The Scots paid a heavy price for honouring their ‘Auld Alliance’ with France.
In September 1513, King James IV of Scotland found himself torn between ties of family and obligations of state. He chose the latter, and on a cold and lonely field in Northumberland, James and thousands of his loyal subjects paid dearly.
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When young Walter Raleigh first came to the court of Queen Elizabeth I he had little more than his wardrobe in his favour, and he wore it wisely.
Walter Raleigh was not always popular in England, as in John Aubrey’s phrase he was ‘damnable proud’, but his gracious demeanour in the weeks preceding his execution in 1618 changed that. One of the best-loved tales of Sir Walter goes back to the early 1580s, when he was still a relative unknown at court with little more than the clothes on his back — though they were all he needed.
The Tudor mansion of Compton Wynyates is full of secrets and puzzles, some macabre, some downright peculiar.
Compton Wynyates is a country house in Warwickshire, begun in the 1480s by Edmund Compton. The house bears the marks of the Reformation, with priest-holes for persecuted Roman clergy, and of the Civil War, with hiding places for the family and Royalist soldiers. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I all stayed there.
On the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 24th, 1497, Venetian navigator John Cabot claimed North America for the King of England.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and was hailed as the first European to see the Americas. But this was not North America, the region where the great English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States would later rise. That was discovered — or rediscovered, since the Vikings had been there long before — five years later in 1497.
Robert Tomson was a typical Englishman and it nearly killed him, but it also made him a fortune and won him a bride.
In a prestigious lecture on the English national character in Oxford, historian Mandell Creighton developed the theme that unlike our European neighbours we don’t much care what others think of us. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad and sometimes, as in the case of sixteenth-century emigrant Robert Tomson, both.
The British Empire may be said to have started when Elizabethan importers got into a fight with the Dutch over the price of pepper.
The English were more interested in war than trade in the days of Henry VIII, but in the reigns of Henry’s daughters Mary I (1553-1558) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603) English mariners began to imitate their Continental neighbours and reach out to the Far East. This did not greatly please their neighbours, who resented the competition.
The Sultan of Aceh in northern Sumatra welcomed his guests from Christian England with an unexpected gesture of friendship.
In 1601, Sir James Lancaster set out in four ships for India and the Far East, seeking trading partners for England on behalf Queen Elizabeth I and the newly-formed East India Company. He visited the Kingdom of Achin (Aceh) in the north of Sumatra the following year, where the Sultan was graciously pleased to receive this emissary from a backward, cold and infidel land far, far away.
Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus urged Fausto Andrelini not to miss out on England’s enchanting contribution to good manners.
Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, first came to England in 1499, a guest of the English court thanks to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and of John Colet at Oxford. During this time he paid a visit to a country house and learnt to enjoy some quaint English customs, as he told his Parisian friend Fausto Andrelini, poet to Queen Anne of France.