John Thelwall was born in 1764 in Covent Garden, London. The son of a silk mercer, he was unsuccessfully apprenticed to his father after leaving school at 13, and then successively, an apprenticed tailor, and an articled legal clerk; but he failed to impress at any of these, apparently reading during working hours. Turning to his pen, he published two volumes of poems and became literary editor of the Biographical and Imperial Magazine. Speaking at the Coachmakers' Hall, he caught the attention of John Home Tooke, who offered to send him to university. But by this time he was already enthusing about the revolution in France and had joined both the whiggish Society of the Friends of the People, and the more down-market London Corresponding Society. In the midst of all of this, and getting married, he attended some courses on anatomy and medicine at one of the London medical colleges.

Although Conservative M.P.s were instrumental in defeating equal pay proposals in parliament in 1936 and 1944, it was a Conservative government which in 1954 decided to proceed with equal pay for female civil servants. Previous explanations for this reversal of traditional Conservative policy have focused on the need to increase the supply of female applicants for civil service positions, and the equal pay campaigns by white–collar unions and by the feminist Equal Pay Campaign Committee. Drawing upon previously unused sources, including P.R.O.files, this article offers a more overtly political explanation.

Within four weeks after the Labour party announced in January 1954 that it would ‘immediately’ implement equal pay when the next Labour government was formed, R. A. Butler, the chancellor of the exchequer, informed his treasury advisers that he wished to proceed with equal pay. With a general election looming in the near future, and believing themselves engaged in a close race with the Labour party, the cabinet reluctantly endorsed reform, fearing that a failure to act might tip sufficient female voters toward Labour to determine the outcome of a close election.

In a theoretical sense it may be said that the Revolution of 1688–9 established the supremacy of Parliament in the English constitution, but from a practical point of view the result of the Revolution was a –mixed and balanced’ constitution, in which power was shared between Crown and Parliament, and exercised within a framework of law. Although the doctrine of a ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution was an old one, the Revolution made clear the need for Crown and Parliament to work together, and in the reign of William III a new definition of their relationship was achieved. In this process the question of finance was crucial, for Parliament saw in control of finance the most effective instrument to limit the power of the Crown, while the Crown insisted that monarchy could not maintain its proper place in the constitution without some degree of fiscal independence. The outcome was, like most aspects of the Revolution Settlement, a compromise, in which the Crown received an independent income for the Civil List, while Parliament assumed responsibility for the military forces and the debt. The Civil List compromise of the reign of William III resolved the conflict between the Stuarts and their Parliaments for control of finance, and was an important step in the achievement of political stability within the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution.

It has become orthodox to criticize Charles I for his failure as a politician. Such criticism is both accurate and anachronistic. It fails to appreciate that for Charles the business of kingship was not the art of politics but the pursuit of conscience. Charles took to heart his father's injunctions to follow conscience and he obeyed them rigidly. Through the study of speeches, letters and royal prayers this essay examines the centrality of conscience to Charles I's kingship. It shows how the divisions of the 1640s led him temporarily to abandon conscience, and finally it studies the king's self-construction as the conscience of the commonwealth – the central stance of the Eikon Basilike.

On 27 January 1806, in a house of commons newly integrating the momentous events of Trafalgar, Nelson's death, and Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz, the obsequies of William Pitt commenced. Lord Lascelles proposed that the late prime minister be honoured as had been his father twenty-eight years before, with a public funeral. The motion eventually passed but the inter-party wrangle that it caused was unseemly. William Windham, who had served as Pitt's Secretary at War between 1794 and 1801, wondered why such unusual honours were proposed for Pitt, given both the precarious situation of the current war (so unlike the Great Commoner's contribution to British glory) and the fact that Edmund Burke's death in 1797 had elicited no such designs. ‘In every point of comparison that could be made,’ said Windham, ‘Mr Burke stood upon the same level with Mr Pitt, and I do not see the reason for the difference.’ In retrospect, it may appear odd that any leading politician thought Burke was entitled to a state funeral. He had been neither war leader nor prime minister, the usual recipients of public funerals. Few others in the political nation in 1797, whig or Pittite, shared Windham's judgement on this matter. That Windham thought the Pittites should have shared his judgement was the source of his bitterness in his speech to the House. If Burke's acknowledged enemies, the Foxite whigs, had opposed public honours for Burke, Windham would not have been surprised,

But that was not the case; it was not from them that the objection came, but from gentlemen on the other side of the house [Pittites], who took Mr Burke as the leader of their opinions, who cried him up to the skies, who founded themselves upon what he had done, but who were afraid, that if they consented to such honours, it would appear as if they approved of all the sentiments of that great man some of which were, perhaps, of too high a tone for them to relish.

The purpose of this communication is to describe the composition, and to analyse the character and motives, of those who collaborated with James II in his attempts in 1687–8 to pack a subservient parliament by intensive canvassing and by prearranging elections. These attempts have usually been dismissed as foolish, futile, provocative and inevitably disastrous, with the result that both the techniques and the agents employed in the campaign have not been thought worthy of serious attention.

This article examines the impact on German urban society of the allied air raids during the Second World War. It rejects the oft-made assertion that the bombing strengthened the ‘community of fate’ on the German home front, arguing that this is an invention of Nazi propaganda which has been absorbed uncritically by subsequent scholars. Instead, it contends that the bombing brought to the surface many social and cultural tensions within German society and led to a widespread process of atomization and dissolution of community ties. The local authorities were quickly overwhelmed by the scale of the bombing and Nazi party propaganda singularly failed to have any impact on the population.

‘The Power of the Man in the Saddle’: this was the burden of the Liberal chief whip's advice to David Lloyd George in April 1918. But the Prime Minister hardly needed any instruction in this theme: the uses and the limitations of power formed his absorbing passion. Even at the time many felt that his period as prime minister had marked a totally new departure in British politics. Some later commentators (most recently Mr Humphry Berkeley) have even claimed to detect the dawn of a new political era between 1916 and 1922, one in which ‘prime ministerial government’ gradually took the place of conventional cabinet government. But, despite their certainty, the precise character of Lloyd's George premiership, like the man himself, is still shrouded in mystery. Was it rule by a dictator or by a democrat? Did any consistent principle animate the ‘man in the saddle’ or was it all opportunism gone berserk ? Was Wales's Great Commoner really ‘rooted in nothing’, as Keynes was to allege? Not even Lloyd George's closest associates, Kerr and Riddell, felt able to say with any assurance. They were as baffled as the rest. Lloyd George was suddenly thrust from office in October 1922 with the issue still inconclusive. Ever since then the debate about his premiership has been passionate and unremitting. Each observer seems to have seen a different prime minister, one created in his own image. Fifty biographies on, the essential Lloyd George remains as elusive as ever. He remains the most controversial and contradictory of political animals, ‘the Big Beast’, the rogue elephant of twentieth-century prime ministers.

Arthur Wilson, in his History of Great Britain, (1653) named William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele, as among the few ‘gallant Spirits’ who ‘aimed at the publick Liberty more than their own interest’. He went on to say that the men he singled out, including in addition to Saye the earls of Oxford, Southampton, Essex and Warwick, ‘supported the Old English Honour and would not let it fall to the ground’. In 1640 Warwick and Saye, this time in company with their associate Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, were praised by a commoner as ‘the best men of the kingdom’ according to the report of a government informer.

The issue of sweated labour formed one of the most intractable social problems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous remedies to solve sweating, such as the restriction of female and child labour, the abolition of domestic workshops, consumers' leagues, and co-operative production were variously advanced but subsequently found to be wanting. Eventually, and bowing to the inevitable, Edwardians finally sanctioned one cautious measure which they thought would curb sweating at its root – that is the legal control of low pay in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. Initially, the act applied to domestic chain-making, ready-made and wholesale bespoke tailoring, paper-box making, and the machine-made lace and finishing trade. In these four industries in which wages were deemed unduly low, boards were established consisting of equal numbers of employers' and workers' representatives, plus independent members nominated by the state. In effect, the boards were thus a form of compulsory arbitration on pay.

Eugenics and sociology are often considered polar opposites, with the former seen as a pseudo-science that reduces everything to genes and the other a progressive social science focused on the environment. However, the situation was not quite so straightforward in mid-twentieth-century Britain. As this article shows, eugenics had a number of important formative intellectual, institutional, and methodological impacts on ideas and practices that would find a home in the rapidly expanding and diversifying discipline of sociology after the Second World War. Taking in the careers of leading individuals, including Alexander Carr-Saunders, William Beveridge, Julian Huxley, and David Glass, and focusing on the relationship between eugenics, ‘population research’, and the emerging field of social mobility studies, the article highlights the significant but underappreciated influence interwar biosocial thinking had on intellectual, scientific, and political cultures in post-war Britain. In so doing, the article draws on recent scholarship on the ‘technical identity’ embedded in mid-century British social science, which, it is suggested, provided the link between the research under consideration and the progressive politics of those who carried it out.

A Major source of difficulty in interpreting the political thought of Dr Robert Brady, the high tory historian who imparted a new dimension to the political quarrels of late Stuart England, arises out of a limitation that he imposed upon himself in writing history. He deliberately included very little political reflection in his writings, observing that he would not ‘inlarge further upon the great Use and Advantage Those that read Old Historians may make of these Discourses, but leave that to the Judgment of Understanding Readers’. This limitation may be offset, it is suggested here, by placing Brady securely within the intellectual framework created by the contemporary theories of legal sovereignty mat had originated during the English civil war and were fast becoming tradition by the late years of Charles II. When Brady made his researches public, almost all the elements were present that were required for fashioning a theory of legal sovereignty on the lines made famous in Blackstone. Englishmen were reading Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Edward Coke on the uncontrollable authority that resided in parliament for making, confirming, repealing, and expounding laws; and many of them were by this time accustomed to associating the legislative power, itself a new expression, with sovereignty in the state. They had also learned during the civil war years to recognize law-making as the characteristic function of their high court of parliament. All that remained for the whole to fall

Who became protestant in sixteenth-century France? This question has long exercised historians. A contemporary, La Popelinière, himself a huguenot, pointed to the varied attractions of the reformation for the politically ambitious and for the socially and economically underprivileged. Moving on to the beginning of this century, Henri Hauser postulated a protestantism dominated by artisans and the lower urban classes, although he later emphasised the appeal of the new religion to all social groups, a point of view endorsed by Lucien Romier and E. G. Léonard. Despite the political and military significance of the adherence of both some high court nobles and lesser rural hobereaux, it is nevertheless clear that Calvinism was predominantly and intentionally an urban phenomenon; Genevan missionaries were directed primarily to the cities and towns, though there were some notable exceptions such as the Cévennes area in southern France. It is, however, possible to advance from these rather cautious generalizations and to ask whether the social and economic profile of those who converted to Calvinism reflects that of the French people as a whole or whether there is some special relationship between status and religion, and whether there is any regional differentiation. Some of the answers, which in the current state of research must remain tentative, may be drawn from lists of huguenots drawn up by judicial and municipal authorities in the course of the civil wars. These lists provide, as Jean Delumeau has recently pointed out, a marvellous introduction to the sociology of French protestantism and indeed, one of the few ways of approaching the issue. Very few registers of the état-civil of protestant churches survive from the sixteenth century and those that do often fail to note occupational status. Lists of refugees in Geneva and elsewhere offer some evidence from a protestant point of view, but are distorted by a number of factors and may be unreliable in respect of geographical distribution and occupations.

Although Dryden's literary club in Covent Garden is remembered today by the readers of Restoration literature, political clubs in Charles II's metropolis have been litde studied by the historians of his reign. Of these political clubs, it was, of course, the First Whigs' Green Ribbon Club which always made most noise in the world, both at the time of the Popish Plot and Exclusionist agitation as well as in partisan histories of that agitation. Accounts of the Club by chroniclers of the calibre of Roger North or of Sir George Sitwell exist alongside the more recent but tantalizingly, brief description from J. R. Jones. Professor Jones has exploded the myth', writes another modern historian, ‘that the Whig Green Ribbon Club was an all-powerful manipulator of mobs and riots; its importance in this field extended only to financing or helping to finance, the two great 17 November pope-burnings in 1675 and 1680, which North regarded as contrived by the club.’ But other characteristics of this club also merit attention, especially in comparison with less well-known Whig clubs in London.

Wandering in his mind during his last illness in 1869, Bertrand Russell's maternal grandfather ‘heard a loud noise in the street and thought it was the revolution breaking out’. The memory of the Terror haunted educated early Victorians just as Belsen and Auschwitz haunt the modern intellectual: ‘one cannot shake off the feeling of disgust with such horrors and shame that Human Nature should be so bad’, wrote Wellington to Miss Burdett-Coutts in 1847 after reading a history of the Girondins. Attacks on aristocratic extravagance by William Wilberforce and Queen Victoria were inspired by dread of an English 1789—of those ‘women almost unsexed, men almost unhumanized’ whom Envy might summon forth at any moment from the backstreets of Victorian cities. Such fears helped push many reforming measures through nineteenth-century parliaments. Indeed, ‘the danger of revolution was in some degree as much a cause of change in England as the fact of revolution was abroad’.

This article examines leisure in eighteenth-century London and argues that historians have exaggerated the importance of public, commercial leisure at the expense of leisure in the home. The domestic sphere was the primary scene of leisure for men and women of propertied society. In tandem with this examination of leisure I argue that our frameworks for understanding the use of domestic space fail to capture both the significance of particular rooms and the variety of uses for individual rooms. The failings of the public/private framework are well known, but scholars have thus far failed to develop successful alternatives. From diaries, letters, and inventories conclusions may be drawn about the habitual uses of space, but letters and diaries also provide evidence of how room use varied depending on time of day, activities pursued or people undertaking those activities. I present several variables that residents used to determine where and with whom different activities were taken. Meanings of spaces were contingent upon a mix of qualities constantly re-assessed by residents and guests.

The Italian experience of being bombed has been neglected in the historiography of the Second World War, especially in English. This marginalization is not justified by the record of events; according to official estimates, Italian civilian victims of bombing numbered around 60,000. The reaction of the Italian population to air raids was carefully evaluated and discussed by the Allies, who decided to hit civilians living near industrial areas with a view to testing their psychological resistance. The article focuses on the civilians' reactions to death coming from the sky, by examining their response to both Anglo-American and Fascist propaganda, and to the experience of the raids at different stages of the war. It analyses the ways in which civilians coped with the collapse of state defences (including the creation of legends and the spreading of rumours independent of state propaganda), and the psychologically complex and shifting response to bombers who introduced themselves as liberators. The research presented is based on archival sources, particularly prefects' reports from different parts of Italy to the Ministry of Interior, on both Anglo-American and Fascist propaganda, newspaper articles, and civilians' diaries.

One of the most fruitful developments in the recent historiography of the English Civil War has been the growing interest in its local dimension. Historians are no longer content to study the constitutional and religious struggles as though they occurred in a vacuum at Westminster, but have examined the diverse reactions to those conflicts within the patchwork of local communities, and the machinery through which central orders were executed – Or circumvented – at the grass-roots level.