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“... 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have ...”

“... Unlike their late 20th-century descendants, contemporary Englishmen knew what that meant: an adult king, of the right religious persuasion, and with a family. Fifty years of that abnormal phenomenon, petticoat government, 45 of a monarch without an heir, and, more immediately, ten of the gloom and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting ...”

“... looking up at his master, the lace, silver and silk: all these say more than the face. To give Charles I, a little man with a very ordinary face, regal presence, and to make his plain queen a beauty, was a gift the king knew the value of. In the exhibition the portrait of Charles by ...”

“... was inside the old Palace of Westminster. It began to appear on seals, medallions and medals after Charles I had lost the war and Parliament was supreme. Once Charles was dead, moulds for his seals were smashed by a blacksmith in the Commons itself. The royal coinage was replaced by the Commonwealth’s: the transition was ...”

“... as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot ...”

“... 1640 to 1648 – on 20 April 1653 effectively ended the republican Commonwealth established after Charles I’s execution in 1649. It remains one of the most memorable and terrifying scenes in English history. Eight months later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented ...”

“... was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the sister of the dauphin, Louis-Charles. All four members of the royal family, together with the king’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, were imprisoned in the Temple, a medieval fortress in the Marais, after the collapse of the monarchy on 10 August 1792. Told it ...”

“... own name – Hortense Mancini begins by noting that she is writing at the request of her patron, Charles-Emmanuel, duc de Savoie, and that she is doing so despite her ‘natural reluctance’ to talk about herself. She apologises in advance for telling a story that may ‘seem like something out of a novel’, and protests that she is well aware that ‘a ...”

“... of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at the battle of Worcester. The two men escaped together to Paris, where the grateful monarch made Henry ...”

“... and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the crown from his never-to-be-equalled father, has now disinherited his own son, thereby occasioning the battle. Outside the obsessively patrilineal English histories, trouble between fathers and daughters seems just as common, whether ...”

“... is a man caught in a momentary spotlight: the famous scene of doubt and resolution is told, in the King James translation, in about 150 words. But here was something longer, more circumstantial, more actual – a twenty-year mission, a journey through broadly identifiable places around and across the southern tip of India. Could the story be true? And if it ...”

“... send-off. He was, after all, the longest-serving capo of them all, a man who commanded respect. King Hussein of Jordan would have laughed to see his adversaries courting his son and heir, King Abdallah II. Spectators could almost hear Hafez al-Assad of Syria whispering into the young ...”

“... Roger de Piles noted, ‘took his time to draw a face when it had its best looks on.’ He painted Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a handsome woman – without, it would seem, losing the likeness. Yet her niece, who knew her first from the painting, was surprised to find the Queen ‘a little woman with long, lean arms, crooked shoulders and teeth ...”

“... You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’ Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit. He looked at his buttery bills too, and noted when the shoemaker’s son had money to spend; noted when (unless he was starving himself) he was absent from college ...”

“... overthrew the Medici in November 1494, which resulted from the arrival in the region of the French King Charles VIII with a large army and which was mounted by members of the Florentine political aristocracy: indeed, up to that time he had, as head of a convent which was a Medici foundation, naturally rather genuflected to the family. His main ...”