"1660 England. General Edward Whalley and his son-in law Colonel William Goffe board a ship bound for the New World. They are on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I--a brazen execution that marked the culmination of the English Civil War, in which parliamentarians successfully battled royalists for control. But now, ten years after Charles' beheading, the royalists have returned to power. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, the...

"A fresh, exciting history of seventeenth-century England, a time of revolution when society was on fire and simultaneously forging the modern world. The seventeenth century was a revolutionary age for the English. It started as they suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman, and it ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, England suffered terrorism and witch panics. Under his son Charles, state and society collapsed into...

The high society of Stuart England found Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess Purbeck (1602-1645) an exasperating woman. She lived at a time when women were expected to obedient, silent, and chaste, but Frances displayed none of these qualities. Her determination to ignore convention contributed in no small measure to a live of high drama, one which encompassed kidnappings, secret rendezvous, an illegitimate child, accusations of black magic, imprisonments,...

From the Publisher: For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language. Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide,...

"In 1649, Jan Brunt arrives in Great Britain from the Netherlands to work on draining and developing an expanse of wetlands known as the Great Level. Here he meets Eliza, a local woman whose love overturns his ordered vision. Determined to help her thrive beyond her situation, Jan is heedless of her devotion to her home and way of life. When she uses the education Jan has given her to sabotage his work, Eliza is brutally punished, and Jan flees...

Lectures on the history of England.