This article contributes to the debate over the value of petitions for the recovery of ‘public opinion’ in early modern England. It argues for a greater attentiveness to the politics and processes in their production. An analysis of a hitherto unknown draft Essex ‘prayer book’ petition explores the construction of contrasting royalist and parliamentarian confessional politics. A reading of the content of the petitions offers evidence of the popular response to the Laudian ceremonialism; a reconstruction of the politics of its production provides evidence of the attempt to construct a political alliance in support of the crown around defence of the prayer book; a reconstruction of the occasion for the petition – the capture of the Essex grand jury by the godly and well affected – suggests a very different, and ultimately more successful, confessional parliamentarian politics. In identifying the critical role played by the middling sort – translating their role in the politics of the parish to the politics of the state – the article argues that a marriage of the research strategy of the social historian with the agenda of a ‘new political history’ will help to establish the enlarged social depth to the public sphere in early modern England.

This article makes use of the data-rich sources, little used by historians, relating to rank and file soldiers, especially those who became Chelsea Hospital outpensioners. It particularly seeks to find out the migration history of such men in the years after Waterloo, focusing on Scots. The conclusion is that Scots were under-represented among soldiers who became imperial settlers. There appear to be good reasons for Scots finding colonial conditions uncongenial, and, in this respect, there was little difference between the ‘Napoleonic’ soldiery and the succeeding generation who belonged more definitely to an imperial service army. Most, in fact, returned to Scotland, and then to that part of the country familiar to them. Moreover, they refute an image of veterans as marginalized men. They are shown, on the whole, to have settled back into civilian society with surprising ease, law-abiding rather than lawless, respected rather than despised or feared.

I am grateful to Professor W. R. Carr for giving my article on James Mill more attention than it deserved. I had many doubts about its suggestions, and more about the way they were expressed, and had hoped that an expert critic versed in Mill might help to remove them. His ‘James Mill's Politics Reconsidered: Parliamentary Reform and the Triumph of Truth’ contains so much that I can accept and profit from, that I am only at a loss to account for the captious vehemence of his language. For our arguments do not seem to me so much to conflict, as to cross and diverge. I was concerned with the Essay on Government as a practical document. I argued that it had less bearing on the movement for parliamentary reform culminating in the Act of 1832 than had been supposed. The effect of his criticism is to remove the Essay into a world of abstract speculation, even more divorced from the problems which beset the parliamentary reformers in the 1820s than I had claimed. Probably he would not admit this, because his real charge is not that I think Mill and his followers made no practical contribution to the Reform Act, but that I have not, as he has, pieced together the various parts of Mill's thought into that mosaic of ‘glittering clarity’ cemented by ‘strenuous logic’ which he conceives it to be.

The folk music movement was among the most important influences on English cultural life in the years immediately before 1914. Its major figure, both in terms of volume of material collected and published, and in terms of organization and publicity, was Cecil Sharp. Historical understanding of the movement and modern appreciation of the material have been hampered by a Marxist orthodoxy which sees folk music as the cultural property of the working class and which attempts to discredit the folk music collectors, particularly Sharp. This article summarizes the trends in scholarship and employs the first biographical survey of a large group of folk singers to challenge the Marxist interpretation.

The anti-socialist legislation enacted in great haste in 1878, following attempts on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I, lapsed in the autumn of 1890. To an innocent observer, the Wiihelmine State thus appeared to be divesting itself of one of the most hated and socially divisive acts of political legislation. One of Kaiser Wilhelm II's first grand ideas, his suddenly-awakened passion for becoming an ‘Arbeiterkaiser’, which produced in its wake a spate of minor social reforms - factory inspection, regulation of child and female labour and guaranteed Sunday rest – suggested moreover that the much-heralded new course might envisage a share in a joint future for the luckless and despised Social-Democrats.

According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?

The fall of class in nineteenth-century British history has become a familiar tale. Its rise in the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain has been less noted. This essay explores the reasons for this divergence and emphasizes its methodological origins. It highlights the need for a comprehensive history of class society and identity to replace the confused and contradictory picture of particular classes and communities that is currently on offer. To understand better the constitution of class society, it urges historians to talk less of consciousness and more of identity and to recognize that class is an imagined community much like any other. It proceeds to use this understanding of class identity to assess the turn to political language amongst social historians interested in class. The paper offers a sustained examination of the recent work of Joyce and Wahrman in particular and argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of usable political languages and to the particular discursive contexts in which they are employed. It is argued that to acknowledge that class is so constructed is not to deny its existence or its importance and that historians need to look beyond political discourse to explain how class became so central to the self and the social in the nineteenth century.

In the year of 1657, a Shropshire clergyman, George Lawson by name, followed a prevailing fashion among English moralists and political writers of the day in publishing a formal refutation of Hobbes' then notorious Leviathan. Three years later, he further provided a positive and complete enunciation of his principles of civil and ecclesiastical polity in a work which he entitled Politica Sacra et Civilis. While it is perfectly evident that neither of these works attracted anything like that degree of contemporary attention which was aroused by the Leviathan of Hobbes or the Oceana of Harrington, it is no less evident, on the other hand, that they did not fall stillborn from the press. Not only are they to be found listed, with a fair measure of frequency, in extant catalogues of private libraries of the period, but in the critical year 1689—eleven years after the death of Lawson—Politica Sacra et Civilis was well recognized by certain ardent supporters of the revolution then in progress in England to be sufficiently timely to warrant its republication, and was palpably considered by at least one Whig pamphleteer to be well worth the trouble of plagiarizing. The popularity of the work was, however, of the most transient nature. The truth would seem to be that those principles of civil government which were maintained by Lawson were some three decades in advance of the age for which he wrote them; and that when, at length, the circumstances attending the English Revolution rendered them particularly appropriate, a greater political thinker, John Locke, was at hand to give them full expression in a form which, for clarity and fidelity to the spirit of the audience to which they were addressed, has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed. In all probability it is chiefly owing to this fact that the name of Lawson has been almost completely forgotten even by students of the history of English political philosophy, while Locke, for more than two centuries, has been regarded as one of the greatest political philosophers of all time.

During the Second World War, controversy surrounded not the inevitability of psychiatric casualties but the extent to which they could be minimized by selection, training, morale, and leadership. By early 1944, when planning for the D-Day landings was advanced, the problem of the psychiatric battle casualty was considered manageable by careful preparation and clinical understanding. The campaign to liberate Europe offered the newly formed Directorate of Army Psychiatry an opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness. Psychiatric services were deployed to Normandy to maximize the return of front-line troops to duty. Commanders, however, entertained doubts about the value of military psychiatrists. By offering a sanctioned escape route from battle, some believed that their mere presence undermined the fighting spirit of combat troops. The records of 32 General (Psychiatric) Hospital have been analysed to discover categories of troops most vulnerable to breakdown and to assess the impact of front-line treatments. Infantry soldiers, those most likely to be killed, were disproportionately represented amongst admissions. Senior non-commissioned officers were also at elevated risk of breakdown, some being war weary from earlier campaigns. Probably 36 per cent of admissions returned to combatant duty, and 53 per cent were evacuated to the UK. The scale of psychiatric casualties revealed failures in pre-deployment screening.

Recent moves by New Historicists to evaluate theatrical material from the early modern period have been at the expense of what historians would recognize as acceptable use of historical context. One of the most glaring examples of the dangers of taking a play out of such a proper context has been The Tempest. The play has had a great deal of literary criticism devoted to it, attempting to fit it into comfortable twentieth-century clothing in regard to its commentary on empire, at the expense of what the play's depiction of imperialism meant for the year 1611 when it was written. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to suggest that the play does not actually call into question the Jacobean process of colonization across the Atlantic at all, and suggests that of more importance for its audience would have been the depiction of the hegemony of the island nation of Great Britain as recreated in 1603. Such a historical reconstruction is helped through contrasting Shakespeare's play with the Jonson, Chapman, and Marston collaboration, Eastward Ho, as well as with the anonymous Masque of Flowers and Chapman's Memorable Masque. These works will be used to illustrate just what colonialism might mean for the Jacobean audience when the Virginia project was invoked and suggest that an American tale The Tempest is not.

This article is a contribution to the cultural history of English Enlightenment. It examines the formation of a discrete ‘family’ of philosophes in the West Midlands who maintained close links with their counterparts on the continent. Birmingham's role as a magnet for ‘industrial tourists’ in the second half of the eighteenth century helped to propagate the influence of this local intelligentsia who were mostly members of the Lunar Society. None the less, it is argued that the activities of the Society correspond more closely to an Enlightenment than to a proto-industrial pattern of inquiry. The events of 1789 in France disrupted this philosophic ‘family’. Their impact is explored through the medium of a real family; that of James Watt, the engineer, who came to Birmingham to manufacture the steam engine in partnership with Matthew Boulton. The vicissitudes of the Watt family, and of other prominent members of the Lunar Society, are unravelled to illustrate the dilemmas faced by men raised in the values of the Enlightenment when confronted with the reality – and the proximity – of a far-reaching political revolution.

Revisionist and post-revisionist historians alike still discuss politics in nineteenth-century terms, paying little attention to the politics of rhetoric and display that characterized Renaissance states. Literary critics and art historians, however, have focused attention on representations of authority and have developed critical methods to illuminate the performance and reception of texts in early modern culture. This essay reviews recent interdisciplinary work on theatre and poetry, painting and pageant, vital to historians of politics, and suggests a series of negotiations and exchanges over images of rule, and a dialogue about and for authority, between governments and subjects, in early modern England.

Scholarship on transnational encounter has predominantly focused on men's cross-cultural interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring women's roles in similar forms of linguistic and power negotiation within the context of English convents founded in Europe during the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent scholarship on English convents has so far remained silent on the question of how these women negotiated the language barriers that many of them faced. This article proposes an answer by examining the correspondence sent in the 1620s from the English Benedictine convent in Brussels. These letters reveal the changing ways in which English nuns relied on both male and female translators to communicate. In so doing, this article expands existing scholarly understanding of epistolary and literary culture by exploring the authorial strategies employed in the convent, which afforded the nuns a sense of authority over their texts. The letters were vital avenues for the women to express dissent, and raise concerns over the way their community was governed. Finally, despite being enclosed institutions, English convents in exile were not monoglot spaces but porous sites of multi-lingual encounter.

The death of the marquis of Santa Cruz (9 February 1588) left the Spanish Armada leaderless. On 14 February, for reasons that have never seemed remotely satisfactory, Philip II named Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, 7th duke of Medina Sidonia, to take his place. Medina Sidonia has been universally regarded rather like a rabbit pulled mystifyingly out of a hat by the king to the amazement of rabbit, spectators, and historians alike. Attempts to explain the appointment have been half-hearted and, until some recent revaluations of the duke's administrative abilities, have concentrated overwhelmingly on his character and social position. Portrayed as an amiable poltroon, loyal, unassuming, and characterless, utterly devoid of military experience but not too proud to be guided entirely by his expert advisers, he was just the man to do what he was told without questioning the instructions of the real admiral of the Armada in the Escorial, or cavilling at his subordination to the supreme commander of the invasion forces, the duke of Parma—issues which had already embittered relations between the king and the marquis of Santa Cruz. At the same time, personal jealousies among Santa Cruz's leading lieutenants, the refusal of the military to accept seamen on equal terms, and the presence in the Armada of a large number of titled and class-conscious gentlemen-adventurers all meant that the new commander had to be an outsider, a landsman, and a nobleman so illustrious that nobody need be ashamed to obey him or take precedence behind him. As the premier duke in Spain, Medina Sidonia's social qualifications were impeccable.1 Some historians have pointed to the duke's religious devoutness as a further recommendation, others have wondered whether his promotion were not a sentimental memento of an extinct romance between Philip and the duke's mother-in-law.

The study of the agricultural history of Jamaica, particularly after the seventeenth century when England seized the island from Spain, has traditionally been dominated by investigations of the sugar industry. Recently a few scholars have deviated from this path to examine in varying degrees of detail, agrarian activities which did not represent the standard eighteenth-century West Indian route to wealth. Foremost among this growing body of literature are articles and papers on the livestock industry (and livestock farmers), arguably the most lucrative of the non-sugar economic activities in rural Jamaica, perhaps until the advent of coffee later in the eighteenth century. Intended as a contribution to the historiography of non-staple agricultural production in colonial Jamaica, this article traces the early establishment and expansion of the important livestock or ‘pen-keeping’ industry. But the history of pens must also be located within the context of the dominant sugar economy; for during the period of slavery, pens were largely dependent on the sugar estate to provide markets for their outputs. Indeed pens expanded as a result of the growth of the sugar industry and, therefore, the importance of the livestock industry in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Jamaica is best appreciated by examining its economic links with the estates.

The reform of crown finances was one of the most urgent and complex problems facing the English government in the second half of Edward VI's reign. As one aspect of the general regeneration of the financial system the crown appointed in 1552 a royal commission to study the state of the revenue courts. This was only one in a long series of temporary commissions established in the mid-sixteenth century to examine various aspects of the crown revenue and its administration. However, several features of this commission set it apart from similar initiatives. It was probably the most comprehensive and thorough investigation performed during this period, and the commission's findings represent the sole surviving detailed analysis of the mid-Tudor revenue system. Moreover, the commissioners went beyond a survey of the courts to make explicit recommendations for reform which have traditionally been linked to the reorganization of the royal finances in 1553–4. Although the commission's report has recently been published, both this document and the agency which produced it have hitherto escaped the detailed analysis which they well deserve and which is essential for an assessment of the report's significance.