Traditional historiographies of the Reformation, seeing it as a unified, directed transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, seem increasingly untenable. This article looks in detail at three individuals from the British Reformation whose careers did not fit this pattern: a Scotsman, John Eldar, and two Englishmen, John Proctor and John Redman. Enthusiasts for Henry VIII's Reformation, they found themselves alarmed, but disempowered and compromised, in the face of Edward VI's more radical religious changes. Redman died in 1551, but Proctor and Eldar both celebrated Mary I's Catholic restoration, while not entirely forgetting their Henrician sympathies. The article argues that these men represent a distinctive religious strand in Reformation Britain. Such ‘latter-day Henricians’ valued Henry VIII's distinctive Reformation: anti-papal, anti-heretical, sacramental, Erasmian, and Biblicist. The vicissitudes of religious politics in both England and Scotland in the 1540s and 1550s left no space for such beliefs, although the article suggests that traces of Henricianism can be seen in Elizabeth I herself. It also argues that the impotence of the latter-day Henricians under Edward VI is a symptom of the paralysing weakness of all English religious conservatives in the reign, a predicament from which they were rescued only by Mary's restoration.

This article explores the activities of Nicolas Chesneau, a Parisian printer active between the beginning of the French Wars of Religion and the League. While printing in the Protestant sphere has received a great deal of historiographical attention, the influence of Catholic printing on opinion forming during the French Wars of Religion remains comparatively misunderstood. Nicolas Chesneau was a militant Catholic printer whose activity responded to commercial and political pressures but also reflects a personal commitment to Catholicism. Evidence drawn from Chesneau's epistles and bibliography reveals personal relationships with authors, other printers, and patrons. Chesneau's production answered growing demand for news and religious instruction for the laity, a phenomenon that is only beginning to be understood. Analysis of his output reveals the influence of the cardinal de Lorraine who was determined to use the vernacular book to pursue his agenda of reform, often in the face of institutional opposition from the crown, the parlement, and the University of Paris. The end of Nicolas Chesneau's career is marked by a shift towards expensive in-folio books that proved to be less profitable than the short in-octavo works that distinguishes his production during the first decade of the French Wars of Religion.

This article seeks to explain some political and theoretical layers of Robert Persons's Conference about the next succession (1595). By examining a Latin manuscript version of the text which appeared in Rome in 1596 and by analysing the context in which this Latin version was composed and the aims which it was intended to fulfil, this article elucidates the political and religious implications of Persons's text, not only in the context of English or British debates over the succession to Elizabeth, but also in a European-wide scenario. Such an approach, I argue, can allow historians of early modern England to gain a deeper and wider understanding of English Catholicism and of its relevance in European political and religious history.

This article investigates propaganda deployed in support of the Covenanting revolution in Scotland during the Bishops' Wars (1638–40). It attempts to broaden the category of ‘British’ history by focusing on discourse instead of high politics, and analyses printed tracts – complemented by select manuscript sources – to reconstruct the Covenanters' theoretical approach to creating an English public to support their cause. The novelty of the ‘explosion’ of print in England in the 1640s is now widely acknowledged, and numerous books and articles have argued about whether or not this constituted a public sphere. This article, however, presupposes a ‘space’ for public debate and focuses instead on the conceptual framework driving Covenanter appeals. It concludes that the Covenanters believed that rational debate in a public forum would expose truth, which would naturally persuade the English people to support their cause and, in turn, pressure the king into making the desired concessions. But this was not how the actual English public functioned: there was an important disparity between the theory of godly rational debate and the reality of a rather ‘wild’, competing, and self-interested plurality of publics.

This article reassesses relations between the free-trade and anti-slavery movements in the mid-nineteenth century. It places well-known controversies over the removal of preferential import duties on free-grown sugar into the context of a broader and more complex relationship, in which the Anti-Corn Law League borrowed many of the tactics pioneered by the abolitionists, while also attempting to assume anti-slavery's mantle of moral reform. In particular, the article situates the campaigns in a transatlantic context complicated by the domestic agendas of American anti-slavery groups and southern cotton growers, both of whom tried to take advantage of the British free-trade movement for their own ends. Finally, it is argued that the apparent success of the League in forcing the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 not only contributed to the decline of anti-slavery as an effective extra-parliamentary movement, but also ensured that other moral reform campaigns such as the peace movement were forced to adopt the language and tactics of free-trade liberalism to survive, generating a lasting legacy that came to fruition with the emergence of the Gladstonian Liberal Party.

This article uses a case-study of agriculture to explore the range of anxieties and contradictions surrounding women's work in the interwar period. National statistics are shown to be inconsistent and questionable, raising questions for historians reliant on official data, but they point to regional variation as the continuous defining feature of female labour force participation. Looking beyond the quantitative data a distinction emerges between traditional work on the land and processes. The article shows that women workers in agriculture provoked vigorous debate among a range of interest groups about the scale, nature, and suitability of this work. These groups, such as the National Federation of Women's Institutes, the Women's Farm and Garden Association, and the National Union of Agricultural Workers represented a range of social classes and outlooks, and had diverse agendas underpinning their interest. Consequently women's agricultural labour is exposed as a site of class and gender conflict, connecting to wider economic and cultural tensions surrounding the place of women in interwar society.

The 1937 Peel Commission proposal for the partition of British mandatory Palestine has generally been framed as the precursor to the United Nations partition plan of 1947. This article demonstrates the importance of tracing the roots of the 1937 Peel Commission plan back to conversations taking place in the Colonial Office and government of Palestine as early as 1929. A close analysis of dialogues over territorial division and of preliminary partition plans, particularly those drawn up by L. G. Archer Cust and D. G. Harris, leads to the conclusion that Britain's focus on the ideal of representative government played a primary role in the development of partition proposals. This article argues that inter-ethnic violence played a much smaller role in the development of partition proposals than has previously been thought. Instead, partition was proposed as a solution to the political implications of non-representative government in Palestine, a topic constantly in the spotlight thanks to the League of Nations.

This article will analyse the psychology and reasoning in the Anglo-German naval agreement and it will hence ask the following questions. First, how did preceding naval agreements influence the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement. Secondly, what were the reasons for Germany to conclude it? Thirdly, what were the reasons for Britain to conclude it? Fourthly, how does it fit into the larger strategy of arms limitations? And, finally, what part did the Anglo-German naval agreement play in the overall strategy of Germany and Britain in the interwar years? In order to come to a conclusion about the reasons behind the agreement it is the thesis of this article that it is essential to include later changes and additions to the agreement. This part has been neglected in previous analyses. Particularly the reasons behind the termination shed light upon the motives for initially concluding the Anglo-German naval agreement. For the British side this article will argue that the Anglo-German naval agreements fit into this general policy line of trying to limit naval armament through international agreements and that they actually fitted into the overall British policy of bringing Germany back into the circle of European powers as an equal partner. For Hitler's Germany, it will be shown that the Anglo-German naval agreement was the abortive step toward an eternal alliance between the two Arian races.

The Spanish empire's vertiginous collapse in the first decades of the nineteenth century has long been a source of historiographical disputes. Historians seeking to explain the demise of Spain's dominion in the Americas and the emergence of independent nation-states have identified certain factors as decisive. Among these are: the coalescence of an anti-colonial, national consciousness among creoles; peninsular misrule and economic mismanagement; and the seismic effects of geopolitical upheaval, particularly the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. This historiographical review recapitulates established explanations, introduces a new wave of scholarship on the subject, and identifies topics that may be crucial for future research.

The most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence; those that do not force taxonomies; histories that resist any simple teleological account of a shift from ‘homosexuality’ as sexual excess to the homosexual as a species. This review examines attempts to write such histories – what has recently been termed the ‘new British queer history’. I will focus on some strands of male and female same-sex desires and their expression in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: male and female same-sex friendships, effeminacy in men and masculinity in women; and representations of lesbianism. This review discusses these histories of desires that resist present-day sexual assumptions.