Utopia, you are standing in it!

Elizabeth I (September 7, 1533 – March 24, 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from November 17, 1558 until her death in 1603. Sometimes referred to as the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was the last of the five monarchs of the House of Tudor.

Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife, who was executed when Elizabeth was 2 and a half years old. Anne’s marriage to Henry was annulled, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate. Her half-brother Edward VI ruled until his death in 1553, bequeathing the crown to Lady Jane Grey and ignoring the claims of his two half-sisters, the Roman Catholic Mary and the younger Elizabeth, in spite of statute law to the contrary.

Edward’s will was set aside mostly because it never had Parliamentary approval and Mary became queen, deposing Lady Jane Grey. During Mary’s reign, Elizabeth was imprisoned for nearly a…

The recent BBC adaptation of John Preston’s book – A Very English Scandal – about the trial of the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy and incitement to murder, prompted us at the HPT to think about other parliamentarians with links to murder, conspiracy and scandal. Today’s blog from our Lords 1715-1790 project Editor, Dr Robin Eagles considers duels between MPs and their political connections…

Politics could be a dangerous business in eighteenth-century England. In a period where the honour code made men quick to reach for their swords, fast friendships were occasionally ended by violent altercations. This was the case with Owen Buckingham, MP for Reading, who attended the birthday party of his friend, William Aldworth in March 1720, only for the two to fall out, for their quarrel to turn violent, and for Buckingham to end up on the floor with a mortal wound. Although technically a duel…

Last night the London Record Society held a launch event for ‘The Diaries of John Wilkes, 1770-1797‘ edited by our own Dr Robin Eagles. Here, Dr Eagles relates one of Wilkes’s extra-parliamentary duels…

The St James’s Chronicle of 15-17 November 1763 carried a story of a duel fought between two unnamed persons of distinction. The account confined itself to reporting the fact that the duel had happened and that one of the participants now lay delirious and in agony from his injuries in his house in Great George Street. Oddly, the same issue contained a separate and rather different account of what must have been the same duel (and its aftermath). Unlike the other, brief summary, this was detailed and named names. The duel had been fought on 16 November between John Wilkes and Samuel Martin, the latter a fellow MP and former secretary to the…

March 23, 2022: Solar Cycle 25 is intensifying–and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding.

“The Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI) is going up rapidly right now,” reports Linda Hunt of Science Systems and Applications, Inc. “It has nearly tripled in the past year.”

TCI is a number published daily by NASA, which tells us how hot Earth’s upper atmosphere is. The thermosphere, the very highest layer of gas, literally touches space and is a sort of “first responder” to solar activity. Hunt created this plot showing how TCI has unfolded during the last 7 solar cycles.  Solar Cycle 25 (shown in blue) is just getting started:

“So far Solar Cycle 25 is well ahead of the pace of Solar Cycle 24,” notes Hunt. If this trend continues, the thermosphere could soon hit a 20-year high in temperature.

Before we go any farther, a word of caution: This does not mean Earth is…

The meme has it that wind and solar are all about slashing CO2 emissions, whereas that pathetic pair are just a colossal moneymaking scam.

Apart from South Australia, no country other than Germany threw more at chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

The results have been an utter debacle: Germans suffer the second highest power prices in Europe, just behind wind ‘powered’ Denmark, and those prices are rocketing north at double-digit rates. The German grid is on the brink of collapse.

And all in an effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide gas. Leaving aside arguments about whether CO2 is a toxic pollutant or a naturally occurring beneficial trace gas which plants crave, if the primary object of Germany’s ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future was cutting carbon dioxide gas emissions, the result has been a dismal failure – that’s cost Germans more than a €Trillion, so…

Victims of their own success, Europe’s wind turbine makers are being crushed by rocketing power prices – caused by reliance on intermittent wind and solar. Oh, the irony…

The staggering surge in European energy costs has rendered them unable to compete with Chinese manufacturers, whose operations benefit from abundant supplies of nuclear and coal-fired power. China’s rapid – and still surging industrialisation – wasn’t built on windmills and wishes, by the way.

One of the biggest, Siemens, has been particularly hard hit, with its wind turbine manufacturing unit dragging the company’s share price to the floor. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

And, as you read on, note the candid response from Siemen’ boss, Christian Bruch to the petulant who believe that Germany should already be running exclusively on wind and solar – that Germany will remain dependent upon (mostly Russian) gas “over the next decades” which, he should have…

Some eighteen months ago, I wrote here on “Money as a Social Construct“. Most civilizations over the millennia have found it expeditious to move from simple, immediate barter of physical objects like cows to some system involving “money”. But what is money? Wikipedia gives the following standard definition:

Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country.Themain functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value.

For convenience, the “thing” used as money is best if it is portable and durable and of limited amount. Gold and silver have historically served these purposes. Even though these are physical objects, their actual value in usage (e.g. how much gold does it take to buy a cow) is arbitrary. Its value…

The Martian (2015) Director: Ridley Scott

Alone on a deserted planet, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney in Ridley Scott’s wonderful adaptation of Adam Weir’s celebrated 2011 science fiction novel of the same name. In the year prior Matt Damon also played a stranded astronaut in a surprise appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The Martian is a eminently enjoyable and enlightening survival-in-space story. When a sudden storm strikes a scientific crew on the surface of Mars in the year 2035 (filmed in the desert terrain of Jordan), its lead botanist Mark Watney is believed to be dead and abandoned by his fellow crewmen aboard the Ares III. When he awakens from the storm, Watney returns to the crew’s rudimentary shelter where he begins devising complex plans for his own survival –growing potatoes using the nutrients from human excrement and Martian soil, while searching for some method…

In our latest blog we’re returning to the ‘Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700’project. Since late September, we’ve been working with the University of Oxfordand theCentre for Intellectual Historyat the University of Oxford to put togetherseries of blogs that explore European Parliamentary Culture.The series is focused on the Early Modern period – roughly 1500-1700 – but they have ranged more widely, seeking to bring in some scholars of the more recent past to provide different perspectives and insights that might stimulate new thinking. We’re reposting some of the blogs here, with thanks to the CIH and to our colleagues who have commissioned, edited and authored the blogs. To find out more about the exciting programme of work and conferences over the coming year, head to the CIH website.

This blog was originally published on 29 September, written by the History of Parliament’s director,