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Email Sign-UpLuytens the Great
Event – Thursday, March 14 - 6:00 pm
Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, OM, was one of the greatest of British architects known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. A boy genius, he began as an architect of lyrical country houses, before discovering the High Game of Classicism. His was a dazzling career which produced, among numerous other works, two great symbols of the national spirit: the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the memorial that became the focus of Britain's grief after the First World War, and the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, a palace bigger than Versailles symbolising British rule in India. This lecture will celebrate Lutyens's achievement on the 150thanniversary of his birth and compare his place in architectural history to that of Wren, Vanbrugh, Adam and Soane. Was Lutyens the greatest of all? The architectural historian Gavin Stamp described him as "surely the greatest British architect of the twentieth (or of any other) century."
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The Elizabethan era (1558-1603) is often depicted as the "Golden Age" in England's history—an era of great exploration and military victories in which Queen Elizabeth I is represented in sumptuous clothing and jewels. But the reality, which included religious conflicts that tore families apart, political challenge to Elizabeth's authority, high levels of poverty and crime, and vulnerability to foreign invasion, was far grimmer. The Queen was considered a Protestant heretic by the rulers of Europe, and numerous plots were hatched to dethrone her in favor of Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth's closest courtiers. notably William Cecil (1st Baron Burghley) and Francis Walsingham—the "Spymaster"—attempted to protect her. Walsingham's network of clandestine agents unearthed a series of threats, including one led by an invasion of priests trained abroad and sent to England and hidden in "priest-holes" by Catholic families in places as Baddesly Clinton and Coughton Court in Warwickshire to prepare for a Catholic rebellion.
