Stuart

Many have dismissed the last Stuart monarch as a nonentity or a figure of fun. Yet according to Richard Wilkinson she does not deserve her tarnished reputation.

On the tercentenary of the fire that destroyed it, Simon Thurley describes the significance of the royal Palace of Whitehall to the Tudor and Stuart monarchs who lived there.

The last years of Charles II saw London a hotbed of political and religious conflict, exploited by a 'hit squad' who brought a reign of terror to the city.

A cabinet of curiosities or a medium for enlightening the general public? Patricia Fara looks at how debate over democratising scientific knowledge crystalised in the development of the newly-formed British Museum.

Presentation of the past as a seed-bed of modernity gives it bogus relevance to modern concerns. Two hundred and fifty years after the battle of Culloden Jeremy Black looks at a classic instance – the military challenge of the Jacobites.

On a cold January morning in 1649 Charles I stepped out onto a scaffold in Whitehall and into history, seen by some as a tyrant, by others as a martyr. But how far was the intellectual climate of mid-17th-century England ready for the republic that followed? Sarah Barber presents the latest thinking.

Penelope Corfield looks at the controversy about religion and ancien régime in the Georgian state and comes to a pluralist conclusion.

Graham Seel reassesses the career of Oliver Cromwell's predecessor as Parliamentary Commander in the 1640s, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, and argues that he has been harshly judged by English Civil War historians.

The way in which the church commemoration of King Charles I's 1649 execution became a potent instrument in the political war of words after the Restoration is examined, and the history of the king's execution and the clergy's promotion of the event are discussed.

Helen Davidson on a new search into recovering Charles I's treasure boat.