Stuart Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Stuart Era’
Young Montague Bertie, Lord Willougby, tended his dying father behind enemy lines.
At eight o’clock on the morning of the 23rd of October, 1642, King Charles I gazed down on the field of Edgehill, and the Parliamentarian army that awaited him there. It was the start of the English Civil War, which would all but end with the King’s execution in January 1649.
The 17th-century entrepreneur developed a way of smelting iron with coke rather than charcoal, but the Civil War frustrated his plans.
Seventeenth-century Government fuel policy made English iron-smelting so expensive that the country became dependent on cheap foreign imports. Dud Dudley had just devised an alternative process, when the Civil War put the industrial revolution on hold.
King James II was forced off the throne in favour of his daughter Mary, and a new English constitution was born.
James II was England’s first Roman Catholic monarch for a hundred and fifty years (if you don’t count his brother Charles II’s deathbed conversion). At any rate, Parliament was determined that he would be the last, and in 1688 they took drastic action to make sure that England did not become a vassal of the powerful and ambitious French King, Louis XIV.
In England’s brief but dismal experiment as a Republic, Playford saved traditional English dance music from destruction.
For eleven years, 17th century England experimented with being a republic. Unsurprisingly, elected politicians turned out to be just as corrupt and oppressive as unelected ones, and but for John Playford, they would have robbed us of the country’s musical heritage.
Only an anonymous tip-off prevented England losing her sovereignty as well as her King.
The Gunpowder Plot was an attempt to assassinate King James I and his entire government on the 5th of November, 1605. Had it succeeded, it would have ended English sovereignty and made England and Scotland junior partners to the great Catholic states of Europe.
The proof of Thomas Ferres’s rags-to-riches tale is quite literally written in stone, but popular lore adds some tantalising and romantic detail.
The rags-to-riches story of Thomas Ferres (d. 1631) has blended fact with a good deal of romantic fiction. But Thomas was a real historical figure, and however he came by his wealth, the way he used it to help the poor and vulnerable is deeply moving.