The political significance of Spanish reason-of-state literature has been studied almost exclusively from the perspective of imperial institutions, in particular the monarchy. This article argues that there was a distinctive political perspective in the crown of Aragon, based on its constitutional traditions, which inspired a particular kind of ‘reason of state’. Focusing on the works of a Catalan nobleman, Don Francisco Gilabert, the argument goes on to show that this constitutional thought was able to articulate a project of reform alternative to that of the minister of Philip IV, the count-duke of Olivares, and that therefore it cannot be merely analysed (as it often has been) as an anachronistic form of aristocratic self-seeking. On the contrary, by denying the king the power of absolute sovereignty, and by insisting on the idea of a mixed constitution, Gilabert's approach was able to articulate republican ideals, even though at the cost of some fundamental ambiguities concerning the idea of empire. It is suggested that the recognition of this distinctive intellectual tradition has important implications for the overall interpretation of the course of Spanish history in the seventeenth century, before and after the Catalan revolt of 1640.

The strange circumstances of the hasty clandestine wedding of Thomas Thynne and Maria Audley in 1594 raise questions about possible motives for it. He was the teenage heir to a rich Wiltshire gentleman, and she was a young attendant of Queen Elizabeth, but their families were divided by political faction. Private correspondence afterwards and contentious court of Arches proceedings lasting to 1601 reveal the tactics adopted on the one hand by her family to try to prove consent of both bride and groom to marriage, on the other the countering tactics of the Thynnes to disprove it. The parents exploited ecclesiastical court procedure, and attempted to influence witnesses and judge. This case shows attitudes to marriage making, beliefs about rituals and tokens, and conceptions of the law of marriage in Elizabethan England.

Recent scholarship has questioned the accuracy of John Foxe's depiction of Anne Boleyn as an evangelical and a patron of reformers. It has even been suggested that Foxe exaggerated or invented the material he presented on the evangelical zeal of Henry VIII's second queen. A thorough examination of Foxe's sources, however, reveals that he based his account of Anne on material ultimately derived from those who knew her or had benefited from her support. It can also be demonstrated that much of Foxe's account of Anne is confirmed by independent sources. Finally, careful comparison of the material on Anne in the different editions of Foxe's work printed during his lifetime, and analysis of their variations, indicates when Foxe acquired his information about Anne. This, in turn, reveals a great deal about the circumstances in which Foxe composed his account and the specific political and polemical purposes which influenced it. Foxe's account of Anne was one-sided and biased but the information he presented on her was, as far as it went, accurate and it should not be discounted in any scholarly assessment of Henry's queen.

In the plays and entertainments performed before the queen from 1561 to 1578, the virginity of Elizabeth was not idealized but instead marriage was celebrated as a preferable state to chastity. Robert Dudley in particular commissioned such dramatic works to assist his courtship of the queen, but the earl of Sussex, and possibly others, used masques to press on her the suit of the Archduke Charles of Austria. The iconography of chastity appeared for the first time in 1578 when Elizabeth embarked on the Anjou marriage negotiations. During the queen's visit to Norwich in the summer she was offered entertainments which implicitly criticized the matrimonial project by idealizing her virginity. For the next three years, opponents of the match followed this lead and cultivated the image of the Virgin Queen as a means of sabotaging the royal marriage plans. Thereafter Elizabeth exploited the image for her own political purposes.

Historians have commonly described John Evelyn's pamphlet about London smoke pollution, Fumifugium, as a precocious example of environmental concern. This paper argues that such an interpretation is too simple. Evelyn's proposals are shown to be closely related to political allegory and the panegyrics written to welcome the newly restored Charles II. However, the paper also shows that Fumifugium was not simply a literary conceit; rather it exemplified the mid-seventeenth-century Ėnglish interest in the properties of air that is visible in both the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Society.

The so-called Bye plot of 1603 is one of the best documented in that procession of treasons which confronted late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean governments. For more than a century, it has also been almost entirely neglected by historians. Through an examination of the cases made against seven suspects – William Clark, George Brooke, Sir Griffin Markham, Anthony Copley, Bartholomew Brookesby, Sir Edward Parham, and John Scudamore – the methods by which the state acquired and deployed evidence in advancing the prosecution are here detailed and analysed. Comparison of each man's fate also reveals how, although the crime of high treason carried but one penalty, the punishments handed down, ranging as they did from execution to discharge before trial, reflected both the prisoners' own conduct and the current political imperatives in a year of dynastic change.

This parliament saw two controversial government proposals: to ratify the Five Articles of Perth which introduced Anglican-style ceremonies into church worship, and to introduce a new tax on interest payments. A rare division list survives. It shows the split to have been partly regional: opposition was concentrated in Scotland's central belt, with government supporters in the more conservative northern and Border regions. The most important division, however, is that between ‘court’ and ‘country’. These concepts, familiar in English history, are shown to be applicable to Scotland. An earlier argument that government faction was responsible for the division is shown to be mistaken. The ideological divide, which persisted until after 1638, has implications for our understanding of the events of the 1640s both in Scotland and in England.

The dissolution of the monasteries is one of the most familiar incidents in Tudor history. The genesis of the dissolution is however ill-documented. Here it is traced back to the suppressions of smaller houses authorized in 1528. It is shown how a partial dissolution could be construed as a desirable and necessary reform without challenging either the basis of monasticism or the doctrine of purgatory. A previously unnoticed petition is published to cast light on the anti-clerical agitation of 1529. It is suggested that there was an attempt to secure a dissolution for financial reasons in 1534 and it was the failure of this which forced the crown to adopt a new strategy to achieve a partial dissolution. This was the collection of damaging evidence of monastic corruption during the visitations of 1535. The display of this material to the Commons in 1536 persuaded them to accept a partial dissolution in the guise of a reform of monasticism. It is suggested that there was no ‘public’ demand for a dissolution in the 1530s except in the artificial circumstances of 1536, and that the shape of the dissolution was determined by the inability of government to secure the support of parliament for a dissolution justified on financial grounds.

In 1641 a century-long partnership of the crown and the London Stationers collapsed, leaving state control of the press and the Stationers’ interest in copyright in an extremely vulnerable situation. Tentatively at first and with growing assertiveness by 1642, the Lords and Commons revised and restated in their own interest the old partnership of the state and the Stationers; for their part, the Stationers worked hard to demonstrate their utility to the new regime and to preserve the privileges that allowed them to control the book business. The result of their joint efforts was the licensing ordinance of 1643, which critics, including John Milton, thought to be scarcely distinguishable from the Star Chamber decree of 1637, the high-water mark of the old regime. But the ordinance proved only partially successful. In the interim between regimes, there emerged a vigorous if vulgar tabloid journalism avant la lettre, sustained by an underclass of undisciplined elements of the Stationers’ Company, non-company interlopers and hawkers, and often youthful scribblers, several of them Cambridge drop-outs. Such engaging rascals no less than moralists like Milton had their share in acclimatizing the English to a press practically free of prior restraint.

On what religious and political grounds did restoration nonconformists argue for ‘ease to tender consciences’, and what did they mean by conscience? These questions are central to any evaluation of nonconformist political thought in the early restoration. Such dissenting thinkers as Slingsby Bethel, John Humfrey, Philip Nye, John Owen, William Penn, and Sir Charles Wolseley authored arguments for conscience during the intense debate about the restoration church settlement that occurred between 1667 and 1672. This essay outlines four different cases for conscience to which these arguments contributed. Two of these cases reconciled claims for conscience with the ecclesiastical authority of the monarch. Two other cases for conscience challenged the traditional religious authority of the crown.

Should any or all of these arguments for conscience be considered radical arguments? The answer to this question requires a definition of the term ‘radical’ – one that is appropriate for the late Stuart period. The grounds upon which early restoration advocates of conscience accepted an indulgence under the royal prerogative in 1672 are also explained.

The essay addresses the historiography of the restoration by considering Christopher Hill's and Richard Ashcraft's views about dissenting thought. It also proposes that the 1667–72 debate about the state and religion raised so many critical issues as to constitute an early restoration crisis about conscience.

Generally dismissed by historians as just an hysterical gesture by parliamentary whig leaders disappointed and angered over the failure of the second Exclusion Bill, the attempted impeachment in 1680–1 of Sir William Scroggs was in fact a complicated and important affair. Although a failure in legal terms (because King Charles dissolved two parliaments), it succeeded in political terms when the king dismissed Scroggs. A propaganda ploy to embarrass the duke of York and also the king of England, re-unite the whig party, and re-ignite anti-popery fervour to promote another try at Exclusion (contrary to recent revisionism), the proceedings provoked discussion of many central issues, but most importantly of the legislative authority of parliament, or control of the law; the affair provoked a ‘crisis of authority’. Print culture played an unprecedented role: four of the eight articles of impeachment against Scroggs were connected with the press. Press people, in effect, brought down a chief minister of the crown and severely embarrassed the government, an event of signal importance in the history of the press.

A previously unknown document reveals the authorship of the most important manifesto produced by the Dutch patriot movement of the mid-1780s and shows that it was originally written in French. This document was published in France in 1788 and may have influenced the drafting of the revolutionary Declaration of the rights of man in 1789.

The essay aims to close a longstanding gap in the political historiography of later Georgian Britain by examining the ‘Hanoverian Crisis’ of 1806. Drawing on a broad range of British, Hanoverian and Prussian records, the essay demonstrates that the British–Prussian conflict of that year was caused not – as conventionally assumed – by the closure of the North Sea ports to British shipping, but by the Prussian occupation of George III's electoral land of Hanover. The essay then shows how the commitment of the British government to its restitution was largely motivated by the desire of Charles James Fox and the incoming Ministry of All the Talents to build bridges to the crown. This stance was in complete contradiction both to the broad thrust of the new ‘maritime’ foreign policy of the Talents and to Fox's previous policy in matters Hanoverian. Subsequently the implications of this for our understanding of Fox's political biography are assessed. Finally, the essay illuminates the existence of a coherent ‘Hanoverian Faction’ in London headed by Count Münster which together with a highly activist George III was often able to tip the balance in the formulation of British policy.

While Restoration historians have traditionally assumed that there was little public interest in foreign affairs, and that English attitudes towards Europe were determined either by religious or domestic concerns, this essay argues that there was a lively and sophisticated English debate about Europe which turned on the proper identification of the universal monarch rather than religion. In the later 1660s the English political nation was deeply divided in its understanding of European politics. Enthusiastic supporters of the restored monarchy thought that the republican United Provinces sought universal dominion, while the monarchy's radical critics identified absolutist France as an aspirant to universal monarchy. French success in the early phases of the third Anglo-Dutch war, the failure of the French navy to support the English fleet at sea, and the overthrow of the Dutch republican regime in favour of William III, Prince of Orange, convinced the vast majority of the English that France represented the greater threat. Ultimately popular pressure compelled Charles II to abandon the French alliance. In addition, the popular conviction that Louis XIV had succeeded in corrupting the English court resulted in a new-found desire for popular accountability in foreign affairs, and a consequent diminution of the royal prerogative in that sphere.

This article explores the domestic political aspects of the last great disaster of French foreign policy before the revolution: the unsuccessful intervention in Holland between 1784 and 1787. These have been largely ignored by historians, although much attention has been given both to the internal politics of the Dutch republic as well as to British involvement in her affairs during this period. The article argues that the increasing incoherence of French policy towards the United Provinces was caused by profound splits within the king's council. These culminated in a series of attacks on the diplomacy of the powerful foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, by his ministerial opponents. The Dutch affair reveals the fragmentation of foreign policy during the last years of the ancien régime, and also paints a wider picture of a deeply divided royal government on the eve of the revolution.

Victorian feminists faced a dilemma in their dealings with the state. This dilemma intensified in the years following the 1867 Reform Act. Radical feminist leaders (Josephine Butler, Lydia Becker, Elizabeth Wolstenholme) eagerly adopted an ‘equality before the law’ stance in order to link women's credentials for citizenship with conventional principles of liberal individualism. Yet the same leaders were recurrently angered and frightened by the sex-insensitive uses to which male politicians were prepared to put state power, even while claiming to be defending and improving a liberal social order. This article traces feminist responses to the dilemma from the high point of libertarian individualism accompanying the 1870s campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts to the more complicated appraisals of the potential of state agency made during following decades. The democratization of English political life, it is argued, may ultimately have persuaded feminists of the worth of the state as a sponsor of social change; but the half-democratized form of politics characteristic of the later Victorian period left key feminists with an ideologically entrenched suspicion of state intervention which even mid-eighties repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and ‘maiden tribute’ child prostitution revelations could not efface.

Recent studies have challenged older views that the British state of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was rather powerless. However, such studies have focused largely on the executive, and particularly on the development of centralized revenue departments, or on the role of county elites in implementing state policies in the localities. This essay considers state formation as it was manifested at the base of the governmental system, and examines the extent of, and reasons for, support of national policies at the parish level. It argues that state power derived in part from institutional changes and innovations in procedure which made government in the localities more uniform, more professional, and more accountable; but that initiatives by parish vestries and a willingness on the part of such local elites to implement national policies also help to explain the strength of the state.

Henrion de Pansey (1742–1829) is an important but neglected constitutional historian whose views on the French past served as a commentary on the unwritten and written constitutions of his own age. A feudal lawyer before the revolution and an appeal judge under Napoleon and the restored Bourbons, he published a variety of works combining liberal sentiment with judicial traditionalism. His career illustrates the shift of moderate conservative opinion across the revolutionary divide. The alteration in his political thought is best understood through its conjunction with the three historical modes prevalent in his time: a discontinuous approach, accepting the past as a series of different regimes interrupted by revolutions; a developmental view, charting the progressive growth of institutions from seeds planted in antiquity; and a fundamentalist habit of thought that saw change as decline from pristine perfection. The jurists of sixteenth-century France remained Henrion's most admired models, and he used his roseate vision of the early modern French monarchy as a sometimes critical commentary on the constitutions designed in his own day. In prerevolutionary days he recast the ideas of the sixteenth-century rationalizer of feudalism, Charles Dumoulin, into Enlightenment terms. After the revolution, De l'Autoritéjudiciaire (1810) depicted the moderating role of the judiciary as defenders of past constitutions, and formed an oblique commentary on Napoleon's civil code. Des Pairs et de l'ancienne constitution (1816) appraised the charter of 1814. It accepted a measure of popular participation in government, but held judicial expertise essential in legislation. Des Assemblées nationales (1826) shifted the emphasis from judicial oversight to the separation of powers and representative government, although Henrion, like Guizot and the doctrinaires, remained critical of popular democracy.

This article argues that within the debates over medical reform which took place throughout the Victorian period, there flourished a variety of models of authority with respect to illness and the body. The controversies surrounding the illness and cure of the journalist, Harriet Martineau, provide a particularly useful vehicle for exploring some of these different models. During a time when many doctors were anxious to establish the medical profession as an authoritative body within British society, Martineau put forward a portrayal of invalidism that gave invalids, especially women, a degree of authority that made many medical men uneasy. By examining the question of the status of the sick individual during this period, and especially Martineau's case, historians can gain a new perspective on broader issues of reform and the status of women in Victorian society.

Of the almost 80,000 prisoners-of-war held by Italy at the time of the Armistice with the Allies of 8 September 1943, more than half succeeded in escaping and almost 18,000 were not recaptured, largely due to the help offered spontaneously by Italian civilians. The records of the Allied Screening Commission preserved in Washington, and other official papers available in England, South Africa and Australia, complemented by oral history fieldwork among former escapers and their Italian helpers, reveal an Anglo-Italian epic of anti-heroism, whose protagonists nevertheless displayed great courage, ingenuity, perseverance and humanity.

Exploration of this neglected but critical dimension of the secret history of the years of occupation and resistance between 1943 and 1945 throws new light upon the characteristics and the long-term potential of a submerged nation of peasants, charcoal-burners and shepherds. The article is an attempt to historicise their expression of an often overlooked but universal peasant culture of survival, far deeper at the time than political commitment, but not without ultimate political importance.