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“... It was only in 1588, when the Catholic counter-offensive was well under way and the reigning Pope was the vigorous Sixtus V – who had no lack of nerve – that saints began to be made again, starting with Diego of Alcala. The revival of saint-making was accompanied by another step in the central control of the sacred, or the right to define the ...”

“... The Continental diplomacy of the 1650s was deeply affected by the rival efforts of Cromwell and Pope Alexander VII to line up their co-religionist princes. Even after 1688, as Prestwich notes, John Locke regarded the war waged by England and the Netherlands against France as a struggle for the survival of Protestantism. There is one other ...”

“... on holy relics. It was his breach of this oath that gave William the moral high ground and caused Pope Alexander II to grant his expedition the status of a proto-Crusade, complete with appropriately blessed banner. Wood doubts the whole story of papal benediction, which has no non-Norman corroboration. But what was Harold doing across the Channel in any ...”

“... leading artists of classical antiquity, such as the painter Apelles, who was said to have painted Alexander the Great and then to have succeeded him as the lover of Campaspe, because Alexander recognised that as a painter he had a keener appreciation of her beauty than ...”

“... of Rievaulx – much of this in service of Edward’s claim to canonisation, eventually granted by Pope Alexander III in 1161. There was a strong element of self-interest in the process, designed to promote the status of Westminster Abbey, Edward’s foundation and burial place, but there is more to be said about the speed and means by which the Edward of ...”

“... 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III rebuilt the abbey in 1245 as a shrine to St Edward – and a royal mausoleum to himself, almost bankrupting the Crown in the process. The abbey’s own website calls him ...”

“... like Coats of Paisley, Scottish shipbuilders on the Clyde and ruthless Scottish traders like Alexander Matheson and William Jardine, drug-runners extraordinaire, proved conspicuous Imperial players. But there has been a recurrent tendency in history for Protestant peoples to claim they are only interested in commerce, when in fact what they have also ...”

“... Alexander Pope’s slur has loomed for centuries over the reputation of Eliza Haywood, the most prominent female author of her day. In The Dunciad, she is the prize of a pissing competition held between talentless hacks:   Who best can send on high The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes ...”

“... fears about the public’s fallibility and fickleness. In the age of Defoe, Manley, Swift and Pope, Shaftesbury was among the first writers to consider whether the eruption of ridicule should be regarded as a negative or positive effect of an uncensored press. Others followed Shaftesbury in grappling with this question. Francis Hutcheson embraced his ...”

“... empirically minded British tend not to go in for. ‘For forms of government let fools contest,’ Pope said, ‘whate’er is best administer’d is best.’ For the British, governing is a practical art acquired through experience. The British governing elite is proud of its reputation for political nous. The very idea of a ‘British constitution’ seems a ...”

“... British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s bull, In eminenti, had excommunicated all Freemasons, British Masonry continued throughout the turmoil and accusations of the Revolutionary era to enjoy direct Hanoverian patronage from its Grand Masters, the Duke of Cumberland, the Prince of ...”

“... and he was brought as a captive to Rome. There, he converted to Christianity at the hands of Pope Leo X and was baptised as Joannes Leo. In Rome he taught Arabic to the great Hebraist Cardinal Aegidius of Viterbo, and worked with the Jewish physician and translator Jacob Mantino on an unfinished Latin-Arabic-Hebrew vocabulary. Leo seems to have written ...”

“... of personality and, through the system of corruption established by Walpole, of the state; though Pope, for one, fights in retreat for God, virtue and family. In an attempt to bring some moral order to this new world, Smith writes The Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments: history consigns the second to the dustbin, a receptacle in which Mr ...”

“... For some at least, the sense of religious mission was certainly enhanced by the 1496 Bull of Pope Alexander (‘Borgia’) VI, which legitimised Castilian conquests by charging the conquerors with the work of Christianising the subjected pagans. The consequence was that, unlike anywhere else in the creole world, ecclesiastics (both religious and ...”

“... a subversive weapon. Sometimes Newton’s pleasure seems merely ‘schoolboyish’ – David Alexander’s word – because what Crowninshield would later call the ‘grossness and somewhat fat overstatement’ overwhelm any political point. Not so, however, when Newton shows Napoleon Establishing French Quarters in Italy by having the ...”