The debate over the nature and significance of religious change in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England has been one of the most lively of recent years and shows no sign of abating. The emergence or otherwise of a Calvinist consensus, the impact of the high church or Arminian party, the role of puritanism, and the relationship between all these and the outbreak of the civil war have generated vigorous discussion. Attention has inevitably tended to focus on the theological outlook of university-educated clerics, whose sermons and treatises provide a mine of information. In the absence of comparable sources it is far harder to evaluate the position of laymen, and in the case of Robert Cecil it may seem exceptionally foolhardy to attempt to do so, since he has usually been depicted as both an enigmatic figure and a morally dubious one. Hurstfield confined his discussion to the Cecils' view of the right relationship between church and state, concluding merely that Robert Cecil followed his father Lord Burghley in supporting a via media. Yet it is possible to piece together a large amount of information about his spiritual development, and the evidence suggests a gradual but very significant change of outlook, from orthodox Elizabethan protestantism to a more complex position in which both his doctrinal and aesthetic sensibilities were moving in the direction later identified with Laudianism. Moreover, in the construction of his private chapel at Hatfield, and in his links with men such as Richard Neile and Samuel Harsnett, he can be seen as the first great patron of the emerging high church party, antedating Buckingham and Charles I by a generation. Tracing the religious evolution of Robert Cecil first earl of Salisbury thus illuminates some of the crucial changes reshaping English protestantism in these formative years.

The ‘middle sort of people’ is a social group that has been the subject of increased historical research in the last decade. Many studies have been written, and many definitions offered of the group, its identity, and its membership. As a result, these overlapping groups and contrasting methods of definition have caused the nature and identity of the group to remain elusive. This study charts the evolution of the historiography of the ‘middle sort’, and the many attempts to produce positive and accurate definitions of the group. It suggests that the identity of the ‘middle sort’ may, in fact, be more complex than is allowed for by existing studies, with different identities being adopted according to social context. It concludes that while the term ‘middle sort of people’ is an appropriate contemporary collective term for use by historians, it is much more problematic as a description of an active, cohesive social group in the early modern period.

This article reintegrates the colonization of Tangier into our understanding of the development of the English empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century. At its acquisition in 1661, Tangier appeared integral to the imperial ambitions of the restored monarchy and promised to carry England's commercial and maritime empire into the Mediterranean. This article argues that the particular conceptions of imperial and commercial organization that underlay the occupation of Tangier isolated the city from England's wider empire and contributed to its failure. The creation of a free port and crown colony at Tangier reflected prevalent perceptions of the political economy of trade in the Mediterranean, but added to a wider process whereby ideological debates over the organization of trade and empire helped to create legal and jurisdictional boundaries that differentiated oceanic space. As a free port, Tangier was out of place within an empire increasingly defined by exclusive and restricted trade. It was, however, the ideological significance of Tangier's status as a crown colony that made it unsustainable. Unable to sustain or surrender its sovereignty over Tangier, the crown abandoned the city in the face of Moroccan empire-building.

Some years ago the late Ronald Balfour wrote a paper on the Study of History at Cambridge. His main preoccupation was the nature of history as a study. To-day interest is focused on more practical matters of detail, and we wish to know why the Cambridge Historical Tripos developed as it did, what was the purpose behind the various reforms, how far the character of the Tripos was affected by the example of foreign Universities, by experience at Oxford or by the requirements of the Civil Service examinations, and, finally, who most influenced the Tripos, the professors or the more junior College lecturers and supervisors.

It has been traditional to regard the reaction of Henry VIII in the face of treason and rebellion as savage and extreme. Perhaps for this reason, historians for long considered it superfluous to examine in any detail what fate actually befell those who took up arms against their king. More recently, however, findings that relatively few persons were executed by Henry, despite the savagery of his reign, and that in general his bark was worse than his bite,1 have suggested that this question could profitably be pursued further. There seems, for instance, to be a significant difference between the 178 executions in the aftermath of the Lincolnshire rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7 and the rather larger number for which Elizabeth was responsible following the much less dangerous Northern Rising of 1569.2 Yet how these figures were achieved and what considerations shaped and determined the extent of the government's retaliation is much less clear. Perhaps the surviving evidence will not normally admit of answers to such questions, for it was not in the government's interests to disclose that external considerations might influence the enforcement or otherwise of the law. The manifestation of this fact was therefore inconvenient, but exceptionally such disclosures might be unavoidable.

The merchant mariner could appeal to the law in the seventeenth century for remedies against arbitrary treatment. But historians have argued that even when the sailor was able to afford legal process he faced judges who served the interests of master and shipowner. This essay estimates the fees of a suit for wages in the seventeenth century, the mariner's propensity to initiate action, and his chances of winning. Evidence for such an appraisal, and for describing the attitudes of judges toward mariner complaints, comes from all wage cases decided by the High Court of Admiralty in sixteen years chosen from across the century. The results add to recent discoveries about the nature of justice in a litigious age and test claims that the sailor was commonly a victim both at sea and at law.

Military history is often misconstrued as a field requiring little intellectual skill, in which the historian provides little more than a chronology of generals and battles. Analysis of one hundred of the twenty-first century's best military histories reveals that military history today goes well beyond such subject matter, incorporating social, cultural, and political history. Common areas of inquiry for contemporary historians include the impact of society, culture, and politics on a country's ability to wage war; the social, cultural, and political after-effects of war; the society and culture of military organizations; and the relationship between military organizations and the communities from which they spring. While historians continue to devote considerable attention to the conventional militaries of Europe and the United States, many also are studying small armies, irregular forces, non-state actors, civil wars, and non-Western armed forces. Within the military realm, historians frequently tackle subjects of much greater complexity than the generals-and-battles stereotype would suggest, to include the relationship between technological and human factors, the interdependency of land and naval warfare, and the influence of political direction on the military.

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia was the scene of intense guerrilla warfare as well as a programme of ethnic cleansing undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, by the Croatian state under the control of the Ustaša fascist party. This article investigates the Wehrmacht’s contrasting perceptions of its own violence in the anti-partisan war and its views of the Ustaša’s assault on Croatia’s Serb minority. The author argues that these different views emanated from the Wehrmacht’s conviction that its strategic concepts offered the only correct strategy for the prosecution of modern warfare. As the key to victory, Wehrmacht staff officers emphasized the maximization of force on the operational level. By contrast, the Ustaša state pursued a strategy of nationalizing war that moved away from Wehrmacht strategic concepts and infuriated Wehrmacht staff officers. Moreover, the Wehrmacht employed a starkly different vocabulary in describing its own violence and Ustaša violence. These descriptions more deeply entrenched the Wehrmacht’s sense of difference regarding the two types of violence. By examining the Wehrmacht’s views of violence, this article suggests that factors other than anti-Slavic racism more strongly determined the way in which the Wehrmacht both perceived and acted out violence in Eastern Europe.

This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.

This article suggests an alternative explanation for the failure of the so-called Spanish match in 1623. The Spanish monarchy was not unanimously against the marriage of the Infanta María to Prince Charles, and the marquis (later duke) of Buckingham was not the brilliant negotiator who was able to expose elaborate attempts by the Spanish to hide their alleged mendacity. Analysis of archival materials from England, Spain, and Germany indicates that Charles decided to abandon the match when he realized that it would not guarantee the restoration of his dispossessed brother-in-law, Elector Palatine Friedrich V, who had done everything in his power to prevent the marriage. When Charles signed the treaty anyway, the Spanish then began to make preparations for the wedding, preferring to postpone serious discussion of a solution to the Palatine crisis indefinitely. For Charles, however, the two issues were inseparable. For him the match was as important for securing the restitution of the Palatinate as for designating his future royal spouse. When he left Spain, he had already devised and initiated a plan to dissolve the match. In many ways both sides were equally guilty of delay, dissimulation, and deception.

The dissolution of the monasteries is one of the most familiar incidents in Tudor history. The genesis of the dissolution is however ill-documented. Here it is traced back to the suppressions of smaller houses authorized in 1528. It is shown how a partial dissolution could be construed as a desirable and necessary reform without challenging either the basis of monasticism or the doctrine of purgatory. A previously unnoticed petition is published to cast light on the anti-clerical agitation of 1529. It is suggested that there was an attempt to secure a dissolution for financial reasons in 1534 and it was the failure of this which forced the crown to adopt a new strategy to achieve a partial dissolution. This was the collection of damaging evidence of monastic corruption during the visitations of 1535. The display of this material to the Commons in 1536 persuaded them to accept a partial dissolution in the guise of a reform of monasticism. It is suggested that there was no ‘public’ demand for a dissolution in the 1530s except in the artificial circumstances of 1536, and that the shape of the dissolution was determined by the inability of government to secure the support of parliament for a dissolution justified on financial grounds.

This article reconstructs the constitutionalist nationalist critique of the Irish revolution. It employs the writings of Stephen Gwynn, John Dillon, Jasper Tully, and others to illustrate the views of those Irish parliamentarians who were marginalized by the emergence of Sinn Fein as the dominant force in Irish political life after 1918. Stephen Gwynn, in particular, claimed that republican violence could not militate against – indeed exacerbated – the damage done by the failure of the constitutionalist nationalists to grasp the need for compromise over Ulster. Indeed, Gwynn argued that the violence of the Collins era – which has been justified on counter intelligence and broader political grounds – played a major role in shaping the sectarian institutions of the Northern Irish state. Gwynn's reflections on the self-defeating aspects of the Collins strategy are linked to a wider consideration of the role of the British government. This article attempts to qualify a scholarly orthodoxy – that British policy in 1920–2, undoubtedly subject to fluctuations, was incoherent and essentially reactive; instead, it argues that from the spring of 1920, Britain evolved a strategy, dependent on a considerable degree of intelligence success, involving the application of a carrot and stick policy designed to lead precisely to the Treaty compromise of 1921, but available much earlier to any Sinn Fein leadership willing to take it.

This article reviews the current state of historical writing on British political culture in the interwar period, with a particular focus on the character of the democratic society which emerged from the franchise extensions of 1918 and 1928. It takes as its starting point the influential interpretation advanced by Ross McKibbin in his two most recent books, Classes and cultures (1998) and Parties and people (2010). This holds that Britain's interwar democracy came to be shaped in the image of the anti-socialist middle class, buoyed by the centrist appeal of Baldwinite constitutional Conservatism. Anti-socialism's interwar hegemony, McKibbin further argues, had serious consequences for the progress of social democracy after the Second World War. Whilst this narrative is, in many respects, highly compelling, this review suggests that much recent literature on the period points to a range of alternative interpretative possibilities which offer different answers to McKibbin's core question: what kind of a democracy was Britain between the wars? Drawing on these studies, the review argues that Britain's political culture was rather more ‘democratized’ during these years than McKibbin allows, before finally identifying some directions for future research.

This article examines the Irish fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century. It locates the Irish state within a broader imperial context showing how Ireland contributed to the wider British imperial project. In particular, this article looks at the development of an efficient tax-gathering apparatus, showing how the revenue board, the most pervasive agency of the eighteenth-century Irish state, extracted increasing levels of taxation from a sometimes hostile population. Drawing extensively on the records of the Irish revenue commissioners, a very rich if under utilized source, it demonstrates for the first time the levels of taxation raised in Ireland, while also exploring how these taxes were collected. It concludes that this period saw the expansion of an increasingly professional bureaucracy, challenging existing interpretations that have focused predominantly on politicization. The final section looks at issues of evasion and compliance, showing the difficulties faced by the Irish state in this period, as it expanded deeper into Irish society.

Drawing upon recently published research and previously unseen archival sources, the article provides a new explanation of the British conquest of Burma in 1885. Previous explanations have attributed British motives for conquest to either the need to defend the eastern borders of Britain's Indian empire from French expansion in mainland south-east Asia, or the desire to open Burma and China to British trade and investment at a time of perceived economic depression. The article contends that while French expansionism certainly loomed large in the British decision to invade, commercial interests and considerations were pivotal in persuading the British government of the French threat. In particular, the role of London-based ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ in shaping government policy is emphasized and explored. In the process, new insights into the methods and strategies of City financiers are revealed. Besides contributing to the debate surrounding the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis of Cain and Hopkins, the article also evaluates the importance of socio-economic conditions in Burma itself as a factor which stimulated British expansion.

The consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny brought with it a more closely defined honorific hierarchy. From the first investiture at Windsor in 1861 of the Star of India and increasingly agter the assumption by the Queen of her new title of Empress, high service came to be rewarded in honours and distinctions with a discriminating lavishness reminiscent of the creations of the Younger Pitt. But the title assumed by the Queen and announced on 28 April 1876 had not originally been designed for India alone. It was Disraeli's caution that induced the Queen to abandon the style of ‘Empress of Great Britain, Ireland and India’. In his anxiety to avoid controversy many assurances were given that the United Kingdom would not be affected. Thus limitation of the title to India did not at first have any special significance. In reply to Lowe's criticisms, the Prime Minister saw no reason why two of the Queen's sons should not become Dukes of Canada and Australia. It was only in the course of the preparations for proclaiming the title on the first day of 1877 that the Indian Government, recovered from its surprise, suggested that the occasion might be invested with a political as well as a symbolic significance. The Viceroy, Lytton, came to believe that the occasion was a unique opportunity, not merely for broadening the base of the imperial Government through a popular symbol, but for materially strengthening the executive by a new understanding with the native princes of India.

Geoffrey Elton's model of Tudor politics, which emphasized the importance of political institutions and which dominated our understanding of Tudor politics for much of the second half of the twentieth century, has been challenged by a number of historians for over twenty years. They have re-emphasized the importance of social connections and cultural influences and turned attention away from studying the privy council to studying the court. In doing so, they have gone back to re-examine earlier approaches by Sir John Neale and Conyers Read which Elton had challenged. Yet, these new socially and culturally derived approaches, recently labelled ‘New Tudor political history’, remain varied and its practitioners sometimes at odds with each other. Focusing on both established seminal works and recent research, this review considers the different elements of these approaches in relation to Tudor court politics. It assesses the methodological problems they raise and identifies what shortcomings still remain. It demonstrates that Tudor politics are increasingly defined as based on social networks rather than institutional bodies, making issues of access to, and intimacy with, the monarch central. Our understanding has been further enhanced by exploration of political culture and its relationship to political action. However, the review points to the need to integrate more fully the political role of women and the relationship between the court and the wider political community into our understanding of Tudor politics, as well as place England into a European context.

Charles Booth dates the beginning of the agitation for old age pensions from the late 1870's, which were marked by two publications of first importance in the field. He himself drew inspiration from the pamphlet of Mr Hookham who, in 1879, published ‘The Outline of a Scheme for dealing with Pauperism. The Question of the Day’. Running neck and neck with Mr Hookham, however, was another now long-forgotten gentleman named Canon Blackley who produced a scheme of national insurance which acquired widespread commendation. The two of them together symbolize both the desire for social action and the cleavage of opinion as to the direction such action should take.

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.