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“... as a precedent for 1688 the revolution of the 1640s, which had culminated in the execution of Charles I. Often described as the Great Rebellion, the earlier revolution was for conservative Whigs a monumental embarrassment, not least on the Feast of the Blessed Royal Martyr every 30 January, a day when some Whig preachers opted for prudent evasiveness on ...”

“... appropriate career of a mercenary. By 1579, when James, at the age of 13, made his formal entry as king into Edinburgh, Montgomerie was there to write two poems that clearly were meant to accompany pageants. For the next few years he was a court poet and apparently, in a very minor way, a favourite of James, who gave him a pension of five hundred marks in ...”

“... consistently satisfying. It is announced at the opening with the declaration that the support of Charles I’s Government for the drainage schemes illustrates the absolutist tendencies at work in that regime. Yet it is soon apparent that such projects were attempted before Charles’s reign, by a client of Burghley under ...”

“... performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many apocryphal but irresistibly dramatic meetings, this one a dreamlike and overwrought ...”

“... he was a supplier of headgear à la mode to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest ...”

“... until 1650, but was privately circulated in 1640, when Parliament was finally convened by Charles I for the first time in 11 years, and members of the Short Parliament were vociferously denouncing the king’s attacks on liberty. Later that year, Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him ...”

“... Jerusalem, had not woken in the night with a terrible thirst and sipped the water forbidden her by King Solomon, peeved by her refusal to sleep with him, and in his own palace, too. He had to make do with her slave girl, but stipulated that the Queen should take nothing from the palace or she would pay the penalty. She scoffed at the idea that he might have ...”

“... the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles Whiting, in his ’45: The Final Drive from the Rhine to the Baltic, provides repulsive detail which makes such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of ...”

“... should be present for any royal birth. (This ‘ancient tradition’ dated back to the reign of King James II and the rumour about the ‘warming-pan baby’ delivered covertly to his consort, Mary of Modena.) So J.R. Clynes, Home Secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, had to journey to Glamis Castle and wait for 16 days for the waters to break. He passed the time ...”

“... Before we come to Philip’s internal strife, we have to contend with the randy bonhomie of old King George. It is said that American viewers are distressed to find the word ‘cunt’ used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from Britain to the former ...”

“... was acquired for the Duke of Mantua on the recommendation of Rubens (and from Mantua passed to King Charles I). The question of private and public is also of obvious importance for the vexed question of Caravaggio’s homosexuality. His early paintings of boys suggestively half-dressed or undressed, with melting expressions, preparing to play musical ...”

“... of Los Angeles, for example, was termed a “manifesto” in quite respectable circles.’ Charles Silberman, an editor of Fortune, recommended, in his influential Crisis in Black and White, the Saul Alinsky technique of ‘rubbing raw the sores of discontent’. Change would almost certainly be accompanied by violence, Silberman wrote. Nor was it ...”

“... different contingencies would not have made any essential difference. John Adamson asks: what if Charles I had avoided the Civil War? In line with revisionist readings of 17th-century history, he uses this question to make a case for the non-inevitability of a clash between the King and his English Parliaments, had he not ...”

“... were quite often written down. In the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish nobles warn King Robert that if he should let them down and ‘yield Scotland or us to the English king or people’, they will dethrone him and choose another. ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than us to accept ...”

“... at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his brother, Charles I’. At the same time a certain value, undefinable in economic terms, came to be attached to the ownership of paintings which had no equivalent in the ownership of lace gowns or silver-plate – or even palatial dwellings. And almost certainly this ...”