Traditionally puritanism has been treated as a religious phenomenon that only impinged on the world of that ‘secular’ politics to a limited extent and mainly in relation to church reform. Such an approach, however, is to employ a misleadingly narrow definition which ignores the existence of a much more all-embracing puritan political vision traceable from the mid-sixteenth century. First clearly articulated by some of the Marian exiles, this way of thinking interpreted the Bible as a manifesto against tyranny whether in church or state. Under the successive regimes of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, puritans can be found who continued to judge the actions of government by the same biblical criterion, which also helps to explain among other things their prominence in opposing unparliamentary taxation. Puritan ideology itself was transmitted down the generations partly via a complex of family alliances, underpinned by teaching and preaching, and this in turn provided a basis for political organization. Moreover, the undiminished radical potential of puritanism is evident from responses to the assassination of Buckingham in 1628. Given these antecedents the subsequent resort to Civil War appears less surprising than historians often claim.

This article analyses the interplay of arguments for religious reconciliation and peace on the one hand and a patriotic vocabulary or programme in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the other. Focusing on different phases of irenic debate in the Empire, various types of what will be termed ‘irenic patriotism’ will be identified. Irenic patriotism could employ both utilitarian politique and more principled arguments for a religious peace. Finally, a consideration of Hugo Grotius's irenicism, which drew heavily on German sources, will show how a distinct humanist critique of theological controversies and their political consequences resulted in an emphasis on a minimalist and ethical concept of Christianity, as well as the idea of a total submission of the church and its doctrines to the authority of the magistrate and the patria. The distinctively civil type of irenicism, which arose from this debate, was less concerned with the unity of the church than with the integrity of the civitas, respublica, and patria.

Luther's early statements, such as that belief is a ‘free work’ and must not be coerced, gained crucial relevance in the juridical debates about the meaning of the Augsburg Peace of Religion in the empire. Christoph Besold was among those transforming the reformers' message into a legal claim of subjects against their governments, based on an alleged natural right to believe what one wants. He thus transferred Luther's claim based on the reformer's trust in the work of the divine word into a juridical claim for subjects against their civil and ecclesiastical magistrates. Besold's argument is thus an example of the important changes in political and religious thought developing within the genre of the German politica during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Henry VIII's first two wives experienced multiple pregnancies culminating in late-term miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal mortality. After his fortieth birthday, the king's mental and physical health underwent rapid deterioration. In this article, we argue that both his reproductive troubles and his midlife pathologies can be explained if Henry VIII were positive for the Kell blood group. A Kell negative woman who has multiple pregnancies with a Kell positive male will suffer repeated miscarriages and death of Kell positive foetuses and term infants that occur subsequent to the first Kell positive pregnancy. This pattern is consistent with the pregnancies of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Additionally, Henry VIII may have suffered from McLeod syndrome, a genetic disorder of the Kell blood group system, which is a condition that causes physical and mental impairment consistent with his ailments.

In 1643, Robert Rich, the second earl of Warwick, the parliamentary lord high admiral, issued directions for naval officers in the Irish squadron to execute any soldiers seized whilst crossing from Ireland to join royalist armies in England and Wales. An ordinance was duly promulgated by parliament in October 1644 which authorized the killing of Irishmen captured at sea or in England. Thereafter, although a number of captains implemented this policy and put to death mariners, soldiers, and passengers detained on vessels going to and from confederate and royalist ports in Ireland, the killing of maritime captives never became the norm in the war at sea. This article provides a detailed analysis of the atrocities that occurred and the treatment of prisoners taken in the seas around Ireland during the war of the three kingdoms. In particular, this article examines the effect exerted by the threat of retaliatory executions of English seamen held in towns such as Wexford and Waterford on forcing parliament and its naval commanders to moderate their actions.

This article examines the assessments of John Calvin's life, character, and influence to be found in the polemical writings of English Catholics in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. It demonstrates the centrality of Calvin to Catholic claims about the character and history of the established church, and the extent to which Catholic writings propagated a vibrant ‘black legend’ of Calvin's egotism and sexual depravity, drawing heavily not only on the writings of the French Calvinist-turned-Catholic Jerome Bolsec, but also on those of German Lutherans. The article also explores how, over time, Catholic writers increasingly identified some common ground with anti-puritans and anti-Calvinists within the English church, and how claims about the seditious character of Calvin, and by extension Calvinism, were used to articulate the contrasting ‘loyalty’ of Catholics and their right to occupy a place within the English polity.

For much of English history, the law punished felons not just with death, but also with the loss of their possessions. This article examines the practice of felony forfeiture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on who profited and with what effects. It argues that recognizing the role such profit-takers played challenges common depictions of the nature and meaning of participation in law and governance. The heightened use of judicial revenues as tokens of patronage under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts impinged upon participatory aspects of the law's operation.

The development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of ‘state formation’ in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the ‘politics of the parish’.

Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism are essential categories for the interpretation of political discourse in Stuart Ireland, Scotland, and England. In the 1650s, the Capuchin Richard O'Ferrall defined the future of the Irish kingdom by means of its past. This Irish ancient constitution was not anchored in J. G. A. Pocock's common law mind, but rather in Aristotelianism. Ancient constitution discourse in England and Scotland shared this Aristotelian basis. Responding to O'Ferrall, John Lynch, Catholic archdeacon of Tuam, employed openly anti-Aristotelian arguments which had been pioneered by the Jacobean attorney general for Ireland, Sir John Davies. Recognizing the Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian nature of these discourses enables the incorporation of both Catholic and Protestant writers, whether educated in Ireland, England, or France, within a coherent account of political thought across the Stuart world.

When James VI and I arrived in London in 1603, he created a new bedchamber, which he filled with Scottish courtiers. This he positioned, antagonistically as it turned out, between himself and the more English privy chamber. These Scottish courtiers thus had the most intimate access to James, and were able to exercise great influence over the distribution of James's favour. Whilst their importance has been debated within an English context, their significance within James's government in Scotland has not yet been addressed. These Scotsmen became the focus for patronage networks stretching from Whitehall, through the privy council in Edinburgh, to the Scottish regional elites, and helped James retain the co-operation of those elites. Against the background of attempts to gain fuller union, James sought to demonstrate the benefits of regnal union by prosecuting a pacification of crime within the Scottish and English Borders, now rechristened the Middle Shires. Patronage networks from Whitehall to Roxburghshire secured the co-operation of the Scottish Borders elite, whilst acting as conduits for information and advice back to Whitehall. This article will suggest that these relationships were integral to Scottish governmental processes in James's absence, providing a much-needed cohesive force within his fragile new multiple monarchy.

This article examines the origins of the first Agreement of the people: a draft written constitution presented to the general council of the New Model Army on 28 October 1647. It argues that the Agreement was a document that emerged from concerns amongst some of the soldiery and their civilian allies that the terms of a projected settlement with Charles I, The heads of the proposals, would betray the political programme advanced in the army's earlier public statements, especially its Declaration, or, representation of 14 June 1647. As such, this article moves away from the traditional narrative of seeing the Agreement as a Leveller manifesto that was authored in a deliberate attempt to infiltrate the army, and thereby asks fresh questions about the political networks and the programme behind the document. What emerges is a picture of the post-first Civil War political scene that integrates parliamentary manoeuvrings with City of London politics and the public and private affairs of a politicized army. As a result, the article sheds new light on aspects of the constitutional crisis of the later 1640s.

This article challenges the recent interpretation of the trial of Charles I which sees it as an ‘extended negotiation’, an attempt to achieve a settlement with the king, and depicts the execution as the by-product, contingent and reluctantly undertaken, of the failure of that attempt. This argument was developed by Dr Sean Kelsey in a number of articles, not least one in this journal, and has been embodied in recently published general works on the period. I argue that this revisionist account of on-going negotiation with Charles I up to and during the trial is defective. It relies on an uncritical approach to the evidence, particularly that distilled from newspaper accounts. It misunderstands the significance of several key texts, notably the army's November Remonstrance, the Act establishing the High Court of Justice, and the charge against the king. Finally, it emphasizes a unity of purpose among conservative judges eager to do a deal with Charles, and fails to comprehend the force of the army's and Cromwell's insistence on public justice upon ‘this man against whom the Lord hath witnessed’.

Recent research has argued that English cathedrals, particularly but not exclusively Westminster Abbey, formed a ‘liturgical fifth column’ in the church and were the Trojan horse by which Laudianism – the ceremonial, clericalist, anti-Calvinist policies associated with Charles I and William Laud in the 1620s and 1630s – was introduced into the English church. This article re-examines links between cathedrals and Laudianism, not just in England, but also in the associated Protestant state churches of Charles's other realms: Ireland and Scotland. Laudian divines emphasized cathedrals as liturgical showcases, ‘mother churches’ which their ‘daughters’, the parish churches, should follow in the policy of the ‘beauty of holiness’, particularly the placing, railing of, and reverence to the Laudian altar. However, cathedrals are shown to be more diverse than historians have generally allowed, and Laudian policies are shown to have been grafted on to cathedrals, rather than emerging from them. Caroline cathedrals were more the victims of Laudianism than its midwives.

This article assesses the significance of Presbyterian ideas of church government in Scottish politics after the revolution of 1688–90. While recent historians have revised our understanding of Scottish politics in this period, they have mostly overlooked debates concerning religious authority. The article focuses on what contemporaries called the ‘intrinsic right’ of the church: its claim to independent authority in spiritual matters and ecclesiastical administration. The religious settlement of 1690 gave control of the kirk to clergy who endorsed divine right Presbyterianism, believed in the binding force of the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), and sought to uphold the intrinsic right. An ambiguous legal situation, the criticisms of episcopalian clergy and politicians, and the crown's religious policies helped to make the Presbyterians' ecclesiological claims a source of instability in Scottish politics. Meetings of the general assembly and, after 1707, the appointment of national fast and thanksgiving days were particularly likely to spark controversy. More broadly, the article questions two narratives of secularization assumed by many previous scholars. It argues that Scottish politics was not differentiated from religious controversy in this period, and that historians have exaggerated the pace of liberalization in Scottish Presbyterian thought.

This article examines the circulation of printed questionnaires as a research strategy among those investigating the constituent parts of the British Isles between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries. It traces the origins and development of published ‘heads’ or ‘articles of enquiry’ as a means of acquiring information on antiquities, geography, and natural history and pieces together the research networks through which this methodology was shared and elaborated. The learned societies, ecclesiastical infrastructure, and periodical publications of the day are shown to have been instrumental in promoting this practice and in forging links between scholars and the ‘learned and ingenious’ in the parishes to whom such ‘queries’ were addressed. It is argued that these questionnaires were an important and insufficiently appreciated aspect of regional studies during the period. Though the responses to them are shown to have been highly variable, both in quantity and quality, it is suggested that they helped to establish what has become an important technique of data collection in modern academic inquiry.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Historians generally discount the advent of the First French Empire as the result of Napoleon's personal ambition. Napoleon, however, could not have brought about the transition from republic to empire without wide support, not only among the political and military elite, but also among the French people. This article re-examines the reasons why, a little more than ten years after the execution of Louis XVI, moderate-conservative elements in the political elite opted for a monarchical-style political system, and why it was so widely accepted by ordinary people across France. It does so by examining the arguments in favour of empire in three ‘sites of ideas’: the neo-monarchists in Napoleon's entourage; the political elite, preoccupied with many of the same concerns that had plagued France since 1789; and the wider political nation, which expressed a manifest adhesion to Napoleon as emperor that was marked by an affective bond. The push to empire, it is argued, was an expression of a dominant set of political beliefs and values. Napoleon, on the other hand, only reluctantly came to accept the notion of heredity.

This article re-evaluates the role and importance of the thirteenth earl of Eglinton as president of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (NAVSR). Departing from the established historiography, which depicts his career as a romantic absurdity because of his organization of a medieval tournament in 1839, it shows Eglinton to have been a political figure of substance, who played a significant role in public life during the mid-Victorian era. The article emphasizes the importance of ‘administrative devolution’ as a feature of long-term Conservative political thought and points to activities of Eglinton and his circle as an example of the need to give more weight to the importance of Conservatives in modern Scottish history.

This article examines leisure in eighteenth-century London and argues that historians have exaggerated the importance of public, commercial leisure at the expense of leisure in the home. The domestic sphere was the primary scene of leisure for men and women of propertied society. In tandem with this examination of leisure I argue that our frameworks for understanding the use of domestic space fail to capture both the significance of particular rooms and the variety of uses for individual rooms. The failings of the public/private framework are well known, but scholars have thus far failed to develop successful alternatives. From diaries, letters, and inventories conclusions may be drawn about the habitual uses of space, but letters and diaries also provide evidence of how room use varied depending on time of day, activities pursued or people undertaking those activities. I present several variables that residents used to determine where and with whom different activities were taken. Meanings of spaces were contingent upon a mix of qualities constantly re-assessed by residents and guests.

Oliver Cromwell remains a deeply controversial figure in Ireland. In the past decade, his role in the conquest has received sustained attention. However, in recent scholarship on the settlement of Ireland in the 1650s, he has enjoyed a peculiarly low profile. This trend has served to compound the interpretative problems relating to Cromwell and Ireland which stem in part from the traditional denominational divide in Irish historiography. This article offers a reappraisal of Cromwell's role in designing and implementing the far-reaching ‘Cromwellian’ land settlement. It examines the evidence relating to his dealings with Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic, and his attitude towards the enormous difficulties which they faced post-conquest. While the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation, in the 1650s Cromwell in fact emerged as an important and effective ally for Irish landowners seeking to defeat the punitive confiscation and transplantation policies approved by the Westminster parliament and favoured by the Dublin government.