EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Kathryn Hughes on Leanda de Lisle’s study of Henrietta Maria It was not quite a case of lightning striking twice in almost the same place within twenty four hours but it was pretty close. Today’s edition of The Sunday Times has a review by Kathryn Hughes in its Culture magazine of Leanda de Lisle’s new book, Henrietta Maria , Conspirator, Warrior and Phoenix Queen. [1] In one sense, it is the logical successor to the latter’s study of Charles I, White King , published not long ago. But I am not clear what Hughes’s qualifications for this task were since she is an historian of the Victorian period who is also interested in contemporary culture. John Adamson or Michelle Dobbie or Malcolm Smuts would have been more appropriate for this role. Much of Kathryn Hughes’s review concentrates on Henrietta Maria’s early life as the daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Medici and the development of her relationship after their marriage with King Charles I. Her predilection for conspicuous ...

  Today’s post brought a copy of the most recent Times Literary Supplement . It contained a piece by Madoc Cairns, a staff writer at the Catholic Publication, the Tablet, of Victor Stater’s new book on the Popish Plot of 1679 entitled Hoax : The Popish Plot that never was. Cairns began by describing the plethora of plots to which credence was given by contemporaries and the willingness to believe the claims of Titus Oates that a plot to restore Catholicism in England was in existence. The death of the magistrate, Edmund Godfrey, who had heard Oates’s claims, lent apparent substance to these allegations. The Earl of Shaftesbury was willing to exploit such fears for his own political aims aided and abetted by jurists like Chief Justice Scroggs. Eventually, however, the panic subsided. Charles II called the bluff of the Whigs seeking to exclude his brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession and first adjourned Parliament to Oxford and then dissolved it. Cairns concluded by prai...

  Paul Musselwhite on the patents granted to Samuel Argall and John Martin by the Virginia Company of London in 1616-1617 One of the key features of Paul Musselwhite’s remarkable claims about the nature of land grants in Virginia in the period leading up to the ‘Great Reforms’ of November, 1618 concerns his analysis of the grants made to Captain Samuel Argall and Captain John Martin in 1616-1617. He has claimed in two or three places that these grants involved the creation of large landed estates with a more hierarchical manorial structure of landownership than the colony had previously experienced. [1] In addition, he has twice argued that, although the terms agreed to by Argall and Martin have not survived, it was likely that an agreement made by Edward, Lord Zouche in December, 1617 with the 3 rd Lord De La Warr, who was about to return to Virginia as its Governor, “was likely modelled on these earlier agreements.” [2] It is true that the details regarding the patent given...