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, cousin to the 14th Earl of Desmond, took up arms against the English foe.

N.M. Sutherland describes how some two hundred English exiles found refuge in Protestant Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor.