Chartist internationalism has usually been treated as a peripheral question in the consideration of some broader topic—the history of the labour movement or of Chartism or communism—or as an element in the background of some radical's biography. It has, however, played a much larger part for Marxist writers, particularly in its embodiment in the Fraternal Democrats, with whom Marx and Engels were for a time associated.

The argument presented here rests on three assumptions. The first is that, at least in commercial terms, a capitalist system was in operation in Europe by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its features included a well-developed structure of international exchange, complex trade patterns, sophisticated methods of organization and finance, a realization of the importance of ‘putting money out to work’, and a versatility of mercantile activity that was a product of the most spectacular boom, expansion of trade, and growth of the merchant community that Europe had ever seen.

A number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.

This article weaves together two episodes separated by a generation. The inciting event is the trial in 1653 of Anne Bodenham, an elderly cunning woman in Salisbury, who found herself embroiled in a feud in a gentry household, set against the turbulent backdrop of a divided city. Her arrest and examination evoked painful memories of an earlier scandal, the fateful association of the duke of Buckingham with Dr John Lambe, a sorcerer whom Bodenham claimed to have served in the 1620s. These tales, in turn, echoed an even older awareness of the perils of the diabolic, most prominently the pact of Dr Faustus. Together these narrative strands demonstrate how feelings of public disgust at Stuart corruption were revived in the commonwealth era and used as a polemical device by puritan activists. Both stories are rich in gossip, rumour, rhymes, libels, anonymous notes, and the practical uses of printed works, not to mention spells and curses, visions and dreams. As such, this article also shows just how complex a witch-trial could be, and serves as a reminder of the sophistication, ingenuity, and ebullience of seventeenth-century communications and consciousness across the social order.

The article explores the key components of the political project of West Germany and the role of the Rechtsstaat within it. It shows how the German Federal Republic developed a specific reading of the rule of law as an order founded on basic rights as supra-legal values and judicial authority, which had to be defended even against democratic government. This did not signify a departure from the constitutional theory of the Weimar period, as constitutional lawyers such as Gustav Radbruch and Carlo Schmid claimed at the time. Instead, the decisive innovations in constitutional thought stemmed from the Weimar era. Judicial review and basic rights had been instruments in a political and legal struggle over the social question and the boundaries of democratic decision-making in the 1920s. They had been invoked by conservative lawyers such as Carl Schmitt and been the subject of a substantial critique mounted by social democrat interpreters of the Weimar Constitution such as Hermann Heller and Franz Neumann. As such the Rechtsstaat, which is so strongly associated with the renewal of German democracy, carries with it a tradition of legal thought which systematically and successfully expanded judicial power to the detriment of the legislature and democratic action.

In the years following the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1763, George Grenville possessed a reputation for his consistent demands that Britain's war-proven naval superiority should be used to strengthen British diplomacy and prevent the Family Compact reacquiring die means of endangering Britain. In a typical statement to the Commons in 1768, referring to the Grafton Government's mishandling of the Corsican crisis, he said: ‘for fear of going to war, you will make war unavoidable’. It is interesting, therefore, to examine how and for what reasons the Grenville Government used its naval resources in conjunction with diplomacy to defend British interests when they were threatened consecutively in Honduras, Turks Island, and the Gambia in 1764–5.

Honour was a gendered phenomenon for the eighteenth-century English social elite; scholars have argued that for women, honour was mainly equated with chastity. By problematizing the concept of chastity as well as chastity's relation with women's social reputation, this article questions the widely adopted view of the crucial importance of female chastity for maintaining honour and social status. A critical examination of eighteenth-century discourses of feminine propriety shows that even though chastity was presented as an internal feminine feature, it was evaluated by external signs, making it less dependent on physical continence than on public display of purity. Chastity should thus be seen as a negotiable performative identity rather than a stable state of sexual virtue. Moreover, the relation between chastity and social reputation is more complex than hitherto supposed; even a public loss of chaste reputation did not necessarily lead to the social disgrace threatened by eighteenth-century writers, but could often be compensated through other performative means. The article concludes that not only was chastity's role in the construction of female honour ambiguous, female and male honour also resembled each other more than has been assumed, since they were both based on an external spectacle of proper honourable appearance.

This article explores how political parties in France, West Germany, and Italy conceptualized democracy and challenged the conceptions of democracy of their political adversaries between the end of the 1940s and the early 1960s. It studies from a comparative perspective the different conceptions of democracy held by Christian democrat, Left-wing, and Gaullist political actors and shows how these diverged on key issues such as the economic system, foreign policy, the separation of powers, electoral systems, and the use of state institutions in the defence of democracy against anti-democratic forces. In this way, the article reveals how in the first fifteen years after the Second World War, government and opposition parties disputed each other's democratic credentials and political legitimacy, and it thereby reconsiders the claim that there existed a broad consensus on the meaning of democracy among political elites in post-war Western Europe. It is argued that these different conceptions of democracy only started to converge after they had clashed during political crises at the turn of the 1960s in all three states. This study thereby contributes to an enhanced understanding the formation of the post-war democratic order in Western Europe.

When news arrived in summer 1580 that James Eustace, third viscount Baltinglass, had entered into rebellion with Gaelic elements in Leinster, Tudor officials in Ireland could barely contain their mystification. How, they wondered, had this important Tudor noble, whose family had for centuries served as a bulwark against the menace of marauding Gaelic clans, become ‘so forgetful of himself’? In seeking to explain the rebellion historians too have sought to understand Eustace's motivation, and in so doing have come to emphasize his integral position in conceiving and leading the revolt. Yet this approach has obscured the rebellion's Gaelic dimension. The rebellion would not have been possible without the support of the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles who sought to uproot the English county administration then being erected in place of their quasi-independent lordships. Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne emerged from this interest to become the rebellion's true strength and in August 1580 dealt a shattering defeat to the English army in Ireland.

English observers in North America before 1640 found much to praise in the character of the Indians. They were a cheerful people, sharing what they possessed with each other, and especially loving as parents. Churlishness was a great crime among them. They were often said to be trustworthy. Above all, they were dignified and courteous; their chief men were grave and wise. In fact, even the most hostile critic allowed the dignity of the Indian. Typical is George Percy in his Discourse of Virginia of 1606, writing of the Werowance of Rapahanna: the Werowance ‘entertained us in so modest a proud fashion as though he had been a Prince of civill government, holding his countenance without laughter or any such ill behaviour’. These words of praise for the Indian were virtually universal, appearing even in the works of men like Ralph Lane, who was fundamentally hostile to them. Moreover, the praise continued from all other colonies after the massacre of 1622 temporarily ended the favourable attitude in Virginia. William Wood, writing in New England in 1634, said that they ‘be wise in their carriage, subtle in their dealings, true in their promise, honest in defraying of their debts…constant in friendship, merrily conceited in discourse, not luxuriously abounding in youth nor dotingly froward in old age…’.

This article uses a case-study of agriculture to explore the range of anxieties and contradictions surrounding women's work in the interwar period. National statistics are shown to be inconsistent and questionable, raising questions for historians reliant on official data, but they point to regional variation as the continuous defining feature of female labour force participation. Looking beyond the quantitative data a distinction emerges between traditional work on the land and processes. The article shows that women workers in agriculture provoked vigorous debate among a range of interest groups about the scale, nature, and suitability of this work. These groups, such as the National Federation of Women's Institutes, the Women's Farm and Garden Association, and the National Union of Agricultural Workers represented a range of social classes and outlooks, and had diverse agendas underpinning their interest. Consequently women's agricultural labour is exposed as a site of class and gender conflict, connecting to wider economic and cultural tensions surrounding the place of women in interwar society.

On the afternoon of 7 July 1610, two petitions of grievance, one temporal and one spiritual, were presented to James I. According to the French ambassador, he received them with ‘un assez mauvais visage’ and uncharacteristically few words, although later the king permitted himself the tart comment that the petition of temporal grievances was long enough to be his chamber tapestry. Although James exaggerated its size, politically it was a weighty document, for among its complaints it set out the Commons' view that the new impositions, already bringing in around £70,000 per annum, were illegal. ‘With all humility’, they presented ‘this most just and necessary petition unto your Majesty, that all impositions set without assent of parliament may be quite abolished and taken away.’ To answer the grievance, on 10 July James turned to his lord treasurer, Robert Cecil earl of Salisbury, for a full statement. The speech which he then gave formed the basis for all future defences of the royal power to impose on trade made by crown spokesmen up to 1640. Salisbury described how, early in 1607, his friend and predecessor, Lord Treasurer Dorset, had proposed new impositions to help fill the empty royal coffers. The privy council, after discussion, decided instead to raise money on loan; but in October 1607 renewed rebellion in Ireland rendered the situation more urgent, and by spring 1608 it was apparent that loans could not meet the king's necessities.

This article re-examines the career of Sir Thomas Lunsford, one of the most notorious royalist officers of the English Civil War. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, it not only casts new light on the pre-war activities of Lunsford himself but also explores the ways in which his blood-thirsty reputation was exploited by parliamentarian polemicists on the eve of the conflict. The article argues that, following the death of the proto-royalist playwright and plotter Sir John Suckling in 1641, Lunsford inherited Suckling's mantle as the archetypal ‘cavalier’, and that it was in association with Sir Thomas's name, rather than Sir John's, that the hostile caricature of the royalist gentleman-at-arms was first introduced to the English population as a whole. The article concludes by exploring the persistent rumours of cannibalism which have swirled around Lunsford's name for the past 370 years – and by demonstrating that, while the claim that Sir Thomas possessed a taste for human flesh may well have originated in the parliamentarian camp, it was, rather surprisingly, royalist writers who subsequently did most to keep his anthropophagical reputation alive.

Historians have not been kind to Henry Rich, earl of Holland. When they have noticed him, it has been to express moral disapproval. William Godwin spoke austerely of his ‘superficial and gaudy levity’; Clarendon imputed mercenary motives for his trimming in the English civil war; other writers have deplored his general unreliability or his frivolity and cowardice; and his career has been magisterially dismissed:

The personal beauty and untimely fate of Holland [have] thrown an interest over his history which neither his capacity nor his conduct would otherwise have justified.

This article explores the impact of immigration on the social history of Derby, England, after the Second World War. In particular, it studies the changes in the city's religious culture associated with the decline of Christianity as the city's civil religion and the increased religious pluralism due to immigration. This local study challenges assumptions about the nature and timing of secularization, and the characterization of religion in late twentieth-century Britain as militant. As new communities from South Asia and the West Indies settled in Derby, their politicization resulted in a growing emphasis on their religious identity that countered interethnic conflict and fostered civil society. The Christian churches are an important part of this story as they found new ways of remaining relevant, sometimes in concert with members of other faith traditions. Between 1930 and 2000, Derby experienced a shift from a civil religion to an array of religions that were civil to each other and concerned for the good of society. Religion continued to play a constructive role in English society at the end of the twentieth century.

In February and March 1539 Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, visited Calais on a commission for examining the town's fortifications. Returning to England, he promised Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, the lord deputy of Calais, who had entertained him during his stay, his goodlordship and a horse with saddle and harness. In exchange, Lisle's wife dispatched from Calais a present of a stole and a linnet, and she also asked the Seymours if her daughter by a previous marriage might be placed in their care. The exchange of gifts derived partly from the amicability struck up during Seymour's visit; but it was also part of an act of reconciliation. In the previous five years or so, the Lisles and Seymour had clashed, bitterly but not violently, in two land disputes. In the first dispute, the ageing, grossly inefficient, heavily indebted, blue-blooded and heirless Lisle was the victim; in the second dispute, it was Lady Lisle's son by her first marriage. In each dispute, Edward Seymour was the aggressor, unmercifully exploiting legal loopholes. In each case, in the first instance, when the matter came before the law, Seymour was thwarted: by an award in Chancery in the first dispute, and by the king's intervention in the Court of Common Pleas in the second; and then, by more devious means, he managed to have his way. The disputes shed light on the personality of Edward Seymour, the future protector Somerset, and also upon the power and influence open to certain subjects within the Tudor system of government.