Richard III, Game of Thrones, and Invading France
Pretty much everybody else on the interweb-thingy has had their fourpenn’orth about last week’s reburial of King Richard III, and I suppose it was only fitting that the events divided opinion just as sharply as the Marmite Monarch himself – depending on your point of view and which bloggers and tweeters you read, either a […]
Highways and Byways of the 17th Century: the ‘Royal Escape’
There was quite a big response to last week’s post on King Charles I’s possible illegitimate daughter, Joanna Bridges, so I thought I’d follow it up by instituting a new occasional series, ‘Highways and Byways of the 17th Century’, covering some of the odd or lesser known stories that I’ve come across during over thirty […]
Disorderly Houses
…Or, The Very Long History of British Parliamentarians throwing their toys out of the pram over foreign policy. The government’s defeat over its proposed intervention in Syria had political journalists scratching their heads to think of past precedents. Those with GCSE History managed to crawl back as far as Suez, 1956, and Norway, 1940, while those […]
The Dai is Cast
All novelists have a secret fantasy. Actually, it’s not terribly secret. It’s the cast list. Yes, admit it, my fellow authors, you know what I’m talking about. That cast list. The one for the film of your book – the lavish Hollywood spectacular or BBC mini-series based on our purple prose, the prize that we all dream about. […]
The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 3
To finish off this ‘mini-series’ about the ‘thirty ships’ of Charles II’s reign, I thought I’d post a brief history of the Third Rate Hope that I wrote about twelve years ago as part of a leaving present for some friends (called, yes, Hope). This was based on manuscript sources at the National Archives, Kew, notably the […]
The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 2
Following last week’s post about the reappearance of the wreck of the 1678 Third Rate Anne, this week’s concentrates on the first of the ‘thirty ships’ of Charles II’s reign, the Lenox, and especially on the exciting project to build a full-sized replica of her. The Lenox was launched at Deptford dockyard on Friday 12 April 1678 (not on the […]
