William Cecil
Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
Power slips from Gloriana’s jewelled fingers
If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young…
Elizabeth I, queen of the waiting game
Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded…
Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
