The nationwide campaign to erect railed altars in the 1630s has always been seen as a central feature of the Laudian reformation of the Church. Recently some scholars have denied its close association with Laud and Arminian sacramentalism, and have proposed that the policy originated with Charles I, to be reluctantly endorsed by his archbishop. As for its enforcement, Julian Davies has identified at least five variants which were implemented in the dioceses. This article argues instead that Archbishops Neile and Laud were centrally involved in the introduction of the railed altar, and that they oversaw the imposition of a single altar policy, with only Williams of Lincoln briefly championing a variation on it. Differences did emerge, however, over where communicants should receive, since this had not been prescribed by authority. Charles I, on this reading, was not the driving force for change, although he clearly came to support it.

During the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

A tax on dogs was passed in 1796 because it seemed to address both the government's need for revenue and other serious social and economic problems. Arguments for and against a dog tax throughout the eighteenth century engaged with issues not raised in discussions of other kinds of taxes because of the unique place of dogs in human society; positions on the question of a dog tax depended largely on assumptions about the purpose that dogs served, or ought to serve. Proponents often argued that a dog tax would decrease the population of nuisance dogs, whilst also preventing poaching. Other tax advocates presented a dog tax as a luxury tax, but there was no agreement about which kinds of dogs were luxuries, and which were necessities that should be exempt from the tax. By the time a bill was debated in parliament in 1796, the terms of the debate had shifted because of new attitudes toward animals. The tax that was ultimately passed largely ignored the interests of the primary advocates of a tax throughout the century, instead treating the pets of the poor as necessities that merited exemption.

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.

Based on a sample of about 5,000 members, this article offers the first comprehensive social profile of the IRA covering the entire period of the Irish revolution. The picture that emerges is of an organization composed largely of unpropertied, unmarried, young men of the middling classes, increasingly disproportionately dominated by urban, skilled, and socially mobile activists. Officers tended to be slightly older and of slightly higher social status than their men. Sinn Fein activists were older again but otherwise shared these characteristics, as did the IRA in Britain. This dependence on urban and skilled or white-collar members, the reverse of what republicans and most historians have believed, may be attributable to a combination of the greater risks and greater organizational opportunities faced by the IRA in towns. Nevertheless, the movement did attract rural and labouring members, and did to some extent transcend class and geographical boundaries. IRA units were almost never segregated along class lines, and were usually built around familial and neighbourhood networks. Also, as the revolution progressed, activists' previous social identities were superseded by a new and essentially egalitarian identity as comrades and guerrillas.

Since 1947, the relationship between Indian society and the British empire has provided the most important frame of reference for scholars writing about the history of modern India. India is often treated merely as an exemplar of the colonial condition. As a result, scholars have failed properly to examine modern India's participation in global processes of historical change, and been reluctant adequately to ‘provincialize’ Europe. This review argues that historians need to move beyond this imperial frame of reference if they are to explain the transition to, or characteristics of, British rule in the subcontinent. Placing modern India in a broader comparative context allows one to see how the colonial subcontinent participated in an uneven but broadly comparative set of processes which occurred across Asia as well as Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are, for example, important parallels between the process of active state-, economy-, and culture-formation occurring in France, Germany, and India in the nineteenth century, for example. This comparative approach would not denigrate the importance of ‘colonialism’ as an analytical category. It might, though, allow historians to produce a more satisfying interpretation of the difference between colonial and non-colonial states and societies.

The Vatican is often cast as a marginal player in the reshaping of the European international order after the First World War. Drawing on new archival material, this article argues for a reassessment of the content and consequences of papal diplomacy. It focuses on the years between 1917 and 1929, during which time the Vatican used the tools of international law and state-to-state diplomacy to expand its power in both eastern and western Europe. The Vatican's interwar activism sought to disseminate a new Catholic vision of international affairs, which militated against the separation of church and state, and in many contexts helped undermine the principles of the League of Nations’ minority rights regime. Thanks in no small part to the assiduity of individual papal diplomats – who disseminated the new Catholic vision of international affairs by supporting anti-communist political factions – the Vatican was able to claim a more prominent role in European political affairs and lay the legal and discursive foundations for an alternate conception of the European international order, conceived in starkly anti-secular terms.

In 1868 the Birmingham Liberal Association won the first of a series of dazzling victories in parliamentary and municipal elections. Contemporaries immediately recognized the presence of a new phenomenon in English politics: disciplined control of a mass electorate by a tightly organized party apparatus. At first glance the Liberal machine seemed un-English, and the Tories gleefully imported an American epithet to describe it. The traditional interpretation of the caucus, as set forth by Ostrogorski, followed contemporary opinion in emphasizing the novelty of the institution. In his view, ‘the organization of the electoral masses’ by the Liberal Association represented a sharp break with the past. He traced its origin to the minority clause of the Reform Act of 1867, which gave each Birmingham elector two votes to divide among the candidates for three seats, thus challenging the Liberals to develop an organization capable of circumventing the Act. After their success in the ‘vote as you are told’ election of 1868, the Liberal politicians, according to Ostrogorski, continued to use the caucus as a contrivance for manipulating an electorate that otherwise might have exercised independent judgment. This interpretation remains of considerable value, particularly in its treatment of the oligarchic implications of modern democracy. Nevertheless, Ostrogorski’s analysis tends to be misleading and one-sided. The Liberal politicians, like the priests in Voltaire’s account of the history of religion, are depicted as consciously constructing an institution ex nihilo to meet their own needs and purposes. Ostrogorski attributes too much to calculation and too little to the historical process that created the materials out of which the caucus was built and the foundations on which it rested.

That the mid-seventeenth century in some way marked a turning point in English history now seems generally accepted. It witnessed, Professor Davis tells us, the beginning of a commercial revolution; it saw, Mr Hill has argued, the country converted to a vigorous new style imperialism. These are large questions which cannot be debated here. But what particularly concerns us is the corollary to such assumptions, that before this grand climacteric England was negligible at sea; and that, as it has recendy been put, ‘the basis on which England established itself in 1588 as the first naval power of Europe was created only during the previous two decades.’

Much has been written about the Methuen Commercial Treaty and its influence for good or bad. Rather less has been said about the negotiations which related to it, though Sir Richard Lodge wrote a good summary of the three Methuen treaties in Professor Prestage's Chapters in Anglo-Portuguese Relations and there is an excellent and much fuller account in German by Johann Albrecht. Some of the facts relating to these negotiations are still little known and there may, therefore, be scope for the following article, which attempts to set out some of the difficulties with which John Methuen had to contend and to place the commercial treaty in perspective.

This communication presents a newly discovered letter to Thomas Hobbes. It offers conclusive evidence that the letter was written by Hobbes's friend, the scientist and Anglican clergyman Robert Payne, and strong evidence that the letter was in fact received by Hobbes in late 1649. The discovered letter was part of a running controversy over questions of church government in which Hobbes and Payne engaged during the composition of Leviathan. In it Payne tries unsuccessfully to soften Hobbes's strident Erastianism, and to defend the beleaguered Church of England from his criticisms. The letter thus sheds light on the political and religious context in which Leviathan was composed. Moreover, the letter offers an indirect but intriguing glimpse at underlying assumptions of Hobbes's religious thought.

This article takes issue with the influential recent interpretation of Henry VIII's religious position as consistently ‘Erasmian’. Bringing to the discussion not only a re-evaluation of much familiar evidence but also a considerable quantity of hitherto unknown or little-known material, it proposes instead that Henry's religious position, until the 1530s, sat squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’ and that the subsequent changes in his attitudes to the cult of the saints, monasticism, and papal primacy were so significant as to be understood and described by Henry himself in terms of a veritable religious ‘conversion’. This conversion, which was very much sui generis, is not easily to be fitted within the confessional frameworks of other sixteenth-century religious movements (though it was by no means unaffected by them). It hinged upon Henry's new understanding of kingship as a supreme spiritual responsibility entrusted to kings by the Word of God, but long hidden from them by the machinations of the papacy. His own providential deliverance from blindness was, he believed, but the beginning of a more general spiritual enlightenment.

This article presents the first survey of the full range of diplomatic interactions between the Mughal Empire and the English and Dutch East India Companies (EIC and VOC) in the period 1608–1717. It proposes a typology of the six different modes of diplomacy practised by the EIC and VOC as a means to understand better the distinct nature of corporate diplomacy. Moving its focus beyond exceptional embassies, this article demonstrates that by far the most common forms of Company diplomatic activity consisted of low-profile petitioning at the imperial centre and ongoing political interactions with provincial and local power-holders. It draws on c. fifty distinct episodes to chart how Dutch and English diplomatic repertoires in South Asia took shape in response to local demands and conventions. Both Companies petitioned Mughal emperors in much the same way as Indian subjects did, and both relied on Mughal patrons to do so. Cast in the role of supplicants seeking imperial favour and protection, Company envoys presented themselves as obliging participants in the ceremonial performance of an asymmetrical relationship. By tying commercial privileges to expectations of submission and service, the imperial government proceeded to incorporate these foreign actors into a domestic political framework.

The paper considers reactions to William III's Declaration of reasons, the manifesto issued by the prince of Orange on the eve of his invasion of England in 1688. It questions recent historiography, which has argued for the importance of this document in William's success by claiming that it achieved a virtual hegemony of English political discourse in the period of the Glorious Revolution. The paper first shows that James II's supporters mounted an effective challenge to the Orange Declaration by reversing its claim that liberties were in danger under the existing regime. It then suggests that William lost control of his manifesto over the winter of 1688–9 by making moves to secure power and authority which were unadvertised in the document. Once this had happened, various groups opposed to Orange ambition were able to adopt the rhetoric of the Declaration and quote it back at the prince in attempts to block his advance. The paper concludes with the irony that the ubiquity of the Declaration in 1688 may have been a result of its failure as publicity for the Orange cause; and by suggesting that scholars should look in places other than the manifesto for an effective Williamite propaganda.

From the perspective of the 1990s, scarcely an eyebrow would be raised by the news that in 1946 India complained internationally about South Africa's treatment of persons of Indian origin. It would be regarded as fully in keeping with the ethos – both domestic and international – of the age. Moreover, it would be seen as entirely appropriate that the complaint should have been lodged with the United Nations. For that body has not only become South Africa's scourge but has also played the leading role in the now-orthodox campaign against racism. Furthermore, if it were pointed out that this was, in fact, the very first occasion when anti-racist sentiments were given a significant international airing, the response might well be that the UN was set up to deal with just this kind of issue.

The commitment of Charles I's government to press censorship and the rigour with which that censorship was enforced is the subject of the present essay. In 1627 Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, the Latin secretary to the privy council, became political licenser for the press. Over the next fourteen years he granted eighty-two licences and probably was responsible for many more. Drawing on his two office diaries, his personal correspondence, and the books and pamphlets to which he gave his imprimatur, this essay attempts a small portrait of a ‘royal censor’ in 1630s London. Although he occasionally allowed works implicitly critical of government policy, he appears to have been conscientious in his duties. (At least twice he approached Charles for his opinion about a licence.) Weckherlin's eventual loss of his licensing job to secretary of state Sir Francis Windebank's staff signalled the crown's interest in an even closer watch on printing and publishing. The evidence of Weckherlin's career suggests that in the decade before the Long Parliament Charles increasingly sought to curtail the power of the press.

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!