This article examines the attempted impeachment of the duke of Buckingham by parliament in 1626 through the lens of manhood, and specifically early modern definitions of youth. The parliamentary speeches of Buckingham's accusers and the reports of observers such as the Venetian ambassador are used to demonstrate how youth and inexperience were deployed as evidence of his insufficient manhood, and therefore legal justifications for Buckingham's removal from power. The attributes of youth – wilfulness, rashness, and being a prisoner to one's passions – provided a narrative in which Buckingham could be placed to discredit his political authority. Additionally, through personal correspondence with his allies, and Buckingham's own defence of himself before parliament, this article demonstrates that definitions of youth and its relationship with political authority were malleable in the early modern period. Buckingham's impassioned defence of both his political career, and himself as a man, point to an ongoing negotiation over the terms of manhood, and how men were judged as figures of legitimate political authority.

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 a new perspective on Elizabethan puritanism. In particular, it examines the ways in which the memory of Marian conformity continued to influence religious and political controversy during the reign of Elizabeth I. Drawing upon extensive archival evidence, it focuses on moments when the chequered pasts of Queen Elizabeth, William Cecil, and other chief officers of English church and state were called into question by puritan critics. In contrast to the prevailing narrative of Elizabethan triumphalism, it argues that late Tudor religion and politics were shaped by lingering puritan distrust of those who had revealed a propensity for idolatry by conforming during the Marian persecution. This fraught history of religious conformity meant that, for some puritans, the Church of England had been built on unstable foundations.

This article presents the main findings of the first detailed reconstruction of the pattern of attendance at an early modern German school, based on the exceptionally preserved matriculation records of the Latin (grammar) school of Zwickau/Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century. It investigates pupils’ social background, their geographical mobility, and reconstructs their educational choices. Prevailing top-down perspectives on early modern education obscure the range of choices available to pupils. This article argues that substantial social mobility into learned professions formed the backdrop to the preoccupation with rank and distinction within the Republic of Letters in the Holy Roman Empire.

A variant transcription of one of the Whitehall Debates has been identified among the Clarke papers. Located in volume 16 of the Worcester MSS, it records the latter part of the longest debate, on 14 December 1648, concerning the Second Agreement of the People. The fair copy of this debate by army secretary William Clarke (in volume 65 of the Worcester MSS) was previously believed to be the only surviving record. The new source provides additional text, clarifies obscure passages, and is generally easier to understand. Historians now have the advantage of another account of the meeting, which reveals its importance more fully. Although the Levellers’ Agreement was never to be implemented, the Whitehall Debates took place between Pride's Purge and the trial and execution of Charles I. The variant therefore sheds new light on the thinking of the army command and its advisers both religious and lay at this time of unprecedented constitutional crisis. It also provides the first documentary evidence that the army debates at Putney (1647) and Whitehall (1648–9) were not recorded by Clarke alone, but by a team of at least three secretaries.

This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.

This article revisits the late seventeenth-century histories of two of England's most successful overseas trading monopolies, the East India and Royal African Companies. It offers the first full account of the various enforcement powers and strategies that both companies developed and stresses their unity of purpose in the seventeenth century. It assesses the complex effects that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had on these powers and strategies, unearthing much new material about the case law for monopoly enforcement in this critical period and revising existing accounts that continue to assert the Revolution's exclusively deregulating effects and that miss crucial subtleties in the case law and related alterations in company behaviour. It asks why the two companies parted company as legal and political entities and offers an explanation that connects the fortunes of both monopoly companies to their public profile and differing constituencies in the English empire and the varying non-European political contexts in which they operated.

This article attempts to uncover the political significance of the Old Testament verse Judges 5:23, ‘the curse of Meroz’, during the English Civil War. Historians who have commented on the printed text of Meroz have done so primarily in reference to a single edition of the parliamentarian fast-day preacher Stephen Marshall's 1642 Meroz cursed sermon. Usage of the curse, however, as shown in more than seventy unique sermons, tracts, histories, libels, and songs considered here, demonstrates that the verse was far more widespread and politically significant than has been previously assumed. Analysing Meroz in its political and polemical roles, from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and through the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, sheds new light on the ways in which providentialism functioned during the Civil Wars, and serves, more specifically, to illustrate some of the important means by which ministers and polemicists sought to mobilize citizens and construct party identities.

Beethoven the revolutionary is fading from history. Ossified by the Romantic tradition and, under the pressure of recent revision, reconsidered as conservative and prone to power worship, Beethoven's music has been drained of its radical essence. Yet his compositions also evoked the sonic impact of revolution – its aesthetic of natural violence and terrifying sublime – and so created an aural image of revolutionary action. Through stylistic appropriations of Luigi Cherubini and others, Beethoven imported the rhetorical tropes of French revolutionary composition to the more culturally conservative environment of Vienna. But where the music of revolutionary Paris accompanied concerted political action, the Viennese music that echoed its exhortative rhetoric played to audiences that remained politically mute. This inertia was the result of both a Viennese mode of listening that encouraged a solely internalized indulgence in revolution, and a Beethovenian musical rhetoric that both goaded and satisfied latent political radicalism. Far from rallying the public to the figurative barricades, then, the radical content of Beethoven's music actually helped satiate – and thereby stymie – the outward expression of rebellion in Vienna. This article is a bid to reaffirm the revolutionary in Beethoven.

The second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) generated a higher volume of English writing than any other seventeenth-century event involving the Ottomans. This article focuses upon ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege and relates them to the concurrent English political context of the Tory reaction to the exclusion crisis. Situating these ballads within the publication milieu of pamphlet news and political polemic, it examines the figures who produced them and the audiences they were aimed at. Following from this, it shows how the use of commonplace images and associations with the ‘Turk’ as a recurring figure in early modern writing allowed these ballads to find, or depict, synchronicities between the events of the siege of Vienna, and the English political scene.

This article aims to locate English republican thought and writing in a wider European context and to understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. It does so through the case-study of a little-known pamphlet published by the English regicide Edmund Ludlow during his exile in Switzerland after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Les juges jugez, se justifiants (1663) was a French translation of the dying speeches and other miscellaneous texts of some of the English regicides, produced in Geneva and subsequently printed in Yverdon with the help of Ludlow's local Protestant network. Rather than propagating a secular republican ideology, Ludlow offered his work to a European Protestant audience in the language of Geneva, promoting a primarily religious cause in an attempt to make martyrs out of political activists. It is therefore to Ludlow's Protestant networks that we need to turn to find out more about the transmission of English republican ideas in francophone Europe and beyond.

In his influential work on German Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin suggested that Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) catalysed the growth of the nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment. This causal thesis, however, ignored the extent to which the Reflections' German translator, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), altered the meaning of the text to suit his own philosophical agenda. Although Burke saw rationalism and revolution as natural allies, Gentz – a student of Immanuel Kant – used the Reflections to articulate a conservative form of rationalism that, he believed, could stand up to the philosophes' radicalism. Through his selective translation, numerous in-text annotations, and six long interpretive essays, Gentz pressed Burke's Reflections into a Kantian epistemological paradigm – carving out a space for a priori right in the logic of the text, and demoting traditional knowledge from a normative to a prudential role. In Gentz's translation, Burke thus appeared as a champion, not a critic, of Enlightenment.

This article argues that the failed campaign of one former clerk against corruption in the Royal Navy's sick and wounded service during the Nine Years War sheds light on some roots of modern whistle blowing. During the 1690s, England's parliament took important steps towards becoming an organ of inquiry into the workings of all government departments. Parliament's desire for information that could assist it to check Leviathan's actions, coupled with the end of pre-publication censorship in 1695, encouraged the advent of pamphleteering aimed at showing how to improve or correct abuses within the administrative structure and practices of the expanding fiscal-military state. It was from this stream of informative petitioning directed at the Commons and the Lords that informants such as Samuel Baston, as well as George Everett, William Hodges, and Robert Crosfeild, tried to call time on either systematic injustices or particular irregularities within the naval service for what they claimed was the public interest. What they and others called ‘discovering’ governmental malfeasance should be seen as early examples of blowing the whistle on wrongdoing.

Anna Gambles's Protection and politics (1999) established the existence of a sophisticated and pervasive conservative economic discourse in Britain in the decades before Repeal. This article argues that the imperial aspect of that discourse – comprising ideals of imperial economic integration, imperial preference, and British navigational prowess – has been mistakenly understood as a response to ‘the imperialism of free trade'. In fact, these ideals were evolved primarily as the intellectual response of the West Indian lobby to the Anti-Slavery Society's campaign for the emancipation of British colonial slaves. Emancipation was regarded as a prospective economic disaster for the British plantation system and so the years after 1823 witnessed the vigorous and sophisticated defence of West Indian slavery by rhetorical and discursive means traditionally ascribed the label of ‘conservative economics'. This article argues that the imperial economic discourse hitherto considered ‘conservative’ should more properly be recognized as ‘pro-slavery’, something underscored by the pro-slavery sympathies of the writers credited with the articulation of this discourse, and by the almost exclusive relevance of its arguments to West Indian, as opposed to other colonial possessions.

This article establishes the significance of elections held in the annexed departments of the Napoleonic Empire from 1802 to 1813. It thus represents an original, and perhaps surprising, contribution to recent debate on the nature of Napoleonic imperialism, in which attention has shifted from core to periphery, and away from purely military matters. The electoral process under this authoritarian regime has been alternately neglected or derided, especially where the newly created departments of the Low Countries and parts of Germany and Italy are concerned. However, extensive archival research demonstrates that it was taken extremely seriously by both regime and voters, especially outside metropolitan France. These ‘First European Elections', as they may be dubbed, took place in regular fashion right across the Empire and are studied here on a transnational basis, which also involves the metropolitan departments. Though open to all adult males at the primary level, they were not exercises in democracy, but they did create some rare political space which local people were not slow to exploit for their own purposes. Above all, they served as a means of integrating ‘new Frenchmen’, particularly members of indigenous elites, into the Napoleonic system.

The occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen Anne has traditionally been understood as a straightforward symptom of the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. For all the pious rhetoric concerning toleration and the church in danger, the controversy is considered a partisan squabble for short-term political gain. This traditional interpretation has, however, never been able to account for two features of the controversy: first, the focus on ‘moderation’ as a unique characteristic of post-Revolutionary English society; and second, the prominence of the Anglican nonjurors in the debate. This article revisits the occasional conformity controversy with an eye toward explaining these two related features. In doing so, it will argue that the occasional conformity controversy comprised a referendum on the Revolution settlement in church and state. Nonjurors lit upon the practice of occasional conformity as emblematic of the broader malady of moderation afflicting post-Revolutionary England. From their opposition to occasional conformity, the nonjurors, and soon the broader Anglican high-church movement, developed a comprehensive critique of religious modernity that would inform the entire framework of debate in the early English Enlightenment.

This article seeks to illuminate significantly our understanding of the link between abolitionism and evangelicalism by considering the debate at the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846 surrounding the propriety of Christian fellowship with slaveholders. The leading critic of the pro-slavery faction was the Revd Isaac Nelson, an orthodox Presbyterian minister from Belfast, Ireland. Nelson's importance to anti-slavery was recognized by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic at the time, but has not yet been adequately analysed by historians. Hence, this article will examine Nelson's role in the dispute with the defenders of the American slaveholders at the London meeting in 1846 and in further debates within the Alliance on the slavery question. The article will conclude by examining Nelson's claim that the Alliance was a failure owing to its alleged compromise on the slavery question.

In October 1916, the French government agreed with Armenian political elites to establish a Légion of Armenian volunteers in British Cyprus to fight the common Ottoman enemy. Despite British, French, and even Armenian rejections of such a Légion during different times throughout 1915 and early 1916, all sides overcame earlier concerns. Understanding how they managed to overcome these concerns will allow for this little-known episode in the history of the Great War in the eastern Mediterranean to contribute to the knowledge on (1) the complex French and British wartime stances towards this region, driven by imperialism and humanitarianism; (2) the ability of local elites to draw concessions from the Allies; (3) the important role played by local British and French colonial and military officers; and (4) broader historiographical debates on the responses to the Armenian Genocide. This article explores the origins of how the Entente co-opted Armenians in their eastern Mediterranean campaigns, but also made them into pawns in the French and British reinvention of their imperial rivalry in this region in order to achieve their post-war imperialist agendas.

This article argues that theatre in colonial India – both in the form of touring companies and amateur dramatics – offered much more than mere entertainment: first, it was an important social space where the British diaspora constituted itself as a community. Secondly, it served as a lifeline to the home country. By watching theatrical performances either brought to them straight from London or which they performed themselves, colonial Britons felt in touch with their homeland. Finally, theatre not only allowed colonial audiences to participate in the metropolitan culture; it inadvertently helped to unify the British empire. Whether living in London, the provinces, or a colonial city, all British subjects consumed the same popular culture, forming in effect one big taste community. Theatre, therefore, lends itself to a discussion of central issues of imperial history, as, for example, the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the imperial periphery, the colonial public sphere, social and racial hierarchies, the perception of the ‘Other’, and processes of cross-cultural exchange and appropriation.

The article examines Scottish discussions surrounding the French revolutionary wars in the early and mid-1790s. It argues that these discussions were not built along the lines of the dispute that set Burke against the English radicals, because arguments about French ‘cosmopolitan’ love for mankind were largely irrelevant in the context of Smithian moral philosophy. The Scottish writers who observed French developments in the period (including the Edinburgh Moderates, James Mackintosh, John Millar, and Lord Lauderdale) were, however, particularly interested in what they interpreted as France's changing notion of patriotism, and built upon the heritage of Smithian moral philosophy in order to offer original and powerful commentaries of French national feeling and warfare. They identified the ‘enthusiastic’ nature of French national sentiment, and the replacement of traditional patriotism with a new form of relationship between the individual and the nation, as the most significant and dangerous element to come out of the French Revolution.