Elizabeth "Jane" Shore was one of the many mistresses of King Edward IV of England. She became the best-known to history through being later accused of conspiracy by the future King Richard III, and compelled to do public penance. She was also a sometime mistress of other noblemen, including Edward's stepson, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings but ended her life in bourgeois respectability.
Tyburn was a manor (estate) in the county of Middlesex, one of two which were served by the parish of Marylebone.
Newgate Prison was a prison at the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey Street just inside the City of London, England, originally at the site of Newgate, a gate in the Roman London Wall. Built in the 12th century and demolished in 1904, the prison was extended and rebuilt many times, and remained in use for over 700 years, from 1188 to 1902.
William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea. During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her into legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, she declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III. She died shortly after.
Lord Guildford Dudley was an English nobleman who was married to Lady Jane Grey. King Edward VI had declared her his heir, and she occupied the English throne from 10 July until 19 July 1553. Guildford Dudley had a humanist education and was married to Jane in a magnificent celebration about six weeks before the King's death. After Guildford's father, the Duke of Northumberland, had engineered Jane's accession, Jane and Guildford spent her brief rule residing in the Tower of London. They were still in the Tower when their regime collapsed and they remained there, in different quarters, as prisoners. They were condemned to death for high treason in November 1553. Queen Mary I was inclined to spare their lives, but Thomas Wyatt's rebellion against Mary's plans to marry Philip of Spain led to the young couple's execution, a measure that was widely seen as unduly harsh.
Sydney, Lady Morgan, was an Irish novelist, best known for The Wild Irish Girl (1806), a romantic, and some critics suggest, "proto-feminist", novel with political and patriotic overtones. Her work, including continental travelogues, sparked controversy and faced censorship. She counted Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron among her defenders.
Sir Sidney Colvin was a British curator and literary and art critic, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian Colvin family. He is primarily remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson.
White Kennett was an English bishop and antiquarian. He was educated at Westminster School and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where, while an undergraduate, he published several translations of Latin works, including Erasmus' In Praise of Folly.
Lady Jane Grey, later known as Lady Jane Dudley and as the "Nine Days' Queen", was an English noblewoman who claimed the throne of England and Ireland from 10 July until 19 July 1553.
The French Line is a 1953 American musical film starring Jane Russell made by RKO Radio Pictures, directed by Lloyd Bacon and produced by Edmund Grainger, with Howard Hughes as executive producer. The screenplay was by Mary Loos and Richard Sale, based on a story by Matty Kemp and Isabel Dawn. It was filmed in three strip technicolor and Dual strip polarized 3D during what many consider 3-D film's "golden era" of 1952-1954.
Richard Head was an Irish author, playwright and bookseller. He became famous with his satirical novel The English Rogue (1665), one of the earliest novels in English that found a continental translation.
Tower Green is a space within the Tower of London, a royal castle in London, where two English Queens consort and several other British nobles were executed by beheading. It was considered more dignified for nobility to be executed away from spectators, and Queens Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey were among the nobility beheaded here. Queen Victoria asked for information on the exact location where the executions took place and had some granite paving laid to mark the spot. However, it is unclear whether the location is indeed correct because other sources place it on the current parade ground between the White Tower and the entrance to the current Waterloo Barracks.
Thomas Aynscombe was an early-18th-century Dunstable and Smithfield, London landlord and minor benefactor.
Catherine Howard, also spelled Katheryn Howard, was Queen of England from 1540 until 1542 as the fifth wife of Henry VIII. She was the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper, a cousin to Anne Boleyn, and the niece of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. Thomas Howard was a prominent politician at Henry's court, and he secured her a place in the household of Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, where she caught the King's interest. She married him on 28 July 1540 at Oatlands Palace in Surrey, just 19 days after the annulment of his marriage to Anne. He was 49, and she was between 15 and 21 years old.
Margaret Wotton, Marchioness of Dorset was the second wife of Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, and the mother of his children, including Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, with whom she engaged in many quarrels during his minority over money and his allowance. Her lack of generosity to Henry shocked her peers as unmotherly, and inappropriate behaviour toward a high-ranking nobleman, relative of King Henry VIII of England. In 1534, she was compelled to answer to the charges that she was an "unnatural mother".
Dame Elizabeth Brooke was an English religious writer, part of whose writing of Christian precepts survives, and was matriarch of a landed manorial family in East Suffolk, East Anglia, during the English Civil War and Restoration periods. An extended account of her religious thought and practice, written by her minister at Yoxford, Suffolk at the time of her funeral, was printed together with some of her own precepts. Her stance and practice was, like that of her brother Lord Colepeper, politically loyal to the Crown, and her allegiance was therefore to the established Church, but she and her husband, Sir Robert Brooke, lived and worked in close connection with the more Puritan or Presbyterian spirit among the gentry and magistracy of the neighbourhood, and supported a moderate and inclusive policy towards ministers inclined to Nonconformism within the church at large.
Sir Anthony Lee was an English courtier and Member of Parliament, and the father of Elizabeth I's champion, Sir Henry Lee. He was at the court of Henry VIII in his youth, and served as a Justice of the Peace and Knight of the Shire for Buckinghamshire. He was a close friend of his brother-in-law, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt.
Marcy Clay alias Jenny Fox, was an English thief and highwayrobber, and subject of the 1665 pamphlet The high-way woman, or, A true and perfect narrative of the wicked life, and deplorable death of Marcy Clay.
Sir Alexander Gordon of Earlston (1650–1726) was a 17th-century Scottish gentleman. He was known as a Covenanter and was member of the United Societies network. He was involved in the early 1680s in fomenting rebellion against the Crown in Scotland.
