The 313th anniversary of the death of the major seventeenth-century Restoration dramatist and first Poet Laureate, John Dryden, occurred recently on the 1st of May (1700). I felt quite bad about neglecting such an event, so here’s my little homage to Dryden’s work: King David, from “Absalom and Achitophel”: In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy… Read on
That beauteous, intelligent, sensitive woman, Mary Stuart, who later became Queen Mary II of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was born on this day 30th of April, 1662. Her mother was Anne Hyde, a commoner who had become the Duchess of York upon marrying James, Duke of York, younger brother to Charles II. The birth took place at… Read on
[This is available as a podcast on iTunes] He was unquestionably one of the handsomest of the Stuart men. Tall, dark, and seductive, James Crofts, later James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, was born in Rotterdam, the Dutch Republic, on the 9th of April 1649, to an exiled King Charles II and his mistress Lucy Walter. James had a… Read on
Code Red – we have a 17th Century Rake Alert!!! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who in his thirty-three years of life was one of the most dissolute, reckless, cocksure members of Charles II’s Merry Gang – a collection of the most lusty, debauched personages at the Restoration court. Born on 1 April, 1647, he was an… Read on
James I of England, VI of Scotland, died on the 27th of March, 1625. He ruled over what is commonly referred to as the Jacobean era, which witnessed a continuance in the flourishing of art and theatre with the likes of William Shakespeare. Sir Walter Raleigh was executed under James I, and the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605 occurred during the… Read on
The following excerpt is attributed to Andrew Marvell: I sing a Woofull Ditty Of a Wound that long will smart-a Given (the more’s the Pitty) In the Realme of Magna Charta: Youth! Youth! thou’dst better be slaine by thy Foes Than live to hang’d for cutting a Nose. Our good King Charles the Second Too flippant of Treasure… Read on
Anne Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon and Frances Aylesbury, was born on this day 12 March, 1637. Some people think that our current Duchess of Cambridge, the lovely Catherine, is the first commoner to have married an heir to the throne. Au contraire, one of the first ones was this lady, Anne… We must go back… Read on
One of Charles II’s earliest great passions, Lucy Walter, sometimes Lucy Barlow, a Royalist exile of Welsh ancestry who became his bedfellow (possibly his wife) and then the mother of his son, James, the future doomed Duke of Monmouth. Lucy, born around 1630, was considered to be a stunningly beautiful, but quite vapid, woman. The image that has comes… Read on