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David Loades provides a masterful overview of this formative period of British history. Exploring the reign of each monarch within the framework of the dynasty, he unpacks the key questions surrounding the monarchy; the relationship between church and the state, development of government, war and foreign policy, the question of Ireland and the issue of succession in Tudor politics. Loades considers the recent scholarship on the dynasty as a whole, paying particular attention to Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Mary Tudor. He also considers how recent revisionist history asks new questions of their political and personal lives. This places our understanding of the dynasty as a whole in a new light.
Fifteen kings and fourteen queens are buried in Westminster Abbey, which is also the nation's coronation church; every coronation since that of William the Conqueror has taken place in the Abbey. The close relationship between 'Crown and Cloister' was forged when King Edward the Confessor built the first great church on this site (completed in 1065). Today, The Queen and her family come to the Abbey regularly, whether to celebrate or to mourn. Westminster Abbey has adapted well to the changing currents of history. It survived the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1540, and Henry made it briefly a cathedral. His daughter Mary I restored the monastery in 1556, but in 1560 Elizabe...
Following the normal practice in Benedictine monasteries, the obedientiaries of Westminster Abbey kept two quite different kinds of record, and for distinct purposes. Their charters, together with the cartularies and registers where these documents were so often copied, made it possible for them to defend the Abbey's properties and privileges when these were challenged by lay or ecclesiastical opponents. Their financial records - the subject-matter of this book - assisted good housekeeping within their several departments and enabled them to survive the audit which each faced once a year at the hands of fellow-monks; only the abbot and prior were tacitly exempted from this testing experience...
War should be recognised as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII. Henry fought many wars throughout his reign, and this book explores how this came to dominate English culture and shape attitudes to the king and to national history, with people talking and reading about war, and spending money on weaponry and defence.
The first account of the dissolution of the monasteries for fifty years--exploring its profound impact on the people of Tudor England "This is a book about people, though, not ideas, and as a detailed account of an extraordinary human drama with a cast of thousands, it is an exceptional piece of historical writing."--Lucy Wooding, Times Literary Supplement Shortly before Easter, 1540 saw the end of almost a millennium of monastic life in England. Until then religious houses had acted as a focus for education, literary, and artistic expression and even the creation of regional and national identity. Their closure, carried out in just four years between 1536 and 1540, caused a dislocation of p...
In premodern English law, felons had the right to seek sanctuary in a church or ecclesiastical precinct. It is commonly held that this practice virtually died out after the medieval period, but Shannon McSheffrey highlights its resurgence under the Tudor regime and shows how the issue lay at the intersection between law, religion, and culture.
Title first published in 2003. Westminster Abbey occupies a unique position in the religious and royal landscape of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. As the scene of coronations and other great public occasions, it has been the continuing focus of the nation's religious life for half the Christian era. Yet the building itself would not have survived the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation had the institution running it not been itself 'reformed' from monastery into collegiate church. These nine studies discuss ways in which Westminster's new corporate structure evolved in the first century of its existence, and look at some of the personalities who played a part in that process. New research, much of it in the Abbey's own rich archive, opens up previously unseen views of this great church's internal affairs, its relationship with the Crown, and its place in its own locality.
This new reference book describes every aspect the English navy in the second half of the seventeenth century, from the time when the Fleet Royal was taken into Parliamentary control after the defeat of Charles I, until the accession of William and Mary in 1689 when the long period of war with the Dutch came to an end. This is a crucial era which witnessed the creation of a permanent naval service, in essence the birth of the Royal Navy. Every aspect of the navy is covered - naval administration, ship types and shipbuilding, naval recruitment and crews, seamanship and gunnery, shipboard life, dockyards and bases, the foreign navies of the period, and the three major wars which were fought ag...
This book uncovers what might seem to be a dark side of the American dream: the New World from the viewpoint of those who decided not to stay. At the core of the volume are the life histories of people who left New England during the British Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1640–1660. More than a third of the ministers who had stirred up emigration from England deserted their flocks to return home. The colonists’ stories challenge our perceptions of early settlement and the religious ideal of New England as a "City on a Hill." America was a stage in their journey, not an end in itself. Susan Hardman Moore first explores the motives for migration to New England in the 1630s and the rhetoric th...
This Whitbread Award–winning biography and basis for the film Mary Queen of Scots starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie “reads like Shakespearean drama” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). “A triumph . . . A masterpiece full of fire and tragedy.” —Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana In the first full-scale biography of Mary Stuart in more than thirty years, John Guy creates an intimate and absorbing portrait of one of history’s greatest women, depicting her world and her place in the sweep of history with stunning immediacy. Bringing together all surviving documents and uncovering a trove of new sources for the first time, Guy dispels the popular image of Mary Queen of Scots...