Clare Jackson

Inscribed in Latin​ on a large floor slab in the chapel of Eton College is a memorial to a former provost, Sir Henry Wotton, who died, aged 71, in December 1639: ‘Here lies the first author of this sentiment: The itch of disputation is the scab of the churches. Inquire his name elsewhere.’ Izaak Walton was the first to pursue this prompt to biographical appraisal in his Reliquiae...

On​ a recent visit to Apethorpe Palace in Northamptonshire, I was told by the English Heritage tour guide that James VI of Scotland was ‘the person whom Elizabeth I had chosen to be her successor’. Only days after Elizabeth’s death aged 69 in March 1603, Henri IV of France’s ambassador, the comte de Beaumont, similarly reported from London ‘the immediate...

On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on.’...

Two decades ago​, the historian Blair Worden praised a feat of deception ‘without parallel in English literature’. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow were first published posthumously in 1698-99, and edited in two volumes in 1894 by Charles Firth, later the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. For centuries, the Memoirs were one of the best-known sources on the civil wars....

In​ a collection of essays published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest...