History Cafe

Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to gras...

Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No,...

England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaig...

Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost e...

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neoliberalism was welcomed, finally, as a way to tackle what seemed to be a breakdown in American society in the late 1960s. Big business and FBI under J Edgar Hoover felt threatened by Keynsian consensus on welfare and the eradication of poverty. They had plenty to gain by provoking the extremism, and clearing the way for Milton Friedman.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

The breakdown of American post-war consensus in the 60s calls for desperate measures on all sides: a government war in Vietnam, inner-city rioting, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Alarmed, US businesses seek salvation from the previously dismissed economic theory of neoliberal free-market capitalism.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We look at the roots of free market Neoliberalism and discover that big business in the US has been championing freedom from regulation since 1895, even claiming in 1923 that the anti-child labour movement in America was secretly being run from Moscow… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How did less welfare, less government regulation of business (aka neoliberalism free market) become a global ‘fashion’ without any evidence of its benefits? Something to do with an imposter ‘Nobel’ prize and a PBS TV series funded by American big business? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Civil liberty is different from individual liberty. Philosophers have known this since at least the 17th Century. We explore the two fundamental fallacies of neoliberalism to show why neoliberal economics can only bring prosperity to the few, and is incapable of predicting financial crashes. Today in the USA those damaged by neoliberalism have been driven to elect an unhinged criminal... Hosted on...

At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were “civilians in uniform” – conscripts or volunteers. But do we officially remember them? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privac...

One day after Britain goes to war - ‘at sea’ - on 4 August 1914 the first War Council unceremoniously throws out the army’s secret plan to send a few divisions to meet the Germans head on and win quick, painless glory fighting alongside the French. Only then do the four men who had single-handedly thrown away the chance of avoiding a general European war, understand what Britain’s most prestigious...

A right-wing anti-German contingent call their campaign for war, the weekend of 31 July-2 August 1914 a ‘pogrom’. All talks of peace are, in their words, a German-Jewish plot to keep Britain out of the war for financial reasons. They have the support of the Conservative party, the British and French military, the politician in charge of the Royal Navy, and the press. But how on earth does Grey per...

8pm German time the Kaiser orders champagne, halts the German advance towards Belgium, and sends a telegram of congratulations to his cousin George V at Buckingham Palace. The Liberal British Cabinet had voted to remain neutral on 31 July. Earlier on 1 August Foreign Secretary Grey met the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky (one of a string of meetings that week) to tell him that France might als...

In 1912 a deal between War Secretary Haldane and the German chancellor Bethmann-Holweg to allow Britain to retain naval supremacy if they both remained neutral (if neither side had started the war), was rudely sabotaged. It involved lying to Cabinet that the Germans were demanding a full-scale Anglo-German alliance, which they weren’t. It meant throwing away what the majority of the Cabinet saw as...

How did what friendly chats between British and French generals since 1905 turn into a commitment to send a small British Expeditionary Force to France at the start of a war with Germany? A commitment that had not been agreed by Cabinet, Parliament or the Navy? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We look at anti-German hysteria in Britain 1906-1909. The British publishing phenomena of 1906 was The Invasion of 1910 (by Germans), serialised in the Daily Mail and marketed by men walking around London in Prussian uniforms. This chimed perfectly with the anti-German clique at the foreign office. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Britain’s main problem by 1910 was Russian expansion towards its Persian oil and India, the jewel in Britain’s crown. So why did Britain go to war to SUPPORT Russia and AGAINST Germany which was its closest European friend and trading partner? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After years of negotiation and confrontation, Pope Clement VII was heard swearing unpapally over Henry VIII’s divorce. And no wonder. The history of Henry’s pope is a murky tale of code-breaking and ruthless sieges that involves Michelangelo and Machiavelli and a great deal of double-dealing. Pope Clement was trapped between a rock and a hard place: the only way to save his Medici family’s city of...

Most of what we think we know about Anne Boleyn turns out to be later invention, with no historical basis. We argue that she was a MacGuffin: she was necessary to the way things turned out for Henry, but unimportant in herself. We’re not even sure he was in love with her. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry’s decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish seriously weakened by war, Turkish invasion and protestant revolt in Germany, and Henry’s French allies now nee...

In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry’s sudden move in August 1530 to go on the offensive against Rome and the clergy in England? (R) Hosted on Acast....

31 May 1529: Faced with France and Spain doing a deal and leaving England in the lurch, Henry races against time to begin his divorce trial in London, and then pulls the plug just before a verdict is reached. Meanwhile the pope and his cardinals are double-crossing each other. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.