This article seeks to establish the burden of direct taxation in the city of London in the sixteenth century. Previous discussions have been confined to the yield of parliamentary subsidies which cannot give a full picture because of the way responsibility for equipping military levies was increasingly devolved on to the locality. Estimates of the costs of the various additional military levies are therefore made. Innovations in parliamentary taxation enabled the crown to levy extraordinary sums in the 1540s, but they required a level of intervention by the privy council which Elizabeth's government was not prepared to make. The subsidy performed especially badly in London in the later sixteenth century. Local military rates compensated to some extent, but tax levels in real terms were very much lower in the 1590s than the 1540s. Nevertheless taxation was becoming increasingly regressive, which helps explain the greater level of complaint in the 1590s.

John Stubbs's controversial pamphlet against Elizabeth's proposed marriage with Francis, duke of Anjou, The discoverie of a gaping gulf (1579), has conventionally been seen – with Edmund Spenser's The shepheardes calendar and Philip Sidney's letter to Elizabeth – as part of a propaganda campaign organized by Leicester and Walsingham to force Elizabeth to reject the marriage. Yet the evidence linking Stubbs with Leicester and Walsingham is thin. This article re-examines that evidence in the light of recent research on court factionalism, men-of-business, and concepts of counsel. It argues that A gaping gulf was an independent initiative taken by Stubbs which expressed very different attitudes to ‘counsel’ from Sidney's letter. It suggests that participants in public debate need to be explored on their own terms, rather than as necessarily catspaws of councillors; that there was an emergent Elizabethan public sphere independent of the court which, in holding different attitudes to counsel than councillors, could bring them into conflict with Elizabeth.

This article explores the lengthy and convoluted history of a Jacobean project to set the idle poor to work making ‘new draperies’. Although the projector, Walter Morrell, convinced the Cecils, King James, and the privy council of the social and fiscal benefits of his scheme, he failed to persuade the Hertfordshire gentry. This case study in the formulation of crown economic policy, and in ‘Stuart paternalism’, draws upon Morrell's own detailed, unpublished treatise, as well as conventional political sources, and shows how the combination of ‘commonwealth’ rhetoric and progressive economic thinking could sway crown policy-making. It also demonstrates once again the limits of conciliar authority in early Stuart England. In the face of sustained provincial non-compliance, the privy council had neither the machinery nor the stomach to force the Hertfordshire elite to implement government policy and give meaningful support to a government-backed projector. And despite their inability to deal with growing rural unemployment, the Hertfordshire magistrates were unwilling to experiment with rural industry as a solution.

This article contributes to the debate over the value of petitions for the recovery of ‘public opinion’ in early modern England. It argues for a greater attentiveness to the politics and processes in their production. An analysis of a hitherto unknown draft Essex ‘prayer book’ petition explores the construction of contrasting royalist and parliamentarian confessional politics. A reading of the content of the petitions offers evidence of the popular response to the Laudian ceremonialism; a reconstruction of the politics of its production provides evidence of the attempt to construct a political alliance in support of the crown around defence of the prayer book; a reconstruction of the occasion for the petition – the capture of the Essex grand jury by the godly and well affected – suggests a very different, and ultimately more successful, confessional parliamentarian politics. In identifying the critical role played by the middling sort – translating their role in the politics of the parish to the politics of the state – the article argues that a marriage of the research strategy of the social historian with the agenda of a ‘new political history’ will help to establish the enlarged social depth to the public sphere in early modern England.

Andrew Marvell's famous polemical pamphlets against Samuel Parker, the two parts of The rehearsal transpros'd, are packed with references and allusions to other books, some very esoteric. We think we have discovered where Marvell did his reading – in the library of Arthur Annesley, first earl of Anglesey, who also protected Marvell and his bookseller from the licenser and the Stationers' Company. In this, he collaborated with the earl of Shaftesbury, the then Lord Chancellor. The implications of these discoveries go well beyond even the new bibliography, suggesting that Marvell wrote his responses to Parker under the patronage of Anglesey, and that his connections with Shaftesbury began earlier than supposed; but they also show us how one efficient and intelligent reader responded to the task of detailed controversy, by doing focused and rapid research. Would that our own had equally witty results!

English ‘feminist’ writings of the late seventeenth century frequently united pro-woman arguments with party-political polemics. But although such texts have been discussed in terms of rationalist and contractarian philosophy, or as forerunners of modern feminist concerns, the contemporary issues which underscore them have been ignored. However, an understanding of these debates is vital to comprehending fully the motives of pro-woman writers, many of whom were more concerned with the survival of the Church of England than ameliorating the lot of seventeenth-century women. The underlying importance of party politics is exemplified in one of the greatest works of early modern ‘feminism’, Judith Drake's An essay in defence of the female sex (1696). Although Drake shared political similarities with other tory ‘feminists’, including the more celebrated Mary Astell, Drake's work differed radically from theirs over how an Anglican tory society could be maintained. Instead of stressing the necessity of teaching the tenets of Anglicanism to young women, as had her predecessors, Drake combined tory ideas with Lockean philosophy and concepts of ‘politeness’ to formulate an early Enlightenment vision of sociable, secularized, learning and the role female conversation could play in settling a society fractured by party politics.

Until 1836, many of England's lighthouses were privately owned. The owners levied tolls on all merchant shipping which made use of the lights, and in many cases grew rich from the proceeds. After 1815 these profits became increasingly contentious, and, under pressure from shipowners, merchants, and the radical MP Joseph Hume, the whig government abolished private ownership of lighthouses and made Trinity House the sole lighthouse authority for England. The choice of Trinity House as the central administration from a range of alternatives made a UK-wide authority impossible, however, due to the unwillingness of Irish and Scottish MPs to see their national boards replaced by an ‘inferior’ English one. The reform process sheds light on contemporary perceptions of the relationship between private property and public interest and suggests that alongside the process of post-war retrenchment, the state was acquiring a new role as guardian of the public interest, often positioning itself against certain forms of private property. Behind the ‘old corruption’ rhetoric which characterized the demand for reform lay the conviction that certain resources should be excluded from the realm of private property by the state, and that private profit made at the expense of the public interest was morally wrong.

Based on the analysis of primary sources from party archives and the private papers of politicians in six countries, this article evaluates the influence of Christian Democrat transnationalism on European integration in the crucial formative period from 1947 to 1957. It shows how the Christian Democrats' co-operation in the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales and the Geneva Circle shaped and re-enforced their historical orientations, ideological preferences, and common party interests and played an important role in structuring the concept and the reality of a ‘core Europe’ of continental countries. It is crucial to include ‘soft’ factors such as the growing transnational political networks in the analysis of European integration history to avoid a monocausal explanation that focuses exclusively on inter-state relations and sees the integration process solely as the product of a multilateral bargaining process driven by national (economic) interests.

The infamous January 1936 accords between Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and French foreign minister Pierre Laval have been the subject of vigorous debate. Did Laval promise Mussolini a ‘free hand’ in Ethiopia, giving tacit French approval for an Italian invasion? The two men kept no formal record of their final meeting, leaving contemporary critics and historians to speculate about their bargaining. Italian foreign ministry documents reveal the contents of the first two meetings between Mussolini and Laval. The evidence strongly indicates that Laval did give his approval for Italy to invade Ethiopia. Laval hoped to maintain limited French economic interests, but sacrificed French treaty rights in Ethiopia in order to enlist Italy in a defensive front against Germany. Laval failed to foresee the results of his diplomacy, and ended up alienating the Italian dictator.

This historiographical review surveys studies by cultural historians of images of monarchs, including Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I, and Victoria. These are not biographies, but analyses of the diverse and often contradictory representations of monarchs in their own times and afterwards. The review considers the variety of approaches in the field, from iconographical decoding to political history to the application of psychoanalysis to a national culture. It discusses the extent to which queens tend to be conflated to an enduring model of idealized femininity; how seriously we should take representations of monarchs as sacred; and the incorporation of sexuality in the royal image. It considers resistance as well as assent to the royal image, and how far the royal image as art object can become detached from the ideology which produced it. It concludes by observing our mixed motivations for interest in past ‘cults’ of monarchs, seeking in them at once the exotic difference of the past and comparisons with public figures of our own time.

The object of this review is to examine recent developments in our understanding of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, of Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts, and of British and Irish participation in the Spanish Civil War. It argues that fascism can be understood as having three possible phases of development and considers British and Irish fascism from that standpoint. Debates about the nature of British fascism are considered, its attitude towards violence, towards anti-Semitism, towards women, and towards the coming of the Second World War. The review considers the reasons for the movement's failure. It goes on to examine the debate as to whether or not there actually was an Irish fascism in the 1930s. Finally, it discusses recent work on British and Irish participation in the International Brigades and on the performance of O'Duffy's volunteers in Spain.

Politics, ideology and the law in early modern Europe: essays in honour of J. H. M. Salmon. Edited by Adrianna E. Bakos. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1994. Pp. xii+343. ISBN 1-878822-39-X. £55.00.

Changing identities in early modern France. Edited by Michael Wolfe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. vii+390. ISBN 0-8223-1908-X. £42.50

Royal and republican sovereignty in early modern Europe: essays in memory of Ragnhild Hatton. Edited by Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xxi+671. ISBN 0-521-41910-7. £70.00

Images of kingship in early modern France. By Adrianna Bakos. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. x+249. ISBN 0-415-15478-2. £52.50.

The construction of memory in interwar France. By Daniel J. Sherman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-226-75285-2. £31.50.

Realms of memory: the construction of the French past, vol. II: Traditions. Under the direction of Pierre Nora, English-language edn ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+591. ISBN 0-231-10634-3. £29.95.

Vectors of memory: legacies of trauma in postwar Europe. By Nancy Wood. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999. Pp. 204. ISBN 1-85973-294-1. £14.99.

Common destiny: dictatorship, foreign policy, and war in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+262. ISBN 0-521-58208-3. £19.95.

Hitler's Italian allies: royal armed forces, fascist regime, and the war of 1940–1943. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+207. ISBN 0-521-79047-6. £16.95.