Much has been written about Charles I's reign, about the brutal civil war into which his pursuit of unfettered power plunged the realm, and about the Commonwealth regime that followed his defeat and execution....

When Henry VIII passed through Canterbury in 1532, a young woman in her mid-twenties named Elizabeth Barton, widely revered as a visionary and prophetess, burst into his presence and warned him that he...

This seminal period of British history is a far-off world in which poverty, violence and superstition went hand-in-hand with opulence, religious virtue and a thriving cultural landscape, at once familiar...

'War,' wrote Cardinal Richelieu, 'is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men'. Yet the prelate's mournful observation scarcely begins to encapsulate the full complexity and unspeakable...

Few kings have been more savagely caricatured or grossly misunderstood than England's first Stuart. Yet, as this new biography demonstrates, the modern tendency to downplay his defects and minimise the...

In 1517, a certain Dr Beale, rector of St Mary Spitall in London, had roused the capital's mob by laying the blame for an increase in poverty squarely upon the shoulders of grasping foreigners. 'God has...

Cardinal Wolsey is a controversial figure: a butcher's son, a man of letters and the Church, a divisive political expert, a man of principle – yet, to some, an arrogant upstart. As Lord Chancellor to...

This compelling new account of Henry VIII is by no means yet another history of the 'old monster' and his reign. The 'monster' displayed here is, at the very least, a newer type, more beset by anxieties...