George Bernard

In discussing Thomas Mayer’s Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal (LRB, 10 May), Blair Worden endorses Mayer’s claim that Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset was a ‘reform programme to be taken seriously as a plan to rehabilitate the high nobility and to restore it to its proper place at the head of the English commonwealth.’ Such an interpretation takes as fact the highly questionable...

In commenting sceptically on the legends surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Blair Worden (LRB, 24 November 1988) nonetheless lends credence to another legend when he writes of ‘the tradition of aristocratic protest which, over the previous three centuries, had opposed the rise of the Renaissance and Baroque monarchies’. In adopting such a view, he is placing too much weight on the political...

SIR: In his review of David Starkey’s The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (LRB, 7 August), Professor Conrad Russell persuasively emphasises the role of the court, broadly defined, involving king, queen, mistresses, counsellors, favourites, officials, as the arena in which important political decisions were made. It was here that Henry VIII found Anne Boleyn, here that the break with...