The Church of Ireland has been regarded as almost devoid of a high church element and as unreservedly hostile to Tractarian claims. This article questions these assumptions. It considers the evidence for an influential, if minority, high church tradition within the Church of Ireland and shows how far its adherents during the 1830s and early 1840s looked to English Tractarians for support. The very raison d'être of the Irish church was questioned under the reforming and erastian pressures unleashed by a whig ministry in the early 1830s. Tractarian rhetoric stressing apostolical descent and continuity was echoed by Irish high churchmen in their concern to demonstrate that they belonged to a church that was not a creature of the state and was no mere Protestant sect; Irish high churchmen held many theological and spiritual ideals in common with the early Tractarians, but guarded their independence. Irish high churchmen and English Tractarians nevertheless became estranged: the Protestant credentials of Irish high churchmen were suspect as a result of the low church and Evangelical backlash against ‘Puseyism’; Irish high church attempts to put church principles into practice, notably over the foundation of St Columba's as an establishment to educate Roman Catholic converts in high church teaching, were cold-shouldered by English Tractarians. The Irish high church tradition survived but was weakened by Roman Catholic undermining of its assumption of apostolical continuity as well as by ultra-Protestant critiques. Disestablishment in 1869 paved the way not for a high church ‘restoration’ on the Caroline model, as Irish high churchmen wished and as early Tractarian rhetoric assumed, but for the completion of an Evangelical ascendancy rooted in the Irish Articles of 1615 and the church of James Ussher.

On 31 March 1905 the Unionist Government issued Letters Patent granting to the Transvaal a representative constitution, known almost at once, and to history, as the Lyttelton Constitution. This constitution never came into force; it was abrogated in February 1906 by the new Liberal Government, who decided, at a dramatic Cabinet meeting on 8 February, to grant responsible government instead. Until the opening of the government and private archives within the last few years, the accounts of the part played by the Liberal prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, at this Cabinet, and of the encounter between him and General J. C. Smuts, who had come to England on a mission to persuade the Liberal Government to grant responsible government, have necessarily been largely based on hearsay. Something approaching a ‘mythology’ has therefore tended to surround these events; this ‘mythology’ views the Smuts' mission as ‘the climax in the drama of the South African settlement’; it assumes Smuts ‘convinced’ Campbell-Bannerman immediate responsible government should be granted, and that the prime minister then persuaded the Cabinet. This paper is an attempt to carry a stage further the ‘de-mythologizing’ begun by recent historians with partial access to the relevant papers.

J. W. Croker's papers are a valuable and rare source concerning British government patronage of the first half of the nineteenth century. They show us a system that was burdensome for the participants, made more acceptable since it was an extension of gentlemanly civility. The papers also show that patronage, like government generally, was able somewhat to reform itself. True, in his particular sphere as patron – as first secretary to the Admiralty (1809–30) – Croker favoured his relatives, but appointed only those he thought fit, and supervised and controlled their work in a way not feasible outside a family. Nepotism could mean efficiency. It created a Croker family circle within the Admiralty that lasted until the 1860s. Croker continued to have influence as a patron until he died in 1857. He was aided by his network of friendships, but also there was the obligation felt by those in power – of whatever party – to Croker's long years of Admiralty service. Political links had their importance, but is is argued that the three factors of family, friendship, and service were predominant. His career as patron illustrates a vital stage between ‘old corruption’ and competitive entry to the civil service.

‘Supremacy and Uniformity’, wrote A. F. Pollard, ‘occupied less of the time of parliament [in 1559] … than did the scramble for episcopal lands …’ This fact, apparent to anyone who glances at the Journal of the House of Commons for 1559, has been ignored by historians who wrote before Pollard and by those who wrote after him. Concerned only with bills dealing with religion, scholars failed to recognize that proposals concerning the distribution of ecclesiastical lands dominated the session. During the two months before Easter private land bills monopolized the Commons' time for three weeks, ruining any timetable the government might have had and helping to persuade, if not forcing, the queen to continue the session after Easter.

In the aftermath of the First World War, two schools of divergent thought emerged among Whitehall's Middle East policy-makers. One, propounded by T. E. Lawrence, found support in the Foreign Office, where many favoured Arab national ideals and backed the Hashemite family for rulership positions in the region. The other, epitomized by Arnold Wilson, the civil commissioner for Iraq, was thought to reflect the India Office view that direct British rule in Iraq was essential and that Hashemite pretensions should be opposed. In this article, the author shows that the lines separating the India and Foreign Offices were not so clearly drawn. Many senior officials in the India Office were disturbed by Wilson's imperial programme for Iraq and some were prepared to support Hashemite aspirations. But Lawrence's 1920 campaign for Hashemite rule and his hyperbolic press attacks on Wilson's policies had the paradoxical effect of moving the India Office to defend Wilson and to revert to their anti-Hashemite stance. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons behind the triumph of the Lawrentian over the Wilsonian schools at the end of 1920, when Wilson was removed from Iraq and Middle East policy-making was consolidated in the Colonial Office.

The cloth-making town of Hadleigh in Suffolk has often been cited in the annals of the English Reformation as a town that early embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. This view owes much to John Foxe's famous description of this ‘Universitie of the learned’, yet a closer examination of the surviving evidence from Hadleigh indicates that the Reformation was as bitterly contested here as it was in many another mid-Tudor community. And the nature of the bitter struggle between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives in the town may have proved so fierce that the energies for further reform under Elizabeth all but dissipated.

In September 1937, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met in Germany. Millions of ostensibly enthusiastic Germans welcomed the Duce. Here were the world's first two fascist dictators, purportedly united in solidarity, representing the ‘115 million’ Germans and Italians against the Western powers and Bolshevism. Most historians have dismissed the 1937 dictators’ encounter as insignificant because no concrete political decisions were made. In contrast, I explore this meeting in terms of the confluence of culture and politics and argue that the meeting was highly significant. Its choreography combined rituals of traditional state visits with a new emphasis on the personality of both leaders and their alleged ‘friendship’, emblematic of the ‘friendship’ between the Italian and German peoples. Seen through this lens, the meeting pioneered a new style of face-to-face diplomacy, which challenged the culture of liberal internationalism and represented the aim of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to create a New Order in Europe. At the same time, analysis of this meeting reveals some deep-seated tensions between both regimes, an observation that has significant implications for the study of fascist international collaboration.

The article examines the reasons for the failure of the Conservative party to offer effective opposition to the independence of India in 1947. It is argued that until the last moment the Conservative stance on Indian independence was much more hostile than is usually recognized. That this opposition did not evolve into a full-scale revolt is explained less by the conversion of Conservatives to acceptance of the Attlee government's Indian policy than by the party leaders' beliefs that it would be hard to sustain a coherent campaign against it. The inability of unreconciled Conservatives to challenge this tactical decision as they had done in the early 1930s resulted from the erosion and disappearance of many of the organizational advantages they had then enjoyed and of the rapid pace of events in India.

This article analyses the records of 595 entrants to the English College, Rome, and 309 entrants to the English College, Valladolid. These Colleges, set up to train young English men as Catholic priests at a time when Catholicism was proscribed in England, required all entrants to complete questionnaires covering their social, educational, and religious background. The Responsa Scholarum are the autograph manuscripts of students at Rome; the Liber Primi Examinis consists of summaries of oral examinations written down by the interviewers. Through a combination of quantitative analysis and close reading of individual accounts, this article explores responses to the questionnaires, focusing on the engagement of young people with religion and religious identity. It argues that their self-writings shed important light on our understanding of both early modern religion and of early modern childhood and adolescence.

Local conditions and responses to European expansion were important in the ‘interactive emergence of European domination’. However, the comparative lack of sources has tended to obscure what these were. In the early eighteenth century, Morocco was responding to the growth of English power in the Mediterranean; new sources presented here show how ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥamāmī, one of Sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's most powerful ministers, tried to co-operate with the English in order to manage their influence and consolidate his own political position. This offered them a potential means to overcome the obstacles that, compared to the North African regencies, made Morocco resistant to European political and economic influence. These efforts, however, were thwarted by a combination of factors. With al-Ḥamāmī's political credibility threatened, the development of co-operation between the English and a section of the Moroccan elite was undermined, leaving the fundamental dynamics of Anglo-Moroccan relations unchanged.

The complicated series of disputes which followed the York election of 1140–1 is familiar in broad outline to all students of the period. From a small beginning the strife came to involve almost every person of importance in England, and many on the Continent, and lasted, in its ramifications, for some twenty years. Yet the history of this controversy, though it could not fail to receive some notice in any detailed account of the times, has not hitherto been set out in full with complete accuracy. This failure has been due in part to the nature of the records, which are scattered among English chronicles, papal documents and Cistercian sources, and can only be fully used by one who has them all before his eyes simultaneously; many of those who have treated the episode obiter have failed thus to assemble them with completeness. In part also it has been due to gaps in the evidence at more than one crucial point, which have thrown all historians back upon conjecture. These gaps, in part, still exist, but it so happens that within the last few years a number of independent studies have reconstructed much of the narrative that was hitherto dark, and some important documents have come to light; it is therefore possible to arrive at something approaching to a clear view of the whole business.

O'Connell's relationship with Jeremy Bentham is the subject of frequent comment. However, the nature of this relationship has never been adequately documented, largely because the principal documentary evidence – their correspondence – remains uncollected. As a result, there exists a lacuna in the literature relating to O'Connell's involvement with British radicalism. This essay reconstructs the nature of his political alliance with Bentham from the evidence provided by their correspondence, from 1828 to 1831. It begins with O'Connell's plausible professions of discipleship and their shared optimism about the radical reform agenda, through to Bentham's concerted efforts to bind O'Connell to the British radical movement, and ending in the disillusionment and division that arose from O'Connell's insistence on giving priority to Irish reforms and Bentham's deep suspicion of catholicism. The whole is illustrative of Bentham's efforts in his later years to implement his policies through the agency of presumed ‘disciples’.

Property, in spite of its solid sound, is an elusive idea. As C. B. MacPherson puts it:

The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time… The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve.

On 2 August 1521 Wolsey arrived at Calais to preside over a conference the ostensible purpose of which was to put an end to fighting that had broken out earlier in the year, fighting which had increasingly involved French and imperial forces. When, nearly four months later, the conference broke up, the fighting still continued. Clearly Wolsey had been unsuccessful in bringing about peace, but he did not return to England empty-handed. On 24 November a treaty had been signed committing England to a declaration of war against France, at least by March 1523. This treaty, and especially the fact that its terms had to all intents and purposes been settled at Wolsey's meeting with the emperor at Bruges less than a fortnight after his arrival at Calais, has led many historians to suspect that Wolsey had never been very serious about his role as peacemaker. Not, however, all. In his biography of Henry VIII, J. J. Scarisbrick has argued most powerfully that at Calais Wolsey worked very hard to reconcile Francis I and the emperor, and, indeed he sees his activities there as crucial evidence that ‘Wolsey's policy was a peace policy and for about fifteen years he struggled to make it work’. The main purpose of this article will be to argue that, at least as far as the events of 1521 are concerned, this thesis cannot be sustained. Instead, it will be shown that Wolsey's main aim in 1521 was to bring about the alliance with the emperor.

In nineteenth-century France, science and religion have often been portrayed as irredeemably opposed to one another. This article seeks to revise this interpretation by showing how these apparently dissonant views intermingled in the study of hysteria. Through a survey of attitudes towards Catholicism and in their treatment of Catholic patients, the article shows how French psychiatrists and neurologists were deeply indebted to religious iconography and experience, despite their vehement anti-clericalism. Because of their hatred of the church, they focused on the treatment of female hysterics who manifested ‘religious’ symptoms – demonopathy, mystical states, and stigmata – in order to amass conclusive evidence of Catholic ‘superstition’. Their preoccupation with such patients meant, however, that they paradoxically re-embedded Catholicism into their scientific practice by incorporating religious motifs, bodily poses, and iconography into their diagnosis of hysteria. At the same time, their disdain for the Catholic religious imagination meant that they refused to explore the fantasies of their subjects. For physicians like Jean-Martin Charcot and the more subtle Pierre Janet – a contemporary and competitor of Sigmund Freud – fantasies of bodily suffering, unearthly physical perfection, and an array of Catholic maternal fantasies associated with images of Mary and Christ were all nothing more than delusions, not the stuff from which an appreciation or understanding of the ‘unconscious’ could emerge. The result was that French physicians offered no psychodynamic transformation or symbolic reinterpretation of their words or physical symptoms, a resistance that was one reason among many for their hostility to psychoanalysis.

Mary Tudor's ecclesiastical policy is highly vulnerable to the criticism that it was negative and lacked a sense of direction. She seems to have reserved her efforts for the repeal of schismatic legislation and the burning of obstinate heretics. It is therefore easy to agree with those who see little positive zeal or spiritual content in the Marian Church —‘arid legalism’ is one recent verdict. And this condemnation includes Reginald Pole. He received extensive legatine powers from the Pope, enjoyed a wide reputation as a reforming Cardinal, and was trusted by Mary as her kinsman and adviser; we should therefore expect him to have employed in England all the available weapons of the Roman Church for an attack on heresy. Yet, in Professor Dickens' words, Pole and Mary ‘ failed to discover the Counter-Reformation ’.2 It is the intention of this article to examine the priorities which Pole followed in his plans for the Marian Church, and to investigate whether his legalistic approach and his rejection of the positive methods of the Counter-Reformation were the result of inefficiency or were based on a considered, though possibly mistaken, long-term policy.