South Wales and the border counties played a crucial part in the events known as the ‘Popish plot’. The alleged catholic conspiracy laid particular emphasis on the roles allotted to Welsh magnates like Worcester and Powis, with their neighbours and dependants, and invasion plans were said to hinge on strategic centres like Chepstow castle and Milford Haven. Men from this area were active in the’plot’, whether as informers - notably Bedloe - or as parliamentary opponents of the duke of York; Welsh Jesuits were supposedly involved in the main conspiracies and murders, and Border protestants like Bishop Croft were among their main targets. John Arnold of Monmouthshire even aspired to the position in the whig leadership held by Shaftesbury, and the tory Ailesbury regarded the worst villains of the whole ‘plot’ as Arnold himself and his Herefordshire kinsman John Dutton Colt. It was also in this area that the ‘plot’ was at its most violent, and Professor Kenyon's study of the Popish plot rightly refers to ‘this battle area on the frontier of Wale’. ‘The main damage suffered outside London’ by the Jesuits was the loss of the south Wales district headquarters at the Cwm, when this was raided in 1678 by Croft, Arnold, and another ultra-protestant named Charles Price: ‘ the south Wales mission was the only one completely eliminated’. In 1679 a Jesuit wrote from north Wales that’ the college of South Wales was totally rooted up. We of the north have fared a little better, thus far; but God knows how long it is to last, for we live in constant fears and perils, only three of us now remaining’.

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.

Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian church (1706), which elicited more than thirty contemporary replies, was a major interjection in the ongoing debates about the relationship between church and state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Historians have usually seen Tindal's work as an exemplar of the ‘republican civil religion’ that had its roots in Hobbes and Harrington, and putatively formed the essence of radical whig thought in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. But this is to misunderstand the Rights. To comprehend what Tindal perceived himself as doing we need to move away from the history of putatively ‘political’ issues to the histories of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, patristic scholarship, and biblical exegesis. The contemporary significance of Tindal's work was twofold: methodologically, it challenged Anglican patristic scholarship as a means of reaching consensus on modern ecclesiological issues; positively, it offered a powerful argument for ecclesiastical supremacy lying in crown-in-parliament, drawing on a legal tradition stretching back to Christopher St Germain (1460–1540) and on Tindal's own legal background. Tindal's text provides a case study for the tentative proposition that ‘republicanism’, whether as a programme or a ‘language’, had far less impact on English anticlericalism and contemporary debates over the church–state relationship than the current historiography suggests.

In the 1840s the German Romantic August von Haxthausen originated the idea, in a book reporting on his travels through Russia, that collective ownership of land and other assets was integral to the traditional culture of the Russian rural commune. Russian intellectuals accepted this idea and made it the basis for political ideals and social theories (even after 1917, as in the case of Aleksandr Chayanov). The 1861 Emancipation Act had brought collective ownership of land into existence by law, but Haxthausen's own theory – which related to Yaroslavl' province in the first half of the nineteenth century – has never been tested. This article does that, and finds that nearly all parts of Haxthausen's theory, insofar as they are testable, are false. This does not mean that Haxthausen's theory was false everywhere in Russia, but it was false for the place he advanced it about, and may therefore be false elsewhere. No cultural or ownership pattern of rural society, therefore, should be assumed a priori to hold for the whole of Russia. Only painstaking, detailed local studies will tell us which patterns held in which parts of this vast and heterogeneous country.

It will be fifty years in 2008 since Oliver MacDonagh suggested that the adoption of new responsibilities by the state in the early nineteenth century was an inevitable response to the social consequences of the industrial revolution, and impervious to ideological and philosophical influences. This article revisits MacDonagh's model by examining the emergence of occupational health reform in the British mining industry in the early twentieth century. Until the introduction of statutory measures in 1905 to protect miners against developing silicosis and basic sanitation provisions to prevent cross-contamination of disease, state regulation of working conditions prioritized the prevention of accidental injuries. It is argued that this decisive shift in the scope and nature of government intervention can be understood as part of a process of institutional expansion of mining regulations that broadly parallels MacDonagh's model. Yet the precise details of when, and how, health reform emerged and the nature of these specific regulatory controls were influenced by a variety of factors, including visibility of risk, human agency, economic performance of the industry, and contemporary thinking in political economy.

In Gordon J. Schochet's new book on Patriarchalism in political thought (New York, 1975) there is one thirty-year-old assumption that he should have challenged. Our estimate of Filmer's place in political thought and the relation of his ideas to his contemporaries’ depends to some extent on the date at which he is presumed to have written Patriarcha, and Schochet has unquestioningly accepted Peter Laslett's dating of the work in the late 1630s, or at the very latest before the outbreak of civil war in 1642. The New Cambridge bibliography of English literature, without any explanation, gives the date as 1635. It was not always so. Edmund Bohun, Filmer's first editor, thought Patriarcha was written in 1642, and James Tyrell, one of his early detractors, began his attack with the assumption that Patriarcha was the culmination of Filmer's work and contained his ‘most mature thoughts’. The implausibility of a date in the thirties seems recently to have escaped everyone's notice, probably because we are all immensely indebted to Laslett not only for finding the best text of Patriarcha at East Sutton Park in 1939 but for editing it with a scholarly introduction ten years later.

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.

Little has been written about the Foreign Office reforms of 1919. Contemporaries hoped that war-time experiences would lead to a massive overhaul of the whole diplomatic machine. Radical critics, in particular, were vehement in their insistence that the diplomatic and foreign-policy-making process and the diplomatic services should be subjected to ‘democratic’ oversight and control. Even the less radical reformers believed that the transition from war to peace would provide the opportunity for modernizing and rationalizing the existing administrative system. Yet the changes introduced in the years of peace proved to be less decisive than any of these men intended. The difficulty arose from the sheer number of problems to be solved, a confusion of aims among those responsible for reform, financial considerations and a sharp diminution in public interest and pressure after 1919.

Not the least of the duties with which Thomas Cromwell was burdened during the period of his ascendancy was the supervision of the lordship of Ireland. There the changes effected in the function and powers of the Dublin administration in the 1530s proved to be quite as important for the development of early-modern Ireland as those occurring in England during the same decade were for that realm. These changes centred on the legislation of the Irish Reformation Parliament of 1536–7 and on the termination of a policy of aristocratic delegation whereby Anglo-Irish magnates, primarily the earl of Kildare, had ruled the lordship on behalf of the king. By the later 1530s the lordship was governed through an English deputy working with a reconstituted Irish council, backed by a small English garrison, and controlled more firmly from London. For all this, recent research has established the overall responsibility of Cromwell.

‘What do the masses read?’ After popular literacy and an urban market for mass culture became conspicuous in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, dozens of literary figures and social researchers took it upon themselves to answer this question. Middle-class inquirers sought in newsagents' wares a vicarious connection with the culture and values of the readers of popular fiction. Many of these investigators, from Wilkie Collins in the 1850s to George Orwell in the 1930s, practised a form of literary criticism that doubled as social criticism. Other students of popular reading – Florence Bell in her study of early twentieth-century Middlesbrough and Mass-Observation in its surveys of reading during the Second World War – worked at the margins of British traditions of social research. Critics working from the texts of popular fiction tended to concentrate on questions of style and ideology; those doing fieldwork focused on reading as a social practice. Examining the corpus of studies of popular literacy from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century opens up the question of the scope of literary criticism and social research in modern Britain.

Despite differing historiographical traditions, the histories of Tudor England and Ireland often face similar problems, not least how best to narrate and analyse episodes of state and non-state violence in a satisfying way. Latterly, sophisticated models for dealing with this have emerged in treatments of English popular politics. These works succeed in eschewing both inherited ideas of English exceptionalism and the ‘enclosure’ of social history. They also offer a compelling and holistic view of social and political interactions in the past from a number of vantage points. Many recent treatments of sixteenth-century Irish history, by contrast, have centred on atrocity and even genocide. This narrower focus does not preclude important scholarship, but its thematic and methodological limitations hamper that scholarship's broader non-polemical value. The appreciation of Tudor Ireland's status as a political society and the close scrutiny of that political society and its actors is a necessity. It offers just as promising an embarkation point for sophisticated and interesting studies as the study of Tudor English popular politics.

Oliver Cromwell remains a deeply controversial figure in Ireland. In the past decade, his role in the conquest has received sustained attention. However, in recent scholarship on the settlement of Ireland in the 1650s, he has enjoyed a peculiarly low profile. This trend has served to compound the interpretative problems relating to Cromwell and Ireland which stem in part from the traditional denominational divide in Irish historiography. This article offers a reappraisal of Cromwell's role in designing and implementing the far-reaching ‘Cromwellian’ land settlement. It examines the evidence relating to his dealings with Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic, and his attitude towards the enormous difficulties which they faced post-conquest. While the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation, in the 1650s Cromwell in fact emerged as an important and effective ally for Irish landowners seeking to defeat the punitive confiscation and transplantation policies approved by the Westminster parliament and favoured by the Dublin government.

This article explores the late flowering of ‘black loyalism’ during the visit of the British royal family to Southern Africa in the summer of 1947. Whereas most accounts of post-war African politics emphasize the radicalization of political organizations, the growth of nationalism, and grassroots insurgency, this account of African engagement with the royal tour indicates that professed faith in the British monarchy as the embodiment and guardian of the rights and liberties of all peoples living under the crown was more widespread and longer lived than is generally assumed. However evanescent the phenomenon, extensive participation in the ceremonial rituals associated with the tour and the outpouring of expressions of black loyalism underlines the fluidity and unpredictability of black politics in this decade. At such a highly charged moment internationally, with India on the cusp of independence, and political turmoil at home, there was reason to hope that the loyalty of Africans during the Second World War might just be rewarded by the extension of political rights. This article traces the complex legacies and contested expressions of ‘black loyalism’ in what was effectively its swansong.

The Eastern Front of the First World War remains, as Winston Churchill called his book on it, ‘The Unknown War’. Whereas in the West, politics were dominated by the military events, the reverse happened in the East: the gigantic struggles which took place from the Baltic to the Black Sea now seem to have been but a prelude to the Revolution in Russia and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There has been little interest in the military aspects of the Eastern conflict.

The origins of the process that transmuted Prussia–Germany's most hallowed social institution and professional group, the officer corps, into a functional elite of ‘National Socialist Führer-personalities’ remain obscure. Recent studies have argued that the ‘structural pressures of modern war’ – the immense losses of summer 1942 – compelled the abolition of time-honoured educational and social qualifications for officer candidacy and the basing of promotions almost solely on battlefield prowess, and that ‘National Socialist elite manipulation’ was at best a secondary factor. Yet archival evidence makes clear that the pressures of war took second place in the army's official mind to the need to preserve order and tradition, and that it was above all Adolf Hitler who dictated the timing, shape, and extent of changes that the bureaucrats were largely incapable of imagining. ‘Führer-selection through battle’ was simultaneously the most far-reaching and lasting element in the social revolution that Hitler sought, and a decisive step in steeling the German armed forces for their fight to the bitter end. In this as in other areas, it was National Socialism's very modernity that endowed it with demonic force.

There were many passing phases in the eighty-eight years of Gladstone's life. ‘What did last, all through his life, was his overwhelming interest in religion and his incessant preoccupation with religious doctrine.’ ‘It is commonly supposed that there are things in life without religious significance, but this is not so. There is no human activity without its religious motives and its religious use.’ Such was the profession of the young M.P. for Newark in 1835. This article then is addressed, not to Gladstone's personal religion, which would have meant telling the story of his life, but to his attitude to religion – to his anglicanism.

Students of history are liable to assume that the entity ‘England’ has existed at all points in her past in roughly the same way as she exists in their present–not the same England of course, but the same sort of phenomenon, corresponding to a strictly similar social and political reality, apprehended in the same sort of way by contemporaries. When they read statements about any period, they tend to feel confident that the word ‘England’ is one that can be taken for granted, as representing something self-evident or something which can easily be explained in terms of geography and political history.

British policy towards Germany during the period of occupation aimed at preventing a resurgence of German military might in the future, whilst ensuring stable economic conditions in the short term. By mid 1946, however, the scale of the economic problems confronting the occupying powers in Germany had already manifested itself in the reduction of food rations and the consequent falling off in the output of Ruhr coal. The fragile economy was to suffer an even greater setback during the cruel winter of 1946/7. The immediate restoration of economic activity became imperative, not least because the dollar cost of sustaining the British Zone with imported grain weighed heavily on the British exchequer.