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“... to facilitate a Spanish invasion of England – caused James major political difficulties, but the King remained loyal to him. On the eve of his death in 1625, James recommended Huntly to his son Charles as ‘the most faithful servant that ever served a prince’. The summer of 1587 also saw the visit to Scotland of ...”

“... The quatercentenary commemorative King James Bible (KJB) sits on my desk as I write: a satisfying artefact in its chocolate livery enriched by opulently gilded top, tail and fore edges, with stout chocolate slipcase to match, impressive in its folio bulk, though not nearly as bulky as the originals of 1611, which needed a sturdy lectern to bear them, announcing their presence with a swagger equal to the most majestic of England’s medieval church buildings ...”

“... to the press in late 1647. One of its latest datable poems was written in August that year, when Charles I was negotiating to make peace with Parliament and was reconstructing a household of musicians and courtiers at Hampton Court. Negotiations broke down, and in November the king fled. By then Hesperides – which might ...”

“... one but all mankind’s epitome. Merivel climbs into the resplendent and capricious patronage of King Charles II (here portrayed as the all-knowing fairy-tale autocrat) and for a time lives Persarum rege beatior, the purring recipient of gifts, favours, honours, the King’s loving confidant and clown. The highest ...”

“... which form the subject of this book. Rather than provide a narrative account of the fighting, Charles Carlton tries to convey the flavour of the wars as combatants and non-combatants experienced them. He follows current fashion by treating the fighting in England, Ireland and Scotland as part of a single struggle, and shows that in all three kingdoms the ...”

“... theory to promote the cause of Parliament against the Crown and to legitimise the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Hobbes’s counter-revolutionary challenge eventually won the day. To cite Berlin’s own litany, we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely ...”

“... 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. Then, in 1970, a manuscript of Ludlow’s titled ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ was auctioned at ...”

“... roses bloomed eternal in the châteaux of Renaissance France. From the mid-15th century, when Charles VII anointed Agnès Sorel, the country’s first maîtresse en titre, to the late 16th century, when Gabrielle d’Estrées persuaded her lover Henri de Navarre, later Henri IV, to abjure his controversial Calvinist faith, the French court was home to a ...”

“... the most powerful woman in Europe, a defiantly hands-on female ruler whose marriage to Ferdinand, king of the lesser Spanish kingdom of Aragon, created the germ of modern Spain and marked the arrival of a formidable new power in world politics. Their conquest of the Moorish emirate of Granada and their deployment of the Inquisition, forced conversion ...”

“... as the Scots quickly realised, was one of the things of which union had deprived them: when Charles I went to war with Spain, in 1625, there appears to be almost no evidence that Scotland was so much as informed, let alone consulted. Some time shortly after this date, Secretary Coke, taking a leaf out of Olivares’s book, drew up a plan for a union of ...”

“... these studies I changed my mind about ‘the Puritan Revolution’. In an important new book, Charles I and the Popish Plot, Caroline Hibbard has tackled the origins of the Civil War by documenting the Catholic intrigue at the Court of Charles I from the late 1630s to the outbreak of Civil War. Her findings complement ...”

“... of Inquiry into public opinion in Turkey’s former provinces to enter Iraq. Instead, the King-Crane Commission confined its investigations to Syria, where it found the population overwhelmingly in favour of the two goals Britain had specifically excluded: independence and unity. In the event of their having to accept a mandate – a term invented by ...”

“... Christine, as she was baptised in Vienna in 1717, did not expect to become queen – or ‘female king’ (rex femina) as she was known in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet ...”

“... swan’s down, a pinch of panegyric and a soupçon of sedition. Leave to ferment in the blood of a king. That would produce most of the verse of this period, in which conventional elements are graciously reassembled in posies for readers to sniff and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from ...”

“... agenda for debate on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline ...”