WRITER & HISTORIAN
London Historians have just posted online a piece I wrote for their newsletter to mark the 450th anniversary of the birth of the most notorious of Elizabethan traitors, Anthony Babington. (Update: Now available on my blog here in two parts, here and here.) However, I felt that his fate – and those of his fellow... Continue Reading →
Just a brief, moderately immodest post to say that the wonderful Helen Castor has recommended The Favourite as one of her books of the year in this weekend's Sunday Telegraph. It is of course still available from Amazon and all good booksellers! Also on her list is George Goodwin's illuminating and compelling book about the... Continue Reading →
Sir Walter Ralegh was tried for treason in the great hall of Winchester Castle on Thursday 17 November 1603. As with almost all treason trials of the period, the result was a foregone conclusion: he was found guilty. The jury took less than fifteen minutes to reach its conclusion, surprising even the king's counsel, the... Continue Reading →
To mark the anniversary of Ralegh's execution in 1618, I thought it worth posting a letter he wrote to his wife from his prison cell in Winchester in December 1603. He had been sentenced to death for treason on 17 November, and wrote this letter, most likely on 8 December, expecting to die imminently, perhaps... Continue Reading →
I didn't know a great deal about Thomas Cobham when I came across his name in the Middlesex Session Rolls, where he is recorded as one of two men standing surety for a young Walter Ralegh on December 19, 1577, after the latter's servants had been arrested for a drunken assault on the nightwatch in... Continue Reading →
This is the third in my series of posts on a disparate group of courtiers in the 1570s and 1580s – for the purposes of this blog, I am calling them the Lost Elizabethans – who I first encountered researching The Favourite. Although well known in their day – I suspect both Noel, the subject... Continue Reading →
Despite the notoriety which still clouds men like Anthony Babington, executed in 1586 for plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I, history's selective memory has been kind in overlooking the dubious career of other men who flirted with regicide in the same period. Indeed, one man, despite never having attempted the act, seems to have been almost... Continue Reading →
