Charles I

How weird was Oliver Cromwell?

24 August 2024 9:00 am

The pious people’s champion was not only a sadist and ruthless self-promoter; he could also indulge in infantile horseplay during the pressurised period leading up to the regicide

What makes MPs special

18 May 2024 9:00 am

On Monday, the House of Commons passed, by one vote, a motion to allow MPs to be suspended from parliament…

Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?

20 August 2022 9:00 am

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…

Why Merseyside is the natural home for a Shakespearean theatre

6 August 2022 9:00 am

A neglected little town in Merseyside is the natural home for Shakespeare North, says Robert Gore-Langton

Brother against brother in the English civil war

28 May 2022 9:00 am

‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ is the best description of the devastating conflict that erupted in England, Ireland and…

With Elizabeth Stuart as monarch, might the English civil war have been avoided?

27 November 2021 9:00 am

Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled…

‘Anne Cresacre’, c.1527, by Hans Holbein the Younger

A sumptuous feast of an exhibition: Charles I at the Royal Academy reviewed

27 January 2018 9:00 am

Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of…

Not-so-Gloriana: Queen Elizabeth I in her early sixties. (Studio of Marcus Gheerarts the Younger, c. 1596)

Power slips from Gloriana’s jewelled fingers

21 May 2016 9:00 am

If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young…

Ford Madox Brown celebrates 17th-century advances in science in his painting ‘William Crabtree watches the Transit of Venus in 1639’

A.C. Grayling reduces history to a game of quidditch

12 March 2016 9:00 am

The 17th century scores highly  — especially England’s part in it — in A.C. Grayling’s ‘points system’ of history. If only the study of the past were that simple, says Ruth Scurr

Velázquez’s portrait of his Moorish assistant Juan de Pareja. The glorious lace collar would surely have fallen foul of Spain’s sumptuary laws

Velázquez’s vanishing act

2 January 2016 9:00 am

This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct…

‘Pan and Syrinx’, 1617, by Peter Paul Rubens

How will the British public take to Rubens’s fatties?

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Are Rubens’s figures too fat for the British to appreciate them? Martin Gayford investigates

Henry VIII, Edward VI, Charles I, George VI and George V

Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty

3 January 2015 9:00 am

Nigel Jones reviews the first five titles to appear in a new series on British monarchs

Doctor Scroggy’s War (Photo: Mark Douet)

Charles III is made for numbskulls by numbskulls

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by…

Oliver Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles I, by Paul Delaroche

Rebellion without a cause: Peter Ackroyd's curious Civil War

20 September 2014 9:00 am

How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s…

Music at Midnight, by John Drury - review

28 September 2013 9:00 am

When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he…