The first English translation of Castiglione's Il cortegiano was produced by Thomas Hoby, and published in 1561. Hoby began work on the text during Edward VI's reign, when Italian culture was admired for its progressiveness by the Protestant elite. He translated Book iii as a self-contained commission for Elizabeth Parr, marchioness of Northampton. The book in question had particular relevance for the marchioness at that stage of her career. Having ‘Englished’ it, Hoby did not initially intend to translate the rest of Il cortegiano. He knew that someone else was already engaged upon the project. The identity of this alternative translator has hitherto remained unknown. However, a strong case can be made in support of the candidature of William Thomas. Hoby only embarked upon a full translation after Thomas's execution for treason in 1554. By 1556, he had completed his task, and produced a dedication addressed to Henry Hastings. His choice of dedicatee is generally attributed to a sense of political and spiritual affinity; Hastings moved in the same intellectual circles, and shared the same Protestant background, as Hoby. However, the young man who would later be known as the ‘Puritan earl’ conformed to the prescribed religion of the Marian regime. More significantly, he was the nephew of Cardinal Pole. Hoby and several of his evangelical friends were seeking rapprochement with the Catholic government in 1556. Hoby hoped his translation would commend him to Pole, thus effecting his political rehabilitation. However, the authorities were suspicious of Hoby – and of the stationer to whom he entrusted his book. Doubts were also raised about the Catholic orthodoxy of Castiglione's dialogues. Consequently, Hoby's translation was not published until after the Elizabethan accession.

This article reconsiders Mary Tudor's victory in the succession crisis of July 1553. It challenges the traditional interpretation which accounts for Mary's unexpected triumph as the result of a ‘spontaneous’ rising of the East Anglian gentry. Instead it reclaims a central role for Mary's household affinity in the succession crisis and as such presents a longer-term perspective than accounts of Mary's coup d’état have provided hitherto. It concludes by pointing to the implications of the role of Mary's household for interpreting the politics and religion of her reign.

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan offers the fiercest modern indictment against pride. Yet seventeenth-century polemicists and contemporary historians of political theory agree that arrogance is one of Hobbes's stylistic signatures. Does Hobbes, the author, fail to practise the modesty which he preaches to political subjects? Against critical consensus, I argue that Hobbes devises protocols of literary self-presentation consistent with his arguments for modesty. I make this argument by way of a close reading of Hobbes's Latin verse autobiography. Although the autobiography is usually cited as evidence of Hobbes's vanity, I read it as Hobbes's perverse profession of modesty. In the autobiography, Hobbes shuns the role of hero, casting himself as a ‘poor worm’ whose endeavours are motivated by fear. Acute consciousness of mortality, rather than lust for renown, moves Hobbes to philosophize. With this account of the affective springs of his own philosophy, Hobbes redefines the political theorist's vocation. Breaking with traditions that define political theory as a vehicle for heroic self-display, Hobbes defines political theory as a vocation for ordinary mortals.

Etienne Dumont became famous in the early nineteenth century for taking Jeremy Bentham's incoherent manuscripts and editing them into readable books which he translated into French. This article focuses on Dumont's earlier life, and specifically his Genevan background, to explain his work for Mirabeau in the first years of the French Revolution and his ultimate sense of the importance of Bentham's system of legislation. The article explains why Dumont's Genevan origins caused him to promote reforms in France intended to establish domestic stability and international peace. Dumont believed that states across Europe needed to combine free government with moral reform, in order to stifle the growth of democracy. The extent of the danger posed by popular government to modern societies was, in Dumont's view, the major lesson of the French Revolution. An alternative reform project to democracy was necessary, but one that did not entail a return to monarchical or aristocratic despotism. The characteristics of Dumont's planned reform became clear by adopting a comparative perspective on events in France. In developing a comparative perspective, Dumont argued that the history of Britain since 1688 needed to be in the foreground. He was perplexed by the French rejection of Britain's political and constitutional model, and explained many major developments at Paris in 1789 by reference to what he considered to be this peculiar fact. After the Terror, Dumont lost his faith in experiments in constitution building as a means of securing the independence of free states like Geneva. Bentham's great achievement was to have provided an alternative system of legislation that would transform national character gradually, making reform politics compatible with domestic and international peace. For Dumont, Bentham established a bulwark against the enthusiasm and democratic excess, and this was the key to utilitarianism as a moral reform project.

This article seeks to develop our understanding of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by asking a number of elementary questions. Were the plotters terrorists in any meaningful sense? Were they religious fanatics, as the Jacobean state understandably chose to portray them after the event? Was their plan built on a misguided fantasy of widespread support for a Catholic insurrection, or does the Plot perhaps have a practical coherence that lies obscured by the drama of the projected strike against Westminster? How does evidence for coherent planning square with the strong desire for revenge, running through so much of the surviving testimony? Through answers to these questions, we begin to see the Gunpowder plotters as men engaged in a calculated and demonstrably pragmatic attempt to engineer a change in regime. Their planning was robust, and to the point, while the emotional power of revenge was channelled creatively by the ringleaders. The article concludes that the odds against success were long, but not impossible.

The history of reading is a comparatively recent field. Work to date has been diverse both in period and methodology, ranging from case studies of individuals to statistical analyses of populations. This diversity means that it can be hard to discern either a broadly agreed narrative of reading practices or a clear set of debates. However, a range of scholars have emphasized contrasts between intensive and extensive reading, oral and silent reading, utilitarian and recreational reading, and public and private reading. These contrasts have been aligned with historical periods, with oral reading, for example, being associated with early modern reading in contrast to later periods. This article analyses the reading practices of Samuel Pepys and concludes that his example supports a contrast between a more intensive, oral, utilitarian, and public reading in the seventeenth century and that of later periods. Pepys's reading practices are also shown to have profound effects on his interpretation of texts. He sees texts of all genres as scripts to be performed by particular individuals, and judges them according to their suitability for this performance in a specific context.

This article weaves together two episodes separated by a generation. The inciting event is the trial in 1653 of Anne Bodenham, an elderly cunning woman in Salisbury, who found herself embroiled in a feud in a gentry household, set against the turbulent backdrop of a divided city. Her arrest and examination evoked painful memories of an earlier scandal, the fateful association of the duke of Buckingham with Dr John Lambe, a sorcerer whom Bodenham claimed to have served in the 1620s. These tales, in turn, echoed an even older awareness of the perils of the diabolic, most prominently the pact of Dr Faustus. Together these narrative strands demonstrate how feelings of public disgust at Stuart corruption were revived in the commonwealth era and used as a polemical device by puritan activists. Both stories are rich in gossip, rumour, rhymes, libels, anonymous notes, and the practical uses of printed works, not to mention spells and curses, visions and dreams. As such, this article also shows just how complex a witch-trial could be, and serves as a reminder of the sophistication, ingenuity, and ebullience of seventeenth-century communications and consciousness across the social order.

This article seeks to contribute to a revisionist account of the role of the British state and the nation in building the British Museum's early antique collections. Traditionally, there has been a perception that, in contrast especially to France, the British national collections of antiquities were formed primarily by private individuals donating objects, while the state looked on with indifference, or, at best, occasionally bought antiquities on the cheap from enterprising travellers or diplomats. Yet, the scale and quality of the British Museum's collections owe much to the power and reach of the British military and imperial state. The harnessing of political, diplomatic, and military resources to archaeological work, the dovetailing of private and public efforts, and a strong element of international, especially Anglo-French, competition added up to a substantial programme of public patronage. This is easily ignored by approaches that only consider (continental European) ideal types of public patronage, such as Napoleon's Egyptian Commission on the Sciences and Arts. The article sketches the chronological and geographical unfolding of state-supported archaeological activities around the Mediterranean and the Near East, and considers the connections between archaeology and diplomacy, the different modes of collection building, and the origins of debates about preservation and spoliation.

This article makes the case that modern ideological republicanism has its roots, not in Athens or Rome, but in Jerusalem. It begins from the observation that republican political theory underwent a dramatic transformation in the middle of the seventeenth century. Before 1650, republicanism had always been a ‘relative’ position: those who argued in favour of republican government did so because they believed that republics were better than monarchies for various reasons. None of them had any interest in arguing that monarchy was an illegitimate constitutional form. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, we see for the first time the appearance of what we might call republican ‘exclusivism’, the claim that republics are the only legitimate regimes. This article argues that the ‘exclusivist’ turn was prompted by the Christian encounter with a tradition of rabbinic commentary on two chapters of the Hebrew Bible (Deut. 17 and 1 Sam. 8), according to which the Israelite request for a mortal king was regarded as an instance of the sin of idolatry. It further demonstrates that the English pamphleteers at the centre of this story – John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney – were themselves deeply conscious of the degree to which their views had been shaped by the writings of the ‘Talmudical commonwealthsmen’.

This article addresses the extent to which Protestant states in Europe and North America depicted the French Protestants who had found refuge in these states, as having contributed to the process of nation building and the formation of national identity. It is shown that the arrival of Huguenots was portrayed positively as the historians of these nations could contend that Huguenots had been absorbed readily into the host society because their virtues of frugality and industry corresponded admirably with the ethic of their hosts. The article demonstrates that, in no case, did this depiction correspond with reality. It shows that within those countries of refuge, Huguenots fostered a distinctive French Protestant identity that enabled them to remain aloof from the culture of their host society. In all cases Huguenots asserted themselves as a self-confident minority, convinced of the superiority of their language and culture who believed themselves to be privileged in this world as in the next. When national histories came to be composed, this dimension to the Huguenot minorities came to be expunged from historical memory as was also the fact that the Huguenots were but one of several minorities whose distinctiveness had contributed largely to the shaping of the state, culture, and society of the emerging nation-states.

The second reform act came at the close of a remarkable period of constitutional debate, in which seven different governments had committed themselves to reform. Yet historians have shown little interest in this debate, seeing it as largely irrelevant to the making of the second reform act. This article seeks to reconnect the discussions of the 1850s with the measure of 1867, and to explore some of the issues that shaped the course of legislation. It argues that the failure to achieve reform in the 1850s was the result not of hostility to reform in the abstract, but of an inability to agree on the type of reform that was desirable. Depending on who was enfranchised and where, different reform bills could produce quite different electorates, making consensus elusive. The article shows how the Liberal opposition to the 1866 bill was fuelled by concerns over the nature of Liberal politics after Palmerston, and concludes that the disagreement over the rating franchise concealed a wider disagreement on the whole nature of reform, exerting a powerful influence on the measures of both 1866 and 1867.

For French political commentators and polemicists of the Bourbon Restoration period (1814–30), England's history of revolution and of royalist restoration between 1640 and 1688 offered striking and suggestive similarities to the trajectory of France's own political experience since 1789. Elaborated not just in the historical writings of men like Villemain, Guizot, and Carrel, but in a host of political speeches and pamphlets and other forms of ephemeral literature, allusions to Stuart and Cromwellian history carried a potent charge in debates and polemics over France's own political prospects. Drawing on statements by politicians and writers as diverse as François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, and Benjamin Constant, this article explores the meanings that were read into the comparison or juxtaposition of French and English histories, the ways in which these meanings were argued and contested, and the political uses to which they were put, both by critics and by supporters of the Restoration regime. If references to the Stuarts, to Cromwell, or to 1688 were sometimes politically opportunistic, they also sometimes reflected an aspiration to comprehend France's political destiny by relating its present position to broader frameworks of historical understanding – a point which the later parts of the article seek to develop by scrutinizing the ways in which French and English histories are connected in specific writings by Augustin Thierry, Guizot, and Chateaubriand.

Historians of the debate over free trade and tariffs in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not taken adequate account of the impact of the protectionist United States. The article first examines how American protectionism influenced the cause of imperial preference. It then looks at how both sides in the fiscal debate used the American economic experience to bolster their cases. Finally, it is demonstrated that the economic success and liberal democratic character of America compelled free traders to attack the American example on a moral and political basis.

In the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon allowed English smugglers entry into the French ports of Dunkirk and Gravelines, encouraging them to run contraband back and forth across the Channel. Gravelines catered for up to 300 English smugglers, housed in a specially constructed compound known as the ‘city of smugglers’. Napoleon used the smugglers in the war against Britain. The smugglers arrived on the French coast with escaped French prisoners of war, gold guineas, and English newspapers; and returned to England laden with French textiles, brandy, and gin. Smuggling remains a neglected historical subject, and this episode in particular – the relationship between English smugglers and the Napoleonic state between 1810 and 1814 – has attracted little scholarly interest. Yet it provides a rich historical source, illuminating not only the history of Anglo-French Channel smuggling during the early nineteenth century, but offering insights into the economic, social, and maritime history of the Napoleonic Wars.

Studies of the Grand Tour conventionally focus upon the art and antiquities of Italy rather than the urban environment in which the tourists found themselves, and they generally stop short in the 1790s. This article examines the perceptions and representations of Florence amongst British visitors over the course of the long eighteenth century up to c. 1820 in order to establish continuity between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It considers why it was that British travellers appeared to be particularly attracted to Florence: initially they responded to congenial and pleasant surroundings, the availability of home comforts, and a sparkling social life. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Florence acquired new meanings for the British, who began to identify and admire a civilization which had been based upon mercantile wealth and liberty: the foundations for the Victorian celebration of Florence were laid. But the experience of Florence as a city had also changed: it was no longer simply the showcase of the Medici dukes. As a consequence the buildings, monuments, and paintings of the republican period, as well as the history which they embodied, came into focus for the first time.

This article addresses the historiographical neglect of tory women in the early Victorian period. The existence of a vibrant culture of female conservative letters, combined with the widespread participation of women in ultra-Protestant pressure-group politics, is suggestive of the neglected contribution women made to the revival of grass-roots toryism during these years. In particular, it is suggested that a consideration of the distinctive features of premillenarian Evangelicalism enables a more discriminating approach to the impact of Evangelicalism upon contemporary women. By focusing upon the career of the prominent premillenarian Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and her editorship of the Christian Lady's Magazine, it is argued that contemporary attitudes towards ‘female politicians’ were far more flexible, variable, and contingent than is frequently assumed. The associational activities with which many premillenarians were involved, combined with their attention to Old Testament models of publicly active women and the sense of urgency that distinguished their theology, frequently led its adherents to problematize and critique existing formulations of women's roles.

This article analyses more than thirty demonstrations by suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) connected with the Budget crisis of 1909, and challenges many of the established orthodoxies about suffragette militancy. Demonstrations did not represent spontaneous activity by the rank and file, but were carried out or at least led by WSPU employees or ‘professional’ militants, with several visible changes in tactics which indicate an organized campaign directed by the leadership. Damage to property, and the political violence which culminated in the terrorist tactics of 1912–14, did not begin as a response to wrongs done to the suffragettes, but because the leaders decided it was necessary. But these tactics were a counter-productive mistake which caused an adverse public reaction and justified the government in the introduction of forcible feeding. The WSPU was obliged to retreat in a humiliating reversal.

In an influential monograph, The greening of Dublin Castle (1991), Lawrence McBride argued that the Irish administration was in a rapid state of transformation between 1892 and 1922. Broadly speaking, he argued that the Protestant and unionist senior administrators were gradually replaced by Catholic and nationalist civil servants during this period. However, a significant body of evidence suggests that McBride may have overstated the changes taking place in the Irish civil service. Using a prosopographical study of the senior civil servants in Ireland in 1891 and 1911, this article suggests that there was significantly less ‘greening’ than McBride claimed. The British state appears to have regarded Irish-born Catholics as potentially disloyal, and to have implemented a subtle system of ethnic discrimination at the upper levels of the Irish civil service. It is argued that the existence of this glass ceiling provided young educated Catholic professionals with a powerful motive for participation in the Irish revolution (1916–23).

Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had some basis in historical events. This article seeks to qualify some of the basic premises of Eric Hobsbawm's concept of social banditry by examining the context and process by which popular and official knowledge of banditry emerged. This analysis is based on a case-study of the thugs of early nineteenth-century colonial India. Though seldom described as such, thuggee is one of the best-documented instances of banditry historically speaking. This makes the findings and theoretical considerations made in connection with thuggee pertinent to banditry worldwide and during various periods. By focusing on issues of methodology it is hoped that a critical discussion of Hobsbawm's model, rather than just being a polemic deconstruction, may suggest a new approach to the study of banditry more generally.