Windsor Great Park
Windsor Great Park is a Royal Park of 2,020 hectares, including a deer park, to the south of the town of Windsor on the border of Berkshire and Surrey in England. The park was, for many centuries, the private hunting ground of Windsor Castle and dates from the mid-13th century; the park covered an area many times the current size known as Windsor Forest, Windsor Royal Park or its current name. The park is funded by the Crown Estate. Most parts of the park are open to the public, free of charge, from dawn to dusk, although there is a charge to enter Savill Garden; the park is Grade I listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Windsor Forest and Great Park is a Site of Special Scientific Interest; the Great Park is a undulating area of varied landscape. It has sweeping deer lawns, small woods and areas covered by huge solitary ancient oak trees. There is a small river in the north of the park called the Battle Bourne running to the Thames near Datchet; the River Bourne runs through a number of ponds to the south.
Chief amongst these are Great Meadow Obelisk Pond, near the great lake of Virginia Water. The most prominent hill is Snow Hill and the avenue of trees known as the Long Walk runs between here and Windsor Castle; the area is accessed by a number of gates: Queen Anne's Gate, Ranger's Gate, Cranbourne Gate, Forest Gate, Sandpit Gate, Prince Consort's Gate, Blacknest Gate, Bishop's Gate and Bear's Rails Gate and the original medieval park pale can still be seen in places. The main road known as Sheet Street into Windsor runs through the northeast of the park. On the western side of the park is The Village, built in the 1930s to house Royal estate workers, it has a village infant/junior school. Other buildings include Cumberland Lodge, the Cranbourne Tower and Norfolk Farm; the park lies within the civil parish of Old Windsor, though the eastern regions are in the Borough of Runnymede and there are small areas in the parishes of Winkfield and Sunninghill. Areas associated with or attached to the Great Park, but not within its borders include the Home Park, Mote Park, Flemish Farm, Cranbourne Chase, Forest Lodge and South Forest.
The modern enclosed deer park is at the northern end of the Great Park. It is home to a large herd of semi-wild deer, reflecting the original medieval purpose of the park; the Long Walk runs south from Windsor Castle to the 1829 Copper Horse statue of King George III atop Snow Hill where there are impressive views of the castle. It is 2.65 miles from George IV Gateway at Windsor Castle to The Copper Horse. Other equestrian statues in the park include one of the Prince Consort, to the west of the polo grounds, one of Queen Elizabeth II near the Village; the Royal Lodge was built in the centre of the park as the Deputy Ranger's house. It was made into a retreat for the Prince Regent from 1812, but was pulled down after his death; the remains were renovated, in the 1930s, as a home for the Duke and Duchess of York before their accession as George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It is now the official residence of the Prince Andrew, Duke of York and not accessible by the public; the Royal Chapel of All Saints was built after the chapels of the Royal and Cumberland Lodges proved too small for growing numbers of household staff.
The chapel was built in 1825 by Jeffry Wyattville and used by George IV during the refurbishment of Windsor Castle. It was remodelled in the Gothic Revival style by Samuel Sanders Teulon and Anthony Salvin. Queen Victoria attended the chapel as did the Duke and Duchess of York before their accession as George VI and Queen Elizabeth, it is used by Queen Elizabeth II when she is in residence at Windsor. Other notable buildings in the park include Cumberland Lodge, built in 1652 during the Commonwealth. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the Lodge became the home of the Ranger of the Great Park, an office in the gift of the sovereign; each Ranger made his – or in one case, that of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, her – own mark on the features of the house and its surroundings. Throughout her life Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor, her daughter Princess Helena of the United Kingdom lived at the Lodge for over fifty years, presiding over elaborate re-building after a bad fire in 1869 and extensive alterations in 1912.
Lord FitzAlan, last British Viceroy of Ireland, was the last private person to be entrusted with the Lodge. It was in his time, in 1936, that the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, discussed the crisis over King Edward VIII's desire to marry Wallis Simpson, talks which led to his abdication of the crown a few weeks later. In 1947, the King made the Lodge available to the newly established St. Catharine's Foundation known as the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Foundation of St Catharine's. Today the organisation is known as Cumberland Lodge. Cumberland Lodge today is an educational charity dedicated to initiating fresh debate on the burning questions facing society; the grounds are not open to the public, but the house is continually holding conferences, open days and lectures. The private Cranbourne Tower is viewed from surrounding paths, it is all that survives of the residence of the Keeper of Cranbourne Chase. It is thought to date back to the 16th century. In the south-east of the park, near Englefield Green, are the well-endowed Savill Garden and Valley Gardens which were designed and built by Eric Savill in the 1930s and 1940s.
They include an extraordinary range of trees from around the world. Smith's Lawn and Polo Grounds are nearby; the gardens are open to visitors between 10:00 and 16:30 in the winter and 10:00 and 18:00 in the summer. Virginia Wat
Bagshot
Bagshot is a large village in the southeast of England. It is situated in the northwest corner of Surrey within the county's Surrey Heath council district, close to the border with Berkshire, is in the diocese of Guildford. In the past, Bagshot served as an important staging post between London and the West Country. Evidence of this can be seen in some of the original coaching inns; the village is situated 43 kilometres southwest of London, adjacent to junction 3 of the M3 motorway and is split in half by the A30 road, midway between Camberley and Sunningdale. Much of the surrounding land is owned by the Ministry of Defence; the area is in the Green Belt. It is served by Bagshot railway station. Recent excavations have shown that settlements of Bagshot date back as far as pre-Roman, before these excavations it was thought that the earliest settlements in Bagshot were late Saxon. Late Bronze Age settlements have been identified in the area, iron smelting appears to have been a major'industry' in the locality.
Bagshot at one time included a Royal forest. It had a Royal hunting lodge through Stuart and Tudor times, now called Bagshot Park, now the residence of Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex. In Elizabethan times Bagshot prospered due to its position on the main London to the West Country road; as with many villages on main coaching routes, Bagshot developed services, inns for the stagecoach passengers, stables to provide the coaches with fresh horses. Ann Nelson's "Exeter Telegraph" would stop for 20 minutes at Bagshot on its 17 hour journey to Devon; the prosperity of the Great South West Road created its share of highwaymen, one of the most notorious being William Davis, a local farmer who lived near what is known locally as the Jolly Farmer roundabout in Camberley. He was caught at the White Hart Inn in Bagshot and was hanged at the gallows in Gibbets Lane in Camberley. Not one to avoid suspicion he always paid his debts in gold! It was after him; the Golden Farmer, was sold to American Golf Discount Store, who still use the old building.
Burger King had plans to build a fast food restaurant there but has since been cancelled as the roundabout was considered too dangerous and was near Collingwood School. Bagshot has five churches: Church of England. St Anne's Church is 120 years old and was built in a Gothic Revival style under the patronage of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught who lived in the nearby Bagshot Park, it is a building in red brick with stone detail under a slate roof. There is a bell tower with a peal of eight bells, it is a grade II is situated in a conservation area. Bagshot has a cricket field. Curley Park Rangers, the youth football club and play on pitches in both Lightwater and Bagshot; the CPR clubhouse is located at the Bagshot pitch. White Hart Royals, the football team of the White Hart pub in Bagshot village, compete in the Camberley & District Sunday Football League. Bagshot Cricket Club runs a number of adult and under 16 teams and complete in the Thames Valley League, the Three Counties League and the West Surrey Youth League.
Bagshot Tennis Club has four floodlit fields teams in the Woking League. Swinley Forest, which borders Bagshot to the north, provides some of the best mountain biking in South-East England, with many off-road'single-track' trails available as well as plenty of fire roads. Mountain biking is permitted with a permit and walking is free. Swinley Woods was considered as a venue for the mountain biking event of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Other clubs and organisations include Bagshot Concert Band, the Surrey Heath Archaeology and Heritage Trust, Bagshot Gymnastics Club and Bagshot Metal Detecting Club and local branches of the Scouts, Royal Air Forces Association and Women's Institute, it is a short distance from The National Clay Shooting Centre and the Bisley shooting ranges. Bagshot library is situated on the High Street and in addition to the usual library services provides Story and'Rhymetimes' for the local toddler community. Lightwater Country Park is accessible by crossing the M3 footbridge.
Pennyhill Park Hotel located at the far western edge of Bagshot is where the England rugby team train. Bagshot Park, home of Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is located on the northern edge of the town; the A30 leaving Bagshot to the southwest for Camberley has a large roundabout on it called the Jolly Farmer after a public house that used to stand in its centre, now used as a Golfing Store. The local borough, Surrey Heath, is a Conservative area and it has held a Conservative council for the past 50 years. Bagshot itself is, represented by two Liberal Democrat and one Conservative borough councillors. Bagshot is working on a Village Plan; the Bagshot Village Plan aims to pull together the people of Bagshot's collected hopes and concerns for the community and to set out a plan for making Bagshot an better place to live and work. Some large companies are based in Bagshot, including Big Yellow Self Storage, the Wooldridge Group. About Bagshot Village The origins of Bagshot Bagshot Village Surrey County Council.
"Bagshot". Exploring Surrey's Past. Retrieved 30 May 2017
House of Stuart
The House of Stuart Stewart, was a European royal house of Scotland with Breton origin. They had held the office of High Steward of Scotland since Walter FitzAlan in around 1150; the royal Stewart line was founded by Robert II whose descendants were kings and queens of Scotland from 1371 until the union with England in 1707. Mary, Queen of Scots was brought up in France where she adopted the French spelling of the name Stuart. In 1503, James IV married Margaret Tudor, thus linking the royal houses of England. Elizabeth I of England died without issue in 1603, James IV's great grandson James VI of Scotland succeed the thrones of England and Ireland as James I in the Union of the Crowns; the Stuarts were monarchs of the British Isles and its growing empire until the death of Queen Anne in 1714, except for the period of the Commonwealth between 1649 and 1660. In total, nine Stewart/Stuart monarchs ruled Scotland alone from 1371 until 1603; the last ruler of Scotland alone was James VI, who became the first dual monarch of England and Scotland in 1603.
Two Stuart queens ruled the isles following the Glorious Revolution in 1688: Anne. Both were the Protestant daughters of James VII and II by his first wife Anne Hyde and the great-grandchildren of James VI and I, their father had converted to Catholicism and his new wife gave birth to a son in 1688, brought up a Roman Catholic and preceded his half-sisters. But neither had any children who survived to adulthood, so the crown passed to the House of Hanover on the death of Queen Anne in 1714 under the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Act of Security 1704; the name "Stewart" derives from the political position of office similar to a governor, known as a steward. It was adopted as the family surname by Walter Stewart, 3rd High Steward of Scotland, the third member of the family to hold the position. Prior to this, family names were not used, but instead they had patronyms defined through the father; the gallicised spelling was first borne by John Stewart of Darnley after his time in the French wars.
During the 16th century, the French spelling Stuart was adopted by Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was living in France. She sanctioned the change to ensure the correct pronunciation of the Scots version of the name Stewart, because retaining the letter "w" would have made it difficult for French speakers, who followed the Germans in rendering "w" as /v/; the spelling Stuart was used by her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. The ancestral origins of the Stuart family are obscure—their probable ancestry is traced back to Alan FitzFlaad, a Breton who came over to Great Britain not long after the Norman conquest. Alan had been the hereditary steward of the Bishop of Dol in the Duchy of Brittany; the FitzAlan family established themselves as a prominent Anglo-Norman noble house, with some of its members serving as High Sheriff of Shropshire. It was the great-grandson of Alan named Walter FitzAlan who became the first hereditary High Steward of Scotland, while his brother William's family went on to become Earls of Arundel.
When the civil war in the Kingdom of England, known as The Anarchy, broke out between legitimist claimant Matilda, Lady of the English and her cousin who had usurped her, King Stephen, Walter had sided with Matilda. Another supporter of Matilda was her uncle David I of Scotland from the House of Dunkeld. After Matilda was pushed out of England into the County of Anjou failing in her legitimist attempt for the throne, many of her supporters in England fled also, it was that Walter followed David up to the Kingdom of Scotland, where he was granted lands in Renfrewshire and the title for life of Lord High Steward. The next monarch of Scotland, Malcolm IV, made the High Steward title a hereditary arrangement. While High Stewards, the family were based at Dundonald, South Ayrshire between the 12th and 13th centuries; the sixth High Steward of Scotland, Walter Stewart, married Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce, played an important part in the Battle of Bannockburn gaining further favour. Their son Robert was heir to the House of Bruce, the Lordship of Cunningham and the Bruce lands of Bourtreehill.
In 1503, James IV attempted to secure peace with England by marrying King Henry VII's daughter, Margaret Tudor. The birth of their son James V, brought the House of Stewart into the line of descent of the House of Tudor, the English throne. Margaret Tudor married Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, their daughter, Margaret Douglas, was the mother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. In 1565, Darnley married his half-cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, the daughter of James V. Darnley's father was Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, a member of the Stewart of Darnley branch of the House. Lennox was a descendant of Alexander Stewart, 4th High Steward of Scotland descended from James II, being Mary's heir presumptive, thus Darnley was related to Mary on his father's side and because of this connection, Mary's heirs remained part of the House of Stuart. Following John Stewart of Darnley's ennoblement for his part at the Battle of Baugé in 1421 and the grant of lands to him at Aubigny and Concressault, the Darnley Stewarts' surname was gallicised to Stuart.
Both Mary, Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley had strong claims on the E
South East England
South East England is the most populous of the nine official regions of England at the first level of NUTS for statistical purposes. It consists of Berkshire, East Sussex, the Isle of Wight, Oxfordshire and West Sussex; as with the other regions of England, apart from Greater London, the south east has no elected government. It is the third largest region of England, with an area of 19,096 km2, is the most populous with a total population of over eight and a half million; the headquarters of the region's governmental bodies are in Guildford, the region contains seven cities: Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Portsmouth and Winchester, though other major settlements include Reading and Milton Keynes. Its proximity to London and connections to several national motorways have led to South East England becoming an economic hub, with the largest economy in the country outside the capital, it is the location of Gatwick Airport, the UK's second-busiest airport, its coastline along the English Channel provides numerous ferry crossings to mainland Europe.
The region is known for its countryside, which includes the North Downs and the Chiltern Hills as well as two national parks: the New Forest and the South Downs. The River Thames flows through the region and its basin is known as the Thames Valley, it is the location of a number of internationally known places of interest, such as HMS Victory in Portsmouth, Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, Thorpe Park and RHS Wisley in Surrey, Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, Windsor Castle in Berkshire, Leeds Castle, the White Cliffs of Dover and Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, Brighton Pier and Hammerwood Park in East Sussex, Wakehurst Place in West Sussex. The region has many universities. South East England is host to various sporting events, including the annual Henley Royal Regatta, Royal Ascot and The Derby, sporting venues include Wentworth Golf Club and Brands Hatch; some of the events of the 2012 Summer Olympics were held in the south east, including the rowing at Eton Dorney and part of the cycling road race in the Surrey Hills.
At Eartham Pit, Boxgrove near Halnaker in West Sussex in December 1993, the oldest human remains in the UK – a tibia bone and a pair of lower incisor teeth – were found. An Acheulean hand axe was found. Bones of a Megalosaurus were found at a slate quarry at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire and named in 1824: it is now at Oxford University Museum of Natural History. In 1822 an Iguanodon was found at Whitemans Green near West Sussex; the Meonhill Vineyard, near Old Winchester Hill in east Hampshire on the South Downs south of West Meon on the A32, was the site of where the Romano-British grew Roman grapes. The Ridgeway runs through Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire and is Britain's oldest road; the post office at Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, in the Cotswolds, is the oldest still in use in England, built in 1845. The first British Grand Prix was held in 1926 at Brooklands, the world's first purpose-built motor circuit built in 1907 by Sir Hugh F. Locke-King, the land owner. Much of the Battle of Britain was fought in this region in Kent.
RAF Bomber Command was based at High Wycombe. RAF Medmenham at Danesfield House, west of Marlow in Buckinghamshire, was important for aerial reconnaissance. Operation Corona, based at RAF Kingsdown, was implemented to confuse German night fighters with native German-speakers, coordinated by the RAF Y Service. Bletchley Park in north Buckinghamshire was the principal Allied centre for codebreaking; the Colossus computer, arguably the world's first, began working on Lorentz codes on 5 February 1944, with Colossus 2 working from June 1944. The site was chosen, among other reasons, because it is at the junction of the Varsity Line and the West Coast Main Line; the Harwell computer, now at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley, was built in 1949 and is believed to be the oldest working digital computer in the world. John Wallis of Kent, introduced the symbol for infinity, the standard notation for powers of numbers in 1656. Thomas Bayes was an important statistician from Tunbridge Wells. Sir David N. Payne at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre invented the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, a type of optical amplifier, in the mid-1980s, which became essential for the internet.
Henry Moseley at Oxford in 1913 discovered his Moseley's law of X-ray spectra of chemical elements that enabled him to be the first to assign the correct atomic number to elements in periodic table. Carbon fibre was invented in 1963 at the RAE in Farnborough by a team led by William Watt; the Apollo LCG space-suit cooling system originated from work done at RAE Farnborough in the early 1960s. Donald Watts Davies, who went to grammar school in Portsmouth, took over from Alan Turing in developing Britain's early computers, invented packet switching in the late 1960s at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Packet-switching was taken up by the Americans to form the ARPANET. The
Heath
A heath is a shrubland habitat found on free-draining infertile, acidic soils and is characterised by open, low-growing woody vegetation. Moorland is related to high-ground heaths with—especially in Great Britain—a cooler and damper climate. Heaths are fast disappearing and considered a rare habitat in Europe, they form extensive and diverse communities across Australia in humid and sub-humid areas where fire regimes with recurring burning are required for the maintenance of the heathlands. More diverse though less widespread heath communities occur in Southern Africa. Extensive heath communities can be found in the California chaparral, New Caledonia, central Chile and along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In addition to these extensive heath areas, the vegetation type is found in scattered locations across all continents, except Antarctica. Heathland is favoured where climatic conditions are hard and dry in summer, soils acidic, of low fertility, sandy and free-draining. Heaths are dominated by low shrubs, 20 centimetres to 2 metres tall.
Heath vegetation can be plant-species rich, heathlands of Australia are home to some 3,700 endemic or typical species in addition to numerous less restricted species. The fynbos heathlands of South Africa are second only to tropical rainforests in plant biodiversity with over 7,000 species. In marked contrast, the tiny pockets of heathland in Europe are depauperate with a flora consisting of heather and gorse; the bird fauna of heathlands are cosmopolitan species of the region. In the depauperate heathlands of Europe, bird species tend to be more characteristic of the community and include Montagu's harrier, the tree pipit. In Australia the heathland avian fauna is dominated by nectar-feeding birds such as honey-eaters and lorikeets although numerous other birds from emus to eagles are common in Australian heathlands. Australian heathlands are home to the world's only nectar-feeding terrestrial mammal: the honey possum; the bird fauna of the South African fynbos includes sunbirds and siskins.
Heathlands are an excellent habitat for insects including ants, moths and wasps with many species being restricted to it. One such example of an organism restricted to heathland is the silver-studded blue butterfly, Plebejus argus. Anthropogenic heath habitats are a cultural landscape that can be found worldwide in locations as diverse as northern and western Europe, the Americas, New Zealand and New Guinea; these heaths were created or expanded by centuries of human clearance of the natural forest and woodland vegetation, by grazing and burning. In some cases this clearance went so far that parts of the heathland have given way to open spots of pure sand and sand dunes, with a local climate that in Europe, can experience temperatures of 50 °C in summer, drying the sand spot bordering the heathland and further raising its vulnerability for wildfires. Referring to heathland in England, Oliver Rackham says, "Heaths are the product of human activities and need to be managed as heathland. In recent years the conservation value of these man-made heaths has become much more appreciated, most heathlands are protected.
However they are threatened by tree incursion because of the discontinuation of traditional management techniques such as grazing and burning that mediated the landscapes. Some are threatened by urban sprawl. Anthropogenic heathlands are maintained artificially by a combination of grazing and periodic burning, or mowing; the re-colonising tree species will depend on what is available as the local seed source, thus it may not reflect the natural vegetation before the heathland became established. Bolster heath Chalk heath Garrigue Maquis shrubland Matorral Scrubland The Countryside Agency information on types of open land Origin of the word'heath'
Falcon
Falcons are birds of prey in the genus Falco, which includes about 40 species. Falcons are distributed on all continents of the world except Antarctica, though related raptors did occur there in the Eocene. Adult falcons have thin, tapered wings, which enable them to fly at high speed and change direction rapidly. Fledgling falcons, in their first year of flying, have longer flight feathers, which make their configuration more like that of a general-purpose bird such as a broad-wing; this makes flying easier while learning the exceptional skills required to be effective hunters as adults. There are many different types of falcon; the falcons are the largest genus in the Falconinae subfamily of Falconidae, which itself includes another subfamily comprising caracaras and a few other species. All these birds kill with their beaks, using a "tooth" on the side of their beaks—unlike the hawks and other birds of prey in the Accipitridae, which use their feet; the largest falcon is the gyrfalcon at up to 65 cm in length.
The smallest falcons are the kestrels. As with hawks and owls, falcons exhibit sexual dimorphism, with the females larger than the males, thus allowing a wider range of prey species; some small falcons with long, narrow wings are called "hobbies" and some which hover while hunting are called "kestrels". As is the case with many birds of prey, falcons have exceptional powers of vision. Peregrine falcons have been recorded diving at speeds of 200 miles per hour, making them the fastest-moving creatures on Earth; the fastest recorded dive for one is 390 km/h. The Late Latin falco is believed to derive from falx as meaning a sickle, referencing the claws of the bird. In Middle English and Old French, the term faucon refers generically to several captive raptor species; the traditional term for a male falcon is tercel or tiercel, from the Latin tertius because of the belief that only one in three eggs hatched a male bird. Some sources give the etymology as deriving from the fact that a male falcon is about one-third smaller than a female.
A falcon chick one reared for falconry, still in its downy stage, is known as an eyas. The word arose from Latin presumed nidiscus from nidus; the technique of hunting with trained captive birds of prey is known as falconry. Compared to other birds of prey, the fossil record of the falcons is not well distributed in time; the oldest fossils tentatively assigned to this genus are from the Late Miocene, less than 10 million years ago. This coincides with a period in which many modern genera of birds became recognizable in the fossil record; the falcon lineage may, however, be somewhat older than this, given the distribution of fossil and living Falco taxa, is of North American, African, or Middle Eastern or European origin. Falcons are divisible into three or four groups; the first contains the kestrels. Kestrels feed chiefly on terrestrial vertebrates and invertebrates of appropriate size, such as rodents, reptiles, or insects; the second group contains larger species, the hobbies and relatives. These birds are characterized by considerable amounts of dark slate-gray in their plumage.
They feed on smaller birds. Third are the peregrine falcon and its relatives, variably sized powerful birds that have a black malar area, a black cap, as well. Otherwise, they are somewhat intermediate between the other groups, being chiefly medium gray with some lighter or brownish colors on their upper sides, they are, on average, more delicately patterned than the hobbies and, if the hierofalcons are excluded, this group contains species with horizontal barring on their undersides. As opposed to the other groups, where tail color varies much in general but little according to evolutionary relatedness, the fox and greater kestrels can be told apart at first glance by their tail colors, but not by much else; the tails of the large falcons are quite uniformly dark gray with inconspicuous black banding and small, white tips, though this is plesiomorphic. These large Falco species feed on terrestrial vertebrates. Similar to these, sometimes included therein, are the four or so species of hierofalcons.
They represent taxa with more phaeomelanins, which impart reddish or brown colors, more patterned plumage reminiscent of hawks. Their undersides have a lengthwise pattern of lines, or arrowhead marks. While these three or four groups, loosely circumscribed, are an informal arrangement, they contain several distinct clades in their entirety. A study of mtDNA cytochrome b sequence data of some kestrels identified a clade containing the common kestrel and related "malar-striped" species, to the exclusion of such taxa as the greater kestrel, the lesser kestrel, the American kestrel, which has a malar stripe, but its color pattern–apart from the brownish back–and the
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom. The governing party since 2010, it is the largest in the House of Commons, with 313 Members of Parliament, has 249 members of the House of Lords, 18 members of the European Parliament, 31 Members of the Scottish Parliament, 12 members of the Welsh Assembly, eight members of the London Assembly and 8,916 local councillors; the Conservative Party was founded in 1834 from the Tory Party—the Conservatives' colloquial name is "Tories"—and was one of two dominant political parties in the nineteenth century, along with the Liberal Party. Under Benjamin Disraeli it played a preeminent role in politics at the height of the British Empire. In 1912, the Liberal Unionist Party merged with the party to form the Conservative and Unionist Party. In the 1920s, the Labour Party surpassed the Liberals as the Conservatives' main rivals. Conservative Prime Ministers — notably Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher — led governments for 57 years of the twentieth century.
Positioned on the centre-right of British politics, the Conservative Party is ideologically conservative. Different factions have dominated the party at different times, including One Nation Conservatives and liberal conservatives, while its views and policies have changed throughout its history; the party has adopted liberal economic policies—favouring free market economics, limiting state regulation, pursuing privatisation—although in the past has supported protectionism. The party is British unionist, opposing both Irish reunification and Welsh and Scottish independence, supported the maintenance of the British Empire; the party includes those with differing views on the European Union, with Eurosceptic and pro-European wings. In foreign policy, it is for a strong national defence; the Conservatives are a member of the International Democrat Union and the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe and sit with the European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary group. The Scottish, Northern Irish and Gibraltan branches of the party are semi-autonomous.
Its support base consists of middle-class voters in rural areas of England, its domination of British politics throughout the twentieth century has led to it being referred to as one of the most successful political parties in the Western world. The Conservative Party was founded in the 1830s. However, some writers trace its origins to the reign of Charles II in the 1670s Exclusion Crisis. Other historians point to a faction, rooted in the 18th century Whig Party, that coalesced around William Pitt the Younger in the 1780s, they were known as "Independent Whigs", "Friends of Mr Pitt", or "Pittites" and never used terms such as "Tory" or "Conservative". Pitt died in 1806. From about 1812 on the name "Tory" was used for a new party that, according to historian Robert Blake, "are the ancestors of Conservatism". Blake adds that Pitt's successors after 1812 "were not in any sense standard-bearer's of true Toryism"; the term "Conservative" was suggested as a title for the party by a magazine article by J. Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review in 1830.
The name caught on and was adopted under the aegis of Sir Robert Peel around 1834. Peel is acknowledged as the founder of the Conservative Party, which he created with the announcement of the Tamworth Manifesto; the term "Conservative Party" rather than Tory was the dominant usage by 1845. The widening of the electoral franchise in the nineteenth century forced the Conservative Party to popularise its approach under Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby and Benjamin Disraeli, who carried through their own expansion of the franchise with the Reform Act of 1867. In 1886, the party formed an alliance with Spencer Compton Cavendish, Lord Hartington and Joseph Chamberlain's new Liberal Unionist Party and, under the statesmen Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, held power for all but three of the following twenty years before suffering a heavy defeat in 1906 when it split over the issue of free trade. Young Winston Churchill denounced Chamberlain's attack on free trade, helped organize the opposition inside the Unionist/Conservative Party.
Balfour, as party leader, followed Chamberlain's policy introduced protectionist legislation. The high tariff element called itself "Tariff Reformers" and in a major speech in Manchester on May 13, 1904, Churchill warned their takeover of the Unionist/Conservative party would permanently brand it as: A party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation. Two weeks Churchill crossed the floor and formally joined the Liberal Party. )He rejoined the Conservatives in 1925.) In December, Balfour lost control of his party, as the defections multiplied. He was replaced by Liberal Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman who called an election in January 1906, which produced a massive Liberal victory with a gain of 214 seats. Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith enacted a great deal of reform legislation, but the Unionists worked hard at grassroots organizing. Two general elections were held in one in January and one in December; the two main parties were now dead equal in seats.
The Unionists had more popular votes but the Liberals kept control with a coalition with the Irish Parliamentary Party. In 1912, the Liberal Unionis
