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.

Explanations of local interconfessional relations in post-revolutionary England tend to highlight the role of Catholic quiescence and compromise in allowing Protestants and Catholics to ‘get along’. By examining the interactions of a Catholic family who were far from quiescent in their religious and political practice, this article suggests that these explanations may overemphasize the compromise of religious minorities, obscuring the importance of the wider local context to the shape of interconfessional relations. The subjects of this study, the Rookwoods of Stanningfield, Suffolk, were active in expression of Catholic religion and its political implications. Contrary to patterns suggested elsewhere, the social and economic interactions of this family with their neighbours illustrate that such ardent Catholicism was not enough to prevent cordial relations with local Protestants. The social and economic importance of the Rookwoods within their community is used to make suggestions as to why they were accepted on the local level against a backdrop of wider anti-Catholic polemic. The example of the Rookwoods implies a need to explore the broader factors which shaped the underlying balance of power on a local level before it is possible to understand the nature of compromises that allowed for peaceful co-existence.

In the year 1906, Abbot (later Cardinal) Gasquet published Lord Acton and his Circle, which contained 178 letters of Lord Acton, all of them except fifteen being addressed to Mr Richard Simpson. The bulk of the manuscripts passed into the archives of Downside Abbey, possibly in 1914, when Gasquet left England on becoming a Cardinal; though the fifteen letters addressed to Mr T. F. Wetherell are not there, and it has not been possible to discover whether the originals of these are still in existence. At the request of an American scholar the original holograph letters at Downside were recently re-examined for the first time, for the purpose of discovering whether any material concerning Lord Acton had been left unpublished. The inquiry revealed the fact that the volume was in many respects unsatisfactory as a work of scholarship.

The degree to which England had already adopted or grown into feudalism by the generation before the Norman Conquest is one of the oldest of historical controversies, and one in which the opposing views, having reached something like a stalemate, seem now disposed to concede a measure of recognition to each other's premisses. Recent treatments of the tenth and eleventh centuries are cautious and compromising. They are apt to speak of “nascent feudalism”, or of the Normans’ mission to develop and give precision to a Saxon feudalism which is never clearly delineated, but which is assumed to be far advanced. I would suggest on the contrary that, given the known components of early English law and the admitted difficulty of bringing this hypothetical Saxon feudalism to definition, the proper approach to the subject should be one not of compromise but of scepticism, and that, as no major passage of Saxon politics can be made to bear that surface appearance of baronial motive and interest which the play of Norman feudalism everywhere presents, any phrase or text of Saxon law which can be made to carry a feudal implication should be tested rigorously to see if it is susceptible of no other interpretation before a strictly feudal meaning is imposed upon it. I must confess that no single term or maxim of the English codes or charters having any claim to genuineness has ever seemed to me to bear a feudal connotation.

One of the most interesting features of modern historical work on the Anglo-Saxon settlements in recent years has been the tendency to admit a possible connexion between the Jutes and the Franks; or even to stress the possible associations, either of race or culture, between the Germanic conquerors of Kent and the mixed Germanic races of the middle Rhine and northern Gaul. That the language of the Cantware, or whatever they called themselves, was not very different from that of the subjects of the kings of Paris is suggested by the sending of Frankish interpreters along with the Italians of Augustine's mission. Linguists admit this, and they have been delighted to find remnants of the Frankish gau embedded in Kentish placenames. Archaeologists tell us that the early Kentish kings minted no coins of their own, but used Frankish ones, or else used their own rings and bracelets for money; when they did begin to have mints of their own, they copied Merovingian coins in weight, though not in design. Frankish coins, for that matter, were used farther afield than Kent: the coins found at Sutton Hoo were all Merovingian. It is in this pleasantly pro-Frankish context that the subject of the court officers of king Æthelberht of Kent is here offered for consideration. Someone may say: Æthelberht I know, and queen Bertha I know, and Augustine I know, and, in fact, all that Bede tells us about Æthelberht I know: but who are these officers of the court of Æthelberht that you are speaking of? We know, they say, that Æthelberht's law speaks of eorlcund men who had a wergeld of 300 shillings, and ceorls, who had a wergeld of 100 shillings: but we cannot remember that the individual officers of Æthelberht's court are mentioned by anybody; or at least, by any source that is reliable.

If the year 1792 has come to be remembered for political crises which made it one of the turning-points in English history, it has been famous also for the auspiciousness of its commencement, the optimism and the promise that characterized its earliest months. In January and February Pitt repeatedly drew the attention of parliament to the increasing prosperity of the country and the flourishing state of the public revenue; and opposition did not pretend to deny this, but merely said that the prosperity ‘was no feather in the minister's cap’, since it was due to circumstances independent of government. Even that aggressive admirer of the French Revolution, Earl Stanhope, wrote to a Frenchman: ‘We are already free… and England is now the richest, the most prosperous and—climate apart—the happiest country in Europe.’ Even that determined reformer, the Rev. Christopher Wyvill, joined the crowd of witnesses to the country's good fortune, though he speculated that if a great European war should break out, ‘the English people would probably then renew, but in a louder tone’, the cry for parliamentary reform. Pitt attributed the prosperity to the rise of machinery, the credit facilities, the ‘exploring and enterprising spirit of our merchants’, and the mode in which money was continually being fed back into industry. He claimed that something was due, however, to the internal tranquillity of the nation and ‘the natural effects of a free but well regulated government’. The correspondence of the year 1792 often gives evidence of the sense of rising prosperity; and to this would be attributed on the one hand the general attachment to the constitution, and on the other hand the indifference of the nation to matters of foreign policy.

The 1931 General Election reduced the Parliamentary Labour Party to forty-six. Though a disappointing result, there was substantial evidence for confidence in the eventual revival of the Party; it had received over six and a half million votes and thirty per cent of the total vote cast, only seven percent less than the total vote it had received in 1929 when Labour formed a government. The departure of Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and J. H. Thomas to join the National Government freed the Parliamentary Labour Party from the domination of an important section of its older generation. The 1931 election marked the slow transition of power from one generation to another, often an awkward moment for any political party. There was wide agreement in the party that the years after 1931 should be an interregnum period.

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the role played by the Court and government office in the social and political evolution of Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Professor Trevor-Roper has treated office under the Crown as a smooth highroad to economic advancement, one of the principal causes of such rise of the gentry as may have occurred. According to this view, the political antecedents of the English Civil War are best interpreted in terms of the polarities of Court and Country: it was reaction against an overgrown and corruptly lucrative Court that inspired the opposition in 1640; it was desire to dismantle the whole centralizing apparatus which inspired the policy of the Independents in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Others, including Professor Aylmer and myself, have subjected officialdom to detailed inspection and have concluded that its rewards were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth and Charles I, its personnel was restricted in numbers, and its more spectacular beneficiaries were a very small minority. The recently published letter of Sir Edward Stanhope to Thomas Viscount Wentworth, advising him to refuse the Deputyship of Ireland in 1631, has cast a flood of light on contemporary attitudes towards the acceptance of at least one high office. Forty-six years before, when Henry Carey, 1st Earl of Hunsdon, was offered the Lord Chamberlainship of the Royal Household, he received a similar letter of warning from a close follower.

In his article ‘Semantics and historiography’, published in 1953, Richard Koebner invites historians to exploit the benefits which a semantic approach to history readily offers them. A ‘semantic approach’ he defines as a systematic ‘study of the career of political and historical expressions and slogans’. Koebner is convincing when he explains why such a study is so important – indeed indispensable – to historians who do not wish to become ‘victims of destructive ambiguities and…liable to mistake the expressions of popular historical consciousness for historical realities’. There is probably no period in history, Koebner argues, which may not be enlightened by a pursuit of these inquiries; ‘the semantic approach to history has something to reveal in all periods’

The place where the University of Edinburgh now stands was once the site of the church of St Mary in the Fields or, as it is usually called, Kirk o'Field. On a February night in 1567, in the small house close to the church, there occurred what is certainly the most frequently discussed event in the history of Scotland, the murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, consort to Mary Queen of Scots. Much discussed it has been, but since it is still not properly resolved it merits another look.

Several British statesmen have also been historians: Clarendon, Russell, Rosebery, Churchill—and Charles James Fox, although he produced only one volume. His History of the early part of the Reign of James II is a fragment of what might have been a much larger work; it was published posthumously, with a preface by his nephew Lord Holland, in 1808. Although it was given a mixed reception by the critics, it was regarded for several decades as something of a classic. It was translated into French, German, and Dutch; and was republished several times in England during the nineteenth century (most recently as a threepenny paperback in Cassell's National Library in 1888).

The emergence of a coherent narrative history of England, based upon the critical use of authorities, and written in a connected fashion rather than assembled from reproduced earlier materials, is a much slower process than such a simple statement or its requirements might suggest. The process begins in earnest in the late seventeenth century, after the historian ceases being a principal protagonist in the political pamphlet warfare of the time. The narrator must take account of advances in source criticism, and he must also cope, on the level of interpretation, with national myths that his forbears among the Tudor chroniclers and the seventeenth-century contenders had created. Miss Thompson has remarked that the main purpose of Tudor chroniclers, notably Hall and Holinshed, was to praise ‘the king's illustrious ancestors, reign by reign’.

The reoccupation of the Rhineland, on 7 March 1936, conventionally referred to as its remilitarization, was one of the few real turning points in modern history. It marked the end of the last vestiges of the ‘Versailles System’ and it has been considered a missed opportunity for calling a halt to Hitler's aggressive designs. It was also a problem which affected the very foundations of the Franco-Polish alliance, a relationship which had a chequered history in the interwar period. For France and Poland, Germany's neighbours, most of all, the reoccupation of the Rhineland would on the surface appear to have been the last occasion on which they might have collaborated to contain Hitler's Germany. This article will attempt to show how much more complex the question was in reality. It examines the degree of mutual consultation and encouragement between France and Poland prior to the reoccupation, and their reactions to it. This episode provides an excellent case-study of how the alliance worked in practice and also throws some interesting sidelights on the European diplomatic scene in this period.

It is nearly twenty years since the seminal discussions of the English crowd by Hobsbawm, Rose, Rudé and Thompson, and almost forty years since Wear mouth's extraordinary catalogue of eighteenth-century disturbances.1 These studies established that if we examined the composition, organization, objectives and beliefs of eighteenth-century crowds, then we would find them to have been informed, disciplined, and in possession of broad notions of the necessity and legitimacy of their actions. Crowds were not ‘rabble’, or criminal, or ‘society's dregs’. Such conclusions were based upon the examination of the crowd in its most visible and vocal form: the riot.

In Second Class, there was only my valet and two Italians on their way to Valona to buy from a Greek a wood, which, as far as they knew, did not belong to him. A frequent matter in the East

So sardonically wrote in his diary a second-rank Italian politician, the only passenger in first class, voyaging in 1902 across the Adriatic to Albania. The politician was Antonino di San Giuliano. His diary had a purpose, as it was destined to be published in Giornale d'Italia, Rome's new conservative daily. This paper had been founded only a year before by Alberto Bergamini and Sidney Sonnino in an effort to regroup those anti-Giolittian politicians scattered by the failure of the second, authoritarian, Pelloux ministry.

The Yorkshire Association of the early 1780's marked the first effective extension of modern political radicalism in Great Britain from the metropolitan region into the provinces. During what may for convenience be described as the first—the Wilkite—phase of British radicalism, in the early 1770's, the focus of the radical movement had lain in and around London. Attempts to stir up the country provoked only a brief response in a very few constituencies. There was little trace anywhere of sustained radical activity. Provincial apathy at the general election of 1774 caused acute disappointment to the metropolitan radicals. Six years later the situation had changed remarkably, and from 1780 till 1784 politics in Yorkshire were dominated, and in the rest of England considerably affected, by that remarkable political phenomenon, the Yorkshire Association. Starting in December 1779, an extraordinary, widespread upsurge of discontent among the members of the ‘upper class’ in the county, provoked by the North ministry's inept handling of the American crisis, first produced the well-supported petition of 1780 for economical reform, and was then channelled and organized into an instrument of agitation for reform of the parliamentary system. The association proper came into being between its adoption at a county meeting on 28 March 1780 and the middle of the following August, when the parchment copies which had been circulated for signature were gathered in and the roll of some 5800 names was compiled from them.