Two of the most basic functions of any government are the maintenance of order and defence against rebellion or invasion. In the England of Charles II these functions, one police, the other military, were performed by the small standing army and the militia. James II enlarged the army and so was able to use it to maintain order to a greater extent than Charles had done. At the same time he deliberately neglected the militia (except in London) and made sweeping and highly unpopular changes among the lords lieutenant and deputy lieutenants who commanded it. As a result, when William of Orange invaded late in 1688 and James tried to raise the militia, he found it both disorganized and disaffected. Many lieutenancies failed to perform the auxiliary military functions which James expected, and some sections of the militia joined, or were raised by, insurgents against the king. However, the police function of the militia, unlike the military function, did not fail; both properly-appointed lieutenants and insurgents used the forces at their disposal to maintain order, having no desire to encourage or condone violence and looting.

Henry Parker's The Case of Shipmony (1640) may be the first intellectually significant political pamphlet of the Long Parliament era. In this crisp and well printed quarto, Parker, a publicist and man of affairs, used issues raised during John Hampden's celebrated test case of 1637 to develop his own political views.Parker wrote in opposition to the royalist majority in the case. But his carefully circumscribed objections to ship money in The Case of Shipmony show him of two minds – his opposition was of a different order from that heard in the house of commons in 1640 and 1641, and was strangely resonant of the royalist arguments. This was not a sign of political timidity. Rather, as Parker grew bolder and as his notions matured in 1640– his views and those of the royalist counsel and judges, mutatis mutandis, became even more congruent. This can be seen by comparing the ship money arguments not only with the positions taken in The Case of Shipmony but also with the idiom of Parker's fully developed thought, which is usually (though excessively) identified with his most famous tract, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (June 1642).

Through a co-ordinated series of publications in the final years of the seventeenth century, a diverse set of commonwealth texts was entrenched into the canon of whig political thought. This article explores that canon through the lens of the history of the book. A key figure in the formation of this canon was the printer and bookseller John Darby. This article reconstructs Darby's role in the commonwealth opposition to the perceived failures of the Williamite revolution. Using bibliographical methods to establish his output, it shows that from the earliest days of the revolution Darby reprinted a broad range of historic whig texts, ranging from works of history and memoir to collections of poems. These texts provided a language, a rationale, and a model for opposition activity. He also manufactured pamphlets that adapted country principles to contemporary political circumstances. By shifting the focus from John Toland to his printer, the article suggests that the canonical whig texts were one part of a much broader and more ambitious programme to establish an historic canon of oppositional literature.

At about 8 a.m. on Saturday, 16 July 1054, mass was being prepared in the church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople. The congregation was gathering; priests, deacons, and acolytes were assembled in the choir. Then, quite unexpectedly, three strangers—three Papal legates—entered the church. Passing through the nave, they made their way to the high altar, where they stopped to address the congregation in a few words of Latin or ill-spoken Greek. Turning, they placed upon the altar a strange document that one of them was carrying; then, in silence, they went back to the doors. Pausing in the narthex, they cried aloud the words: ‘Videat Deus et judicet!’—and with that they passed from the church. For a moment, there was confusion within. One of the subdeacons picked up the document and flung it to the ground; but then, as anger gave way to curiosity, it was recovered and carried to the patriarchal palace. Here, upon examination, it proved to be a bull of deposition and anathema directed against the Patriarch himself.

One of the more remarkable features of the Second World War was the emergence of a ‘reforming consensus’ within the two major political parties in Britain. As Addison has pointed out ‘a massive new ground emerged in British polities’ and Conservative and Labour leaders alike openly began to espouse the case for ‘“pragmatic reform” in a mixed economy’. By 1945 the emphasis on social equity in ‘the people's war’ and the removal of lingering doubts as to Labour's fitness to govern, had combined with collective memories of the inter-war period, with its mass unemployment and social distress, to produce a new ‘left of centre’ consensus on the issue of postwar reconstruction. This applied not just to the maintenance of full employment and the inauguration of a ‘welfare state’, but also to the reorganization of certain industries. In this latter category by far the most appropriate illustration of the basic measure of agreement between the parties is provided by their approach to the reconstruction of the coalmining industry. As with other industrial sectors the Labour party was irrevocably committed to nationalization as the key element in its reconstruction programme. In this instance there was, of course, a major difference with the Conservatives who wished to retain, as far as possible, the basic principles of private enterprise. But divorced from the rhetoric of laissez-faire capitalism, what did this mean in practical terms? It is worth noting that the successive modifications during the thirties to the statutory cartel system instituted under part I of the Coal Mines Act, 1930, had been made at the instigation of a Conservative-dominated National government and had meant that the freedom of action of the individual colliery undertaking was severely circumscribed by 1939.

Based on hitherto unused archival material, this article reconstructs the genesis of a clandestine mission to Germany by Sir Edward Grey's private secretary, Sir William Tyrrell, planned for the summer of 1914. The mission remained abortive, but it offers fresh insights into a growing sense of détente in Great Power relations on the eve of the First World War. Although the episode involved key officials in London and Berlin, the article emphasizes that, pace many recent scholars of the period, the Anglo-German antagonism was not the central concern of British policy-makers. Rather, relations between the two countries were a function of Anglo-Russian relations, and the revival of Russian power after 1912 provides the proper context to the attempts by British and German officials to place relations between their countries on a friendlier footing. The article thus also calls into question criticisms of the British foreign secretary as irrevocably ententiste, and provides an antidote to assumptions of the First World War as somehow inevitable.

‘You ask me what a Lit de justice is? I will tell you!’ Thus exclaimed Louis-Adrien Le Paige, an eighteenth-century parlementaire who was excoriating the current spectacle of the king's appearance in person in the Grand-Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. Denied their ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation in important affairs of state, which in their view meant an active or participatory role in the legislative process, magistrates like Le Paige felt coerced in 1756 into the passive role of registering policies presented to them as faits accomplis. And thus also opens Professor Sarah Hanley's penetrating and revisionist study of this complex ceremony where monarch and magistrates met together in the legislative arena: the lit de justice. In a tour de force of painstaking scholarship Professor Hanley has convincingly proved that this ceremony, in which the king personally appeared in Parlement and sat on a specially decorated ‘seat of justice’, had evolved out of legend and myth. The lit de justice did not, as generations of parlementaires like Le Paige had claimed, emerge in the middle ages shortly after the creation of the court itself in the late thirteenth century. As Professor Hanley shows, the first such ceremony did not occur until much later, in the reign of Francis I in 1527. More importantly, she demonstrates that at its inception the lit de justice was not associated in any way with the adversarial scene depicted by Le Paige in 1756, with the king forcing his will on a recalcitrant court by making a personal appearance in the Grand-Chambre in order to force the registration of unpopular legislation.

Following the rediscovery of the ‘Christ's copy’ in 1944, Peter Laslett's decision to use it as the copy-text of his edition of John Locke's Two treatises of government (1960) was, in more ways than one, a landmark event. It not only revitalized an entire generation of academic study in the field of Lockean scholarship and, more broadly, in the history of political thought, but has also had a lasting impact in as much as Laslett's edition has remained, since then, the reference text that scholars use, persuaded as they have been by Laslett that it represents ‘the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death’. However, by re-examining the Christ's copy in the light of a near contemporary testimony unknown to Laslett, this article reveals that, with its three layers of corrections, the Christ's copy seems to be a richer palimpsest than what has so far been supposed, belonging as much to the francophone world of Huguenot exile as to an anglophone publishing schedule, and represents, as such, an artefact of transcultural relations. This article therefore challenges Laslett's interpretation of the nature and purpose of the Christ's copy, and thereby questions his editorial decision.

The British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was raised in early 1922 by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, as a striking force and riot squad for Palestine. Through the agency of the Irish police chief, General Hugh Tudor, this British Gendarmerie was recruited almost entirely from amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division, then in the process of disbanding as part of the recent Anglo-Irish settlement. The international notoriety of the Black and Tans led to official efforts to obscure the fact that the force was to be drawn from RIC ranks but these were entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the British Gendarmerie itself quickly acquired a reputation for Black and Tan-type behaviour but an examination of its four-year career indicates that this derived more from preconceptions about the force's composition than from its actual conduct. In fact, in terms of force discipline and levels of police brutality, the British Gendarmerie's record compared very favourably with those of its ‘parent’ forces in Ireland, lending support to recent claims that historians have tended to over-value character-based explanations at the expense of circumstance-based assessments when analysing police behaviour both during the Irish revolution and the Palestine Mandate.

The successes and failures of British foreign policy from the end of the American war of independence until the outbreak of the conflict with revolutionary France will be familiar, at least in outline, to many students of late-eighteenth-century history. In 1783 Britain was widely regarded as having been reduced to the status of a second-rank power. British ministers, and especially Pitt the Younger and his first foreign secretary, the marquess of Carmarthen, sought a European alliance to end their country's isolation and vulnerability. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, the product of French rather than British pressure, was of little help in this respect, as it never developed beyond a limited trade agreement. Negotiations for similar reciprocal commercial concessions with other powers all proved fruitless. In 1787 and 1788, however, political and military arrangements were concluded with the Dutch and the Prussians after Prussian troops – with British encouragement and support – had intervened in the United Provinces to secure the position of the house of Orange and to crush the pro-French ‘Patriot’ party. Fortified by this new British – Prussian – Dutch connexion, or Triple Alliance as it was called, Pitt's government was able to exert considerable influence in Europe and farther afield. In 1788, when the Swedes attacked Russia, which was already at war with the Turks, Denmark, in accordance with its treaty obligations to Russia, invaded Sweden. The British and Prussians threatened the Danes and forced them to withdraw. A few months later, in April 1789, renewed Anglo-Prussian pressure compelled Denmark to maintain a strict neutrality in the continuing Russo-Swedish conflict. In 1790 the British were just as successful in a confrontation with Spain over the Nootka Sound in North America. Only when the government backed down during the dispute with Russia over possession of the Turkish fortress of Ochakov on the Black Sea coast, were the limits of British power fully exposed.

This article explores the nature of relationships formed between nuns and male clergy in early modern Venice. It is based on the records of trials for the violation of conventual enclosure, the principle at the centre of the reforms of nunneries decreed by the Council of Trent, which aspired to sever all links between nuns and the world outside the cloister. The trials offer detailed insights into the interactions of male and female celibates, whose relationships were frequently monogamous, long-term, and intense, although rarely overtly sexual. I argue that the constraints of enclosure conditioned the nature of celibate desire, promoting a model of heterosocial engagement in which bodily intimacy was surprisingly unimportant.

Britain acted as a principal arbitrator of the Eastern Question throughout the nineteenth century. During the 1890's, however, Britain lost this position owing to diplomatic isolation, the hostility of the Sultan of Turkey—who had found a new ally in Germany—and an equal hostility to the Sultan in Britain, where he was regarded as a brutal oriental despot presiding over an empire in the last stages of decay. The immediate cause of Britain's loss of status in Turkey was her failure to provide vigorous support to Sultan Abdul Hamid in the critical period following the Congress of Berlin. Turkey was bankrupt, but the Sultan's appeal for a loan met with no response in Britain; Turkey's European provinces were on the verge of slipping out of the Sultan's control but Britain refused to extend the terms of the Cyprus Convention (which guaranteed the Sultan's dominions in Asia Minor) to cover the more turbulent Balkans. The Convention itself had an alienating effect, since the guarantee was dependent upon the introduction of administrative reforms in Asia Minor under the direction of British military consuls. Britain's insistence on the application of this provision aroused the suspicion that she was actually seeking political control over this area. Turkey's loss of confidence in Britain, however, had deeper roots. ‘Many Muslims believed that Britain had deserted Turkey in the hour of need, that her protection of Islam was disproved by her war with Afghanistan, that her desire for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was shown to be a pretence by the occupation of Cyprus, and that her power to rule provinces properly was doubtful after her failures in Egypt.’ In fact as early as 1879 Britain had lost the special position which she had held in Turkey for nearly half a century; and thereafter her prestige diminished rapidly, especially after the strong public reaction to the Armenian massacres of 1894-95.

When, on 16 October 1925, the leading European statesmen initialled the famous Locarno agreements, a new era of international tranquillity and peace appeared to have dawned. The British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, carried away by euphoria, wrote of ‘feeling like a little child again in spirit’ and of having ‘lived such days and celebrated such a birthday as it is given to no man to experience twice’. In reality, however, the agreements were built on inadequate foundations. As Viscount Cecil of Chelwood foresaw, limited regional security guarantees were an unsatisfactory substitute for the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance (1923) and the Geneva Protocol (1924), whose rejection by successive British Governments had spelt the end of hopes that wider collective security provisions and measures of disarmament might be achieved simultaneously. The Locarno agreements were only finally torn up in March 1936 when Adolf Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland; but the spirit which underlay them began to evaporate from the day of their signature. In this essay attention is given only to the first post-Locarno crisis, which was in itself sufficient to disillusion many optimists and to reveal that Franco-German tension was still a potent force in European relations. This crisis arose out of Germany's decision, in part fulfilment of her obligations under the agreements, to apply for membership of the League of Nations.

This article examines the relationship between Anthony Eden, British minister for League of Nations' affairs (1935) and foreign secretary (1935–8), and Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime within the context of Italian foreign policy in the later 1930s. It outlines the precise aims and objectives of Mussolini's expansionist policies over the period 1935–8, assesses the accuracy of Eden's interpretation of them and, in turn, discusses official Italian diplomatic perceptions of Eden. It specifically challenges Renzo De Felice's view that for Mussolini, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia (1935–6) marked the limit of Fascist expansionism. Furthermore, it contests his theory that the dictator did not pursue an Italo–German alliance that would drive an Italian imperialist war against Britain and France in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Anthony Eden had been fully aware of such an intention, and had been targeted by the regime as Italy's ‘public enemy number one’, precisely because he fully comprehended what lay at the heart of Mussolini's brand of Fascism.

The dominant role of the secretary of the British Labour party, Arthur Henderson, in the reconstruction of the party in 1917–18 has never been disputed. It is surprising, therefore, that little attention has been paid in recent historical literature to the development of Henderson's political ideas during the First World War and, more particularly, to the impact of the Russian Revolution on his attitude towards the conduct of international affairs and domestic politics. The neglect of this aspect of an important chapter of labour history has obscured the fact that Henderson came to advocate the reconstruction of the Labour party only after and partly as a result of his visit to Russia in mid-1917

The British general election of 1945 and the return of the nation's first ever majority Labour government was a profound turning point in Britain's political history. The scale of Labour's victory, and the belief in its inevitability, has, however, obscured important developments in British Conservatism. Historians have subsequently characterized the Conservative party as either unwilling to develop their own distinct plans for the post-war future, or divided between those who were willing to embrace the policies of social democracy and those with a neo-liberal approach to political economy. This article challenges this depiction by examining the thoughts and actions of those within what it terms the wartime ‘Conservative movement’: the constellation of fringe and pressure groups that orbited around the Conservative party during the period. In examining this movement, it identifies three major traditions of Conservative political thinking, and three sets of activists and parliamentarians all committed to developing radical Conservative plans for post-war Britain. The article demonstrates how these different traditions built upon but also radicalized pre-existing currents of Conservative thought, how the language of social democracy was co-opted and reinterpreted by those within the Conservative movement, and how the war changed Conservative perception of the British people.