This article examines the attempted impeachment of the duke of Buckingham by parliament in 1626 through the lens of manhood, and specifically early modern definitions of youth. The parliamentary speeches of Buckingham's accusers and the reports of observers such as the Venetian ambassador are used to demonstrate how youth and inexperience were deployed as evidence of his insufficient manhood, and therefore legal justifications for Buckingham's removal from power. The attributes of youth – wilfulness, rashness, and being a prisoner to one's passions – provided a narrative in which Buckingham could be placed to discredit his political authority. Additionally, through personal correspondence with his allies, and Buckingham's own defence of himself before parliament, this article demonstrates that definitions of youth and its relationship with political authority were malleable in the early modern period. Buckingham's impassioned defence of both his political career, and himself as a man, point to an ongoing negotiation over the terms of manhood, and how men were judged as figures of legitimate political authority.

The histories of ancient Greece and Rome are part of a shared European heritage, and a foundation for many modern Western social and cultural traditions. Their printing and circulation during the Renaissance helped to shape the identities of individual nations, and create different reading publics. Yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the forms in which works of Greek and Roman history were published in the first centuries of the handpress age, the relationship between the ideas contained within these texts and the books as material objects, and thus the precise nature of the changes they effected in early modern European culture and society. This article provides the groundwork for a reassessment of the place of ancient history in the early modern world. Using new, digital resources to reappraise existing scholarship, it offers a fresh evaluation of the publication of the ancient historians from the inception of print to 1600, revealing important differences that alter our understanding of particular authors, texts, and trends, and suggesting directions for further research. It also models the research possibilities of large-scale digital catalogues and databases, and highlights the possibilities (and pitfalls) of these resources.

Scholars have long described the reasons for Anne Boleyn's execution and the nature of her guilt. Recent analyses have suggested that Henry VIII lost interest in his second wife after she miscarried of a male child in 1536 and that his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, wanted to exclude her family from positions of power at court. With royal approval, so it is claimed, Cromwell caused the queen and five men to be executed for the fictitious crimes of adultery and incest. Although some scholars have conceded that she was careless of her honour, most have assumed that Anne was not guilty of these charges. Historians have consequently adopted the cynical conclusion that Cromwell succeeded in orchestrating a wide-ranging conspiracy involving numerous people with the intention of using the legal system to kill six innocent victims in order to satisfy both his own schemes for power and the king's domestic whims.

Harold Temperley's The foreign policy of Canning, 1822–1827 (1925) has been widely acknowledged as the standard work on George Canning's foreign policy in 1822–7. Since its publication, historians have accepted its central theme: that the principal aim of Canning's foreign policy in 1822–7 was to destroy the post-1815 system of great-power concert in Europe. Temperley's book is remarkable for its consistency, and his account of Canning's policy with regard to the Spanish crisis of 1822–3 – that Canning's main concern was not to prevent foreign intervention in Spain, but to weaken the power and authority of the Concert of Europe by exploiting differences among the European allies over the question of Spain – is certainly consistent with its central theme. This article re-examines Canning's diplomacy on the Spanish question from the start of his second tenure in the foreign office to the French invasion of Spain, and contends that its reality fits neither Temperley's account of this particular subject nor his general thesis on Canning's foreign policy. A careful examination of Canning's early diplomacy indicates that its primary object was to prevent foreign military intervention in Spain, and that it was not influenced by a supposed dislike of great-power concert.

In 1949 Sir Herbert Butterfield showed, for one important episode, the necessity of treating England and Ireland as a single political world and of explaining public events in London and Dublin concurrently. Yet most modern scholarship has persisted in examining the two nations in isolation. Ireland is typically relegated, like Scotland, to a separate chapter in the manner of the Oxford history of England; and despite studies of Anglo-Irish constitutional disputes in the light of analogous debates over the American Revolution, the close texture of the reciprocal influence of English and Irish politics in the mid eighteenth century has still received almost no attention from historians. One, indeed, has positively asserted that ‘From the end of Queen Anne's reign until the 1770s Ireland was almost outside the range of British politics’. In reality the connexion was both strong and of several kinds. Many English politicians had an opportunity to learn through personal involvement in Ireland lessons which they were later to find applicable at home. The fourth dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, Richard Rigby, Lord George Sackville, Henry Seymour Conway, the duke of Newcastle and Henry Fox were all involved both in the Irish crisis of the 1750s and in the English ministerial controversies of the 1760s. The English ministry was kept fully informed about Irish politics through both formal and informal channels. Even statesmen not directly concerned had links which encouraged them to keep in touch with events in Dublin. Fox, in Ireland in the summer of 1750 visiting his brother-in-law the earl of Kildare, sent Henry Pelham perceptive accounts of the crisis to date in which he argued for the necessity of eventual legislative union between the two countries; Charles Townshend was aware of Irish problems at the same time as he was preparing, for Newcastle, his ‘Remarks upon the Plan for a General Concert’ of the American colonies.

The present article originated out of an attempt to re-edit the letters of Gilbert Foliot, whose career as abbot of Gloucester, bishop of Hereford, and bishop of London covered nearly half of the twelfth century (1139-87). The edition by J. A. Giles is thoroughly unsatisfactory: the text is un-trustworthy, there is no index, and no attempt has been made to date the letters or to arrange them in any coherent order. Nothing could be done at present about the text, since the necessary manuscripts could not be consulted; but it was possible to make an index and with its assistance to arrange the letters in some sort of order and assign to them approximate dates. The chief clues for dating are naturally the names of persons, usually ecclesiastics, mentioned in the letters, but it soon became evident that the only lists available of these ecclesiastics (other than bishops) are for the most part entirely unreliable, and that a complete revision of these lists is a necessary preliminary to any attempt at precise dating, not only of these letters, but also of twelfth-century documents in general. In the thirteenth century, when Patent and Close Rolls begin, there is more positive information, and still more when episcopal registers become available. Before that time, documents were rarely dated, and appointments and deaths of minor officials were not important enough to receive much notice from chroniclers. It is for this early period, when references have to be collected from a number of scattered sources and exact dates are rare, that revision is most needed, and to it we are confining our investigation.

The remarkable gains made by the Conservatives in the general election of December 1868 in Lancashire have lately been widely recognized. Their extent may have suggested to some, either that there was a general movement of opinion in the area towards the Conservatives between the general election of 1865 and that of 1868, or that the newly enfranchised electors were more favourable to the Conservatives than the old constituency had been, or that some combination of the two elements was at work. It is the purpose of this article to ascertain what grounds exist for these explanations.

Most historians have agreed that only the death of Empress Elizabeth (5 January 1762) and the accession of her nephew, the prussophile Peter III, saved Prussia from destruction in that epic conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. Just when Frederick II's military fortunes were at their lowest point — by early 1762, numerous parts of Prussia had already or were about to come under enemy control — and total defeat appeared unavoidable, chance intervened in the person of the new czar, who, victor though he was, withdrew his forces from the front, offered an armistice and agreed to relinquish without compensation the gains (East Prussia and Pomerania) which Russia had made during the war. At a stroke, the great anti-Prussian confederacy dating from 1757 had collapsed.

In histories of European trade union movements, the observation that women industrial workers were rarely found among the membership has become axiomatic. In virtually every developed nation, it seems that once the industrial order was established, predominantly male trade unions were everywhere the rule, and female unions and trade unionists everywhere notable exceptions.

The construction of memory in interwar France. By Daniel J. Sherman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-226-75285-2. £31.50.

Realms of memory: the construction of the French past, vol. II: Traditions. Under the direction of Pierre Nora, English-language edn ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+591. ISBN 0-231-10634-3. £29.95.

Vectors of memory: legacies of trauma in postwar Europe. By Nancy Wood. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999. Pp. 204. ISBN 1-85973-294-1. £14.99.

In the 1650s, after a century of increase, the population of England stopped growing. It was not to increase substantially again before 1750. Over the same interval, and not wholly coincidentally, scholars and theologians were trying to defend the orthodox account of how global population had increased since the Creation and must continue to do so, and the first political arithmeticians were trying to measure and analyse demographic change. This article seeks to throw fresh light on this many-sided discourse by examining William Petty's attempt to write an account of the multiplication of mankind, and the reasons why he failed to complete it. It focuses particularly on Petty's part in developing methods of measuring population density which highlighted the potential for future growth, and on the equally important demonstration by John Graunt that high and rising mortality in cities was hindering population growth in reality. As Petty's cousin Robert Southwell pointed out, Graunt's ‘rule of mortality’ was wholly incompatible with any coherent account of the future multiplication of mankind. At the end of this particular discourse, newly discovered facts about demography triumphed over the presuppositions of divinity.

During the First World War, the British imperial state deployed economic expertise on a new scale. This article examines how such expertise was involved in the management of the supply and distribution of red meat, a key commodity because of its caloric and symbolic value. Meat was managed not through a centralized bureaucracy, but through the often contradictory policies and initiatives of several government departments. These departments, particularly the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Food, had vastly different ideological commitments about the proper economic role of the state and the importance of market liberalism. They also had highly distinct bureaucratic agendas related to the war. But all departments shared an interest in deploying economic expertise to pursue better their policy and political goals. Economics thus became both a real and a rhetorical tool. This article explores how economic information on meat was collected, analysed, and deployed by Whitehall offices during the First World War. In so doing, it contends that the variegation and ideological divergence of the departments helped integrate economic expertise into the fabric of the administrative state, thereby increasing the power both of the economic discipline and the state itself.

The role of rearmament within the economic framework has become a theme of recurring interest in twentieth century history. During the century, however, the scope of the problem has broadened considerably, so that historians no longer talk of rearmament as merely the direct preparation of a nation's armed forces with the means of waging war. Instead the idea of‘ total war’ introduces a new dimension, indirect or economic rearmament. This second dimension involves a much broader interpretation of the political disposition of individual countries at different times and under rapidly changing circumstances, as well as an understanding of the quality of service, industry or institution that would materially contribute to the effective waging of war on the home front as well. The danger of this sort of interpretation lies in the fact that it only appears to be necessary to locate the will to war in order to understand economic or social processes of a much more sophisticated and diverse nature.

The essay aims to close a longstanding gap in the political historiography of later Georgian Britain by examining the ‘Hanoverian Crisis’ of 1806. Drawing on a broad range of British, Hanoverian and Prussian records, the essay demonstrates that the British–Prussian conflict of that year was caused not – as conventionally assumed – by the closure of the North Sea ports to British shipping, but by the Prussian occupation of George III's electoral land of Hanover. The essay then shows how the commitment of the British government to its restitution was largely motivated by the desire of Charles James Fox and the incoming Ministry of All the Talents to build bridges to the crown. This stance was in complete contradiction both to the broad thrust of the new ‘maritime’ foreign policy of the Talents and to Fox's previous policy in matters Hanoverian. Subsequently the implications of this for our understanding of Fox's political biography are assessed. Finally, the essay illuminates the existence of a coherent ‘Hanoverian Faction’ in London headed by Count Münster which together with a highly activist George III was often able to tip the balance in the formulation of British policy.

The discourse of America's founding generation, it is now widely recognized, was rich and variegated in its composition, drawing upon the commonwealth tradition, the English common law, Montesquieu, Locke, Scottish moral philosophy, and the classics. These sources yield significant clues as to how eighteenth-century Americans viewed religious liberty and church–state relations, subjects of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Supplementing the work of legal historians on the religious provisions of the early state constitutions, the study of political ideas suggests the parameters of the eighteenth-century debate over the effects which various types of religious belief and ecclesiastical establishment had upon manners and institutions. It also reveals the ideological underpinnings of the apparently inconsistent legal provisions for religion at the state level, and, far from settling the elusive question of ‘original intent’, highlights the nature of the divisions within the founding generation.