Pax Britannica: A History of the British Empire

In the personal politics of early modern England, the personalities and desires of the powerful were the stuff of policy. In this episode we examine the actions of: Queen Anne, the closet-Catholic; Prince Henry Frederick, the dashing future king of three realms; Elizabeth, the gracious future Queen of Bohemia; and Charles, the bookish, slightly sickly, future Archbishop of Canterbury. That is, unl...

Both before and after the Flight of the Earls territory in north Ireland was forfeited to the Crown and purchased by investors. Even while the burgeoning colony of Virginia was facing its earliest challenges, it was in Ulster that most government attention was focused. Money, men, and materials flooded the province, determined to make this latest plantation effort a success. The experiences of Eng...

Compared to the kingdoms of Iberia, England was fairly late to the colonisation game. This episode covers the costly failures of Elizabeth's reign, and the successful, but still costly, attempts which James oversaw. Enormous death tolls from disease, starvation, and violence were not enough to prevent the foundations of British North America. Check out the podcast website: https://www.paxbritannic...

A closer look at how James attempts to unite his kingdoms into one body, and the difficulty he faced. In Ireland, the English yoke tightens around both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish in the wake of the Nine Year's War. Check out the podcast website: https://www.paxbritannica.info Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PodBritannica/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BritannicaPax In this episode I made particu...

Despite the cheering crowds and warm welcome James received from his new subjects, all was not well in his new kingdom. As James would find out, England was not so different to Scotland. A number of plots against the king's life, spurred by fears or hopes for religious toleration, were hatched in the early years of James' reign. Some planned to be relatively bloodless, just another way to attract...

With the death of Elizabeth, the King of Scots travels south to take up his new kingdoms of England and Ireland. James faces an uphill challenge; his rulership style is vastly different to Elizabeth's, and he inherits a number of serious problems. Adding to this is James' insistence on political union between his two larger kingdoms; he wants to become King of a single Great Britain. Check out the...

Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, speaks with me in Edinburgh about composite monarchies and personal unions, the similarities between Scotland and Catalonia, the challenges that James will face as he travels south to take up his new crown, and how his and his son’s actions will echo throughout the century and beyond. The recommended books, availab...

James VI was crowned king at one year old, and his early life was spent as the puppet of a succession of regencies. When he finally asserted his independence, he faced down a series of rebellions and strengthened his royal authority through fire and sword. His relationship with Elizabeth of England was complicated and often violent, and his vassals were insubordinate and churlish. Yet he would eme...

Irish lords rise up against English domination, lead by The O'Neill, the Great Earl of Tyrone, Hugh O'Neill. England, already at war with Spain, dispatches thousands of troops to try and quell the rebellion. Felipe II of Spain sees an opportunity, and sends his own soldiers to assist the Irish against Dublin and London. This was the largest military campaign of Elizabeth's reign, and the one with...

For generations, Habsburg Spain had been a stalwart ally of England, their royal families connected by marriage and kinship, to counter-balance the Auld Alliance of France and Scotland. This had been the state of things for decades, and upon Elizabeth's accession there was no reason to think that this would change. Calais had just fallen to the French, and English armies had been rampaging through...

Through a range of cultural, economic, and political changes, the old trading relationships that English merchants had enjoyed for centuries fully broke down during Elizabeth's reign. In their place, new opportunities for wealth emerged; new countries to trade with, new products to buy and sell, and a thinly-guarded colonial empire full to the brim with slave markets and gold mines. Opportunities...

In this episode, we hear about the successive attempts by the Tudor monarchs to enforce their authority over their Irish vassals, a complex mix of ethnicities and religions that resisted any policy Dublin or London tried. They eventually 'settled' on outright displacement of the native Irish and the plantation of English settlers, but even that would not be enough to make Tudor rule unquestioned....

In the first episode of Pax Britannica, we meet the Tudor dynasty; the kings and queens who ruled England, Wales, and Ireland from the end of the 15th century until the start of the 17th. In this first of our foundation episodes we cover the basic timeline of the Tudor era, from Henry VII until Elizabeth I. I also explain the aim of this podcast, what we will cover, and why it matters! Check out t...