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British & Irish history: c 1500 to c 1700
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The story of Perkin
Warbeck is one of the
most compelling mysteries
of English history. A
young man suddenly
emerged claiming to be
Richard of York, the
younger of the Princes in
the Tower. As such, he
tormented Henry VII for
eight years. He tried
three times to invade
England and behaved like
a prince. Officially,
however, he was
proclaimed to be Perkin
Warbeck, the son of a
Flemish boatman. A
diplomatic pawn, he was
used by the greatest
European rulers of the
age for their own
purposes. All who dealt
with him gave him the
identity they wished him
to have: either the Duke
of York or a jumped-up
lad from Flanders. It is
possible that he was
neither. It is also
possible that, by the
end, even he did not
really know who he was.
In Perkin Ann Wroe tells
again a marvellous tale
that is on the brink of
being forgotten. She also
dissects the official
cover story. In doing so
she delves into the
secret corners of
European history and
produces a portrait of
the late fifteenth
century that is
breathtaking in its
detail.--'Extraordinary-Perkin
is a masterclass in how
biography can breathe
life into the darkest and
most inert pockets of the
past' Guardian --'An
unforgettable book-. The
best book I have ever
reviewed in these pages'
Mail on
Sunday--'Gripping-With
Perkin, Wroe has
breathed new life into an
obscure figure' Daily
Mail--'A book that
captures the temper of an
age' Financial
Times--'Rewards every
moment of attention'
Sunday
Telegraph--'Enthralling-A
triumph' Scotsman--'One
of the best books I have
read on the Middle Ages'
New
Statesman--'Colourful,
engaged and engaging'
Independent on Sunday
Availability: In Stock
£11.23
Available
-
The story of Perkin
Warbeck is one of the
most compelling mysteries
of English history. A
young man suddenly
emerged claiming to be
Richard of York, the
younger of the Princes in
the Tower. As such, he
tormented Henry VII for
eight years. He tried
three times to invade
England and behaved like
a prince. Officially,
however, he was
proclaimed to be Perkin
Warbeck, the son of a
Flemish boatman. A
diplomatic pawn, he was
used by the greatest
European rulers of the
age for their own
purposes. All who dealt
with him gave him the
identity they wished him
to have: either the Duke
of York or a jumped-up
lad from Flanders. It is
possible that he was
neither. It is also
possible that, by the
end, even he did not
really know who he was.
In Perkin Ann Wroe tells
again a marvellous tale
that is on the brink of
being forgotten. She also
dissects the official
cover story. In doing so
she delves into the
secret corners of
European history and
produces a portrait of
the late fifteenth
century that is
breathtaking in its
detail.--'Extraordinary-Perkin
is a masterclass in how
biography can breathe
life into the darkest and
most inert pockets of the
past' Guardian --'An
unforgettable book-. The
best book I have ever
reviewed in these pages'
Mail on
Sunday--'Gripping-With
Perkin, Wroe has
breathed new life into an
obscure figure' Daily
Mail--'A book that
captures the temper of an
age' Financial
Times--'Rewards every
moment of attention'
Sunday
Telegraph--'Enthralling-A
triumph' Scotsman--'One
of the best books I have
read on the Middle Ages'
New
Statesman--'Colourful,
engaged and engaging'
Independent on Sunday
Availability: In Stock
£8.09
Available
-
Linda Colley's first book
since the immensely
successful and critically
acclaimed Britons will
explore the individual
experiences of some of
the many British people -
captives or renegades -
who, voluntarily or
involuntarily, lived
throughout the Empire
during a period of 250
years. This unique and
original book provides an
alternative history of
the British Empire and a
brilliant new take on the
whole imperial adventure.
Many Britons - taken as
slaves, imprisoned, or,
by their own choice,
long-term residents in
the outposts of Empire -
left written records of
their motives and
experiences. Linda Colley
examines this rich and
relatively unexplored
material, vividly
recreating individual
lives and personalities.
Her book travels from one
of Britain's earliest
colonies, Tangier, to
other parts of Africa,
and North America to
India and beyond. She
shows us the world
through the eyes of the
individuals who inhabited
it while illuminating
many central issues,
such as national
identity, attitudes
towards race, and the
power or impotence of
Empire.
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£18.00
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Ranging over a quarter of
a millennium and four
continents,
Captives uncovers
the experiences
Availability: In Stock
£8.99
Available
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'Continual, destruction
in the foretop, the pox
above board, the plague
between decks, hell in
the forecastle and the
devil at the
helm.'
It is the
summer of 1588, and the
fate and future of
England hangs in the
balance. Obsessed by the
dream of reclaiming
England for the Catholic
Church - and adding
another country to his
sprawling dominions -
Philip II of Spain has
assembled a fleet of
huge, castle-crowned
galleons that stretches
for miles across the face
of the ocean. In wait in
the Netherlands lies a
battle-hardened Spanish
army, ferocious
professionals with a
taste for rape, looting
and atrocity.
Across the
Channel the English are
scraping together bands
of barely trained men,
many armed only with
scythes, stakes or
longbows. Great warning
beacons stand all along
the coast of England;
torches and kindling lie
to hand. Watchmen strain
their eyes to see over
the horizon. Their only
hope lies in the English
Navy.
But Philip's
Armada is doomed before
it even leaves port. As
soon as it engages with
the English fleet, its
shortcomings are clear in
the face of superior
tactics and firepower.
Its hulls shot through
with cannon fire, its
men dying in thousands
from wounds and disease,
the mightiest fleet ever
assembled is mercilessly
harried into fleeing
north, at the mercy of
the elements. Over forty
Spanish ships are wrecked
on the Irish coast;
survivors crawling ashore
have their throats slit
and their purses
ransacked. The dream of
subduing the Protestant
English lies in
tatters.
A
triumphant combination of
historical detail and
storytelling flair, The
Confident Hope of a
Miracle draws on
undiscovered and little
known personal papers and
records to tell the epic
story of the Spanish
Armada in all its scope.
No book has ever conveyed
in such vivid, living
detail how kings, queens
and courtiers, sea
captains, deckhands and
galley slaves, the
highest and the lowest in
the land, fared in those
turbulent months as the
fate of England teetered
on the
brink.
Availability: In Stock
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Available
-
'Continual, destruction
in the foretop, the pox
above board, the plague
between decks, hell in
the forecastle and the
devil at the
helm.'
It is the
summer of 1588, and the
fate and future of
England hangs in the
balance. Obsessed by the
dream of reclaiming
England for the Catholic
Church - and adding
another country to his
sprawling dominions -
Philip II of Spain has
assembled a fleet of
huge, castle-crowned
galleons that stretches
for miles across the face
of the ocean. In wait in
the Netherlands lies a
battle-hardened Spanish
army, ferocious
professionals with a
taste for rape, looting
and
atrocity.
Across
the Channel the English
are scraping together
bands of barely trained
men, many armed only
with scythes, stakes or
longbows. Great warning
beacons stand all along
the coast of England;
torches and kindling lie
to hand. Watchmen strain
their eyes to see over
the horizon. Their only
hope lies in the English
Navy.
But Philip's
Armada is doomed before
it even leaves port. As
soon as it engages with
the English fleet, its
shortcomings are clear in
the face of superior
tactics and firepower.
Its hulls shot through
with cannon fire, its
men dying in thousands
from wounds and disease,
the mightiest fleet ever
assembled is mercilessly
harried into fleeing
north, at the mercy of
the elements. Over forty
Spanish ships are wrecked
on the Irish coast;
survivors crawling ashore
have their throats slit
and their purses
ransacked. The dream of
subduing the Protestant
English lies in
tatters.
A
triumphant combination of
historical detail and
storytelling flair, THE
CONFIDENT HOPE OF A
MIRACLE draws on
undiscovered and little
known personal papers and
records to tell the epic
story of the Spanish
Armada in all its scope.
No book has ever conveyed
in such vivid, living
detail how kings, queens
and courtiers, sea
captains, deckhands and
galley slaves, the
highest and the lowest in
the land, fared in those
turbulent months as the
fate of England teetered
on the
brink.
Availability: In Stock
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Available
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An abused child, yet
confident of her destiny
to reign, a woman in a
man¹s world,
passionately sexual yet,
she said, a virgin,
famed as England's most
successful ruler yet
actually doing very
little, Elizabeth I is a
bundle of contradictions.
Starting with
Elizabeth¹s own speeches
and writings, Starkey
lays novel emphasis on
two things: her faith
made her see religion as
a purely personal
relationship between the
individual conscience and
God, yet her
sophisticated education
led her to a
smoke-and-mirrors view of
politics, in which
clever image-making and
speech-writing could
solve or postpone real
problems. The result was
a surprisingly
contemporary approach to
some very modern
questions, like civil
strife in Scotland and
Ireland and the risk of
England¹s absorption
into a European
super-state. This new
approach to the enigma of
the Queen¹s character is
presented within a lively
and readable retelling of
her reign; her love for
Robert Dudley, the
tragi-comedy of her
favourites and suitors,
her epic struggles with
Mary Queen of Scots and
Philip II of Spain, and
the final, humiliating
debacle of her
relationship with Robert
Devereux, Earl of Essex.
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Tudor England abounded
with traitors great and
small, whose ill-timed,
self-defeating and
irrational antics
guaranteed their failure.
Yet from the inept and
calamitous intrigues of
'Sweet-Lips' Gregory
Botolf in 1540 and Lord
Admiral Thomas Seymour
during the reign of
Edward VI, to the
bungling efforts at a
palace coup by Robert
Devereux, second Earl of
Essex, during the final
years of Elizabeth's
reign, treason didn't
prosper. Modern
historians tend to
dismiss the wave of
political disasters as
the works of men of
unsound mind. Here,
Lacey Baldwin Smith
re-evaluates this mania
for conspiracy in the
light of psychological
and social impulses
peculiar to the age.
Tudor England
accepted unquestioningly
the conspiracy theory of
history; it assumed the
existence of evil; and it
instinctively believed
that a greater and
usually malicious reality
lay behind outward
appearance. Sensible men
were for ever on guard
against their Iago,
dedicated to evil for its
own sake, who lurked
under the guise of a
trusted friend or
servant. Father's advised
their sons, 'Love no
man: trust no man';
contemporary literature
and drama reflected and
reinforced this belief,
as did the essentials of
Tudor education which
taught students how to
dissemble convincingly
upon a public
stage.
By looking
at the behaviour of the
flamboyant Robert
Devereux (who bore all
the hallmarks of
paranoia) as a case study
in political hysteria,
Lacey Baldwin Smith
examines the ways in
which insecurity in the
midst of political and
religious revolution was
obsessive and
self-perpetuating, and
produced throughout the
kingdom a state of
hysteria that was unique
to the sixteenth
century.
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Henry VIII was almost
never alone. He was
surrounded, twenty-four
hours a day, by the
small group of intimates
and personal attendants
who made up the staff of
his Privy Chamber. They
organised his daily life,
kept him amused and
acted as the landline
between the King and the
formal machinery of
government. These men,
intermarried, interbred
and close-knit even in
their mutual feuding,
were supremely well
placed to rig politics
and patronage for their
own benefit. Their
influence was important
and sometimes decisive:
factions in the Privy
Chamber destroyed Anne
Boleyn, they frustrated
the 'Catholic' reaction
of the 1540s, and, by
doctoring Henry's will,
prepared the way for the
full-blooded
Protestantism of his
son's reign. The Reign of
Henry the VIII is not so
much a book about Henry
VIII. It is about the
great game of politics
over which he presided.
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-
There had been other
fires, of course. Four
hundred and fifty years
before, the city had
almost burned to the
ground. The citizens
still called it the Great
Fire. But that autumn
they were more fearful of
destruction borne by
water. Across the sea,
the Dutch and French
threatened a country
barely recovered from
civil war and still
uncertain of its new
King. Yet the signs from
the heavens were ominous:
comets, pyramids of
flame, monsters born in
city slums. Then, in the
early hours of 2
September 1666, a small
fire broke out on the
ground floor of a baker's
house in Pudding Lane. In
five days that small fire
would devastate the third
largest city in the
Western world: London. By
Permission of Heaven,
Adrian Tinniswood's
magnificent new account
of the Great Fire of
London, explores the
history of a cataclysm
and its consequences,
from that first small
blaze to the decades-long
work of rebuilding. The
statistics of the
disaster are terrible:
436 acres of closely
packed streets burned;
13, 200 houses destroyed;
-10 million lost at a
time when -10 million
represented the City's
annual income for 800
years. But the Great Fire
wasn't simply a tragedy
of economics or
architecture. It wrecked
lives and destroyed
livelihoods, it killed
and maimed, and it drove
Londoners mad in their
quest for vengeance. By
Permission of Heaven
pieces together the
untold human story of the
Fire and its aftermath -
the panic and terror,
the bewilderment and
violence and chaos, the
search for scapegoats,
the rebirth of a city.
Above all, it provides
an unsurpassable
recreation of what
happened to
schoolchildren and
servants, courtiers and
clergymen when the
streets of London ran
with fire and 'by ye
Permission of Heaven,
Hell broke loose upon
this Protestant City.'
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Charles I waged civil
wars that cost one in ten
Englishmen their lives.
But in 1649 parliament
was hard put to find a
lawyer with the skill and
daring to prosecute a
King who was above the
law: in the end the man
they briefed was the
radical barrister, John
Cooke.
Cooke
was a plebeian, son of a
poor farmer, but he had
the courage to bring the
King
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If the story that struck
the Grand Banks off
Newfoundland in October
1991 was The Perfect
Storm, the fire that
destroyed London in
September 1666 was The
Perfect Fire.
A
fire needs only three
things: a spark to ignite
it, and the fuel and
oxygen to feed it. In
1666, a ten-month
drought had turned London
into a tinderbox. The
older parts of the city
were almost entirely
composed of wood-frame
buildings and shanties.
The riverside wharves
were stack with wood,
coal, oil, tallow,
hemp, pitch, brandy,
and almost very other
combustible material
known to seventeenth
century man. On 2
September 1666, London
ignited. Over the next
five days the gale blew
without interruption and
the resulting firestorm
destroyed the whole
city.
THE DREADFUL
JUDGEMENT tells the true,
human story of the Great
Fire of London through
the eyes of the
individuals caught up in
it. It is a historical
story combining modern
knowledge of the physics
of fire, forensics and
arson investigation with
the moving eye-witness
accounts to produce a
searing depiction of the
terrible reality of the
Great Fire of London and
its impact on those who
lived through
it.
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On 5 July 1884, the
yacht Mignonette set sail
from Southampton bound
for Sydney. Halfway
through their projected
one hundred and twenty
day voyage, Captain Tom
Dudley and his crew of
three men were beset by a
monstrous storm off the
coast of Africa. After
four days of battling
towering waves and
hurricane gales, their
yacht was finally crushed
by a ferocious forty foot
wave.
The
survivors were cast
adrift a thousand miles
from the nearest landfall
in an open thirteen foot
dinghy without
provisions, water or
shelter from the
scorching sun. When,
after twenty four days,
they were finally rescued
by a passing yacht, the
Moctezuma, only three
men were left and they
were in an appalling
condition. The ordeal
that they endured and the
trial which followed
their eventual return to
England held the whole
nation - from the
lowliest ship's deckhand
to Queen Victoria herself
- spellbound during the
following
winter.
This is
the true story of the
voyage and the subsequent
court case which outlawed
for ever a practice
followed since men first
put to the ocean in
boats: the custom of the
sea.
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Two hundred years before
Hardy disguised it as
Casterbridge, Dorchester
was a typical English
county town, of middling
size and unremarkable
achievements. But on 6
August 1613 much of it
was destroyed in a great
conflagration, which its
inhabitants regarded as a
'fire from heaven', the
catalyst for the events
described in this book.
Over the next twenty
years, a time of
increasing political and
religious turmoil all
over Europe, Dorchester
became the most
religiously radical town
in the kingdom. The
tolerant, paternalist
Elizabethan town
oligarchy was quickly
replaced by a group of
men who had a vision of a
godly community in which
power was to be exercised
according to religious
commitment rather than
wealth or rank. One of
this book's most
remarkable achievements
is the re-creation, with
an intimacy unique for an
English community so
distant from our own, of
the lives of those who do
not make it into history
books. We glimpse the
ordinary men and women of
the town drinking and
swearing, fornicating
and repenting,
triumphing over their
neighbours or languishing
in prison, striving to
live up to the new ideals
of their community or
rejecting them with
bitter anger and mocking
laughter. In it subtle
exploration of human
motives and aspirations,
in its brilliant and
detailed reconstruction,
this book shows how much
of the past we can
recover when in the hands
of a master historian.
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-
On 5 July 1884, the
yacht Mignonette set sail
from Southampton bound
for Sydney. Halfway
through their projected
one hundred and twenty
day voyage, Captain Tom
Dudley and his crew of
three men were beset by a
monstrous storm off the
coast of Africa. After
four days of battling
towering waves and
hurricane gales, their
yacht was finally crushed
by a ferocious forty foot
wave.
The
survivors were cast
adrift a thousand miles
from the nearest landfall
in an open thirteen foot
dinghy without
provisions, water or
shelter from the
scorching sun. When,
after twenty four days,
they were finally rescued
by a passing yacht, the
Moctezuma, only three
men were left and they
were in an appalling
condition. The ordeal
that they endured and the
trial which followed
their eventual return to
England held the whole
nation - from the
lowliest ship's deckhand
to Queen Victoria herself
- spellbound during the
following
winter.
This is
the true story of the
voyage and the subsequent
court case which outlawed
for ever a practice
followed since men first
put to the ocean in
boats: the custom of the
sea.
Availability: In Stock
£8.09
Available
-
On 5 July 1884, the
yacht Mignonette set sail
from Southampton bound
for Sydney. Halfway
through their projected
one hundred and twenty
day voyage, Captain Tom
Dudley and his crew of
three men were beset by a
monstrous storm off the
coast of Africa. After
four days of battling
towering waves and
hurricane gales, their
yacht was finally crushed
by a ferocious forty foot
wave.
The
survivors were cast
adrift a thousand miles
from the nearest landfall
in an open thirteen foot
dinghy without
provisions, water or
shelter from the
scorching sun. When,
after twenty four days,
they were finally rescued
by a passing yacht, the
Moctezuma, only three
men were left and they
were in an appalling
condition. The ordeal
that they endured and the
trial which followed
their eventual return to
England held the whole
nation - from the
lowliest ship's deckhand
to Queen Victoria herself
- spellbound during the
following
winter.
This is
the true story of the
voyage and the subsequent
court case which outlawed
for ever a practice
followed since men first
put to the ocean in
boats: the custom of the
sea.
Availability: In Stock
£9.38
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