This article examines the assessments of John Calvin's life, character, and influence to be found in the polemical writings of English Catholics in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. It demonstrates the centrality of Calvin to Catholic claims about the character and history of the established church, and the extent to which Catholic writings propagated a vibrant ‘black legend’ of Calvin's egotism and sexual depravity, drawing heavily not only on the writings of the French Calvinist-turned-Catholic Jerome Bolsec, but also on those of German Lutherans. The article also explores how, over time, Catholic writers increasingly identified some common ground with anti-puritans and anti-Calvinists within the English church, and how claims about the seditious character of Calvin, and by extension Calvinism, were used to articulate the contrasting ‘loyalty’ of Catholics and their right to occupy a place within the English polity.

Russia in 1815 appeared with England as the saviour of Europe from Napoleon's despotism; the Tsar Alexander I, both by his moderation towards the French nation and by the generosity of his promises to the Poles, earned the respect of all good Europeans. In England especially the Whig party, true to the traditions of 1790 and of opposition to Pitt's warlike threats, was always ready to admire the Tsar and to co-operate with Russia. Twenty years later dislike and fear of Russia was in the minds of most Englishmen, and the responsible utterances of party leaders ranged from extreme reserve to unconcealed hostility. It is curious that some of the most hostile voices were now among the Whigs, while the tone of Conservative leaders was more cautious, and the only friends of Russia were to be found in Lord Durham and Richard Cobden, both men of Radical leanings.

The tendency to draw a sharp line of demarcation between pre- and post-1660 England has long been standard historical practice. This separation is especially evident in the study of apocalyptic thought, which is accepted as important to understanding the history of early and mid-seventeenth-century England: despite the efforts of some scholars to trace its subsequent developments, the presence of eschatological language and belief in the later seventeenth century is most often relegated to the radical margins and lunatic fringes of English society. This article demonstrates that apocalyptic convictions were not dismissed from mainstream relevance after 1660. Using the Revolution of 1688–9 as a case-study, it demonstrates that hopes and predictions of eschatological fulfilment were present among nonconformists and Church of England proponents alike. In their works are found apocalyptic celebrations of the events of 1688 and 1689, and also the continued concern with issues that had dominated domestic religious and political discourse for the previous three decades.

Seeking to challenge the totalizing theory of an ‘ethnographic state’, this article examines a mid-nineteenth-century paradigm shift that impacted the colonial study of borderland populations along India's North-West Frontier. While the establishment of metropolitan ethnographic societies in the 1870s facilitated the rise of socio-cultural evolutionism, colonial agents also utilized folklore and proverb studies to represent the borderland societies as dynamic cultural entities reactive to British encroachment. Four case-studies, moreover, demonstrate that a variety of motivations compelled colonial agents to produce ethnographic material. These factors included personal scholarly ambition, political activism, and a commitment to transregional ‘scientific’ data collection projects. This study complicates the relationship between knowledge production and state power by reasserting the significance of personality as an operative force in the formation of colonial discourse.

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike.

The article draws on recently discovered manuscript sources to re-examine Joseph II's structural changes to the Catholic and Uniat church in the Austrian central lands between 1781 and 1790. In contrast to the extensive literature dealing with state policy towards church authority, or Josephinism, these changes have traditionally been the subject of guesswork and misstatement. Joseph has been credited with nationalizing the church, ruthlessly cutting down its monastic numbers, placing the secular clergy on fixed stipends, and financing a wholesale increase in bishoprics, parishes and secular clergy by extensive sales of monastic lands. The article presents new figures for clerical numbers and income before and after Joseph's reforms, and argues that while the latter were radical (though not always consistent) in intention, they were much less so in execution, partly because the church's resources, exposed by the emperor's massive investigation, proved less extensive than he had expected.

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.

During the wars of the eighteenth century, French prisoners on parole in Britain were placed in a paradoxical situation of captives with privileges. Instead of studying these men as if they dwelt in a world apart, this article focuses on captivity zones as a social laboratory, where people of different status would socialize. These spaces accordingly provide a lens through which to glimpse the repercussions of international conflicts at the level of local communities. The disputes which opposed these captives to the English population, which were the object of letters of complaints sent by the French prisoners to the authorities, shed light on the normative and moral resources which were used by eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen to legitimize themselves in situations of social conflict. As a configuration characterized by shifting social relations, the parole zone brought together local, national, and international issues, intertwined primarily in the rhetoric of honour. In these incidents, there was no systematic alignment of class and national discourses and actions, while the precise standing of these Frenchmen on the social ladder was constantly challenged and debated. The resulting quarrels therefore reveal a series of social inversions: dominant groups in France were in many respects dominated in England. Rather than being a mere reflection of pre-existing social hierarchies, such micro-incidents reinvented them.

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.

The dominant memory of the Paris Commune has been of disproportionate violence wreaked on the Communards by a brutal government. However, accounts of the extent of the bloodshed rest on flimsy foundations. A range of archival evidence suggests that the death toll has been greatly exaggerated, and a revised estimate is here proposed. How and why the number of deaths became crucial to the history of the Commune from an early date is explored. If the killing was in reality on a far less apocalyptic scale, how does this affect the narrative of nineteenth-century French politics and its ‘memory’?

The importance of the honours system as an institution in British politics and public life has frequently been underestimated. At the end of the First World War, the British government prioritized voluntary service to the state as an area which the honours system should reward more than others through the newly created Order of the British Empire. However, after the war the Order changed to focus more on civil servants, soldiers, and the broad category of ‘local service’. The latter could include volunteers, but more often did not. Various attempts to democratize honours through reforms from the 1960s focused on rewarding a wider range of service. The most successful of these was John Major's honours reform programme in 1993, which returned volunteer service to the forefront of the public image of honours. While these reforms were not as egalitarian as they seemed, they were successful because they integrated an ideology of crown honours with the other functions of the modern monarchy and opened up the honours system to a wider potential set of recipients. At the same time, they maintained a hierarchical structure that meant that elites who had traditionally enjoyed the exclusivity of high honours continued to do so.

The period 1929–33 was perhaps the most traumatic in the inter-war history of the British Labour movement; the ignominious collapse of the second Labour government led the Labour party to question not only the role of its former leaders but also its ideology. This article will reassess the role of the Oxford academic and socialist intellectual, G. D. H. Cole, in this period and will argue that his contribution to the reshaping of the party in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis and the formation of the national government was of much greater significance than has previously been acknowledged. In addition, it will analyse the effects that the political events of the 1920s and the failures of the Macdonald government had upon Cole's socialist ideology and will illustrate that his move away from his earlier guild socialism to a collectivist philosophy was more profound than he himself, and many commentators since, have been prepared to concede.

Financing the crown was, perhaps, the seminal question in the English reign of James VI and I. Attempts to tap commercial wealth were a central feature of fiscal policy. The derivations of crown finance from commerce are straightforward; for instance, customs duties or concessions the crown held in monopolies and patents. The grandest project of James's reign, Alderman Cockayne's project to export dyed and dressed cloth, embodied these commercial-fiscal connections in addition to the goal of economic growth. The same points are exemplified by proposals to construct a fleet of fishing vessels (busses) with which to confront Dutch mastery of the trade. This project also enticed policy-makers and provides a vehicle through which to examine the relationship between crown finance and commerce, the revisionist approach to the structural failures of early Stuart government, and the politics of crown finance. The first section will trace the development of ‘projects’ and the conceptualization of crown finance as a project par excellence. The second section analyses specifically the busses projects. The final section examines the interaction of busses and fiscal policy in the 1610s. The argument is that the ultimate failure of finance was political rather than structural and the basis for this failure lay in the operation of Jacobean kingship upon policy-making.

An expeditionary force of the Indian Army landed in Turkish territory at the head of the Persian Gulf almost immediately upon the declaration of war by Britain against Turkey on 5 November 1914. After winning some minor engagements against Turkish forces, it marched into Basra, the chief town of southern Mesopotamia, on the 23rd. The subsequent course of the campaign in Mesopotamia included a number of setbacks for the British. The principal city, Baghdad, was not captured until after nearly two and a half years of fighting, and the chief northern city, Mosul, not indeed until after an armistice had been signed with Turkey. Even so, by the time hostilities ceased, large areas in the south had been under continuous British occupation for four years and the possibility of further advance was throughout the war present in the minds of British leaders, whether in London, Simla or Mesopotamia itself. Against this background of military conquest and a pre-war diplomacy among the European powers, excluding Russia, in which Mesopotamia had been marked out as the British sphere if Turkey was partitioned, it is unsurprising that the political future of the country should have been much discussed within British official circles. War aims went through several phases whose study contributes to understanding of British aims in the war as a whole.

It is almost forty years since the Geneva conference of April–July 1954 ended the French war in Indo-China. The ‘success’ of the conference was seen as a triumph for the efforts of British diplomacy, and for Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in particular, a judgement which has altered little with the passage of time. The following article questions this view on the grounds that, ironically, British support for Geneva had little or nothing to do with the situation in Indo-China. On the contrary, it arose in the wider context of policy towards the European Defence Community. It was also a product of Eden's unhappiness at Britain's junior status in the so-called Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. The British attitude to Geneva only became more positive in March-April 1954 when French fortunes reached their nadir and the alternative to a negotiated solution in Viet-Nam seemed to be American, or American-led, military intervention. Faced with this potentially catastrophic prospect, the previously ‘unwanted’ conference assumed a new relevance for Eden and British diplomacy.

Even in the uncertain and tempestuous times of Henry VIII, Cromwell's fall from power was unusually sudden and precipitate. On 18 April 1540 he was created earl of Essex and great chamberlain of England, thus confounding his enemies and those onlookers who had seen him tottering for some time; for the next two months he appeared to be enjoying his master's confidence as much as ever; but on 10 June he was suddenly arrested at the council table, hustled to the Tower, condemned without a hearing, and kept alive until a belated execution on. 28 July only because Henry still wanted his testimony against Anne of Cleves. It is alleged that he foresaw his fall some two years earlier, and indeed it is probable that he was always aware of the dangerous insecurity of a position which so entirely depended on the royal favour; nevertheless, when the knife actually fell it seems to have taken him by surprise. How and why it all happened are questions that have often been considered, but may never find a completely satisfactory answer because the principal actors in the drama did not commit themselves on paper. Burnet pointed out long ago that Henry's dissatisfaction with Anne of Cleves cannot have been the sole or even the chief reason, because Cromwell obtained his last and greatest honours after that storm broke; he saw the decisive factors in the accusations of heresy which were brought against Cromwell.

Successive governments in Britain took great steps towards a more democratic form of government between 1911 and 1928. Universal suffrage, first proposed tentatively by a government in the former year, was completed in the latter. In the same period, the house of lords - the rejuvenation of which was treated at least nominally as vital by both the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition in 1911 - was effectively relegated even by Conservatives to an unimportant role. The attitudes and policies of Conservative politicians towards these changes deserve study for diverse reasons. They were part of a national debate about the wisdom of progress towards democracy; and so they form an important chapter in the development of political attitudes. They also do much to explain both how the process of democratization occurred, and how post-war governments viewed the electorate, as Conservatives participated in or dominated governments for most of the years from 1915 to 1945. Finally, the importance of Conservative views has been overlooked by historians, because they have persistently pre-dated the trend to democracy in Britain and so underestimated the scale of controversy about it. These historiographical tendencies are illustrated by the still lingering myth that the franchise before 1914 was close to manhood suffrage, or by the hitherto general assumption that the reform bill of 1917–18 was uncontroversial.

Although one of the most influential figures of his time, Bishop Gilbert Burnet has become one of the most neglected. This article outlines Burnet's worldview, arguing that it can only be partly understood by labelling him a ‘latitudinarian’ as scholars have hitherto tended to. Alongside Burnet's conventionally latitudinarian descriptions of Christianity as a set of rational and simple beliefs that could command very wide assent, the bishop also had a strong sense of history as a providential and apocalyptic unfolding of a battle between ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches, which was characterized by a powerful European dimension and by an identification of Antichrist with religious persecution. The article concludes with suggestions about how such lines of thought might have cohered with the more traditionally ‘latitudinarian’ elements of Burnet's philosophy, and about how they might allow historians to re-think the latitudinarian movement more generally.

Although often differing dramatically in their methodologies and conclusions, most studies of the slave societies of the American South either draw to a close by the middle years of the eighteenth century or begin their story only in the 1820s and 1830s. Moreover, whilst some scholars have differentiated between particular patterns of black behaviour, as for example between African- and country-born slaves, field hands and domestic slaves, until quite recently comparatively little interest has been shown in delineating the ways in which black women perceived and responded to their status and condition.

This article addresses the historiographical neglect of tory women in the early Victorian period. The existence of a vibrant culture of female conservative letters, combined with the widespread participation of women in ultra-Protestant pressure-group politics, is suggestive of the neglected contribution women made to the revival of grass-roots toryism during these years. In particular, it is suggested that a consideration of the distinctive features of premillenarian Evangelicalism enables a more discriminating approach to the impact of Evangelicalism upon contemporary women. By focusing upon the career of the prominent premillenarian Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and her editorship of the Christian Lady's Magazine, it is argued that contemporary attitudes towards ‘female politicians’ were far more flexible, variable, and contingent than is frequently assumed. The associational activities with which many premillenarians were involved, combined with their attention to Old Testament models of publicly active women and the sense of urgency that distinguished their theology, frequently led its adherents to problematize and critique existing formulations of women's roles.