Stuart

Charles II’s Secretaries of State

D.G.C. Allan introduces the eleven Secretaries of State employed by Charles II, who reflect in the variety of their personalities, the social brilliance and the shifting policies of the Restoration Age.

A Missionary on the Amazon

Derek Severn recounts how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a priest from Bohemia served the Society of Jesus in the more remote parts of Brazil and Peru.

John Bunyan in Prison

As a ‘common upholder of unlawful meetings and conventicles’, Monica Furlong remembers, the great preacher was imprisoned for twelve years in 1660.

John Evelyn and London Air

Steven R. Smith finds that John Evelyn proposed some drastic remedies to combat the polluted air of London in the seventeenth century.

Algernon and the Rye House Plot

Only by a trick of fate in 1683, finds J.H.M. Salmon,  were Charles II and his brother preserved from an ambush that might have put an end to monarchy in England.

Charles I and the Fens

L.E. Harris shows how, by draining the Fens, Charles I hoped to replenish his Exchequer; but that the Dutch engineers he employed began a work that still continues.