The Rainborowes

The Rainborowes bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World. Starting with William Rainborowe, a prominent merchant-mariner and shipmaster, and his equally formidable sons and daughters between 1630 and 1660, we follow their astonishing story through the Civil War, the Putney debates, and settling in America. The Rainborowes explains America and mourns England’s failed revolution. It spans oceans and ideologies and encompasses personal tragedies and triumphs, the death of kings and the birth of nations. Using rare printed material from the period and unpublished manuscripts from collections in Britain and America The Rainborowes recreates day-to-day life on both sides of the Atlantic during one of the most tumultuous periods in Western history. In their efforts to build a paradise on earth, the Rainborowes and their friends encounter pirates and witches, prophets and princes, Muslem militants and Mohican Indians. They build new societies. They are ordinary men and women, and they do an extraordinary thing. They change the world.

Biography of Thomas Rainborowe - now being recognised as one of the most important players in the English Civil War. This book offers an account of the life and career of Thomas Rainborowe, a significant figure in the English Civil War in both military and political terms. His involvement in the sea-borne Irish Expedition of 1642 was followed byservice as an infantry leader within the Eastern Association and the New Model Army, where he achieved particular distinction as a siege commander. In the context of the New Model's burgeoning political role, Rainborowe emerged at the Putney Debates [a landmark in the history of the political philosophy] as perhaps the most cogent spokesman for the radical/Leveller cause; but his association with the abortive Leveller-inspired mutiny at Ware, and his hostility toward continued negotiation with Charles I, led to his fall from grace with Cromwell and the `grandees'. Despite this, he re-emerged as a pre-eminent siege-commander at Colchester; but, en route to impose a more rigorous siege of Pontefract Castle, he was assassinated at Doncaster, in highly suspicious circumstances, in November 1648. Written in a lively and accessible style, this is the first full-length study of a man whose importance has been hitherto neglected.

The period between 1630 and 1660 was one of the most tumultuous in Western history, witnessing the birth of New England and, in the mother country, a chaotic civil war that rent the very fabric of English social, political, and religious life. At the center of this turbulent time was an outsized family: the Rainborowes. Shipmasters and soldiers, entrepreneurs and idealists, they bridged two worlds as they struggled to forge a better future for themselves and their kin.

From an acclaimed social and architectural historian, the tumultuous, scandalous, glitzy, and glamorous history of English country houses and high society during the interwar period As WWI drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England's country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous and glamorous history of English country houses during the years between World Wars. As estate taxes and other challenges forced many of these venerable houses onto the market, new sectors of British and American society were seduced by the dream of owning a home in the English countryside. Drawing on thousands of memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before, opening the door to a world by turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, and forever wrapped in myth. We are drawn into the intrigues of legendary families such as the Astors, the Churchills and the Devonshires as they hosted hunting parties and balls that attracted the likes of Charlie Chaplin, T.E. Lawrence, and royals such as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. We waltz through aristocratic soiré, and watch as the upper crust struggle to fend off rising taxes and underbred outsiders, property speculators and poultry farmers. We gain insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and see how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs. Through the glitz of estate parties, the social tensions between old money and new, the hunting parties, illicit trysts, and grand feasts, Tinniswood offers a glimpse behind the veil of these great estates -- and reveals a reality much more riveting than the dream.

From the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values. 'Preposterously entertaining' Observer 'Brilliant' Daily Telegraph 'Rollicking' Sunday Times As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Yet - perhaps surprisingly - many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, Noble Ambitions takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power. * A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year * * Longlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History *