The English occupation of Tournai has recently generated far-reaching claims about its importance; allegedly Tournai provided a foretaste of certain developments of the Henrician Reformation. This article argues that Tournai was treated as an integral part of Henry VIII's ‘kingdom of France’ and its status consistently distinguished from that of the English kingdom. It was not, as has been suggested, granted representation in the English parliament. The argument that advanced ideas of ‘sovereignty’ derived from fifteenth-century French thought entered into English political discourse through Tournai is also countered. Important jurisdictional points were raised, notably over the administration of the bishopric, involving three powers, England, France, and the Habsburg government of Flanders. But Henry's insistence on his rights as a sovereign prince were directed against France, not, as has been claimed, against the papacy. Nothing in Henry's dealings with Tournai transcended well-established English doctrine and practice about the relationship between the political authority and the church. Nor did Henry's treatment of the conquered town evoke novel doctrines of royal power; it followed closely precedents set by Henry V. The conquest of Tournai increased the self-confidence of Henry VIII's government in both domestic and international affairs; but largely through Henry's belief that he was successfully emulating the military achievement of Henry V, not through any input of novel political doctrine.

This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later prudently disowned them. Closer inspection of Hacket's exploits sheds fresh light on the relationship between experimental Calvinist piety and the religious and magical culture of the unlettered rural laity – a relationship still widely presented as bitterly adversarial. Relocated in the context of contemporary attitudes to prophecy and insanity, the episode illuminates the eclecticism of early modern belief and the manner in which medical and theological explanations for bizarre behaviour comfortably coexisted and mingled. Variously labelled a witch, visionary, and raving lunatic, Hacket's case reveals the extent to which such roles, diagnoses, and stereotypes are socially, culturally, and politically shaped and conditioned. In exploiting the incident to discredit Presbyterian activism within the Church of England, leading conformist polemicists anticipated the main thrust of the campaign against religious ‘enthusiasm’ mounted by Anglican elites in the Interregnum, Restoration, and early Enlightenment.

In a recent contribution to the debate over the operational significance of the Old Poor Law, Peter Solar has argued that ‘the local financing of poor relief gave English property owners, individually and collectively, a direct pecuniary interest in ensuring that the parish's demographic and economic development was balanced’. His survey of the implications of the attempt to maintain this equilibrium, however, fails to take account of the social and political relationships between rate-payers, rate-receivers, and parish officers. In seeking to integrate considerations of power into the analysis of the relief of the poor, by contrast, this paper locates social welfare provision in the context of the authority structures of several parishes in Holland Fen (Lincolnshire) over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emphasizes the role of the parish vestry in regulating and relieving the poor; demonstrates the extraordinary scale of poor relief in the local context; and argues that even in the open parishes of the Lincolnshire fenland, hostility to poor migrants could be marked, resulting even in the prohibition of the marriages of the poor. The politics of the poor rate implied the exclusion of poor strangers in the interests of relieving the ancient settled poor.

The career of the MP and poet Christopher Brooke, in particular his The ghost of Richard the third (1614) and his activity in the 1614 ‘addled’ parliament, forms the basis of this study of Jacobean political culture. Brooke's career foregrounds the close interaction of political and literary cultures in the period; he was a leading member of the political circle, the ‘Sireniacs’, which had strong parliamentary ties, and was one of the Inns of Court-based ‘oppositional’ Spenserian poets. Together with his fellow ‘Sireniac’ MPs, Brooke vehemently opposed the definition of impositions as the domain of absolute rather than ordinary powers of the crown because of the threat this posed to the rights of parliament and the subject. The ghost of Richard the third provides an example of parliamentary debates entering a wider print culture, where impositions merged with broader civic issues. Political language in this period was not confined to the realms of high theory and Brooke's poem illustrates the complex mediation of political discourses through literary forms. A humanist discourse of tyranny provided Brooke with a coded language, enabling him to articulate his concern for the health of the commonwealth and to address areas of ideological conflict in early Stuart political culture.

John Cusacke, an Irish gentleman who was educated on the continent and worked on the fringes of the court of wards, constructed a striking re-reading of kingship, law, colonial government, and parliament in a series of tracts written between 1615 and 1647. His writings provide insight both into seventeenth-century colonial theory and early Stuart political thought. Shaped in the cauldron of Irish land struggles and continental political thought, Cusacke rejected Old English constitutionalism, arguing instead that Ireland was a colonial dependency of England. Further, to gain royal favour for various projects, Cusacke recast contemporary conceptions of parliament and common law, rejecting the centrality of custom, insisting that the king was the law maker and vigorously attacking Sir Edward Coke. Cusacke's writings reached the libraries of James I and Charles I, and their officials Sir Robert Naunton, master of the court of wards, and attorney-general Sir Robert Bankes. Cusacke's tracts graphically demonstrate the existence of an absolutist political discourse in early Stuart Britain applied not to issues of theology or of international law but to domestic politics.

Seventeenth-century English men and women, caught in the upheaval of the Civil War, sought to understand what it was to be English and sought to grasp England's proper role in the world. One of the ways in which they did this was through their encounters with other people. The Irish had a long history of interaction with the English, but in the middle of the seventeenth century their role in defining Englishness became acute. Late Tudor and early Jacobean commentaries on Ireland had stressed the superiority of English culture while acknowledging some virtues of Ireland and its people that would make it amenable to beneficial transformation by the English. In the middle of the century, occasioned by the events of the 1641 uprising, this ameliorative view of the Irish gave way to the view that English and Irish were incompatible. Earlier studies have emphasized the role of religion in the discordant relationship between the two peoples in the seventeenth century. This essay maintains that the shift in attitude had as much to do with ethnicity as it did with religion and considers the central role of John Temple and his treatise The Irish rebellion in changing English attitudes on both a national and local level. The study suggests that Temple's view became the dominant one for more than 200 years because of the demographic changes within the Irish community in London and puritan concerns about a godly community that occurred at the time Temple set forth his ideas.

Since the appearance of volume I of The decline and fall of the Roman empire in 1776, the religion of Edward Gibbon has been subject to intense debate. He has been variously identified as an atheist, a deist, even as a somewhat detached Christian. Examination of his relations, both personal and scholarly, with the varieties of religion and irreligion current in eighteenth-century Britain leads to the conclusion that he remained resolutely critical of all such positions. He did not share the convictions of dogmatic freethinkers, still less those of determined atheists. The product of a nonjuring family, Gibbon benefited from the scholarly legacy of several high church writers, while maintaining a critical attitude towards the claims of Anglican orthodoxy. It was through the deliberate and ironical adoption of the idiom of via media Anglicanism, represented by such theologians as the clerical historian John Jortin, that Gibbon developed a woundingly sceptical appraisal of the history of the early church. This stance made it as difficult for his contemporaries to identify Gibbon's religion as it has since proved to be for modern historians. Gibbon appreciated the central role of religion in shaping history, but he remained decidedly sceptical as to Christianity's ultimate status as revealed and unassailable truth.

By the later eighteenth century, the Danish–Norwegian monarchy had a convincing track record for stability and the near-absence of domestic unrest. That stability, despite the wide-ranging claims of the Royal Law of 1665, depended less on force than on a consensus derived from religious unity, a traditionally approachable monarch, and a fairly accessible system of justice. But the crown also relied on a widespread loyalty which was bound to come under strain at the accession of the demented Christian VII in 1766. Despite the removal of censorship restrictions in 1770, however, a convincing public discussion of social and political issues was slow to emerge. Only after the resolution of the political crisis in 1784 did the government feel sufficiently secure not only to tolerate, but even to come to rely on, an unprecedented if moderate public debate. That debate, as reflected through samples of the Copenhagen press studied here, remained even in the 1790s largely supportive of the view that absolutism offered a viable way to lasting reform.

In contrast to the prevailing historiographical consensus, this essay will seek to demonstrate that there was a widespread and persistent concern with foreign policy in the early years of the French Revolution, the product of the interplay between inherited diplomatic assumptions on the one hand and revolutionary politics and values on the other. In particular, it will show how and why public opinion in France after 1789 abandoned its pre-revolutionary concern with Britain, Russia, and the global balance of commercial power in favour of Austria, the émigrés, and the security of the frontiers. In this light, considerable attention will be given to the development of Austrophobia in the period. Rooted in traditional French distrust of the Habsburg dynasty and reinforced by widespread opposition to the Austrian alliance of 1756, this would find its most virulent expression in the popular myth of a sinister counter-revolutionary ‘Austrian committee’ headed by Marie-Antoinette. The argument of the essay will turn upon the links between the emergence of that myth and the popularization of the ideas of Louis XV's unofficial diplomacy – the secret du roi – and its outspoken apologist Jean-Louis Favier. Adopted by various disciples after his death in 1784, Favier's ideas gained in popularity as the menace of counter-revolutionary invasion – aroused in particular by the emperor's reoccupation of the Austrian Netherlands in July 1790 – began to dominate the popular forums of revolutionary politics. They would ultimately help to generate a political climate in which the Brissotins could engineer an almost universally popular declaration of war against Austria less than two years after the revolutionaries had declared peace and friendship to the entire world. From this perspective, the growth of Austrophobia between 1789 and 1792 and its profound influence on the development of revolutionary foreign policy might usefully be described as the triumph of ‘Favier's heirs’.

Lyndon B. Johnson fails to mention the 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights in his autobiography and the conference has been equally ignored by historians. Yet this conference, promised in Johnson's famous Howard University speech in 1965, was to be the high point of Johnson's already considerable efforts on civil rights. Underlying the confusion and rancour that characterized the conference held in June 1966 (but more especially the ‘planning conference’, held in November 1965) was a struggle to maintain the integrative impetus of the ‘American Creed’ against the realization that integration was unlikely to take place except in the very long term. The conference transcripts, recorded verbatim, provide a useful reminder of the very different mood of the mid-1960s, suggesting that the extent of panic after the Watts riot went beyond racial issues into fears for the survival of political and governmental institutions. Especially evident is the fragmentation of Johnson's liberal civil rights coalition before dissent on the Vietnam War ensured his downfall.

The existence of an Independent church at Stepney presided over by William Greenhill is already well known as too is the association of the eastern suburbs generally with religious and political radicalism in the 1640s. What is less familiar, however, is the fact that Stepney's neighbouring parish, St Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel, also came to possess an Independent church gathered under the divine Thomas Walley (or Whalley), and that prominent members of that church and their sectarian allies had for some time assumed key roles in local politics and were eventually to engineer an Independent take-over of the parish after a protracted struggle. This article will focus upon the composition of the Whitechapel Independents, the form taken by the parochial factionalism, the identities and reactions of their local opponents and the way in which events and personalities in Whitechapel related to broader religious and political themes in the capital.

The newly available documentation from the Russian archives sheds new light upon many aspects of Soviet-British relationship during World War II and the early Cold War. One such relatively unexplored facet of this relationship is propaganda interaction between the two countries. While the organization and technique of both Soviet and British propaganda machines have been studied rather extensively, there has been very little documented analysis of an actual impact of British propaganda on the Soviet regime and society in the mid-1940s (although some internal estimates within the British government must have been made at the time). Now, with the opening of Agitprop (department of agitation and propaganda of the central committee of the CPSU) records it becomes possible to measure this impact, including Soviet steps to manage it. A good case study in this regard can be made out of Soviet internal reaction to the main mouthpieces of the British printed propaganda targeted on the Soviet audience in 1942–8 – a journal, Britansky Soyuznik (The British Ally) and its digest companion Britanskaia Khronika (The British Chronicle).

Devising liberty: preserving and creating freedom in the new American republic. Edited by David Thomas Konig. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+383. £35.00. ISBN 0-804-72536-5

Benjamin Lincoln and the American revolution. By David B. Mattern. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xii+307. $39.95. ISBN 1-570-03068-5

The devious Dr. Franklin, colonial agent. Benjamin Franklin's years in London. By David T. Morgan. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+273. $34.95. ISBN 0-865-54525-1

General Richard Montgomery and the American revolution: from redcoat to rebel. By Hal T. Shelton. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+245. $45.00. ISBN 0-814-77975-1

The role of instructive, heroic, and exemplary themes in accounts of great national events has a complex history of its own. American independence and its aftermath provide rich examples. Ever since the events themselves, conventional and popular accounts have either featured individuals as heroes or role models, or dwelt on the struggle for values such as liberty and democracy. These traditions became so deeply rooted in patterns of discourse that academic historians have never been able to avoid engaging with them. Countless studies have embodied or responded to some kind of patriotic or hagiographic purpose, and such concerns to different degrees underlie the works under discussion here. The ‘new’ cultural history, however, has sparked a fresh interest in the ‘exemplary’ as a cultural construction in itself, and an increasing number of scholars are engaged in tracing the creation of image and identity, reputation and memory. All the works here touch on this concern, too, though they fall short of embracing the new agenda fully. Taken together, they illustrate the instability of what might be called the ‘traditional exemplary’: certainty that a historical episode or figure can illustrate an ideal principle or characteristic.

The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7

Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8

Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited by Isser Woloch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1

Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Mona Ozouf et al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political culture, and by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather than through l'histoire événementielle of ministries and elections. The three books reviewed here all relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly in The past in French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon, artistic culture was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe was left to nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom. Yet whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make only passing references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary adjuncts to such an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which enables one to put l'histoire événementielle aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within the political class. The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures. What, though, creates these communities?