Word: monarches
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...peuple c 'est moi! Thus the 20th century, for Americans the century of the common man, became for the British the century of the common monarch, whose position depended, not on divine right or any other sanctions but on personal charisma...
...decision to rebel came with agonizing difficulty to most patriots. Torn between a traditional love for the monarch and a growing conviction that his surrogates were abusing the royal prerogative, many like Quincy felt a crushing ambivalence toward their colonial rulers. Indeed, despite his vehement rhetoric, Quincy had once actually defended Hutchinson from the "Rage-intoxicated Rabble" who attacked his home years earlier upon passage of the Stamp Act of 1765. This kind of contradictory behavior characterized the actions of many men of conscience in the late colonial says; it did not come from political opportunism, but from heart-felt...
...Lady Diana Spencer in another day, there would be protocol problems aplenty. As late as the 1920s, divorced persons were never received socially by Britain's royal family, and Lady Di's parents are divorced and remarried. The reason for that barrier in social protocol: the British monarch is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which, like the Roman Catholic Church, refuses to recognize divorce or allow a second marriage while the original spouse is still living...
...strictness bemuses those who recall that the Church of England was created because Henry VIII, against papal orders, wanted to shed Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, and marry Anne Boleyn. As it happened, the much married monarch did not actually divorce Catherine, but engineered an annulment. Nor did he divorce Anne or any of his succeeding four wives.* The ancient Anglican church tradition forced King Edward VIII to abdicate in 1936 so that he might marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, the twice-divorced "woman I love," and led Princess Margaret to reject the divorced Peter Townsend in 1955. Margaret...
...that covers 24 years of English history. The three plays that come first--Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV--are far superior as works of art; but even third-drawer Shakespeare is pretty wonderful stuff. According to the standard view, Richard was a legitimate but incompetent monarch; Henry IV was capable but doomed by having usurped the crown; and Henry V was Shakespeare's conception of the perfect sovereign, a hero-king with legitimate title...