In The Favourite, Mathew Lyons strips away the myth - and the self-mythologising - to find Sir Walter Ralegh in the one role in which his contemporaries knew him best: the courtier who could win the attention - and the heart - of Elizabeth I, while also being the 'most hated man in England'.Using first-hand accounts, Lyons uncovers the maze of ambition, desire and amorality in which Ralegh lived before he rose to fame - a brutal Elizabethan world riven with crime and corru...

In 1464, the most eligible bachelor in England, Edward IV, stunned the nation by revealing his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a beautiful, impoverished widow whose father and brother Edward himself had once ridiculed as upstarts. Edward's controversial match brought his queen's large family to court and into the thick of the Wars of the Roses.This is the story of the family whose fates would be inextricably intertwined with the fall of the Plantagenets and...

This fascinating account of an unsung English monarch and military leader is "a pleasing and well-informed appraisal of the first Yorkist king" (Dr. Michael Jones, author of Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle).Indisputably the most effective general of the Wars of the Roses in fifteenth-century England, King Edward IV died in his bed, undefeated in battle. Yet he has never been accorded the martial reputation of other English warrior kings such as Henry...

Elizabeth Woodville is a historical character whose life no novelist would ever have dared invent. She has been portrayed as an enchantress, as an unprincipled advancer of her family's fortunes and a plucky but pitiful queen in Shakespeare's histories. She has been alternatively championed and vilified by her contemporaries and five centuries of historians, dramatists and novelists, but what was she really like?In this revealing account of Elizabeth's life...

The real life story of the Plantagenet ruler, by "the most remarkable medieval historian of our time" ( The Times, London).The talented, confident, and intelligent son of John of Gaunt, Henry IV started his reign as a popular and charismatic king after he dethroned the tyrannical and wildly unpopular Richard II. But six years into his reign, Henry had survived eight assassination and overthrow attempts.Having broken God's law of primogenit...

The story of the Scottish ruler—and the mysterious death of her ambitious and controversial husband.In the early hours of February 10, 1567, a large explosion ripped through the lodgings at Kirk o' Field, Edinburgh, where Mary Queen of Scotland's consort, Henry, Lord Darnley, was staying. Darnley's body was found with that of his valet in a neighboring garden the next morning.The queen's husband had been murdered—and the ramifications for Mary and Scottish ...

Not many people would claim to be saints, or alternatively, consider themselves entirely without redeeming qualities. Some are unquestionably worse than others, but few have been held in greater infamy than Richard Plantagenet, afterwards Duke of Gloucester and, later still, King Richard III. Richards character has been besmirched as often as it has been defended, and the arguments between his detractors and supporters still rage after several centuries. Was he a ruthless hunchback who but...

Richard III is a paradox - the most hated of English kings, yet the most beloved, a deeply pious man, yet materialistic to the point of obsession, puritan, yet the father of at least two illegitimate children. This new biography concentrates on the much neglected early part of Richards life - from his birth in 1452 as a cadet of the House of York to his marriage to the beautiful Anne Neville - and shows how his experiences as the son of an ambitious duke, a prisoner of war, an exile, his k...

Richard III is accused of murdering his nephews (the 'Princes in the Tower') in order to usurp the throne of England. Since Tudor times he has been painted as the 'black legend,' the murderous uncle. However, the truth is much more complicated and interesting. Rather than looking at all the killings Richard III did not commit, this book focuses on the one execution for which we know that he was responsible.On Friday 13 June 1483, William, Lord Hastings was hustled ...

Samuel Pepyss London was a turbulent, boisterous city, enduring the strains caused by foreign wars, the Great Plague and the Great Fire, yet growing and prospering. The Restoration in 1660 brought the reopening of the theatres, with women appearing on the stage for the first time, and the period saw the development of English opera and the first public concerts. Pepys lived through a time of change in a city of contrasts, which maintained a sophisticated cultural scene, yet was a focus for...

NEW YORK TIMES BETSELLER • A poignant, suspenseful, and sometimes tragic biography of Elizabeth of York, the first Tudor queen and mother of Henry VIII, from the renowned author hailed as “the finest historian of English monarchical succession writing” (The Boston Globe)“[Weir] is a meticulous scholar. . . . [She] sincerely admires her subject, doing honor to an almost forgotten queen.”—The New York Times Book Review...

Henry Stuart’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years’ War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous.NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2 DOCUMENTARY The Best King We Never HadHenry Stuart, Prince of Wales was once the hope of Britain. Eldest son to James VI of Scotland, James I of England, Henry was the epi...