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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Church of Ireland has been regarded as almost devoid of a high church element and as unreservedly hostile to Tractarian claims. This article questions these assumptions. It considers the evidence for an influential, if minority, high church tradition within the Church of Ireland and shows how far its adherents during the 1830s and early 1840s looked to English Tractarians for support. The very raison d'être of the Irish church was questioned under the reforming and erastian pressures unleashed by a whig ministry in the early 1830s. Tractarian rhetoric stressing apostolical descent and continuity was echoed by Irish high churchmen in their concern to demonstrate that they belonged to a church that was not a creature of the state and was no mere Protestant sect; Irish high churchmen held many theological and spiritual ideals in common with the early Tractarians, but guarded their independence. Irish high churchmen and English Tractarians nevertheless became estranged: the Protestant credentials of Irish high churchmen were suspect as a result of the low church and Evangelical backlash against ‘Puseyism’; Irish high church attempts to put church principles into practice, notably over the foundation of St Columba's as an establishment to educate Roman Catholic converts in high church teaching, were cold-shouldered by English Tractarians. The Irish high church tradition survived but was weakened by Roman Catholic undermining of its assumption of apostolical continuity as well as by ultra-Protestant critiques. Disestablishment in 1869 paved the way not for a high church ‘restoration’ on the Caroline model, as Irish high churchmen wished and as early Tractarian rhetoric assumed, but for the completion of an Evangelical ascendancy rooted in the Irish Articles of 1615 and the church of James Ussher.

Queen Victoria, her court, the embassy in Paris, the prime minister, and the press, led by The Times, were early and impassioned sympathizers with Alfred Dreyfus and bitter critics of his persecutors. This article traces the development of their views and the information available to them, analyses the principal themes as they saw them, and attempts to explain how and why they formed their opinions. It considers why the Dreyfusard position was so congenial to them. It argues that their own principles and prejudices – conservative, patriotic, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant – were confirmed by a critique of French political culture, seen as corrupted by a combined heritage of absolutism, revolution, Catholicism, and demagoguery. This appears to be confirmed by contrast with the few dissenting voices in Britain, on one hand Catholic and Irish, on the other, anti-Semitic socialist, who showed little sympathy with the Dreyfusards, and even less with the views of their British supporters.

The passage of the 1926 Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act prohibited the detailed reporting of divorce cases in newspapers. The voluminous press coverage of divorce cases commanded a large readership, but this very popularity had provoked anxiety about how such stories affected public morality. An overview of the range of opinion about this issue from the passage of the 1857 Divorce Act until the First World War will provide a context for an account of the steps by which the law underwent revision during the 1920s. The analysis will show both how the meaning of the public ridicule of sexual transgression changed over time and the ways in which the logically necessary but inherently unstable relationship between the erotic and public decency provided an impetus for such changes in meaning. The 1926 legislation represented one effort on the part of the state to control and to regulate that relationship. It did so, not so much to protect the individual's privacy from public scrutiny and so extend the scope of the individual's freedom of personal conduct, but in order to preserve the public decorum crucial for the maintenance of hierarchies of class, gender, and age.

The object of this article is to reassess received views about the significance of the 1934 rally at Olympia for the fortunes of the British Union of Fascists. It begins by analysing the debate in the House of Commons which is traditionally seen as reflecting a reaction against BUF methods, and shows the extent to which it actually revealed sympathy amongst National Government members. Then follows a discussion of reactions in the press. The article suggests that far from being purely negative, the effect of Olympia in some parts of the press was to attract more attention, and not necessarily of a hostile nature. Finally it examines the reasons for hesitation on the part of the government in using the law and the police to curtail BUF methods in the aftermath of Olympia. It shows how far Mosley continued to conduct large indoor meetings, partly because he was able to make use of the existing law. The article concludes that the British defence of free speech after 1934 was less firm than is usually supposed and that resistance to fascism by the authorities was of marginal significance.

This article addresses one aspect of the legal proceedings known collectively as the ‘Nuremberg trials’: British policy towards, and trials of, Nazi war criminals in the British zone of occupied Germany. The killing of fifty allied airmen after their escape from Stalag Luft III illustrates how atrocities against British POWs affected British war crimes policy. The article examines one part of that policy: the efforts to expedite trials and the decision to end them. It examines the ambivalence that characterized British attitudes towards war crimes trials, and also discusses British hopes for an expeditious trial programme and political and legal objections to delays in prosecutions. Finally, it shows that concerns about the Stalag Luft III case led to extensions in the trial programme, but that eventually the programme was subordinated to Britain's broader policy of reintegrating Germany into the western fold.

The soldier, publisher, and pamphleteer John Streater is a comparatively neglected political writer of the 1650s, who represents the turning of the dispersed Levellers to classical republicanism. In the 1650s he is seen as a brave and uncompromising voice of opposition. In the autumn of 1653 he was prosecuted by Cromwell for publishing a work entitled The grand politick informer. This article rediscovers this publication, identifies it as Streater's first newsbook, and explores its implications for Streater's career and canon. In 1654 Streater wrote two series of newsbooks which criticized the Protectorate in an oblique fashion. The grand politick informer, a work of unbridled ferocity, shows that Streater learned to tame his voice after his 1653 prosecution and imprisonment, and to couch his antagonism to the government in the language of classical allusion.

There is one interesting piece of testimony relating to the death of Bob Smillie that Tom Buchanan does not discuss in his article on this sad affair (‘The death of Bob Smillie, the Spanish Civil War, and the eclipse of the Independent Labour party’ Historical Journal, 40 (June 1997)). The Orwell Archive at University College, London, contains a statement dated 30 January 1930 that Georges Kopp sent to Fenner Brockway and John McNair of the ILP with a copy to his friend and comrade, George Orwell. In this document, Kopp makes clear his belief that Bob Smillie was kicked to death by his Communist interrogators in an effort to get him to sign statements prejudicial to the POUM and the ILP. As Buchanan points out, Kopp was Smillie's unit commander and was himself arrested during the repression of the POUM and only released in December 1938. His account of events deserves consideration.

Is the development of a new British history of the early modern period a boon or a bane for those interested in the history of Scotland (or, for that matter, Ireland, Wales, even England)? Such a false antithesis we might normally confine to our examination papers; but it is difficult to avoid considering it after reading the five books under review here. Professor Burns has written a superb account of Scottish political thought in the long sixteenth century and Dr Coffey an equally successful exploration of the mind of the leading ideologist of the Covenanters. The collection edited by Dr Mason, which connects with the Burns study at several points, is explicitly a view of Scottish political thought focused on the Union of 1603, while that edited by Dr Robertson drops the particular emphasis on Scottish thought in its exploration of the intellectual context to the Union of 1707. Professor Speck presents us with a slightly different problem: a volume in a series on the history of early modern England that takes as the central theme of English politics in the decade 1700–10 the birth of Britain. Each of these books is rewarding, at the very least ; together their effect may be disquieting.

On 16 October 1997 at a forum at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University in Houston, Mikhail Gorbachev received the Enron Prize for Public Service. Former secretary of state James Baker credited Gorbachev for ‘setting the USSR on the irreversible path to freedom’. Because of Gorbachev's ‘tremendous political courage’, Baker claimed, millions of people enjoyed freer, more prosperous lives. But millions of Russians do not approve of what Gorbachev did, would deny him the Enron and Nobel Prizes, and mark him a villain because he caused the unravelling of the USSR and Warsaw Pact and because their lives are less prosperous in today's Russia.

To understand why a policy (like Gorbachev's glasnost) succeeded or failed, one has to look at its social impact. Rarely are policies carried out exactly as the policymaker envisioned. Although the five titles reviewed in this article vary in their focus and geographical scope, most tend to emphasize Soviet and Russian policy implementation, as opposed to the initial decision-making process.

For the interdisciplinarian, Anglo-Indian historiography can be frustrating. In working on Paul Scott's Raj quartet (four profoundly historical novels about Anglo-India, 1942–7, better known as TV's The jewel in the crown) I have faced such questions as: whether it is reasonable to believe that in 1947 a senior British police officer who owned Pathan clothes and brown make-up used them professionally, passing as an Indian to gather intelligence; what credence the officer's probable homosexuality gives an alternative explanation, that cultural transvestism and Indian guise served private sexual rather than public professional ends; and whether the resonances with Thuggee in the costumed and made-up officer's murder by strangulation (in a Muslim-ruled, Hindu-majority, not-yet-acceded princely state in late July 1947) are of any historical merit. But the archetypes in which writers of fiction can combine scope and particularity are unavailable to the historian, too often confined to the dense and satisfying footnotery of the local study claimed as typical, or happily wandering the open generalizations of the all-India history claimed as exemplary; and for the critic wishing to test the historical probity of a fiction the result is Hobson's choice between easily-found but tangential treatments, and trawling memoirs for the reticent implications of conventional Anglo-Indian understatement.