William Cecil
A dangerous balancing act
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
Elizabeth alone
If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young…
Gloriana waits and sees
Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded…
The Putney boy done good
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
