In the plays and entertainments performed before the queen from 1561 to 1578, the virginity of Elizabeth was not idealized but instead marriage was celebrated as a preferable state to chastity. Robert Dudley in particular commissioned such dramatic works to assist his courtship of the queen, but the earl of Sussex, and possibly others, used masques to press on her the suit of the Archduke Charles of Austria. The iconography of chastity appeared for the first time in 1578 when Elizabeth embarked on the Anjou marriage negotiations. During the queen's visit to Norwich in the summer she was offered entertainments which implicitly criticized the matrimonial project by idealizing her virginity. For the next three years, opponents of the match followed this lead and cultivated the image of the Virgin Queen as a means of sabotaging the royal marriage plans. Thereafter Elizabeth exploited the image for her own political purposes.

The dissolution of the monasteries is one of the most familiar incidents in Tudor history. The genesis of the dissolution is however ill-documented. Here it is traced back to the suppressions of smaller houses authorized in 1528. It is shown how a partial dissolution could be construed as a desirable and necessary reform without challenging either the basis of monasticism or the doctrine of purgatory. A previously unnoticed petition is published to cast light on the anti-clerical agitation of 1529. It is suggested that there was an attempt to secure a dissolution for financial reasons in 1534 and it was the failure of this which forced the crown to adopt a new strategy to achieve a partial dissolution. This was the collection of damaging evidence of monastic corruption during the visitations of 1535. The display of this material to the Commons in 1536 persuaded them to accept a partial dissolution in the guise of a reform of monasticism. It is suggested that there was no ‘public’ demand for a dissolution in the 1530s except in the artificial circumstances of 1536, and that the shape of the dissolution was determined by the inability of government to secure the support of parliament for a dissolution justified on financial grounds.

In 1641 a century-long partnership of the crown and the London Stationers collapsed, leaving state control of the press and the Stationers’ interest in copyright in an extremely vulnerable situation. Tentatively at first and with growing assertiveness by 1642, the Lords and Commons revised and restated in their own interest the old partnership of the state and the Stationers; for their part, the Stationers worked hard to demonstrate their utility to the new regime and to preserve the privileges that allowed them to control the book business. The result of their joint efforts was the licensing ordinance of 1643, which critics, including John Milton, thought to be scarcely distinguishable from the Star Chamber decree of 1637, the high-water mark of the old regime. But the ordinance proved only partially successful. In the interim between regimes, there emerged a vigorous if vulgar tabloid journalism avant la lettre, sustained by an underclass of undisciplined elements of the Stationers’ Company, non-company interlopers and hawkers, and often youthful scribblers, several of them Cambridge drop-outs. Such engaging rascals no less than moralists like Milton had their share in acclimatizing the English to a press practically free of prior restraint.

While Restoration historians have traditionally assumed that there was little public interest in foreign affairs, and that English attitudes towards Europe were determined either by religious or domestic concerns, this essay argues that there was a lively and sophisticated English debate about Europe which turned on the proper identification of the universal monarch rather than religion. In the later 1660s the English political nation was deeply divided in its understanding of European politics. Enthusiastic supporters of the restored monarchy thought that the republican United Provinces sought universal dominion, while the monarchy's radical critics identified absolutist France as an aspirant to universal monarchy. French success in the early phases of the third Anglo-Dutch war, the failure of the French navy to support the English fleet at sea, and the overthrow of the Dutch republican regime in favour of William III, Prince of Orange, convinced the vast majority of the English that France represented the greater threat. Ultimately popular pressure compelled Charles II to abandon the French alliance. In addition, the popular conviction that Louis XIV had succeeded in corrupting the English court resulted in a new-found desire for popular accountability in foreign affairs, and a consequent diminution of the royal prerogative in that sphere.

Recent studies have challenged older views that the British state of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was rather powerless. However, such studies have focused largely on the executive, and particularly on the development of centralized revenue departments, or on the role of county elites in implementing state policies in the localities. This essay considers state formation as it was manifested at the base of the governmental system, and examines the extent of, and reasons for, support of national policies at the parish level. It argues that state power derived in part from institutional changes and innovations in procedure which made government in the localities more uniform, more professional, and more accountable; but that initiatives by parish vestries and a willingness on the part of such local elites to implement national policies also help to explain the strength of the state.

The crisis of legitimacy following Spain's loss of empire in 1898 combined with the effects of a longer-term crisis of modernization to undermine efforts to reform the political system and regenerate the social and economic life of Spain. Rising social agitation, middle-class movements for national regeneration, Catalan bourgeois nationalism and military reaction all interacted to block the development of a modernizing alternative to the Restoration regime. As a result, the gap between the established order and society grew wider and the potential for peaceful change diminished. Events in the first decade of the century thus established the pattern of conflict that was to dominate Spanish politics until the Civil War.

Liberalism in Devon and Cornwall before 1914 pursued a traditional ‘democratic’ rhetoric based on a class division which associated the Liberal party with ‘the people’ and Unionism with a privileged aristocracy. The ‘new Liberalism’ and social reform were unimportant. In the 1920s, the Gladstonian trinity of peace, retrenchment and free trade comprised easily the most common theme in Liberal candidates’ speeches. The Gladstonian tradition remained central to Liberalism because it accurately reflected the preoccupations of the party's core supporters in the region. There was apparently no belief amongst Liberals that the party's policies after 1918 were out-dated and irrelevant; their view is supported by an analysis of the 1923, 1924 and 1929 contests and their results.

Throughout the period, Liberal candidates were as ready and able as their opponents to use the coarser arts of electioneering. Liberalism was not wedded to a restricted Edwardian electorate with a relatively high level of political intelligence. The argument that it was is contradicted by contemporary accounts that the electorate of the 1920s was more thoughtful and less susceptible to emotional appeals than were pre-war voters.

This article takes a fresh look at Anglo-American nuclear relations between 1946 and 1958. It concentrates on the relationship between the military establishments of the two countries in general and the ties between the United States air force and the Royal Air Force in particular. The article argues that an understanding of military relations is essential for an understanding of the high politics of the nuclear relationship. It is shown that senior officers in the armed services were the main ‘functional elite’ dealing with nuclear delivery systems and the planning for their use. Relations between these groups were personally and institutionally close and on the whole cordial. In Britain the link sustained optimism about the possibility of close nuclear co-operation in the 1940s and early 1950s and suppressed fears about the loss of nuclear independence in the late 1950s. In the United States it was recognized that military relations were an important channel through which to influence British nuclear policy. The article offers accounts, based on new archival research, of the nuclear aspect of the October 1947 Pentagon talks on the Middle East, Churchill's visit to the United States in January 1952 and the first Anglo-American joint nuclear targeting agreement – the Wilson/Alexander agreement of 12 March 1954. It reveals for the first time details of Plans E and X which equipped the RAF with American atomic and thermonuclear weapons between 1955 and 1958. The article concludes that the British nuclear force was becoming subordinated to the United States even before negotiations about Thor, Skybolt and Polaris missiles became central to the relationship.

Based on the recently released documents in the Public Record Office, London, this article is concerned with examining the reasons behind the shift in the British approach towards decolonization in Africa signalled by Macmillan's ‘wind of change’ speech to the South African parliament on 3 February 1960. The documents suggest that the British decision to abdicate in Africa was partly due to international considerations, and to Cold War politics and the need to prevent Soviet penetration in Africa. The change from ‘multi-racialism’ to ‘non-racialism’ can be attributed to the influence of the commonwealth relations office under Lord Home, and an initiative from the leader of the Africa Capricorn society, David Stirling. The emphasis on the need for Britain to pursue the same policy in all of Africa can also be traced to the commonwealth relations office. Macmillan, himself was influenced by the ‘moral’ aspect, by the policies pursued by the Belgians in the Congo, but above all by the failure of French policy in Algeria.