The King with a Pope in his Belly (B.Wyborn d'Abrera)

Every History has a history. The art and craft of historiography always carries either the odium or a vindication of its time, or the purposes of the culture from which it arose. Few Histories have been truly objective, written without an eye to propaganda. Gibbon's ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, was a rare model of that kind. The severely mistranslated work of Flavius Josephus was another. In the main however, great historical publications have emanated as reflections of, and justifications for great civilizations. Even the Catholic Church has suffered from unashamed triumphalism in the works of many of its historians. It has ever been 'Victor's History: And so to the British Empire, where ‘Pax britannica’ has been the guiding principle of Histories that have emanated for nearly five centuries from scholars and the great seats of learning in Britain. Consequently, the history of that period, still with us, is in effect tainted by a justification of Pax anglicana, that is, the history of Reformation and post-Reformation England. To that end, the author has undertaken to correct the inherent bias of the period by revisiting its history in a trilogy of works, of which this is the first part, and will base her studies on a wider range than the currently accepted canon of historical sources.