Recent scholarship has questioned the accuracy of John Foxe's depiction of Anne Boleyn as an evangelical and a patron of reformers. It has even been suggested that Foxe exaggerated or invented the material he presented on the evangelical zeal of Henry VIII's second queen. A thorough examination of Foxe's sources, however, reveals that he based his account of Anne on material ultimately derived from those who knew her or had benefited from her support. It can also be demonstrated that much of Foxe's account of Anne is confirmed by independent sources. Finally, careful comparison of the material on Anne in the different editions of Foxe's work printed during his lifetime, and analysis of their variations, indicates when Foxe acquired his information about Anne. This, in turn, reveals a great deal about the circumstances in which Foxe composed his account and the specific political and polemical purposes which influenced it. Foxe's account of Anne was one-sided and biased but the information he presented on her was, as far as it went, accurate and it should not be discounted in any scholarly assessment of Henry's queen.

The subject of when nuclear weapons might have to be employed by the United States during the early Cold War period was the setting for a prolonged and uneasy dialogue within the Anglo-American relationship. While British governments pressed for a formal agreement that there should be prior consultation before the atomic bomb was ever used, the Americans were determined to retain the freedom to take this crucial decision alone. This article explores the debates that ensued and the tensions that were created by this issue, between the meetings of Attlee and Truman in December 1950 and the Indochina crisis of 1954, and highlights the contrasting geopolitical positions of Britain and the United States as they sought to reconcile their views. For the British, playing host to a clutch of important US airbases, the risk of early nuclear devastation in any outbreak of general war was a paramount consideration. Although impatient with British caution, the Americans recognized an overriding need for allied support in general war giving British views the capacity to exercise a restraining influence.

This article seeks, through the medium of a case study of the York Lunatic Asylum scandal of 1813 to 1815, to rethink aspects of the existing historiography of early nineteenth-century asylum reform. By moving away from the normative medical historical focus on ‘madness’ and ‘custody’, it relates the reform of lunatic asylums to the wider social, cultural, and political currents of the early nineteenth century. In particular, it demonstrates how the conflict over the administration of the York Asylum represented a clash between different conceptions of social power and public accountability which were rooted in mutually opposed cultural ideologies. In addition, by bringing more recent work on identity and performance to bear on a classic set of historical issues, it also seeks to investigate how the reform of lunatic asylums, and the cultural shifts which they embodied, impacted upon the social identities of medical practitioners engaged in the charitable care of the sick and mad.

Around 1670, a group of moderate Restoration puritans published extended explanations of their movement at a particularly tense and pregnant time, when the recently erected, unstable barriers between the institutional Church of England and puritanism were under extreme pressure. Their efforts are important and revealing for their analyses of Restoration puritanism's contemporary situation and its historical roots. These publications, however, have received little scholarly attention. Restoration scholars tend to use the term ‘puritan’ in a static even perfunctory way that bears little resemblance to the self-conscious, fluid approach of historians of earlier puritanism. This usage also bears little resemblance to how Restoration puritans understood themselves. A close examination of these treatises helps to locate Restoration puritanism as the latest evolution of a century-old movement and helps to evaluate and refine the analytical frameworks within which historians attempt to make sense of that movement.

New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had a strong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during the era of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonial connections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways that Caribbean colonies and the imperial metropole shaped one another and to reconsider the place of the Caribbean region within wider Atlantic and global contexts. Attention to transatlantic links has become especially important in new work on abolition and emancipation. Scholars have also focused more of their attention on white colonizing elites, looking in particular at colonial identities and at strategies of control. Meanwhile, recent calls for pan-Caribbean approaches to the history of the region are congruent with pleas for more detailed and nuanced understandings of the development of slave and post-slave societies, focusing on specifically Caribbean themes while setting these in their wider imperial, Atlantic, and global contexts.

With the recent rise in global history as a discipline, early modern Europe's Asian trade has become a new focus of interest. In French historiography, however, this still remains marginalized. Some studies of the French East India Companies and the French presence in Asia exist, but the impact of this on metropolitan France remains woefully underexplored. This article outlines the history and historiography of the French East India Companies and their wider role and importance, outlining pathways of both existing, current, and possible future research.

The measure of 1723 known as the ‘Waldiam Black Act’ (9 Geo. I, c. 22) has acquired a lasting notoriety. Lecky called it ‘a special and most sanguinary law’, and even Sir Leon Radzinowicz finds it ‘remarkable’ as the most severe legislation of the eighteenth century, its comprehensive nature making it an ‘ideological index’ to the capital laws at large. The Act was extended for five years in 1725 (12 Geo. I, c. 30), amended in 1754 (27 Geo. II, c. 15) and made permanent in 1758 (31 Geo. II, c. 42). Effectively it survived for a century, until Peel took it off the statute book despite opposition from the Quarterly Review. Its main provisions were directed against ‘wicked and evil-disposed Persons going armed in Disguise, and doing Injuries and Violences to die Persons and Properties of his Majesty's Subjects’. It became a felony without benefit of clergy to go abroad into woods in any form of disguise or with a blackened face. Commission of a specific act of destruction or larceny was not necessary for a prosecution to lie.

When Sir Llewellyn Woodward wrote his distinguished book Great Britain and the German Navy in 1935, the last volumes of Gooch and Temperley were not yet published, and the original papers were still subject to the fifty-year rule. In 1971, all of the Gooch and Temperley collection of documents has long since been available; and the archives have been open since 1965. It is therefore possible to add to what Sir Llewellyn wrote, and this article seeks to show, not differently from him, but more fully, how the naval holiday proposals unfolded and how the general tenor of Anglo-German relations remained unaltered in this most vital area. Nothing that the Haldane Mission had done, nor even the general co-operation between London and Berlin during the Balkan Wars, could change the fundamental position—despite Baron Marschall's hopes.

The following Communication presents a newly discovered manuscript by John Locke. The manuscript dates from 1667–8 and it deserves notice as the most significant example of Locke's thought on the toleration of Catholics prior to the Epistola de tolerantia (1689). The manuscript, entitled Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others, reveals Locke's engagement with Sir Charles Wolseley's Liberty of conscience, the magistrates interest (1668) and significantly informs the compositional history of Locke's Essay concerning toleration (1667–8).

Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, ennobled as Count of Gondomarin 1617, served as Spanish ambassador to England from 1613 to 1622 and continued thereafter in a sort of emeritus status as Spain's leading, almost only, expert on English affairs until his death in 1626.

In this tense, crisis-ridden time of uneasy peace prior to the Thirty Years' War and during the opening years of that war, when its course and its eventual extent were still much in doubt, what was going to happen in Europe, and to Europe, was very much in the hands of the relatively few men who guided or influenced affairs of state in a few key capitals. None were more important than such men in Spain and England, widely recognized as the heads of ‘the two protectorats’ over Catholic and Protestant Europe. Gondomar must certainly be counted among these few.

In his influential work on German Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin suggested that Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) catalysed the growth of the nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment. This causal thesis, however, ignored the extent to which the Reflections' German translator, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), altered the meaning of the text to suit his own philosophical agenda. Although Burke saw rationalism and revolution as natural allies, Gentz – a student of Immanuel Kant – used the Reflections to articulate a conservative form of rationalism that, he believed, could stand up to the philosophes' radicalism. Through his selective translation, numerous in-text annotations, and six long interpretive essays, Gentz pressed Burke's Reflections into a Kantian epistemological paradigm – carving out a space for a priori right in the logic of the text, and demoting traditional knowledge from a normative to a prudential role. In Gentz's translation, Burke thus appeared as a champion, not a critic, of Enlightenment.

The use by British crowds of victorious admirals to articulate patriotic and libertarian ideas during the wars of the long eighteenth century is well known. But conflict also posed awkward questions about masculinity and issues surrounding it. Was military prowess compatible with politeness, with religiosity? During the 1790s, the fight to the death with revolutionary France made such questions hard to ignore, being compounded by the fact that Britain's most celebrated leader – Nelson – was not a paragon of virtue. This article shows how evangelicals sought to resolve these tensions by advancing a different set of ideals founded on piety and professionalism: by finding heroes of their own. This has crucial consequences for our understanding of how they and the ideas they championed became so prominent in late Hanoverian public life. In contradistinction to recent work suggesting that they exploited causes that were already popular – moral reform, antislavery – this article shows how they advanced a powerful providential narrative in which Christian heroes and godly policy were what made Britain great, a narrative whose veracity was ‘proven’ by wartime successes, especially in the navy, and which would remain highly influential well into the nineteenth century.

Ours is the age of the Jacobite restoration – not in dynastic terms, but in historical scholarship. Parliamentary Jacobitism in the period after 1710 has particularly attracted recent attention. While disagreement persists among historians as to the extent and seriousness of tory involvement with the Jacobite cause, few would deny that the issue is significant. By contrast, the influence of Jacobitism on politics under William III has been almost entirely neglected. Beyond the shadowy conspiracies that have long fascinated researchers, little is known of the role of Jacobite sentiment in the political life of England between 1688 and 1702. Not much has been added to Keith Feiling's sixty-year old assessment of the Jacobites as ‘that right wing of Toryism, in which the whole pre-Revolutionary sentiment survived’.

Scottish philosophical history has received its characterization from the programme of social enquiry typical of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed recently, the historical thinking of two of its philosophers, Hume and Smith, has been seen as the superstructure of their philosophies of mind.

In the penultimate chapter of St Matthew's gospel, immediately before the account of the betrayal by Judas, the story is told of a visit which Jesus paid to the house of Simon the leper. As he sat eating a woman came and poured a precious ointment over his head. The disciples were indignant, saying, in the words of King James's bible, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, why trouble ye the woman for she hath wrought a good work upon me? For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always’.

This article reveals how the ambassadress became an important part of early modern diplomatic culture, from the invention of the role in the early sixteenth century. As resident embassies became common across the early modern period, wives increasingly accompanied these diplomatic postings. Such a development has, however, received almost no scholarly attention to date, despite recent intense engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of early modern diplomacy. By considering the activities of English ambassadresses from the 1530s to 1700, accompanying embassies both inside and outside of Europe, it is possible not only to integrate them into narratives of diplomacy, but also to place their activities within broader global and political histories of the period. The presence of the ambassadress changed early modern diplomatic culture, through the creation of gendered diplomatic courtesies, gendered gift-giving practices, and gendered intelligence-gathering networks. Through female sociability networks at their host court, ambassadresses were able to access diplomatic intelligence otherwise restricted from their husbands. This was never more true than for those ambassadresses who held bonds of friendship with politically influential women at their host or home court, allowing them to influence political decision-making central to the success of the diplomatic mission.

M.P.s who supported the Grey, Melbourne, Russell and Palmerston governments were all described as ‘Liberals’ in contemporary registers such as those by Dod and McCalmont. However, historians have recently attempted to differentiate intellectually among these M.P.s, and in particular to sort out the liberals from the whigs. A difficulty here is that, in a period which was almost equally dominated by religious and ecclesiastical issues on the one hand and social and economic issues on the other, it appears that those politicians who were most ‘liberal’ in one context were least ‘liberal’ in the other. The subject of this article, Lord Morpeth, conformed to a type of ‘whig–liberal’ politician whose social policies were ‘whig’ rather than ‘liberal’, but who exemplified that tolerant approach to religious politics which has been termed ‘liberal Anglican’. It is possible to infer Morpeth's theological views from his many comments on sermons and devotional texts, and it appears that the best way to understand his religion (and its impact on his politics) is in terms, not of liberal Anglicanism, but of incarnationalism combined with a type of joyous pre-millenarianism (or jolly apocalypticism) not uncharacteristic of the mid nineteenth century. Reacting against the evangelical and high church revivals, yet sharing their piety and rectitude, Morpeth's incarnational religion represented an attempt to reconcile a theory of individual personality with ideas of community and brotherhood – to soften the ‘spiritual capitalism’ implied by ‘moderate’ Anglican evangelicalism, while retaining its emphasis on individual responsibility. Its secular equivalent was the type of ‘half-way’ social reform espoused by many whig-liberals in the third quarter of the century.

The lurid story of the fall of Anne Boleyn, her trial and condemnation on charges of multiple (and in one case incestuous) adultery has been used to support many different interpretations of the political and religious history of the reign of Henry VIII. This article argues that the fate of the queen and those accused with her was not the result of wider factional battles or a cynical sacrifice, either to appease a jaded king or to enable a shift in religious or diplomatic policy. Nor was it a case of justice catching up with a libidinous woman who was guilty as charged. In fact Anne's fall was far swifter and more dramatic than previous accounts have suggested, the result essentially of just two days of hectic activity at court and their aftermath. Anne fell, it is argued here, not as a result of what she did, but of what she said during the May Day weekend of 1536, in a series of incautious conversations with the men who were to be tried and executed with her.

England's decision to opt for the reformed religion had major repercussions in her foreign relations. Continental and Scottish protestants now looked to their royal co-religionist for protection. An intervention in Scotland on behalf of the reformers was triumphantly successful. When the French protestants took arms in 1562 they turned to Elizabeth for aid. Cecil was hesitant; Robert Dudley, however, backed by Throckmorton, urged armed intervention. The queen agreed but drove a hard bargain. The Huguenots were to hand over Newhaven (Le Havre) to be held by the English until Calais was returned. She in turn loaned money to hire mercenaries. From the beginning the alliance faltered. Elizabeth refused succour to the Huguenots besieged in Rouen. Condé and Coligny opened negotiations with Catherine de Medici, in which English interests were disregarded. In due course the assassination of the duke of Guise, the catholic champion, opened the way for a settlement. The reunited French parties joined in an assault on Newhaven; a humiliating surrender followed. The ill success of this venture was decisive in shaping the future course of English relations with their continental co-religionists. At home it marked the emergence of Robert Dudley as a major player in high politics.

There exists in the British Museum a copy of the prayer book of 1559 bearing the signature of Sir Nicholas Bacon. It would be reasonable to infer that the book was once the lord keeper's property, but a pleasing fancy to pretend that he autographed it for a friend and well-wisher. He was not the author of this all but final recension of the Anglican liturgy but he was one of its principal sponsors. For in the words of Ralph Churton,’the business of that important parliament… in which the acts of uniformity and supremacy for the settlement of religion were passed was principally managed by the Lord Keeper Bacon’. It was Bacon who presided, not only in the House of Lords but over the theological disputation in Westminster Hall which was staged as a public signal that the English Church was to be once more reformed according to the protestant model. In a speech at the conclusion of the 1559 parliament he defended the newly made settlement against opponents and detractors, and in so doing scratched in the sand, as it were, the line of the Anglican via media:’Amongst thease I meane to comprehende aswell those that be to swifte as those that be to slowe, those I say that goe before the lawe or beyond the lawe as those that will not followe.’