The crisis arose from the expressed desire of King Edward VIII of England to marry a twice-divorced American woman. While his father George V was ill, struggling through the last years of a longish reign, the Prince of Wales (Edward) had enjoyed a series of affairs with married women. Queen Mary thought this was a youthful phase that her son would grow out of, but Elizabeth, the very young wife of Edward’s younger brother Bertie Duke of York thought otherwise.
Precedent suggested rather forcefully that it was in the spirit of the (unwritten) British Constitution for the sovereign to seek the advice of Ministers before marriage. In order to marry a [...]

K-141 Kursk was the pride of the Russian Navy. Launched in 1994, the nuclear-powered super-submarine was probably the most sophisticated warship on (and under) the seas, but ended its days in the icy waters of the Barents Sea on 12th August, 2000. With her to the bottom of the ocean went 24 ‘Granite’ missiles, and a dozen torpedoes of the latest type and design. The submarine’s experienced captain was Liachin, a bit of a legend in the Navy. The shipwreck took him and 118 crew members to a slow, agonizing death. Why did it happen? The tragedy placed in perspective the fact that despite its fearsome reputation, the Russian Navy [...]

There are celebrated photo shots and newsreels of the three most powerful men on earth, seated together smiling for the cameras while they carve up the planet. The man in the middle is a shrunken giant, very ill-looking, with a rug drawn up to his lap over scrawny, long legs. This is Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States. On his right, an appropriate position, sits an even older man called Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain. To Roosevelt’s left, even more appropriately, sits Josef Stalin, Russia’s leader and commander-in-chief. It is 24 January, 1943. The place is Casablanca. Later the same three will meet at Teheran, and [...]

Theodore (born 1858) was born in New York, and educated at Harvard. The family was Dutch/American. As a young, vigorous man, he spent two tough years working on a cattle ranch, probably the reason why he was called (not always sympathetically) ‘cowboy’ for most of his life. He worked for the New York City administration from 1889 to 97, and became Assistant Secretary of the US Navy in 1897 when he was thirty-nine. During his stint with the Navy (1897 – 98) he prepared the fleet for the Spanish-American War, but by astute use of newspaper contacts he became world famous as a colonel commanding the ‘Rough Riders’ in Cuba, [...]

Called by some ‘colonialism’ – a mistake – imperialism is a term frequently abused by being used pejoratively by politicians and journalists. For historians, the word can be applied to numerous epochs, in each of which there may be detected a shade of difference, always significant.
Persia, Macedonia, Ottoman Turkey, Spain, France, Soviet Russia and Britain have extended their respective domain over other societies at different times, giving way to imperial rule. Germany has attempted to rule over others, using force. Britain used commercial enterprise backed by a powerful navy. Spain used a powerful navy backed by the immense courage of the conquistadores. Persia used vast resources and her armies, while [...]

Raleigh was an explorer, navigator, courtier and part-time corsair. When young he took part in two privateering expeditions to the West Indies, an increasingly important staging post between the newly opened up North America, and Britain, hub of the fledgling empire.
He was also sent by Queen Elizabeth I to suppress a rebellion in Ireland. On his return from this unsuccessful sortie (unsuccessful as all attempts made by the English to sort out the Irish Question always were, and are) Raleigh became a favourite of the Queen, who rewarded him with honours and financial rewards – including (what irony!) – land in Ireland.
From 1585 to 1591 he was busy organising several [...]

These three years saw a conflict that really was a civil war, just as the Wars of the Roses in England were not. A real civil war splits the country, regions, families, married couples and best friends in two, for purely ideological reasons. England’s feudal War of the Roses was a series of basically private battles fought between members of a powerful aristocracy, employing their private armies, with the aim of securing the throne for one family or the other.
After the fall of Primo de Rivera in 1930, and the eclipse of the monarchy in 1931, Spain was split. On one hand there were the privileged (landowners, the church) and [...]

On the 23 and 24 August, 1572, the streets of Paris ran with blood as they would again in a little more than two hundred years, with the French Revolution (see this site). The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve formed a part of the French Wars of Religion. The Guise family and faction persuaded Catherine of Medici to authorize a premeditated attack on the principal Huguenot leaders in their homes.
Wild Catholic mobs used the plot as a pretext, however, to indulge in an orgy of butchery. The original plan was to kill about 200 leaders of the Huguenots (Calvinist), but by the time the Paris mob had finished, by the [...]

The ardent traveller can find a multitude of manor houses still standing in England. Most are occupied by families, many by the same family that has owned the house for centuries, and which has passed by the law of promogeniture down the male line.
The manor house was the home of the lord of an estate in medieval times. It housed the lord and his family, possibly cousins and uncles too, as well as being the home of the lord’s bailiff, or manager of the estate. Bailiffs were often gentlemen too, though this was not always the case. Far too many bailiffs spent most of their lives robbing their master via [...]

Sir James Brooke (1803 – 1868)
In a recent article, Toda Historia published a brief account of the rise and fall of the British empire. The empire was just as much a product of private enterprise and individual initiative as it was a result of British and foreign politics. British adventurers discovered the lands and islands that eventually formed the empire, British politicans secured their ‘new ownership’, and British administrators managed the vast possessions, while the British Navy sailed round the world protecting them. James Brooke is a perfect example. Young, ambitious, ruthless, slight in build but wide in intellect, Brooke arrived in Borneo as just another administrator. He [...]

What we mean by this expression was (formerly) an apparently haphazard collection of lands throughout the world linked by common allegiance to the British throne. In 1800, though Britain had lost her Thirteen Colonies in North America, she still retained Newfoundland, scarcely populated parts of Canada and many West Indian islands, plus other islands useful for trading purposes. Britain held Gibraltar from Spain following the Treaty of Utrecht which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1788 she had created convict settlements in New South Wales, Australia, which greatly helped the condition of overcrowding in prisons at home.
During the Napoleonic Wars Britain ‘acquired’ more islands, among them Malta, Mauritius, [...]

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