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.

This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

This article analyzes the activism of Eastside Community Heritage in London's Docklands, circa 1997 to 2003, following its establishment by community activists concerned by the British National Party's electoral success in the postindustrial area. Eastside attributed local racism to deindustrialization and unaccountable, exclusionary redevelopment. Aiming to recenter solidarity against economic injustice—thereby countering racism—and to challenge redevelopers’ neglect, the group published booklets celebrating the area's working-class past. But the project's archived oral histories show that residents remembered an area forged by different ideals. Their nostalgia was for participation in empire through the docks as much as for an idealized working-class community. Residents rarely distinguished between the interconnected losses of imperial purpose and social cohesion. I frame these tensions as a heritage encounters, making three key arguments. First, memories of youth in the imperial metropole informed residents’ perceptions of the late twentieth-century nation, despite recent scholarly efforts to separate them temporally and conceptually. Second, contrary to their predominance within histories of postwar class identity, deindustrialization and urban change were popularly understood within a larger, postimperial narrative of local and national decline. Finally, a close reading of this project offers a vivid case study into the fragility of British multiculturalism in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Family Planning Association emerged in Britain as one of the largest providers of infertility diagnosis for men and women. In the early years of the century, women were coming to birth control centers seeking cures for their childlessness, well before those centers began officially offering infertility investigation and treatment. What changed by mid-century was the emergence of a determination not only to welcome infertility patients at birth control clinics but to establish the clinics as centers for infertility research and care. Beginning in the late 1930s, eugenicists concerned with the impact of population decline on the social acceptability of birth control formed an alliance with feminist medical professionals determined both to empower women in involuntarily childless marriages to understand and address the causes of their infertility and to shift the paradigm of infertility treatment away from its over-focus on the female body. This political marriage of convenience gave birth to a large-scale movement to diagnose both male and female infertility through the auspices of the Family Planning Association. The organization's infertility program, in turn, spurred the development of infertility as a field of medical research in postwar Britain and encouraged the expansion of National Health Service provision of infertility care.

In summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored with researcher Horace Cayton. What attracted him to Tiger Bay for his next project was a scandal that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic around Britain's growing population of what were referred to as brown babies. These children were the product of sexual encounters that sometimes took place between local white women and some of the 200,000 African American GIs who were at different points stationed across the United Kingdom during the later part of the Second World War. Using the extensive field notes Drake kept during his sojourn in Cardiff, this article reconstructs the nature and feel of a neighborhood where, by the 1940s, half of all residents were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Drake's work serves as a window onto the nature of racism and ideas about race in late-imperial Britain, alongside the parallel presence of metropolitan community life in Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multicultural communities.

Nurses and their labor are essential to the provision of health care. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the flagship institution of postwar British welfare, the National Health Service. When it launched in 1948, a shortage of thirty-five thousand nurses endangered its future. This article examines the National Health Service's nursing shortage and its most enduring solution: the recruitment of Caribbean and African nursing staff for struggling British hospitals. It follows the manner in which British civil servants, hospital administrators, and nursing leaders came to recruit nurses from the colonies and the deep ambivalence that marked their project. What began as a reformulated colonial development project gave rise to a sprawling and unregulated market for nursing labor that powered the National Health Service for decades. The so-called dark stranger, deemed unworthy of membership in the national community, in fact carried out its most intimate work—caring for the bodies of sick white citizens.

This is the revised transcript of a roundtable on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, presented at the North American Conference on British Studies in Chicago in November 2022. It includes an account of the many meanings of Queen Elizabeth II for her subjects and discussion of why so many at home and in the Commonwealth were devoted to her. The panel also touches on the significance for the monarchy of Elizabeth's passing, the meaning of queenship, and the importance of Elizabeth's gender for British women. An account of the queen and the Commonwealth focuses particularly on imperial optics and the queen's desire to be seen as the ruler of the Commonwealth. The panel concludes with the personalized account of a transnational scholar regarding the degree to which the media manufactured the appearance of grief over the queen's passing.

In December 1905 R.B. Haldane, later Viscount Haldane of Cloan, became Secretary of State for War. Among his fellow politicians Haldane, at this time, was looked on as an intriguer who combined habitual meddling in high places with a curious and remarkable interest in German philosophy. The Prime Minister of the day, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had good reason to dislike Haldane, nicknamed him “Schopenhauer.” Both men knew that the War Office had ruined the reputations of several of Haldane's predecessors. “We shall now see,” remarked Campbell-Bannerman, in a phrase that later became famous, “how Schopenhauer gets on in the Kailyard.” Despite this unpromising start Haldane's military reforms were so successful that they established his reputation in history as one of the great servants of the state in the pre-1914 era. His work and accomplishments in the field of military aviation, however, have been criticized very severely. In fact, the matter is so complicated that one aviation authority has written of the record in this area that “Haldane's actions behind the scenes may never be known with certainty.”

Even some of his closest subordinates in the field of military aeronautics were very critical of Haldane's attitude and outlook. In February 1911 a major step was taken when, by an Army Order, a unit known as the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers was created. This Battalion was entrusted with the duty of training a “body of expert airmen.” The Battalion's first commander was Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, an officer who knew little about airplanes, but was instead a balloon expert with experience in the South African and Russo-Japanese wars.

A fresh interpretation of King William III's employment of the royal veto provides new insights into the political and constitutional issues of his reign. The veto, or the crown's negative voice as it was called by contemporaries, is a particularly fruitful subject for study in charting the course of politics in seventeenth century England. The employment of the veto offers an accurate barometer for measuring political and constitutional change. It addresses the key issue of sovereignty—who makes law? King or Parliament? It is surprising, therefore, that historians have neglected to examine the implications of William's employment of the veto. As a result, their conclusions about the veto are not supported by a full analysis of the available evidence. What they have overlooked is that a close examination of the bills the king rejected, and of contemporary views of the royal prerogative, demonstrates that underneath the turmoil of Williamite politics lay a stable foundation built on the settlement achieved at the Revolution of 1688/9.

During his brief rule William III rejected a significant number of bills. Between 1692 and 1696 he vetoed five public bills: the Judges, Royal Mines, Triennial, Place, and MP Qualifications Bills. Previous Tudor and Stuart monarchs, with the exception of Queen Elizabeth I, only infrequently invoked the crown's right to refuse legislation. Queen Anne, who followed William to the throne, vetoed only one bill. She was the last monarch to employ this prerogative, although it remains theoretically a legitimate royal power.

In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of the Gesta Stephani accused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from his Policraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

The elaborate pageantry and festivities of grand public processions have proven to be of great interest to historians writing on late medieval and early modern Europe. The more limited ceremonies and protocol at court have attracted somewhat less attention, although on occasion they have been adopted as evidence of a monarch's personal feelings about his attendants and family members. A study of royal protocol and the social and political framework in which rulers fulfilled their roles as sovereigns is timely, for it will surely lead to a new and fuller understanding of how monarchs's public roles, such as those of the Tudors, related to their private motivations.

Greeting ceremonies, which were one aspect of the “law of hospitality,” require special attention, because they offer insights into the interactions of people of varying status who were of fundamental importance to the hierarchical communities of Europe. As Esther Goody points out, “Greeting becomes a mode of entering upon or manipulating a relationship in order to achieve a specific result.” How monarchs privately greeted their brides, the topic of this essay, not only offers insights into the complexity of the relationship of individuals who were wed by proxy before they had become acquainted, but also offers evidence of how the greeting ritual performed by monarchs differed from that enacted by their royal and noble relatives.