In the mid-1980s Stuart historians began a major re-evaluation of the restoration era. Among the principal themes are the period's unsettledness, the continuing impact of the radical tenets that had been manifested so forcefully in the mid-century upheavals, the significance of religion and ideology, and renewed debate over the origin of political parties. As I have suggested elsewhere, the period is most accurately conceived as a time of recurring crises of varying magnitude and duration. The first extended from Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658 to the passage of the Conventicle Act in 1664, the second from 1667 to the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, the third from the revelation of the spurious Popish Plot in 1678 to the repression of the Rye House schemers and the Monmouth/Russell/Essex cabal in 1683, the fourth the rebellions of the earl of Argyll and the duke of Monmouth in 1685, and the fifth the crisis that entailed the collapse of James II's regime and the constitutional settlement of 1689.

Bunyan lived through the first four periods of crisis and died amid the final one. It is appropriate to ask how this reinterpretation of the restoration period affects our interpretation of Bunyan. Elsewhere I have offered some suggestions, particularly with respect to the crisis of 1678–83 and our understanding of The Holy War, Of Antichrist and His Ruine, and Seasonable Counsel: or, Advice to Sufferers. This essay will focus on the crisis of 1667–73, the principal interpreter of which is Gary De Krey. For him this controversy at root entailed a crucial debate about liberty of conscience—a revival of the debate that in his judgment was central to the mid-century revolution. De Krey makes a compelling case for the significance of the debate in the period 1667–73 because it challenged many of the assumptions on which the restoration settlement was founded, including the limits of political authority, the relationship between church and Crown, and the rights and obligations of subjects. In their various assertions of the right of conscience, nonconformists rejected the restoration settlement by insisting on God's ultimate sovereignty in the spiritual realm and “the autonomy of the conscience as God's vicegerent in that sphere.” For them the issue was not parliamentary versus royal sovereignty—not least because the policy of persecution was parliamentary—but the sovereignty of the conscience against any persecutorial authority.

We are so used to the “revisionist” account of the English Reformation as a story of Protestant failure and of (relative) Catholic success that it is easy to forget how late sixteenth-century English Catholicism was once viewed by scholars not as an innocent parish pastime or a culturally conservative reaction to puritan evangelical excess. In the older narratives of the religious struggle in early modern England, historians recounted a fierce battle—the papal excommunication of Queen Elizabeth, the endless plotting to promote the dynastic claim of Mary Stuart, and foreign enterprises to invade the realm and put paid to the Tudors. Here the politics of disagreement about religion engendered a fair measure of violence on the part of the state toward some of its Catholic subjects, and this confrontation has come down to us most vividly through the martyrological narratives in which leading Catholic clerics described the sufferings of the faithful. Yet these narratives were themselves deliberately depoliticized. The context of the state's proceedings was largely cut away, and the actions and opinions of the Catholic martyrs that so irritated the regime were glossed over as part of an incisive rhetorical statement that Catholics died for their religion, not for any treasonable inclinations on their part. This was a brilliant polemical reply to the official propaganda that described Roman Catholic Englishmen as not merely ungodly but a lethal threat to the security of the state. In the regime's opinion, and in the antipopish canon that developed at this time, they were a fifth column of dissent set fair to exploit and assist foreign attempts to unseat the Tudor regime. The language of antipopery rode continually on a fear of domestic plots and schemes to meddle in the settlement of religion and the succession to the throne.

In this letter to her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu expresses what was in the early eighteenth century a commonplace view of wedlock. Marriage, she writes, is such an object of mockery that even women have lost interest in it and married women like herself must “excuse” themselves for their unfashionable behavior. Obviously, Lady Mary's tone is light, but she expresses ideas that were being argued quite seriously in a variety of circles. Many of her contemporaries believed that marriage was deteriorating into a business contract. Rather than being respected as an institution ordained by God and necessary to social stability, the argument went, marriage was an object of mockery, used only as a cynical means of increasing wealth. Brides were being bought and sold with no regard for their future happiness or compatibility with their husbands. Most famously, perhaps, this notion was exploited in William Hogarth's series, Marriage à la Mode (1745), its very title embodying the idea that mercenary marriage was a new fashion.

This article examines the relationship between politically motivated murder, martyrdom, and the death penalty in Britain and Ireland in the period from 1939 to 1990. First, it investigates the nexus between historical experience and memory, political martyrdom, and capital punishment as it applied to Irish Republicans in Britain during the Second World War. Secondly, it examines the use of extraordinary legal powers to impose the death penalty in the Irish state during the “Emergency,” and charts the processes through which the threat of capital punishment continued to be perceived as an essential instrument of security in both Irish jurisdictions in the postwar period. Thirdly, it evaluates the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring politically motivated murder and explores the anomalous, paradoxical decision to abolish capital punishment at the height of subversive killing in Northern Ireland. The essay concludes that the national security issue and the potential martyrdom of Irish Republicans were pivotal factors in dissuading successive British governments from reintroducing the death penalty for politically motivated offenses in Britain and Northern Ireland.

This paper proposes the importance of television, the televisation of US and British race politics, and the framing of “Black Power” in this television coverage, for race politics in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. British politics and culture was “re-racialized” in the postwar era, and television, for white and black Britons, became a site of racial knowledge, racial identification, and racial dislocation. The rise of television as a central medium of everyday life saw it emerge, too, as a central site for the imagination of community. As critics have long noted, the community imagined in British television programming of this era was overwhelmingly white, and black people were featured most often only as a marker of social difference or social “problems.” Many black Britons, excluded from the national “everyday” as it was constituted on television, and facing increasing institutional and interpersonal racism in daily life, found in coverage of the burgeoning black liberation movements of the United States a useable politics through which to articulate new sites of identification, community, and solidarity. For others, though, coverage of race politics in the United States could be a source of anxiety and alarm. The televisation of US race politics was central to the growth of cultures and politics of radical blackness in Britain, but it also reconstituted the politics of white racism, recasting blackness in Britain as a sign of violence and impending social disorder.

On June 16, in the midst of the disturbances at Cambridge during the Rising of 1381, a woman named Margery Starre was said to have tossed the ashes of burnt documents to the winds, crying as she did so, “away with the learning of clerks! away with it!” The story of this woman's violence against texts is not unknown—it has been noted several times in major studies of the revolt—but its significance as part of the much larger story of women in 1381 has been overlooked.

Instances of women's participation appear in the judicial records, chronicles, and poetry produced in the decade following the revolt. These texts depict women as independent leaders and maintainers of rebel bands, as instigators of others' violence, and as accomplices with their family members in criminal acts. They also “participated” as victims: women were assaulted, abducted, and threatened with death, and their property was frequently stolen or destroyed. Despite the evidence, and despite the recent and widespread interest of medievalists in both social history and feminist studies, women's roles in the revolt have gone largely unexamined. In this initial sense, the women constitute an imaginary component of their society: overlooked and ignored by the scholarship, their presence in 1381 is assumed to be unreal. From the absence of study comes the absence of women in history.

But we should not be so surprised to “discover” women in 1381, since earlier and later medieval collective actions feature women either in active roles or functioning as symbols of insurrection.

The triennium 1536–38 marks the crisis of Henry VIII's reign. The palace coup that toppled Anne Boleyn in May and June 1536 and apparently left Thomas Cromwell more firmly in control instead ushered in a series of further threats to both Cromwell and Henry. The upheaval of the Pilgrimage of Grace convulsed the north in late 1536 and early 1537 and looked for a time as if it would shake Henry's throne. The Pilgrims' calls for the upstart Cromwell's removal forced the chief minister to withdraw behind the scenes for a time, always a tricky maneuver. The battle of wits and wills between the king and his cousin and sometime protégé Reginald Pole runs as counterpoint throughout these dislocations. Pole's intemperate attack on Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, De unitate, arrived at the extremely sensitive moment of June 1536 and announced the beginning of an eighteen-month struggle that finally led to an irreparable breach between Henry and Pole. De unitate has often been taken to signal Pole's crossing of the Rubicon. It should certainly have discomfited Pole's potential allies just as many of his partisans thought they had jockeyed themselves into power by engineering Anne's downfall. In fact, the work had a minimal effect, mainly because the committee entrusted with reading it was heavily stacked with Pole's friends. Henry probably never saw De unitate. Despite its violent language, neither Pole nor his supporters were then quite ready to give up on Henry. Early the next year the situation changed. Paul III created the new cardinal Pole a legate and dispatched him to Flanders, traditional locus of plots against England.

John Ruskin, art and social critic, master of English prose, is one of the most infuriating yet attractive Victorian figures. In the last twenty years, a revival of interest in his work after years of neglect has stimulated a considerable body of scholarly analysis and several biographies. As Ruskin himself would have hoped, historians have been most interested in his trenchant attacks on the assumptions and effects of nineteenth-century political economy, but paradoxically he appears in women's history only as the author of “Of Queens' Gardens,” promoting a fundamental Victorian paradigm, the ideology of pure womanhood. Yet the anthologized excerpts which are all most people read of Ruskin do not do justice even to “Of Queens' Gardens,” an admittedly cloying piece, and although biographers have analyzed his tortured relationships with Effie Gray and Rose La Touche almost to the point of tedium, there is no extended general study of his many relationships with women and the expectations he had of them. An adequate analysis of Ruskin's view of women requires familiarity with all his works, an understanding of his fears for the state of England, and a greater knowledge of his relationships with women than provided by the lurid details of his failed marriage and predilection for adolescent girls. The following is an attempt to sketch an outline of such an account.

In January 1912 in an article on “British Banking Interests in South America,” the South American Journal advised its readers that while British banks were unquestionably profitable investments they did not have the field entirely to themselves, “for they not only had to face the competition of local, in many cases State-owned banks, but also the competition of several very successful and strong German banking companies, such as the Deutsche Bank, etc.” Nevertheless, British banks had the advantage of considerable experience in the business, an experience at that time dating back nearly fifty years. This statement gives direct expression to the theme of this paper, namely, the continuing prosperity of the British overseas banks in Latin America despite the competition of the more recently established, but nonetheless very successful, German overseas banks. Moreover, aside from the inevitable competition from local Latin American banks, it is to be noted that the only foreign competitors mentioned are the German banks. This was because the several Spanish, French, and Italian banks in the region had much more the structure and character of Latin American institutions based on investment and support from the local immigrant communities of those nations rather than the structure of overseas banks run from Europe.

The struggle for the “Great” Reform Act was one of the most serious crises of the nineteenth century, stirring controversy not only in Parliament and the political unions but in churches and chapels across the country. For many of its supporters, reform was a holy cause; for its opponents, it was a “Satanic” measure. This article seeks to reestablish reform as a religious controversy, paying special attention to the religious press and to the hundreds of sermons preached by the Anglican clergy. Anglicans mobilized an array of scriptural authorities against the reform bill, contributing directly to the rising temperature of debate. This was a “Constitution in Church and State,” and the church possessed both an authority and an audience that few institutions could match. Restoring it to the center of debate helps us to understand what was at stake in the reform bill and why it aroused such bitter passions.

When Jack Goody put more than a thousand years into the few hundred pages of his Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, he could be allowed a little judgmental rhetoric. The documentation from early medieval Europe, unevenly distributed across very diverse situations, may indeed yield fewer examples of female than male predation, and perhaps more examples of female than male benefaction. But, since Goody wrote, historians have been increasingly alerted to complex relationships among individuals, property, and the church, which may extend far beyond the scope of individual documents, across several generations. Goody's female “givers” take on a new complexion in an environment in which donations can be more apparent than real, where a land transfer may prove no more than a social gesture. In such circumstances, identifying the originators of grants, let alone separating male and female action, becomes a delicate process. In the following article, female involvement is considered in the context of pre-Conquest wills, a body of documents that could be interpreted as classic evidence that female “givers” literally as well as morally stood in credit with the church.

The prominence of women in pre-Conquest wills has long been noted.

The deconstruction of what is termed “the public sphere” in recent decades has resulted in an important shift in scholarly attention towards networks and forms of association. This article explores how greater sensitivity to the unstable and ephemeral nature of “publics,” combined with a stronger awareness of the role of cultural exchange, has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of early modern politics. Some analytical precision has, nonetheless, been lost. A justifiable emphasis on the artificiality of the territorial borders that have defined units of enquiry has occurred at the expense of deeper consideration of the cultural boundaries that dictated the terms on which people could participate in and shape public discourse. Study of the British archipelago can offer new ways of thinking about these problems. Linguistic and ethnic differences, the search for religious concord as well as the reality of confessional division, institutional variation, and the consequences of London's increasing dominance of the archipelago, are key facets of the reassessments undertaken here. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactions between varieties of “public” and other forms of association can nuance our understanding of early modern state formation.

In his presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, G. R. Elton drew attention to the “points of contact” in Tudor central government, namely, the relations of court, council, and Parliament. Among other things, Elton's discussion revealed the need to integrate more fully the often separately related histories of those institutions. Although such an integrated history obviously lies beyond the scope of this essay, part of the subject, Privy Chamber finance, introduces an important, if often secret, point of contact between officers of the royal household and officers of “state”—the management of the king's money. A declaration of money disbursed from Henry VIII's Privy Coffers in 1542–48 and an audit of Edward VI's Privy Purse for the years 1550–51, both discussed here for the first time, disclose some previously unknown aspects of early Tudor government and finance. Taken together, these documents should provide the basis for a deeper appreciation of the dynamics of the English Reformation regime.

I

Research of the past decade has revealed the place and importance of the Privy Chamber in the household and government of the Tudor kings. By 1540 a heretofore informal group of the king's body servants and boon companions had acquired wages and administrative functions to match their royally bestowed places and titles. The officers and staff of the king's private apartments now constituted a separate department of the royal household. Of the eighteen gentlemen in ordinary (i.e., in wages), two were honored by the title “chief” because of the intimate nature of their attendance on the king's person. One of them, the groom of the stool, became, ex officio, “first” gentleman.

Consumption has recently acquired key importance in re-interpreting post-war British politics. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska has argued the Conservative construction of a popular alliance in opposition to rationing and controls was crucial to their electoral recovery after 1945 and in securing an advantage among women voters. A wealth of evidence indicates Labour, by contrast, had scant purchase on affluence in the later 1950s. It was not only, as Amy Black and Stephen Brooke would have it, “Labour's befuddlement at the problem of women and gender,” but that it was ambivalent, if not hostile, towards the goods, lifestyles and values associated with consumerism and the people obtaining and exhibiting them. Other factors blur differentiation between the parties. Both were affiliated to the world of production—through their business and trade union links. Richard Findley has contended the Conservative abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM, whereby manufacturers fixed retail prices) in 1964, aroused electorally deleterious opposition from manufacturers and backbenchers. And while Labour consumerists were rare commodities, as is argued here, Labour revisionism made an important contribution to the Consumers' Association (CA).

This focus on consumerism corrects the neglect of it by narratives like political consensus or historians' consuming passion with production and work. It arises from rethinking Britain's much vaunted “decline” as, for example, the transition to a post-industrial society. In Matthew Hilton's hands how the consumer “interest” was variously articulated and gendered becomes a means to unlock modern citizenship and the configuration of private and public spheres.

A new topic of controversy was interjected into relations between the English crown and the community of the realm during the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries as a result of large scale purveyancing of victuals, military supplies, and transport to provision a nation at war. The old right of purveyance or prise-taking, which permitted the king, members of his family, royal officials, and the greater nobility to preempt foodstuffs and requisition carriage for their personal use, was transformed into an elaborate mechanism for supplying English armies fighting in Scotland and France. The conflict provoked by this institutional change dominated crown-community relations in England from the latter part of Edward I's reign forward through the reign of Edward II and much of Edward III's. In order to defend private property against royal purveyance, representatives of the community experimented—especially during the period 1297 to 1362—with several methods for restricting the practice. But efforts to regulate purveyance were hindered by the ambiguous nature of the king's right, which could be viewed both as a royal prerogative and as a simple act of buying necessities for the king and his court. Further, depending on its scope and extent, purveyance by the crown could be seen either as a means of provisioning the household alone or as a form of national taxation applicable to the country at large. Occasionally during this period the community equated purveyance with regular taxation and tried to subject it to parliamentary control. Eventually, however, the nation was compelled to accept the view of purveyance as a commercial arrangement between English kings and their subjects based on the more or less legitimate right of the crown to take goods and services by forced loan or under promise of future payment. Accordingly, attempts to regulate it assumed the form of legislation designed to assure the prompt compensation of sellers, the accountability of the king's agents, and the punishment of corruption.