From its origins in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean to its transformation into smoke in a Jacobean chamber, tobacco entered drastically new contexts of use as it travelled from Indigenous America to the social spaces of early seventeenth-century London. This article draws on comparative anthropology and archaeology to explore how early colonization, particularly in Jamestown, influenced the development of smoking among the English political elite. This offers a case study into the ways in which Indigenous commodities and knowledge were integrated into English ritual practices of their own; it also reveals the deliberate choices made by the English to set themselves apart from those they sought to colonize. Placing the material practices and wit poetry of gentlemen within the geopolitics of colonialism raises attention to the acts of erasure or dispossession that accompanied the incorporation of tobacco into urban sociability. Here, the practices of Indigenous peoples were modified and altered, and the pleasures of plantation were expressed as an intoxication as potent as the plant itself.

A series of recent books all attest to a revival of interest in the theory and practice of parliamentary representation in the modern era as a scholarly discipline. This review surveys eight different aspects of that history since the early nineteenth century: the spatial dimension of the Palace of Westminster; the comparative framework offered by the history of parliaments in Europe; ideas of parliamentary representation; the history of parliamentary procedure; women in parliament; the House of Lords; the history of corruption; and the Brexit crisis. Insights and perspectives are drawn from recent historical research as well as from political science and intellectual history. The review concludes by observing that the history of parliamentary representation in the modern era is in good shape. Some older interpretive paradigms still lurk, especially an obsession with ‘democratization’. However, more is now known about individual MPs and constituencies than ever before. The digitization of the records of parliament is expediting the kind of longitudinal analysis which was impossible back in the 1960s and 1970s. And the intellectual history and public policy literature around the idea of representation is enjoying a renaissance.

Counter-revolution: the second Civil War and its origins, 1646–48. By Robert Ashton. London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xxi+521. £35.

Sir Matthew Hale 1609–76. By Alan Cromartie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. x+264. £40.

The old service: royalist regimental colonels and the English Civil War, 1642–46. By P. R. Newman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. ix+324. £40.

Constitutional royalism and the search for settlement, c. 1640–1649. By David L. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi+371. £35.

Loyalty and locality: popular allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War. By Mark Stoyle. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi+330. £30.

Although Maximilien de Béthune, duke of Sully (1559–1641), held many high offices under Henry IV (superintendent of finances, grand voyer, grand master of artillery, among others), he never held the realm's highest military post, constable of France. Sully once had the chance to acquire the position, he tells us in his memoirs, the famous Économies royales, but turned it down. The occasion came when Henry IV offered Sully succession to the office held by the aged duke of Montmorency if Sully and his son would convert to Catholicism (Sully's son Maximilien II was to receive Henry's illegitimate daughter Mlle de Vendôme in marriage). Sully thanked the king but claimed he already held sufficient offices and declined to convert. When pressed further, the duke agreed to consider the offer for a month, at the end of which time he informed the king that his Calvinist convictions forbade a conversion’. Henry ‘showed great regret that you remained so firm in that resolution’, Sully's secretaries wrote, ‘and told you that he saw that you no longer loved him, and that since you were more attached to the Huguenots than to him, he would speak to you no more of it…’ This, Sully wished posterity to believe, was all there was to the episode. Since historians of the duke have credited his version of the affair, his wish prevailed. A close scrutiny of the episode and its aftermath reveals, however, that Sully's account concealed far more than it revealed. Henry's offer was far more than just a great ‘temptation.’ What really happened was that Sully tried to secure the ‘great elevation’ without converting. Henry grew angry when Sully refused to yield to his will and briefly threatened him with disgrace. In the end the king acclaimed his minister's firmness of will and forgot his pique. Sully did not, however, and decided that even if his master refused to reward him sufficiently for his contributions to Henry and France, posterity would learn of them. Thus was born the idea of, and very possibly a first draft of, Sully's famous Économies royales.

The traditional division of the Klan phenomenon into three or four separate outbreaks (Reconstruction, 1920s, post-1954, and post-1979) is a useful organizing construct for scholars, but is deceptively simple and not necessarily reflective of reality. Alabama's KKK is examined immediately following World War II. During this alleged period of dormancy there is, instead, a thriving Klan presence in perhaps the most racist of the deep South states. Postwar Alabama was especially tense as black voting registration aspirations and the growing appeal of biracial economic liberalism challenged the status quo. Klan resurgence was part of a determined white supremacist reaction. The concept of soft opposition is also coined and introduced to describe the efforts of elites to combat the Klan. While waging a vigorous opposition, elites were not so concerned with Klan depredations as abominations in and of themselves; rather, they were worried about the threat of federal intervention into southern race relations in response to violence. They opposed Klan excesses to perpetuate traditional elite, white control over southern blacks. Such opposition, while genuine, was less than effective, altruistic, or hard opposition; the kind needed to eliminate the Klan as an accepted part of southern society, which evolved only after 1979.

To most Frenchmen of the revolutionary generation the south conjured up a stereotype image of militant royalism in which bizarrely accoutred peasants followed ci-devant seigneurs and priests into battle and murder gangs toiled under a burning sun. The principal weakness of such a view lies not in the factual detail nor even in the presumption that the entire population was insurgent, but in its essentially linear perspective. As a recent historian has observed, the south can be characterized not only by its fervent royalist commitment but also by its predilection for the politics of extremes. The complicating and exacerbating factor in this southern counter-revolutionary equation was the presence of a parallel and equally uncompromising loyalty to the Republic. Of course, both stances were rationalizations whose ideological content needs careful weighing, but their interaction in small and often volatile communities provided counter-revolution with a dynamic which perpetuated confrontation and drove each side to extremes of savagery and fanaticism.

Founded in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 presidential candidacy, Citizens for Eisenhower took on an ambitious mission to revitalize the Republican party by expanding its activist ranks and by supporting the moderation of its conservative policy agenda. The organization proved unable to sustain the impressive momentum that it achieved during the 1952 campaign, however, instead helping to fuel factional opposition that informed the intraparty upsurge of conservatism during the 1950s and afterwards. The Eisenhower administration's efforts to encourage Citizens activists to join the party were flawed, and existing Republican activists often viewed such newcomers with hostility. More significantly, despite recruitment initiatives, in most cases activism in support of Eisenhower did not translate into enthusiasm for the party cause. The history of Citizens for Eisenhower therefore demonstrates the seriousness of Eisenhower's interests as president in boosting the Republican party's fortunes, but also the shortcomings of ‘amateur’ political activity in support of the party cause. It also sheds light on goals and activities of this era's moderate Republicans, together with their role in fostering the conservative resurgence that characterized the post-Eisenhower Republican party.

The earliest literature on the massacre of St Bartholomew, we are told, was dominated by the attempt of Henry, the Duke of Anjou, to secure the throne of Poland. Henry needed the support of the Protestants in that country—then a more considerable body than they have ever been since; and, as he had been one of the chief culprits in the massacre, the Huguenots were determined that the world should know the magnitude of the crime. He secured his election in 1573, but, in the face of the storm which was raised against him, he was supposed to have been seized with remorse in Cracow, and to have made a confession to his doctor, Miron—a narrative which we shall have to notice later.

The office of Marshal of the Eyre is the subject of at least two interesting cases reported in the Year Books of Edward II. As no account of this Marshalsy appears to exist it seemed worth while to bring together the following particulars, not only for their own sake, but as illustrating the history of a medieval serjeanty. These particulars fall under three heads: the origin and evolution of the office, its tenure and descent, and the functions and activities it involved.

It is a remarkable fact that the only continuous series of records which has survived from the twelfth century, the Great Rolls of the Pipe, was not completely available in print with adequate indexes until the thirties of the twentieth century. The search for an explanation takes one back to the beginnings of English medieval scholarship in the early seventeenth century. The great antiquaries of that day had not conceived the idea of printing adequately indexed editions of the records they used, for the medieval past, when books were patiently transcribed by hand for circulation, was too near. When scholars met to discuss their work it was of making copies by hand and passing them from one to another that they talked. They were concerned that the notes sent to them should be on ‘paper of the same size for bignesse as the sender first did use’. To them in the seventeenth century, the past was a virgin field in which they had no forerunners; and they themselves aimed at writing history which should stand for ever.

The revolution by which the municipal government of Cambridge was in the decade 1780-90 transformed from an oligarchy to a dictatorship has this in common with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that it was made possible by the absence of a written constitution; but whereas it is impossible, as Maitland has said, by any stretch of ingenuity to make the Revolution of 1688-9 a perfectly legal act, the processes of constitutional change at Cambridge a century later were again and again submitted to the scrutiny of the courts. Indeed, Newling v. Francis, the judgement in which finally established the right of the corporation to revise its own constitution, may be described as a leading case in the law of corporations.

The decline in prosperity of the British West Indies after 1815 was so rapid as to obscure their importance during the Napoleonic War; but of their commercial pre-eminence among British colonies at that time there are many proofs. Thus, on 12 September 1804, while watching Toulon, Nelson, who knew them well, wrote in a lately published letter, “…I think the French will some day send their fleets to sea, and that the West Indies … is (sic) more likely for them to hurt us in than this country. We have but few troops to defend our islands and recent conquests; 10 or 12,000 French troops would injure us more there than in any other part of the world.” Herein he agreed with Dundas, who in August 1796 stated to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, that far more harm would result to our commerce and credit from a French invasion of Jamaica than of Great Britain or Ireland. As is well known, Nelson in April 1805 acted on his conviction recorded above, and, despite the perilously scanty news as to the course of the Franco-Spanish fleet, he chased it to the West Indies because of his conviction of the immense importance of those colonies. Lord Barham, now First Lord, approved his action; for he himself had come to the conclusion from the French moves against those colonies, “that depredation and the destruction of our trade is their grand object,” and that the invasion of England was now a secondary object. This view was for the present somewhat exaggerated; for Napoleon, who overworked his admirals even more than his generals, expected Villeneuve and Gravina first to devastate our Leeward Islands (with Tobago thrown in) and then to fly back, along with Ganteaume's fleet, to cover the invasion of England.

This article offers a case-study of an early preservation campaign to save the remains of the fifteenth-century Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, London, threatened with demolition in 1830, in a period before the emergence of national bodies dedicated to the preservation of historic monuments. It is an unusual and early example of a successful campaign to save a secular building. The reasons why the Hall's fate attracted the interest of antiquaries, architects, and campaigners are analysed in the context of the emergence of historical awareness of the domestic architecture of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as wider recognition of the importance of this period for Britain's urban and commercial development. The Hall's associations with Richard III and other historic figures, including Thomas More and Thomas Gresham, are shown to have been particularly important in generating wider public interest, thereby allowing the campaigners to articulate the importance of the Hall in national terms. The history of Crosby Hall illuminates how a discourse of national heritage emerged from the inherited tradition of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and highlights the importance of the social, professional, and familial networks that sustained proactive attempts to preserve the nation's monuments and antiquities.