The history of Parliament is the history of the United Kingdom itself. It has a cast of thousands. Some were ambitious, visionary and altruistic. Others were hot-headed, violent and self-serving. Few were unambiguously noble. Yet their rowdy confrontations, their campaigning zeal and their unstable alliances framed our nation. This first of two volumes takes us on a 500-year journey from Parliament's earliest days in the thirteenth century through the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses and the upheavals of the Civil Wars, and up to 1801, when Parliament - and the United Kingdom,...
The history of Parliament is the history of the United Kingdom itself. It has a cast of thousands. Some were ambitious, visionary and altruistic. Othe...
Over the last two hundred years Parliament has witnessed and effected dramatic and often turbulent change. Political parties rose - and fell. This second volume has a cast of characters that includes some of British history's most famous names: the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher.
Over the last two hundred years Parliament has witnessed and effected dramatic and often turbulent change. Political parties rose - and fell. This sec...
They had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world. When Charles Dickens wrote these tragic lines he was penning fact, not fiction. He had visited the condemned cells at the infamous prison at Newgate, where seventeen men who had been sentenced to death were awaiting news of their pleas for mercy. Two men were particularly striking: James Pratt and John Smith, who had been convicted of homosexuality. Theirs was ‘an unnatural offence’, a crime...
They had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well kne...
