The navy occupied a significant position in the 1553 succession crisis. However, assessments of its role hitherto have been hampered by conflicting contemporary observations and a paucity of information. Not all issues of consequence can be resolved, but important fresh evidence, particularly, extensive High Court of the Admiralty documentation for one of the royal ships dispatched by the Duke of Northumberland to the East Anglian coast following Edward VI's death, permits a reappraisal of the episode and its significance for the events of that year. The evidence confirms that the Northumberland regime experienced difficulty from the outset in its attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and it suggests that the regime's perceived strengths—in this instance the mid-Tudor navy—were all too frequently illusory.

On the morning of 8 February 1587 (n.s.) Mary Stuart was executed at Fotheringay Castle in Northampton for her complicity in the Babington Plot—the last of the great conspiracies to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and to place her distant cousin Mary on the English throne in order to re-establish England as a Catholic state. Particularly because of remarks Queen Elizabeth allegedly made to William Davison, to whom the execution warrant was entrusted, nearly every modern historian who has written about the trial and death of Mary Stuart has speculated about the possibility that Queen Elizabeth, particularly in the days immediately preceding Mary's beheading, considered assassination of her cousin as a politic alternative to the axe. Although Elizabeth's chief councillor, Lord Burghley, wished to proceed with what (at least publicly) he regarded as a legal activity, it has not been at all points clear how he was able to persuade the queen to take the steps necessary to accomplish the execution; because Mary was her relative, because she was female, because the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings (to which Elizabeth frequently resorted as proof of her own authority) specified that monarchs were subject to God's judgment alone (and not civil law), and finally, because of the foreign policy implications of executing a woman who was French, Queen of Scotland, near heir to the English throne, and a devout Catholic, Elizabeth hesitated to proceed.

By using Manx taxation and postal privileges, radicals and other activists were able to avoid the “taxes on knowledge,” to continue the campaign for a cheap press that mainland publishers, veterans of the “war of the unstamped,” had been forced to abandon in 1836. Free of stamp duty, paper duty, and advertizement tax, papers published on the Isle of Man were entitled to free postage throughout mainland Britain, a privilege extended to include re-postage in 1840. Taking advantage of these Manx facilities, publishers were able to defy commercial pressures to re-launch the “unstamped,” briefly recapturing its original political and educational mission. This paper seeks to recover this neglected episode in newspaper history. It highlights the use of Manx facilities by three broad groups of reformers, each of whom looked to the medium of the cheap press to redefine the reform agenda of early-Victorian Britain. First, those who promoted individual behavioral reform, a project that extended from temperance through various “alternative” remedies and regimes, physical and mental, to a bewildering array of “faddist” nostrums. Second, those involved in the increasing formalization of popular politics and associational culture, a process that placed print above traditional oral and visual modes of communication. Third, and closely related, those radicals who wished to expurgate earlier errors and excesses, to replace the transient tumult of the collective mass platform by individual commitment to rational reform. Each of these groups sought to benefit from Manx publication and postal privileges: through the widespread distribution of inexpensive propaganda; by the production of cheap “in-house” journals, which would provide channels of information for members of affiliated friendly societies, amalgamated trade unions, and political organizations; and by the packaging of news in cheap and attractive formats to reach the individual family home. These categories often overlapped, as did their formats; in the publications of William Shirrefs, the most enterprising of the Manx-based printers and publishers, newspaper, magazine, and “agitational” journal merged into one, providing a lively mixture of news, education, politics, information, fiction, amusement, and recreation, a comprehensive cheap package for the working-class reader. At a time of commercialization—the rise of the penny dreadful, the advent of the family magazine, and the dominance of the lurid Sunday press—the Manx press pointed towards the higher ideals of mid-Victorian Britain, providing its readership with the information and instruction to allow their personal and political development within the privacy of the home.