In order to understand why Tsar Peter and King Augustus II of Poland fell into one another's arms when they met at Rawa in August 1698, and why they parted such bosom friends, we must first of all briefly consider the relations between Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Sweden in the last three or four decades of the seventeenth century. After the peace of Oliva with Poland in 1661 and that of Kardis with Russia in 1669, Sweden's possession of Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and Karelia debarred both the Polish Republic and the tsar from the Baltic, thereby furnishing them with a common grievance and object of envy. Sweden's granary and her bulwark against Russia and Poland, Livonia with the port of Riga— ‘the most valuable jewel of the crown of Sweden’ — was a particularly invidious token of predominance in the Baltic and one whose lustre still outshone the growing importance of Narva in Estonia.

Common destiny: dictatorship, foreign policy, and war in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+262. ISBN 0-521-58208-3. £19.95.

Hitler's Italian allies: royal armed forces, fascist regime, and the war of 1940–1943. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+207. ISBN 0-521-79047-6. £16.95.

The prize question of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for 1780, on the utility of deception, has attracted both controversy and scholarly interest. Yet very little attention has been dedicated to the question's peculiar beginnings in the correspondence between the philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, in a discussion concerning the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. This correspondence not only reveals the prize question's complex genealogy in long-standing debates on the true ends of philosophy, but also helps revise conventional frameworks for understanding the relationship between philosophy and politics in Enlightenment Europe. Far from an adornment intended to boost the ‘Enlightened’ credentials of an absolutist king, d'Alembert held the momentum in this relationship, and recruited Frederick to his own campaign of promoting publicly useful philosophy. ‘Philosophy’ here amounted to a commitment to the truth and its public defence, rather than subscription to or belief in a specific set of ideas or political reforms. Placing pressure on rulers to disavow deceitful politics, the far-reaching implications of this conception of philosophy for political life were no less ambitious than the agendas espoused by protagonists of a supposed ‘radical Enlightenment’.

This article analyses Nathaniel Hone's portrait of Lord and Lady Scarsdale (1761) and the significance that such images have for our understanding of the eighteenth-century family. It first discusses the imagery of the painting and places it in the context of the shift that occurred in family portraiture between 1740 and 1760. Whilst earlier images presented stiffly posed figures, later portraits such as that by Hone came to focus on the sitters' affective relationships. The article argues that, whilst aesthetic influences played a part in this transition, it was chiefly prompted by the sentimentalization of familial ideals. Such ‘promenade portraits’ encapsulated the companionate marriage, hailed as a blend of masculine rationality and feminine tenderness. However, once contextualized within the state rooms for which it was conceived, the Hone portrait also reveals more ‘traditional’ concerns. It makes formal references to accompanying portraits of Stuart monarchs and dignitaries, emphasizing the tory affiliations of the Scarsdales and their loyalty to the Stuart dynasty. The state rooms also contain a portrait of Lord Scarsdale as a baby with his parents and his deceased elder brother. This image affirms the continuation of the male line in the face of high infant mortality rates, a statement that is confirmed in the Hone painting.

The Indian Rebellion leader Nana Sahib became Victorian Britain's most hated foreign enemy for his part in the 1857 Cawnpore massacres, in which British men, women, and children were killed after having been promised safe passage away from their besieged garrison. Facts were mixed with lurid fiction in reports which drew on villainous oriental stereotypes to depict Nana. The public appetite for vengeance was thwarted, however, by his escape to Nepal and subsequent reports of his death. These reports were widely disbelieved, and fears persisted for decades that Nana was plotting a new rebellion in the mountains. He came to be seen as both a literal and symbolic threat; the arrest of suspects across the years periodically revived the memories and the atavistic fury of the Mutiny, while his example as the Victorians' archetypal barbaric native ruler shaped broader colonial attitudes. At the same time, he influenced metropolitan perceptions of empire through the popular Mutiny fictions in which he was a larger-than-life villain. Tracing Nana's changing presence in the British collective memory over generations illustrates the tensions between metropolitan and colonial ideas of empire, and suggests the degree to which an iconic enemy figure could shape perceptions of other races.

There can be few nineteenth-century figures whose papers and writings are so frequently consulted and quoted by historians as those of Francis Place, yet who have been so sadly neglected as historical figures. The only full-length study of Place's life and work, by Graham Wallas, is seventy-odd years old.2 It suffers from numerous defects, the two major of which are a tendency to show Place in an unduly favourable light and to make enormously lengthy quotations from Place's manuscripts, with very little criticism or analysis of their content or of the part which Place played in any given situation. The failure to look at Place's career and influence in the light of the views of his contemporaries inevitably means that Wallas's study is one-sided and incomplete as a biography and is only really useful as a selection from Place's writing, illustrating a number of the campaigns in which he played a part.

The preservation and the consolidation of international peace was the general aim of Emperor Alexander I of Russia in the first year of his reign. The young autocrat, faced with the novelty of international politics and bent on domestic reform, hoped for good relations with all the powers and tried to avoid any serious entanglement in European affairs. Diplomatic relations with Great Britain, which had been severed by the unstable Emperor Paul, were restored in June 1801, and a treaty of friendship was signed with the French Republic in October of the same year. Alexander expressed his readiness to co-operate with Bonaparte, whom he at first much admired, in arranging a general continental pacification and in settling the indemnities for the German princes dispossessed by France's expansion to the Rhine. The only issue that could have marred Franco-Russian relations at die time was Alexander's concern that full inde- pendence be restored to Piedmont and Naples. Nevertheless, the appointment of V. P. Kochubey, an advocate of a passive foreign policy, as head of the College for Foreign Affairs in October 1801, confirmed Alexander's pacific intentions. Yet widun four years Russia was to find herself at war with France as a leading and zealous promoter of a wide European coalition and the champion of a new European order.

Samuel Pepys's affair with his wife's companion Deborah Willet is one of the most celebrated episodes in his journal of the 1660s. When Pepys ended his journal in May 1669, he also believed that he had ended contact with Deb. Unable to trace her in the historical record, scholars have been forced to accept this conclusion. However, new evidence shows that Deb Willet did not disappear from Pepys's life. Rather, she married soon after the end of the diary and her husband, the clergyman Jeremiah Wells, quickly became a client of Pepys. This article explores the evidence on the connections between the three in the 1670s, offering a case study of one individual's role in Pepys's patronage network, and reflecting back upon events in the journal.

This article explores the domestic political aspects of the last great disaster of French foreign policy before the revolution: the unsuccessful intervention in Holland between 1784 and 1787. These have been largely ignored by historians, although much attention has been given both to the internal politics of the Dutch republic as well as to British involvement in her affairs during this period. The article argues that the increasing incoherence of French policy towards the United Provinces was caused by profound splits within the king's council. These culminated in a series of attacks on the diplomacy of the powerful foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, by his ministerial opponents. The Dutch affair reveals the fragmentation of foreign policy during the last years of the ancien régime, and also paints a wider picture of a deeply divided royal government on the eve of the revolution.

Seventy-five years ago the Clarendon press published the first volume of The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Developments, and its third volume came out in 1878. Those of us in Cambridge who have been responsible for the list of books recommended to the attention of the students of medieval constitutional history have of set purpose placed Stubbs’ book in the category of those recommended for ‘study’—a category in which no other secondary history book is to be found. It is our considered view that no student of the early history of our constitution can dispense with reading it, and this article, is an attempt to justify that opinion, whilst indicating, as far as may be, the directions in which the results of seventy years ‘research and reinterpretation have supplemented Stubbs’ knowledge and modified our attitude to his judgements. I would say at once, with all the force at my disposal, that there is no nineteenth-century historian towards whom it is less possible to be condescending without condemning oneself as unfit to study history. As one who loves Maitland this side idolatry, I can only accept Professor Galbraith's opinion that Maitland's learning fell far short of that of Stubbs—as Maitland himself would have been the first to declare. ‘In the augmentation of knowledge’, he said, ‘Dr Stubbs stood supreme. No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising.’

A decade ago there appeared a volume of twelve essays on Lloyd George, written by a dozen young historians and edited by A. J. P. Taylor. These pieces, of varying merit and degree of interest, ranged widely from pre-1914 social reform to the Greek question and even to the Second World War.1 Yet strangely enough one of the most colourful patches of the huge canvas that was Lloyd George's life did not receive so much as a passing glance - namely his relations with the press. Taylor had hinted at the possibilities in that sphere when preparing a volume of his own essays a few years earlier. There he placed in sequence two entertaining chapters of quite unequal length and importance, one entitled ‘Lloyd George: rise and fall’ and the other ‘The Chief’.2 The latter requires a little explanation, for ‘ Chief was the style of address beloved of Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, the man who owned The Times, Daily Mail, Evening News, and a host of other newspapers and journals. Quite simply he was the greatest press lord of them all, and Fleet Street has known many. While it is manifestly impossible in a few pages to explore in detail the full story of Lloyd George and the press, we can profitably follow his relations with Lord Northcliffe during the years 1914 to 1918 when these two giants were at the peak of their power and their fortunes were intertwined in many and strange ways. During the war Northcliffe was frequently called (and with utmost seriousness) ‘The Most Powerful Man in the Country’, while at the end Lloyd George was ‘The Man Who Won the War’. Often it seemed that the stage was not big enough for both and the British people must choose between them. Not until 1918 did two events - the ‘Maurice debate’ and the ‘Coupon election’ - prove conclusively that in the final analysis Lloyd George's power was real while Northcliffe's was largely illusory. Perhaps none was more surprised at this outcome, certainly none was more relieved, than Lloyd George himself. The reasons will become apparent as the history of their wartime relationship unfolds.

Generally dismissed by historians as just an hysterical gesture by parliamentary whig leaders disappointed and angered over the failure of the second Exclusion Bill, the attempted impeachment in 1680–1 of Sir William Scroggs was in fact a complicated and important affair. Although a failure in legal terms (because King Charles dissolved two parliaments), it succeeded in political terms when the king dismissed Scroggs. A propaganda ploy to embarrass the duke of York and also the king of England, re-unite the whig party, and re-ignite anti-popery fervour to promote another try at Exclusion (contrary to recent revisionism), the proceedings provoked discussion of many central issues, but most importantly of the legislative authority of parliament, or control of the law; the affair provoked a ‘crisis of authority’. Print culture played an unprecedented role: four of the eight articles of impeachment against Scroggs were connected with the press. Press people, in effect, brought down a chief minister of the crown and severely embarrassed the government, an event of signal importance in the history of the press.

This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evan's death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing.