Historians have long debated which continental sources gave a major impetus to the early Elizabethan religious reform. While many have examined the alleged Reformed influence on the English church, that of the Lutherans has also been discussed by some. However, these have in the main failed to appreciate the full implications of this German influence which was linked closely with ongoing diplomatic developments on the continent. During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, political considerations more than religious actually dominated the minds of politicians like William Cecil in formulating the nation's ecclesiastical policy. In fact, some key decisions on religion were the direct result of contemporary diplomatic talks with Lutheran princes.

The debate over the nature and significance of religious change in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England has been one of the most lively of recent years and shows no sign of abating. The emergence or otherwise of a Calvinist consensus, the impact of the high church or Arminian party, the role of puritanism, and the relationship between all these and the outbreak of the civil war have generated vigorous discussion. Attention has inevitably tended to focus on the theological outlook of university-educated clerics, whose sermons and treatises provide a mine of information. In the absence of comparable sources it is far harder to evaluate the position of laymen, and in the case of Robert Cecil it may seem exceptionally foolhardy to attempt to do so, since he has usually been depicted as both an enigmatic figure and a morally dubious one. Hurstfield confined his discussion to the Cecils' view of the right relationship between church and state, concluding merely that Robert Cecil followed his father Lord Burghley in supporting a via media. Yet it is possible to piece together a large amount of information about his spiritual development, and the evidence suggests a gradual but very significant change of outlook, from orthodox Elizabethan protestantism to a more complex position in which both his doctrinal and aesthetic sensibilities were moving in the direction later identified with Laudianism. Moreover, in the construction of his private chapel at Hatfield, and in his links with men such as Richard Neile and Samuel Harsnett, he can be seen as the first great patron of the emerging high church party, antedating Buckingham and Charles I by a generation. Tracing the religious evolution of Robert Cecil first earl of Salisbury thus illuminates some of the crucial changes reshaping English protestantism in these formative years.

Almost from the first, the reign of Henry VIII witnessed high views of kingship. Some instances in the first decade of his rule have attracted much attention, but one critical episode has been overlooked. In the course of the occupation of Tournai between 1513 and 1519, Henry developed and successfully tested a complete theory of imperial kingship, partly cast in a new language of sovereignty. Drawing in part on the French models liberally strewn about the English cultural landscape, Henry asserted all the prerogatives of a rex imperator not only against the Tournaisiens but more significantly against Leo X. This new model kingship and its implications for royal relations with the church alarmed some of Henry's agents, especially Ralph Sampson. Sampson contented himself with expostulating about the threat to his conscience to his chief, Thomas Wolsey, but others showed more alarm. One of Sampson's friends, Thomas More, a similarly junior but rising functionary, offered two meditations on the potential dangers of Henry's kingship, going much beyond the abstract admonitions against tyranny of his Latin epigrams.

John Thelwall was born in 1764 in Covent Garden, London. The son of a silk mercer, he was unsuccessfully apprenticed to his father after leaving school at 13, and then successively, an apprenticed tailor, and an articled legal clerk; but he failed to impress at any of these, apparently reading during working hours. Turning to his pen, he published two volumes of poems and became literary editor of the Biographical and Imperial Magazine. Speaking at the Coachmakers' Hall, he caught the attention of John Home Tooke, who offered to send him to university. But by this time he was already enthusing about the revolution in France and had joined both the whiggish Society of the Friends of the People, and the more down-market London Corresponding Society. In the midst of all of this, and getting married, he attended some courses on anatomy and medicine at one of the London medical colleges.

‘To me he was always the embodiment of Cavalier romance.’ Thus Vita Sackville-West on her seventeenth-century ancestor, Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset. Such labelling indicates the problems which still bedevil any study of Civil War royalism. Brian Wormald's Clarendon brilliantly revealed that the men who joined Charles I in 1642 represented a broad range of opinion. Above all, he made us aware of a coherent group of moderate (‘constitutional’) royalists who throughout sought accommodation. There was a palpable difference of strategy between these people, who favoured royal concessions in order to prevent further military initiatives, and others who favoured military initiatives in order to prevent further royal concessions. Within these two basic matrices, there were further subtle inflections of attitude between individuals and within the same individual over time. But many such inflections remain murky. Wormald's lead was never followed through. Charles's supporters have consistently received less attention than those who remained with parliament; and among the royalists, moderates have attracted fewer studies than ‘cavaliers’ and ‘swordsmen’. There is thus an urgent need to clarify different varieties of royalism and especially to bring the constitutional royalists into sharper focus. However, before we can assess their wider aims and impact, we must first identify them; and here the inappropriate labels bestowed on so many of Charles's supporters create real problems. Anne Sumner has recently ‘de-mythologized’ John Digby, first earl of Bristol, revealing him as more complex and less intemperate than the ‘hawk’ of legend.

In 1581 Antoinette de La Marck, the devout duchesse de Montmorency made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin at Montserrat in Catalonia. The next year her husband Henri de Montmorency, the governor of Languedoc, corresponded with the viceroy of Catalonia about the problem of banditry which was rife on both sides of the frontier. In 1583, Montmorency's servant carried letters to Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy, hidden in the soles of his shoes. During the festivities for the wedding of Charles Emmanuel to the infanta Catalina in 1585, Giuseppe Lercaro, Montmorency's Genoese-born intendant desfinances, spent some ten days in Barcelona concealed in the lodgings of Savoy's ambassador and had several clandestine interviews with both the duke and his new father-in-law Philip II. In 1588 Philip offered 100,000 francs towards the dowry of Montmorency's daughter Charlotte, provided that she married the son of the due de Guise and thus reconciled the two families whose rivalry had dominated the French political scene since the 1540s. These incidents, unremarkable as they may individually appear, formed part of the negotiations between Henri due de Montmorency and Philip II which, in notable contrast to those of the Spanish king with the Guise family, have been little studied by historians. Consequently, Montmorency's reputation now is generally that of a politique and patriot. This paper offers a rather different appraisal of him.

Ireland's position as a kingdom in early modern Europe was, in some respects, unique, and this eccentricity sheds light upon the complexity of governing a multiple kingdom during the seventeenth century. The framework for looking at the way Ireland operated as a kingdom is provided, first by an article by Conrad Russell on ‘The British problem and the English civil war’ and secondly by an article by H. G. Koenigsberger entitled ‘Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe – dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale’. Russell listed six problems that faced multiple kingdoms: resentment at the king's absence, disposal of offices, sharing of war costs, trade and colonies, foreign intervention and religion. Koenigsberger used Sir John Fortescue's two phrases of the 1470s to distinguish between constitutional, or limited monarchies, and more authoritarian ones during the early modern period. Both these contributions are valuable in looking at the way the monarchy operated in Ireland because the application of the constitution there was deeply influenced by Ireland's position as part of a multiple kingdom and because Englishmen, looking at Ireland, wanted her to be like England, but, at the same time, did not wish her to exercise the type of independence that they claimed for England.

In contrast to the innumerable studies of the revolutionary movement in risorgimento Italy, the popular counter-revolutionary movement has received scant attention from historians. Reasons for this neglect are not hard to find: distaste for what is perceived as a retrograde movement on behalf of a deservedly lost cause reinforces the normal tendency of historians to concentrate on the ‘winners’ rather than the ‘losers’ who by their very nature seem of less significance. That the Italian popular counter-revolution, was among the losers of history is undeniable: it did not succeed in its own time, nor did it contribute to any of the great progressive movements that transformed European society over the next century. Nonetheless, this neglect seems unjustified. To ignore a movement that had the support of a sizeable part of the Italian people – indeed, greater support at times than the risorgimento itself, which few historians would deny was the work of a small elite – can only result in a very distorted picture of nineteenth-century Italy. Moreover, to understand the development of a complex historical event such as the risorgimento, it is not sufficient to study only the winners, for the nature and weaknesses of the losers may also have played a major role in determining the outcome. This raises a fundamental question concerning the Italian counter-revolution: enjoying as it did wide popular support, why did it accomplish so little? It had its moments of triumph, but in general its record was unimpressive. Why did not this reservoir of popular support give conservatives the upper hand and abort the risorgimento? Why, in particular, did conservative governments make so little use of this apparently potent ally?

The Popish Plot is the proper starting point for a reassessment of society and culture in late seventeenth-century England. The origins of the plot have become increasingly obscure, primarily because historians have made the erosion of Calvinist religious values and belief a defining characteristic of social and political change after the Restoration. John Kenyon has argued that the plot was an instance of mass hysteria, with its roots in the overcrowded, rumour-infested environment of London. Having identified post-Restoration nonconformity with cranks mentally ‘unhinged’ by the civil wars and the Great Fire, Kenyon interprets the plot as an obvious fabrication foisted on a paranoid and credulous nation by adventurers and religious extremists. Christopher Hill, in rare agreement with Kenyon, sees the decline of the religious approach to politics until ‘by the time of the Popish Plot it had degenerated into a stunt manipulated by cynical politicians’.

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”.

The issue of sweated labour formed one of the most intractable social problems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous remedies to solve sweating, such as the restriction of female and child labour, the abolition of domestic workshops, consumers' leagues, and co-operative production were variously advanced but subsequently found to be wanting. Eventually, and bowing to the inevitable, Edwardians finally sanctioned one cautious measure which they thought would curb sweating at its root – that is the legal control of low pay in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. Initially, the act applied to domestic chain-making, ready-made and wholesale bespoke tailoring, paper-box making, and the machine-made lace and finishing trade. In these four industries in which wages were deemed unduly low, boards were established consisting of equal numbers of employers' and workers' representatives, plus independent members nominated by the state. In effect, the boards were thus a form of compulsory arbitration on pay.

Viscount Scudamore had three great passions: God, cider and cattle, in that order. He was remembered for cultivating cider apples, breeding cattle, his learning, and most of all for his piety, rebuilding one church, endowing others and aiding distressed divines during the interregnum. Many commended his erudition. He stood on the fringes of that republic of letters which revolved around Mersenne, a friend of the philosophers Hobbes, DuBosc and Grotius, and known to Samuel Hartlib who considered him ‘a great schollar and studying hard continually’. In particular he was a great reader of theology. William Laud had to warn him to ‘Booke it not to much’ while William Higford advised his grandson to ask the viscount, ‘a great lover of learning and very learned’, to guide his own study. The viscount recommended Jeremy Taylor's Holy living and Holy dying to his son, whilst consulting with Laud and Henry Hammond for his own reading. Hammond directed him to Augustine, Aquinas, Peter Lombard, Suarez and Grotius; clearly he was no beginner. In the early eighteenth century Matthew Gibson, Scudamore's first biographer, was astonished at the amount oftheological notes amongst the first viscount's papers. These, however, have all but disappeared. DespiteScudamore's famed ‘affection to Divine knowledge…[and] good proficiencie in it’, it is no longer possible to construct a system of divinity for the viscount, if he did ever work out his theological position comprehensively; perhaps like his friend William Laud he preferred to leave off the deep points of divinity.

The First World War was launched in the belief that force could be an effective instrument of policy. Underlying the decisions of July and August 1914 was a hard core of calculation, based on the advice to governments that the fighting would be fierce but short, and that its political and economic repercussions could be contained. In addition, because the two sides were closer to military equivalence than in previous crises, both could believe that they had a reasonable prospect of victory. But such equivalence, given the weapons technology of the day, might also deny either coalition a speedy, surgical triumph. And it is from the prolongation of the war as well as its inception – from its not being over by Christmas – that its historical importance derives. Among the consequences were eight million dead, and the dislocation of the Western economic system. Without the war it is unlikely that either Lenin, or Mussolini, or even Hitler, would have come to office. As far as such things can be said with certainty, the First World War was a precondition of the Second. A four-month rather than a four-year conflagration would have had other, now unknowable, consequences. It would not, presumably, have had these.

The historical verdict on the General Court of the East India Company has often been an unfavourable one. The Court, the ultimate sovereign body within the company, has invariably been described in terms similar to those which used to be applied to the eighteenth-century house of commons: it has been seen as a corrupt, disorderly, and disreputable political institution. Macaulay set the general tone in 1840 when he painted a typically vivid picture of proceedings at the General Court in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘The meetings’, he wrote, ‘were large, stormy, even riotous, the debates indecently virulent. All the turbulence of a Westminster election, all the trickery and corruption of a Grampound election, disgraced the proceedings of this assembly on questions of the most solemn importance’. This unflattering and somewhat impressionistic sketch has occasionally received uncritical acceptance from modern-day historians, and indeed it may be endorsed by contemporary observations of particular events at the Court. In 1767, for example, a first-time visitor to the Court room at India House in Leadenhall Street was appalled by what he saw, and he came away with the impression that this was ‘the most riotous assembly I ever saw’. And yet, on numerous other occasions commentators were full of praise for the good order and high standards of oratory at the Court. This has prompted two of the leading modern authorities on the history of the company in Britain to comment favourably on the quality of debate at India House during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.

A national militia has been the cry of every patriot since the Revolution, and this measure, both in Parliament and in the field, was supported by the country gentlemen or Tories, who insensibly transferred their loyalty to the House of Hanover. In the language of Mr. Burke, they have changed the idol, but they have preserved the idolatry.

On 15 February 1647 hostility to the excise flared up at Smithfield market in London. A riot occurred when a purchaser of livestock refused to pay his excise and attempted to remove his livestock without doing so. When he was stopped by ‘the guard’ a crowd gathered in his defence. It was dispersed but another crowd gathered later burning down the excise office and ‘80. or 100.li [was] scattered and purloined’. The rioters were said to have drawn encouragement from excise disturbances in Norwich shortly before. The crowd that gathered later was led by butchers one of whom, William Taylor, was reported to have said that he would ‘bear down the Excise by Force’. The Kingdom's Weekly Intelligencer could not ‘heare of any man killed’, but remarked that the tumult ‘did arise to such a hight that many of the Officers of the excise were beaten, [and] their books torn’. The Weekly Account, emphasizing the seriousness of the riot, reported that the ‘Lord Mayor and Sherriffes of the City were forced to come in person to pacifie the tumult’.

‘Western history since 1800,’ Charles Tilly has written, ‘is violent history.’ And so it is, though the German southwest – by which I understand Nassau, Hesse-Darmstadt, the Rhenish (Bavarian) Palatinate, Baden, Wüirttemberg, as these polities emerged after 1815 – constitutes an anomaly so striking as to tax historical imagination. I realize that I risk resurrecting a caricature of ‘the German’ – the obsequious and officious Spiesser, the kowtowing burgherpedant – or at least of appearing to lend credence to that image by suggesting that German social strife was contention with civility.

Gambling has received surprisingly little attention from social historians, especially considering the wide growth of interest in working-class leisure over the last decade. The leading historians in this field, including Peter Bailey, Hugh Cunningham and Stephen Jones, have been more concerned with the development of institutional forms of leisure such as the music-hall and the cinema. In the only detailed study of gambling, Ross McKibbin considered the growth of betting on horse racing and the football pools between 1880 and 1939, claiming that gambling constituted a rational pursuit within the economic and intellectual environment of working-class life. McKibbin's pioneering article established that betting was a central feature of working-class leisure, and in a case study of Salford I propose to develop this argument by looking at a wider range of forms of gambling, and by an examination of the survival of betting as an illegal activity. McKibbin dealt only briefly with the question of the policing of gambling. I propose to relate some of the findings of my research to a second concern of recent social history, the impact of policing upon popular recreation.

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.

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.