1603

Name: 1603
Author: Christopher Lee
ISBN: 9780312321390

368 pages2004St. Martin's PressISBN 9780312321390

Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533-1603 -- Death and burial.Great Britain -- History -- James I, 1603-1625.Great Britain -- Civilization -- 17th century.

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About this book

1603 was the year that Queen Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, died. Her cousin, Robert Carey, immediately rode like a demon to Scotland to take the news to James VI. The cataclysmic time of the Stuarts had come and the son of Mary Queen of Scots left Edinburgh for London to claim his throne as James I of England. Diaries and notes written in 1603 describe how a resurgence of the plague killed nearly 40,000 people. Priests blamed the sins of the people for the pestilence, witches were strangled and burned and plotters strung up on gate tops. But not all was gloom and violence. From a ship's log we learn of the first precious cargoes of pepper arriving from the East Indies after the establishment of a new spice route; Sharkespeare was finishing Othello and Ben Jonson wrote furiously to please a nation thirsting for entertainment. 1603 was one of the most important and interesting years in British history. Christopher Lee, acclaimed author of This Sceptred Isle, unfolds its story from first-hand accounts and original documents to mirror the seminal year in which Britain moved from Tudor medievalism towards the wars, republicanism and regicide that lay ahead.

Publication Details

Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2004
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780312321390
Language: en

About Christopher Lee

Two authors are often conflated. Christopher Lee (1941-2021) was a British historian. He was best known as a BBC radio defence and foreign affairs correspondent (1976-86), in particular through reporting on the Falklands war from London in 1982. But he was also a writer with a wide range of interests, and penning 396 episodes of This Sceptred Isle single-handedly was just one aspect of a considerable output. The project incorporated extracts from Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. It began with the Romans’ occupation of Britain, and after it reached the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, three further tranches were commissioned – covering the story of Britain’s great dynastic families, the 20th century, and the British empire. It eventually concluded in 2006 (The Gardian). Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee CBE, CStJ (1922-2015), was an English actor, singer and author. With a career spanning nearly 70 years, Lee was well known for portraying villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films, a typecasting situation he always lamented. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the second and third films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).