bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
II. Legal Sovereignty in the Brady Controversy
Authors: Weston Corinne Comstock
Published: June 2009

A Major source of difficulty in interpreting the political thought of Dr Robert Brady, the high tory historian who imparted a new dimension to the political quarrels of late Stuart England, arises out of a limitation that he imposed upon himself in writing history. He deliberately included very little political reflection in his writings, observing that he would not ‘inlarge further upon the great Use and Advantage Those that read Old Historians may make of these Discourses, but leave that to the Judgment of Understanding Readers’. This limitation may be offset, it is suggested here, by placing Brady securely within the intellectual framework created by the contemporary theories of legal sovereignty mat had originated during the English civil war and were fast becoming tradition by the late years of Charles II. When Brady made his researches public, almost all the elements were present that were required for fashioning a theory of legal sovereignty on the lines made famous in Blackstone. Englishmen were reading Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Edward Coke on the uncontrollable authority that resided in parliament for making, confirming, repealing, and expounding laws; and many of them were by this time accustomed to associating the legislative power, itself a new expression, with sovereignty in the state. They had also learned during the civil war years to recognize law-making as the characteristic function of their high court of parliament. All that remained for the whole to fall
A Hundred Years of the Teaching of History at Cambridge, 1873–1973
Authors: Clark G. Kitson
Published: June 2009

Before I start I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty Board of History who have entrusted me with the very interesting task of delivering this lecture and to Mrs Lindsay for handing me a copy of her article on the ‘Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, which appeared in volume IX of the Cambridge Historical Journal. This article surely must remain the authoritative account of the early development of the Tripos. I owe much to it, as also to an anonymous set of notes on the changes in the Tripos up to 1932, which was discovered in the offices of the History Faculty. This I suspect to have been compiled by Ronald Balfour, a Fellow of King's and close friend of mine, who was killed in the last war. I need not say that neither Mrs Lindsay, nor the author of these notes is responsible for what follows.
‘The Rulers now on Earth’: Locke'sTwo Treatisesand the Revolution of 1688
Authors: Tarlton Charles D.
Published: June 2009

When we believed that Locke had writtenTwo treatises of governmentto justify the Glorious Revolution, we could say a great deal about his purposes in relation to the events of 1688–89. The book served to interpret those events, to disclose their underlying meaning; philosophy and action were joined in such a manner that both gained lustre from the link. But, now we have generally accepted the view that Locke actually wroteTwo treatisesin the partisan heat of the Exclusion debate, and we have stopped saying very much of anything about the book's relation to William III and the events of the year in which Locke anonymously published it.
F.D.R. and Panama
Authors: Major John
Published: June 2009

Historians of United States policy towards Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century have paid remarkably little attention to Washington's dealings with the republic of Panama. The failure to explore this terra incognita is all the more surprising in the light of the fact that those dealings hinged round one of America's vital interests, the Panama Canal, which runs through the heart of the country and has given Panama an importance unique in U.S. diplomacy. Yet much of the detailed history of the relationship remains unknown.
Towards Partition: Polish Magnates and Russian Intervention in Poland During the Early Reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski
Authors: Lukowski Jerzy T.
Published: June 2009

In a report on the state of Poland in 1766 the papal nuncio, A. E. Visconti, observed that the new king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, possessed ‘a burning desire to reform the whole country in one day – if only he could – and the entire nation, in order to bring it up to the level of other, more advanced nations’. The interregnum after the death of Augustus III in October 1763 and Poniatowski's election in September 1764 had inaugurated the most determined campaign for reform within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Union of Lublin of 1569. By 1763–4 there was little that did not need to be reformed. The accumulation of privilege by the szlachta, the nobility, had attained such dimensions that both the monarchy and the Sejm, the parliament, were almost powerless to govern. The most obvious expression of the impotence of the state and of the refusal of the nobility to submit to the discipline of any centralized authority was, of course, the liberum veto, the use of which, real or threatened, had consigned the majority of the Sejmy of Augustus II (1697–1733) and of Augustus III (1733–63) to nullity. Yet the veto's successful, widespread application was only possible because of a rough equilibrium of political strength between Poland's various magnate factions.After Augustus Ill's death, Russian military backing enabled the so-called ‘Family’, the party led by Michael Czartoryski (1696–1775) and his brother, August (1697–1782), to break through the stalemate. At the Convocation Sejm of 7 May to 23 June 1764, the Czartoryskis pushed through a series of unprecedented reforms aimed at conferring on the monarchy and the Sejm a degree of real authority over the country at large.
‘The Irishman's Prize’: Views of Canada from the British Press, 1760–1774
Authors: Lawson Philip
Published: June 2009

This was how thePublic Advertisergreeted the passage of the Quebec Act through parliament in June 1774. It was a remarkable transformation from the ecstasy evident in newspaper reports that greeted the fall of New France in 1760. As early as November 1759 the city of Nottingham singled out the North American campaign as the glorious core of British strategy. Its loyal address congratulated the king ‘particularly upon the defeat of the French army in Canada, and the taking of Quebec; an acquisition not less honourable to your majesty's forces, than destructive of the trade and commerce and power of France in North America’. What occurred in those fourteen years to produce such a stark revision of views on the conquest of New France? The answer can be found partly by surveying the English press for this period. During these years, treatment of Canadian issues in the press displayed quite distinct characteristics that revealed a whole range of attitudes and opinions on the place Canada held in the future of the North American empire. No consensus on this issue ever existed. Debate on Canada mirrored a wider discussion on the future of the polyglot empire acquired at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. In ranged from the enthusiasm of officials at Westminster to spokesmen of a strain in English thinking that challenged the whole thrust of imperial policy to date.
‘Commerce and Christianity’: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan
Authors: Porter Andrew
Published: June 2009

‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?”’ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is very little ground for hoping that Christianity will be able to make its proper way unless we can establish a lawful commerce in the country’. Britain's part in forging the connexion was abundantly clear. It was effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries', giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labour’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be ‘a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.
Rhodes and the City of London: Another View of Imperialism
Authors: Chapman S. D.
Published: June 2009

There have been any number of biographies of Cecil Rhodes but they are all concerned with his imperialist dreams and dieir realization, paying litde attention to his business career and financial connexions in London. This is surprising in view of J. A. Hobson's identification of finance as ‘the motor-power of Imperialism’ and his reference to the prime role of Rothschilds (Rhodes' financiers) and other Jewish firms. The name of Rothschild is of course mentioned in the biographies, but the merchant bank's contribution is nowhere probed and the student of business history or imperialism is left to draw his own inferences from its characteristically low profile. Perhaps Rothschilds only receive passing mention because their contribution was very modest, an initial priming for a client that needed litde external financial support? Or, following Hobson, conceivably the bankers were the real powers behind Rhodes, ‘the prime determinants of imperial policy’? Recent revelations of some of Rhodes' business deals have not improved his reputation, and it is important to know if his financial backers were in any way responsible for the unsavoury aspects of his business record.
The Origins of British–Saudi Relations: The 1915 Anglo–Saudi Treaty Revisited
Authors: Goldberg Jacob
Published: June 2009

The outbreak of the First World War in Europe and the subsequent Ottoman–German alliance presented Great Britain with some severe dilemmas as to her interests in the Middle East as well. Striving to consolidate their position in the Middle East should a war against the Ottomans become inevitable, the British began to search for local allies. In the Arabian Peninsula, three rulers emerged as potential allies: the Sharif Husayn, the guardian of the Holy Places in the Hijāz on behalf of the Ottoman sultan; the Idrisi Sayyid of 'Asīr, the area south of the Hijāz and north of Yemen; and 'Abd al-'Azīz Ibn Saud, the Amir of Najd, who became a Persian Gulf coastal ruler in May to 1913 by virtue of his occupation of Hasa the coastal strip stretching from Kuwayt to the base of the Qatar peninsula.
Direction and Purpose in British Imperial Policy, 1783–1801
Authors: Mackay D. L.
Published: June 2009

Since the publication in 1952 of the first volume of V. T. Harlow's The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, the debate on the nature and concept of empire in the twenty years after the American war of independence has focused on the questions of motivation and direction in imperial expansion. Harlow himself established the terms of the debate. The hiatus which traditional historiography had established in colonial affairs as a consequence of American independence, was swept away to be replaced with a set of themes appropriate to an empire which was undergoing continuous change after the Seven Years War. Two of these diemes in particular have caught the imagination of historians. As trouble and disenchantment spread in the colonies across the Atlantic, there was a marked swing in imperial direction towards die east – to Asia and the Pacific – where the second empire was to have its core. But the change was not only one of direction. The new empire reflected a revulsion against colonization and a clear preference for trade over dominion.
Peasants and Revolutionaries in Venice and the Veneto, 1848
Authors: Ginsborg Paul
Published: June 2009

One of the central problems that needs careful analysis and explanation by any historian of the revolutions of 1848 is that of the failure throughout Europe of the predominantly urban, middle-class revolutionary governments to secure tiie support of the peasant masses. With the notable exception of die alliance that Kossuth formed between Magyar peasants and gentry, which resulted in die heroic resistance of the Hungarians until late in 1849, there seems little evidence of die peasantry being won wholeheartedly to die revolution. In fact, far from a repetition of the Jacobin model of 1793–4, the more familiar pattern emerges of counter-revolutionary armies, composed largely of peasantry, destroying die urban revolutions. Peasants from every part of Europe made up the armies of Windischgrätz, Radetzky, Haynau and Paskievitsch which crushed Prague, Milan, Vienna, Budapest and ultimately Venice. Little or no support came from the German countryside for the dying Frankfurt Assembly in the spring of 1849; and, in the rather different conditions of France, the ballot box army from the rural areas in April and December 1848 dealt fatal blows to the aspirations of the Parisian revolution. In most of the great cities of Europe, the middle class had some limited measure of success in gaining and keeping the urban poor on their side. It was this alliance, after all, between the advanced sections of the bourgeoisie and the rapidly expanding lower classes of the cities, that was principally responsible for the toppling of so many of the Restoration governments in February and March 1848. But in a largely pre-industrial society, as Europe was at this time, the peasantry still formed the vast mass of the population, and could rightly be seen to be the arbiters of the bourgeois revolution.
’The Basque Ulster’: Navarre and the Basque Autonomy Question under the Spanish Second Republic
Authors: Blinkhorn Martin
Published: June 2009

The Spanish Civil War, as Stanley Payne has recently pointed out, was also a civil war between Spanish Basques. On the side of the Spanish Republic was the tiny and shortlived Basque Republic of Euzkadi, limited to the coastal provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa where Basque Nationalism had its stronghold; on that of the insurgents were the inland provinces of Álava and Navarre, dominated politically by the ultra-conservative, monarchist and rabidly Catholic Carlists. In a war notorious for the bitterness of its fighting, some of the most bitter took place along the front formed by the Basque mountains, now a political as well as a physical barrier dividing the Basque country. Basque Carlists seized in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa were imprisoned and executed as enemies of Euzkadi; in Navarre and Álava, Basque Nationalists met a similar fate as traitors to Spain; and when Guipúzcoa was overrun by a predominantly Carlist invading army from Navarre, it was treated as conquered and occupied territory, part of its area actually being claimed for a Navarrese ‘corridor’ to the sea.
The Anti-Jacobite Intelligence System of the English Ministers, 1715–1715
Authors: Fritz Paul S.
Published: June 2009

Following the Atterbury plot of 1722 the earl of Orrery, one of the prominent English Jacobites, told James III that they must bend all their efforts ‘to lull the Government asleep and make them believe there are no further thoughts of designs against them’. Their efforts were never to be realized, for to the English government ministerial idleness where Jacobites were concerned was a luxury it felt it could not afford. By 1716 the government had been made too well aware of the threat this group presented to its position. Reversal could only be avoided through close vigilance and the early detection of plot and conspiracy. Their earlier experiences of attempted plots, near assassinations, foreign aid, open rebellion, and the inability to gauge the movement's strength, created in the ministers between 1715 and 1745 an almost pathological fear of a Stuart restoration. It was never to subside but only to increase with each passing year, reaching its climax during the administration of Robert Walpole. Dissatisfaction with the existing system under the Hanoverians and the presence of an alternative choice on the continent were two facts that could not be overlooked. Jacobitism as a rallying cry for the disaffected in England, Ireland, and Scodand was an obvious reality. Each ministry, in varying degrees, pursued what appeared to it to be the hideous, all-pervasive force of Jacobitism – a force that seemed to assume infinite proportions the less visible it was to the eye. Jacobites must be hunted out, their secrets penetrated, their plans squashed. The best evidence of this pre-occupation of the government with fear of a Stuart restoration lies in an examination of its methods of securing intelligence through the post office, the employment of spies, and personal interviews with the Jacobites themselves.
Transportation and Rearmament in the Third Reich
Authors: Overy R. J.
Published: June 2009

The role of rearmament within the economic framework has become a theme of recurring interest in twentieth century history. During the century, however, the scope of the problem has broadened considerably, so that historians no longer talk of rearmament as merely the direct preparation of a nation's armed forces with the means of waging war. Instead the idea of‘ total war’ introduces a new dimension, indirect or economic rearmament. This second dimension involves a much broader interpretation of the political disposition of individual countries at different times and under rapidly changing circumstances, as well as an understanding of the quality of service, industry or institution that would materially contribute to the effective waging of war on the home front as well. The danger of this sort of interpretation lies in the fact that it only appears to be necessary to locate the will to war in order to understand economic or social processes of a much more sophisticated and diverse nature.
V. James Mill's Politics Reconsidered: Parliamentary Reform and the Triumph of Truth
Authors: Carr Wendell Robert
Published: June 2009

All persons concerned with the Benthamites are indebted to William Thomas's ‘James Mill's Politics’ for reopening a crucial, complex and much-debated question and for offering a number of thought-provoking opinions on die subject. Despite the ingenuity of his essay, however, many of Thomas's conclusions merit further consideration. Most of the questionable points in his argument centre on three basic issues: the meaning of the Essay on Government; the import of James Mill's distinctive theory of propaganda; and the general perspective from which James Mill's politics should be studied. Thomas's position on these issues casts doubt on his entire approach to James Mill's political theory.
The Origins of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ in English Political Language
Authors: Willman Robert
Published: June 2009

Although ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are among the most historic words in the language of English politics, their origins have never been subjected to modern scholarly study. Modern historians of the Exclusion Crisis are attracted by other aspects of the period; we find in the words little of die immediate relevance or historical continuity which Macaulay saw when he wrote glowingly of ‘two nicknames which, diough originally given in insult, were soon assumed with pride, which are still in daily use, which have spread as widely as the English race, and which will last as long as the English literature’.
The Exclusion Controversy, Pamphleteering, and Locke's Two Treatises
Authors: Tarlton Charles D.
Published: June 2009

It is now more than twenty years since Peter Laslett argued that the Exclusion controversy and not the Revolution of 1688 was the occasion of the composition of Locke's Two treatises. Nevertheless, scholarly interpretations still resist treating Two treatises as mainly an activist tract and persist in characterizing it always as something loftier, viz. ‘political philosophy’, ‘systematic moral apologia’, and the like. Resistance to the implications of a rigorous historical mode of interpretation is surely part of the problem. The perennial or transcendent purposes with which the classics are haloed often get diminished in too specific an historical location of the motives and situation of the author. Oddly, however, even critics friendly to a strictly historical approach have hesitated before the implications of Laslett's dicta that Locke wrote as a whig pamphleteer and for Shaftesbury's purposes. This, in turn, parallels the widespread contempt felt by many contemporary English historians (Locke's interpreters among them) for the early whigs. Righteous indignation against the whigs is even detectable in those modern writings from which we take our view of the whig Exclusion pamphleteers.
Rudolf Hilferding and the Application of the Political Economy of the Second International
Authors: James Harold
Published: June 2009

The Second International's socialism saw itself as a moral force. That moral force served to maintain a precarious balance between politics conducted perforce within a national framework, and an internationalist rhetoric; between politics which in practice worked within an established system, and a theoretical rejection of that old society. The First World War broke one part of this precarious balance by demonstrating the impotence of the organized working class in stopping an imperialist conflict; but another pillar of marxist orthodoxy, economic dogma, remained for the marxist parties of the post-war world. That pillar was unshaken by the collapse of societies and politics in Central Europe; it held up an intellectual elite in the world of post-war socialist politics.
III. Tories, Catholics, and the General Election of 1859
Authors: Hoppen K. Theodore
Published: June 2009

The fine and delicate balance of political forces and interests in midnineteenth century Britain is nowhere better demonstrated than in the activities of certain social and religious pressure groups during the general election campaign of 1859. The two main parties were certainly conscious of their past and of the traditions imposed upon them by those who had gone before; equally certainly the differences between them were more the outcome of these traditions than of real contemporary disagreements as to policy or outlook. The Tory administration led by Lord Derby, which had come to power in February 1858, was in a minority in the House of Commons. Its survival depended on an ability to attract dissident Whigs and men of independent views. Derby, never the most optimistic of men, had realized as early as April 1857 that his party, ‘if not an actual corpse’, was at most ‘in a state of suspended animation’.1 By the beginning of 1859 it had become evident to a number of Tory leaders, and particularly to Disraeli, that if the
government were to survive, it would be necessary to obtain help from quarters hitherto untapped by the party. A peculiar set of circumstances led Disraeli to look to sections of the Roman Catholic community for such support. Although Catholicism was a growing force in England, the centre of its political operations lay of course in Ireland, which then returned 105 members to Westminster.
IV. The British Government and Imperial Economic Unity, 1890–1895
Authors: Trainor Luke
Published: June 2009

When Joseph Chamberlain launched his striking tariff reform campaign in 1903 he was contributing to a very old debate. At the centre of the discussion had usually been the triangular relationship between free trade, protection and imperial unity. Were preferential tariffs compatible with British free trade? Was imperial preference necessary to maintain imperial unity? Could an empire divided against itself on tariff questions stand? Questions of that type became increasingly pertinent in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Entry for British exports into continental markets had become more difficult in the 'eighties, not only because of the tariff barriers which were more prominent but also because Britain found herself with few bargaining counters in the European tariff negotiations. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1860 had provided that neither party would, in its own country, subject the produce of the other party to higher duties than similar produce from other countries. This Most-Favoured-Nation clause had been the basis of a series of commercial treaties linking the European nations. The new network which arose in the ’eighties, covering Europe and the Americas, was negotiated largely without British intervention and the classification and rates were not designed to favour Britain. Britain sometimes even had difficulty in securing renewal of her M.F.N. agreements.
VI. The Royal Society and the Government Grant: Notes on the Administration of Scientific Research, 1849–191
Authors: Macleod R. M.
Published: June 2009

The development of government participation in the support of research is one of the most significant characteristics of nineteenth-century science. As public money became available for science, the social framework of research underwent a profound transformation. This process of transformation is not easy to define, but the response of scientific societies and institutions sometimes provides significant clues.
Family Responsibility and State Responsibility in Britain Before the Welfare State
Authors: Crowther M. A.
Published: June 2009

In his autobiography, Joseph Arch recalled a trial which had taken place in Bedford in 1875, and which had caused much local dissatisfaction:

Samuel Dawson, a farm labourer aged fifty-seven, whose wages averaged twelve shillings a week, was sent to Bedford gaol for two months with hard labour…because he could not pay one shilling a week towards the maintenance of his parents… It was a cruel business and it touched scores and scores of labourers on the raw^-fof'this question of maintaining parents was a burning one.
The Unemployment Policy of the National Government, 1931–1936
Authors: Miller Fredric M.
Published: June 2009

The British response to the mass unemployment of the 1930s was in striking contrast to that of the other major industrialized countries. Only in Britain was a policy of accepting the apparent logic of capitalism, and waiting out the slump, successfully maintained in a reasonably stable, democratic setting. In an article on ‘The New Deal, National Socialism and the Great Depression’, John A. Garraty wrote that ‘in both Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany economic objectives were subordinated whenever necessary to political aims’. In neither country was there ‘any consistently held theory about either the causes of the depression or how to end it’ Britain under the National government represents almost precisely the opposite case. First, the government's policy of minimal direct intervention to relieve unemployment was directed towards achieving its central objective of ensuring that the depression would cause no fundamental changes in existing economic and social relationships. Immediate political considerations were subordinated to this overriding goal, Secondly, the government's approach, though not all of its particular actions, was based on a rational, comprehensive and widely accepted theoretical foundation.
II. The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Colloquy of Poissy
Authors: Nugent Donald G.
Published: June 2009

In a whimsical scene of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine enter the banquet hall only to have an invisible Faustus snatch away their dinners and, in a truly spectacular exit, scatter the banquet hall with fireworks.1 The Cardinal of Lorraine has been surrounded by fireworks for four hundred years. This is an effort to give him some peace at last.

The concern here is a symposium of quite another sort, the Colloquy of Poissy. Poissy, the last great Colloquy of the Reformation, was an attempt at religious reconciliation of Calvinist and Catholic within the framework of the Gallican Church.
Problems in Jacobean Administration: Was Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, A Reformer?
Authors: Peck Linda Levy
Published: June 2009

Complaints about corrupt administrative practices were endemic to the Tudor-Stuart state. During the reign of James I, however, the issue of corruption was transformed from a staple of political discourse to an issue which not only aggravated administrative problems but also undermined the crown's very legitimacy. With the impeachment in 1621 of James' lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, for accepting bribes while holding judicial office, parliament forged for itself a weapon capable not only of rooting out corruption but unpopular government ministers as well. When administrative reform was successfully undertaken by Charles I, it came too late to resurrect the credit of the court or to restore that identification of monarch and subjects which Elizabeth had brought to its apogee only decades before. Yet the problem posed by Jacobean corruption is complex. Many of the practices for which the Jacobean court stood condemned were characteristic of the early modern state, and energetic attempts to reform the administrative apparatus were, in fact, undertaken throughout the reign. What then differentiates Jacobean administration from that of Elizabeth or the Georges and what caused the critical failure of reform? Answers to these questions may be suggested by taking a close look at the findings and fate of several investigations undertaken by one reform-minded official.
The British Government and the Governor Eyre Controversy, 1865–1875
Authors: Knox B. A.
Published: June 2009

In the several works on the great controversy aroused by Governor Edward John Eyre's measures for suppressing the Morant Bay rebellion, in Jamaica in October 1865, British government reactions and decisions have been surprisingly neglected. For the best part of two years at the beginning of this period the government had to deal with a most serious political as well as colonial crisis. Two successive ministries were involved in this. Lord Russell's Liberals received news of the rebellion in the depths of the 1865–6 parliamentary recess. Public dispute was therefore kept, temporarily, at a distance which policy-makers could welcome. The government appointed, in December 1865, a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Jamaican troubles. Its report, which alone amongst official sources has attracted much attention from writers on the subject, was released shortly before the end of June 1866, when the Liberals, defeated in parliament, resigned. The Derby Conservatives then taking office continued the Liberals' policies over Jamaica and Governor Eyre, a deceptively simple task.
Liberal versus Liberal: 1874. A Surrebuttal
Authors: Hurst Michael
Published: June 2009

Let us return to the undying fascination of Bradford and Sheffield. Like Wright before him, Temmel misses the point of my using the Bradford and Sheffield examples. Many schoolteachers often take the line that if the slowest children in their classes understand something the rest can be taken to have mastered it. In a somewhat similar way, I argued that if the Liberal party could be shown to be vastly more catholic than Vincent's definition allowed for in two large places where the structure of society was least favourable to a Right and Centre, then his overall contentions would have been brought most seriously into question. 1874 was a fair date to choose and comprehensive Liberalism was easily to be observed. Examination of the two boroughs showed that British Liberalism was much more broadly-faceted than Vincentian theory allowed; that ‘Whiggery’ was not just a family word, divorced in several respects from a doctrinal context; and that the Centre and the Radicals were in fact varied. If the Centre and Radicals flourished in those places, a fortiori they would elsewhere. The ‘slowest’ so to speak had obliged with data and so the Vincent case fell to the ground. Such an approach makes some intellectual demands upon the reader, not only logical but imaginative and factual. Nevertheless, it should not have proved too much for any able person in any serious profession.
‘A Ship with Two Rudders’: ‘Righetto Marrano’ and the Inquisition in Venice
Authors: Pullan Brian
Published: June 2009

In Venice on 5 October 1570:

A man of ordinary height, dressed in the foreign style, with a curved black beard, was escorted into the Holy Office and asked his age.

He answered, ‘Some forty years’.

He was asked his name, his surname, his father, his status, his country and his employment.

He answered, ‘My name is Abraham, called Righetto, my father's Num Rig (a Spaniard of Portugal), my occupation is that of an exchange-broker; I am no Christian but a Jew; and I have been detained in the prisons of the Most Excellent Council of Ten’.

He was asked, ‘For what reason have their Most Excellent Lordships sent you to this Holy Office?’

He answered, ‘I know not, and cannot imagine, for I have never heard of Jews entering this Office’.

He was asked, ‘Do you know what Office it is?’ He answered, ‘This moment I was told it was the Office of the Holy Inquisition’.

He was asked, ‘In the last ten years, where have you lived?’

He answered, ‘Lately I have been in Spain, and was there three years from leaving this place, and I journeyed, too, to France; and seven months have passed since my return to Venice’.
‘That Horrid Electorate’ or ‘Ma Patrie germanique’? George III, Hanover, and theFürstenbundof 1785
Authors: Blanning T. C. W.
Published: June 2009

The League of Princes (Fürstenbund) was founded on 23 July 1785, when the representatives of Prussia, Hanover and Saxony signed at Berlin a main treaty and several secret articles relating to the domestic affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. During the following months a number of other German princes joined the League, notably the elector of Mainz, the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, the margrave of Baden and the dukes of Brunswick, Saxony-Gotha and Saxony-Weimar.s Its general objective was the preservation of the imperial status quo. More specifically, it was aimed at the Emperor Joseph II and the innumerable schemes of expansion popularly attributed to him, not always without justification. More specifically still, the League was designed to prevent any renewal of Joseph's most cherished ambition - the exchange of the Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands (which embraced the larger part of present-day Belgium) for the Electorate of Bavaria. From the European perspective, the League was soon overshadowed by the reopening of the Eastern Question in 1787, eclipsed by the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1788 and finally extinguished by the Austro-Prussianrapprochementin 1792, but during 1785–6 it assumed great importance. Not the least affected was Great Britain, whose king - albeit in his capacity as elector of Hanover - was a founder-member of the League and one of its most enthusiastic protagonists. Despite the official British view - repeatedad nauseamto sceptical foreign diplomats - that Georg Kurfürst von Hannover and George III King of England were two entirely separate beings and that consequently the actions of the former could have not the least effect on the latter's domains, British policy could not help but be influenced.
Reform, Repression and Unrest at the Inns of Court, 1518–1558
Authors: Fisher R. M.
Published: June 2009

In 1546 the members of Lincoln's Inn beheld a most peculiar sight in their communal hall. The traditional midsummer light of St John had been replaced with the ridiculous head of a horse. Three young members were charged by the benchers. Two who refused to confess were expelled from the house and imprisoned in the Fleet by the lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and Sir Roger Cholmley, the chief baron of the Exchequer and a former bencher. The other culprit, who confessed and made humble suit to the bench, was merely excluded from commons. After the inevitable petitions, all were forgiven ‘their said lewd and nowghtie mysdemeanours’ and shortly remitted into the house.
A Utopian Tory Revolutionary at Cambridge: The Political Ideas and Schemes of James Bernard, 1834–1839
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: June 2009

Agricultural distress following the Napoleonic wars evoked various responses from those classes whose interests were most immediately bound up with the land. Such factors as decreasing market prices and hence wages, a falling standard of living, and rising indebtedness incited, on the one hand, the disciples of Captain Swing to attempt to restore to the agricutural labourer his dispossessed inheritance, or at least to register protest at its loss. For the landowners and farmers, on the other hand, constitutional means of redress were clearly more acceptable, and between 1815 and 1845 there were several attempts to develop a protectionist organization of farmers’ associations, led, particularly in the early years, by George Webb Hall, and in the latter often associated with Lord Chandos.
The London Lobbies in the Later Sixteenth Century
Authors: Archer Ian
Published: June 2009

Historians of Tudor government have tended to write about the relationship between rulers and ruled in terms of the ability of central government to impose on the localities things which they did not want, in particular the Reformation and taxes to fight wars. Students of the localities have written in terms of the local obstructions in the way of the enforcement of central directives. Students of parliament have examined that institution in terms of its power to block government initiatives. Students of the institutions of central government have explored their subject in terms of the degree of ‘bureaucratic’ development exhibited by these institutions, in other words, how well suited they were to the task of efficient government. But there is another aspect to the functioning of Tudor government, and that is the ways in which subjects could secure their own objectives by use of its machinery. Recent research has begun to provide some insight into this neglected topic. It is axiomatic to revisionist writing on parliament that parliament was, primarily concerned with legislation, and that legislation was as much a matter for localities and interest groups as it was for the crown. Diarmaid MacCulloch and Stephen Kershaw have pointed to the ways in which local communities turned to the central courts, and even the privy council, for support against aggressive landlordism. The accessibility of parliament, the council and the law courts, it may be argued, was a major factor behind the stability of English society in this period, offering a variety of fora within which redress of grievances might be pursued.
Courtiers and Politics in Elizabethan Herefordshire: Sir James Croft, his Friends and his Foes
Authors: Tighe W. J.
Published: June 2009

For well over a decade studies in local history have occupied a significant position in the historiography of early modern England. In particular, the study of the ‘county community’ as the most significant English political and governmental unit and as the primary sphere of social and affectional loyalties for the greater number of those Englishmen constituting the political nation has become securely established. Within this wide and fruitful field for continuing research the theme of the ‘points of contact’ or reciprocal communication between the court and the county, Westminster and the provinces, which Sir Geoffrey Elton raised not so long ago and which Kevin Sharpe more recently attempted to apply to the problems of government in early Stuart England, suggests that investigations of the gentry of a particular county might illustrate how this interchange between the centre and the localities functioned. For such a study to prove fruitful, however, one prerequisite would appear to be necessary: a member of a prominent county family, perhaps its head, who also holds a major office of state or position at court. Such a man was Sir James Croft whose eminent position in Herefordshire was founded on the contacts he made and the patronage he attracted in the last years of Henry VIII's reign. Although this position was threatened in the years of his disgrace during Queen Mary's reign, it gathered strength again in the 1560s, and reached its apogee during the following two decades. Between 1570 and his death in 1590, he served at court as comptroller of the household.
John Simon and the post-war National Liberal Party: an Historical Postscript
Authors: Dutton David
Published: June 2009

Historians have not expended much energy in tracing the fortunes of the National Liberal party. Though the party enjoyed a theoretically independent existence for nearly forty years, there is general agreement that it is best seen as a mere adjunct of Conservatism. Writers whose sympathies lie with the mainstream Liberal party have been particularly dismissive. Roy Douglas notes that as early as the autumn of 1933 the Liberal Nationals ‘had become Conservatives for all practical purposes’. In similar terms, Sir Dingle Foot concludes that they ‘became the obedient servants of their Tory masters. In return they received their quota of offices and honours.’ Yet while the policies of National Liberalism became increasingly indistinguishable from those of their Conservative allies, many who bore this label clung tenaciously to it and proved most reluctant to give up their independent identity and ‘the grand old name of Liberal.’ The fortunes of the post-war party, and in particular the role played by its elder statesman, Lord Simon, are not without interest for the student of the modern British political system.
Between Mars and Mammon; the East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1832
Authors: Peers Douglas M.
Published: June 2009

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.
Authority vs. Democracy: Prussian Officials in the German Elections of 1898 and 1903
Authors: Fairbairn Brett
Published: June 2009

The suffrage for the German Reichstag had by the 1890s become the most potent symbol of democratic ideas in imperial Germany. ‘Universal, equal, secret, and direct’, as contemporaries described it, the Reichstag suffrage stood in contrast to restrictive state suffrages as a model of liberty and fairness. By the turn of the century, 70–80 per cent of adult male German citizens took advantage of their right to participate in this, the freest of all German political arenas.
John Reeves's prosecution for a seditious libel, 1795–6: a study in political cynicism
Authors: Beedell A. V.
Published: June 2009

Considered by many of his contemporaries in 1792–3 as the saviour of the British state, at his subsequent trial in 1796, Reeves was charged by the house of commons with seditious libel. The case offers an opportunity to scrutinize the current revisionist position which claims that loyalist values and ideologies, such as those promulgated by Reeves and his Association, were widely accepted and functioned as a natural bulwark against revolutionary principles and the destabilizing of the British state. But the publication of Reeves's ultra-tory tractThoughts on the English governmentin 1795 not only provided the Foxite minority with a focus for its parliamentary attack on the 1795 Treason and Sedition bills, but, because of the overwhelming condemnation of the tract, forced Pitt publicly to repudiate Reeves and the entire ultra-tory position. Indeed, it is argued here that Reeves's church and king loyalist crusade of 1792–3 had been tolerated by Pitt's ministry merely as a convenient means of political intimidation and found little resonance in the political culture of the house of commons.
Trotsky andBor'ba
Authors: Thatcher Ian D.
Published: June 2009

Leon Trotsky's contributions to the journalBor'ba,published in St Petersburg between February and July 1914, have been overlooked in scholarly accounts of his biography. This paper has two aims. First, to provide an exposition of Trotsky's contributions to this journal; and, second, to explain why they have been forgotten. Three explanations are offered. First, Trotsky biographers look to Deutscher's trilogy for the main events in Trotsky's life, and he does not mentionBor'ba.Second, Trotsky himself did not refer to his work for the journal in his autobiographyMy Life.Finally, Stalin did not use Lenin's critique of Trotsky's participation inBor'baas further ammunition against Trotsky in the power struggle after Lenin's death.
Joseph II's Reshaping of the Austrian Church
Authors: Dickson P. G. M.
Published: June 2009

The article draws on recently discovered manuscript sources to re-examine Joseph II's structural changes to the Catholic and Uniat church in the Austrian central lands between 1781 and 1790. In contrast to the extensive literature dealing with state policy towards church authority, or Josephinism, these changes have traditionally been the subject of guesswork and misstatement. Joseph has been credited with nationalizing the church, ruthlessly cutting down its monastic numbers, placing the secular clergy on fixed stipends, and financing a wholesale increase in bishoprics, parishes and secular clergy by extensive sales of monastic lands. The article presents new figures for clerical numbers and income before and after Joseph's reforms, and argues that while the latter were radical (though not always consistent) in intention, they were much less so in execution, partly because the church's resources, exposed by the emperor's massive investigation, proved less extensive than he had expected.
The Rolls of Parliament, 1449–1547
Authors: Elton G. R.
Published: June 2009

The Roll of Parliament, supposedly the master record of that institution, actually occupied that place until some time in the sixteenth century. Yet it has never been systematically studied for the period after parliament had institutionally emerged in the middle of the fourteenth century. Since the rolls down to 1504 and for several of the parliaments of Henry VIII have been in print for some 200 years, their contents have been used often enough; but no one has subjected the originals to scrutiny, so that the documents themselves have not been made to tell what they can. This paper will consider the rolls for the years 1449–1547, the period covered by the extant early journals of the house of lords which have already been analysed. The manuscripts reveal that the print hides many interesting features, but since the texts as printed are sound enough it will at times be convenient to use them for purposes of reference.