The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

The dissolution of the monasteries is one of the most familiar incidents in Tudor history. The genesis of the dissolution is however ill-documented. Here it is traced back to the suppressions of smaller houses authorized in 1528. It is shown how a partial dissolution could be construed as a desirable and necessary reform without challenging either the basis of monasticism or the doctrine of purgatory. A previously unnoticed petition is published to cast light on the anti-clerical agitation of 1529. It is suggested that there was an attempt to secure a dissolution for financial reasons in 1534 and it was the failure of this which forced the crown to adopt a new strategy to achieve a partial dissolution. This was the collection of damaging evidence of monastic corruption during the visitations of 1535. The display of this material to the Commons in 1536 persuaded them to accept a partial dissolution in the guise of a reform of monasticism. It is suggested that there was no ‘public’ demand for a dissolution in the 1530s except in the artificial circumstances of 1536, and that the shape of the dissolution was determined by the inability of government to secure the support of parliament for a dissolution justified on financial grounds.

It has been traditional to regard the reaction of Henry VIII in the face of treason and rebellion as savage and extreme. Perhaps for this reason, historians for long considered it superfluous to examine in any detail what fate actually befell those who took up arms against their king. More recently, however, findings that relatively few persons were executed by Henry, despite the savagery of his reign, and that in general his bark was worse than his bite,1 have suggested that this question could profitably be pursued further. There seems, for instance, to be a significant difference between the 178 executions in the aftermath of the Lincolnshire rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7 and the rather larger number for which Elizabeth was responsible following the much less dangerous Northern Rising of 1569.2 Yet how these figures were achieved and what considerations shaped and determined the extent of the government's retaliation is much less clear. Perhaps the surviving evidence will not normally admit of answers to such questions, for it was not in the government's interests to disclose that external considerations might influence the enforcement or otherwise of the law. The manifestation of this fact was therefore inconvenient, but exceptionally such disclosures might be unavoidable.

The merchant mariner could appeal to the law in the seventeenth century for remedies against arbitrary treatment. But historians have argued that even when the sailor was able to afford legal process he faced judges who served the interests of master and shipowner. This essay estimates the fees of a suit for wages in the seventeenth century, the mariner's propensity to initiate action, and his chances of winning. Evidence for such an appraisal, and for describing the attitudes of judges toward mariner complaints, comes from all wage cases decided by the High Court of Admiralty in sixteen years chosen from across the century. The results add to recent discoveries about the nature of justice in a litigious age and test claims that the sailor was commonly a victim both at sea and at law.

This article suggests an alternative explanation for the failure of the so-called Spanish match in 1623. The Spanish monarchy was not unanimously against the marriage of the Infanta María to Prince Charles, and the marquis (later duke) of Buckingham was not the brilliant negotiator who was able to expose elaborate attempts by the Spanish to hide their alleged mendacity. Analysis of archival materials from England, Spain, and Germany indicates that Charles decided to abandon the match when he realized that it would not guarantee the restoration of his dispossessed brother-in-law, Elector Palatine Friedrich V, who had done everything in his power to prevent the marriage. When Charles signed the treaty anyway, the Spanish then began to make preparations for the wedding, preferring to postpone serious discussion of a solution to the Palatine crisis indefinitely. For Charles, however, the two issues were inseparable. For him the match was as important for securing the restitution of the Palatinate as for designating his future royal spouse. When he left Spain, he had already devised and initiated a plan to dissolve the match. In many ways both sides were equally guilty of delay, dissimulation, and deception.

Some years ago the late Ronald Balfour wrote a paper on the Study of History at Cambridge. His main preoccupation was the nature of history as a study. To-day interest is focused on more practical matters of detail, and we wish to know why the Cambridge Historical Tripos developed as it did, what was the purpose behind the various reforms, how far the character of the Tripos was affected by the example of foreign Universities, by experience at Oxford or by the requirements of the Civil Service examinations, and, finally, who most influenced the Tripos, the professors or the more junior College lecturers and supervisors.

This article reconstructs the constitutionalist nationalist critique of the Irish revolution. It employs the writings of Stephen Gwynn, John Dillon, Jasper Tully, and others to illustrate the views of those Irish parliamentarians who were marginalized by the emergence of Sinn Fein as the dominant force in Irish political life after 1918. Stephen Gwynn, in particular, claimed that republican violence could not militate against – indeed exacerbated – the damage done by the failure of the constitutionalist nationalists to grasp the need for compromise over Ulster. Indeed, Gwynn argued that the violence of the Collins era – which has been justified on counter intelligence and broader political grounds – played a major role in shaping the sectarian institutions of the Northern Irish state. Gwynn's reflections on the self-defeating aspects of the Collins strategy are linked to a wider consideration of the role of the British government. This article attempts to qualify a scholarly orthodoxy – that British policy in 1920–2, undoubtedly subject to fluctuations, was incoherent and essentially reactive; instead, it argues that from the spring of 1920, Britain evolved a strategy, dependent on a considerable degree of intelligence success, involving the application of a carrot and stick policy designed to lead precisely to the Treaty compromise of 1921, but available much earlier to any Sinn Fein leadership willing to take it.

The tales of divine judgements on sinners which are found throughout John Foxe's famous martyrology, the Acts and monuments, and also collected in a concluding appendix to the work, have often been dismissed as the products of gossip, while Foxe's printing of them has been traditionally regarded as an idiosyncratic, but ultimately insignificant, aberration in his historical writing. After examining the sources for two of these stories of providential punishment, this article will argue that some of the anecdotes of divine retribution printed in Acts and monuments were sent to Foxe in pursuit of local feuds and private grievances, arising from personal hatreds and prospects of material gain as well as religious conflict. After examining the changes made to these stories in the different editions of Acts and monuments, this article will maintain that such providential stories were central, rather than marginal, features of Foxe's work and thought. It is hoped that this article will offer a fresh perspective on Foxe's editorial practices, on the accuracy of Acts and monuments and also on the conflicting objectives of Foxe and his informants.

The ‘middle sort of people’ is a social group that has been the subject of increased historical research in the last decade. Many studies have been written, and many definitions offered of the group, its identity, and its membership. As a result, these overlapping groups and contrasting methods of definition have caused the nature and identity of the group to remain elusive. This study charts the evolution of the historiography of the ‘middle sort’, and the many attempts to produce positive and accurate definitions of the group. It suggests that the identity of the ‘middle sort’ may, in fact, be more complex than is allowed for by existing studies, with different identities being adopted according to social context. It concludes that while the term ‘middle sort of people’ is an appropriate contemporary collective term for use by historians, it is much more problematic as a description of an active, cohesive social group in the early modern period.

This article concludes that Australia was determined to possess nuclear weapons from the end of the Second World War. The best prospects for this lay in working with Britain through the so-called ‘joint project’. British defence planners knew that their small island would not survive a future atomic blitz and, therefore, needed ‘active’ deterrent weapons. The problem was that the US after 1946 moved to protect its atomic monopoly and denied Britain research, raw materials, and test facilities. Australia was, therefore, an invaluable partner in the British deterrent weapons programme, in all its aspects from research to testing, as long as the US refused co-operation. The quest for atomic weapons lies at the heart of many of Canberra's initiatives after 1945 – the decision to build an Australian National University; the construction of the vast Snowy Mountains scheme; and ultimately the decision to deploy Australian forces into South-East Asia in the mid-fifties. The height of Anglo-Australian co-operation coincided with the atomic tests after 1952, London's decision to help build atomic reactors in Australia, and the Suez crisis. Britain's acquisition of deterrent weapons in 1957, however, saw the end of imperial co-operation on atomic weapons and delivery systems.

This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia was the scene of intense guerrilla warfare as well as a programme of ethnic cleansing undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, by the Croatian state under the control of the Ustaša fascist party. This article investigates the Wehrmacht’s contrasting perceptions of its own violence in the anti-partisan war and its views of the Ustaša’s assault on Croatia’s Serb minority. The author argues that these different views emanated from the Wehrmacht’s conviction that its strategic concepts offered the only correct strategy for the prosecution of modern warfare. As the key to victory, Wehrmacht staff officers emphasized the maximization of force on the operational level. By contrast, the Ustaša state pursued a strategy of nationalizing war that moved away from Wehrmacht strategic concepts and infuriated Wehrmacht staff officers. Moreover, the Wehrmacht employed a starkly different vocabulary in describing its own violence and Ustaša violence. These descriptions more deeply entrenched the Wehrmacht’s sense of difference regarding the two types of violence. By examining the Wehrmacht’s views of violence, this article suggests that factors other than anti-Slavic racism more strongly determined the way in which the Wehrmacht both perceived and acted out violence in Eastern Europe.

This article reviews the current state of historical writing on British political culture in the interwar period, with a particular focus on the character of the democratic society which emerged from the franchise extensions of 1918 and 1928. It takes as its starting point the influential interpretation advanced by Ross McKibbin in his two most recent books, Classes and cultures (1998) and Parties and people (2010). This holds that Britain's interwar democracy came to be shaped in the image of the anti-socialist middle class, buoyed by the centrist appeal of Baldwinite constitutional Conservatism. Anti-socialism's interwar hegemony, McKibbin further argues, had serious consequences for the progress of social democracy after the Second World War. Whilst this narrative is, in many respects, highly compelling, this review suggests that much recent literature on the period points to a range of alternative interpretative possibilities which offer different answers to McKibbin's core question: what kind of a democracy was Britain between the wars? Drawing on these studies, the review argues that Britain's political culture was rather more ‘democratized’ during these years than McKibbin allows, before finally identifying some directions for future research.

The Exclusion Controversy of 1679–81 echoes many of the constitutional issues debated before and during the Civil War, just as it anticipates many of the arguments used to support the 1688 Revolution. If the attempt to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession to the throne was abortive, it still provides an important key to contemporary opinion about the vital political problems of the century; and at this time when the structure, indeed the very existence of the early Whig and Tory parties is being questioned, the Exclusion Controversy can be shown in one respect at least to have had a markedly unifying effect on the former party, as demonstrated in its literature. The attempt at Exclusion was the supreme effort of Shaftesbury to rally the early Whig party, and it was accompanied by an intensive propaganda campaign, issuing forth a steady stream of pamphlets, most of which are still extant. Some of the best of these have been printed in Somer's Tracts, The Harleian Miscellany and State Tracts: A Collection of Treatises relating to the Government, Privately Printed in the Reign of Charles II, 1693; while others are now very rare, and single copies may be found only in the British Museum or Bodleian Library, or in such repositories as the City Guildhall Library, London. Together with the Tory replies, they form a list of nearly two hundred titles, not as vast a collection as the Civil War produced, but one to compare favourably with the volume of pamphlets occasioned by the Restoration and the Revolution.

Considered by many of his contemporaries in 1792–3 as the saviour of the British state, at his subsequent trial in 1796, Reeves was charged by the house of commons with seditious libel. The case offers an opportunity to scrutinize the current revisionist position which claims that loyalist values and ideologies, such as those promulgated by Reeves and his Association, were widely accepted and functioned as a natural bulwark against revolutionary principles and the destabilizing of the British state. But the publication of Reeves's ultra-tory tract Thoughts on the English government in 1795 not only provided the Foxite minority with a focus for its parliamentary attack on the 1795 Treason and Sedition bills, but, because of the overwhelming condemnation of the tract, forced Pitt publicly to repudiate Reeves and the entire ultra-tory position. Indeed, it is argued here that Reeves's church and king loyalist crusade of 1792–3 had been tolerated by Pitt's ministry merely as a convenient means of political intimidation and found little resonance in the political culture of the house of commons.

The minor heroes of anarchism have not been much noticed by historians. Johann Most, who was quite a celebrated anarchist in his own time, now lives chiefly in footnotes and in a few passing recollections in the memoirs of more famous contemporaries. His neglect is not altogether surprising. Anarchism must always suffer neglect while it remains (as yet) one of history's minor tributaries, an aberration, a movement with no discernible place in the mainstream of human political development. Anarchists themselves are generally of little intrinsic interest to anyone unless they are notable thinkers, like Kropotkin, or activists, like Malatesta. Johann Most was neither: not a philosopher of any sophistication, nor (so far as is known) a bomb-thrower. He came between the two: an acid-tongued propagandist for the cause of anarchy who advocated the use of violence, by others. As such he is acknowledged to have had a significant influence on the early growth of anarchist movements in Germany, the United States, and in Britain, where he lived from 1878 to 1882. He may however have been more significant for the things that were done to him than for the things he did. Everywhere Most moved he provoked reactions, persecution, imprisonment. It will be argued here that this is where the importance of the English stage of his career lay.

The Church of England has received little attention either as an issue or as a force in mid-eighteenth-century politics. The contrast with the immediate post-revolutionary decades, when the Church and churchmen were at the centre of political debate, is striking. This development has been explained in terms of the achievement of political stability, one manifestation of which was the transition from the whig–tory dichotomy of the reign of Anne into a court–country one by 1725, with the issues dividing the two parties losing both ideological and political significance. Among the debates which were ‘overtaken by events’ was religion which ‘ceased to be a central issue of political debate’. Indeed, Geoffrey Holmes has argued that the decline of religious controversy began with the Sacheverell trial, claiming that most of the eighteenth century was characterized by ‘spiritual inertia’ and ‘religious tranquillity, within the framework of an Erastian polity’. Such views accord well with the secularist interpretation of the enlightenment, epitomized by Peter Gay's portrayal of it as ‘a volatile mixture of classicism, impiety, and science’, and they have been little challenged by ecclesiastical historians. Norman Sykes may have vindicated the pastoral and administrative standards of the Georgian Church, but the overwhelming impression remains one of Stability and intellectual torpor.

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

The rise of global history has been a major development in historical studies in recent years, with the history of globalization a central part of that. But did the global matter as much to people in the past as to historians now? This article addresses that question with reference to Britain as viewed through some neglected aspects of the life of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). He is usually remembered for his extensive global preoccupations. Yet his ability to be a citizen of the world, most famously on Cook's first voyage of exploration, rested on his considerable landed wealth. Indeed, as the years passed, he became more interested in improving both his own estates and the wider region, especially his beloved county of Lincolnshire in England. There, global pressures exerted some indirect influences, but local ones, especially environmental and legal, remained more important, often addressed by resort to parliamentary legislation.

The consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny brought with it a more closely defined honorific hierarchy. From the first investiture at Windsor in 1861 of the Star of India and increasingly agter the assumption by the Queen of her new title of Empress, high service came to be rewarded in honours and distinctions with a discriminating lavishness reminiscent of the creations of the Younger Pitt. But the title assumed by the Queen and announced on 28 April 1876 had not originally been designed for India alone. It was Disraeli's caution that induced the Queen to abandon the style of ‘Empress of Great Britain, Ireland and India’. In his anxiety to avoid controversy many assurances were given that the United Kingdom would not be affected. Thus limitation of the title to India did not at first have any special significance. In reply to Lowe's criticisms, the Prime Minister saw no reason why two of the Queen's sons should not become Dukes of Canada and Australia. It was only in the course of the preparations for proclaiming the title on the first day of 1877 that the Indian Government, recovered from its surprise, suggested that the occasion might be invested with a political as well as a symbolic significance. The Viceroy, Lytton, came to believe that the occasion was a unique opportunity, not merely for broadening the base of the imperial Government through a popular symbol, but for materially strengthening the executive by a new understanding with the native princes of India.