Henry VIII's first two wives experienced multiple pregnancies culminating in late-term miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal mortality. After his fortieth birthday, the king's mental and physical health underwent rapid deterioration. In this article, we argue that both his reproductive troubles and his midlife pathologies can be explained if Henry VIII were positive for the Kell blood group. A Kell negative woman who has multiple pregnancies with a Kell positive male will suffer repeated miscarriages and death of Kell positive foetuses and term infants that occur subsequent to the first Kell positive pregnancy. This pattern is consistent with the pregnancies of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Additionally, Henry VIII may have suffered from McLeod syndrome, a genetic disorder of the Kell blood group system, which is a condition that causes physical and mental impairment consistent with his ailments.

This article examines the assessments of John Calvin's life, character, and influence to be found in the polemical writings of English Catholics in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. It demonstrates the centrality of Calvin to Catholic claims about the character and history of the established church, and the extent to which Catholic writings propagated a vibrant ‘black legend’ of Calvin's egotism and sexual depravity, drawing heavily not only on the writings of the French Calvinist-turned-Catholic Jerome Bolsec, but also on those of German Lutherans. The article also explores how, over time, Catholic writers increasingly identified some common ground with anti-puritans and anti-Calvinists within the English church, and how claims about the seditious character of Calvin, and by extension Calvinism, were used to articulate the contrasting ‘loyalty’ of Catholics and their right to occupy a place within the English polity.

When James VI and I arrived in London in 1603, he created a new bedchamber, which he filled with Scottish courtiers. This he positioned, antagonistically as it turned out, between himself and the more English privy chamber. These Scottish courtiers thus had the most intimate access to James, and were able to exercise great influence over the distribution of James's favour. Whilst their importance has been debated within an English context, their significance within James's government in Scotland has not yet been addressed. These Scotsmen became the focus for patronage networks stretching from Whitehall, through the privy council in Edinburgh, to the Scottish regional elites, and helped James retain the co-operation of those elites. Against the background of attempts to gain fuller union, James sought to demonstrate the benefits of regnal union by prosecuting a pacification of crime within the Scottish and English Borders, now rechristened the Middle Shires. Patronage networks from Whitehall to Roxburghshire secured the co-operation of the Scottish Borders elite, whilst acting as conduits for information and advice back to Whitehall. This article will suggest that these relationships were integral to Scottish governmental processes in James's absence, providing a much-needed cohesive force within his fragile new multiple monarchy.

Recent research has argued that English cathedrals, particularly but not exclusively Westminster Abbey, formed a ‘liturgical fifth column’ in the church and were the Trojan horse by which Laudianism – the ceremonial, clericalist, anti-Calvinist policies associated with Charles I and William Laud in the 1620s and 1630s – was introduced into the English church. This article re-examines links between cathedrals and Laudianism, not just in England, but also in the associated Protestant state churches of Charles's other realms: Ireland and Scotland. Laudian divines emphasized cathedrals as liturgical showcases, ‘mother churches’ which their ‘daughters’, the parish churches, should follow in the policy of the ‘beauty of holiness’, particularly the placing, railing of, and reverence to the Laudian altar. However, cathedrals are shown to be more diverse than historians have generally allowed, and Laudian policies are shown to have been grafted on to cathedrals, rather than emerging from them. Caroline cathedrals were more the victims of Laudianism than its midwives.

Oliver Cromwell remains a deeply controversial figure in Ireland. In the past decade, his role in the conquest has received sustained attention. However, in recent scholarship on the settlement of Ireland in the 1650s, he has enjoyed a peculiarly low profile. This trend has served to compound the interpretative problems relating to Cromwell and Ireland which stem in part from the traditional denominational divide in Irish historiography. This article offers a reappraisal of Cromwell's role in designing and implementing the far-reaching ‘Cromwellian’ land settlement. It examines the evidence relating to his dealings with Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic, and his attitude towards the enormous difficulties which they faced post-conquest. While the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation, in the 1650s Cromwell in fact emerged as an important and effective ally for Irish landowners seeking to defeat the punitive confiscation and transplantation policies approved by the Westminster parliament and favoured by the Dublin government.

This article examines the major role that newspapers played in Colombia, as central components of its political system, between 1830 and 1930. After some introductory remarks, the first section offers a general characterization of the Colombian press during the period, underlining its volatile existence, its national significance despite limited readership levels, and its overwhelming political nature in the hands of partisan editors. The second section analyses the political role of the press, by focusing on the crucial electoral functions performed by newspapers in launching candidates and providing them with platforms, serving as party organs, and measuring the amount of public support for candidates and parties. The article also explores the extent to which the press played a wider democratic role in supporting the suffrage, in instructing voters about rights and duties, and, by doing so, in forming an enduring sense of citizenship.

This article examines the prelude to, and machinations surrounding, the arrest, trial, and expulsion from America of Charles Rowcroft, the British consul in Cincinnati. Rowcroft's difficulties were a direct consequence of the conniving of Irish-American nationalists in the region during the Crimean War. The article places these events in Cincinnati against a backdrop of intense Anglo-American diplomatic distrust. It also highlights the exaggerated Hibernophobic response of some British officials in the United States. A study of Irish-American nationalism during the 1850s, bridging the historical and historiographical gap between the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion and the beginnings of Fenianism, has long been wanting. This article is a first, important step toward filling that void, elucidating the hitherto hidden extent of Irish-American agitation during the Crimean War.

Sir Horace Wilson was Neville Chamberlain's confidential adviser while the latter was prime minister. The article addresses three questions. First, what was Wilson's role in Whitehall in connection with rearmament and foreign policy? Second, did he diminish the influence of the Foreign Office? Third, what contribution does his defence of appeasement make to understanding of a subject that continues to divide historians? The article concludes that Wilson played an important role in enabling Chamberlain to pursue his foreign policy goals. However, when there was outright disagreement between Wilson and the Foreign Office, it was the Foreign Office view that prevailed. Finally, the evidence of Wilson's words and actions, both in 1937–9 and later, broadly supports R. A. C. Parker's post-revisionist interpretation of appeasement, particularly as regards Munich, but Wilson was a good deal firmer in 1939 about Britain's will to fight, if necessary, than his critics then or later allowed.

This article examines changes to Dublin's built environment in the 1960s through a study of the north inner city. It first discusses Dublin Corporation policy in the area and then studies three efforts to resist these changes, by the Irish Georgian Society, Uinseann MacEoin, and the Dublin Housing Action Committee. It argues that, due to the deficit of urban regulation emanating from central government, these groups could use preservation as a way to articulate a variety of discontents. The three campaigns all had very different conceptions of what was worth preserving in the urban environment, resisted Corporation policy in very different ways, and ultimately came into conflict. This urban activism raised issues about the nature of the city in the Irish cultural imagination, the effects of urban modernization, and the role of voluntary bodies in shaping the urban environment. Through addressing these themes this article makes a fundamental contribution to the historiography of the 1960s in Ireland by assessing the complexities of Irish modernity and the continued impact of a multiplicity of pasts on Irish politics and culture.

Scholarly works dealing with the Long Parliament's military finances have often necessarily relied on sampled data and exemplary evidence. This communication demonstrates that full, systematic analyses of the relevant materials in the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers have the potential to alter our understanding of these finances when certain questions are asked. Lacking a detailed calendar, this vast collection of documents is extraordinarily complex and opaque, and because of this it is very hard to deal with holistically. Nevertheless, this communication demonstrates that achieving a broad yet precise view of this vital quantitative material is sometimes possible. It will be suggested here that the army of the earl of Essex enjoyed full payment from the moment of its creation in August 1642 until the end of that October. This will be demonstrated by comparing the total payments received by the foot soldiers to a newly calculated model of their monetary needs during the period in question. Ultimately, there are many possible reasons for the army's failure to secure a decisive victory at Edgehill, but a financial crisis at the political centre was not one of them.

Interpretations that solely emphasize either continuity or controversy are found wanting. Historians still question how the English became Protestant, what sort of Protestants they were, and why a civil war dominated by religion occurred over a hundred years after the initial Reformation crisis. They utilize many approaches: from above and below, and with fresh perspectives, from within and without. Yet the precise nature of the relationship of the Reformation, the civil war, the interregnum and the Restoration settlement remains controversial. This review of recent Reformation historiography largely validates the current consensus of a balance of continuity and change, pressure for further reform and begrudging conformity. Yet ultimately it argues that continuity must form the foundation for any interpretation of the Reformation, for controversial or dramatic alterations to the status quo only made sense to contemporaries in the context of what had come before. Challenging ideas, like challenging individuals, did not exist in a vacuum devoid of historical context. The practical limits of possibility, constrained largely by the established norms and procedures, shaped the course of English Reformation. As such, practicality seems a unifying and central theme for current and future investigations of England's long Reformation.

This article reviews the latest research on the making of the Anglo-Scottish parliamentary union of 1707 and unionism in modern Scotland. Stimulated by the tercentenary of the union, but running counter to the popular mood at the time of that anniversary, many of the recent publications exhibit a novel and sympathetic interest in principled support for union. Using Christopher Whatley's The Scots and the union (2006) and Colin Kidd's Union and unionisms (2008) as starting points, the article shows how the new histories differ from earlier work, while also identifying the interdisciplinary roots of the ‘unionist turn’ in Scottish history.

Over the last forty years, the history of sexuality has developed into a vibrant historical genre. Despite the diversity of the resulting academic literature, within it is an often implicit focus on ‘marginal’ subjects. This historiographical review examines why this is the case, exploring the development of the history of sexuality and its theoretical underpinnings, before suggesting the ways in which this focus on the ‘marginal’ has limited resulting works. Finally, it suggests ways in which the historians might move forward, both by discussing some of the more provocative new texts and concepts within the field, and also by posing several questions for future study.