Too often religious policy in Henry VIII's reign after the break with Rome has been seen as fluctuating and inconsistent as he was influenced first by one group of ministers and courtiers and then by another. Here it is argued by contrast that Henry VIII was very much the dominant force in the making of religious policy and that his policy, which he pursued skilfully and consistently, is best characterized as a search for the middle way.

This article contends that the confrontation between Sir Francis Hastings and the new king of England, in the winter of 1604–5, was of far more lasting significance in determining King James's religious policy than the Hampton Court Conference, which had left many grievances of the most dogmatic and zealous Calvinists largely unresolved. The showdown was prompted by James's apparent leniency towards Catholicism and his role in the peace process with Spain. James emerged from the encounter as a king of real political ability who turned the episode to his advantage; using the opportunity to ‘tackle’ the Catholic threat and ‘subdue’ the nonconforming puritan ministers whilst also endeavouring to energize local government. Thereafter, he was able to defuse religious friction for much of the rest of his reign.

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.

The English occupation of Tournai has recently generated far-reaching claims about its importance; allegedly Tournai provided a foretaste of certain developments of the Henrician Reformation. This article argues that Tournai was treated as an integral part of Henry VIII's ‘kingdom of France’ and its status consistently distinguished from that of the English kingdom. It was not, as has been suggested, granted representation in the English parliament. The argument that advanced ideas of ‘sovereignty’ derived from fifteenth-century French thought entered into English political discourse through Tournai is also countered. Important jurisdictional points were raised, notably over the administration of the bishopric, involving three powers, England, France, and the Habsburg government of Flanders. But Henry's insistence on his rights as a sovereign prince were directed against France, not, as has been claimed, against the papacy. Nothing in Henry's dealings with Tournai transcended well-established English doctrine and practice about the relationship between the political authority and the church. Nor did Henry's treatment of the conquered town evoke novel doctrines of royal power; it followed closely precedents set by Henry V. The conquest of Tournai increased the self-confidence of Henry VIII's government in both domestic and international affairs; but largely through Henry's belief that he was successfully emulating the military achievement of Henry V, not through any input of novel political doctrine.

This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later prudently disowned them. Closer inspection of Hacket's exploits sheds fresh light on the relationship between experimental Calvinist piety and the religious and magical culture of the unlettered rural laity – a relationship still widely presented as bitterly adversarial. Relocated in the context of contemporary attitudes to prophecy and insanity, the episode illuminates the eclecticism of early modern belief and the manner in which medical and theological explanations for bizarre behaviour comfortably coexisted and mingled. Variously labelled a witch, visionary, and raving lunatic, Hacket's case reveals the extent to which such roles, diagnoses, and stereotypes are socially, culturally, and politically shaped and conditioned. In exploiting the incident to discredit Presbyterian activism within the Church of England, leading conformist polemicists anticipated the main thrust of the campaign against religious ‘enthusiasm’ mounted by Anglican elites in the Interregnum, Restoration, and early Enlightenment.

This article examines the circumstances surrounding the condemnation and burning for heresy of the Observant Franciscan John Forest in 1538. Forest's principal ‘heresy’ was his adherence to the papacy, making him the only Englishman to be burnt for this offence by any Tudor regime. His fate, however, can be placed in the context of an increasing willingness of Henrician apologists in the 1530s to identify papal claims as heretical, particularly over the issue of the authority of a general council, to which Henry VIII had appealed over the divorce. The papal convocation of the council of Mantua in 1536–7, and Henry's need to impugn its authority, provides the immediate context for Forest's condemnation. The article also demonstrates how the harshness of Forest's treatment was related to his avowed equivocation over the oath of supremacy, and how Forest and a number of other conservative priests and laypeople were able to employ strategies to subvert the government's attempts to bind their consciences. It concludes by suggesting a number of reasons, political and theological, why the policy pursued with Forest was not repeated.

This article engages with recent work on the nature of religious censorship in the early Stuart period that has emphasized that the government possessed neither the power nor the will to control systematically what was written. It is argued here, instead, that there is evidence of attempts to control the presses' output of religious materials during the Laudian period and earlier, by all parties within the Church of England. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revive a simplistic view of government ‘control’, but rather to study the means by which licensers could exert an influence over what would be printed with an aura of mainstream legitimacy. Texts were often interfered with by official licensers with a variety of motives. Interference might sometimes be essentially ‘benign’, conferring legitimacy on marginal works by massaging their contents, or texts might be modified in order to make their authors appear to endorse the views of their opponents. The issue of whether it was practically possible to publish work clandestinely is here seen to be something of a red herring, since by publishing in this illicit fashion authors were effectively resigning their right to be considered as spokesmen of the orthodox mainstream. It is the control and manipulation of the licensing process which emerges as one important means by which the religious middle ground was defined and controlled in the early Stuart period.

The comprehensive neglect of English church buildings in the century after the Reformation until the advent of Archbishop Laud has long stood as one of the standard readings of English church history. This article argues that attitudes towards the building and repair of churches in the pre-Laudian period were far more complex than has previously been recognized. It documents a sustained revival of church building and beautification in London that took place well before Laud's emergence, and which is inexplicable without reference to a whole range of practical and social, as well as religious, forces. This evidence, however, should not lead us to downplay the novelty and distinctiveness of the Laudian building programme. Rather, it is suggested here that Laudian polemic advanced a specific view of puritanism as incorporating a profane neglect and contempt of both church services and of the building which housed them. It is this vision of puritan neglect that not only provided a justification for Laudian changes to church practices and interiors in the 1630s, but which has also deflected the attention of later historians away from programmes of church repair in the reign of James I.

The commitment of Charles I's government to press censorship and the rigour with which that censorship was enforced is the subject of the present essay. In 1627 Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, the Latin secretary to the privy council, became political licenser for the press. Over the next fourteen years he granted eighty-two licences and probably was responsible for many more. Drawing on his two office diaries, his personal correspondence, and the books and pamphlets to which he gave his imprimatur, this essay attempts a small portrait of a ‘royal censor’ in 1630s London. Although he occasionally allowed works implicitly critical of government policy, he appears to have been conscientious in his duties. (At least twice he approached Charles for his opinion about a licence.) Weckherlin's eventual loss of his licensing job to secretary of state Sir Francis Windebank's staff signalled the crown's interest in an even closer watch on printing and publishing. The evidence of Weckherlin's career suggests that in the decade before the Long Parliament Charles increasingly sought to curtail the power of the press.

In a recent contribution to the debate over the operational significance of the Old Poor Law, Peter Solar has argued that ‘the local financing of poor relief gave English property owners, individually and collectively, a direct pecuniary interest in ensuring that the parish's demographic and economic development was balanced’. His survey of the implications of the attempt to maintain this equilibrium, however, fails to take account of the social and political relationships between rate-payers, rate-receivers, and parish officers. In seeking to integrate considerations of power into the analysis of the relief of the poor, by contrast, this paper locates social welfare provision in the context of the authority structures of several parishes in Holland Fen (Lincolnshire) over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emphasizes the role of the parish vestry in regulating and relieving the poor; demonstrates the extraordinary scale of poor relief in the local context; and argues that even in the open parishes of the Lincolnshire fenland, hostility to poor migrants could be marked, resulting even in the prohibition of the marriages of the poor. The politics of the poor rate implied the exclusion of poor strangers in the interests of relieving the ancient settled poor.

Recent moves by New Historicists to evaluate theatrical material from the early modern period have been at the expense of what historians would recognize as acceptable use of historical context. One of the most glaring examples of the dangers of taking a play out of such a proper context has been The Tempest. The play has had a great deal of literary criticism devoted to it, attempting to fit it into comfortable twentieth-century clothing in regard to its commentary on empire, at the expense of what the play's depiction of imperialism meant for the year 1611 when it was written. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to suggest that the play does not actually call into question the Jacobean process of colonization across the Atlantic at all, and suggests that of more importance for its audience would have been the depiction of the hegemony of the island nation of Great Britain as recreated in 1603. Such a historical reconstruction is helped through contrasting Shakespeare's play with the Jonson, Chapman, and Marston collaboration, Eastward Ho, as well as with the anonymous Masque of Flowers and Chapman's Memorable Masque. These works will be used to illustrate just what colonialism might mean for the Jacobean audience when the Virginia project was invoked and suggest that an American tale The Tempest is not.

In recent years historians have grown sceptical about attempts to trace connections between puritanism and liberty. Puritans, we are told, sought a godly society, not a pluralistic one. The new emphasis has been salutary, but it obscures the fact that a minority of zealous Protestants argued forcefully for the toleration of heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. During the English revolution, a substantial number of Baptists, radical Independents, and Levellers insisted that the New Testament paradigm required the church to be a purely voluntary, non-coercive community in the midst of a pluralistic society governed by a ‘merely civil’ state. Although their position was not without its ambiguities, it constituted a startling break with the Constantinian assumptions of magisterial Protestantism.

The career of the MP and poet Christopher Brooke, in particular his The ghost of Richard the third (1614) and his activity in the 1614 ‘addled’ parliament, forms the basis of this study of Jacobean political culture. Brooke's career foregrounds the close interaction of political and literary cultures in the period; he was a leading member of the political circle, the ‘Sireniacs’, which had strong parliamentary ties, and was one of the Inns of Court-based ‘oppositional’ Spenserian poets. Together with his fellow ‘Sireniac’ MPs, Brooke vehemently opposed the definition of impositions as the domain of absolute rather than ordinary powers of the crown because of the threat this posed to the rights of parliament and the subject. The ghost of Richard the third provides an example of parliamentary debates entering a wider print culture, where impositions merged with broader civic issues. Political language in this period was not confined to the realms of high theory and Brooke's poem illustrates the complex mediation of political discourses through literary forms. A humanist discourse of tyranny provided Brooke with a coded language, enabling him to articulate his concern for the health of the commonwealth and to address areas of ideological conflict in early Stuart political culture.

This article presents a reinterpretation of James Harrington's writings. It takes issue with J. G. A. Pocock's reading, which treats him as importing into England a Machiavellian ‘language of political thought’. This reading is the basis of Pocock's stress on the republicanism of eighteenth-century opposition values. Harrington's writings were in fact a most implausible channel for such ideas. His outlook owed much to Stoicism. Unlike the Florentine, he admired the contemplative life; was sympathetic to commerce; and was relaxed about the threat of ‘corruption’ (a concept that he did not understand). These views can be associated with his apparent aims: the preservation of a national church with a salaried but politically impotent clergy; and the restoration of the royalist gentry to a leading role in English politics. Pocock's hypothesis is shown to be conditioned by his method; its weaknesses reflect some difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘languages of thought’.

This study examines the posthumous competition over the print publication of works by Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) before the English Civil War. The print history of the two official volumes edited by Laud and John Buckeridge (1626), and of competing editions of texts rejected by them but printed by puritan publishers, sheds important new light not only on the formation of the Andrewes canon, but on Laud's manipulation of the print trade and his attempts to erect new textual authorities to support his vision of the church in Britain.

This article examines the history of the German Fürstenbund prior to the Prussian take-over of the scheme in 1785. In charting the union's initial conception as a small-state alliance designed to resist both Prussian and Austrian expansionism, the article reveals the cultural dimension of imperial diplomacy. Exclusive concentration on the straightforward diplomatic sources produced by Prussian-style bureaucracies has led historians to underrate the contribution of smaller German principalities, which typically employed more indirect, metaphorical means of political communication. A prominent example of such ‘cultural politics’ is the process by which Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau drew on English precedents in shaping the Fürstenbund. Its participants were to be united not just by formal agreements, but by a shared spirit. Under the leadership of a ‘Patriot king’, they were to act as champions of ancient regional liberties, thus resembling the English aristocrats of the anti-Walpole opposition whom Franz admired. At the same time, an English-inspired rhetoric of sentimentalism was employed to suggest that this political union would function in analogy with sentimental friendships, creating a firmer bond whilst preserving that small-state ‘individualism’ which was the source of so many reform initiatives in the late eighteenth-century German Empire.

John Cusacke, an Irish gentleman who was educated on the continent and worked on the fringes of the court of wards, constructed a striking re-reading of kingship, law, colonial government, and parliament in a series of tracts written between 1615 and 1647. His writings provide insight both into seventeenth-century colonial theory and early Stuart political thought. Shaped in the cauldron of Irish land struggles and continental political thought, Cusacke rejected Old English constitutionalism, arguing instead that Ireland was a colonial dependency of England. Further, to gain royal favour for various projects, Cusacke recast contemporary conceptions of parliament and common law, rejecting the centrality of custom, insisting that the king was the law maker and vigorously attacking Sir Edward Coke. Cusacke's writings reached the libraries of James I and Charles I, and their officials Sir Robert Naunton, master of the court of wards, and attorney-general Sir Robert Bankes. Cusacke's tracts graphically demonstrate the existence of an absolutist political discourse in early Stuart Britain applied not to issues of theology or of international law but to domestic politics.

According to their charters, borough magistrates were to be independent of county justices of the peace. But between 1664 and 1688, the crown granted commissions of association appointing county justices to act in twenty-one towns. Though such commissions effectively annulled provisions in corporate charters, their use was entirely within the law of franchises by which such charters were granted. Three phases mark the life of these commissions: the mid-1660s, when the gentry – not the crown – prompted their use for their own purposes; the late 1660s to 1670s, when the crown used them to strengthen excise collection; and the 1680s, when they were used to support a more ambitious policy of imposing new charters on the corporations. Their use thus reveals when, how, and why the relationship between royal and local authorities changed, demonstrating the crown's essentially benign posture toward the provinces in the 1660s and 70s, thereby providing a vivid contrast to developments in the 1680s.

Vincenzo Gioberti's Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) has been acknowledged as a major influence on moderate liberal thinking in the Risorgimento. Yet historians and political theorists have tended to dismiss the text as ponderous, unreadable or worse. The concern of this paper is to present what was once seen as a canonical text in terms that might make its initial appeal intelligible. Gioberti's text is set in the context of theological reappraisals within the Catholic tradition sparked by the rise of the national idea. The Primato managed to bring together currents of thought which are often regarded as antithetical. Catholic universalism was used to buttress and legitimize a specific view of the Italian nation. Gioberti's synthesis was to have a lasting impact on Italian liberalism, fostering a regard for established traditions rather than abstract rights. It also served to isolate revolutionaries and reactionaries in a dramatic and decisive decade for political debate in Italy.

This article seeks to re-balance the canon of anti-corn law leadership by examining the ideas and activities of Thomas Perronet Thompson. A relatively neglected figure in modern accounts of the Anti-Corn Law League and repeal in 1846, Thompson was acknowledged in his own lifetime as an outstanding campaigner whose role in the work of the League and in the mobilization of opinion was exceptional. This article investigates Thompson's free trade principles, and uses his pamphlets, articles, correspondence, speeches, and organizational efforts to create a vivid impression of repeal agitation in the 1830s and 1840s. Personal relationships between anti-corn law leaders are examined, as are the links between their movement and such other phenomena as Chartism and the campaign for factory reform. The article stresses the central importance of Thompson in the achievement of repeal and, by using his contribution as a point of entry, seeks to promote a deeper understanding of the anti-corn law creed and its modes of organization, campaigning, publicity, and propaganda.