Word: viii
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young son, who became Edward III. The four other English abdications were also under pressure. Richard II and Henry VI were forced out by political rivals during the Wars of the Roses; James II was expelled in 1688 because he had converted to Roman Catholicism; and Edward VIII gave up his throne in 1936 because of the widespread opposition to his marrying an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson...
...great-grandmother was Queen Victoria, who was photographed holding him on her lap in the last year of her life. The children of Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia were his cousins. So was Edward, Prince of Wales, later briefly King Edward VIII of England and interminably the Duke of Windsor, who was best man at his wedding. As a young man, Prince Philip, penniless but promising, married his adored young cousin Lilibet. His sister was the Queen of Sweden. Louis Mountbatten himself--and how he loved it all--was wealthy, flashingly handsome, a polo-playing friend of rajas and movie...
There is a drawing of Thomas More dating from 1527, just eight years before Henry VIII had him beheaded for refusing to recognize the King's right to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Hans Holbein's sketch shows a prosperous Londoner in a fur-trimmed robe, surrounded by his family and his possessions-silver dishes in the cupboard, and a shelf or two of those rare luxuries, books. Mounted on the wall, dangling above More's head like a sword, hangs a clock...
Thomas' martyrdom was an irony More himself might have appreciated. Henry VIII, in Marius' view a frightened, defensive monarch, already tired of the mistress he was determined to marry, faced in his Lord Chancellor a holy man manque, with whip and hair shut, whose secret passion had always been to become a monk...
...went the paparazzi trailed behind; following their soap-opera romance became almost a necessary diversion for a world wearied by wars and assassinations. The pair made millions and spent millions, traveling with an entourage that would pauper a Saudi prince, taking over entire floors of famous hotels. Like Henry VIII, a part he played with gusto in Anne of the Thousand Days, Burton lavished jewels on his consort: the 33-carat Krupp diamond, the 69-carat Cartier diamond and the lustrous Peregrina pearl that King Philip II of Spain gave Mary Tudor in 1554. Liz and Dick made a couple...