A copiously illustrated guide to the monarchs of the British Isles and Ireland from pre-Saxon times to the present, complete with concise genealogical charts and details of key historical events.

The book is divided into five sections, together with a Compendium at the end.

Part One, presents information about Pre-Saxon rule, including details about ancient British chiefs, Roman rulers and the Roman Conquest. Part Two provides information about Scotland, Ireland and Wales, with sections on Robert I and the Wars of Independence, The Union of the Crowns, the Princes of Wales and the High Kingship of Ireland.Part Three discusses the Saxons, Normans and Plantagenets. Part Four gives details about the Tudors and Stuarts. Part Five presents an in-depth discussion of the houses from Hanover to Windsor.

Parts Two to Five provide all the essential information you will need to know about Kings and Queens including details of birth, parents, accession to the throne, coronation, authority, personal status, death date and burial place for each monarch.

In addition an overview is given for each reign outlining major events and personal tragedies, war, celebrations and conspiracies.

'Readers will enjoy Plowden's combination of a fine gift for storytelling with sound research and an infectious affection for her troop of intrepid ladies.' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times. 'Our women are all on fire, striving through a gallant emulation to outdoe our men and will make good our yielding walls or loose their lives' wrote a chronicler of the siege of Chester in 1645. In the war between king and parliament, the women of England played an active part. Some displayed a courage so far above their sex as to suprise and disconcert their men. The Royalists included Queen Henrietta, who went abroad to raise money for the cause, and Mary Bankes who held Corfe Castle for the king with her daughters, heaving stones and hot embers over the battlements at the attacking Roundheads. On the opposing side, Lady Brillia Harley guarded Brampton Bryan Castle in Herefordshire against the Royalists and Anne Fairfax, wife of Cromwell's northern general, who was taken prisoner by the Duke of Newcastle's troops after Adwalton Moor. Also featured are the oyster wenches of London, who laboured beside the men digging trenches around the City; the women who helped prisoners escape, such as Anne Mu

The Tudor era belongs to its women. No other period of English History has produced so many notable and interesting women, and into other period have they so powerfully influenced the course of political events. Mary Tudor, Elizabeth 1 and, at moments of high drama, Mary Queen of Scots dominated the political scene for more than half a century, while in the previous fifty years Henry VIII's marital escapades brought six more women to the centre of attention. In this book the women of the royal family are the central characters; the royal women set the style and between them they provide a dazzling variety of personalities as well as illustrating almost every aspect of life as it affected women in Tudor England. We know what they ate, how they dressed, the books they read and the letters they wrote. Even the greatest of them suffered the universal legal and physiological disabilities of womanhood - some survived them, some went under. Now revised and updated, Alison Plowden's beautifully written account of the women behind the scenes and at the forefront of sixteenth-century English history will be welcomed by anyone interested in exploring this popular period of history from the point of view of the women who made it.

The House of Tudor changed the history of Britain forever. The Tudor monarchs have been immortalised in novels and films for generations. However, the true history of this incredible dynasty is often romanticised and fact is overlooked. Alison Plowden's accessible and beautifully written history traces the family's turbulent reign of power from Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, who fathered the great Henry VIII. Henry VIII went onto revolutionise England's armed forces and implement controversial reforms in England. Yet, he is perhaps most remembered for his tumultuous love life and the fates of his six wives, including Anne of Boleyn, who sparked an international crisis. He fathered four known offspring, including Mary I and Gloriana - Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, who reigned for 44 years in what is known as England's Golden Age. This book not only re-tells the familiar stories of these famous monarchs, revealing the truth behind the scandals; but it also recounts the history of the less well-known Tudor monarchs: Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (the uncrowned Queen of England), and those who came directly before and after them - Edward IV and James I. If you read on history of the Tudors, make it this one - you are sure to be enthralled and surprised by how the facts are often more incredible than the fiction surrounding them.

This is a study of life during the Interregnum: the unique period in England's history, when it was a commonwealth, from 1649-1660. During this time, the House of Lords was abolished along with the monarchy, the Anglican church was in eclipse and the Book of Common Prayer proscribed. The Interregnum was first dominated by the struggle for supremacy between parliament and army then the country was governed by the Protectorate - a highly unpopular form of martial law - and Cromwell's was installed as Lord Protector and king in all but name. It was also a time of intellectual upheaval, with the proliferation of sects and splinter groups, from the Levellers, sometimes described as prototype socialists, to the Diggers, who established a commune in Surrey; from the Fifth Monarchy Men, who confidently anticipated the imminent rule of Christ and his saints, to the Quakers, who first appeared in the 1650s. Drawing on contemporary memoirs, diaries, letters, newspapers and state papers, this book will reveal what family life, religion, culture and literacy, trade, domestic life, health were under the Commonwealth.