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Skipwith and Anktill

David Wootton: Tudor Microhistory, 10 August 2000

Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Oxford, 351 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 19 820781 6
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A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven 
by Cynthia Herrup.
Oxford, 216 pp., £18.99, December 1999, 0 19 512518 5
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... original complaint against Castlehaven had come from his son, Lord Audley, who had appealed to the King to prevent his inheritance from being squandered, and the fatal testimony had come from his wife. Here was a man who had betrayed his responsibilities as husband, father and head of a household in so gross a fashion that he was unfit to continue to govern ...

Disasters Galore

Steven Connor: Nostradamus, 27 September 2012

Nostradamus: The Prophecies 
translated by Richard Sieburth.
Penguin, 351 pp., £20, November 2012, 978 0 14 310675 3
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... though they were cards shuffled and dealt from some unnumberable deck: ‘Bronzebeard’, ‘the king’, ‘the lady’, ‘the French brothers’, ‘the blond one’, ‘the forked nose’. What’s more, Nostradamus seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating repeatedly the relative futility of prediction: ‘Death, then pillage: good advice, coming ...

Macédoine de Dumas

Douglas Johnson, 6 December 1979

The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas 
by F.W.J. Hemmings.
Hamish Hamilton, 231 pp., £8.95
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... travel, memoirs and numberless newspaper articles – probably running to more than 300 titles. As Charles Hugo put it, ‘everyone has read Dumas, but nobody has read everything of Dumas’s, not even Dumas himself.’ It is well-authenticated that some works which appear under the name of Dumas were not written by him at all, and certain of his rivals even ...

At Tate Britain

Inigo Thomas: Frederick Swynnerton, 21 January 2016

... and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being older than the Jatakas, older ...

At the Musée des arts et métiers

Richard Taws: Madame de Genlis’s Models, 18 March 2021

... of them survive today. They were ordered from the engineer brothers Jacques-Constantin and Auguste-Charles Périer, and constructed by François-Étienne Calla, a former technician for Vaucanson. In his Tableau de Paris (1781-88), Louis-Sébastien Mercier described with enthusiasm the ‘curious and useful’ nature of this project, which was still then in ...

Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age ...

Finished Off by Chagrin

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Monarchs and Emperors, 21 July 2022

The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World 
by Edward Shawcross.
Faber, 336 pp., £20, January, 978 0 571 36057 4
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King Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the 19th Century 
by Andrew Fitzmaurice.
Princeton, 592 pp., £35, February, 978 0 691 14869 4
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The Kaiser and the Colonies: Monarchy in the Age of Empire 
by Matthew Fitzpatrick.
Oxford, 416 pp., £90, February, 978 0 19 289703 9
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... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...

Social Workers

David Cannadine, 5 October 1995

Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy 
by Frank Prochaska.
Yale, 352 pp., £19.95, October 1995, 0 300 06453 5
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... royal, the infant to whom they were given was unquestionably so, being none other than the future King of Kings himself. Monarchs, this story reminds us, not only make benefactions they also receive them – which adds a suggestively majestic connotation to the otherwise plebeian notion of ‘give and take’. British sovereigns have until relatively recently ...

Did my father do it?

C.H. Sisson, 20 October 1983

Elizabeth R.: A Biography 
by Elizabeth Longford.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £10.95, September 1983, 0 297 78285 1
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Aristocrats 
by Robert Lacey.
Hutchinson/BBC, 249 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 0 09 154290 1
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The Cult of the Prince Consort 
by Elizabeth Darby and Nicola Smith.
Yale, 120 pp., £10, October 1983, 0 300 03015 0
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... by Sir Henry Marten of Eton. Time for a change? Lady Longford gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits of Blackstone. Mercifully, however, royal personages are dependent on books for only a ...

Factory of the Revolution

Blair Worden: Quentin Skinner, 5 February 1998

Liberty before Liberalism 
by Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 137 pp., £19.99, November 1997, 0 521 63206 4
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... secured by the Glorious Revolution, but several years before it, as an urgent and daring attack on Charles II’s bid for absolutism. It was less an abstract statement of principle than an exercise in persuasion. What was true of Locke’s work, historians soon learned to remind themselves, was equally so of all the great books in that broad movement of ...

Once there was a bridge named after him

Mark Mazower: Gavrilo Princip, 23 October 2014

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War 
by Tim Butcher.
Chatto, 326 pp., £18.99, May 2014, 978 0 7011 8793 4
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... as Serbia, independent only since 1878, moved out of the Habsburg orbit. In 1903, the country’s king, Aleksander Obrenovic, and his wife were assassinated in the palace by a cabal of army officers. The headstrong king had displeased his subjects by marrying a woman who’d been one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, and ...

The Virtue of Incest

Marina Warner, 7 October 1993

Elizabeth’s Glass 
by Marc Shell.
Nebraska, 365 pp., £30.95, July 1993, 0 8032 4216 6
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... The romance of Apollonius of Tyre opens with the classic fairy-tale couple: the king and his daughter. Antiochus is powerful, she is beautiful, and of marriageable age – there is no mother. The difference is that, in this variation, she will not leave home to marry a prince, for her father Antiochus ‘began to love her in a way unsuitable for a father ...

Rome’s New Mission

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Early Christianity, 2 June 2011

Christians and Pagans: The Conversion of Britain from Alban to Bede 
by Malcolm Lambert.
Yale, 329 pp., £30, September 2010, 978 0 300 11908 4
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... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman Conquest forgery from dimly ...

Scattering Gaggle

Jessie Childs: Armada on the Rocks, 4 May 2023

Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588 
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.
Yale, 718 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 0 300 25986 5
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... more than 150 illustrations.‘I do warrant you,’ the lord admiral of the English fleet, Charles Howard of Effingham, reported from his flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The ...

Tyrannicide

James McConica, 21 January 1982

Buchanan 
by I.D. McFarlane.
Duckworth, 575 pp., £45, June 1981, 0 7156 0971 8
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... is no evidence of strong confessional conviction. After a return to Paris as tutor to the son of Charles de Cossé, Comte de Brissac and Maréchal de France, it is clear that in ‘the France of Henri II and the chambre ardente’, he enjoyed the reputation of an orthodox if undemonstrative Catholic. Buchanan appears to have left the employ of the Comte de ...

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