An account of the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in August 1822, the first visit by a British monarch for almost two hundred years. It was a visit surrounded by ceremony. The feasting and processions went on almost continuously for ten days, before the satiated monarch sailed again for London. But the visit was a very complex affair. The author describes the political machinations which preceded the event, and the way different courtiers attempted to sway the King's dithering sybaratic moods. He also describes the true state of the Scottish clans and the hypocrisy which lay behind the welcome extended to the King. John Prebble is author of "Culloden", "Glencoe" and "The Highland Clearances" among many others.

The King's Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822 'One and Twenty Daft Days'

History

John Prebble

Europe

Fontana Press

This work looks at the Scotland's turbulent history.

Lion In the North: One Thousand Years of Scotland's History

Penguin Putnam~trade

Lion In the North: A Personal View of Scotland's History

The Borgias

Literature & Fiction

Sarah Bradford

Genre Fiction

Weidenfeld &Nicholson

'HIGH GIRDERS: TAY BRIDGE DISASTER, 1879'

Pan Books

In the terrible aftermath of the moorland battle of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs. Following his magnificent reconstruction of Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands.   ‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.

The Highland Clearances

Secker and Warburg

This work looks at the Scotland's turbulent history.

The Lion in the North: One Thousand Years of Scotland's History

Distributed by Crown Publishers

The National Trust for Scotland published a color booklet depicting the history of the Battle of Culloden-fought on April 16, 1746, it was the last great battle on British soil. Profusely illustrated. 36pp.

CULLODEN

PIMLICO (RAND)

The word Darien is a scar on the memory of the Scots, and the hurt is still felt even where the cause of the wound is dimly understood. Three hundred years ago the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, defied the King and the persistent hostility of the English to establish a noble trading company, to settle a colony, and to recover its people from a century of despair, privation, famine and decay. The site of the colony, Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, was the enduring dream of William Patterson, the erratically brilliant Scot who had helped to found the Bank of England. He called it 'the door of the seas, and the key of the universe', and believed it would become a bridge between East and West, an entrepôt through which would pass the richest trade in the world. The first attempt to make the Company a joint Scots and English venture was crushed by the English Parliament. The Scots created it by themselves, in a wave of almost hysterical enthusiasm, subscribing half of the nation's capital. Three years later the 'noble undertaking', crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms by Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned. It was a tragic curtain to the last act of Scotland's independence. John Prebble's book is the first detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from original sources in the records of the Company, the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn William Patterson's dream into reality. ---from book's back cover

DARIEN DISASTER

Americas

Secker Warburg

Dorset_Press

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Books by John Prebble