Parliament's Protestation of May 1641 pledged subscribers to defend the protestant doctrine of the Church of England against all popery and popish innovations, while upholding the honour of the king, the privileges of parliament, and the liberties of the subject. The following twelve months saw contentious debate about the ambiguity of these phrases and the conflicting obligations they entailed. Leaders of the political nation subscribed the Protestation voluntarily in the summer of 1641, emulated in some places by ordinary parishioners. In the more polarized political circumstances of early 1642, parliament ordered the Protestation to be taken nationwide by all men aged eighteen and above. Women, too, occasionally subscribed. This article traces the tendering and reception of the Protestation on both occasions, and examines some of its local consequences. The circulation of the Protestation significantly widened the arena for political and religious involvement in the opening stages of the English revolution.

The Northern Risings of 1663 are remarkably little-known episodes, scarcely a postscript to the triumph of the Restoration. As with most rebellions that dissolve before properly beginning, their historical significance is generally dismissed. Yet twenty-six rebels were condemned to death; sixteen of them were hanged, drawn, and quartered at York on one morning, providing a spectacle on a scale unseen in the city for nearly a century. Nearly all of those executed were West Riding men involved in the rebel muster at Farnley Wood; the government was conspicuously lenient towards the rebels of the North Riding, Durham, and Westmorland. This is an investigation into the background of the risings, in particular the West Riding episode. It tackles the wider question of the Restoration's impact on local communities that had been strongly parliamentarian, and in so doing, examines how the gentry's relationship with those of lower social status was transformed by the experience of civil war and interregnum.

In a jarring passage toward the conclusion of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes endorsed the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of an Independent religious settlement within England. Most historians have ignored this feature of Leviathan, or have dismissed it as an off-hand aside of no consequence. Others, more plausibly, have construed it as part of a royalist scheme (encouraged by Queen Henrietta Maria and her supporters) to secure a Stuart Restoration by allying with the English Independents. This article offers an alternative theory. It argues that Hobbes's attentions were probably drawn to Independency by the political machinations of a group of idiosyncratic Catholics gathered around the philosopher-priest, Thomas White (alias Blacklo). In 1649, White and his ‘Blackloist’ followers engaged in secret negotiations with Oliver Cromwell. In exchange for religious toleration for Catholics, the Blackloists promised allegiance to the Commonwealth and conformity to a Congregationalist religious settlement. This article examines Hobbes's close personal links with the leading Blackloists, documents similarities in their reactions to Independency, establishes the strong intellectual influence Leviathan had on Blackloist tracts, and demonstrates that royalists consistently linked Hobbes with the Blackloist treason. The article concludes that the Blackloist plot to betray the Stuart cause, rather than any royalist scheme to strike a deal with the Independents, provides the most compelling contextual explanation for Thomas Hobbes's endorsement of Independency.

This article analyses two dissenting periodicals, the Occasional Paper and the Old Whig. It argues that these periodicals provide an opportunity to reconsider the current priorities in the historiography of eighteenth-century political thought and religious history. Having considered the contexts from which the periodicals emerged and the importance of a perceived growth in catholic proselytizing in the 1730s, it analyses the importance of ‘popery’ in religious and political discourse. Taken together, popery and private judgement provided the parameters to descibe what was termed ‘consistent protestantism’ and this was used to defend a particular version of dissent. The protestant aspect to oppositional whiggery has been largely ignored, particularly by those keen to assert the centrality of ‘classical republicanism’ to opposition language in the early Hanoverian period. This article suggests an alternative account of the transmission of the commonwealth tradition and indicates further lines of inquiry into the evolution of whig ideas.

This article seeks to locate William Shakespeare in the traditions of nineteenth-century popular politics in Britain. The bards of radicalism are usually seen as the romantic poets, particularly Byron and Shelley. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's national standing, the lack of hard details about his life, and the subversive messages many radicals believed to have discovered in his plays allowed reformers to project him as a ‘son of the soil’, and to contest appropriations of him by the aristocratic patrons of events like the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864. Through the agitation surrounding this celebration, a link into a radical bardolatry is established that indicates the centrality of memories of Shakespeare's England to the popular platform. The article concludes with a consideration of the light shed by ‘Shakespearean radicalism’ on current debates about continuity between Chartism and liberalism in popular politics, and the role of memory and memorialization in the political culture of nineteenth-century plebeian reform movements.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, local government was intrinsic to the nature of liberalism in theory and practice, beyond the specific national contexts of England or Germany. At an ideological and practical level, local government was integral to the liberals' concern for efficient and representative government. As long as liberals were unwilling to contemplate more redistributive state measures, local government became their central arena for social policy. Local involvement in primary education provided them with the ability to enable individual progress and self-fulfilment, while control of local income and taxation provided a further tangible yardstick against which liberal politics could be measured. The liberals' popularity in the urban sphere was enhanced through a distinctive rhetoric of civic pride. However, the appeal to community and belonging which this entailed remained illusory as long as liberals remained wedded to granting special political rights to property. Ultimately, the liberals' success and innovativeness in local government led to a ‘nationalization’ of their policies and concerns. In this way, local government contributed to the liberals' popularity from the 1870s, and underlined their ultimate failure.

This is the first account of the prison in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), set in the context of the evolution of German social policy. In the early years, the Weimar prison was characterized by hunger, overcrowding, and conflict. At this time, leading officials agreed on a new approach to imprisonment, influenced by the demand for the ‘incapacitation of incorrigibles, reformation of reformables’. This principle was championed by the modern school of criminal law, designed to replace traditional policy based on deterrence and uniform retribution. The policy of reform and repression shaped the Weimar prison. Most prison officials supported the indefinite confinement of ‘incorrigibles’. While this did not become law, many prisoners classified as ‘incorrigible’ (increasingly after ‘objective’ examinations) received worse treatment than others, both in prison and after their release. Regarding the ‘reformables’, some institutions introduced measures aimed at prisoner rehabilitation. But such policies were not fully implemented in other prisons, not least because of resistance by local prison officials. During the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, measures aimed at rehabilitation, only just introduced, were cut back again. By contrast, the repression of ‘incorrigibles’ was pursued with even more vigour than before, an important legacy for Nazi penal policy.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) became the focus of a recurrent and sometimes heated debate within the British Labour party before 1973. The official stance of the party followed an all-party consensus within parliament about the non-recognition of the second German state. Yet many on the left wing of the Labour party came, for various reasons, to perceive such an inflexible stance as governed not by reason but dictated by the West German government. Such ambivalence towards West Germany and the Adenauer government in particular led to ambiguities within the party's policy as a considerable minority, including some key figures within the party, offered alternative strategies for maintaining or improving relations with the GDR. The most radical alternative, official recognition of the GDR as a legal, political entity, was only propounded by a core of hard left campaigners both within and outside the party. This article examines why sections of the Labour left came to sympathize with the GDR and how successful it was in influencing official party policy during the whole period of non-recognition of the GDR between 1949 and 1973.

Based on sources from the East German regime's internal archives, this article examines how the exodus of over 3 million people from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before the construction of the Berlin Wall undermined the communist regime's ability to exert its authority over internal affairs. Instead of focusing on the relatively well-known economic and diplomatic costs of the mass exodus, it considers rather the grass-roots political ramifications of this unique phenomenon among the Soviet satellite states. The article focuses on three interrelated issues: first, the government's little-known efforts to curb and control emigration before the Wall; second, the myriad causes of the mass emigration and how these were perceived by the party/state apparatus; and third, the variety of strategies through which ordinary East Germans who stayed in the GDR attempted to use the possibility of flight to the West to enhance their bargaining position with state authorities. It argues that the refugees to the West were not the only East Germans to capitalize on the permeable border around West Berlin. The possibility of emigrating westwards also gave those who stayed a degree of power vis-à-vis the regime that they otherwise would not have had.

The loyal opposition: Tudor traditionalist polemics, 1535–1558. By Ellen A. Macek. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Pp. xvi+299. ISBN 0-8204-3059-5. £36.00.

Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. By Lucy E. M. Wooding. Oxford: University Press, 2000. Pp. x+305. ISBN 0-19-820865-0. £40.00.

Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610. By Michael L. Carrafiello. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Pp. 186. ISBN 1-57591-012-8. £27.00.

The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541–1588: ‘our way of proceeding’. By Thomas M. McCoog SJ. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. Pp. xxii+316. ISBN 90-04-10482-8. £67.90.

Newsletters from the archpresbyterate of George Birkhead. Edited by Michael C. Questier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for the Royal Historical Society, Camden 5th ser., 12, 1998. Pp. xiv+307. ISBN 0-521-65260-X. £40.00.

Conversion, politics and religion in England, 1580–1625. By Michael C. Questier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+240. ISBN 0-521-44214-1. £35.00.

Catholicism, controversy and the English literary imagination, 1558–1660. By Alison Shell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+309. ISBN 0-521-58090-0. £37.50.

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, gender and seventeenth-century print culture. By Frances E. Dolan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+231. ISBN 0-8014-3629-X. £26.95.

Catholicism in the English Protestant imagination: nationalism, religion, and literature, 1660–1745. By Raymond D. Tumbleson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. x+254. ISBN 0-521-62265-4. £35.00.