London, 1660: Ready to throw off a generation of Puritan rule, all England rejoices when Charles Stuart returns to reclaim the throne. Among those welcoming him is young Barbara Villiers Palmer, a breathtaking Royalist beauty whose sensuality and clever wit instantly captivate the handsome, jaded king. Though each is promised to another, Barbara soon becomes Charles's mistress and closest friend, and the uncrowned queen of his bawdy Restoration court. Rewarded with titles, land, and jewels, she is the most envied and desired woman in England--and the most powerful. But the role of royal mistress is a precarious one, and Barbara's enemies and rivals are everywhere in the palace.

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Charles II had at least twelve illegitimate children that we know of. Although his queen, Catherine of Braganza, fell pregnant several times she was not able to bear any children to full term. The king, who was known for his many mistresses, had his first recognized child out of wedlock in 1649; the child was James Croft who would become Duke of Monmouth and mastermind of an infamous rebellion. Not all of his children would gain such notoriety but they would live long and full lives creating a Stuart bloodline that descends to the present day. There was Nell Gywn’s son, Charles Beauclerk, Duke of St Albans who was present at the siege of Belgrade in 1688. The French mistress, Louise de Keroualle’s son, Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond who was an early patron of cricket. Catherine Pegge’s son, Charles Fitzcharles, 1st Earl of Plymouth who was a colonel in the King’s Own Royal Regiment and lost his life in Tangier and Moll Davis’ daughter Mary Tudor, Countess of Derwentwater who separated from her husband because she refused to be a Catholic. Not to mention Charles’s offspring by Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland – there was Anne who had an affair with one of her father’s mistresses, Charles who succeeded to the dukedom of Cleveland, Henry who became vice-admiral of England, George who was in the secret service in Venice, Barbara who after a torrid affair with the Earl of Arran gave birth to illegitimate twins and became a nun in France and Charlotte, who became Countess of Lichfield and had eighteen children! And then there are the stories of other children like James de la Cloche and Charlotte Boyle whose births and lives are shrouded in mystery and rumor. This book will bring to life the king’s many illegitimate children and tell their stories.

Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather the biography's organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicize. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, only that is through a full return to history and an exact historicizing, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. In Writing Lives literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern conceptions of the life and our own conceptualizing of the biographical project, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.

In LORD CHURCHILL’S COUP, Stephen Saunders Webb further advances his revisionist interpretation of the British Empire in the seventeenth century. Having earlier demonstrates that the Anglo=American empire was classic in its form, administered by an army, committed to territorial expansion, and motivated by crusading religion, Webb now argues that both England and its American social experiments were the underdeveloped elements of an empire emerging on both sides of the Atlantic and that the pivotal moment of that empire, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” was in fact a military coup driven by religious fears. In a vigorous narrative, Webb populates this formative period of the Anglo-American past with colorful and commanding characters. At the center is John Churchill. We see him rise from page boy to earl of Marlborough, winning battlefield glory, influence, and promotion; and his corresponding rise from ensign of the English army taking control of the destiny of the later Stuart monarchs of Britain and America. Webb shows us Churchill increasingly alarmed by the Catholicizing course of his patron, James II, and becoming instrumental in the organization of a successful coup to protect Anglicanism and the constitution. We see the resulting alliance with William of Orange, the Protestant champion of Europe, quickly turn sour as William makes himself king; and we see Churchill, now transformed into imperial politician, once again in power—able to secure the succession of Queen Anne and negotiate the terms of resumption of war against France. Throughout, Webb makes it clear that at the heart of Churchill’s ascent and actions is his vision of America as a decisive factor in the world war between England and France for impersonal supremacy. As the book ends, Churchill’s American agenda thus becomes central to the war aims of the Grand Alliance.