In late 1599 the population of York was able to witness a fairly extraordinary sight. In York Castle, the Catholic prisoners of conscience, as they saw themselves (though others regarded them as dangerous political dissidents), were being compelled to listen, once a week, to a Protestant sermon. These sermons were preached at them by a slate of godly ministers. This exercise was something the prisoners actively contested by murmuring, blocking their ears, shouting, and attempting to rush out of the hall. The prisoners' antics provoked the authorities into increasingly coercive measures to make them hear the Word of God. This outwardly rather ridiculous and unseemly charade went on, week after week, for nearly a year, at which point the whole business was abandoned by the lord president, Lord Burghley, as a waste of time. However, by decoding the extant manuscript narrative that we have of the sermon series and by looking at who was involved in this business and why, and what political messages were being sent during the course of it, we can say something about the popular politics of late Elizabethan England. In particular, we can comment on the strategies adopted by those who were anticipating the moment, surely not far off, when Tudor power would be extinguished and Elizabeth's crown would pass to her successor.

Throughout the reign of Elizabeth I, a steady stream of tracts appeared in English print to vindicate the succession of the most prominent contenders, Mary and James Stuart of Scotland. This article offers a comprehensive account of the polemical battle between the supporters and opponents of the Stuarts, and further identifies various theories of English kingship, most notably the theory of corporate kingship, developed by the Stuart polemicists to defend the Scottish succession. James's accession to the English throne in March 1603 marked the protracted end of the debate over the succession. The article concludes by suggesting that, while powerfully renouncing the opposition to his succession, over the course of his attempt to unify his two kingdoms, James and his supporters ultimately departed from the polemic of corporate kingship, for a more assertive language of kingship by natural and divine law.

The reforms in the rites and ceremonies of the Order of the Garter that Charles I introduced during the 1620s and 1630s have traditionally been seen by historians as enhancing its high church, religious associations and downplaying its military traditions. This study, however, argues that the celebration of courage, martial achievement, and noble companionship remained central themes within the order during this period and that this tells us a good deal about how Charles understood his relationship with his nobles, and the honorific and chivalric values that lay at the heart of his kingship.

The completion of the House of Commons, 1604–1629, a sprawling research project involving over a dozen scholars who have toiled in the archival vineyards for the past quarter century, is a development of fundamental importance for the study of early Stuart history. This essay highlights some of its many findings and suggests some directions for further research, deploying the riches in these six volumes.

Using a unique source on offenders' place of birth, in combination with trial reports and newspapers, this article offers the first systematic analysis of how the Irish were treated by the English criminal justice system when they came as witnesses, prosecutors and accused. Although the Irish were massively over-represented amongst the accused, in the vast majority of Old Bailey cases – i.e. those involving property crime – they were no more likely to be convicted than other groups and overall the sentences they received were slightly less severe. However, doubts about their evidence and their reputation for violence meant that they were less successful as prosecutors and were more heavily punished when they were accused of violent offences. Thus the Irish were on the receiving end of both justice and prejudice and their treatment was intimately linked to contemporary English discourses about the Irish.

British officials' largely negative impression of the United States caused by America's intransigence in allowing renegotiation of Britain's First World War debts must be viewed against a backdrop of a longstanding debtor-creditor relationship between the two nations. Since the mid-nineteenth century, British creditors, largely through the efforts of the London-based Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, vigorously yet unsuccessfully attempted to collect large debts on repudiated American state bonds. This article provides greater understanding of this history and shows that the nineteenth-century debt controversy might well have been avoided to the economic benefit of the British and particularly the American South.

This article rethinks the concept of the “British World” by paying close attention to the voices of those who attended the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference. They identified not one, but three different kinds of British world space. Mapped, respectively, by ideas and emotions, by networks and exchange, and by the specific sites of empire, this article suggests that, in the light of criticisms the British World concept has faced, and in the context of recent scholarship on the social and material production of space, this tripartite approach might offer a useful framework for British and imperial historians interested in the history of the global.

The apparent lack of representations of the Titanic disaster in Britain between the start of the First World War and the end of the 1950s was due, not to a lack of interest, but to active resistance to such representations. Shipping interests, the press, government, and the public all opposed portrayals of the catastrophe, but their opposition depended much on the medium by which the sinking was to be represented, on the broader international context, and on the nature and status of individual memories of the events of 1912. Questions of fact, fiction, national prestige, and the ethics of representation dominated the first half century of the Titanic's cultural history in the United Kingdom.