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The Terror in the French Revolution
Classic Pamphlet
A natural reaction to the history of the French Revolution is to see it as a glorious movement for liberty which somehow ‘went wrong', ending in a nightmare of blood and chaos. This pamphlet explains what really happened, and why. It shows how the apparent achievements of the first two...
The Terror in the French Revolution
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The Council of the North
Classic Pamphlet
"The king, intending also the suppression of the greater Monasteries, which he effected in the 31st of his Reign for the preventing of future Dangers and keeping those Northern Counties in Quiet, raised a President and Council at York, and gave them his several Powers and Authorities, under one great...
The Council of the North
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The War of American Independence
Classic Pamphlet
In the two-hundredth year of American Independence, it is proper to ask: why did it occur? It need not have happened; it was the act of men, not immutable forces. But once the tensions became acute, the three thousand miles of ocean were a difficult chasm to bridge. The War...
The War of American Independence
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William the Silent and the Revolt of the Netherlands
Classic Pamphlet
The Revolt of the Netherlands was the most successful of all uprisings in early modern Europe and had far reaching effects on the course of Dutch and European history. In accounting for its outcome recent research has emphasized the significance of impersonal forces of political, economic or religious nature rather...
William the Silent and the Revolt of the Netherlands
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Faction in Tudor England
Classic Pamphlet
'This wicked Tower must be fed with blood' - W. S. Gilbert's dialogue sums up the popular myth of Tudor England. This pamphlet looks at the reality, a society and politics necessarily divided into rival factions by the pulls of patronage, local loyalty and the implications of personal monarchy, and...
Faction in Tudor England
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Jacobitism
Classic Pamphlet
In recent years, the debate over the nature, extent, and influence of the Jacobite movement during the 70 years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 has become one of the new growth industries among professional historians, spawning scholarly quarrels almost as ferocious as those which characterised ‘the Cause' itself.The term...
Jacobitism
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Cartoons and the historian
Historian article
Many historical books contain cartoons, but in most cases these are little more than a relief from the text, and do not make any point of substance which is not made elsewhere. Political cartoons should be regarded as much more than that. They are an important historical source which often...
Cartoons and the historian
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Kett's Rebellion 1549
Classic Pamphlet
On 20 june, 1549, the men of the town of Attleborough and of the neighbouring hamlets of Eccles and Wilby, in South Norfolk, threw down the fences recently erected by John Green, lord of the manor of Beckhall in Wilby, round part of the common over which they all had...
Kett's Rebellion 1549
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The Scottish Enlightenment
Classic Pamphlet
In recent decades, Scotland's distinctive contribution to the Enlightenment has been of increasing interest to scholars. Often very remarkable in an analytical view, such studies may nevertheless miss their sense of the story by treating Scottish insight in abstraction from Scottish life. Taking a more concrete approach, the present study...
The Scottish Enlightenment
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English Puritanism
Classic Pamphlet
When the modern world was christened Puritanism appeared as a bad fairy and bestowed upon it certain dubious gifts: capitalism, democracy, America. This is a fairy story, but like all fairy stories it contains a small grain of truth. But what was Puritanism? Already in the seventeenth century a critic...
English Puritanism
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The Tudor Court
Classic Pamphlet
In 1976, in one of his challenging Presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, Professor Geoffrey Elton drew attention to the importance of the court as a ‘point of contact' between the Tudors and their subjects. It was, he suggested, a central and essential aspect of personal government, but in...
The Tudor Court
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Peter the Great
Classic Pamphlet
No European ruler except Napoleon I has impressed both contemporise and later historians so profoundly as Peter I of Russia by the originality and the personal character of his achievements. Like Napoleon, Peter appeared to some observers, at least in his later years, as almost more than human. He seemed...
Peter the Great
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Louis XIV
Classic Pamphlet
Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 and became King on May 14 1643 at the age of four years and eight months on the death of his father Louis XIII. He attended the Conseil d'en haut from 1649 when he was eleven years old. He announced his coming...
Louis XIV
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Napoleon: First Consul and Emperor of the French
Classic Pamphlet
Four years after the battle of Waterloo, Richard Whately publicised a philosophical essay in which he argued that there was no real proof of Napoleon's existence. The deeds attributed to him were either so wondrously good or so amazingly bad that they far outran the evidence available to support them:...
Napoleon: First Consul and Emperor of the French
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The Chapel and the Nation
Classic Pamphlet
The Noncoformitst chapel has played a crucial role in the history of the English and Welsh nations. When the great French historian Elie Halevy sought to explain the contrast between the turbulent history of his own country and the peaceful evolution of England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
The Chapel and the Nation
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The Monarchies of Ferdinand and Isabella
Classic Pamphlet
On 12 December 1474, the news reached the Castillian city of Segovia, north-west of Madrid, that Henry IV, king of Castile, had died. After the proper ceremonies had been conducted in memory of the deceased monarch, his sister, Isabella, was proclaimed queen of Castile in that place. There was much...
The Monarchies of Ferdinand and Isabella
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Charles XII
Classic Pamphlet
The reputation of Charles XII who became king of Sweden before he was fifteen years old and had the responsibility of absolutist goverment thrust upon him within the next six months - contrary to the plans laid down for him by his father - has tended to attract political rather...
Charles XII
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An English Absolutism?
Classic Pamphlet
The term 'Absolutism' was coined in France in the 1790s, but the concept which described it was familiar to many Englishmen in the late seventeenth century. They talked of 'absolute monarchy', 'tyranny', 'despotism' and above all 'arbitrary government'. Their use of such terns were pejorative: they described political regimes of...
An English Absolutism?
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The Enlightenment
Classic Pamphlet
Can a movement as varied and diffuse as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century be contained within the covers of a short pamphlet? The problem would certainly have appealed to the intellectuals of that time. Generalists rather than specialists, citizens of the whole world of knowledge, they relished the challenge...
The Enlightenment
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Religion and Party in Late Stuart England
Classic Pamphlet
The second English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the Revolution of 1688, ushered in during the next twenty-five years a series of changes which were to be profoundly important to the ultimate development of the country. Most conspicuously, the reigns of William III and Anne released Englishmen - though not...
Religion and Party in Late Stuart England
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A Mid-Tudor Crisis?
Classic Pamphlet
This classic pamphlet takes you through the Mid-Tudor period focusing on foreign affairs and finance, the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, the risings of 1549, coups and commissions 1549-53, Edwardian Protestantism success and failure, Mary and the Catholic Restoration, the Marian Administration and the Spanish Marriage.
A Mid-Tudor Crisis?
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The myths about the 1745 Jacobite revolution
Historian article
The harsh reality
The 1745 Rebellion has become part of the romantic heritage in both British and Scottish history. At the time there was little romance to it. The many myths and misconceptions about Bonnie Prince Charlie and his followers need to be corrected and the glamorous image of the...
The myths about the 1745 Jacobite revolution
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London and the English Civil War
Historian article
In the spring of 1643 William Lithgow, a Scot born in Lanark in 1582, who had spent most of his life travellingaround Europe, often on foot and having many fantastic adventures, decided to return to Britain. Having just turned sixty, he was obviously feeling pretty gloomy. ‘After long 40 years...
London and the English Civil War
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Dean Mahomet: Travel writer, curry entrepreneur and shampooer to the King
Historian article
The National Portrait Gallery in London is home to many thousands of portraits, photographs and sculptures of the great and the good, as well as those who travelled on the darker side of history.
In 2007 it hosted a small exhibition in the Porter Gallery entitled Between Worlds: Voyagers to...
Dean Mahomet: Travel writer, curry entrepreneur and shampooer to the King
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The Eighteenth Century in Britain: Long or Short?
Article
W. A. Speck reviews an historical debate central to the interpretation of the eighteenth century in Britain. Few British historians treat the eighteenth century as consisting simply of the hundred years from 1701 to 1800. Until recently political historians tended to end it in 1783. Many textbooks reflect this treatment...
The Eighteenth Century in Britain: Long or Short?
