Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene
Thomas Blood was born in Sarney, county Meath in Ireland around the year 1618. The circumstances surrounding his early life are obscure but his father was said to have been a blacksmith and ironworker of ‘no inferior credit’. Blood's first real appearance in the historical record occurs during the survey taken in Ireland in the period 1654–6. In this he is listed as a protestant who had owned some 220 acres of land at Sarney since at least 1640. In between these dates, however, Blood had evidently undertaken some sort of military service. The evidence concerning this military service is both slight and contradictory and there is at least the possibility that his later claims about an army career were partly bogus, or certainly inflated to suit his particular company.
Why was Ormond dismissed in 1669?
On 14 February 1669 Charles II informed the committee of foreign affairs that he intended to remove the duke of Ormond from the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland. This announcement ended eighteen months of intrigue, speculation and rumour, and Orinond’s second period in office as viceroy. It seemed to contemporaries that the fickle king had again yielded to the pressure and importunities of his ambitious and politically ascendant courtiers. On hearing the news of Ormond’s dismissal Pepys commented that it showed ‘the power of Buckingham and the poor spirit of the king’. Few of Pepys’s contemporaries would have quarrelled with that judgment and few historians have seriously questioned it since.
The Mound on the Mount: A Possible Solution to the Problem with Jerusalem
Following Knauf's suggestion (2000), the article raises the possibility that in most periods in the second and first millennia BCE the main built-up area of Jerusalem was limited to a mound on the Temple Mount. This mound, which may have covered an area of five hectares and more, was boxed-in under the Herodian platform. At these periods activity in the City of David ridge was restricted to the area near the Gihon spring. In the Iron IIB and late Hellenistic Periods the fortified settlement expanded simultaneously to both the City of David ridge and the southwestern hill. In these two periods there was no need to fortify the western side of the City of David, as this line ran in the middle of the city.