A Hive of Historical Content
(1485-1750)
It’s not every day that an undiscovered portrait of William Shakespeare is brought to your attention. But having spent many an hour scrutinising images of Shakespeare for my book, Who Killed William Shakespeare? (The History Press, 2013)…
The European conquests of the Americas brought war, pestilence and death to the communities that populated the continent. Infecting of the Amerindian people with disease cultures to which their bodies where not accustomed caused wide…
Nine hours travelling, squalid sleeping arrangements, too much to drink and money lost during late night card games. Not a scene from a 20th Century teenage gap year, but a young person’s 17th Century Grand Tour, in …
How Did She Keep Henry Enraptured for Six Long Years Before Marriage? Like so many of you, I have a long-standing love affair with the mysterious, the beautiful, the oh-so-intriguing…Anne Boleyn. Why? Pondering that question,…
400 years ago, the first Globe Theatre was destroyed by fire. But was it an accident? The afternoon of Tuesday 29 June 1613 was warm and sunny. Crowds crossed the Thames to see William Shakespeare’s…
OK, so she may not be the most popular, nor glamorous of Henry’s wives, and after Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, most people’s interests tend to wax and wane a little. However, I am starting…
Translate the lingo and the following would not be out of place in one of those ‘speciality’ stores you find in modern day Soho. Behind closed doors it turns out folk in the Restoration era…
I have a confession to make. I love Anne Boleyn, and I don’t care who knows it. If you mention the name ‘Anne’, there is no one else I think of first. Some say she…
With the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg fast approaching in July, I decided to undertake a Civil War reenactment of my own: by following the Civil War adventure of my Great Great Uncle…
Before the ashes settled on the devastation that was London after the Great Fire in 1666, rumours spread like erm… fire about who had started it and why they felt the need to burn the hell out…
When James Stewart, Duke of Rothesay, learnt he was the new King of Scotland, he was only six years old. His father, James I, had just been murdered at a friary in Perth, by men…
For the next ten minutes, imagine you are a Queen of the Tudor Court, married to the tempestuous tyrant King Henry VIII. You are on a whirlwind journey that will no doubt change history. Would…
Everyone knows that Henry VIII was married six times, right? Divorced, beheaded, died – Divorced, beheaded, survived – that’s the rhyme to remember them by. But in all the fuss about Catharine, Anne, Jane, Anne,…
As a kid growing up in Lancashire, my parents used to take my sister and I on little road trips over yonder ‘ill (that’s ‘over the next hill’ in plain English). We’d usually go to…