The History Book Club discussion

We tend to forget that Britain is not the only country who has a monarchy. Go to this link for the other 25 royal families whose power ranges from total rule to ceremonial. Interesting stuff.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...

(Source:Washingtonpost)

Expected publication: September 26th 2017

Queens of the Conquest: England’s Medieval Queens

by Alison Weir


Synopsis:


The story of England’s medieval queens is vivid and stirring, packed with tragedy, high drama and even comedy. It is a chronicle of love, murder, war and betrayal, filled with passion, intrigue and sorrow, peopled by a cast of heroines, villains, stateswomen and lovers. In the first volume of this epic new series, Alison Weir strips away centuries of romantic mythology and prejudice to reveal the lives of England’s queens in the century after the Norman Conquest.

Beginning with Matilda of Flanders, who supported William the Conqueror in his invasion of England in 1066, and culminating in the turbulent life of the Empress Maud, who claimed to be queen of England in her own right and fought a bitter war to that end, the five Norman queens emerge as hugely influential figures and fascinating characters.

Much more than a series of individual biographies, Queens of the Conquest is a seamless tale of interconnected lives and a rich portrait of English history in a time of flux. In Alison Weir’s hands these five extraordinary women reclaim their rightful roles at the centre of English history

Might have to give it a look. I have been interested in the Empress Maud since I read about her in conjunction with King Stephen in the Cadfael books.

Me too. Been curious about her since I read some historical romance books with her in them. I've been trying to find good books about her ever since. But I haven't found any yet. Hope that this book is as good as Alison Weirs other ones :) Happy reading :)

I have been disappointed by her last couple of books and this might be as tedious. I am beginning to think Weir writes an outline and has a totally different Alison Weir persona write the book. I used to love her books but now approach with caution. I will also read these reviews before purchase

I've read some of her earlier books and I think they where good. I haven't gotten around ro read any of her newer books yet :)

Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch (no photo)

Synopsis:

The long-awaited biography of the genius who masterminded Henry VIII's bloody revolution in the English government, which reveals at last Cromwell's role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn

"This a book that - and it's not often you can say this - we have been awaiting for four hundred years." --Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

Since the sixteenth century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king's insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540.

After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry's mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell.

History has not been kind to the son of a Putney brewer who became the architect of England's split with Rome.

Where past biographies portrayed him as a scheming operator with blood on his hands, Hilary Mantel reimagined him as a far more sympathetic figure buffered by the whims of his master.

So which was he--the villain of history or the victim of her creation? MacCulloch sifted through letters and court records for answers and found Cromwell's fingerprints on some of the most transformative decisions of Henry's turbulent reign.

But he also found Cromwell the man, an administrative genius, rescuing him from myth and slander.

The real Cromwell was a deeply loving father who took his biggest risks to secure the future of his son, Gregory. He was also a man of faith and a quiet revolutionary.

In the end, he could not appease or control the man whose humors were so violent and unpredictable. But he made his mark on England, setting her on the path to religious awakening and indelibly transforming the system of government of the English-speaking world.

Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation

by Diarmaid MacCulloch (no photo)

Synopsis:

Edward VI died a teenager in 1553, yet his brief reign would shape the future of the nation, unleashing a Protestant revolution that propelled England into the heart of the Reformation. This dramatic account takes a fresh look at one of the most significant and turbulent periods in English history.

'A challenging, elegant and persuasive biography of an unjustly neglected king' Jerry Brotton, author of This Orient Isle

'MacCulloch puts the young Edward at the centre of the action ... as this excellent and lively study shows, his ghost continues to haunt the history of Anglicanism' Sunday Times

'This is Reformation history as it should be written, not least because it resembles its subject matter: learned, argumentative, and, even when mistaken, never dull' Eamon Duffy, author of The Stripping of the Altars

'One of the best historians writing in English today' Sunday Telegraph

This is an excerpt from an interview that Five Books had with Paul Lay who is the editor of History Today:

Let’s talk about your next book, which is about female spies. It’s called Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth Century Britain and it’s by Nadine Akkerman.

I read this as much out of duty as pleasure because this is my period, the mid-seventeenth century, the Civil Wars, the Protectorate.

I probably would say this, but this is one of the most important periods in English and indeed British history and it’s not very well known by the wider public. I’ve wondered why that’s the case because it has such extraordinary characters.

A theory I’ve always had is that one of the reasons why the mid-seventeenth century is not popular among readers is the absence of women in major roles.

In Tudor times, with Henry VIII, you have Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Mary and Elizabeth.

There are prominent female figures, whereas during the seventeenth century, with Charles and Cromwell, men dominate. There’s an absence of strong women, at least to the layperson.

What Nadine Akkerman does is concentrate on these invisible women. That’s why it’s such a good title—because women are so invisible in this period in the public sphere. Men literally couldn’t imagine that women were capable of being spies or intelligencers.

There are some great stories in the book. There’s one about Alexandrine, Countess of Taxis. She has a house in Brussels, and a Stuart agent who’s there is having his letters intercepted. He talks to her and says something like, ‘Who is doing this? It couldn’t be you, because of your honesty, your dignity and your sex. You just wouldn’t be capable of doing it.’

But Alexandrine has this commercial network and she’ll sell this stuff to the highest bidder. She’ll sell to Catholics; she’ll sell to Protestants. She has no real loyalty to anyone. It’s very amusing. It’s a classic lesson in what so many historians have overlooked—which is not just what historians have overlooked, it’s what people at the time overlooked as well.

This world is a little bit like the world of Thomas Cromwell.

It’s quite fragmented. It’s a place where you can step through the cracks. There are some great details in the book about spying in general.

We’ve tended to concentrate in the popular imagination on spies in the Elizabethan world, but in the period of the Civil Wars, there’s some great stuff. The book talks about Oxford, which is Charles’s capital at the time.

The parliamentarians would put little pieces of paper in holes and they’d be picked up by ‘gardeners’, brought back and left in a ditch just outside the city where they’d be picked up. The book is very good on tiny, fascinating details, and also at conveying the high stakes. Being a spy was incredibly dangerous.

There’s one particularly gruelling episode recounted by Akkerman which begins with a man called Anthony Hinton. Hinton is a member of the Sealed Knot, a clandestine organization—largely incompetent, it should be said—that tries to build a network of resistance to Cromwellian rule and the Protectorate.

It’s not very good at this: many of its people are louche, drunken or just not very able figures. Anthony Hinton is arrested for carrying correspondence from Susan Hyde, who is quite highly placed within the circle.

Eventually, at the Restoration, her brother, Sir Edward Hyde, becomes the chief minister of Charles II. She’s investigated and although it’s claimed that there’s no torture during the Cromwellian period—which I think is right—it’s nevertheless a very brutal episode. She is stripped; she’s interrogated; she has an almost complete mental breakdown. She’s left catatonic. It’s an appalling experience, and she dies a week later.

Although one of the things she points out is that women quite often get off scot-free because nobody can believe that they are spies.

Yes, it’s safer than it is for the men. The example with Susan Hyde is atypical in terms of brutality towards a female spy. Coming back to the title, ‘invisible agents,’ it simply wasn’t thought that women were capable of doing this, though they were at it all the time.

It’s quite a scholarly work. Perhaps more could have been done to give it a narrative thrust, but it’s so revelatory in terms of scholarship that it’s worth persisting. Maybe now this groundbreaking work has been done, others will carry on.

You were saying this is your period, and people aren’t generally that familiar with it. If somebody were looking for a popular history or introduction to it, what would you recommend?

There’s a small book by Blair Worden called The English Civil Wars which is quite good.

But if you just concentrate on the Civil Wars, you don’t see how we got there and you don’t see what the consequences are.

So the best book if you really want to understand this period, I would say, is probably by Austin Woolrych. It’s called Britain in Revolution.

It’s a well-written, really brilliant overview of the whole period. It explains how it began. It’s a very good chronological narrative of the war. You also get the idea of the Cromwellian Settlement and the problems there were and why the Restoration happened.

It’s also quite good on the idea of ‘revolution’ because it has two meanings, really. We tend to think of it in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration. It is literally the revolution of a wheel.

“We tend to think of ‘revolution’ in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration.”

So is it a revolution that happens when Cromwell comes to power? It’s very difficult to argue that it’s a revolution in the modern sense—like the French Revolution—because it’s so imbued with religion.

Or is it a revolution when Charles II comes back? I suppose you do have a turning of the wheel, but it’s never quite the same again. The king never has the power that Charles I was trying to find in his personal rule.

The other thing that is misunderstood about the Civil Wars is that we tend to view Charles as the reactionary and Parliament as the radical, progressive force.

Actually, I think it’s the other way round. It’s Charles who’s trying to build something new, because he’s seen European absolutism and wants to build that kind of absolute monarchy in England. That was a modern thing.

It’s the Parliamentarians who want to return to what they constantly call ‘the ancient constitution’; the Levellers want to get rid of ‘the Norman yoke.’ It’s much more ambiguous than we tend to think, from our twenty-first-century perspective.

Source: Five Books

This is a wonderful little film that was put together at the beginning of NATO for all of the member states. This was the one put together for the United Kingdom.


The Instrument of Accession signed by His Majesty King George VI in London on 17 May 1949

Presentation of the history and contribution of the United Kingdom to Western defense and the Atlantic Community.

"Introducing the United Kingdom" is part of a series originally designed as "Know your Allies", and finally titled "the Atlantic Community Series".

Its objectives were to familiarize public opinion in each of the member country with the other Alliance members and to emphasize the national contributions to Western culture and political traditions, economic reconstruction and allied defense in the framework of NATO.

The series was produced between 1954 and 1956 and financed by the US government in the context of the Marshall Plan with the cooperation of the Information Service of NATO, and distributed by NATO. The films in the Atlantic Community Series received large non-theatrical distribution and, in some cases, were shown in cinemas and on TV. Language versions were made and distributed with the help of the national governments.

“My country and NATO” tells the story of each one of NATO’s members, using a selection of unique archival materials to take you back in time.

Link to film: https://youtu.be/ODrja3SmIL4
Note: This is an excellent little film produced between 1954 - 1956 so there is a lot of history in the making here. And it shows a lot of pride in the country.

The United Kingdom and Nato
Link: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/de...

Nato Declassified:
Link: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/de...