https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Stuart
And they were monarchs of England, Scotland, and Ireland from King James IV-who-was-also-King James-I through Queen Anne.
James IV was about a century earlier, and "only" the King of Scotland. But it was his artfully negotiated marriage to Margaret Tudor that set the dynastic stage - for his great grandson (James VI and I) to also inherit the thrones of England and Ireland in the Union of the Crowns.
Jean Plaidy / Eleanor Alice Burford
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Alice_Burford
Georgette Heyer novels are another series in the same category. Some good writing and depictions there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgette_Heyer
All fiction.
lordleft•8mo ago
vondur•8mo ago
Xss3•8mo ago
PontifexMinimus•8mo ago
notahacker•8mo ago
tbf the English Civil War is, like most Civil Wars, pretty darned complicated in the motivations and actions of the key players, and dumbing it down gives lessons which are near, fit very nicely into modern tropes and are also almost entirely wrong in the messages they convey.
vondur•8mo ago
notahacker•8mo ago
Then you've got questions like "was Cromwell unusually enlightened on issues of religious freedom or a religious extremist with a vicious hatred of anything that vaguely resembled Catholicism?" to which the correct answer is "both actually, and simultaneously". And the likelihood the whole thing could have been avoided if a king who wasn't exactly unusual in his behaviour for contemporary monarchs was actually good at politics or military planning, and that having taking the unprecedented step of executing a monarch for refusing to acknowledge them, Parliament then let a gentleman of modest background and means rule whilst refusing to acknowledge them them because he actually was good at politics and military planning.
Then there was the Glorious Revolution which wasn't actually a revolution a couple of decades and two kings later which was way more influential on democracy and religion in modern Britain and gets studied way less...
GJim•8mo ago
As every British schoolboy knows, there is only one narrative....
Royalists: Wrong but Wromantic
Parliament: Right but Repulsive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That
cryptonector•8mo ago
growlNark•8mo ago
potato3732842•8mo ago
ahmeneeroe-v2•8mo ago
In the US this is still true (idk anything about other countries' politics)
nicoburns•8mo ago
growlNark•8mo ago
ahmeneeroe-v2•8mo ago
wahern•8mo ago
There were democratic movements elsewhere, but almost all were squelched by king and tsars (domestic or foreign) and the legal and political environments reset to square 0.
Also, the modern notion of the history of democracy is the devolution of power to the masses. But I like to think of the evolution of English history, at least legally, as the (albeit slow and uneven) elevation of the masses to the aristocracy, and in that way something similar to how the Greek's viewed democracy--with power comes responsibility and stricture. Though, that was partially the product of the expulsion of certain groups from the island; yet, that process was carried over in the US where many of those groups landed.
dan-robertson•8mo ago
jltsiren•8mo ago
rjsw•8mo ago
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-re...
growlNark•8mo ago
dhosek•8mo ago
mistrial9•8mo ago
FridayoLeary•8mo ago
The Brit in me is also smug that "our" revolution was so much less messy then the French one.
atombender•8mo ago
[1] https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_exact-and...
mystified5016•8mo ago
Monarchies have crossed into dictatorship many times throughout history. Would a modernized dictator monarchy look like the US today?