The internal dissessions and upheavals in the Unionist party following the catastrophic defeat incurred at the general election of 1906 have been the subject of frequent examination by historians. Despite, or perhaps because of, the importance of the issues involved there has been general agreement that questions of policy were at the centre of this struggle. Balfour's official biographer has commented that any rumours of ‘disputed leadership’ were ‘ludicrous in the light of the correspondence that was passing in private’, while Chamberlain's biographer has asserted that he was staking ‘everything on policy’. Recently Dr Judd has suggested that Chamberlain ‘envisaged…a reunited Unionist party…very probably under his leadership not Balfour's’, but he took this analysis no further and Mr Fraser's judgement is typical that what took place was ‘a polite but ruthless struggle for the control of the Unionist party's machinery and policy’. The Birmingham leader is characteristically seen to have played through the whole episode with the straightest of bats, bound above all by personal loyalty to Balfour. Contemporaries, however, saw a different Chamberlain – one whose ruthless ambition bordered on fanaticism. Balfour noted that Chamberlain ‘cannot realize that because he is only thinking of one thing, it does not follow that every one else has the same limited intensity of vision’. Some were prepared to interpret Chamberlain's machinations in terms of a dual personality: ‘You know there are two Joes and that one honestly sees no harm in prosecuting such a manoeuvre’, but others were ready to place more sinister constructions upon them:

In the first half of the twentieth century, parole in the Deep South of the United States was part of a nexus of penal mechanisms providing white employers with a pliant black labour force. By contrast, in New York, which was at the forefront of innovations in parole policy, there was a surprising interracial consensus among white parole administrators and politicians, civil rights activists, and black prisoners themselves that the African American community was integral to parole administration and success. This article explores why different constituencies supported this consensus through debates on parole in the black press and via the desperate, and invariably futile, letters that prisoners wrote to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These sources also indicate that, for black prisoners in New York, African American influence over the parole system was routinely constrained by widespread black poverty, racial segregation, and discrimination in employment.

In a book published twenty years ago, the present writer expressed the following opinion on the European wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: ‘It was not that the wars of that period meant less in expense and suffering than those of later times. Armies and navies were smaller, and even smaller in proportion to the number of the peoples; but they were as large as the poorer and simpler societies of those days could afford. In every great war there was some state that fought until it came within sight of revolution at home.’ The purpose of the present article is to consider, for the special case of the Nine Years War, whether this opinion may still be maintained or ought to be modified in the light of the many relevant publications of the intervening twenty years. The words quoted above relate to the social and economic aspects of the wars, but these, of course, cannot be entirely detached from the military aspects, and it will be well to begin by stating an assumption as to these military aspects. This assumption is that those who directed the fighting, whether on land or on sea, apart from such exceptions as the weaknesses of human nature must always occasion, fought to win and fought as hard as they could. For the present purpose this will be assumed, but it is not accepted as true by all historians. Some of them have applied to this period a famous sentence of Gibbon: ‘in War the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests’.

This article seeks to revise existing interpretations of the political writings composed by the early Stuart MP, Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), while imprisoned in the Tower of London between 1629 and 1632. In particular, it challenges the common understanding of Eliot as an absolutist writer. This characterization is shown to be based on a misreading of his principal treatise, The monarchie of man, and the problematic assumption that De jure – a translation he undertook of the continental absolutist, Arnisaeus – should be taken to epitomize Eliot's own views. The article also refutes the notion that The monarchie of man is an uncontroversial text that ignores contemporary political context. It is argued that the treatise can, in fact, only be read in relation to the constitutional crisis of the late 1620s: Eliot's work is presented as a subversive attack on Charles I's tyrannical pretensions, which supplies a remedy in the form of a Ciceronian insistence on active virtue. These findings in turn have implications for how we understand the political thought and culture of early Stuart England more generally.

The Spanish Armada and the battle of Lepanto loom large in a remarkable period of international history shaped to a considerable extent by the deployment of sea power. Yet between 1581 and 1583, France also conducted a large-scale naval operation at great distance. A series of expeditions to the Azores reached a climax with the defeat in battle of a French fleet of sixty ships off the island of São Miguel in July 1582. Acting under the authority of Catherine de Medici and in the name of her rival legal claim to the Portuguese throne, the commander Philippe Strozzi had not only led the most ambitious oceanic operation in French history up to that date and a bid to extend France's overseas empire but a serious challenge to Philip II's union of the Iberian crowns. Yet this was more than just a puzzling anomaly in France's foreign policy. It was also an act of royal authority and the pursuit of reputation and status by the queen mother that was entirely consistent with the domestic priorities of the crown in the context of the Wars of Religion.

During the 1890s evangelical Protestants took to preaching on the streets in southern Irish towns and cities. They provoked an angry response, with large Catholic crowds gathering to protest at their activities. This created a difficult situation for the authorities. Obliged, on the one hand, to protect the rights and liberties of the preachers, they also looked to nurture behaviour appropriate to the sectarian realities in Ireland. At stake was the extent to which Ireland could be treated as an undifferentiated part of the United Kingdom, with W. E. H. Lecky increasingly recognizing the need for a different legal basis in Ireland. These events formed part of the wider evolution of ‘constructive unionism’. More broadly, respectable Irish Protestant and Catholic disapproval of preachers and the ‘mob’ revealed the way in which class attitudes cut across sectarian identities, suggesting that the political dividends paid the wider unionist movement by this exposure of the apparent realities of ‘Rome rule’ were little valued in the locale. Similarly, interventions by home rule politicians reinforced the sense that conciliating British public opinion was a central concern. Here was an example of how locally orientated sectarianism helped shape national political agendas.