England

Thomas of Lancaster: the Turbulent Earl

Albert Makinson offers a study of Edward II's “over-mighty subject” who, having suffered a violent death as a rebel against the King, became a popular hero and a strong candidate for canonization.

William Beckford: Man of Taste

Boyd Alexander profiles a man whose whole life and fortune were spent in creating and living out a youthful dream. But William Beckford was not only a romantic visionary: he was also an inspired collector and an artistic pioneer.

A Vous Entier: John of Lancaster, 1389-1435

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.

Lotteries and Government Finance in England

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.

John of Gaunt’s Grande Chevauchée

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.

The Death of William Rufus

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?

Cromwell and the Historians

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”.

The Cromwells at Whitehall

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.

Robinson Crusoe: an Englishman of the Age

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.”

Julius Caesar’s Elephant

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.