The Tower of London has over two million visitors a year, with the Crown Jewels as its centrepiece. This title provides the history of the Crown Jewels, the most famous jewelry collection in the world.
Anna Keay Livres
Long-listed for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2017 James, Duke of Monmouth, the adored illegitimate son of Charles II, was born in exile the year his grandfather was executed and the English monarchy abolished. Abducted from his mother on his father's orders, he emerged from a childhood in the backstreets of Rotterdam to command the ballrooms of Paris, the brothels of Covent Garden and the battlefields of Flanders. Pepys described him as `the most skittish, leaping gallant that ever I saw, always in action, vaulting or leaping or clambering'. Such was his appeal that when the monarchy itself came under threat, the cry was for Monmouth to succeed Charles II as King. He inspired both delight and disgust, adulation and abhorrence and, in time, love and loyalty almost beyond fathoming. Louis XIV was his mentor, Nell Gwyn his protector, D'Artagnan his lieutenant, William of Orange his confidant, John Dryden his censor and John Locke his comrade. Anna Keay matches rigorous scholarship with a storyteller's gift to enrapturing effect. She brings to life the warm, courageous and handsome Duke of Monmouth, a man who by his own admission `lived a very dissolute and irregular life', but who was ultimately prepared to risk everything for honour and justice. His life, culminating in his fateful invasion, provides a sweeping history of the turbulent decades in which England as we know it was forged
THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 WINNER OF THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE Eleven years when Britain had no king.