In The Sisters of Henry VIII, Maria Perry brings history alive by examining the lives of these extraordinary women and their influence on Europe in the Tudor Age. Margaret became queen of Scotland at age thirteen; family members arranged beautiful Mary's betrothal to the aging king of France when she was twelve. But both women chose their second husbands for love: Margaret married and divorced twice after Henry's advancing armies slaughtered her first husband and kidnapped her children; Mary risked execution by proposing to the handsome duke of Suffolk. Groundbreaking in both depth and scope, Perry's work rescues two remarkable princesses from the shadows of history and offers a fresh interpretation of a royal family and an era sure to fascinate readers of Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser.

    Parlour games. Cocktails. Welcome to a glorious journey through the golden age of the country house party - and you are invited. Our host, celebrated historian Adrian Tinniswood, traces the evolution of this quintessentially British pastime from debauched royal tours to the flamboyant excess of the Bright Young Things. With cameos by the Jazz Age industrialist, the bibulous earl and the off-duty politician - whether in moated manor houses or ornate Palladian villas - Tinniswood gives a vivid insight into weekending etiquette and reveals the hidden lives of celebrity guests, from Nancy Astor to Winston Churchill, in all their drinking, feasting, gambling and fornicating. The result is a deliciously entertaining, star-studded, yet surprisingly moving portrait of a time when social conventions were being radically overhauled through the escapism of a generation haunted by war - and a uniquely fast-living period of English history. Praise for The Long Weekend:'Delicious, occasionally fantastical, revealing in ways that Downton Abbey never was. It is as if Tinniswood is at the biggest, wildest, most luxuriantly decadent party ever thrown, and he knows everyone.' Observer 'A deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book. Tinniswood displays a terrific insider's grasp of gossip . A meticulous, irresistible story.' Spectator 'Elegant, encyclopedic and entertaining . A confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly . Deserves to be on every costume drama producer's bookshelf.' Times

    The might of Richard III's army was pitted against the inferior forces of the upstart pretender to the crown, Henry Tudor, a twenty–eight year old Welshman who had just arrived back on British soil after fourteen years in exile. Yet this was to be a fight to the death—only one man could survive; only one could claim the throne.It would become one of the most legendary battles in English history: the only successful invasion since Hastings, it was the last time a king died on the battlefield. But The Rise Of The Tudors is much more than the account of the dramatic events of that fateful day in August. It is a tale of brutal feuds and deadly civil wars, and the remarkable rise of the Tudor family from obscure Welsh gentry to the throne of England—a story that began sixty years earlier with Owen Tudor's affair with Henry V's widow, Katherine of Valois.Drawing on eyewitness reports, newly discovered manuscripts and the latest archaeological evidence, including the recent discovery of Richard III's remains, Chris Skidmore vividly recreates this battle-scarred world and the reshaping of British history.

    They lived on the brink of the golden age of the European Renaissance and witnessed social and religious upheavals as the medieval world they knew crumbled to dust, replacing the old with the new. In this new book, Sylvia Barbara Soberton paints a vivid picture of the rivalry between the courts of England and France during the reigns of Henry VIII and Francis I. Set against the backdrop of sixteenth-century court life are the interwoven stories of individual French and English noblewomen whose dramatic lives even the best of novelists would have trouble inventing.Louise of Savoy knows that her son Francis is destined for greatness, but he faces new challenges after his accession, trusting his mother to become regent during his absence.Mary Tudor agrees to marry Louis XII, a man thirty-four years her senior, but after his unexpected death, she decides to become no man’s pawn and marries for love, creating one of the greatest scandals in Renaissance Europe.Claude of France may have been meek and submissive, but there is more to her character than meets the eye.Brought up at the French court, Anne Boleyn boldly refuses to become Henry VIII’s mistress. Her refusal triggers the King’s divorce case and eventually leads to the change of religious persuasion of the entire nation. Margaret of Alençon, Francis I’s sister, faces new challenges as her brother’s captivity after the Battle of Pavia propels her onto the diplomatic stage of Europe. Queen Eleanor, Charles V’s sister, marries Francis I and struggles to find her place at the French court, where his glittering mistress, Anne de Pisseleu, reigns supreme and exerts more influence than any royal mistress before her. Witnessing the warring political factions at court, the young Catherine de Medici, humiliated by her husband’s relationship with Diane de Poitiers, learns how to navigate the murky waters of courtly intrigue to emerge as the leading force on the international stage of sixteenth-century Europe.

    On one side of the watery pasture at Sedgemoor was the dashing thirty-six-year-old Duke of Monmouth, the charismatic son of Charles II, adored by the people. A reformer, a romantic, and a Protestant, he was fighting the army he had once commanded, in opposition to his uncle, King James II. Yet even before he launched his attack, Monmouth knew he would die.Born in the backstreets of Rotterdam in the year his grandfather Charles I was executed, Monmouth was the child of a turbulent age. His mother, the first of Charles II's famous liaisons, played courtesan to the band of raw and restless young royalists forced abroad by the changing political current. Conceived during a revolution and born into a republic, Monmouth, by the time he was twelve, was the sensation of the most licentious and libertine court in Europe. Adored by the king and drenched in honors, he became the greatest rake and reprobate of the age.On his path to becoming "the last royal rebel," Monmouth consorted with a spectacular list of contemporaries: Louis XIV was his mentor, William of Orange his confidant, Nell Gwyn his friend, the future Duke of Marlborough his pupil, D'Artagnan his lieutenant, John Dryden his censor, and John Locke his comrade. Anna Keay expertly chronicles Monmouth's life and offers splendid insight into this crucial and dramatic period in English history.

    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

    Charles I of England was a Protestant, the fifteen-year-old French princess a Catholic. The marriage was arranged for political purposes, and it seemed a mismatch of personalities. But against the odds, the reserved king and his naively vivacious bride fell passionately in love, and for ten years England enjoyed an era of peace and prosperity. When Charles became involved in war with Puritan Scotland, popular hatred of Henrietta's Catholicism roused Parliament to fury. As the opposition party embraced new values of liberty and republicanism”the blueprint for the American War of Independence and the French Revolution”Charles's fears for his wifes safety drove him into a civil war that would cost him his crown and his head. Rejecting centuries of hostile historical tradition, prize-winning biographer Katie Whitaker uses a host of original sources”including many unpublished manuscripts and letters ”to create an intimate portrait of a remarkable marriage. 16 pages of illustrations

    This book helps to restore full humanity to these six fascinating women by applying the insights of feminist scholarship. Here they appear not as stereotypes, not simply as victims, but as lively, intelligent noblewomen doing their best to survive in a treacherous court. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived takes a revisionist look at 16th-century English politics (domestic and otherwise), reinterpreting the historical record in perceptive new ways. For example, it shows Ann Boleyn not as a seductress, but as a sophisticate who for years politely suffered what we would now label royal sexual harassment. It presents evidence that the princess Anne of Cleves, whom Henry declared ugly and banished from his bed, was in fact a pretty woman who agreed to the king's whim as her best hope for happiness.

    But few books have brought to life more vividly the exquisite texture of two women's rivalry, spurred on by the ambitions and machinations of the forceful men who surrounded them. The drama has terrific resonance even now as women continue to struggle in their bid for executive power.Against the backdrop of sixteenth-century England, Scotland, and France, Dunn paints portraits of a pair of protagonists whose formidable strengths were placed in relentless opposition. Protestant Elizabeth, the bastard daughter of Anne Boleyn, whose legitimacy had to be vouchsafed by legal means, glowed with executive ability and a visionary energy as bright as her red hair. Mary, the Catholic successor whom England's rivals wished to see on the throne, was charming, feminine, and deeply persuasive. That two such women, queens in their own right, should have been contemporaries and neighbours sets in motion a joint biography of rare spark and page-turning power.

    His poor health and frailty of mind render him a weakling king -Henry depends on his closest men, Spymaster Derry Brewer and William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, to run his kingdom.Yet there are those, such as the Plantagenet Richard, Duke of York, who believe England must be led by a strong king if she is to survive. With England's territories in France under threat, and rumours of revolt at home, fears grow that Henry and his advisers will see the country slide into ruin. With a secret deal struck for Henry to marry a young French noblewoman, Margaret of Anjou, those fears become all too real.As storm clouds gather over England, King Henry and his supporters find themselves besieged abroad and at home. Who, or what can save the kingdom before it is too late?

    Endowed with English royal blood on her mother's side, she was betrothed in infancy to Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VII of England, an alliance that greatly benefited both sides. Yet Arthur died weeks after their marriage in 1501, and Catherine found herself remarried to his younger brother, soon to become Henry VIII. The history of England-and indeed of Europe-was forever altered by their union.Drawing on his deep knowledge of both Spain and England, Giles Tremlett has produced the first full biography in more than four decades of the tenacious woman whose marriage to Henry VIII lasted twice as long (twenty-four years) as his five other marriages combined. Her refusal to divorce him put her at the center of one of history's greatest power struggles, one that has resonated down through the centuries- Henry's break away from the Catholic Church as, bereft of a son, he attempted to annul his marriage to Catherine and wed Anne Boleyn. Catherine's daughter, Mary, would controversially inherit Henry's throne; briefly and bloodily, she returned England to the Catholicism of her mother's native Spain, foreshadowing the Spanish Armada some three decades later.From Catherine's peripatetic childhood at the glittering court of Ferdinand and Isabella to the battlefield at Flodden, where she, in Henry's absence abroad, led the English forces to victory against Scotland to her determination to remain queen and her last years in almost monastic isolation, Giles Tremlett vividly re-creates the life of a giant figure in the sixteenth century. Catherine of Aragon will take its place among the best of Tudor biography.

    Hers was certainly a dramatic life with dizzying reversals of fortune; from poverty in 1461 to queenship in 1464, followed by deposition, restoration, and conflicts with Richard III and Henry VII before spending her final years in religious seclusion. There is also the issue of her two sons, the infamous 'Princes in the Tower', and the controversy surrounding their disappearance.

    Here, brought vividly to life in this most moving novel, is a man who inspired loyalty and hatred in almost equal measure, until at last the implacable enmity of one woman brought about his downfall.

    Tied to Queen Anne by an intimate friendship, Sarah hoped to wield power equal to that of a government minister. When their relationship soured, she blackmailed Anne with letters revealing their intimacy, and accused her of perverting the course of national affairs by keeping lesbian favourites. Her spectacular arguments with the Queen, with the architects and workmen at Blenheim Palace, and with her own family made Sarah famous for her temper. Attacked for traits that might have been applauded in a man, Sarah was also capable of inspiring intense love and loyalty, deeply committed to her principles and to living what she believed to be a virtuous life.Sarah was a compulsive and compelling writer, narrating the major events of her day, with herself often at center stage. This biography brings her own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life, and casts a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history, and literature. Here is an unforgettable portrait of a woman who cared intensely about how we would remember her.

    His Victoria is not only the formidable, demanding, capricious queen of popular imagination—she is also often shy, diffident, and vulnerable, prone to giggling fits and crying jags. Often censorious when confronted with her mother's moral lapses, she herself could be passionately sensual, emotional, and deeply sentimental. Ascending to the throne at age eighteen, Victoria ruled for sixty-four years—an astounding length for any world leader. During her reign, she dealt with conflicts ranging from royal quarrels to war in Crimea and rebellion in India. She saw monarchs fall, empires crumble, new continents explored, and England grow into a dominant global and industrial power. This personal history is a compelling look at the complex woman whom, until now, we only thought we knew.