The Habsburg monarchy – its Iberian branch, at least – could regard 1559 as the beginning of a new era; a lasting peace had been made with France and the new King had returned to Castile. In Europe the Empire had withstood the stresses of the previous fifty years with remarkable success: Habsburg control of the Netherlands and the thin ribbon of territories linking them with Italy remained unimpaired: in Italy, Charles V and his successor had defeated all attempts by France and the Papacy to weaken the Imperial hold on the peninsula.

During Queen Anne's reign it was thought noteworthy that, in an age otherwise disfigured by party rancour, the charity school movement had won general acclaim. ‘No colourable Objection has been made against it’, declared the high churchman Andrew Snape in 1711, ‘nor indeed can it meet with Opposition from any, but those who are unwilling that the Empire of the Devil should be weaken'd, that Vice and Immorality should lose any Ground, and who are the declar'd Enemies of God and Goodness’. Charity schools were viewed as a force for unity in a politically divided society. Writing to Robert Harley in August 1710, John Hooke expressed his hope that Harley would lead a non-party ‘Coalition of Honest Men’, and noted universal praise for the charity schools as a sign of optimism for the future. At the 1709 anniversary service of the London charity schools, Samuel Bradford, a whig divine, bemoaned divisions in the body politic, but happily remarked that ‘The design which we are here pursuing has a natural tendency to unite the serious and pious of different persuasions amongst us’ Bradford's joy, though, was tempered with a warning. Just as there was ‘nothing more likely to unite us, than the zealous Prosecution of such a design’, so there was ‘nothing could so effectually defeat our endeavours in this case, as the espousing or promoting any particular Party or Faction’. The Reverend Lord Willoughby de Broke also feared that the charity schools would be dragged into the arena of party conflict. The charity would flourish, he commented in 1712, “if our political Discords do not withhold the Mercy of God from prospering this good work”.

Baron Aehrenthal told the British Ambassador at Vienna in 1908 that British policy was “idealistic and humanitarian” while “his was frankly realistic.” In practice British “idealism” hasnowhere been more strongly dashed with “realism” than in Turkey. The dogma of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire became established as a principle of British policy during the late thirties. This result was mainly due to Palmerston and to the revelation of the dependence of Turkey on Russia implied in the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. The presence of Russian warships on the waters, and Russian troops on the shores, of the Bosphorus taught a lesson to Englishmen. The defence of Constantinople became a sort of dogma, which ultimately extended to almost all parties in the state. Cobden and Bright resisted the infection but they were in a small minority. The Crimean War was a result of this dogma, and it is to be noted that even Aberdeen—who so greatly regretted the bloodshed—thought it right for England to defend Constantinople. Even so late as 1878 Disraeli was able to rally the majority in Parliament and in the country in defence of the same cause and city. And the reason for this defence was British interests.

The fine and delicate balance of political forces and interests in midnineteenth century Britain is nowhere better demonstrated than in the activities of certain social and religious pressure groups during the general election campaign of 1859. The two main parties were certainly conscious of their past and of the traditions imposed upon them by those who had gone before; equally certainly the differences between them were more the outcome of these traditions than of real contemporary disagreements as to policy or outlook. The Tory administration led by Lord Derby, which had come to power in February 1858, was in a minority in the House of Commons. Its survival depended on an ability to attract dissident Whigs and men of independent views. Derby, never the most optimistic of men, had realized as early as April 1857 that his party, ‘if not an actual corpse’, was at most ‘in a state of suspended animation’.1 By the beginning of 1859 it had become evident to a number of Tory leaders, and particularly to Disraeli, that if the government were to survive, it would be necessary to obtain help from quarters hitherto untapped by the party. A peculiar set of circumstances led Disraeli to look to sections of the Roman Catholic community for such support. Although Catholicism was a growing force in England, the centre of its political operations lay of course in Ireland, which then returned 105 members to Westminster.

In the negotiations relating to eastern and north-eastern Africa which Lord Salisbury conducted with Germany and Italy in 1890 and 1891, the desire to safeguard the waters of the Upper and Middle Nile usually played the predominant part. But this problem could not be solved in isolation from the more general considerations of Britain's position towards the powers of the Triple Alliance and, less directly, towards France. It was important that disputes relating to the upper basin of the Nile should not be permitted to disrupt the friendly relations with Germany and Italy which were themselves the diplomatic guarantee of Britain's continued presence in Egypt and indeed, since the Mediterranean Agreements of 1887, the main foundation of Salisbury's foreign policy. But it was equally important that the friendly settlement of these disputes should not result in alignments with Rome and Berlin so close as to destroy the generally tolerable relations with France which enabled Salisbury to avoid complete commitment to the Triple Alliance and an excessive dependence upon German goodwill. The history of the Anglo-Italian controversy and the immediate consequences of its settlement, which took place over a period of nearly two years, reveals more explicitly than the much briefer negotiation with Germany the perturbing influence of international rivalry in Africa upon Salisbury's delicate adjustments in Europe. For Salisbury the problem was complicated, rather than simplified, by the fact that Britain's rivals in Africa were friends nearer home.

Pietro Giannone was a revolutionary thinker who sought in the early decades of the eighteenth century to free Italy from the inveterate, legally entrenched feudal power of the church and then to free Christianity itself from the stifling and corrupting embrace of the political church. This essay tells the improbable story of how his writings were taken up and disseminated in Britain by the non-juring bishop and antiquary Richard Rawlinson, the learned but morally unsound Scottish journalist Archibald Bower, and an odd crew of Jacobites. It is shown that the translations of Giannone got into some very influential hands and represent part of an undervalued Jacobite contribution to the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment and to the thought of Edward Gibbon.

‘Watersheds’ and ‘turning points’ are two standard literary devices for addressing the question of direction in history. Once that direction is determined, one is able to survey the roads not taken, sorting out the possible and the probable from the unavoidable. This paper forswears the vocabulary of turning points, but it owes something to the idea such language expresses. Put cryptically, our discussions of the origins of the Second World War could afford to pay closer attention to Franco-Italian relations in the 1930s. Next to the Manchurian, Rhenish, Spanish, Austrian, Czech and Polish crises of that decade, the crisis within the ephemeral alliance between Paris and Rome has been given short shrift. Even within the context of the Ethiopian crisis there is a tendency to measure the implications against Anglo-French, Anglo-Italian and Italo-German relations. The net effect is to downplay the importance of relations between France and Italy. And from that, to choose but one example, comes an exaggerated sense of the ease with which the French fell into line with British policy in the Mediterranean, and with which the Italians subsequently received German overtures respecting Austria and Central Europe.

This article examines travel within a group of Protestant families from Ireland over three generations after the Restoration. It offers both a case-study through which to reassess continental educational voyages, exploring a neglected period between the royalist exile of the 1650s and the mid-eighteenth-century heyday of the Grand Tour, and a contribution to current work on Irish elite formation. Histories of travel often begin as undifferentiated Englishmen or Britons arrive on the French or Dutch coast, but this study is the first to prioritize where travellers came from. Backgrounds, outlooks, and networks from home shaped experiences abroad. The article uses manuscript journals, letters, and financial accounts to locate travel within family educational strategies and to reconstruct preparations and advice. It explores how connections and identifications from home informed interactions with fellow travellers, expatriate communities, and foreign hosts. Travellers pursued two-sided interactions with hosts and destinations, returning with objects, accomplishments, and connections that fed into Irish elite formation. Continental links often feature in explanations of how Catholic Ireland survived, but this article shows that European encounters also contributed to Protestant hegemony. It demonstrates the importance of origins, as well as destinations, to understandings and experiences of educational travel.

From the pageantry and elaborate stage-management of embassies in the early modern period to ping pong or panda diplomacy, policy-makers have used public rituals to dramatize or make statements about international relationships. For most of the nineteenth century the United States refused, in the name of republican simplicity, to sanction the wearing of court dress or the sending and receiving of ambassadors. Congress steadfastly refused to compromise with the standards of European monarchies on these symbols of American exceptionalism. Historians of diplomacy have neglected such phenomena, but concentration on them may allow a bridging of the gulf which Bernard Porter has lamented between their field and other sub-disciplines, commenting that the former remained ‘Newtonian survivals in the age of Einstein’.

Historians of the ‘Age of Reform’ have sometimes been tempted into the fallacy castigated long ago by Herbert Butterfield; they busy themselves ‘with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress’ and forget ‘with what wilfulness and waste [progress] twists and turns”. Often, by implication, they exaggerate the stupidity and selfishness of the reactionaries while overestimating the enlightenment of the reformers and understressing their faddishness, their lack of scruple, and their divided aims or methods; it thus becomes difficult to see why reforming causes were ever resisted. In this sense, nineteenth-century England has received too few ‘Tory historians’ not too many; though with Professor Gash's well-known defence of Tories misguided enough to oppose franchise reform in 1831–2, and with the recent reinstatement of mid-Victorian working men shortsighted enough to vote Liberal there are signs that the reaction against Whiggish historiography of the nineteenth century has already begun.

The rise of modern Catalan nationalist sentiments dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In essence, these sentiments reflected a growing political, intellectual and, to a lesser extent economic resentment within the region of Catalonia against the Restoration regime which was imposed upon Spain in 1875. The breakthrough of Catalan nationalism, or regionalism as it is sometimes called, to become a significant force in Spanish politics followed the victory of four Catalanist candidates in the elections to the Cortes of 1901. Shortly afterwards the groups responsible for that electoral success came together to establish what was, with the possible exception of the Socialists (P.S.O.E.), the first modern political party of Spain, the Lliga Regionalista. Significantly, the foundation of the Lliga marked a turning point in the nature of Catalan nationalism, or at least its dominant strain. Of the four candidates elected in 1901, all for Barcelona seats, three represented economic interests. Indeed, much more than that, they were, or had been, presidents of three of the most powerful big business organisations of the region.

When thinking of Churchill's attitude towards the Soviet Union one automatically thinks of him as the most outspoken of the advocates of armed intervention during the civil war, or as the author of the speech in Fulton, Missouri, which many people regard as the opening salvo in the Cold War. During the war, however, when the Soviet Union became a great ally without whose help the war in Europe could never have been won, his attitude was bound to be quite different. Even before the Germans launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’ thus forcing the Soviets into the Allied camp, Churchill had been thinking of the Russians as possible partners in the struggle against Nazi Germany, for however much he detested the Soviet regime, his passionate determination to destroy Nazism was a far more powerful emotion, and, as he put it, if Hitler were to invade Hell he would promptly sign a pact with the Devil.

On 17 February 1785, William Pitt reported to the house of commons on his administration's response to the reports of the commission for examining the public accounts established by Lord North five years earlier. Since 1780, the commissioners of accounts had summarized and rationalized the new approaches to public administration that had blossomed in the economical-reform movement of the early 1780s; their work has been described by recent commentators as ‘a comprehensive and quite radical philosophy of the public interest’, and even ‘a new bureaucratic ideology’. For his part, Pitt commended the commissioners for having ‘given light to parliament on subjects hitherto involved in the most inscrutable obscurity’, and he stated that it was ‘the duty of the House to profit from the Reports’. After reviewing their findings of manifold deficiencies in the issue and audit of public money, Pitt introduced legislation to reform the treasurership of the navy and to set up a new department for auditing public accounts. The commissioners' more sweeping recommendations for reforms of official compensation and discipline were to be addressed by a new commission on fees, whose broad charge would be: to inquire into the fees, gratuities, perquisites, and emoluments, which are, or lately have been, received in the several public offices…; and to report such observations as may occur to them for the better conducting and managing the business transacted….

The Spanish Civil War, as Stanley Payne has recently pointed out, was also a civil war between Spanish Basques. On the side of the Spanish Republic was the tiny and shortlived Basque Republic of Euzkadi, limited to the coastal provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa where Basque Nationalism had its stronghold; on that of the insurgents were the inland provinces of Álava and Navarre, dominated politically by the ultra-conservative, monarchist and rabidly Catholic Carlists. In a war notorious for the bitterness of its fighting, some of the most bitter took place along the front formed by the Basque mountains, now a political as well as a physical barrier dividing the Basque country. Basque Carlists seized in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa were imprisoned and executed as enemies of Euzkadi; in Navarre and Álava, Basque Nationalists met a similar fate as traitors to Spain; and when Guipúzcoa was overrun by a predominantly Carlist invading army from Navarre, it was treated as conquered and occupied territory, part of its area actually being claimed for a Navarrese ‘corridor’ to the sea.

This article examines Allied peace planning during the latter stages of the First World War by comparing and connecting the British, French, and American expert groups. These academic experts were expected to apply the publicly announced programme of national self-determination to the local realities in Europe without losing sight of their governments’ geopolitical directives. Contacts and exchanges between the three groups, largely neglected in the literature, played a crucial role in shaping the experts’ work. At the same time, persisting national suspicion and the fragile institutional position of the experts prevented open debate on the precise meaning of national self-determination and thereby forestalled the development of a coherent Allied peace programme. This shortcoming would become a serious burden for the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and the early interwar period, in that it led to growing frustration and undermined Allied commitment to the Paris peace treaties.

In his celebrated 1987 essay, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Patrick Collinson wrote that ‘Elizabethan England was a republic which also happened to be a monarchy: or vice versa.’ Since then, the idea of an Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’ has been tested, challenged, and developed, with precedents found in Henry VIII's and Edward VI's reigns. Mary I's reign has not, however, been considered for its contribution to the debates. Yet, in 1553, the unique circumstances of Mary's accession as England's first queen regnant, who was also still legally a bastard, exacerbated sixteenth-century anxieties about monarchical authority, and about the correct relationship between a monarch and parliament. Prior to Mary's coronation, her council put forward an unprecedented proposal: they wanted parliament to sit before Mary was anointed and crowned queen. This article explores this proposal, in conjunction with two texts, Richard Taverner's An oration gratulatory made upon the joyfull proclayming of the moste noble Princes Quene Mary Quene of Englande and the play Respublica, to argue that, at the beginning of her reign, significant pressure was put on Mary to rule her country as a ‘monarchical republic’.

Condorcet has been seen since the 1790s as the embodiment of the cold, rational Enlightenment. The paper explores his writings on economic policy, voting, and public instruction, and suggests different views both of Condorcet and of the Enlightenment. Condorcet was concerned with individual diversity; he was opposed to proto-utilitarian theories; he considered individual independence, which he described as the characteristic liberty of the moderns, to be of central political importance; and he opposed the imposition of universal and eternal principles. His efforts to reconcile the universality of some values with the diversity of individual opinions are of continuing interest. He emphasizes the institutions of civilized or constitutional conflict, recognizes conflicts or inconsistencies within individuals, and sees moral sentiments as the foundation of universal values. His difficulties call into question some familiar distinctions, for example between French, German, and English/Scottish thought, and between the Enlightenment and the ‘counter-Enlightenment’. There is substantial continuity, it is suggested, between Condorcet's criticism of the economic ideas of the 1760s (of Tocqueville's ‘first’ French revolution) and the liberal thought of the early nineteenth century.

An issue that has long concerned historians of colonial America is that of the social origins of the English men and women who came to the New World in bondage. It has been estimated that half of all white immigration to the thirteen colonies was made up of indentured servants; therefore no quantitative description of the labour force or the social structure of colonial America is possible without some knowledge of what kinds of people bound themselves to serve in return for passage to the colonies. Historians' assessments of these early immigrants have ranged widely, from Abbot Emerson Smith's judgment that they were ‘the most ignorant and idle’ of English contemporaries to Mildred Campbell's view that ‘most were drawn from the middling classes…the productive groups in England's working population’.

The contemporary international system is at once the continuation and the negation ofthe old European states-system. It is the continuation in the sense that the world is nowpeopled with the same kind of political bodies that were formerly concentrated within thearea of Europe alone, namely sovereign states. The overseas empires of Britain, France, Spain, and others, represented both the subordination of the rest of the world to Europe, and the media through which the state as a political structure was exported from Europe. The dissolution of these empires, foreshadowed by the independence of the United States and the emancipation of Spain's Latin American colonies, and accomplished definitively in the half-century following the Great War, signified the extension of inter-state relationships to the world in general, while it marked the end of the domination of the European states in particular.