The House of Tudor was an English and Welsh dynasty that held the throne of England from 1485 to 1603. They descended from the Tudors of Penmynydd, a Welsh noble family, and Catherine of Valois. The Tudor monarchs ruled the Kingdom of England and the Lordship of Ireland for 118 years with five monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. The Tudors succeeded the House of Plantagenet as rulers of the Kingdom of England, and were succeeded by the Scottish House of Stuart. The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, descended through his mother from the House of Beaufort, a legitimised branch of the English royal House of Lancaster, a cadet house of the Plantagenets. The Tudor family rose to power and started the Tudor period in the wake of the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), which left the main House of Lancaster extinct in the male line.
The Most Noble Order of the Garter is an order of chivalry founded by Edward III of England in 1348. The most senior order of knighthood in the British honours system, it is decoration outranked in precedence only by the Victoria Cross and the George Cross. The Order of the Garter is dedicated to the image and arms of Saint George, England's patron saint.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature.
The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise written by the Italian diplomat, philosopher, and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli in the form of a realistic instruction guide for new princes. As a remarkable general theme, The Prince appears to take it for granted that immoral acts are justified if they can help achieve political glory.
Regicide is the purposeful killing of a monarch or sovereign of a polity and is often associated with the usurpation of power. A regicide can also be the person responsible for the killing. The word comes from the Latin roots of regis and cida (cidium), meaning "of monarch" and "killer" respectively.
Appeal to flattery is a fallacy in which a person uses flattery, excessive compliments, in an attempt to appeal to their audience's vanity to win support for their side. It is also known as apple polishing, wheel greasing, brown nosing, appeal to pride, appeal to vanity or argumentum ad superbiam. The appeal to flattery is a specific kind of appeal to emotion.
The Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, originally the Crown Jewels of England, are a collection of royal ceremonial objects kept in the Jewel House at the Tower of London, which include the coronation regalia and vestments worn by British monarchs.
Maria Karolina Zofia Felicja Leszczyńska, also known as Marie Leczinska, was Queen of France as the wife of King Louis XV from their marriage on 4 September 1725 until her death in 1768. The daughter of Stanislaus I Leszczyński, the deposed King of Poland, and Catherine Opalińska, her 42-years and 9 months service was the longest of any queen in French history. A devout Catholic throughout her life, Marie was popular among the French people for her numerous charitable works and introduced many Polish customs to the royal court at Versailles. She was the grandmother of the French kings Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X.
Thaïs or Thais was a famous Greek hetaira who accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaigns. Likely from Athens, she is most famous for instigating the burning of Persepolis. At the time, Thaïs was the lover of Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander's close companions and generals. It has been suggested that she may also have been Alexander's lover, on the basis of Athenaeus's statement that Alexander liked to "keep Thaïs with him", but this may simply mean he enjoyed her company, as she is said to have been very witty and entertaining. Athenaeus also says that after Alexander's death Ptolemy married Thaïs, who bore three of his children, and may also have become a Queen of Egypt.
Cordelia was a legendary Queen of the Britons, as recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth. She came to power in 855BC.
Queen Zixi of Ix, or The Story of the Magic Cloak, is a children's book written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Frederick Richardson. It was originally serialized in the early 20th-century American children's magazine St. Nicholas from November 1904 to October 1905, and was published in book form later in 1905 by The Century Company. The events of the book alternate between Noland and Ix, two neighboring regions to the Land of Oz. Baum himself commented this was the best book he had yet written. In a letter to his eldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, he said it was "nearer to the "old-fashioned" fairy tale than anything I have yet accomplished," and in many respects, it adheres more closely to the fairy tale structure than the Oz books.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a German painter and lithographer, known for his flattering portraits of royalty and upper-class society in the mid-19th century. His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture. Among his best known works are Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting (1855) and the portraits he made of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1865).
The Crusades is a 1935 American historical adventure drama film directed and produced by Cecil B. DeMille for Paramount Pictures, loosely based on the life of King Richard I of England during the Third Crusade, and his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre. The film stars Henry Wilcoxon as Richard, Loretta Young as Berengaria, and Ian Keith as Saladin, along with C. Aubrey Smith, Katherine DeMille, Joseph Schildkraut and Alan Hale Sr. in supporting roles.
A favourite was the intimate companion of a ruler or other important person. In post-classical and early-modern Europe, among other times and places, the term was used of individuals delegated significant political power by a ruler. It was especially a phenomenon of the 16th and 17th centuries, when government had become too complex for many hereditary rulers with no great interest in or talent for it, and political institutions were still evolving. From 1600 to 1660 there were particular successions of all-powerful minister-favourites in much of Europe, particularly in Spain, England, France and Sweden.
The Fox and the Crow is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 124 in the Perry Index. There are early Latin and Greek versions and the fable may even have been portrayed on an ancient Greek vase. The story is used as a warning against listening to flattery.
In modern English, sycophant denotes an "insincere flatterer" and is used to refer to someone practising sycophancy. The word has its origin in the legal system of Classical Athens. Most legal cases of the time were brought by private litigants as there was no police force and only a limited number of officially appointed public prosecutors. By the fifth century BC this practice had given rise to abuse by "sycophants": litigants who brought unjustified prosecutions. The word retains the same meaning ('slanderer') in Modern Greek, French, and Italian. In modern English, the meaning of the word has shifted to its present usage.
Ezekiel was patriarch of the Church of the East from 570 to 581. He is principally remembered in the popular tradition for having called his bishops 'the blind leading the blind', an act of presumption for which he was punished by becoming blind himself.
In linguistics, negative inversion is one of many types of subject–auxiliary inversion in English. A negation or a word that implies negation or a phrase containing one of these words precedes the finite auxiliary verb necessitating that the subject and finite verb undergo inversion. Negative inversion is a phenomenon of English syntax. Other Germanic languages have a more general V2 word order, which allows inversion to occur much more often than in English, so they may not acknowledge negative inversion as a specific phenomenon. While negative inversion is a common occurrence in English, a solid understanding of just what elicits the inversion has not yet been established. It is, namely, not entirely clear why certain fronted expressions containing a negation elicit negative inversion, but others do not.
Mavea is an Oceanic language spoken on Mavea Island in Vanuatu, off the eastern coast of Espiritu Santo. It belongs to the North–Central Vanuatu linkage of Southern Oceanic. The total population of the island is approximately 172, with only 34 fluent speakers of the Mavea language reported in 2008.
Coming from the Greek origin, κολακεία, which means flattery, the word "kolakeia" means to flatter someone as a means to take advantage of or gain something from them through speech. Kolakeia's concept is to overload someone with compliments so the speaker can slip in another idea that the listener may not agree upon. It may also include a subtle compliment where the listener does not know it happened but it affects their way of thinking. The use of the kolakeia is often looked down upon because it is not a true concept of speech. The use of this type of communication, allows people to question the speaker's motives.
