Tudor Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Tudor Era’
In 1573, Sir Francis Drake had two ambitions: to revenge himself on the Spanish, and to see with his own eyes the Pacific Ocean.
In 1567, Francis Drake had been humiliated on an English expedition against Spanish possessions around the Caribbean. Five years later he returned, seeking revenge. With the help of the Cimarrons — Africans escaped from Spanish slavers, and nursing their own grievances — he planned to snatch gold bound for the Spanish Treasury at Nombre de Dios. But first, his chaplain tells us, he had a stop to make.
Queen Elizabeth I’s quick thinking and command of five European languages made her a dangerous enemy in a war of words.
In 1588, King Philip of Spain sent a vast Armada against England. As the husband of the late Queen Mary I, he thought the English crown should have gone to him and not to her half-sister Elizabeth, and now Elizabeth was supporting Protestant rebels in the Spanish Netherlands. Hoping to daunt this upstart Englishwoman, he threatened war in Latin verse, no less; but the Queen was not a novice in the art of verbal fencing.
Mary I’s fear for her throne had risen to such a pitch that her Chamberlain felt threatened by a three-year-old child.
In the Spring of 1554, Queen Mary I was in tense negotiations to marry the King of Spain. Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, had been widely expected to wear the crown beside her, but now she charged him with conspiring with rebel Sir Thomas Wyatt and threw him in Tower; and on March 17th, he was joined by Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth, rumoured to be Edward’s new love. Yet Mary’s minders did not feel safe.
It was George-a-Green’s job to stop animals trampling the crops, and it nettled his pride in Wakefield’s broad acres to see some ramblers behaving no better.
Robin Hood, Maid Marian and Robin’s merry men have been tramping carelessly over fields of corn near Wakefield, much to the disgust of George-a-Green, a local pinder (an animal control warden) and the lovely Beatrice beside him. Robin, who for once was armed with no more than a staff like the one George held, said soothingly that for any damage done the amends lay in his own hands.
Emperor Akbar’s court physician told his nobles that beneath the waters of a lake was a dry, cosy room, and dared them to find a way in.
In April 1594, Persian physician and inventor Hakim Ali Gilani (?-1609) laid a challenge before the open-mouthed courtiers of Emperor Akbar, then in Lahore. He showed them a small pool, and assured any man brave enough to dive in that there was a perfectly dry, cosy room waiting for him beneath the dark surface.
In 1585, English merchant Ralph Fitch found himself at the heart of Mughal India, as a guest at the court of Emperor Akbar the Great.
In 1600, Ralph Fitch was among the advisers engaged in the founding of the East India Company, thanks to his account of a daring tour of Syria, Iran and India from 1583 to 1591 that had gripped Queen Elizabeth I and all London. In July 1585, Fitch had arrived in the Indian city of Agra, which with nearby Fatehpur-Sikri lay at the heart of the realm of Akbar the Great (r. 1556-1605), third Mughal Emperor.