The first king of this tiny country, washed by the Atlantic, and blessed with fine seamen, navigators and harbours, was Alfonso I, in 1139, but the Portuguese Empire…
Category: French History
Further thoughts on Thomas Becket, martyr and saint
Thomas Becket, or Thomas à Becket as he was called by my teacher of History, was not a Saxon. He was a son of a wealthy Norman merchant…
Burgundy: Kingdom,Duchy and House
Burgundy, a region of France, was first a kingdom after the collapse of the Roman Empire, roughly speaking the fifth century. It was incorporated into the Carolingian Empire,…
Alsace/Lorraine & Schleswig/Holstein
These two tongue-twisters used not only to twist tongues, but eject furious spittle from the pursed mouth of European statesmen and politicians. The problem is not only of…
Queen Elizabeth I (the ‘Virgin Queen’)
The only half-decent member of the infamous Tudor dynasty was Elizabeth, born in 1533. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn. It…
The ‘White Terror’
It is a common misconception that the French Revolution (q.v.), the ‘Terror’ and the fall of Robespierre and other leading Jacobins, led immediately to the rise of Napoleon…
An infamous trio, Darnley, Bothwell & Rizzio
These three sixteenth century men had a lot in common, though the first had royal blood, the second noble blood, and the third was a foreign commoner. What…
Further thoughts on John I
King John has the worst reputation of any English king, and there is plenty of competition. He was a crooked legislator, greedy, consumed with ambition of the despicable…
More thoughts on that Yalta Conference
In February, 1945, the second ‘Big Three’ conference took place at Yalta in the Crimea. The first had been in Teheran in Persia. What was agreed at Yalta…
Action Française (1899)
In one of our recent posts we described the case of Alfred Dreyfus, and discussed how much the prevalent anti-Semitism at the end of the 19th century influenced…