Search Results

“... Four hundred years ago, on 17 October 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died at the age of 31 of a wound sustained in a skirmish at Zutphen, where his forces had fought for the Dutch cause against Spanish domination of the Netherlands. It was one of the great deaths of English history. His early biographers – or hagiographers – wrought a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been ...”

“... In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex from his campaign in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ – a light touch from which some heavy inferences have been drawn. Instead, the Earl returned in disgrace in September and was placed under house arrest ...”

“... One characteristic of the historical writing of the Eighties was an expanding readiness to relate the politics of the past to its literature: to the literature of ideas and imagination. The social and economic explanations of political behaviour which had been dominant in the previous decades had left too much unexplained. A growing number of historians turned to literature, as to art and religion, to understand the structures of thought and emotion which distinguish one age from another, and without a grasp of which the political language of the past can be unintelligible ...”

“... manifestation was especially violent and decisive. The harbingers of ‘modern scholarship’ (as Blair Worden described them at the time) self-consciously identified themselves as ‘Revisionists’ and labelled extant interpretations as ‘Whig’ or ‘Marxist’. They then condemned these Whig and Marxist interpretations as ...”

“... by the plan to marry him to the daughter of the hero of the Dutch resistance, William of Orange. Blair Worden puts it neatly: ‘Where Sidney’s plan to marry Orange’s daughter was a pledge of commitment to international Protestantism, Elizabeth’s negotiations with Anjou signalled her repudiation of it’. In the late summer of 1579, with things ...”

“... body in Westminster Abbey. Hardy’s glass-all-empty perspective is brought forcefully to mind by Blair Worden’s dispiriting account of the English civil wars. This, too, is a remarkable work of concision, narrating one of the most crowded series of events in Britain’s long history in little more than 150 pages. It is aimed at the general reader on ...”

“... Hebrew studies during the century. Republicans seem much concerned with this search for forebears. Blair Worden shows how the republicans of the Long Parliament ransacked the classics for their examples. Richard Cobb catalogues the fantasy figures which adorned the Jacobin imagination. Biographical essays predominate in more recent times – mostly ...”

“... 55,000 people made homeless. In his fine, scholarly, closely argued but clearly written book, Blair Worden traces the downs and ups not just of Cromwell’s reputation but that of the Roundheads from the 17th to the 20th century. Until fairly recently Civil War feelings remained high. ‘We are Cavaliers or Roundheads, before we are Conservatives or ...”

“... sight, though we can’t just blame Nedham’s copious quill for his blindness – and from 1650, Blair Worden argues, had been collaborating in one way or another with his apparently unprincipled friend. Worden shows how Milton and Marvell, just as much as Nedham, had to trim and adapt themselves to political ...”

“... serious political division was going to make the need to resolve them too urgent to be ignored. Blair Worden and his team of contributors have given us a coffee-table book of considerable quality, in which the 17th century is brought back into line for a reconciliation with the 16th. Blair Worden’s ...”

“... Two decades ago​ , the historian Blair Worden praised a feat of deception ‘without parallel in English literature’. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow were first published posthumously in 1698-99, and edited in two volumes in 1894 by Charles Firth, later the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. For centuries, the Memoirs were one of the best-known sources on the civil wars ...”

“... in their focus: Corinne Weston on the ancient constitution, David Wootton on the Levellers, Blair Worden on the English republicans. This may be justified by referring to the section’s title, and claiming that England was the only major society in 17th-century ‘Europe’ in which what is ordinarily called a ‘revolution’ can be said to have ...”

“... Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), put together after his death by one of his most brilliant pupils, Blair Worden, is itself a powerful corrective to the balder version of his own argument. As he recognised, before its decline into localised scholastic sterility – not least in the Scotland of the Covenanters – the early 17th-century Calvinist ...”

“... together in a review, but some must be mentioned whether they can be pulled together or not. Blair Worden, on Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan, is inside Cromwell’s mind in a way few historians have ever been, and sheds important light on why he refused the crown. Boyd Hilton, on Evangelicals and Providence, distinguishes between those ...”

“... 1580, as a sublimation, a substitute for virtuous action, and as a spin-off from the Anjou affair. Blair Worden has demonstrated in The Sound of Virtue (1996) the extent to which Sidney’s fiction was saturated in the urgent political concerns of the time. Buried near its heart (in the middle of a wedding!) is a song sung by the shepherd Philisides ...”