Foundation: The History of England Volume I

Product Information

Henry VIII began the process of breaking away from Rome for political and dynastic reasons, not because he was swayed by the new teachings of Luther or Calvin. By the end of his reign, the monasteries were destroyed, much of the church lands and treasure confiscated and the monarch was head of the Church in England. I found the section on Elizabeth I's reign more interesting. I knew about her early life, plus the defeat of the Armada, and the problem of Mary Queen of Scots, but this filled out the reign more fully and put things more into context.

The author writes with wit and great insight. I love the details of history and the amazing connections that if I made up in one of my novels readers would say I was over the top-- but in this book they're the real deal. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Not that it should be overlooked, the point is important enough I won’t discuss that. But it fills 80% of the book, the rest being succession issues and unimportant details. To say it left me wanting is an understatement. The main focus of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, ignoring the brief interlude of Lady Jane Grey, is centred on the reformation of the English church and the slow demise of the feudal society. These issues are brought to the fore in 'Tudors'.The author offers thoughtful new insights into age-old discussions of English history. I particularly enjoyed the way the chapters alternate between narratives about the people in power, and descriptions of everyday life. We are led from the very early days of the native peoples right through a series of conquests and colonisation, wars, famous battles and rivalries, mythical figures and folklore, up until the end of Henry VII. Though he claims it's a history of England and the people, it more honestly a history of the Kings of England during this period, each chapter taking them one at a time. I have to say, that suits me fine but it seems to have annoyed some. We do start to get a sense of England as it develops, slowly, usually through inconsequential turns of events and chance occurrences but it's far from the main focus. Between the main chapters are shorter vignettes into various aspects of daily life, the food, agriculture, playthings etc. that make up life. They're good but over too soon.

Why do we need another book about the big gun Tudors? You might as well ask why we need another book about Shakespeare for the answer to both questions is the same. Well I didn’t really give much more thought to the Plantagenets than any other royal family until my cousin Nancy began researching our family history. It seems my ancestor James Ives (1775-1802) convinced (bamboozled) this rather wealthy girl from a well connected family in Boston to marry him. Her name was Anna Ashley (1782-1822). So far research has not brought to light exactly how James was in a position to marry so well. His livelihood is murky, so he must have been charming or attractive or at the very least a smooth talker. The interesting thing about this marriage is that it insured that at least a thimble-full of Plantagenet blood is circulating in my body. If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of mistrusts and hatreds between Catholic and Protestants in England, this is a good place to start. Powerful theologians such as Thomas Cranmer worked on standardised forms of liturgy which were to be used in all churches throughout England.

Publication Order of Collections

Elizabeth I to her credit though did not like war; as she said, “My mind was never to invade my neighbors.” The English possession of 211 years on port of Calais is lost. It had cost a fortune to upkeep. Elizabeth I spoke Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. She was rarely (if ever) alone. She restored debased coinage to its real value. Mary is forced to abdicate in Scotland and is replaced by James VI. Timber and clay houses are replaced by stone and plaster. Elizabeth I wore the first wristwatch in 1572. The French could be violent douchebags too: “Count Orsini had told the French king that not one Huguenot should be left alive in France.” The Anabaptists are tortured during Elizabeth’s reign for saying Christians shouldn’t be carrying swords. Getting tortured for believing in Christian non-violence. Torture was a royal prerogative in matters of the state. In an exceedingly rare appearance by the real God, on January 12, 1583, the stand of a bear-pit collapses killing many spectators (one hopes the bears dined well that night and the meat wasn’t too tough). Peter tells of the cataclysmic break of England with Rome brought about by Henry VIII due to his relentless pursuit of the perfect heIr and perfect wife. He tells of how the short reign of Edward VI the teenage king resulted in the reign of Bloody Mary who violently reimposed Catholicism. I enjoy it, I suppose, but I never thought I'd be a novelist. I never wanted to be a novelist. I can't bear fiction. I hate it. It's so untidy. When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet, then I wrote a critical book, and I don't think I even read a novel till I was about 26 or 27. [5] Calvin is partly responsible for this sadistic religious crap; Calvin had declared that Christian had a duty to “destroy” false gods. Let’s look at linear progress: under Henry VIII Catholics were burned, while under Elizabeth “some 200 Catholics were strangled or disemboweled.” Vive la difference. Whether your Tudor monarch was a man or woman, looked like Bette Davis or not, you still had to live in fear in a sadistic land. And that violence wasn’t confined to royalty: the stone throwers at executions and that “the people would rather go a bear-baiting than to attend a divine service”.

All across the USA, people are showing up dead. The deaths don't appear to be connected in any way until one particular death occurs and gets the Secretary of Defense's attention. He arranges for a task force to investigate. It is probably not easy to write an account of English history that would satisfy both the layman and the expert and that would cover all the aspects and choose the vantage point every potential reader could wish for, and so all I can say is that if you want to read a history focusing on the monarchy and its representatives and adding vignettes of everyday history in between, this is the right book for you. The publishing of this work showed his tendency to creatively reexamine and explore the works of several London based authors. The houses of York and Lancaster were in fact two sides of the same ruling family. The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. They are sometimes describes as the third and fourth sons respectively, but this omits one male child who lived for six months. Their closeness, however, bred only enmity and ferocity. Blue blood was often bad blood.However, it was his bad attitude towards parliament that resulted in the deep divisions that almost tore the country apart during the reign of Charles I, his heir. I put those words in quotes because I think they're imaginary, foul concepts. Obviously, I recognize that such classes were created and had a monumental impact, and I'm fascinated by them, but I sure don't recognize them as "noble," much less royal.) This book covers from Stonehenge to the end of the Plantagenet rule with the death of Richard III in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field. I also had a relative that fought on the side of the Tudor usurpers (well how they are referred to in my household anyway) he was knighted on the battlefield by Henry VII for his role in helping to slay Richard. I've never really 'done' any history - my ideas of the Tudors until recently were Henry VIII = a sort of half-timbered shouting Brian Blessed and Elizabeth I = Miranda Richardson - so I guess I'd probably have liked any book which told their crazy stories fairly competently. Growing up, his mother was employed in the human resources department of an engineering organization. He never saw his father as he had abandoned the family when he was but a baby. By the time he was five years old, he was reading newspapers and wrote a play inspired by Guy Fawkes by the time he was nine.

This is a very ambitious book, covering the period from prehistory up to the death of Henry VII, and really it would be a good ideas to have some sort of computer programme such as Visio to hand while reading it, because the relationships between the main players becomes confusing. But this is not really a fault. I was prompted to read this book after reading the author's version of the Canterbury Tales, and I'm pleased I did. After Edward’s early death, his deeply conservative Catholic eldest sister, Mary, came to the throne. Under her rule, Protestants were ruthlessly pursued and thousands were burned at the stake as heretics.It would be difficult to find a more informative and entertaining volume. You are drawn into the barbarity of much of English history and entertained by the more whimsical descriptions of life, particularly in the middle ages. The book is quite startlingly inaccurate on dozens of occasions. George VI became king in 1936, not 1937. The famous 1933 Oxford Union motion about not fighting for king and country is significantly misquoted. How Elgar could be regarded as one of the two most successful British composers in the 1930s escapes me: he wrote nothing of any importance after 1919 and was painfully out of fashion by the time he died in 1934. Mrs Thatcher didn’t ‘form a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’, at Yuri Andropov’s funeral in 1984. She wanted to meet him, but was rebuffed. She first met him on his trip to the UK at the end of the year, three months before he became General Secretary. It wasn’t the ‘leader of East Germany’ who announced the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but an ill-informed Günter Schabowski, by mistake. The novel of Kingsley Amis’s that Thatcher was so dismissive about (‘Huh! Get another crystal ball!’) is not about ‘a communist take-over of Britain’ but a Russian occupation — communism having long been replaced by feudalism. And so on.