Scotland

Four hundred years ago, writes Antonia Fraser, the young Queen of Scots, then struggling to hold her own against her factious nobles, saw a favourite servant butchered at her feet.

G.W.S. Barrow describes how, 260 years ago, the Scottish people made a difficult but necessary choice.

W. Brownlie Hendry describes how a sixteenth-century Scottish laird, with, in Gibbon's words, ‘a head to contrive and a hand to execute,’ worked out the powerful aid to mathematical calculation known as logarithms.

Antonia Fraser describes how no murder in the course of history has aroused more argument than the assassination of the Queen of Scots’ husband at Kirk o’Field on the night of February 9th, 1567.

It was in the spring of 1559 that ‘the uproar for religion’ began in Scotland; J.H. Burns introduces Ninian Winzet, a faithful cleric on the losing side.

In September 1513 the fourth James Stewart became the last king to die in battle on British soil. Linda Porter argues that his life and achievements deserve a more positive reassessment.

Resolved to examine the prospect before his younger brother emigrated, Shirreff undertook an arduous perambulation of the United States and Canada. G.E. Mingay describes events.

J.H. Burns writes that few men have had a more decisive influence on the history of Scotland than John Knox. At what point in his career did he make up his mind to use his religious authority for political purposes, in order to bring down the “idolatrous sovereignties” that he saw around him? And why did he thus, almost unwittingly, become a revolutionary?

R.J. Adam presents a new study of the Jacobite rising, and of the complex pattern of local interests that helped to determine the conduct of the Scottish clan-leaders.

J.W. Blake describes how, during the colonial period, just over half a million emigrants—English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish—are calculated to have left Europe for a new home in America. Often they reached their goal only at the cost of hideous suffering.