Letters are a literary resource often under-estimated by scholars. Sackville's letters from France, to Thomas Heneage and Elizabeth I, demonstrate how the application of literary means, guided by a partial viewpoint, creates the circumstances in which the political management of actuality can occur. These letters are generally known only from extracts and digests in calendars, which give no hint of their literary forms and styles. No one has yet commented on the significance of their rhetorical tactics. The full context of the correspondence shows Sackville exploiting existing relationships with Heneage and the queen to build up good will and credibility for himself as a lively and judicious personality. In particular, the previously unpublished representation of his secret interview with Catherine de Medici exploits the actuality of dramatic dialogue far beyond the normal use of so-called verbatim report in diplomatic correspondence. This representation raises questions of how far Sackville interpreted what he heard and why. The opportunity to compare Catherine's account of their meeting with Sackville's shows him selecting and emphasizing certain details, while suppressing others, in anticipation of his reader's response.

Anglican parish registers have been the basis for most studies of population trends and characteristics in early modern England, and one of the most important of the techniques used in analysing them has been family reconstitution. But Anglican registers at all times were an incomplete and inaccurate record of vital events, and their defects tended to become more pronounced in the later part of the period during which they afford the chief source of empirical information about population behaviour. And there are inherent limitations and biases in the results that can be obtained by family reconstitution. This article attempts to describe the range of difficulties and dilemmas involved in studying the demography of populations in the past when using this source of data and this technique of analysis. A variety of tests is deployed to establish the degree of reliability attaching to the results obtained in a recent exercise based on the family reconstitution of 26 parishes, and more generally to assess the opportunities open to scholarship in this area and the pitfalls associated with such work. The conclusion is that reliable results can be obtained but that great care is needed in the selection of suitable registers, and that a number of tests should be employed to monitor the internal consistency and the demographic plausibility of any findings.

This article surveys the expansion of Russian peasant settlement from 1550, when most of the 6·5 million peasants lived in the forest-heartland of Muscovy, to 1897, when around fifty million Russian peasants lived throughout large parts of the immense Russian empire. It seeks to explain how this massive expansion was achieved with reference to different facets of the ‘frontier’: the political frontier of the Russian state; the environmental frontier between forest and steppe; the lifeway frontier between settled peasant agriculture and pastoral nomadism; and the ‘hierarchical frontier’ between the Russian authorities and the mass of the peasantry. The article draws attention to the different ways in which peasant-migrants adapted to the variety of new environments they encountered, and stresses interaction across each facet of the frontier. Nevertheless, by 1897, the coincidence between the two main types of environment and the two principal lifeways of the population had been virtually eliminated in much of the Russian empire outside central Asia. This was a consequence of the expansion of Russia's political frontiers, mass peasant migration, the ploughing up of vast areas of pasture land, and the sedentarization of many nomadic peoples. The expansion of peasant settlement helps explain the durability of Russian peasant society throughout the period from the mid-sixteenth to the late-nineteenth centuries.

England's decision to opt for the reformed religion had major repercussions in her foreign relations. Continental and Scottish protestants now looked to their royal co-religionist for protection. An intervention in Scotland on behalf of the reformers was triumphantly successful. When the French protestants took arms in 1562 they turned to Elizabeth for aid. Cecil was hesitant; Robert Dudley, however, backed by Throckmorton, urged armed intervention. The queen agreed but drove a hard bargain. The Huguenots were to hand over Newhaven (Le Havre) to be held by the English until Calais was returned. She in turn loaned money to hire mercenaries. From the beginning the alliance faltered. Elizabeth refused succour to the Huguenots besieged in Rouen. Condé and Coligny opened negotiations with Catherine de Medici, in which English interests were disregarded. In due course the assassination of the duke of Guise, the catholic champion, opened the way for a settlement. The reunited French parties joined in an assault on Newhaven; a humiliating surrender followed. The ill success of this venture was decisive in shaping the future course of English relations with their continental co-religionists. At home it marked the emergence of Robert Dudley as a major player in high politics.

Although Mary Tudor had reigned for five years before her, Elizabeth Tudor's reign has often been treated as if it raised issues of English female monarchy de novo. The argument of this paper is that the study of Mary's reign is important in its own right, as well as a necessary introduction for any wider study of English female monarchy. It was during Mary's reign that the accommodations consequent upon the occupation of the traditionally male monarchy by the first female occupant were devised. Those strategies subsequently defined central symbolic forms of Elizabeth's reign and shaped their readings. Moreover, the shifts in ritual and representations during the first queen's reign made to accommodate that other novelty, a king as consort, throw considerable light on the underlying political assumptions of the times, as well as the more gendered aspects of constitutional theory.

This essay challenges the established interpretation of the political allegiances of the miners of north-west Derbyshire. It shows that, far from being dominated by parliamentarian and puritan ideas in 1642, the miners were deeply divided in their response to the war. Both the king and the parliament were able to recruit troops from amongst the miners throughout the first civil war. From this, a broader critique of recent historical work on popular politics and popular allegiances before and during the English Revolution is mounted. It is argued that ‘post-revisionist’ and Marxian historians have deployed overly schematic and deterministic models of allegiance which frequently fail to reflect the complexity of popular responses to war and revolution in England in the 1640s.

This essay explores the circulation of rumour and news among those at the lower levels of society in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It does so through an analysis of the court records in which people were indicted for spreading false reports or speaking seditious words and which are now preserved in assize files or amid the state papers. These sources reveal the networks of communication by which information was disseminated nationwide and shed light upon the relationship between oral, manuscript and printed media. They show how wild stories could be whipped up in the act of transmission and were fuelled by the political insecurities of this period. At the same time a more sophisticated awareness of current affairs is evident in some illicit conversations which suggest that even humble people were participating in the arguments which anticipated the Civil War.

This article explores the Jacobean oath of allegiance as an act of government. It suggests that historians have misread the intentions of the regime in its formulation and enforcement of the oath. Consequently they have underestimated the capacity of the regime to enforce its will on catholic nonconformists. An analysis of contemporary reaction to the oath demonstrates that early modern government could exert its power in ways which revisionist historians have either missed or denied. The oath should be understood as an exceptionally subtle and well-constructed rhetorical essay in the exercise of state power, and this we see in the devastating effect it had on the structure of Jacobean Romanist dissent. The evidence presented here suggests that this statutory oath was not a simple profession of civil allegiance to which English Romanist dissenters responded with a characteristic mixture of paranoia and politically illiterate confusion. Rather it was an exceedingly complex association of religious and political ideas, a diabolically effective polemical cocktail, which did not have to rely merely on the mechanics of a bureaucracy to work its intended course against the Romanist fraction within the English state.

The capture of Cadiz in 1596 was a spectacular but short-lived success in England's war against Spain. More enduring were the many partisan accounts of the victory, which were prepared and disseminated by various officers from the expedition. This article traces these rival narratives and explores their circulation in manuscript form, including the earl of Essex's notorious ‘True relacion’. Such documents illustrate the increasingly bitter divisions of late Elizabethan politics. The stories of Cadiz gained a fresh currency when England and Spain went to war again in the 1620s, placing a heavy burden of expectation on the government of Charles I.

Governors always seek to monitor the flow of information and guide its release. Secrecy and tactical publicity are valued aspects of government, boosting authority but also marking limits of participation by restricting access to official words and their written expression. Close attention is given to two ubiquitous institutions in early modern London, guilds and vestries (material illustrating city government is also introduced). A distinction is drawn between concealed information and policy communicated to the people. Attention is given thus to the regulation of meetings, chests and keys, and the selective discharge of information. Secrecy gave rise to vocabularies of ‘public’ and ‘private’. It was a code (a form of protection), but in languages of ‘private’ and ‘public’ as they were used in specific contexts studied here, it also depicted the use of space, the distribution of authority, and the limits of access and participation. The study of secrecy and partial publicity adds another dimension to our knowledge of the formation of opinion, perceptions of authority were partly formed by this enclosure of information, secrecy spawned speculation. It also provides a linguistic indication of the nature of government in institutions which mouthed fraternal tunes while remaining obsessed with formality and secrecy.

This article looks at the relationship between professional and political aspiration in Georgian England by examining the office of attorney general during the period 1714–1810. It argues that while the office offered a unique opportunity for a lawyer to combine a legal and political career, this was a formidable task and one rarely achieved. The generally hostile attitude toward lawyers in the house of commons was a significant obstacle. More important, however, were the complex and potentially conflicting expectations associated with the office of attorney. The relationship with the government was an awkward balance of loyalty and remoteness, whereby the attorney was encouraged to regard fellow ministers both as colleagues and as clients. Moreover, he owed a duty to parliament that was independent of, but inevitably linked to, his obligations to the crown. As a consequence of these various pressures attorneys tended to remain aloof from politics and interested primarily in their own professional advancement. The office of attorney general was less the stepping-stone to ministerial office than the reliable path to the bench.

It is commonly asserted that people were hanged at Salem on charges of spectral appearance; and the way to avoid hanging was to confess. Non-spectral acts of witchcraft are regarded as inconsequential to the outcome of the trials. Yet it was the non-spectral acts which provided the one magnet that attracted attention from the court. No one charged only with spectral appearance was even tried. The reprieves granted to confessors were the last decisions the court was allowed to make. This profile provides evidence that the standard claims about the court of oyer and terminer's use of evidence are the reverse of what actually happened, and highlights a number of patterns that have gone unremarked, requiring fresh interpretations.

British colonial policy initiatives of the 1760s and the American revolutionary war led to a period of sustained lobbying by the West India interest in Britain; lobbying which developed from an informal body into a more professionally organized lobby, along the lines of modern economic interest groups. The composition of the lobby and its activities during the revolutionary period are examined here. Its considerable influence is also assessed and explained. The article finds that the lobby won major concessions from the British government and vitally affected British policy towards North America. It nevertheless concludes that the lobby enjoyed its greatest influence in the early century when ironically its organization was weaker but its goals coincided more harmoniously with those of British colonial policy. Its later reorganization was a response to the increasing conflicts of interest between the white elites of the British Caribbean and the mother country which intensified during the period of the American revolution and its aftermath.

It has become orthodox to criticize Charles I for his failure as a politician. Such criticism is both accurate and anachronistic. It fails to appreciate that for Charles the business of kingship was not the art of politics but the pursuit of conscience. Charles took to heart his father's injunctions to follow conscience and he obeyed them rigidly. Through the study of speeches, letters and royal prayers this essay examines the centrality of conscience to Charles I's kingship. It shows how the divisions of the 1640s led him temporarily to abandon conscience, and finally it studies the king's self-construction as the conscience of the commonwealth – the central stance of the Eikon Basilike.

After the execution of Charles I in 1649 a series of daring and desperate attempts were made on the lives of agents and ambassadors dispatched to continental Europe by the fledgling republic. This essay explores the evidence relating to these plots, and to the murders of Isaac Dorislaus and Anthony Ascham, in an attempt to show that the royalists responsible were not merely desperadoes seeking revenge for the murder of their king, but the employees and emissaries of prominent exiled courtiers. The complicity of Montrose, Cottington and Hyde in such conspiracy can be both documented and explained, in the context of the struggle for diplomatic recognition and financial assistance in the months of shock, outrage and uncertainty after the regicide. The concerns of diplomacy and high politics which lay behind these plots also helped to determine the reaction of European leaders, as it gradually became clear on whose side fortune smiled in Britain.

O'Connell's relationship with Jeremy Bentham is the subject of frequent comment. However, the nature of this relationship has never been adequately documented, largely because the principal documentary evidence – their correspondence – remains uncollected. As a result, there exists a lacuna in the literature relating to O'Connell's involvement with British radicalism. This essay reconstructs the nature of his political alliance with Bentham from the evidence provided by their correspondence, from 1828 to 1831. It begins with O'Connell's plausible professions of discipleship and their shared optimism about the radical reform agenda, through to Bentham's concerted efforts to bind O'Connell to the British radical movement, and ending in the disillusionment and division that arose from O'Connell's insistence on giving priority to Irish reforms and Bentham's deep suspicion of catholicism. The whole is illustrative of Bentham's efforts in his later years to implement his policies through the agency of presumed ‘disciples’.

George Lockhart of Carnwath is best known for his bitter denunciation of the Anglo-Scottish Union in his Memoirs, concerning the affairs of Scotland, first published in 1714. There Lockhart appears as a wholly Jacobite narrator and moralist, passionately inveighing against the iniquity of his peers. Yet we know that his background was not cut from the same cloth as that of his more stereotypical Jacobite contemporaries. Not for him the brooding presence of a Cavalier ancestor ‘martyred’ while fighting alongside Montrose or ancient traditions of loyalty to the Stuarts. Rather, like many Scotsmen after him, he was converted to Jacobitism in the course of the political crisis gripping early eighteenth-century Scotland. From the point of view of the historian studying the dynamics of political commitment the fact that Lockhart falls into this category is a godsend. Uniquely among his Jacobite peers, in the Memoirs and in his many surviving letters, as well as the correspondence and accounts of affairs penned by contemporaries, Lockhart has left the historian a substantial amount of evidence to work on. This article will explore the social and intellectual background to George Lockhart's adherence to the Stuart cause, focusing in particular on the interplay of social forces that shaped his childhood and teenage years, before going on to trace the key features of his understanding of politics and society. Lockhart was not a natural convert to Jacobitism, and the fact that he and many like him moved in that direction merits close analysis. By better understanding why a man like Lockhart embraced the exiled Stuarts we can gain a more general insight into the revival of the Jacobite cause in Scotland in the early eighteenth century.

It is now common to study the Enlightenment ‘in national context’, and in few cases has the approach been more fertile than in the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The danger of this approach, however, is that it deflects attention from the international connections of the Enlightenment, fragmenting the movement as a whole. It is argued here that the Enlightenment is better understood as an intellectual movement which was both cosmopolitan and patriotic, and that this is particularly evident in its commitment to political economy, as the key to improving the human condition in this world. The argument is developed through a comparison of Scottish and Neapolitan political economy from the mid- to the later eighteenth century. Though set apart by very different economic circumstances, the Scots and the Neapolitans had a common point of reference in French economic writings, and through these Hume's ideas in particular were transmitted to Naples. It was from within this common intellectual framework that the Scots and the Neapolitans elaborated their distinctive positions on the scope for free trade between nations. If Hume and Smith believed that poor countries such as Scotland would prosper through greater free trade, while Genovesi and Galiani argued that only by measures of protection could the abundant natural resources of the kingdom of Naples be harnessed to its benefit, their differences derived from shared premises, and a comparable fear of the inclination of the leading mercantile powers, Britain and France, to control trade to their sole advantage.

This article examines the attitude and policy of Lord Malmesbury in regard to the growing Italian crisis of 1858–9. Making use of previously unavailable archival material (in particular the private papers of Malmesbury himself) it seeks to present a much fuller picture of tory Italian policy than has, until now, been possible. Although it is recognized that Malmesbury's Italian policy was based upon a sincere desire for peace, this does not explain why Malmesbury chose to hold Cavour personally responsible for the Italian crisis and directed his peace efforts not at Paris but at Turin and Vienna. This had much to do with Malmesbury's close personal links with the French emperor, Louis Napoleon. In addition, this article challenges the traditional view of Sir James Hudson as ‘more Italian than the Italians’. Hudson was not prepared to support Cavour in a course of action which promised only to deprive Piedmont of her constitutional freedoms and deliver Italy into the hands of France.

Thomas Carlyle's promotion of Sir Robert Peel as a heroic statesman capable of presiding over a strongly interventionist state is paradoxical in light of the latter's rejection of paternalistic government. This paradox is heightened by Carlyle's hostility to the whigs: some members of this party identified an active role for the state and struggled against tendencies in whiggism which were connected to the ‘liberal toryism’ of Peel and his followers. An examination of Carlyle's knowledge of, and attitude towards, Peel shows that he was aware of his attraction to liberal economic ideas. However, Carlyle believed that Peel's sense of moral purpose and his cool view of conventional parliamentarianism were indicative of heroic potentials that were not possessed by whig politicians. The popularity which Peel enjoyed in the late 1840s was attributed by Carlyle to a widespread appreciation of his distinctive qualities; this provided the grounds for a generalized heroism which could be focused in an active state that was freed from the trammels of both economic liberalism and parliamentarianism.