It’s a week of anniversaries and art. JMW Turner (1775-1851) died 160 years ago today. “I never miss an accident” he once said, and true to his word, he was out on the night of the fire at Westminster in 1834. Armed with his two notebooks he spent hours absorbing the colour and drama of the scene, both on land […]
The 1834 Fire
Albert and the Armada
At 11pm on 14 December 1861 at Windsor – 150 years ago today – Queen Victoria declared beside the sickbed of the Prince Consort, ‘Oh, yes, this is death!’. Her husband of 21 years, was gone, aged only 42. For many years it was believed that Prince Albert (1819-1861) had died of typhoid, as written on the death certificate […]
Albert and the Armada
At 11pm on 14 December 1861 at Windsor – 150 years ago today – Queen Victoria declared beside the sickbed of the Prince Consort, ‘Oh, yes, this is death!’. Her husband of 21 years, was gone, aged only 42. For many years it was believed that Prince Albert (1819-1861) had died of typhoid, as written […]
The Day Parliament Burned Down: Live!
Sunday 16 October 2011 is the 177th anniversary of the 1834 fire. Today I’m tweeting a ‘live’ feed of events from 1834 in real time on Twitter. I’ve prescheduled the tweets so I can watch as the come through: it will be fascinating to experience it myself in real time, rather than just writing about […]
The Invisible Women
I’ve worked hard to get women into my book. It’s not been easy. A day-conference I attended earlier this year run by the History of Parliament Trust contained a whole session on their problem of undertaking a decades-long academic enterprise which, by definition, had to concentrate on the biographies of MPs and Lords before the 20th century – […]
John Rickman, Census Man
22 August marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of John Rickman (b. 1771). Successively Speaker’s Secretary and Clerk Assistant of the Commons, Rickman was a brilliant polymath: a proto-statistician, founder of the UK Census, reforming Parliamentary official and friend of Byron, Charles Lamb and Telford. He is also a key figure in the story […]
