The Derbyshire man who reached for the stars…

In the latest in her series of Derbyshire’s connections with royalty, Deborah Barham Smith looks at the 16th and 17th centuries.

IT’S A CURIOUS ANOMALY that so often a radically negative event can result in fortunes being made by people with the available resources.  So it was after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s after King Henry VIII disbanded Catholic institutions in England, Wales and Ireland; seizing their income and disposing of their assets, then dispensing with their former supporters – all to fund his military campaigns…