Already at the beginning of her reign Elizabeth I was resolved to effect at the earliest opportunity both the restoration of the Royal Supremacy and the replacement of the Latin liturgy by an existing Edwardian Prayer Book. Constrained by Marian legislation which she was firmly minded not to break, the queen signalled her intentions by conspicuous adoption in her Chapel Royal of such few and minor manifestations of Protestant liturgy and practice as fortuitously were still legitimate, amplified by certain early Edwardian practices (1547–9) originally introduced not by statute but by proclamation or injunction and therefore never formally de-legitimated by statutory repeal. That her initial intention was restoration of the Prayer Book of 1549 is indicated by the identity of certain texts set to music early in 1559 by her Chapel Royal composers, and by the response of Edmund Guest to a contemporary request that he undertake a revision of parts of the 1549 Book. Arising from her own personal convictions, Elizabeth's policy was not without merits; however, political pragmatism and ecclesiastical realities coerced her into agreeing instead to the restoration of the Book of 1552. She exacted a number of concessions to her own conservatism ; first discernible in the instructions given to Guest, these achieved their realization through the rubrics of the 1559 Prayer Book and certain of the 1559 Injunctions.

This article addresses one aspect of the legal proceedings known collectively as the ‘Nuremberg trials’: British policy towards, and trials of, Nazi war criminals in the British zone of occupied Germany. The killing of fifty allied airmen after their escape from Stalag Luft III illustrates how atrocities against British POWs affected British war crimes policy. The article examines one part of that policy: the efforts to expedite trials and the decision to end them. It examines the ambivalence that characterized British attitudes towards war crimes trials, and also discusses British hopes for an expeditious trial programme and political and legal objections to delays in prosecutions. Finally, it shows that concerns about the Stalag Luft III case led to extensions in the trial programme, but that eventually the programme was subordinated to Britain's broader policy of reintegrating Germany into the western fold.

This piece reinterprets the career of the Leveller, John Lilburne, during the English Civil War, by re-examining the official sources pertaining to him, and the multitude of pamphlets written by himself and his enemies. The article recovers the chronology of Lilburne's story, by stripping away the layers of propaganda with which he later surrounded himself. It shows that he had powerful friends at Westminster, and that his tribulations were caused by political rivalries within Westminster rather than his development of a radical political theory. He is shown to have formed part of the ‘Independent alliance’ during the mid-1640s, although his protected position was eventually imperilled by the fracturing of this group after the end of the first Civil War. The aim is to improve not just our understanding of Lilburne, but the complexity of parliamentarian politics during the 1640s.

The relationship between intellectual secularization and the writing of academic history has long been one of the major neglected themes in British historiography, and its unexamined presuppositions are explored here in relation to the religious history of the eighteenth century. A great deal of the history of eighteenth-century religion has been written from a confessional standpoint, and this has served further to marginalize discussion of the subject in a period of history concerning which secular interpretations continue to prevail. A reunion of the religious and the secular is a major desideratum in the writing of eighteenth-century history, and this applies not only to historians of religion but also, a fortiori, to political, social, and cultural historians. The perspectives offered by such historians are critically examined, and the need for them to take seriously the integral part of religious history in the broader history of the period is emphasized accordingly.

There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.

Some time soon after the execution of Charles I, the new rulers of England began seriously to consider imposing an oath of loyalty to the new republic. On 22 February the Council of State were directed to take an ‘Engagement’ to the regime, and for the rest of 1649 there were periodic suggestions to extend this Engagement to wider sections of the political nation, and especially to office holders. Finally, on 2 January 1650, the Rump decided that all men over the age of 18 would take an Engagement, of the form I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords

On 28 January 1689 the house of commons of the newly assembled Convention resolved that King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of this kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the government and that the throne is thereby vacant.

This paper examines an important and rather neglected forum for popular discussion – the debating society – in London in 1780. This was the first full year that debating societies left their semi-private, club-like sites and took to new rooms, all across the metropolitan area. These new venues were large (seating between 400 and 1200) commercial settings, where men and women could come to speak and to listen, to enjoy an evening of rational entertainment at a small price. Using the many daily London newspapers as its main source, this essay examines the audiences present at these debates, the types of questions asked and the nature of the responses, when known, and surveys the wide range of reactions to such activity. Finally, it suggests some explanations for and evaluations of the growth and decline of this important cultural form.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Diplomacy confirms the fact. As an illustration no incident is better than the Italian retention of the Southern Sporades or Dodecanese group of Aegean Islands in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Italy, last and weakest of the Great Powers, was able to defy the expressed wishes of Britain, the dominant naval power on whose patronage Italy traditionally relied. Defiance of Britain was not accompanied by a corresponding surrender to Italy's Central Power allies. It triumphed through Italian skill at exploiting the above dictum: possession is nine-tenths of the law.

By bringing the Botha-Smuts ministry to power in 1907, the ‘Vereeniging Het Volk’ (the ‘People's Union’) restored supremacy in the Transvaal to the Boers, less than five years after a war fought with the avowed object of wresting that supremacy from them. One might argue that, given the grant of self-government, this achievement owed less to the organizing techniques of Het Volk as a party, than to the numerical strength and the cohesion of the Boers as a community; but even so, the importance of Het Volk would be established as the expression, at the level of a political party, of these social facts. Coming into existence alongside other parties, before the introduction of self-government, Het Volk helped ensure that under the new constitution a fully fledged party system would function from the beginning.

Few politicians can have been as maligned, insulted and manhandled as John Stuart, third earl of Bute. Before 1760, cosseted within the confines of the Prince of Wales's court at Leicester House, this former Scottish representative peer was of little public note although he had acted as the lifeline between Pitt and the reversionary interest between 1755 and 1758. In London society he was known for his intellectual pretensions (he was a very competent botanist), his haughty airs, and a shapely figure which was displayed to such good effect in the theatrical productions held under the auspices of the Princess Dowager. It was only after 1760, when it became abundantly clear that the youthful George — if not his mother - was infatuated with Bute, that the royal favourite was exposed to the bleak winds of political hostility,. Admittedly there were rumours before George's accession about the subsequently notorious liaison between Bute and the Princess Dowager, rumours that Sir John Pringle told Boswell emanated from the intrigues of Bute's rivals at Leicester House. But these were a mere foretaste of what was to come: after 1760, whether Bute was serving the king (1761–3) or out of office, he was attacked by the mob, threatened with assassination, vilified in pamphlets, prints, newspapers, songs, plays, and handbills, and effectively rejected as a potential ally by all the leading politicians of the day except for the none too politically respectable Henry Fox. The bulk of this criticism was levelled in the 1760s, but even after 1770 the so-called ‘Northern Machiavel’ was under withering if increasingly sporadic fire, and as late as the 1780s vestigial elements of the old hostility remained.

Since the advent of the social sciences, historians have been ploughing up large areas of well-trampled history. Sociology, for example, has lent them an expanding range of hypotheses and interpretations. In particular, studies more concerned with behavioural patterns than with the mere details of what happened have cast the traditional accounts aside. But there are dangers in this rush to produce fresh formulations. The historian, once caught in the tangle of an ingenious general explanation, abandons too easily the normal rigorous standards of historical research. Frequendy, in such cases, he fails to establish the relationship between his evidence and his generalizations. These criticisms often apply when broad concepts from political sociology are used to explain the motives and behaviour of specific politicians and groups of politicians. Any background study of the Great Reform Act is exposed to all these risks.

Although many in the West have written on the Popular Front and its role in French or Spanish politics during the thirties, very little has been revealed about its origins. Indeed, one of the foremost historians of the Popular Front has expressed perplexity on this matter. Daniel Brower asks: ‘What brought on this change? Why had fascism suddenly assumed such threatening proportions in the eyes of Comintern leaders? To this day the answer remains obscure.’ The aim of this article is to throw some light on this question.

In 1641 a century-long partnership of the crown and the London Stationers collapsed, leaving state control of the press and the Stationers’ interest in copyright in an extremely vulnerable situation. Tentatively at first and with growing assertiveness by 1642, the Lords and Commons revised and restated in their own interest the old partnership of the state and the Stationers; for their part, the Stationers worked hard to demonstrate their utility to the new regime and to preserve the privileges that allowed them to control the book business. The result of their joint efforts was the licensing ordinance of 1643, which critics, including John Milton, thought to be scarcely distinguishable from the Star Chamber decree of 1637, the high-water mark of the old regime. But the ordinance proved only partially successful. In the interim between regimes, there emerged a vigorous if vulgar tabloid journalism avant la lettre, sustained by an underclass of undisciplined elements of the Stationers’ Company, non-company interlopers and hawkers, and often youthful scribblers, several of them Cambridge drop-outs. Such engaging rascals no less than moralists like Milton had their share in acclimatizing the English to a press practically free of prior restraint.

Oliver Macdonagh’s ‘model’ for social legislation in the mid-nineteenth century is, after more than twenty years, a familiar one. It requires the exposure of a social evil, preferably in sensational terms, which sets in motion ‘an irresistible engine of change’. The increased scale of industrial processes, coupled with the ‘ widespread and ever-growing influence of humanitarian sentiment’, and stricter views of sexual morality and ‘decency’ combined to put pressure on legislators to assume new social responsibilities. This pressure, it has been said, frequently owed its origin to a pervasive Christianity, or at least to the work of churchmen, while legislation rested less on philosophic foundations than on forces which, if not inevitable, were at least inherently probable in the context of Victorian social and political life - in short, were part of a ‘self-generating’ process.

The ex-officer problem in Britain following the Great War derived its special meaning from the difficulties associated with finding a satisfactory relationship between wartime rank and postwar status. Images of social decline competed for public attention with those of social elevation. Behind these images lay a series of dilemmas about how to reconcile the social and economic effects of military promotion with the claims of democracy. The shifting usage of the term ‘temporary gentleman’ during the war reflected the changing background of those being granted commissions, and the possibilities of upward mobility produced tensions which were to persist and grow after demobilization. Government policies for ex-officers, in seeking to assist talent without perpetuating the distinctions of rank, were directly affected by such tensions. Ultimately, expectations of higher social status faded in the light of experiences which conveyed a sense of loss and decline, and ex-officers became a symbol for those who saw their pre-war social position being threatened in a less secure world. However, the ex-officer problem existed in its own right as the result of the uniquely awkward adjustments associated with being ‘de-officered’ at the same time as being demobilized.

Historians of the Edwardian tariff reform movement have disagreed about its aims. This article examines the motivations of the leadership of the Tariff Reform League, which was by far the most influential organization in the tariff lobby. It argues that the League's leaders were more empire-minded than often allowed, and that it was the preferential tariff which they were most determined to promulgate and defend. Indeed, attempts by the Balfourite wing of the Unionist party to twist tariff reform away from its imperial origins were strongly resisted by the League, and the forces of protection within the organization were also carefully controlled. When the Tariff Reform League finally gave way on the issue of imperial preference in January 1913, it was not because it had suddenly ceased to be concerned about the unity of the empire. Rather, the widespread public hostility to the imposition of food duties showed no sign of diminishing, thus making it difficult to persuade a critical mass within the Unionist party that tariff reform was a politically viable strategy of imperial federation.

For much of the interwar period there was discussion in Whitehall of the policy to control prices and profits in any future major war. Opinion was divided between those who believed that the control of prices and profits would be necessary in return for controlling labour in the light of the experience of the First World War, and those who focused on the financial aspects of the issue, in which the control of prices and profits was seen to play little positive role. This second strand of thinking, rooted in the treasury, predominated, particularly once rearmament began: the co-operation of business and labour, it was argued, was best achieved by maintaining the status quo. As a result, once war did break out, legislation had to be enacted very rapidly to meet popular demands. More generally, this study throws light on the nature of interwar government in Britain and its attitude towards intervention.

This article recovers the rationale behind the project to found a ‘new’ British history undertaken by J. G. A. Pocock in the early 1970s, and contrasts this with the approach adopted in the subsequent historiography. The article argues that British history as conceived by Pocock was intended to transcend the parochialism of national history whilst also rehabilitating the writing of imperial history without succumbing to the temptations of metropolitan whiggism. Pocock's perspective was constructed against the backdrop of a British withdrawal from empire and led him to a neo-Seeleyan interest in the dynamics of imperial expansion and retrenchment. While this process is best understood through the comparative study of empires, any such undertaking raises complex questions about the ultimate subject of historical inquiry and the nature of historical explanation. In addressing these questions, this article distinguishes the ambition to write the history of a polity from the aim of writing histories of ‘party’ as originally formulated by the historians of the Scottish enlightenment whose work has been among Pocock's abiding subjects of investigation.