The Prince Who Would Be King
The Life and Death of Henry Stuart
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Henry Stuart’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years’ War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous.
NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2 DOCUMENTARY The Best King We Never Had
Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales was once the hope of Britain. Eldest son to James VI of Scotland, James I of England, Henry was the epitome of heroic Renaissance princely virtue, his life set against a period about as rich and momentous as any.
Educated to rule, Henry was interested in everything. His court was awash with leading artists, musicians, writers and composers such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. He founded a royal art collection of European breadth, amassed a vast collection of priceless books, led grand renovations of royal palaces and mounted operatic, highly politicised masques.
But his ambitions were even greater. He embraced cutting-edge science, funded telescopes and automata, was patron of the North West Passage Company and wanted to sail through the barriers of the known world to explore new continents. He reviewed and modernised Britain’s naval and military capacity and in his advocacy for the colonisation of North America he helped to transform the world.
At his death aged only eighteen, and considering himself to be as much a European as British, he was preparing to stake his claim to be the next leader of Protestant Christendom in the struggle to resist a resurgent militant Catholicism.
In this rich and lively book, Sarah Fraser seeks to restore Henry to his place in history. Set against the bloody traumas of the Thirty Years’ War, the writing of the King James Bible, the Gunpowder Plot and the dark tragedies pouring from Shakespeare’s quill, Henry’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale: the story of a man who, had he lived, might have saved Britain from King Charles I, his spaniels and the Civil War with its appalling loss of life his misrule engendered.
About the author
Sarah Fraser won the 2012 Saltire First Scottish Book of the Year for her acclaimed debut The Last Highlander, which in 2016 also became a New York Times ebook bestseller. A writer and regular contributor on TV and radio, she has a PhD in obscene Gaelic poetry and lives in the Scottish Highlands. She has four children. Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarah_fraseruk. And at www.sarahfraser.co.uk where her speaking dates can be found, and regular blogs about the tumultuous Stuart era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this focused, engrossing narrative, Fraser (The Last Highlander) resurrects the memory of the oft-overlooked Protestant Prince Henry (1594 1612), who might have drastically changed the future of the Stuart line had he lived longer. With arrogance and youthful exuberance, the educated and well-trained Henry intended to serve as a beacon of Protestantism, pushing conversion efforts onto other European countries while building a solid, unified kingdom at home. Henry wasted no time, fighting for the long-dormant Crown Prince estates and financial independence at age 15 and establishing a court rivalling that of his comparatively staid father, James VI and I of England and Scotland. Though Fraser claims that Henry was no great scholar, she provides several examples of his love of learning and continual academic work. After Henry's death from illness, his father dismissed his son's devoted and like-minded court members without prospects, resulting in future defections to the regicide movement that later destroyed the Catholic Charles I. Fraser fills a gap in the Stuart story while making the family legacy of regicides, religious wars, and licentiousness even more tragic in context of the story of the king who never was.)