This paper uses two manuscript tracts to reconstruct the vision of the English polity underpinning Lord Burghley's interregnum proposals of 1584–85. These proposals famously prompted Patrick Collinson's work on “the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I,” which in turn became embroiled in subsequent attempts to recuperate distinctively “republican” strands of thought and feeling in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Written by two clients of central figures in the regime, the two texts are replies to a tract by John Leslie outlining Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne. This tract was republished in 1581 in Latin and then in 1584 in English as part of a Catholic propaganda offensive of the summer of 1584 to which, in turn, the Bond of Association and the interregnum scheme itself were responses. By comparing different versions of the two texts with one another and with Thomas Bilson's later printed tract, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion, something like the structuring assumptions, indeed the political thought, underlying the interregnum scheme can be recovered and analyzed and the republican nature of the monarchical republic assessed in detail for the first time.

This is a history of life after death—not the life of a disembodied soul, but of the body left behind in a prison yard, buried in quicklime. It is a history composed of family members, friends, politicians, and bureaucrats drawn into cooperation and conflict by the politics of rebellion, partition, and sexuality in Ireland and Great Britain. The deceased in dispute, Roger Casement, had been a controversial figure during the later years of his life, knighted by the British Crown in 1911 for his advocacy of humanitarian causes in Africa and South America and then hanged by the British government on 3 August 1916 for conspiring with Germany to mobilize and arm Irish separatists. Casement had requested that his body be buried at Murlough Bay, near his family's home in County Antrim in the province of Ulster. Instead, Casement's body was buried at Pentonville Prison in London, and for almost fifty years the British government rejected the appeals of Casement's family and supporters for the repatriation of his body to Ireland. In 1965, the body was finally exhumed and reinterred at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, following a state funeral.

Why did the British government take over fifty years to disinter Casement's body from Pentonville, and why was his request to be buried at Murlough Bay not honored? In exploring the answers to these questions, I focus on negotiations between the British and Irish governments, and the terms of their final agreement over the present location of Casement's remains.

One of the pervading interpretations of Anglo-American relations in the interwar period is that the advent of James Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in June 1929 set in train the series of events that ended bitter relations between Britain and the United States, bitterness which had been caused by the naval question. There are several strands to this: first, that the American policy pursued by the Conservative second Baldwin government from November 1924 to June 1929, and especially after the failure of the Coolidge naval conference in the summer of 1927, was bankrupt; second, that MacDonald was more amenable to settling British differences with the Americans than were his Conservative predecessors and, that being so, softened the hardline towards the United States that had marked Conservative foreign and naval policy for more than two years; and, finally, that MacDonald's decision to travel to the United States on what proved to be a very successful visit in the autumn of 1929 to meet Herbert Hoover, the new president, to discuss outstanding issues personally, was a major diplomatic coup. Some of this received version is true. No one can doubt that MacDonald and his Labour ministry played a crucial role in helping to ameliorate the crisis that had been dogging good Anglo-American relations for more than two years before June 1929. The Labour Party constituted the government when the London naval conference of 1930 ended the period of Anglo-American naval rivalry. Moreover, for six months before that conference convened, Labour had conducted effective diplomacy in preparing for its deliberations.

Among the individuals who populated rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few were more unloved than the gamekeeper. That he was regularly damned at the village alehouse is not, perhaps, all that surprising. The gamekeeper was, after all, responsible for enforcing the highly unpopular laws “for the preservation of the game.” It was he who searched laborers' cottages for snares, nets and illicit game; it was he too who hauled poachers before the local justice of the peace for summary trial and punishment. But if the gamekeeper was hated by the poor, his standing in other quarters was not notably higher. Stewards questioned his honesty, foxhunters denounced him as a vulpicide, and the press was always eager to brand him as a rank hypocrite. Defenders were rare and cautious. Even Richard Jefferies, author of a very sympathetic portrait of a keeper he had known in his youth, nevertheless felt compelled to acknowledge “the abuse lavished upon [gamekeepers] as a class—often, it is to be feared, too well deserved.” Historians, for their part, have made little effort to discover whether that abuse was in fact deserved. Those who have not ignored the question altogether have usually been content to repeat the charges hurled at gamekeepers by their contemporaries. In the view of one of the more recent historians of the game laws, for example, the gamekeeper “was usually some bold pugnacious labourer, often a former poacher chosen on the maxim ‘set a thief to catch a thief.’… He could not often resist the constant temptation to sell game on the sly ….And the combination of igonorance and authority all too often made him into a brutal and arrogant man.”

Labour took office in 1945 amid high hopes that its socialist message could be applied abroad as well as at home. Although Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and other Labour leaders had had almost as much responsibility as their Conservative counterparts for Britain's wartime foreign policy, it was widely believed that once on its own Labour would play a different role in world affairs. Let Us Face the Future, the party's election manifesto, pledged to “apply [a] Socialist analysis to the world situation.” Bevin's famous “Left understands Left” remark was widely taken to mean that Labour would be more sympathetic to revolutionary developments throughout the world but above all to the Soviet Union. For many in the Labour movement, a socialist foreign policy and sympathy for the Soviet Union also implied distrust of the United States and its attempt to create what the New Statesman called a capitalist “economic empire.” For the Labour movement as a whole, the story of these years can be summarized simply: the reluctant abandonment of hopes of Anglo-Soviet friendship and the grudging acceptance of an Anglo-American alliance.

Labour leaders, of course, did not fully share the assumptions of their more enthusiastic followers, and they made clear from the start that they intended no radical break with the foreign policy of the wartime coalition that they had helped to shape. Ernest Bevin told the Commons in his first major speech as foreign secretary that he accepted the foreign policy of his predecessor, Anthony Eden. But a commitment to continuity in foreign policy did not immediately entail complete hostility to the Soviet Union or a special relationship with the United States.

When the third Earl Grey attempted, between 1846 and 1851, to promote federations in Australasia, South Africa, and British North America, he found scant support either at home or in the colonies concerned. He failed (except, in a sense, in New Zealand) partly because his schemes were more visionary than practically suited to existing colonial conditions, and partly because measures “imposed by the imperial authority” were apt to encounter difficulties abroad and, therefore, political trouble at home. Following Grey's departure from the Colonial Office, imperial policy makers refrained from prescribing federal systems for the settlement colonies. His abortive plans, however, had consequences during the next twenty years which, though different from Grey's intentions, amply vindicated the ability of the imperial government to exert its authority, and established, in the end, the desirability of colonial federations. For a decade and a half after 1850, the home government repeatedly and successfully frustrated local proposals for federation in the three continental groups of colonies. Then, between 1864 and 1870, it hurried to completion the union of British North America, and set about promoting that of South Africa. At the same time, it refrained from pressing any such development upon Australia, and actually arranged the dismantling of New Zealand's federal/provincial system.

No inconsistency was involved. Britain's policy towards all these colonies was designed in favor of its own interests, tempered by a remarkable consideration of those of the colonies. The chief imperial object during the period in question (c. 1850-1870) was to reduce the country's military and political commitments; and the chosen device for the purpose was encouragement of colonial self-government, in various forms, including republican independence in the Boer states of South Africa.

Despite having a powerful influence on the historiography of radicalism and nineteenth-century politics for the past several decades, the language of the constitution has not recently received scholarly attention. In Chartist and radical historiography, the constitution is usually treated as a narrative of national political development. This article extends the horizons of Chartist constitutionalism by exploring its similarities with American constitutionalism. By doing so, it also opens up questions regarding the ideas of the movement. Like the Americans sixty years before, the Chartists were confronted by a parliament that they believed had superseded its constitutional authority. This perception was informed by a belief that the constitution rested on the authority of the fixed principles of fundamental law, which they argued placed limits beyond which Parliament had no power to reach. As a result, the Chartists imagined that the British constitution functioned like a written constitution. To support this claim, they drew on a sophisticated interpretation of English law that argued that the common law was closely related to natural law.

This article explores the relationship between religion, sexuality, and modernity through a study of the important yet neglected text Sex and Common-Sense (1921) by the celebrated Anglican feminist preacher, pacifist, and campaigner for women's ordination, Maude Royden (1876–1956). It argues for the ongoing vitality of religious constructions of sexual identity in interwar Britain and the deeply symbiotic rather than oppositional relationship between Christian and secular (scientific) discourses during this period. Royden's engagement with the new sexological and psychological approaches to the self and sexuality is examined, as are her efforts to modernize religious understandings of sexuality through a more compassionate, progressive reading of women's capacity for sexual pleasure, marriage reform, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality. The centrality of her High Church incarnational theology to an understanding of sex as sacramental is also assessed. The article proposes that histories of sexuality and histories of religion have hitherto worked with differing chronologies of secularization that have had interesting implications not only for the recognition of religion's continued influence in shaping mainstream British sexual morality but also for the uneven and multifarious readings of modernity itself.

This article examines how early modern publics were shaped partly by dynamics of linguistic difference and physical distance. Taking Wales as its focus, it argues that barriers to communication have yet to be considered sufficiently in a literature which presents English language metropolitan discourses as normative. Particularist publics that drew upon different cultural heritages and employed different communicative practices to those prevailing in and around London deserve greater attention. This is illustrated principally by the vernacularizing impulses of Protestant reform in sixteenth-century Wales and the responses these elicited from Catholic interests, and also the attempts to construct political publics in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s. Early modern Welsh public culture was characterized by a degree of isolation from the genres and sites of critical opinion (such as newsbooks and coffeehouses); print production was underdeveloped; and there were logistical barriers to the spread of news. Conceptualizing early modern Wales as a “particularist public” can help enrich our understanding of center-locality relationships in other parts of the English (and subsequently British) realm.

In the sense that myth is a reordering of various random elements into an intelligible, useful pattern, a structuring of the past in terms of present priorities, nineteenth-century Englishmen were inveterate myth-makers. As liberal and scientific thought shook the foundations of belief, the Victorians erected gothic spires as monuments to a medieval order of supposedly simple, strong faith. While their industrial masses languished, they extolled the virtues of self-made men. Confronted with foreign competitors and rebellious colonials, they instinctively asserted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In classic myth-making style, the Victorians set about “reorganizing traditional components in the face of new circumstances or, correlatively, in reorganizing new, imported components in the light of tradition.”

Myth not only serves self-validating ends; it also provides a cohesive rationale, a fulcrum propelling people towards great achievements. If the Victorians were confident and self-congratulatory, they had cause to be: their material, intellectual, and political accomplishments were many. Not the least of their successes was in the sphere of sports and games, a subject often ignored by historians. Especially in the development of ball games—Association and Rugby football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf—the Victorians modernized old games, created new ones, and exported them all to the four corners of the earth. Stereotyped as overly-serious folk, they in fact “taught the world to play.”

Since sport, more than most forms of human activity, lends itself to myth-making, it is not surprising to find a myth emerging among the late-Victorians having to do with the origins of Rugby football. Like baseball's Doubleday myth, the tale of William Webb Ellis inspiring the distinctive game of rugby is a period piece, reflecting more of the era which gave it birth than of the event to which it referred.

What is “protest”? Who is a protester and who is not? This is a problem that has bothered me ever since I began, about ten years ago, to try to sort out the social and political protesters from the rest of the convicts transported to Australia from the late 18th century to the 1860s. To some this is no particular problem at all. Criminologists and writers on crime and punishment - such as Leon Radzinowicz, J. J. Tobias and Nigel Walker (to cite the most recent) - have tended to place protest, when they have dealth with it at all, under such omnibus labels as crimes against property and crimes against persons. Others have eluded such refinements altogether and have argued that if protest is a social phenomenon, so is crime, and how can one sensibly draw a distinction between the rebel against society and the man whom society drives, or appears to drive, to crime? So it has been claimed that all convicts, whether they were transported or hot, were the victims of a society that left them out in the cold; and there is some justice in the claim (was it made by the Hammonds?) that in a society like Britain's in the early nineteenth century there was a large measure of culpability in common between the cattle-maimer or urban thief and the magistrate or High Court judge who sent them to a penitentiary at home or to the convict-jails of Van Diemen's Land or Sydney Cove.

The history of British continuing education has been written almost entirely as institutional history. The impact of the 1924 Board of Education regulations on the funding of adult classes has been thoroughly examined, and we know a good deal about the various district secretaries of the Workers' Educational Association. But we have yet to tackle a set of more fundamental and revealing questions about the WEA: Who were the students? Why did they enroll in WEA courses? What were their intellectual goals? What cultural equipment did they bring to their classes? What went on inside the classroom? Most importantly, how, if at all, did the WEA change the lives and minds of its students?

This article focuses on a controversy that erupted shortly after the WEA was launched in 1903, and which persists today: a question that can only be resolved by studying WEA students at close range. According to a number of Marxist critics, the WEA played an important role in steering the British working class away from Marxism. Roger Fieldhouse argues that the WEA'S emphasis on objective scholarship and open-mindedness “could have the effect of neutralising some students' commitments or beliefs and integrating them into the hegemonic national culture.”

The last fifteen years have seen an efflorescence of scholarly studies of British fascism between the wars. Once identified exclusively with the figure of Sir Oswald Mosley and dismissed as a wholly derivative imitation of its Italian and German counterparts, fascism in Britain is now understood as a complex and variegated phenomenon whose roots run no less extensively in British political culture than in external influences. As historians have probed more deeply into the ideological underpinnings of the British ultra-right, they have made increasingly apparent the numerous connections between this new form of political mobilization and long-standing tensions within British politics and society. While scholars continue to acknowledge the many important ways in which British fascism was indebted to its Continental equivalents, they can no longer maintain—as did Robert Benewick in 1969 in his groundbreaking survey of the radical right—that fascist policy was developed “with a callous disregard for principles” or that the distinctively fascist elements of British ultra-right ideology were imported en bloc from overseas.

It is all the more surprising that existing histories should have overlooked so completely one of the most important “indigenous” components of British fascist ideology - its preoccupation with the Irish question. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Irish sentiment became a principal theme of several leading fascist groups, exceeded in prominence only by anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, to which it was often explicitly linked. For these small, politically marginal societies, the formulation and dissemination of hibernophobic ideas held obvious attractions.