England

Lucy Worsley reveals the strange stories of the cast of characters on the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace, painted by William Kent for George I in the 1720s.

In the mid-18th century – at the height of the power struggle between France and England and the political ferment of both nations – a French spy with a peculiar personal agenda came to prominence in London. Jonathan Conlin tells his story.

The Wars of the Roses were no clear-cut dynastic conflict, but rather a series of struggles between the magnates of the age and the retinues they maintained by Alan Rogers. Anthony Pollard offered his own separate historiographical analysis in 2010.

Anthony Pollard visits the History Today archive to examine Alan Rogers’ claim that a lack of principle among rival lords resulted in the great conflagration of 15th-century England.

Early 17th century England saw the emergence of pirates, much romanticised creatures whose lives were often nasty, brutish and short. Adrian Tinniswood examines one such career.

The murder of a 12-year-old boy in Norwich in 1144 inspired Thomas of Monmouth, a monk from the city's cathedral, to create an anti-semitic account of the incident. His influential work reveals much about life and belief in medieval England, argues Miri Rubin.

Eadwig died on October 1st, 959, still in his teens, in circumstances which remain unknown.

Ian Friel argues that popular ideas of the nature of Elizabethan seapower are distorted by concentration on big names and major events. Elizabethan England’s emergence on to the world stage owed much more to merchant ships and common seamen than we might think.

Patrick Williams provides us with the results of the latest research on the Armada

John Matusiak pricks the imperial pretension of the monarch who came to the throne 500 years ago