The White King

The White King
Author: Leanda de Lisle
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610395611

From the New York Times bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the tragic story of Charles I, his warrior queen, Britain's civil wars and the trial for his life. Less than forty years after England's golden age under Elizabeth I, the country was at war with itself. Split between loyalty to the Crown or to Parliament, war raged on English soil. The English Civil War would set family against family, friend against friend, and its casualties were immense--a greater proportion of the population died than in World War I. At the head of the disintegrating kingdom was King Charles I. In this vivid portrait -- informed by previously unseen manuscripts, including royal correspondence between the king and his queen -- Leanda de Lisle depicts a man who was principled and brave, but fatally blinkered. Charles never understood his own subjects or court intrigue. At the heart of the drama were the Janus-faced cousins who befriended and betrayed him -- Henry Holland, his peacocking servant whose brother, the New England colonialist Robert Warwick, engineered the king's fall; and Lucy Carlisle, the magnetic 'last Boleyn girl' and faithless favorite of Charles's maligned and fearless queen. The tragedy of Charles I was that he fell not as a consequence of vice or wickedness, but of his human flaws and misjudgments. The White King is a story for our times, of populist politicians and religious war, of manipulative media and the reshaping of nations. For Charles it ended on the scaffold, condemned as a traitor and murderer, yet lauded also as a martyr, his reign destined to sow the seeds of democracy in Britain and the New World.

The Trial of Charles I: A History in Documents

The Trial of Charles I: A History in Documents
Author: K.J. Kesselring
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2016-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 146040579X

In January 1649, after years of civil war, King Charles I stood trial in a specially convened English court on charges of treason, murder, and other high crimes against his people. Not only did the revolutionary tribunal find him guilty and order his death, but its masters then abolished monarchy itself and embarked on a bold (though short-lived) republican experiment. The event was a landmark in legal history. The trial and execution of King Charles marked a watershed in English politics and political theory and thus also affected subsequent developments in those parts of the world colonized by the British. This book presents a selection of contemporaries’ accounts of the king’s trial and their reactions to it, as well as a report of the trial of the king’s own judges once the wheel of fortune turned and monarchy was restored. It uses the words of people directly involved to offer insight into the causes and consequences of these momentous events.

English Historical Drama, 1500-1660

English Historical Drama, 1500-1660
Author: Barbara Ravelhofer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2007-12-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230593267

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, exploring both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order discuss a wide variety of possible sources for historical drama, ranging from oral traditions to chronicles. They also explore genres outside the canon which think of 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities and closet drama.

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 1009
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421437848

This new volume of JHU Press's landmark Shelley edition contains posthumous poems edited from original manuscripts. "The world will surely one day feel what it has lost," wrote Mary Shelley after Percy Bysshe Shelley's premature death in July 1822. Determined to hasten that day, she recovered his unpublished and uncollected poems and sifted through his surviving notebooks and papers. In Genoa during the winter of 1822–23, she painstakingly transcribed poetry "interlined and broken into fragments, so that the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses." Blasphemy and sedition laws prevented her from including her husband's most outspoken radical works, but the resulting volume, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), was a magnificent display of Shelley's versatility and craftsmanship between 1816 and 1822. Few such volumes have made more difference to an author's reputation. The seventh volume of the acclaimed Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley extracts from Posthumous Poems those original poems and fragments Mary Shelley edited. The collection opens with Shelley's enigmatic dream vision The Triumph of Life, the last major poem he began—and, in the opinion of T. S. Eliot, the finest thing he ever wrote. There follow some of the most famous and beautiful of Shelley's short lyrics, narrative fragments, two unfinished plays, and other previously unreleased pieces. Upholding the standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness set by previous volumes, every item in Volume 7 has been newly edited from the original manuscripts, in some cases superseding texts that have stood since 1870. Extensive appendixes contain Mary Shelley's preface to Posthumous Poems, Shelley's source for "Ginevra," and preparatory material for his play Charles the First. Wide-ranging discussions of the poems' composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. The editorial overview and commentaries offer insights into Mary Shelley's editorial strategies while proposing surprising new contexts and redatings. Volumes 4 to 6 are in preparation.

The Ruin of All Witches

The Ruin of All Witches
Author: Malcolm Gaskill
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2024-08-20
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0593467108

A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology. “The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place…Thought-provoking and absorbing." —Hilary Mantel, best-selling author of Wolf Hall In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, and people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. A woman is seen wading through the swamp like a lost soul. Disturbing dreams and visions proliferate. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment and denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, and his troubled wife, Mary. Drawing on rich, previously unexplored source material, Malcolm Gaskill vividly evokes a strange past, one where lives were steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in omens, curses and enchantments. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition and enlightenment, tradition and innovation.

Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland

Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland
Author: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 586
Release: 1989
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

A biography of the king who is remembered by the English with more popular affection than any almost any other. Covering his entire life, it takes in his colourful years as a prince and as an exiled monarch during the Civil War and Interregnum, in addition to his later career as effective ruler of three kingdoms.

White King

White King
Author: Leanda de Lisle
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0099555271

The subject of a BBC TV series on Charles I The prize-winning biography of Charles I * Winner of the HWA Crown for Best Work of Historical Non-Fiction 2018 * * Times Book of the Year * * Shortlisted for the Catholic Herald Biography Award 2019 * Less than forty years after the golden age of Elizabeth I, England was at war with itself. At the head of this disintegrating kingdom was Charles I, who would change the face of the monarchy for ever. His reign is one of the most dramatic in history, yet Charles the man remains elusive. To his enemies he was the 'white tyrant of prophecy: to his supporters a murdered innocent. Today many myths still remain. It is an epic story of glamour and strong women, of populist politicians and religious terror, of mass movements and a revolutionary new media: one that speaks to our own divided and dangerous times. 'This is the most gripping piece of revisionist history I have read for a long time' - The Spectator

The Lessons of Tragedy

The Lessons of Tragedy
Author: Hal Brands
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300244924

A “brilliant” examination of American complacency and how it puts the nation’s—and the world’s—security at risk (The Wall Street Journal). The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage—to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivaled global leadership, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. They have forgotten that the descent into violence and war has been all too common throughout human history. This amnesia has become most pronounced just as Americans and the global order they created are coming under graver threat than at any time in decades. In a forceful argument that brims with historical sensibility and policy insights, two distinguished historians argue that a tragic sensibility is necessary if America and its allies are to address the dangers that menace the international order today. Tragedy may be commonplace, Brands and Edel argue, but it is not inevitable—so long as we regain an appreciation of the world’s tragic nature before it is too late. “Literate and lucid—sure to interest to readers of Fukuyama, Huntington, and similar authors as well as students of modern realpolitik.” —Kirkus Reviews