Just after midnight on 24 January 1577, Alice Neate crept into a bedchamber at the New Hythe in Colchester and slit her sister-in-law's throat. She wrapped the body in a red blanket and dragged it out into the woodhouse yard where it was discovered the following morning. An intensive investigation immediately ensued. All the chief suspects except Alice Neate, namely neighbours who had visited the Neate cottage on the evening prior to the murder, satisfactorily established their innocence. The testimony against Alice was overwhelming. Even her husband conceded that his sister had been murdered and prayed, ‘God save [my] wife!’ To be sure it was only indirect evidence, yet nonetheless damaging because it came from her own husband. Her daughter Abigail's testimony, however, was utterly devastating. At first steadfastly maintaining her mother's innocence, Abigail's support collapsed when under pressure of ‘straight examination’ she finally admitted that her mother had persuaded her to conceal clear proof of the homicide. Abigail shared the bedchamber with her murdered aunt, and since she had been wide awake during the killing had been an eyewitness to the whole bloody tragedy. If that was not enough, Alice also had a clear motive. Her hatred of her sister-in-law was well known and stemmed from her belief that the murdered woman had herself murdered two of Alice's children. On the basis of this overwhelming case against her, Alice Neate was committed to prison where she was held until the next gaol delivery at which she was duly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to hang for murder, according to the blood law of felony.

Among the many apparent paradoxes of Jean Bodin's personality one of the most striking was the sudden transformation of the defender of royal sovereignty and religious toleration into the apologist of the rebelling Catholic League at Laon in 1589. Throughout the middle period of the Wars of Religion (1572–84) Bodin had been attached to the parties opposing the Guise and the Catholic League; he had been active first in the royalist party of Henri III and subsequently he rose to prominence in the retinue of the king's brother, the politique duke of Alençon. After the duke's death in 1584 Bodin seems to have been attached loosely to Henri of Navarre, supporting (so it seems) his claim to the French throne and earning through his services to Navarre the promise of a reward in 1587. Yet despite this royalist and politique history Bodin in March 1589 to all appearances threw overboard his old loyalties and went over to public support of the League. In so doing he appears at first sight to have repudiated political, religious and jurisprudential convictions of long standing. The League demanded that the king of France be Catholic whereas Bodin had never regarded a religious test as a fundamental law of the French crown; the League demanded sectarian religious war of the kind which the République had proscribed; the League abhorred the principle of religious toleration advocated in the République; the League overruled the juristic right to the throne of Henri of Navarre which Bodin had justified as late as 1586. What motives could conceivably have driven Bodin to commit this act of apostasy (if such it really be)? The answer is of the greatest significance for an understanding of Bodin's mind not only in his later years but from his youth onwards. For Bodin's change from politique to ligueur is but one of the several conversions which punctuate his life and the details of this particular alteration may illuminate his personality and thought in general.

Historians will give no thanks for being told that professionalization models are fraught with pitfalls as putative interpretations of scientific development. When deployed stricto sensu, essentially to trace the evolution of the remunerated career structure, the concept of professionalization invites blinkered antiquarian administrative history. Too easily, however, the jargon can serve as a blanket pseudo-explanation of the key phenomena of modern science, and thereby it loses all precision. Thus a recent author, having noted that professionalization is a Protean term, concludes ‘perhaps we can use it to mean the emergence of a scientific community’. But this runs the risk of collapsing quite distinct concepts into each other, and thereby of begging the very questions which must be faced.

In recent studies of the various revolutionary attempts of 1848–9 in Italy, historians have moved away from the liberal nationalist interpretations in order to pursue analyses of social problems and class interest in particular regions, especially in Lombardy, Venetia and southern Italy. Often overlooked, however, is Tuscany, despite its strategic central location in the peninsula. An examination of Tuscan society in process of change over the three decades before Italian unification reveals internal divisions which must be assessed in terms of domestic conditions and which cannot be understood solely in the context of the nationalist movement.

‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ Familiar words to children, but not normally found over a leading article in a staid old tory newspaper. Certainly not when Britain was in the darkest period of a struggle for her very existence. Yet the Morning Post's use of the nursery rhyme was most appropriate on Monday, 4 December 1916. The previous day there had been an historic confrontation between the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and his secretary of state for war, David Lloyd George. What happened when they met at 10 Downing Street was not clear – nor, it should be added, is it clear to this day – but by Monday morning it was widely assumed that Lloyd George had held a pistol to Asquith's head and forced the old prime minister to yield the higher direction of the war to a small committee with the secretary for war at the helm. Therefore the answer should have been easy: Lloyd George killed ‘Cock Robin’.

Historians have examined in great detail the dramatic debate in American politics over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles which culminated in the physical collapse of President Wilson and the defeat of his peace programme. The failure of Wilson to carry his programme through the United States senate represented also a distinct setback for the peacemaking strategies of the British government whose policies at the peace conference had been based in large measure on the hope that an enduring trans-Atlantic partnership could be established. The British government followed closely the American treaty debate, sending Viscount Grey, the former Liberal foreign secretary, as a special ambassador, and played a significant if unsuccessful role in the outcome of the drama. It is the intention of this article to examine the attitudes and role of the Lloyd George government through the latter part of 1919 and into 1920 with regard to the fate of the Treaty of Versailles in America, and in particular to reassess the part played by Viscount Grey. It is hoped to shed some new light on the dilemmas of foreign policy and defence strategy encountered at this time by Britain and the empire, as well as to elucidate certain aspects of the American struggle. Since the Covenant of the League of Nations lay at the heart of the American fight over the treaty, it is hoped also that new insight will be provided on the uncertain inauguration of the League.

In November 1920 Lord Hardinge succeeded Lord Derby as ambassador to France, thereby acquiring the position that he had wanted and been expected to get for so long. Ironically enough, he had, as he realized, George Nathaniel Curzon, the foreign secretary, to thank for the Paris plum. His gratistude, however, did not prevent him from remarking later that one of the main reasons why he accepted the offer was that it gave him satisfaction that it was Lloyd George and Curzon, ‘who three years earlier had done their utmost to hound me out of the Diplomatic Service’ just after the publication of the Mesopotamia Commission Report, who offered him the coveted post. Hardinge's appointment was generally well received, and he was happy to escape from the ‘never-ending strain’ of the Foreign Office.

During the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century more than fifty men were hanged for sodomy in England. This was less than a seventh of the number of people executed for murder in the same period, though in one year, 1806, there were more executions for sodomy than for murder. Nevertheless, it was the case that in the first third of the nineteenth century trials and executions for sodomy were much commoner than they had been in any earlier period.

The letter dated 28 April 1882 which Parnell wrote in Kilmainham jail to Captain O'Shea has become indelibly known to history as the Kilmainham Treaty, with or without benefit of quotation marks or capital letters; and though probably few historians would today maintain that anything properly describable as a treaty was intended, let alone concluded, between Parnell and Gladstone, the influence of the name and myth persists. For example, the most recent and excellent biography of Parnell by Professor F. S. L. Lyons, while repudiating the existence of a bargain, nevertheless refers to ‘the Kilmainham settlement’ and even states that Parnell ‘negotiated the Kilmainham “treaty” that brought the ordeal [of the detainees] to an end’. A re-examination, however, of the original document, its textual content and its detailed circumstances casts a new and sinister light upon the letter, revealing Parnell as the victim of a series of malpractices by O'Shea, to which Joseph Chamberlain was at least partly privy.