It has been said of James Tyrrell that his ‘main claim to distinction was perhaps his friendship with John Locke’, but his elaborate monument in Oakley church, near Brill in Buckinghamshire, although it records a number of his qualities and achievements, does not mention this. James was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Tyrrell, Knight, of Shotover House, near Oxford; his mother's father was James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh. Sir Timothy had been a Cavalier and in royal service, but his n son was to devote himself to writing books attacking the principles for which the royalists had stood. Born in London in May 1642, James Tyrrell was entered before he was fourteen as a student at Gray's Inn, but a year later he abandoned legal study and went up as a gentleman commoner to Queen's College, Oxford.

This article looks at central government's role, focusing on the parliamentary terms 1959–64 and 1964–6, in directing the way in which local authorities enacted the central area redevelopment schemes of the 1960s. The first two sections review the substantial but little-studied literature produced across the political spectrum about central area urban renewal in the period 1959–64. Section III uses the Joint Urban Planning Group, a group set up within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a case-study to show how modernist approaches to redevelopment became operative within a government department. The Joint Urban Planning Group has received no attention from historians. Section IV discusses the fate of these ideas during Labour's first term after the 1964 election.

The so-called ‘decade of reform’ witnessed far-reaching changes not only in Britain's domestic affairs but also in the colonial sphere. This applied particularly to the sugar colonies. Until the early 1830s the economy and society of those colonies had rested upon two main pillars – slave labour and a protected market for their produce in the United Kingdom. Yet within a few years the first of these pillars was completely destroyed, the second was already beginning to crumble, and the old ruling classes in the sugar colonies were in a state of frustration, rapidly despairing of the possibility of adapting themselves to the new situation.

The English Revolution began in the summer of 1647. It was a struggle to delimit power and authority which neither the constitutional reforms of 1641 nor the civil war that followed had been able to resolve. Shortly after the fighting ceased in 1646 the House of Lords propounded that ‘things that are to be perpetual might be settled in the old way, by the three estates’. Unexpectedly, however, it was conservative ‘presbyterian’ members of the House of Commons who conducted an experiment in government without the king. In the winter of 1646 Denzil Holies succeeded in obtaining sufficient personal support and institutional power to coordinate and implement a political programme. But the inability of the men at Westminster collectively to secure an accord with the king had encouraged some to question parliament's intentions and others its integrity. Moreover, Charles's defeat, flight to the Scots, and subsequent imprisonment revived the long deferred examination of sovereignty. This now centred on parliament, whose good intentions were, nevertheless, an insufficient justification for its rule. Beginning in the winter of 1646 and building to a climax in the summer of 1647, an assault mounted from both left and right struck at the conduct of Holles and his ‘faction’ and then at the foundation of parliament's role as a conservator of order and authority.

While British colonial rhetoric consistently identified tradition as the basis of legitimate authority, colonial practice actually produced far-reaching changes in the nature of government in Britain's African possessions. New institutions, and new holders of power, emerged in African societies in response to the particular needs of colonial administration. This article explores this transformation in one part of Condominium Sudan, which was effectively a British possession but which has often been excluded from historical discussions of the impact of colonialism because of its unique status. The Nuba Mountains have recently gained notoriety as a particularly bloody theatre of Sudan's long post-colonial civil war; while some have sought to explain this as the result of British policies which encouraged racial antagonism, the article suggests that here, as elsewhere in Africa, the real legacy of colonial rule was the creation of new kinds of local government which sat uneasily with enduring local ideas of spiritual power and proper authority.

Contrary to stereotypes that represent it primarily as an expression of machismo or romantic chivalry, military honour in early modern England was professional, moral, utilitarian, and a force for social stability. It was pragmatic as well as idealistic. It shared attributes of civilian honour but also comprehended rules and obligations specific to soldiers. Professional honour required that the soldier should know and observe the codes and practices of his métier. To do so satisfied his internal sense of personal integrity and brought external reputation. Honour also had a broader social value. Mutuality and utility marked its operation in the English civil war. This mutuality safeguarded practices both sides found useful, such as prisoner exchanges, for the honour of each side was engaged in observance of the relevant rules. The survival of a bipartisan soldiers' honour ameliorated relations between enemies. It helped to prevent irrevocable social divisions, to sustain social order, and to enable previously warring Englishmen to live together with tolerable equanimity.

Violence is the means of expression of men who lack any other, and is especially useful to the historian of an otherwise inarticulate working class, starving on die scraps which middle-class sources leave him. Everyman is anonymous, but becomes memorable in rebellion; and in die many memorable rebellions of nineteenth-century Europe, that self-proclaimed ‘age of revolution’, historians have rejoiced that trie poor had found voice in violence.

During the years following the end of the Second World War the British Labour government was preoccupied with the threat posed by Russia. Britain could not contain Russia on its own; indeed, only the United States possessed the necessary power. At the beginning of 1949 this was emphasized by the newly formed permanent under secretary's committee headed by William Strang. That committee considered the Anglo-American special relationship as the pivot of British foreign policy: British interests were best likely to be ensured by its maintenance and consolidation. An inequality was, however, inherent in the association, and Britain thought that the alliance would be least effective in Asia and the far east, an area where American naivety and selfishness were particularly evident. The spread of Mao Tse Tung's communists across the Chinese mainland emphasized Britain's predicament, especially as, initially, the Chinese were regarded as orthodox communists.

Recent historiography has argued that the British ecclesiastical policies of James VI and I sought ‘congruity’ between the different churches in Scotland, England, and Ireland, rather than British ecclesiastical union or the anglicanization of all the churches. It is argued here that the asymmetry of the changes he sought in Scotland and England has been underplayed and that this has masked his choice of a fundamentally Anglican model for the British churches. Through allowing the archbishop of Canterbury to interfere in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs, undermining the presbyterian system, promoting episcopal power and liturgical reform, anglicanization of the Church of Scotland was the goal of James VI and I, and one which he pursued until his death. The motivation for King James's persistent desire for the fulfilment of this policy is to be found in his rapid assimilation to the Church of England after 1603 and, moreover, in his goal of the reunification of Christendom as a whole, on the Anglican model.

The debate over the popularity or otherwise of state social reform has been inhibited by the lack of contemporary sources. This article seeks to advance our understanding of working-class experience of the 1908 pensions scheme by utilizing the material in Post Office archives and the local press. It argues that the scheme was implemented in ways calculated to reassure the beneficiaries, that it promoted the independence of the elderly, that it reached more people than is usually thought, and that it helped to modify popular attitudes towards the state.

This article examines the origins of the first Agreement of the people: a draft written constitution presented to the general council of the New Model Army on 28 October 1647. It argues that the Agreement was a document that emerged from concerns amongst some of the soldiery and their civilian allies that the terms of a projected settlement with Charles I, The heads of the proposals, would betray the political programme advanced in the army's earlier public statements, especially its Declaration, or, representation of 14 June 1647. As such, this article moves away from the traditional narrative of seeing the Agreement as a Leveller manifesto that was authored in a deliberate attempt to infiltrate the army, and thereby asks fresh questions about the political networks and the programme behind the document. What emerges is a picture of the post-first Civil War political scene that integrates parliamentary manoeuvrings with City of London politics and the public and private affairs of a politicized army. As a result, the article sheds new light on aspects of the constitutional crisis of the later 1640s.

Although it is now recognized that the Stalin-Tito dispute was sparked off by Tito's desire to intervene decisively in the Greek civil war, the ideological context of that decision has never been fully explored. This article suggests that, since the early days of the Second World War, Tito had been committed to establishing a popular front ‘from below’, i.e. under clear communist control. He did this not only in Yugoslavia, but used his position in the war-time Comintern to persuade other communist parties to do the same. As a result he was dissatisfied with the all-party coalition governments established with Stalin's consent throughout Europe in 1945. Tito favoured a communist offensive, while Stalin, aware of the international position of the Soviet Union, favoured a more cautious approach. When Stalin summoned the first meeting of the Cominform in September 1947 and made Tito its de Facto leader, Tito mistakenly assumed he was to head a new international committed to a revolutionary offensive not only in Eastern Europe but in Greece and even Italy and France.

Few men have ever shown a more sublime faith in the divine origin of their mission than the papal reformers of the eleventh century. They set to work with a ‘modest proposal’ to destroy two of the most intimate and powerful foundations of clerical society: they aimed to abolish simony and with it the lay control of patronage; they tried to destroy the family life of the clergy. From one point of view they were doing only what every policeman does—they were trying to enforce the established law. From another point of view their platform was a devastating social revolution. If we may admire the high idealism of Leo IX, Humbert, Hildebrand and Peter Damian, we must also concede that their work had many victims; the legislation of the eleventh-century Popes on clerical marriage must have produced as many broken homes and personal tragedies as the morals of Hollywood. Both Damian the ascetic and Heloise the deserted wife have a claim on our sympathy as historians; and both found their supporters in their own day. Between the unbending demand for the enforcement of celibacy and the view of the Anonymous of York that it was entirely proper for the clergy to be married there were many possible positions. The Anonymous (writing at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) was propounding opinions already obsolescent; and clerical marriage found few defenders in the middle and late twelfth century. But if the field narrowed, the subtleties of the problem were more fully appreciated. The twelfth century was an age of growing sophistication in lay circles as well as clerical. Nowhere was this more true than in the world of love and of marriage; in that century (whatever the lot of womankind as a whole) the romantic ideal was born, under whose spell we still live. It is the variety and the subtlety of the view-points which give my subject its interest, and also its intractability. Clerical marriage is an exceedingly delicate topic, though it has not always been delicately treated.

The popular mind loves the dramatic and the macabre, and so it has come about that the two events of British Indian History which the man in the street is aware of are the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Great Mutiny. When there were no Mutiny horrors to contemplate, their place was taken by the legend of Tipu Sultan; even in 1831 Ram Mohan Roy was followed about by crowds in London crying Tipu Tipu. It has been a misfortune for British Indian understanding that these two events seemed discreditable to India; for though Seraja-Daula is now acquitted of responsibility for the Black Hole, and the military revolt theory of the Mutiny generally prevails, the popular legend continues. The well of Cawnpore is remembered where the well of Ujnalla is forgotten.

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.

The article seeks to establish the reasons why Conservative governments in the 1950s decided not to proceed with legislation to restrict immigration from the Commonwealth in the 1950s. It is thus particularly concerned with the debates about proposals that were put before the Eden cabinet in 1955 and the subsequent postponement of any decision to take action.

The various constraints such as the need to placate opinion in the African and West Indian colonies, a strong desire to present an enlightened view of conservatism at home and abroad and uncertainties about possible reactions which could be exploited by their Labour opponents, are examined. It is argued that these factors outweighed the arguments of senior figures in government urging a speedy response to pressures building up for restrictions within the parliamentary backbenches and in a number of constituencies. The significance of the race riots that took place in Nottingham and the Notting Hill district of London are discussed.

The article concludes that many of the factors which had contributed to a delay in imposing restrictions were seen, at the beginning of the 1960s, to possess less relevance than in the previous decade. This paved the way to the passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962 which finally ended unrestricted entry.

Counsel was central to negotiating the politics of Reformation monarchy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In a personal monarchy, particularly one wherein the monarch was supreme governor of the church, shaping the character of the ruler was vital for the smooth functioning of the political system. This article provides a conspectus of a broader project on early modern kingship and counsel which will discuss advice-giving provided by privy councillors, parliaments, preachers, and courtiers between 1509 and 1689. It shows how ecclesiastical counsel was central to defenders of the established church and in absolutist theorizing, and how men between 1558 and 1688 drew on patristic examples of its practice. Comparing ecclesiastical counsel to other genres of advice-giving also shows their common and distinctive features.

The reasons for the decline of the Liberal party in Britain, and its replacement by the Labour party as the representative of the left, continue to be the subject of debate among historians of twentieth-century British politics. An important point at issue has been whether or not the Liberal decline had irreversibly set in prior to World War I; or if the war itself with the strains it placed on liberal ideology and the relationship among the party's most prominent leaders, and with the stimulus it provided for a more militant working class, was the catalyst for decline. There can be no question that the Liberal party was critically dependent upon the support of working-class voters for its viability as an alternative party of government.1 Thus, a major issue of contention among historians of Liberal politics has been the party's success or failure before August 1914 in retaining the allegiance of this crucial electoral base.

In early modern Europe, religious heterodoxy and intellectual inquiry posed serious challenges to the authority of centralizing forces both secular and ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, these dangerous developments had been driven by those individuals whom eighteenth-century writers had adopted as ‘culture heroes’ for an age increasingly self-conscious of its own enlightened status. In Britain, the newly established order defended itself against the scepticism and moral determinism of ‘freethinkers’ by upholding a religious and moral order based on liberty. But ‘freethinkers’ such as Anthony Collins were themselves the inheritors of, and propagandists for, the seventeenth-century revolution in science which underpinned the ideology being wielded against them. Their challenge elicited from Edmund Law an argument which co-opted their epistemology to ground the familiar metaphysics of liberty associated with the Newtonian position of Samuel Clarke. Where ‘freethinking’ had been perceived as a dangerous solvent of the social order, ‘freedom of thought’, within limits that were themselves a leading subject of debate in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, could be upheld as consistent with the demands of political society.

A leading historian of the British intelligence community has described the British public archives as ‘laundered’. Christopher Andrew was, of course, referring to the closure, sometimes deceptively, of the official records of the security services. ‘Laundered’ can cover a wide variety of sins and might even give a misleading impression. An understanding of the disposition of the historical records of British intelligence, of the prospects for access to such an archive, and the implications for research in this field, depend on more than knowledge of Whitehall practice or the state of legislation regarding public records. Such understanding depends, in the first instance, on what we mean by ‘intelligence archives’.