‘The Kinge and His Cubbs’ in Peril

This chapter examines Elizabeth Stuart's ledger to show how her spending patterns reveal the rhythms of her life at Oatlands. It also considers several plots against her family. The first is a pair of overlapping plots whose combined intention was to overthrow King James in favour of his first cousin, the English-born Lady Arabella Stuart and thence install Thomas Grey, 15th Baron Grey of Hilton, as de facto king, and secure greater religious toleration for Catholics in England. The famed Elizabethan explorer and privateer Sir Walter Raleigh was amongst the backers of this plan. The conspirators escaped execution but not imprisonment. The second is the Gunpowder Plot. The confession of Guy Fawkes showed beyond doubt that although the primary aim had been to blow up parliament with James and Henry in attendance, this was merely a clearing of the way, as 'they intended that the king's daughter the Lady Elizabeth should have succeeded'. The chapter then explores Elizabeth Stuart's education, looking at how Henry and Elizabeth behaved and were in many ways treated as if they were twins.

Introducing Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and Modernity

Friedrich Wöhler was referring to the field of organic chemistry during the early 1800s when he wrote the above but his comments would not be out of place in the context of embarking upon a global study of past and present human relationships with tropical forests. Dense vegetation, difficulty of navigation, issues of preservation, political and health concerns, poisonous plants, animals, and insects, and the prospect of carrying out sampling or excavation in high humidity have all meant that our knowledge of human history and prehistory in these environments is under-developed relative to temperate, arid, or even polar habitats. There have been theoretical questions as to what kind of human activity one would even expect to find in tropical forest environments, which seem hostile to human foraging (Hart and Hart, 1986; Bailey et al., 1989) let alone thriving agricultural or urban settlements (Meggers, 1971, 1977, 1987). This has, until relatively recently, left the state of archaeological tropical forest research in a similar position to popular conceptions of these environments—untouched, primeval wilderness. Public ideas of an archaeologist investigating a tropical forest are probably synonymous with someone in a shabby-looking leather hat being chased, if not by a large stone boulder then by a group of Indigenous people with blowpipes, as they wade through dense undergrowth and vines while clutching a golden discovery that has been lost to the western world for thousands of years (Spielberg, 1981). The more recent development of the best-selling Uncharted video game series has done little to change these ideas amongst the next generation of media consumers, with players taking on the role of Francis Drake’s mythical ancestor in search of long lost treasure, frequently hidden within caves and ruins surrounded by vines and dense canopies (Naughty Dog et al., 2016). The idea of treasure hidden within tropical forest is also not a modern conception. The long-term myth of El Dorado, a city covered in gold, fuelled exploration of the tropical forests of South America by renowned individuals, including Sir Walter Raleigh, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Nicholl, 1995).

Spenser, Raleigh, Harvey, and Nashe on Empire

This article explores the responses to early modern colonial enterprises in the writings of four major English writers: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe. The article shows how diverse responses to such undertakings were and that there was as much hostility and indifference as there was enthusiasm, not only for political and/or moral reasons but also because expensive overseas ventures were sometimes thought of as a needless waste of money and lives. In doing so the article aims to contribute towards recent calls to ‘decolonize’ the university and the curriculum, showing that responses to colonialism in colonising societies were never monolithic and that it is important that this historical reality is recognised if we are to engage seriously with the impact of colonialism and imperialism. Harvey and Raleigh were enthusiastic proponents of the benefits of colonial settlements, and took their cue from reading Richard Hakluyt the Younger’s Principal Navigations (1589), which suggested that the English had always thrived when they had ventured overseas and expanded their dominions. Spenser was much more ambivalent, despite his status as a colonist in Ireland after 1580, and Nashe was scornful of the purpose of such grand plans. For Nashe, partly inspired by his vitriolic quarrel with Harvey, it was much more important to concentrate on the locality of England itself and he accuses others of failing to see what surrounds them because they have been misled by the prospect of plunder and profit from exotic lands.