Historia’s April 2019 giveaway is five signed superproof copies of of Alison Weir’s Anna of Kleve, the latest in her best-selling Six Tudor Queens series about the wives of Henry VIII, one copy each to be won by five different entrants.
What’s in a Date?
‘History is just a list of boring dates!’ Joanna Hickson considers the importance and meaning of certain dates in the life of Henry VII. We’ve recently had a royal wedding and millions cheered the happy couple – history in the making. But how many times do Historia readers hear people say, ‘I don’t like history, […]
Sultana Isabel: Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Empire
Historian and award-winning author Jerry Brotton on Elizabethan England’s alliance with the Islamic world. Historical events have a way of overtaking a book. When This Orient Isle was published in March 2017, I hoped that it might enable some calmer reflection on the status of today’s British Muslim community by seeing it within a much longer […]
Tardiness and Tempest: Henry VIII’s Courtship of Anne Boleyn
Did Anne Boleyn really fend off Henry VIII’s advances for seven years? Our guest this month, Alison Weir, dishes the dirt. It was novel for a King like Henry VIII to have to beg for sexual favours. When he asked Anne Boleyn to become his mistress, around 1525-6, she refused. She would not even agree to […]
The Countess and the Crown
Our guest this month, Morgan Ring, on the extraordinary life of Lady Margaret Douglas and her crucial role in the Tudor succession. In July 1536, Henry VIII found himself — for the first time in twenty years — with neither a legitimate child nor a pregnant wife. In the absence of a boy born in […]
What’s in a Name?
Joanna Hickson looks at the naming of characters in historical fiction. Authors who write novels based around medieval royal England often have trouble identifying characters one from another, because the same names crop up time and time again in the family trees of the major dynasties. During the fifteenth century for instance the name Henry […]
Escaping the Tudors
Linda Porter on why she’s happy to leave the sixteenth century behind. Last year I appeared in two programmes in the Channel Five ‘Last Days’ series, talking about Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I. Much of my contribution on Mary was eventually edited out because it did not fit the overall ‘well, she was […]
Are the Stuarts the New Tudors?
It’s quite possible that we have reached peak Tudor. Henry VIII’s stinking, gangrenous leg has been endlessly speculated upon, every layer of Elizabeth I’s petticoats has been lifted and thoroughly searched and Anne Boleyn’s execution has been read, learned and inwardly digested from all possible angles. There are even novels that speculate upon what might […]