This article considers how lecturing in Victoria Park in the East End of London allowed three early heads of the university settlement Oxford House to engage local communities in a discussion about the place of religion in the modern world. It demonstrates how park lecturing enabled James Adderley, Hebert Hensley Henson, and Arthur Winnington-Ingram, all of whom also held positions in the Church of England, to perform and test out their religious identities. Open-air lecturing was a performance of religious faith for these settlement leaders. It allowed them to move beyond the institutional spaces of the church and the settlement house in order to mediate their faith in the context of open discussion and debate about religion and modern life. The narratives they constructed in and about their park sermons reveal a good deal about how these early settlement leaders imagined themselves as well as their relationship with the working-class men they hoped to reach through settlement work. A vivid picture of Victorian religious and philanthropic life emerges in their accounts of lecturing in Victoria Park.

During Italy's ‘two red years’ (1919–20), left-wing catholics challenged the authority of the church and the landowners in large areas of northern Italy. Calling themselves the estremisti (the extremists), left catholic unions organized peasants and workers in land and farm occupations and encouraged a series of radical strikes. Left catholic leaders became national figures, in particular Guido Miglioli at Cremona and Romano Cocchi at Bergamo. This article examines these innovative struggles and their troubled relationship with the traditional socialist Italian left during this turbulent period. No alliances were formed between the estremisti and the ‘red’ unions until 1921–4, when fascism was already rampant and the revolutionary wave had already subsided. The article analyses why alliances were not built earlier, and why the socialists were so hostile towards the catholic left. Both the theory and the practice of the traditional left prevented any positive appraisal of the estremisti. In addition, there are detailed accounts of the extraordinary mass movements inspired by Cocchi and Miglioli in some of the richest and most staunchly catholic regions of northern Italy.

The events of 1857 etched themselves deeply into the consciousness of the British in India. Throughout the remaining years of British rule the lessons of the Mutiny were never forgotten; indeed they provided the constant backdrop against which British policy was enacted. To a large extent this experience played a decisive role in recasting the whole direction of British policy. Its impact on policy toward the native Indian states was sharp, and lasting in its effects. Canning realized that the native states were ‘break-waters to the storm which would otherwise have swept over us in one great wave’, and he henceforward, by his grant of the right of adoption, committed Britain to their maintenance.1 This post-Mutiny solicitude for the native states stands in obvious contrast with the deprecatory, if not avowedly annexationist, policy of Canning's predecessors.

This article explores the actions of Prince Charles in the parliaments of 1621 and 1624. It discusses his role in the electoral process, his activities in parliaments, and the legislation which affected his interests. It begins by exploring the precedents for the heir to the throne being summoned to parliament, before examining his political apprenticeship in 1621, and how his actions in 1624 reveal the difficulties in controlling the reversionary interest. Throughout the two parliaments, Charles was an active participant, taking part in debates in the House of Lords, committee meetings, joint conferences, and in liaising between the king and parliament. The article concludes by suggesting that Charles, although successful in achieving some of his aims, believed that he had been able to manipulate parliament for his own ends when in fact the tide of events ran with him and deluded him. This led to a false assumption that he could control parliament – a notion which had disastrous consequences when he summoned his own parliaments after he had succeeded to the throne in 1625.

Recent writing on early modern London offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics. Interest in the literary and cultural is particularly strong, and much attention has been given to John Stow, London's sixteenth-century historian. This review discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stow's Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.

This article seeks to demonstrate the structure of attitudes in British colonial officialdom through a case study of Mauritius from the governorship of Sir John Pope Hennessy to decolonization. It suggests that officials consistently saw Mauritians as a whole as ‘the Others’, while seeking both to divide and rule them – into an émigré French elite left over from the French colonial period at the time of British conquest (1810), a Creole community, and an Indian community – without assimilating them; and to suspect each in turn of disloyalty and treachery. By a grim irony, many of the governors and their officials were suspected by the colonial office of joining the Others. This is thus a story of an adaptable imperial paranoia.

One of the most serious problems facing Archbishop Laud was the rapid growth of the Lecturer Movement during the 1620s and 1630s. The increasing numbers of graduates available, and the increasing amount of money donated to support them meant that the weekly lectures had become one of the chief “religious … organizations of the opposition”, and were beginning to “undermine the hierarchical principle”. The gravity of the situation was marked by the increasingly stringent regulation of the lecturers. They had originally been allowed to preach with very little control, but from the Canons of 1604 onwards they were made the subject of several new regulations. These culminated in the Directions of March 16296 which, although issued by Archbishop Abbot, were based upon suggestions made by Laud to the king. Soon afterwards the lecturers in London Diocese were curtailed as a prelude to Laud's future work as archbishop. The Directions were reissued in January 1634, and a policy of deliberately reducing certain kinds of lecturer was initiated in several dioceses, pursued in the Metropolitical Visitation, and completed by Laud's supporters amongst the bishops.

This article looks at the membership and organization of the opposition that emerged in the house of lords between 1720 and 1723 under the leadership of William, 1st Earl Cowper. The origin of this new opposition lay in the political reaction to the extensive corruption exposed by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, which brought together a coalition of dissident whigs and tones (both Hanoverian tories and Jacobites) who proceeded to attack the ministries of the earl of Sunderland and of Viscount Townshend and Robert Walpole for their supposed corrupt administration. The hallmark of the new opposition was the extensive campaign of protests against the opposition's defeat in votes, protests which were entered (with reasons) into the Journals of the House, and which were then published in the form of broadsheets, pamphlets, and newsletters as propaganda in an appeal to public opinion. This was the first time an opposition had indulged in an extensive and sustained campaign of influencing the public outside Westminster. This campaign required a high level of organization. This Cowper provided in imitation of some of the new management techniques being developed by the ministry to control the house of lords, plus a new feature – the daily pre-sitting meetings of the leadership to concert tactics. The legacy of the new opposition was the preservation of the concept of a loyal opposition as an acceptable part of British political life.

The general election of 1885 has been described as ‘the nearest point ever attained to the accomplishment of disestablishment in England’; and it is a curious fact that the very considerable part played by the Church question in this election has largely escaped notice. For this the suddenness with which the issue of Irish Home Rule came to dominate the political scene after the election is primarily responsible. Yet for all its brevity - it was effectively only during the last few weeks of an extended election campaign that the controversy over disestablishment became dominant — the agitation over the question was both fierce and ferocious; and was closely bound up with the name of Joseph Chamberlain.

This article questions the assumption that the earl of Cork was at the forefront of the attack on the earl of Strafford in England. It is argued that, before the opening of the Long Parliament, Cork had much to gain by securing Strafford's favour because of his continuing need to secure his Irish estates and his increasing social ambitions within the English court. The earl's decision to stand as witness against the lord lieutenant in 1641 was made with great reluctance, and the trial itself was fraught with unexpected dangers for Cork as well as Strafford. Throughout the crisis of 1638–41, the earl of Cork was motivated by political and financial concerns, not by a single-minded hatred of the earl of Strafford.

Richard Cobden, John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain were the most famous and influential reform agitators of the Victorian era. Collectively they ensured that much British political development in the period was influenced by ideas associated first with Manchester and then with Birmingham. In this context, Blight's career was particularly important since he was the only one of the trio who had close links with the other two and with both Manchester and Birmingham. Bright's partnership with Cobden in the Anti-Corn-Law League has long been an historical cliché and has been closely studied. Yet Cobden died in 1865 and Bright outlived him for twenty-four years. During that period Bright pursued a political career which often owed little to Cobden's influence. He also became a Liberal cabinet minister on three occasions: an honour declined by Cobden. Moreover Bright developed a close association with the rising radical leader Joseph Chamberlain. Yet their relationship has received scant attention from historians.

The purpose of the article is to examine the official response to the widespread series of disorders occurring in France following poor harvests in the 1840s and 1850s. A large number of studies of popular protest have been written in recent years. Most have failed to consider the forms of repression employed, and yet this is an essential means of understanding both the scale and the characteristics of protest. Our essential concern is thus with the techniques of repression employed in this period prior to the development of modern police and bureaucratic systems.

The central place occupied by Russia in the calculations of British statesmen after the Seven Years War has long been realized. For ministers in search of a ‘system’ on the continent to set against Choiseul's threatening Système du Midi, alliance with Catherine II seemed to offer an obvious means of providing for Britain's future security. The quest for alliance with St Petersburg, indeed, formed the leitmotif of British foreign policy in the age of the American Revolution. Negotiations with Russia went on infinitely longer, and were pursued with considerably more vigour on the British side, than any comparable discussions for a continental alliance. Even before the treaties of peace were signed in 1763, Britain had made the first move in the direction of St Petersburg, and the negotiations thus initiated continued intermittently for a whole decade. Only in the late spring of 1773 did the British government finally and reluctantly concede that, without a subsidy (which London had long refused to countenance), no firm commitment could be hoped for from Russia.

Factionalism among the nobility and gentry was a common although by no means universal phenomenon of local politics in Tudor England. During the 1560s it was the foremost fact in the political life of Hampshire. Co-operation among the gentry is at least as significant a phenomenon for the historian as conflict. At the same time conflict is much more likely to have left documen tation. The amiable resolution of local issues would usually be celebrated by silence while a dispute was likely to culminate in a lawsuit. For Hampshire in the 1560s the survival of one of the earliest and most fully preserved disputed election cases in Star Chamber from the reign of Elizabeth provides crucial evidence of the occurrence of conflict and the motivations of the participants. Thanks to the existence of this material, which includes lists of voters for both sides, the members of both factions are clearly identified. In addition the local issues at stake are further clarified. As a result all of the evidence surviving for the entire decade can be tied together to produce a comprehensive picture of the local political situation in Hampshire.

Focusing on the Franconian margraviates of Brandenburg around 1500, this study argues that the process of state formation engendered an elite of nobles who derived their power and status from the possession of high office. It shows, however, that as the state expanded, and the princely debt mounted, the relationship between ruler and noble elite was transformed: the leading nobles came to control more and more of the state in terms of offices and share of the public debt. To secure themselves in this elevated but unstable position they developed a dense network of marriage alliances among themselves. By the early sixteenth century this consortium of eminent nobles acquired a powerful hold on the princely state to the detriment of the princes and the exclusion of fellow nobles. The article suggests that it is against this background that the notorious deposition in 1515 of Margrave Friedrich by his sons should be seen: his overthrow was, among other things, an outcome of a change in the balance of power between prince and nobles that had been taking place since 1450. Finally, this change played a part in the creation of the Imperial Knighthood by which the nobles constitutionally placed themselves outside the princely states.