Charlotte Yonge

The soldier went quite deliberately into a burning room full of gunpowder and ammunition.

Mathieu Martinel was a cavalry soldier in the French army. At the age of twenty, he had already saved a fellow-soldier from drowning in the River Ill, but his heroic exploits were far from over.

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A firework display in Paris turned to tragedy in the narrow streets of the capital.

It is 1837, and Mathieu Martinel, a cavalry soldier in the French army, is now a senior officer in the military college in Paris. Fate, however, had not yet finished testing his mettle.

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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.

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King Harold died at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Or did he?

Harold Godwinson was killed at the Battle of Hastings on England’s south coast in 1066, pierced through the eye by an arrow. But that wasn’t the tale they told up north in the city of Chester...

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A King and Queen gentler than the times in which they lived.

The powerful Earl Godwin, a rough Saxon and an ambitious man, gave his support to King Edward the Confessor on condition that he marry Godwin’s daughter Edith.

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A popular tale of scorched cakes and a scolded king.

King Alfred the Great ruled from 871 to 899. He did more than any other king to unite the English as a nation, but first he had to overcome an invasion of Danes from across the North Sea, and a very cross housewife.

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