John's mother died in 1394 when he was but five years old, in 1399 his father Henry of Bolingbroke, a grandson of Edward III, usurped the throne of his cousin Richard II and was crowned Henry IV. The ...

Isabella of Valois the second wife of Richard II was born in Paris on 9 November 1389 and was the daughter of King Charles VI of France and his wife Isabeau of Bavaria. Isabella was born at a time of ...

The Act of Supremacy, passed in 1534, established King Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the English Church. The Reformation Parliament of 1529-1536 approved the king's break with the see of Rome, as ...

The child was christened at Winchester Cathedral, his godfathers were John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby and Lord Maltravers, Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV ...

Often considered the greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward I was born on the evening of 17th June 1239, at Westminster Palace, the firstborn child of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. He was named ...

Strathclyde or Ystrad Clud (beautiful Estuary) was a kingdom of the Britons, or brythonic celts in the Hen Ogledd, in what is now Northern England and southern Scotland, through the post-Roman and ...

Tostig Godwinson, younger brother of King Harold II was the third son of the powerful Earl Godwine of Wessex and his Danish wife Gytha, the daughter of Thorkell Sprakaleg. In 1051, Tostig married ...

When Britain's last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne died in 1714, the crown of England passed by the 1701 Act of Settlement to the Stuart dynasty's German Protestant cousins, the House of Hanover, or ...

Somerled, which name derives from the Old Norse Sumarliði, meaning 'summer traveller', was a mid-twelfth century warlord and ruler of the Isles. Somerled was the son of GilleBride, of a Norse-Gaelic ...

The porphyrias are a group of disorders connected with the production of haem, which is used to make haemoglobin in red blood cells. There are seven different types of porphyria and in most cases, ...

Henry Percy, later made famous as 'Harry Hotspur' was born on 20 May 1364 at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. He was the eldest son of Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and Margaret Neville, ...

When John, the last child of the great Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine was born on Christmas Eve, 1167 at Beaumont Palace in Oxfordshire, his father jokingly nick-named him Sans Terre or Lackland, ...