P.R. Cavill offers a major reinterpretation of early Tudor constitutional history. In the grand 'Whig' tradition, the parliaments of Henry VII were a disappointing retreat from the onward march towards parliamentary democracy. The king was at best indifferent and at worst hostile to parliament; its meetings were cowed and quiescent, subservient to the royal will. Yet little research has tested these assumptions. Drawing on extensive archival research, Cavill challenges existing accounts an...

In this groundbreaking history of Ireland, Neil Hegarty presents a fresh perspective on Ireland's past. Comprehensive and engaging, The Story of Ireland is an eye-opening account of a nation that has long been shaped by forces beyond its coasts.The Story of Ireland re-examines Irish history, challenging the accepted stories and long-held myths associated with Ireland. Transporting readers to the Ireland of the past, beginning with the first settlement in A.D. 433,...

William Hague has written the life of William Wilberforce who was both a staunch conservative and a tireless campaigner against the slave trade.Hague shows how Wilberforce, after his agonising conversion to evangelical Christianity, was able to lead a powerful tide of opinion, as MP for Hull, against the slave trade, a process which was to take up to half a century to be fully realised. Indeed, he succeeded in rallying to his cause the support in the Commons Debates of some the fin...

Means to be God, and do as pleases himself Martin Luther observed. It was a shrewd comment, not merely on the divorce in which the King was then embroiled, but upon his whole career. Henry VIII was self righteous, and convinced that he enjoyed a special relationship with the Almighty, which gave him a unique claim upon the obedience of his subjects. He subdued the church, sidelined the old nobility, and reorganised the government of his realm, all in the name of that Good Lordship which wa...

Ever since the discovery of his lost grave in Leicester, the eyes of the world have been drawn to the twists and turns surrounding England’s King Richard III… Annette Carson, acclaimed author and expert on Richard’s reign (and one of the team who found him), has published A Small Guide to the Great Debate, a brief summary of the main arguments concerning his actions and reputation. Carson has researched and written extensively on Richard III. Her book Richard III: The Maligned King (The Hi...

Richard III has been written off in history as one of England's evil kings. His usurpation of the throne from his nephew Edward V and then subsequent generations of pro-Tudor historians ensured his fame as the disfigured murderer portrayed by Shakespeare. In the twentieth century, Richard found his apologists, those who saw him as more sinned against than sinning.This biography – by the leading expert on Richard – strips away the propaganda of the centuries...

Lady Jane Grey, is one of the most elusive and tragic characters in English history.In July 1553 the death of the childless Edward VI threw the Tudor dynasty into crisis. On Edward's instructions his cousin Jane Grey was proclaimed queen, only to be ousted 13 days later by his illegitimate half sister Mary and later beheaded. In this radical reassessment, Eric Ives rejects traditional portraits of Jane both as hapless victim of political intrigue or Protestant martyr. Instead he pr...

Antonia Fraser's Perilous Question is a dazzling re-creation of the tempestuous two-year period in Britain's history leading up to the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, a narrative which at times reads like a political thriller.The era, beginning with the accession of William IV, is evoked in the novels of Trollope and Thackeray, and described by the young Charles Dickens as a cub reporter. It is lit with notable characters. The reforming heroes ar...

From medieval Runnymede to twentieth-century Jarrow, from King Alfred to George Orwell by way of John Lilburne and Mary Wollstonecraft, a rich and colourful thread of radicalism runs through a thousand years of British history. In this fascinating study, Edward Vallance traces a national tendency towards revolution, irreverence and reform wherever it surfaces and in all its variety. He unveils the British people who fought and died for religious freedom, universal suffrage, justice and lib...

Colm Lennon's Sixteenth-Century Ireland, the second instalment in the New Gill History of Ireland series, looks at how the Tudor conquest of Ireland by Henry VIII and the country's colonisation by Protestant settlers led to the incomplete conquest of Ireland, laying the foundations for the sectarian conflict that persists to this day. In 1500, most of Ireland lay outside the ambit of English royal power. Only a small area around Dublin, The Pale, was directly administered by the crown. The...

In Seventeenth-Century Ireland, Professor Raymond Gillespie, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, tries to understand Ireland in the seventeenth century in a new way. Most surveys of seventeenth-century Ireland approach the period using war, conquest, plantation and colonisation as their organising themes. It does not see Ireland as a passive receptor of colonial ideas imposed from above. In fact, Professor Gillespie argues that the seventeenth century was a uniquely creative moment i...

Based on historical research and debates about Wales and Welshness, this volume offers an authoritative and accessible account of the period from Neanderthal times to the opening of the Senedd, the home of the National Assembly for Wales, in 2006. Within a remarkably brief and stimulating compass, Geraint H. Jenkins explores the emergence of Wales as a nation, its changing identities and values, and the transformations its people experienced and survived throughout the centuries. In the fa...