Putting down a revolt always risks seeing the legitimate use of force degenerate into an excessive and discredited repression, here called domestic state violence. Sergio Cotta's analytical model of the difference between force and violence helps to reveal the significance of various cycles of revolt and repression over three centuries of French history. Oscillations between measured coercive force and domestic state violence divide these three centuries into six stages: early absolutist (1594–1639), Louisquatorzian (1640–75), themistocratic (1675–1789), revolutionary (1792–5), late republican (1797–1802), and liberal authoritarian (1802–71). Continuities existed across all of these stages, such as the recourse to regular troops and summary justice; however, periods of rapid socio-political realignment caused the use of force to become domestic state violence. In order to overcome the alienation this produced, the state created new means of restricting its use of force while still protecting the new social order. The years 1797–1802 constituted the pivotal phase of this process because this was when so many methods of repression developed during the era between early absolutism and the Terror were revived, only now wrapped in the restraints of legal-rational authority. The resulting ‘liberal authoritarianism’ persisted until the 1880s without substantial changes other than growth in the sheer magnitude of repression.

The merchant mariner could appeal to the law in the seventeenth century for remedies against arbitrary treatment. But historians have argued that even when the sailor was able to afford legal process he faced judges who served the interests of master and shipowner. This essay estimates the fees of a suit for wages in the seventeenth century, the mariner's propensity to initiate action, and his chances of winning. Evidence for such an appraisal, and for describing the attitudes of judges toward mariner complaints, comes from all wage cases decided by the High Court of Admiralty in sixteen years chosen from across the century. The results add to recent discoveries about the nature of justice in a litigious age and test claims that the sailor was commonly a victim both at sea and at law.

The cloth-making town of Hadleigh in Suffolk has often been cited in the annals of the English Reformation as a town that early embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. This view owes much to John Foxe's famous description of this ‘Universitie of the learned’, yet a closer examination of the surviving evidence from Hadleigh indicates that the Reformation was as bitterly contested here as it was in many another mid-Tudor community. And the nature of the bitter struggle between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives in the town may have proved so fierce that the energies for further reform under Elizabeth all but dissipated.

This article argues that historians have misread Sir Thomas Smith's famous work as a narrowly factual description of English society and institutions, and Smith himself as a proto-rationalist thinker. Instead, De republica anglorum represents Smith's attempt as a citizen of the elect nation to theorize the ‘mixed monarchy’ inaugurated with Elizabeth's accession. It should thus be read as an important contribution to English Protestant apologetic of the 1560s, in conjunction with the work of men who more obviously engaged in that discourse: John Foxe, Laurence Humphrey, and John Aylmer. The article makes this case by reconstituting three cultural contexts which I argue need to be taken into account when analysing Smith's text. The first establishes Smith's ideological concerns and convictions in Edward VI's reign and in the early years of Elizabeth's. The second focuses on the immediate circumstances in which Smith wrote De republica anglorum: a polemical exchange between the Englishman Walter Haddon and the Portuguese Osorio da Fonseca concerning religious reformation and kingship. I then analyse De republica anglorum with reference to the key terms and issues identified in these contexts. The conclusion locates Smith's text in relation to one further context: Claude de Seyssel's The monarchy of France and its use by French Huguenot theorists in the 1560s. That nexus enabled Smith satisfactorily to address the central problem with which he and fellow apologists grappled throughout Elizabeth's reign: ungodly kingship in the guise of female rule.

Although sometimes seen as a bastion of royalism, the northern counties supplied some of the most militant members of the Long Parliament. Northern MPs and peers figured prominently in the war party, played a key role in negotiating the Solemn League and Covenant, and comprised an important element within the anti-Scots, pro-New Model Army faction at Westminster. Anglo- Scottish relations in the Civil War period were intimately linked with the parliamentary history of the northern counties during the 1640s. This article examines the development and structure of the northern interest in the Long Parliament, and in particular its collaboration with the parliamentary Independents. Analysis of the drafting of the Newcastle peace propositions and of the Commons' efforts to reduce the size of the Covenanting forces indicates that the Independents relied heavily on evidence of abuses committed by the Scottish army in the northern counties to advance their own programme for settlement and to frustrate that of the Scots and their English allies. It is also argued that the Independents' exploitation of the northern reaction against the Scots had a profound impact upon the relations between all three Stuart monarchies.

Historians have portrayed the Virginia Company and its colony, the first permanent English settlement in America, as an essentially commercial enterprise. The atmosphere of the colony is represented accordingly as one of proto-capitalist individualism. This paper shows that the Virginia Company promoters described the aims of its colony in civic terms: that is, in terms of a politics of virtue, citizenship, and the pursuit of the common good. Promoters of the colony drew on a civic tradition particularly hostile to commerce; a tradition in which wealth was portrayed as Asiatic luxury and corruption. The civic arguments of the Company were a response to the commercial and human disasters which characterized the first years of the colony and its Elizabethan predecessors. The civic ideology promoted by the Company was an attempt to remedy what were perceived to be the causes of this disastrous situation – corruption, greed, faction, and idleness. The promoters' civic arguments also provided an ideological motivation both for potential investors and colonists who might otherwise have been deterred by the financial and human expense.

The years immediately after the Glorious Revolution saw the Irish parliament establish itself as an active legislative body. Local government in the country then received something of a fillip, both through legislative action in Dublin, and by reason of the extended period of social and political stability that followed the end of Queen Anne's reign. This essay seeks to outline the responsibilities and functions of the grand jury in Ireland, and thus to establish its position as perhaps the most important component in the governance of provincial Ireland. Further to this it attempts to analyse the social composition of juries through a study of the methods of selection, and the attendant qualification criteria. The available evidence suggests that despite its extensive power and influence, membership of the grand jury was not completely monopolized by the land-owning Anglican elite. Rather, service on the grand jury reached some way down the social scale, and could be undertaken by men from outside the established church. Over time, however, jurors came to be selected from a diminishing pool of candidates : a practice which led to the creation of a largely homogeneous local administrative elite.

Since the late 1960s, the English Reformation has often been represented as a process of change forced upon an unwilling people by an educated social elite. The religious system of the elite, by this view, is seen as inimical to a broad range of popular practices and beliefs, with puritan ideology giving extreme expression to socially repressive tendencies. Although recent scholarship has sought to modify this view, the relationship of popular and elite culture in London is still often perceived as confrontational. The present article seeks to examine patterns of religious behaviour among the social elite in London during the later sixteenth century, arguing that continuity in certain traditional forms of piety, such as charitable benefaction and funerary practice, expresses a complex of fundamental attitudes and beliefs which operated across the social spectrum. These practices, when enacted, defined and legitimated the parish as a religious community. They also served to reattach a shared belief system to a historically changing religious context, a process of renegotiation in which the whole civic population participated.

Despite the growing conflict between Britain and her colonies, a metropolitan education remained a popular choice for the sons of elite colonial Americans in the late colonial period. This article explores the attitudes of the youths themselves, and of their parents, towards their London education during a period when political conflict was engendering a growing sense of separateness. American youths typically underwent a status crisis upon reaching the metropolis. Their insecurities related to the usual pitfalls of genteel London life: the prospect of social isolation and vulgarity, and the opportunities for debauchery. The parents of these colonial youths, however, shared the view of elite British parents of the period that a public education was a necessary social apprenticeship for their children. They regarded personal experience of the metropolis, and familiarity with its social and political systems, as important attributes for elite colonists. Parental views on the advantages of a metropolitan education for their sons were unaffected by the imminent breach with Britain. The status crisis experienced by colonial youths in London was age-related; their visiting parents were acculturated to the metropolitan environment. The article concludes by suggesting that the polarized provincial mentality so long attributed by historians to the colonial presence in London should be replaced by a more integrationist model which reflects the real complexity of the relationship between colonial American elites and their mother country.

The two decades of French rule in the German-speaking Rhineland at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the dramatic imposition of the sovereign state on a region previously noted for its absence. The successful integration of the new territories into the Republic and Empire depended upon the response of Rhenish elites to the transformation of local government from an accumulation of historical privileges into the lowest administrative tier of the state. Napoleon, more than his revolutionary predecessors, recognized the importance of ‘rallying’ the ‘notables’ in what was a politically inclusive and socially exclusive process. This policy was successful insofar as elites did, in general, rally. Their motivation varied, and the commitment was rarely unconditional. Rhenish notables, long adept at exploiting Old Regime institutions to preserve particular privileges, abused Napoleonic institutions, in order to protect clients and preserve their social position. This helped widen the gulf between the mainly urban notables and the rest of the predominantly rural population, which had fewer legal and institutionalized opportunities for asserting its interests directly. This system of rule proved suited to Rhenish conditions until the rise of party politics in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This article exonerates Charles I and Attorney General Sir Robert Heath from charges that they tampered with the records of the court of King's Bench in the Five Knights' Case. It refutes allegations made by John Selden in the parliament of 1628 and repeated by modern historians. Selden's attack on Heath and the king's government was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of King's Bench enrolments and a radical view of the crown's intentions in imprisoning loan resisters. The view that Charles was attempting to establish the prerogative right to imprison opponents without remedy at common law has no basis in either the arguments presented during the Five Knights' Case or the king's behaviour both before and during the parliament. By accepting the most radical critique of Caroline government at face value, historians have concluded that Charles was attempting to establish a ‘legal tyranny’. This article rejects these views.

The examination of Pufendorf's Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbes's theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the forma imperii. But Pufendorf's writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.

This article argues for a more holistic approach to understanding the Old Poor Law. Using three detailed case studies from southern England, it focuses on the dynamics of differing social groups within the parish. It also looks at the role of the law, looking beyond the statutes to the parts played by King's Bench, Quarter Sessions and individual justices and petty sessions in creating a diversity of experiences for the poor. However, it also stresses the differential access to charitable funds, common rights, and poor relief in individual communities, and the ways in which parish elites attempted to put the total available resources to what they saw as the best uses. From 1650 to 1780 these combined resources allowed a generally humane approach to the treatment of poverty and misfortune, and maintained the independence of the cottager and labourer in southern England. Only after 1780 when population rose sharply and rural employment shrank did the flexibility of combined charitable and rate-based relief founder and more drastic devices were employed to cope with basic needs. In this process the independence of the labourer and cottager was undermined, charitable sources were marginalized, and the seeds were sown for the acceptance of the New Poor Law.

Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker have both been regarded as isolated and eccentric disciples of Thomas Hobbes. However, a detailed examination of their views reveals a more complicated relationship with the notorious philosopher. Far from being simple ‘Hobbists’, Scargill and Parker developed ideas close to those of ‘latitudinarian’ clergymen. In the polarizing political circumstances of the later 1660s, the hostile identification of their views with the doctrines of the Leviathan led to public discussion of latitudinarianism and its relationship to Hobbism. In response, writers with latitudinarian sympathies used criticism of Hobbes as a means of reconsidering and redefining their own position. Such criticism accepted some of Hobbes's political conclusions, while at the same time rejecting his controversial methodology. Discussion of Hobbism and criticism of Hobbes were thus important means by which Hobbes's political insights were absorbed by Restoration political thinkers.

Contrary to the widespread assumption that in imperial Germany urban affairs were conducted by a homogeneous ‘unpolitical’ notable elite until around 1900, a review of recently published case studies suggests that politics had entered local government by the 1870s. Frequent causes for the politicization of local affairs included confessional divisions, territorial change, or simply the wish of local elites to buttress their own positions. The ways in which liberals in particular took advantage of this emergence of political discourse at the urban level is highlighted by the case of Frankfurt am Main. The city's three liberal parties developed in competition with each other. Each managed to address and articulate the citizens' peculiar grievances with differing degrees of success. By 1880, public life inside and outside the town hall was conducted according to political ground rules, and this was accepted by every party. Against the still prevailing view of a rigid liberalism which after 1874 was in evident terminal decline, the decade after 1866 needs to be recognized as the period in which liberals took charge of municipal government across most of Germany, through the politicization of often highly individual local concerns with astonishing sophistication and flexibility.

This article examines the series of legislative measures, beginning in 1776, which culminated in the passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779. It argues that, although the Penitentiary Act is of considerable long-term significance in the history of English criminal justice and penal practices, the act passed in 1779 was in fact a somewhat modest affair by comparison with the scheme originally envisioned by its principal architects. The act embodied a decisive retreat from an original ambition to replace transportation with imprisonment at hard labour as the principal punishment next to death in late eighteenth-century England. This modification arose from a pragmatic appreciation of the limitations imposed, first, by a persistent preference amongst most legislators for transportation of the worst classes of offenders not actually put to death and, secondly, by the reluctance of local authorities to have such a preference imposed upon them to the detriment of local control of punishment and of the finances which paid for it. Attention is also drawn to how the course of events was shaped by the interaction of the act's main architects, William Eden and Sir William Blackstone, with both government and non-ministerial MPs such as Sir Charles Bunbury.

This article establishes for the first time the identity of Edward Colman, the Catholic courtier executed for treason in 1678. Discoveries about his background are used to show how he made his way into court circles in the 1660s, at an earlier date than has usually been assumed. It is suggested that his cousin, Richard Colman, may have been the person who introduced him to the duke of York. Another relative, William Battie, also had connections at court, but he and Colman later quarrelled over the issue of religious toleration. Thereafter, Bishop Compton acted as Battie's patron to further the campaign by himself and the earl of Danby against Colman and the other court Catholics.

The discourse of America's founding generation, it is now widely recognized, was rich and variegated in its composition, drawing upon the commonwealth tradition, the English common law, Montesquieu, Locke, Scottish moral philosophy, and the classics. These sources yield significant clues as to how eighteenth-century Americans viewed religious liberty and church–state relations, subjects of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Supplementing the work of legal historians on the religious provisions of the early state constitutions, the study of political ideas suggests the parameters of the eighteenth-century debate over the effects which various types of religious belief and ecclesiastical establishment had upon manners and institutions. It also reveals the ideological underpinnings of the apparently inconsistent legal provisions for religion at the state level, and, far from settling the elusive question of ‘original intent’, highlights the nature of the divisions within the founding generation.

This article re-examines a crucial aspect of French history between 1789 and 1793, and one which remains controversial : the attitude of Louis XVI towards the Revolution. It does this by exploiting an important and unpublished source, the letters of the king's secret plenipotentiary to the European powers, the baron de Breteuil, to the foreign monarch most trusted by the French royal family, Gustavus III of Sweden. Since Louis XVI's precarious position in Paris from the October Days until his death prevented him from expressing his true feelings except very rarely, historians since have found it difficult to reach firm conclusions on his political views and motivation during the Revolution, and the result has often been partisan judgements from left and right. The issue has been further clouded by persistent claims for over a century that several of Louis's most important letters of this period are forgeries. While they do not resolve all these problems, the letters of Breteuil to Gustavus III, which are incontestably genuine, reveal Louis XVI's views on critical events between 1791 and 1792 as represented by the politician closest to his real policy, to the fellow-ruler in whom he had the most faith. The most important subjects covered are Breteuil's interpretation of Louis XVI's true attitude to the constitution of September 1791, his distrust of his brothers, the comtes de Provence and d'Artois, and the plan for an armed congress of the European powers to put pressure on revolutionary France. These letters, and Gustavus III's replies to them, are published at the end of the article in an appendix.

Most historians have assumed a fundamental antagonism between Marxism and theism. In practice, the relationship between the two world-views has been far more complex than simple hostility – a complexity admirably illustrated by the experience of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) between 1882 and 1905. While the Marxists of the POF developed a vicious socialist anti-clericalism that made its own original contribution to France's long tradition of anti-religious polemic, they none the less experimented with a rudimentary Christian socialism designed to attract the proletarian faithful, and also developed an agnostic programme of religious indifference which sought to insert the circuit-breaker of class conflict into the highly charged link between militant secularism and Catholic clericalism. This article examines the intricate and, in the end, incoherent, pattern of engagement between Marxist socialism and French religion during the fin de siècle, and suggests that this incoherence contributed to the eventual frustration of the Parti Ouvrier's revolutionary purpose.