Tracy Borman Announced as a Speaker at The Stuart Summit!
Find out more about the entire speaker line up
Welcome to this week’s newsletter!
I think we all take something slightly different from history. Some of us see it as a knowledge pursuit, while others engage with the human stories or see links back from now to the past. Hopefully, alongside whatever you find brings you to history, you also find a sense of community too. Social media is a great way of getting that, this Substack, my Patreon, and history festivals.
This week I want to tell you some really exciting news about the upcoming Stuart Summit and, at the end of this newsletter, you will find a link to the latest historian interview available on my YouTube channel. Dr Kat Marchant spoke to me about Arbella Stuart, cousin of James I of England and the lady who could have potentially succeeded to the throne on the death of Elizabeth I.
I’ve been fortunate enough to attend 3 talks over the past few weeks, at various history festivals. These are usually events stretched over a long weekend at which many speakers will give talks on a variety of subjects. You pay for each talk individually and travel to the venue to hear them speak.
As I sat in St Mary’s Church in Warwick listening to Dr Joanne Paul talk about the Dudley family, on which her book ‘The House of Dudley is concerned, it occurred to me that The Stuart Summit, this Autumn, is in fact a History Festival. It has the added advantage of all talks being included for the cost of one in-person talk (£20) and being online with access to all the talks until the end of January 2023! P.S. I will be interviewing Joanne soon, about her book - join the British History Patreon and you can submit your own questions to Joanne and access the extended, ad-free interview a week before the interview is released to everyone else. Click here for more details about my Patreon, which is just £5 per month.
I am profiling all 7 historians who have contributed to the festival, below. Before I do that there is another way which coming together as a history community works in a really powerful way, live streams!
My weekly live shows are a great way for everyone to join in (if the times suit of course) and are all available on catch up anyway. Besides my weekly ‘Thursday Tea Time History Chat Live’, (which is now in its 21st month) to which I’ll come back to shortly, you can also find me each Wednesday night at 8:15pm on ‘History After Dark’ with Dr Kat Marchant and Catherine Brooks, and, each Friday at 4pm on ‘Visiting Tudor Britain' with Deb Roil and Sarah Morris.
If you are already a fan of History After Dark, or if you dare to try us out, we now have our own Substack and YouTube Channel! Visit History After Dark Substack | Visit History After Dark YouTube Channel
7 Historians | 7 Topics | The Stuart Summit
I am very, very happy to announce that Historian and Author Tracy Borman has joined the line up of incredible speakers taking part in this Autumn’s Online History Festival, The Stuart Summit, hosted by British History Events.
The line up is now:
Tracy Borman: James I and the English Witch Hunts
Julian Humphrys: Reformation not Revolution. The Real Intentions of the English Civil Wars
Eleri Lynn: Styling the Stuarts
Gareth Russell: Charles II. The Party King. The Politics of Promiscuity.
Leanda de Lisle: Henrietta Maria. The Black Legend and the Real Woman.
Dr Kat Marchant: Propaganda Through Imagery. The Divine Right to Rule.
Antonia Keaney: Sarah Churchill. The Indomitable Duchess.
Read on to find out more about each speaker…
Tracy Borman
Tracy Borman is a best selling author, historian and broadcaster. As well as numerous non-fiction books, she has also written a fiction trilogy, The King’s Witch, based in the court of James I. Her book James I and the English Witch Hunts is the real history that inspired her trilogy and the topic of her talk.
Tracy is joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, Chief Executive of the Heritage Education Trust and an honorary professor at Bishop Grosseteste University. She has presented a number of history programmes for TV and is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine and gives talks on her books across the country and abroad.
Her latest book, Crown & Sceptre: A New History of the British Monarchy, was published in November 2021 and we are keenly awaiting her next book about the relationship between Elizabeth I and her mother, Anne Boleyn.
Tracy also joins many of my tours to give talks to our group.
Julian Humphrys
Julian read history at Emmanual College, Cambridge before spending 12 years at Chelsea’s National Army Museum, setting up special exhibitions and acting as spokesman to the media on all matters of military history.
He has acted as a historical expert on a number of TV programmes, including the Channel Five Select series on British battlefields, has featured a number of times on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings Series and made three expeditions to Bosnia during the Civil War to record the British Army’s activities there.
Julian set up and led English Heritage’s Battlefield hikes programme and in 2009 was appointed Development Officer of the Battlefields Trust. He lectures and writes on many aspects of British history – he is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine and History Revealed Magazine and his published books include The Private Life of Palaces (for Historic Royal Palaces), Clash of Arms: Twelve English Battles, and Enemies at the Gate: English Castles under Siege (both for English Heritage).
Eleri Lynn
“In my talk, Styling the Stuarts, I’ll be giving an overview of a century of royal Stuart style and also looking at how the Stuarts got dressed and styled themselves, with a glimpse at make-up and bathing along the way.” - Eleri
Eleri Lynn is a fashion and textiles curator, author and historian. She gained her experience as an Assistant Curator within the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum before becoming Curator of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Historic Royal Palaces. She is currently Head of Exhibitions at National Museum Wales and a Trustee of the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace. Eleri is the curator of several major fashion and textiles exhibitions including Diana: Her Fashion Story (Kensington Palace, 2017) and The Lost Dress of Elizabeth I (Hampton Court Palace, 2019).
Gareth Russell
Gareth Russell is the author of eight books, including the best-selling Young and Damned and Fair, a biography of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. He studied History at Oxford and Queen’s University, Belfast, where his postgraduate dissertation was on the queen’s household in the 1540s. His book, The Ship of Dreams, was named a Book of the Year by The Times and a Best History Read of 2019 by the Daily Telegraph. He is a regular contributor on TV shows and documentaries and also hosts his own podcast “Single Malt History”. His latest book Do Let’s Have Another Drink, a biography of The Queen Mother through 101 anecdotes, is top of the charts! He is currently working on a history of Hampton Court Palace and the people who lived there which will be published in 2023.
Gareth also accompanies me as tour historian on my history tours.
Leanda De Lisle
Leanda de Lisle has written several best selling and prize winning books on Tudor and Stuart history, including the Sunday Times top ten best sellers Tudor: The Family Story and White King The Tragedy of Charles I, a winner of the Historical Writers Association non-fiction Crown Award. Her latest book ‘Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen’ was published in the summer of 2022 to critical acclaim. Her talk is based on Henrietta Maria and will give a fascinating insight to a much overlooked Queen.
Dr Katrina Marchant
Dr Kat is a researcher and lecturer specialising in early modern literature and culture and is the writer and presenter of the hit YouTube channel ‘Reading the Past’.
She can also be seen regularly at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London as a costumed interpreter, where she also teaches school, college and university groups.
Antonia Keaney
Antonia is the Social Historian at Blenheim Palace near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Her research has helped uncover and tell the stories of Blenheim Palace and the people connected to it. Spanning over 300 years, from before the first stone was laid for a brand new palace on the ancient royal park of Woodstock, through its long and sometimes fraught construction right through to the Palace in the World Wars and since, Antonia’s research has helped visitors and scholars alike to understand the history of the Palace and the people connected with it. Not least, Sarah Churchill, the First Duchess of Marlborough and the focus of Antonia’s talk, given in conversation with Philippa.
There will also be 2 live events:
A Panel of Authors and Historians, will be live at 8pm on Saturday 19th November to answer your questions on the Stuart period.
Our closing event is a live quiz. The quiz is just for fun and will be based on the content of the talks but this is also when we will draw the winners of the free prize draw.
All ticket holders will be entered into the free prize draw and will get the chance to win one of the following prizes:
Signed Stuart Book Bundle from Pen & Sword (2 prizes)
Ticket Refund: Get your ticket price refunded (1 prize)
Amazon Gift Voucher worth GBP£15/USD$15 (1 prize)
Winners of the Free Prize Draw will be announced live at the closing event and will be contacted directly via email.
Historian Interviews
This week I have also released an interview originally recorded for the British History Patreon and which has been a Patreon exclusive for 12 months.
Arbella Stuart is the Queen we never had, according to Dr Kat Marchant, who I had the pleasure to interview about this lesser-known possible successor to Elizabeth I.
The Podcast version of this interview will be available on Wednesday and you will receive a notification via this Substack 😀
I hope to see you on one of my live streams this week and wish you a lovely week ahead.
Until next time, take care
Philippa 💕