England

House of Plantagenet

On the morning of Friday the twenty-fifth of October 1415, the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, on the wet ploughed-and-newly-sown ground between the small French villages of Azincourt, Tramecourt and Maisoncelle in the Pas-de-Calais, the twenty-eight-year-old King Henry V of England, the second Lancastrian-Plantagenet monarch, gave the morning's address to his exhausted, malnourished, dysentery-weakened English army of approximately six thousand archers and one thousand five hundred men-at-arms, drawn up across a narrow eight-hundred-yard front between two patches of woodland on the line of the road from the village of Maisoncelle to the small castle of Azincourt. The English army was three days' march out of Harfleur on the long retreat to the safety of Calais, was eighteen days late, was outnumbered by the French royal army facing them across the muddy ploughed-field on the strict modern count of approximately three to one (approximately twenty thousand French men-at-arms, including the cream of the French chivalric nobility), and had been judged by every English-and-French observer of the morning to be on the verge of catastrophic defeat. Across the next three hours of the Saint Crispin's Day battle, the English longbow archers under the personal field-command of Sir Thomas Erpingham and the dismounted English men-at-arms under the King's own command broke the French cavalry charges on the narrow front, channelled the French heavy infantry into the deep mud where they were cut down by the second-and-third-rank English archers, and produced one of the most-celebrated single one-sided military victories in the long history of the European Middle Ages: approximately four hundred English dead against approximately seven thousand French dead, including the Constable of France, the Admiral of France, three Dukes, ninety Counts and over fifteen hundred knights of the French gentry. The victory at Agincourt is the central military moment of the long Plantagenet-and-Lancastrian Hundred Years' War, the high-water mark of English continental military reach in the late Middle Ages, and on the strength of Shakespeare's 1599 play Henry V and its famous Saint Crispin's Day speech (we few, we happy few, we band of brothers) the central English military memory of the medieval period.

Stanley

Late in the morning of Monday the twenty-second of August 1485, on the small ploughed-and-marsh field of Bosworth between the villages of Sutton Cheney, Stoke Golding, Shenton and Dadlington in the south-west of Leicestershire, Thomas Stanley, fifty-year-old Lord Stanley and the stepfather of the Lancastrian-Tudor claimant Henry Tudor, sat on the open field with his army of approximately three thousand Cheshire-and-Lancashire Stanley levies arrayed on the rising ground to the north of the engagement-field, and held the position through the opening two hours of the battle between Henry Tudor's outnumbered Lancastrian army of approximately five thousand and the larger Yorkist royal army of approximately ten thousand under the reigning King Richard III of England. Lord Stanley's brother Sir William Stanley sat on the parallel rising ground to the south with the second Stanley levy of about two thousand five hundred men. Both Stanley brothers had refused to commit to either side in the morning's deployment in spite of the King's standing instruction to Lord Stanley (King Richard III was holding Lord Stanley's eldest son George Strange as a hostage at the Yorkist royal camp). At approximately eleven in the morning, with the battle hanging on the small cavalry charge Richard III had launched personally against Henry Tudor's bodyguard at the centre of the field, Sir William Stanley committed his levy in a flank charge against the King's cavalry that broke Richard's small bodyguard formation, brought down Richard in person on the slopes above Redemore Plain, and ended the Plantagenet dynasty in twenty minutes of close-quarters fighting. By tradition, the crown of Richard III was found in the thorn-bush near the King's body by Lord Stanley personally and was placed by him on Henry Tudor's head on the field of victory. Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII on the spot. The earldom of Derby, created within the year by Henry VII as the reward for the Stanley intervention, has been held in the senior Stanley line continuously since.

Fisher

On the morning of the twenty-second of June 1535, on the scaffold at Tower Hill, John Fisher, seventy-six years old, Bishop of Rochester since 1504, theological tutor to the young Henry VIII, chancellor of Cambridge University since 1504, recently elevated by Pope Paul III to the cardinalate (his red hat had been sent from Rome but never reached him), was beheaded by axe for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy of 1534, which required every subject of Henry VIII to acknowledge the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Fisher had refused on the canonical grounds that the Pope was the head of the Church of Christ and that no temporal prince could supersede the spiritual authority. He had been a prisoner in the Tower for fourteen months. He went to the scaffold on foot from his Tower chamber, supported by two yeomen of the guard because he could not walk unaided; he had refused food in his last week to weaken himself sufficiently that the axeman's stroke would not be impeded by his vigour. The tradition of London held that the head, by the order of Henry VIII, was set on a spike at London Bridge for two weeks but did not, by the testimony of three contemporary chroniclers, decay or change colour; the head was removed on the king's orders on the second of July and thrown into the Thames, two days before Sir Thomas More followed Fisher to the same scaffold on the sixth of July.

Howard

Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk and a cousin of Anne Boleyn, who had been executed for treason at the same end of the same Tower yard six years earlier. She had been queen for fifteen months. She was, by the historical balance, between sixteen and twenty years old, and very probably nineteen. Charges of pre-marital intercourse with Francis Dereham and adulterous intent with Thomas Culpeper had been brought before the Council in November 1541. She was attainted by Parliament in February 1542 without a trial. On the evening of the twelfth of February 1542, by Eustace Chapuys's account written to Charles V, she asked the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Gage, to have the executioner's block brought to her room so that she might rehearse the laying of her head upon it. The request was, by the practice of the Tower, granted. She was beheaded the next morning at seven o'clock on Tower Green by a single stroke of the axe.

Butler

On the eighth of February 1565, on the open ground above the ford at Affane on the lower Blackwater River in County Waterford, the Anglo-Irish house of Butler (under Thomas, tenth Earl of Ormond, called Black Tom, in his thirty-fourth year) met its hereditary rival house of FitzGerald (under Gerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond) in what is, by the reckoning of every careful Irish historian, the last private battle fought between two great noble houses on Irish soil. About two thousand men were on the FitzGerald side, fewer on the Butler. The Butler line broke the FitzGerald centre by a cavalry charge across the ford; the FitzGerald wing under James FitzMaurice was broken on the riverbank; Desmond himself was captured wounded and brought to Kilkenny Castle. The two earls were summoned to court at Greenwich within the year. Queen Elizabeth, in person, by the tradition recorded in James Ware's De Hibernia of 1654, asked the captive Earl of Desmond, in front of the assembled court, on what grounds he had fought a private battle without her royal commission. Desmond, by the same tradition, answered: May it please your Majesty, we fought it without our own. The remark was preserved as the example of Anglo-Irish wit; Elizabeth held the two earls in close confinement in London for the next eighteen months until they would compose. The Affane battle was the last private noble pitched battle on the island.

Davis

On 7 June 1585 the Devon-born navigator John Davis sailed from Dartmouth with two small barks, the Sunshine (50 tons) and the Moonshine (35 tons), and a combined complement of forty-two men, on a commission from the Muscovy Company merchant William Sanderson and the Cambridge geographer Adrian Gilbert to find the North-West Passage to Cathay. Davis was about thirty-five, an experienced Devon coastal pilot trained on the Newfoundland cod-banks, and (uniquely among the Elizabethan navigators of the period) able to compute lunar-distance longitude from a bound-tables-and-cross-staff method that he had taught himself across the 1570s Devonshire coastal-pilot decade. He reached the south-east Greenland coast on 19 July 1585, named the headland Cape Farewell, sailed up the western coast across late July and early August, and on 6 August 1585 entered the straits between Greenland and Baffin Island that have carried his name ever since as the Davis Strait. Three further voyages followed (1586, 1587, the 1588 cancelled-by-the-Armada-mobilisation expedition) and the Davis chart of the strait, published by Edward Wright in his 1599 Certain Errors in Navigation, was the senior English-language chart of the north-Atlantic-and-Greenland navigation for the next hundred years.

Cecil

Across the summer of 1586, in the small Secretariat office in the south-west tower of Whitehall Palace, William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, sixty-six years old, the Lord High Treasurer and senior Privy Counsellor of England, working in close concert with his protégé and successor as Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, brought to its conclusion the eighteen-month intelligence operation that became known as the Babington Plot: the Catholic conspiracy of Anthony Babington and his fellow gentleman-conspirators to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and to replace her on the throne with Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic claimant who had been Elizabeth's prisoner in England since 1568. The operation Walsingham ran on the Babington circle through the spring and summer of 1586 (the famous Phelippes-cipher decryption of the Babington letters smuggled out of Mary's confinement at Chartley Castle through the bunghole of the beer-barrels delivered to the household by the Walsingham-controlled agent Gilbert Gifford, the so-called bunghole letters of June and July 1586) produced the documentary evidence of Mary's personal signed approval of the assassination plot. The evidence was laid before Burghley at Whitehall on the seventeenth of August 1586. Burghley ordered the arrest of Babington and his thirteen co-conspirators on the fourteenth of August (Babington was apprehended in St John's Wood by Walsingham's men on the same evening); the conspirators were tried and convicted at Westminster Hall in September; the convicted were hanged, drawn and quartered at St Giles's Fields on the twentieth and twenty-first of September 1586. Mary was brought to trial at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on the fourteenth of October 1586 under the special commission of forty-six peers and Privy Counsellors that Burghley had personally constituted; the commission convicted her on the twenty-fifth of October on the strength of the Phelippes-decrypted Chartley letters; she was executed in the great hall at Fotheringhay on the eighth of February 1587. The Babington Plot trial-and-execution, conducted under Burghley's careful constitutional-and-judicial management across the eighteen months of the operation, was the central state-security operation of the Elizabethan period and set the institutional template of the modern English security service for the next four centuries.

Howard

On the evening of the seventh of August 1588, while the Spanish Armada under Medina Sidonia lay at anchor off Calais waiting for the Duke of Parma's army to come down from Flanders, the English fleet of Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral, sent eight fireships into the anchored line at midnight. The Spanish cut their cables and ran north before a south-westerly. The English fleet under Howard, with Drake on the Revenge, Hawkins on the Victory, Frobisher on the Triumph, gave chase up the Channel through the morning of the eighth. At the action off Gravelines that day they broke the Spanish line, drove four ships ashore on the Flemish coast, and pushed the rest into a North Sea where the wind would carry them around the top of Scotland and break a third of them on the Irish coast. Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham, was fifty-two years old, a Catholic in religion in a Protestant fleet, the cousin of the queen, and the man whose decision not to anchor inshore at the Isle of Wight on the third of August had kept the Spanish from a deepwater harbour in southern England.

Lee

In the autumn of 1589, in the upstairs parlour of the parsonage at Calverton in Nottinghamshire, the Reverend William Lee, twenty-six years old, a recently ordained Cambridge curate of the village living, finished the construction of a wooden hand-operated knitting machine of his own design: a frame on which a row of about a hundred small barbed-needle hooks (eight per inch, the fine-gauge stocking density) could be brought down through a row of weft yarn, loops drawn through previously formed loops, and a row of stocking knit in a single motion. The machine, by every later assessment of the textile-history scholars (Charles Singer, Stanley Chapman), is the first complex mechanical loom-and-needle device in European industrial history and the foundational machine of the modern knitting industry. Tradition holds that Lee had developed the machine because he was, in his courtship, distracted by the rapid hand-movements of his fiancée when she was knitting; the folk-attribution of the courtship-motive is, by the nineteenth-century antiquaries, probably apocryphal but is attested in the local Calverton tradition since at least the seventeenth century. Lee travelled to London in 1589 to seek a Crown patent from Elizabeth I; the queen, by the court tradition, refused the patent on the grounds that the machine would impoverish her hand-knitters. Lee took the machine to France in 1604 under the patronage of Henri IV, who granted him a French patent and pension; Henri's assassination in 1610 cut off the support, and Lee died in Paris a few years later in obscurity.

Adams

On the morning of the twelfth of April 1600, the Dutch trading ship De Liefde (one of the five ships of the Mahu-De Cordes Pacific Expedition of 1598 from Rotterdam, the only one of the five to survive the Pacific crossing) made landfall at Usuki on the east coast of Kyushu in southern Japan, with about twenty-four surviving Dutch and English crew of the original hundred-and-ten. The pilot-major of the ship, William Adams, thirty-six years old, Kentish-born, formerly a Royal Navy pilot in the Drake Spanish-Armada campaign of 1588, was the only Englishman of the surviving crew. The ship was held by the Bungo daimyo; the surviving officers were summoned to the court of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the of the five-regent Council of the Toyotomi minority, who would within six months become the shogun of Japan) at Osaka on the fifteenth of May 1600. Ieyasu, by his curiosity about the European arrivals and by his strategic-political interest in European shipbuilding-and-mathematical-navigation expertise, kept Adams in Japan; he was made a hatamoto (a samurai retainer of the shogun) in 1605, given an estate at Hemi near Yokosuka in Sagami province, and the Japanese name Miura Anjin (the pilot of Miura). He was never permitted to leave Japan. He married a Japanese wife (Oyuki, daughter of a samurai family of the Edo road-station, no children of his first English marriage to Mary Hyn at Stepney; two children, Joseph and Susanna, by Oyuki). He died at Hirado on the northwest coast of Kyushu on the sixteenth of May 1620, fifty-six years old. He is the model for John Blackthorne in James Clavell's Shōgun (1975) and the 1980 NBC television series and the 2024 FX-Hulu series of the same name. The real story is the slow assimilation of the first Englishman in Japan into the service of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Ward

In the autumn of 1609 the Yorkshire Catholic Mary Ward, twenty-four years old, daughter of the Catholic recusant Ulrick Ward of Mulwith and Newby and Ursula Wright of Plowland, founded at the Flemish exiled-English Catholic colony of Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands the first uncloistered women's religious order in the post-Reformation Catholic Church. The new Institute (the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the Jesuit-male-order model) was founded on the principle that English Catholic women refugees from the post-1559 Elizabethan recusancy crisis could form an active, mobile, teaching-and-pastoral religious community rather than enter the contemplative cloistered orders that were the only female religious option available under the post-Tridentine reform legislation. The foundation was the senior post-Reformation development in the history of Catholic women's religious life and is the foundational moment of the modern Catholic women's apostolic religious congregations that run from Saint-Omer 1609 through to the Sister-of-Mercy and Daughter-of-Charity female religious orders of the nineteenth century.

Hudson

On the morning of Friday the third of August 1610, on the North-Atlantic at the approximately-60-degrees-north latitude west of the Resolution-Island coast at the eastern-entrance of what is now the Hudson-Strait, the approximately-forty-five-year-old English navigator Henry Hudson, the master of the small fifty-five-ton English-bark Discovery on the Company-of-Adventurers fourth-voyage in search of the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean, sailed his Discovery vessel into the narrow Hudson-Strait between the Baffin-Island and the Labrador-Peninsula on the strength of his personal-conviction that the westward-running tidal-current on the Strait-eastern-entrance indicated a large-westward-running ocean-passage beyond. The Discovery sailed westward across the four-hundred-mile Hudson-Strait across August-and-early-September 1610, emerged on the second-of-August into the vast inland-sea (the Hudson Bay, approximately one-thousand-mile-long and five-hundred-mile-wide Arctic-Canadian inland-sea) that Hudson named for his Discovery-Company-of-Adventurers patron the merchant adventurer Sir Dudley Digges (the original-name Digges-Bay was renamed Hudson-Bay across the subsequent-Royal-Society-and-Hudson's-Bay-Company nomenclature-tradition), and across the September-1610 period sailed south down the east-coast of the Hudson-Bay to the southern-Hudson-Bay James-Bay region. The Hudson-Bay 1610 discovery is the foundational moment of the Canadian-and-British North-American Arctic geographical record and the foundational European-discovery of the vast inland-sea that has carried Hudson's name continuously since.