Just after midnight on 24 January 1577, Alice Neate crept into a bedchamber at the New Hythe in Colchester and slit her sister-in-law's throat. She wrapped the body in a red blanket and dragged it out into the woodhouse yard where it was discovered the following morning. An intensive investigation immediately ensued. All the chief suspects except Alice Neate, namely neighbours who had visited the Neate cottage on the evening prior to the murder, satisfactorily established their innocence. The testimony against Alice was overwhelming. Even her husband conceded that his sister had been murdered and prayed, ‘God save [my] wife!’ To be sure it was only indirect evidence, yet nonetheless damaging because it came from her own husband. Her daughter Abigail's testimony, however, was utterly devastating. At first steadfastly maintaining her mother's innocence, Abigail's support collapsed when under pressure of ‘straight examination’ she finally admitted that her mother had persuaded her to conceal clear proof of the homicide. Abigail shared the bedchamber with her murdered aunt, and since she had been wide awake during the killing had been an eyewitness to the whole bloody tragedy. If that was not enough, Alice also had a clear motive. Her hatred of her sister-in-law was well known and stemmed from her belief that the murdered woman had herself murdered two of Alice's children. On the basis of this overwhelming case against her, Alice Neate was committed to prison where she was held until the next gaol delivery at which she was duly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to hang for murder, according to the blood law of felony.

While the crucial question of the contribution of the troubles of the 1620s to the eventual dissolution of the old political order in Stuart England remains clouded in debate, with historians like C. Russell questioning the whole concept of escalating parliamentary opposition to the Crown in that decade, we are at least beginning to recognize the pattern of provincial unrest and the growing interaction of national and local agitation at this time. D. Hirst in particular has shown how constituencies were increasingly volatile and vociferous, a development which owed a great deal to the expansion of their electorates. In the boroughs country gentry joined forces with anti-oligarchic groups of citizens to broaden the franchise. Here agitation was strongly influenced by the severe economic and social problems of many county towns during the early seventeenth century.

The single most intriguing problem posed by the history of the Reformation in Ireland is the failure of the state-sponsored religion to take root in any section of the indigenous population. Perhaps because this outcome has been taken so much for granted a satisfactory explanation of it has yet to be offered. Historians are now coming to recognize that the central question cannot be properly discussed without a prolegomenon ranging over the political, social and intellectual history of the period. What follows is intended as a contribution to such a series of preliminary studies. It investigates the sources of tension within reforming circles in sixteenth-century Ireland and considers the implications of this aspect of its internal history for the external history of the movement.

As the devil never leaves unbelieving heretics in repose, they conspired in such cities as Paris, Rouen, Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse and other large cities to surprise the catholic Christians and put them all to the sword. The king was apprised of this near the end of the year 1572, whereupon, considering well such a damnable enterprise, he sent orders to all the cities to inquire as to the truth of this endeavour…. When its truth was discovered, he ordered, so that the cost of the executions for which he otherwise would have had to pay might be avoided, that…[the huguenots] be put to death in all of the cities of France where they could be caught. [Explanation of the Saint Bartholomew's massacre provided by an anonymous catholic chronicler, 1581.]

During the past ten years, historians of early modern Europe in Britain, France and the United States have shown an increasing interest in the history of education. Doubtless encouraged by the contemporary formulation of an educational sociology, they in turn have begun to investigate the form and function of education in pre-industrial societies. For the most part, however, research has been limited to the study of elementary education with the purpose of understanding the effect of its expansion on literacy and popular attitudes. Less attention has been paid to the social history of higher education, particularly to the role of the universities. The one exception is the case of Oxford and Cambridge for which studies abound through the efforts of Professor Stone and his pupils. But outside England, apart from Kagan's work on the Spanish universities, studies have been few and limited to accounts of patterns of attendance over relatively short periods of time that give little indication of the general picture. Indeed, information about the history of attendance at most universities in the early modern period has still to be gleaned from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies – useful as sources of administrative history, but seldom revealing on questions that interest the present-day historian. Apparendy, too, there is little chance of the position improving in the future. With the exception of a project envisaged by the French early modernists, Chartier, Frijhoff and Julia, interest in the social history of universities seems to be diminishing.

And first, it is necessary that we should agree what we mean by an absolute Monarch, which is indeed a point rather controverted, than clearly decided by any Author, that I have yet met withal. [Thomas Goddard, Plato's Demon, 1684.]

Among the many apparent paradoxes of Jean Bodin's personality one of the most striking was the sudden transformation of the defender of royal sovereignty and religious toleration into the apologist of the rebelling Catholic League at Laon in 1589. Throughout the middle period of the Wars of Religion (1572–84) Bodin had been attached to the parties opposing the Guise and the Catholic League; he had been active first in the royalist party of Henri III and subsequently he rose to prominence in the retinue of the king's brother, the politique duke of Alençon. After the duke's death in 1584 Bodin seems to have been attached loosely to Henri of Navarre, supporting (so it seems) his claim to the French throne and earning through his services to Navarre the promise of a reward in 1587. Yet despite this royalist and politique history Bodin in March 1589 to all appearances threw overboard his old loyalties and went over to public support of the League. In so doing he appears at first sight to have repudiated political, religious and jurisprudential convictions of long standing. The League demanded that the king of France be Catholic whereas Bodin had never regarded a religious test as a fundamental law of the French crown; the League demanded sectarian religious war of the kind which the République had proscribed; the League abhorred the principle of religious toleration advocated in the République; the League overruled the juristic right to the throne of Henri of Navarre which Bodin had justified as late as 1586. What motives could conceivably have driven Bodin to commit this act of apostasy (if such it really be)? The answer is of the greatest significance for an understanding of Bodin's mind not only in his later years but from his youth onwards. For Bodin's change from politique to ligueur is but one of the several conversions which punctuate his life and the details of this particular alteration may illuminate his personality and thought in general.

Scholars whose speciality is Scottish church history have long been aware that in 1657 members of two factions of the Scottish Presbyterian church came to London to debate before the Lord Protector the method of selecting ministers for Scottish parishes, but these historians have overlooked some of the Scots' other activities. A close look at parliamentary happenings reveals that these men, Resolutioners and Remonstrants, were also deeply involved in secular politics. Their disagreements were not confined to church matters, for during their stay these groups lobbied vigorously both in parliament and in the council of state, taking opposing positions as to what should be the qualifications for voting in Scotland. In this country, most Scots had been disenfranchised since the conclusion of the Civil War and their defeat at the hands of Cromwell's soldiers. The problem to be resolved was which and how many past adherents of the Stuart cause in Scotland should now be allowed to vote and hold office.

Contemporary reactions to the 1832 Reform Act were diverse. Concomitant with the feeling of relief that a revolution had been avoided was a fear even among some of the Bill's most earnest advocates that the whigs had perhaps gone too far. The long period of political agitation by extra-parliamentary associations suggested that a radical House of Commons might emerge from the forthcoming elections. In fact, the expected radical onslaught never really materialized. Although they were returned to the Commons in strength by the election of December, the radicals failed to find common ground for action and the whigs successfully defended the pact given royal assent the previous summer. That sentence of failure is not unreasonable. Radicalism in the early nineteenth century was by its very nature the province of the individualist whose imagination often ranged beyond the bounds of practicality and who found compromise irksome. Membership of the House of Commons was to prove a chastening experience for men accustomed to the adulation of the common people. Rules of procedure and the traditional circle of agenda so circumscribed these enthusiasts that energy became sapped and their sense of mission vitiated. Woodward's suggestion, too, that the radicals floundered because they ‘defended the interests of a class to which they did not belong’ may contain a measure of truth. But apart from the odd chapter in the occasional biography, there has been a marked lack of interest in proceeding beyond these general conclusions; failure is too often equated with justified obscurity.

The historiography of Locke's First treatise exhibits a vicious circle of oversight, prejudgement and caricature which has effectively prohibited detailed, structural interpretation of that work for generations. Twenty years ago the solitary voice of Herbert Rowen escaped the inertia and admonished scholars for their lack of attention. ‘There is more to the First treatise’, he argued, ‘than a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's derivation of political authority from Adam in a straight line of inheritance.’ The central theme of the treatise had been misconstrued, Rowen thought, and that mistake helped to account for the general neglect. He urged a reassessment of the predominant dogma, maintaining that

Locke's First treatise turns out to be an essential portion of his total argument on behalf of the social compact state, and against the dynastic (and potentially absolute) state. Though its argument is negative, the First treatise is necessary to Locke's major, positive work in the Second treatise because it clears and defines the ground for it. It therefore merits more attention than has usually been given to it.

Historians will give no thanks for being told that professionalization models are fraught with pitfalls as putative interpretations of scientific development. When deployed stricto sensu, essentially to trace the evolution of the remunerated career structure, the concept of professionalization invites blinkered antiquarian administrative history. Too easily, however, the jargon can serve as a blanket pseudo-explanation of the key phenomena of modern science, and thereby it loses all precision. Thus a recent author, having noted that professionalization is a Protean term, concludes ‘perhaps we can use it to mean the emergence of a scientific community’. But this runs the risk of collapsing quite distinct concepts into each other, and thereby of begging the very questions which must be faced.

In his celebrated work England under the Stuarts George Macaulay Trevelyan dismissed in a single sentence the question of the position adopted by the bulk of the English rural population during the Civil War: ‘The tenant-farmer was in no position to avow any political or religious faith but that of his landlord.’ Given this assumption it was logical that Trevelyan and his successors should concern themselves with the problems and opinions of landlords and other, more independent, men and leave the doings of the peasantry to students of agrarian and social history. And so they have, never seriously questioning the proposition that the aristocracy's sympathy for the Crown would be reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of their tenants. Indeed, the king himself had felt confident of the peasants' support, and an assortment of facts and myths have been marshalled post facto to persuade us that his confidence was justified. For example, since peasants were assumed to have been rather simple-minded and very conservative men, it was deduced that they ought to have sided with their monarch. The Great Chain of Being, the accepted basis of heavenly and earthly society, placed kings between man and the angels, surely a height bound to inspire awe in a plain man of the soil. According to some historians, Charles I had been a veritable champion of the poor with his vigorous campaign to enforce the poor laws and his commissions for the prevention of enclosure. His humbler subjects must have been grateful for such paternalism. In any case, as Trevelyan pointed out, the stark reality of their dependent position would have forced tenants to adhere to the party chosen by their landlords, and most landlords who committed themselves to a party joined the king's.

In 1949 Sir Herbert Butterfield showed, for one important episode, the necessity of treating England and Ireland as a single political world and of explaining public events in London and Dublin concurrently. Yet most modern scholarship has persisted in examining the two nations in isolation. Ireland is typically relegated, like Scotland, to a separate chapter in the manner of the Oxford history of England; and despite studies of Anglo-Irish constitutional disputes in the light of analogous debates over the American Revolution, the close texture of the reciprocal influence of English and Irish politics in the mid eighteenth century has still received almost no attention from historians. One, indeed, has positively asserted that ‘From the end of Queen Anne's reign until the 1770s Ireland was almost outside the range of British politics’. In reality the connexion was both strong and of several kinds. Many English politicians had an opportunity to learn through personal involvement in Ireland lessons which they were later to find applicable at home. The fourth dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, Richard Rigby, Lord George Sackville, Henry Seymour Conway, the duke of Newcastle and Henry Fox were all involved both in the Irish crisis of the 1750s and in the English ministerial controversies of the 1760s. The English ministry was kept fully informed about Irish politics through both formal and informal channels. Even statesmen not directly concerned had links which encouraged them to keep in touch with events in Dublin. Fox, in Ireland in the summer of 1750 visiting his brother-in-law the earl of Kildare, sent Henry Pelham perceptive accounts of the crisis to date in which he argued for the necessity of eventual legislative union between the two countries; Charles Townshend was aware of Irish problems at the same time as he was preparing, for Newcastle, his ‘Remarks upon the Plan for a General Concert’ of the American colonies.

From the standpoint of the late Victorian and Edwardian governing classes, the most disturbing feature of the ‘social problem’ was the breakdown of British industrial relations. The long ideological and political truce observed by organized labour more or less since the 18405 had ended. A new and more militant trade unionism had emerged which condemned the consensus policy of the craft unions and challenged both the prerogatives of management and the conventional criteria of wage determination. Not only did it endanger social stability, it was also regarded in government circles as a major obstacle to British economic growth. Industrial unrest would, it was feared, disrupt production, intensify resistance to technical innovation, and weaken Britain's cost competitiveness in world markets. In the establishment press, in the parliamentary reports, and in the political memoirs and diaries of the period, one therefore finds a growing concern to secure industrial peace; a concern reflected in the growth of state intervention in industrial relations.

In recent studies of the various revolutionary attempts of 1848–9 in Italy, historians have moved away from the liberal nationalist interpretations in order to pursue analyses of social problems and class interest in particular regions, especially in Lombardy, Venetia and southern Italy. Often overlooked, however, is Tuscany, despite its strategic central location in the peninsula. An examination of Tuscan society in process of change over the three decades before Italian unification reveals internal divisions which must be assessed in terms of domestic conditions and which cannot be understood solely in the context of the nationalist movement.

On 22 August 1849 a privately sponsored peace congress opened in the Salle de Sainte Cécile in Paris. In the chair was Victor Hugo, assisted as vice presidents and secretaries by a team of men from Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Several of these men, such as Richard Cobden, were members of the legislatures of their respective countries: others were prominent clergymen and philanthropists. Seated before them were delegates from a slightly wider range of countries which in that blissfully Eurocentric era were deemed to represent the world. They had been brought together by an invitation sent by the London-based Peace Congress Committee to well-known individual sympathizers, peace societies, religious bodies, philanthropic and other civic groups. The business before them consisted of a series of propositions advocating international arbitration, general and simultaneous disarmament, a congress of nations, an international court, and various measures designed to facilitate international communication. This peace congress was the second in a series of four convened between 1848 and 1851 in Brussels, Paris, Frankfort and London to co-ordinate and develop various pressure-group activities which had gained momentum during the late 1840s in Britain and the United States.

On 27 February 1885, Kaiser Wilhelm I signed a Schutzbrief, or Imperial Charter, drafted under Bismarck's supervision at the Foreign Ministry, which placed about 60,000 square miles of east African territory under the protection of the German Reich. Incorporating the interior districts directly west of the island of Zanzibar, the German protectorate was based on treaties made with local chieftains late the previous autumn by Carl Peters, founder and co-director of the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation. Bismarck, in endorsing Peters' claims to territory in east Africa, approved as well the sending out of further expeditions. The eastern boundaries of the soon to be established Congo Free State were described as the anticipated limit of continued annexations which the German company was authorized to undertake at once.

The five years 1917–21 are commonly regarded as a period of unusual turmoil in Britain when fears of revolution reached an intensity unknown in more than three generations. In explaining this unrest, historians have naturally concentrated upon the organized Labour movement; upon the complex dialectics of a conservative rank-and-file marshalled behind creative revolutionary leaders in the engineering trades; and, in the trades unions and Labour party, upon the genesis and meaning of Clause IV. In all such studies the state's most powerful servants have, however, commanded relatively little attention. Other than as an instrument of public order intruding into industrial disputes, historians of the working class have shown scant interest in the serviceman who remains very much the ‘candy man’ in uniform. This article, by way of redress, is concerned to examine the character of unrest in the armed forces, to compare and contrast disaffection in the army and navy, and to review Labour's response to both veteran and serviceman.

The Crimean war has been the victim of much conceptualization. For modern historians, drawn to the phenomenon of a European conflict conveniently sited in the middle of a century of comparative peace, much can be made to hang on it. Whether it is an aberration, or the expression of suppressed feelings, or indeed the beginning of a current that is to grow stronger until 1914, diplomats, soldiers, politicians and economists have taken it as a dividing line. It is simultaneously the continuance of the Peninsular tradition in warfare and an array of technological novelties tempting the variously applied title, ‘the first modern war’. But while its impact on domestic politics and European diplomacy has been scrutinized, and while Captain Nolan has failed to convey his breathless order to the Light Brigade correctly on innumerable occasions, the bridge between the two, between – at its most banal – politics and tactics, has not been so closely examined.

‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ Familiar words to children, but not normally found over a leading article in a staid old tory newspaper. Certainly not when Britain was in the darkest period of a struggle for her very existence. Yet the Morning Post's use of the nursery rhyme was most appropriate on Monday, 4 December 1916. The previous day there had been an historic confrontation between the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and his secretary of state for war, David Lloyd George. What happened when they met at 10 Downing Street was not clear – nor, it should be added, is it clear to this day – but by Monday morning it was widely assumed that Lloyd George had held a pistol to Asquith's head and forced the old prime minister to yield the higher direction of the war to a small committee with the secretary for war at the helm. Therefore the answer should have been easy: Lloyd George killed ‘Cock Robin’.