On 28 July 1540 Thomas Cromwell went to execution, and two days later Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome, leading protestant preachers and the minister's protégés, were burned at the stake.1 These reformers were sacrificed to implicate Cromwell in apostasy, but their deaths were more than judicial murder; they died for making a reality of the conservatives’ old fears that religious radicalism would engender social disorder. With the coming of the Reformation issues of faith for the first time deeply divided the people, and the rift went beyond the schism between orthodox and reformed alone. Many who witnessed the confusion thought that ‘the devyll reyneth over us nowe’ and believed that ‘alle thys devysyon comyth through that ffalse knave that heretyke Doctor Barnys and such other heretiks as he ys’.2 The faction struggles in court and council which dominated the last years of Henry VIII's reign produced the shifting policies of reaction or toleration towards reform, but while political intrigue determined the incidence of persecution and decided the victims the events of 1540 were to reveal that Protestantism was spreading independently, thwarting the restoration of Catholic orthodoxy, whatever the policy of government. The religious history of London was inextricably linked with the feuds of contending factions at court in the confused months of the spring and summer of 1540, not least because many of the protagonists and persecuted were Londoners themselves. The tensions witnessed in the capital between orthodox and reformed, and popular disturbance there, underlay all the machinations in high politics and influenced the outcome.

François due de Guise, commander of the French catholic forces, was assaulted by Poltrot de Mérey (or Méré) before Orléans on 18 February 1563. He succumbed six days later, on 24 February, to the attentions of his surgeons, whose lethal ministrations are horribly retailed by the Spanish ambassador, Chantonnay. On that fatal day, Guise had gone to inspect his camp in the suburb called Portereau from which his forces were sapping and mining the stronghold of Orléans, occupied for the past year by the protestant confederates of the prince de Condé. The capture of this city, then considered imminent, would have been the fourth military episode of the first French civil war. But, instead of the expected collapse of Orléans and the continuation of war, France was rocked by the unexpected death of Guise which effectively interrupted hostilities.

The early years of Thomas Hobbes are almost entirely sunk in obscurity. Biographers from George Croom Robertson (1886) to Miriam Reik (1977) have added little, for the period before 1628, to the scant information provided by Aubrey and the Latin Vitae. If to this we add the handful of details which have been gleaned by modern scholarship, the picture remains a bare one, and one that can be briefly summarized.

A revisionist explanation of the political events of the Glorious Revolution has crept into recent literature virtually unscathed. Briefly summarized, the argument contends that it is difficult to discover evidence of resistance to the Crown in the debates of either the House of Lords or the Convention parliament during 1689. According to J. P. Kenyon, a major advocate of this new interpretation, John Locke's Second treatise of government misled historians and even some contemporaries into believing that parliament deposed James II for breaking the original contract between sovereign and people. Actually, during the long debates in and between both houses ‘it was clear that the word “abdicated”, or the Lords’ preferred choice, “deserted” both implied a voluntary act, if not a rational choice, on James's part’. The Lords especially, Kenyon argues, were careful to dissociate themselves from contract theory. Whig ‘revolution principles’, then, built upon the ‘haste and confusion of the occasion’ were rooted in a misunderstanding of actual events, a mis-understanding fostered by the writings of Locke and Algernon Sydney and enshrined as doctrine by whig politicians and historians.

The first object of this article is to present some findings from an analysis of criminal activity in an early modern society, as measured primarily through various records of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize, and General Jail Delivery (the Assizes) from its creation in 1692 to the eve of the American Revolution. Since the amount of serious criminal behaviour revealed by this evidence seems small, the article will then seek to identify the most important components of the system of social control over criminality evidently at work in provincial Massachusetts. These include a conscious effort to maintain a homogeneous population, a pattern of collective settlement in townships, an effective system of prosecuting serious breaches of the criminal law, the commitment of elite groups in town, church, county, and province to law and order, and the role of the family in teaching and assuring appropriate behaviour.

Most historians of modern France would agree that the quarrel between clericals and anticlericals was one of the most significant political issues in French politics between 1870 and 1914, especially in the period before the passing of the law which separated Church and State in 1905. The charges brought against the Catholic Church by the anticlericals were many, but until recently few students of nineteenth-century France have commented on the fact that one of their most serious allegations was that the Church oppressed women. Perhaps the most celebrated formulation of this theory came from the pen of the historian Michelet who, in a virulent polemic entitled Priests, women and the family, bitterly attacked the powers which priests were reputed to exercise over the female mind through the institution of the confessional, to the great detriment of marital life and family unity.

Systematic military policy-making towards internal security in Great Britain dates from the period immediately following the First World War. It was stimulated above all by widespread fears of possible revolution, sharpened by a belief in the collective incapacity of police forces to deal with civil disorder. Many, although by no means all, politicians and senior officials felt that the labour militancy of the 1920s was simply the harbinger of ‘red’ revolt, and preparations were made accordingly. Following the trade unions’ defeat in the general strike of 1926 fears of revolution subsided, although the War Office continued to revise the plans it had made in the early 1920s. Throughout the entire inter-war period, nevertheless, the general staff displayed an extreme reluctance to commit the army to internal security duties. Almost without exception, it seems, military men shared Lord Ironside’s opinion that ‘for a soldier there is no more distasteful duty than that of aiding the Civil Power’.

President Truman celebrated the birth of the central intelligence agency with a private lunch at the White House on 24 January 1946. He invited the first director of central intelligence, Admiral Sidney Souers, and the president's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy. Truman appeared with wooden daggers and black hats and coats which he presented to his guests.