‘A mysterious dispute arose in Cumberland between the Earl of Carlisle, lord lieutenant, and Sir George Fletcher.’ So wrote Professor J. R. Western in 1965 as he speculated that the matter stemmed from party conflicts in parliament at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. While that had some bearing on the matter, the dispute can be understood more fully only by a study of county politics in Restoration Cumberland and Westmorland. The controversy originated around 1679 between the earl's son, generally known by his courtesy title of Lord Morpeth (c. 1646–92) and Sir George (1633–1700). At the time the earl, Charles Howard (1628–85), was in Jamaica as governor. When he returned to England in September 1680 he sided with his son and became Sir George's principal antagonist.

In his study of Les Droits des Marchés et des Foires, M. Huvelin discusses the question whether markets owed their origin to grants made by the king, direct or through authority delegated to a lord, or to grants made by a lord and confirmed by the king. His decision that they were entirely of royal origin would have met with the approval of Edward I, whose attorneys during the Quo Waranto inquest constantly asserted that, “to no one in the realm is it permitted to have a market without the licence and goodwill of the lord king or his predecessors.” In the delegated regality of the Palatinate of Durham it had been definitely stated in 1228 that, “no one has toll save the Bishop, because no one has market or fair in the Haliwarifolc save he alone.” Yet it is legitimate to wonder how this particular apple got into the royal dumpling. The majority of the regalia are obviously such by nature; but there are some about which we feel that, while we hear much of baronial usurpations from the king, we might well hear something of royal encroachments upon domanial rights. If a market is regarded simply as a regularly recurrent assembly for the sale of local products, it is surely a matter that concerns the local community or its lord rather than the king. A phrase in the so-called “Laws of William the Conqueror”—“There shall not be any market or fair save in cities of our realm and in boroughs enclosed by a wall and in castles and very safe places, where the customs of our realm and our common right and the royalties of our crown … may not be defrauded”—sounds more like an attempt to bring an existing, independent market system under the control of the Crown than the assertion of an acknowledged regality; and it may be noted that a previous attempt, made by Athelstan in 925, to confine markets to towns had had to be abandoned.

Note, the King by his proclamation, or other ways, cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … also the King cannot create any offence by his prohibition or proclamation, which was not an offence before, for that was to change the law, and to make an offence which was not; for ubi non est lex, ibi non est transgressio; ergo, that which cannot be punished without proclamation, cannot be punished with it…

The Egyptian experience of the Suez crisis and subsequent conflict of 1956 has received significantly less treatment than those of the other major players, Great Britain, France, Israel, and the United States. The consensus over Egypt's role in the crisis has, moreover, has advanced very little from the narrative put forward by official participants at the time, portraying the event as a landmark in a nationalist struggle to restore Egypt's independence and national dignity. This article takes a fresh look at the Suez crisis from the perspective of the figures of an emergent Egyptian political opposition in 1955–6, whose responses differed substantially from this received view. By bringing domestic Egyptian political struggles to the foreground of this international crisis, the article will offer a more nuanced view of the origins of Suez in British planning, and of its significance for contemporary Egyptians. The conclusion will seek to explain how a collection of sometimes extreme nationalists could take such a counter-intuitive position in the Suez crisis through exploring the diversity of nationalist thought in the Egypt of the 1950s.

Manchester ‘working men’ approved an address in support of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation policy and the American Union at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862. The US president described their gesture as ‘sublime Christian heroism’ when hopes of restoring the cotton supply and reopening the mills were better served by Confederate recognition. This transatlantic exchange became an integral part of the scholarly traditional interpretation that the British working class frustrated the pro-Confederate designs of the upper classes during the American Civil War. It formed the historiographical orthodoxy until revisionists countered that Lancashire workers advocated Confederate recognition. The Manchester meeting, revisionists claimed, was contrived to give the impression of working-class support for Lincoln which was, in fact, a myth. These two incompatible interpretations simplify and flatten the complexity of an event with local, national, and international ramifications. This article presents the first detailed examination of who organized the Free Trade Hall meeting and why. It moves scholarly understanding of the British public response to the American Civil War beyond its current stasis of ‘traditional’ versus ‘revisionist’ by placing the field in conversation with the recent history of radicalism and ‘class’ in the Victorian era.

The Action Française was neither a widespread nor a powerful nor a successful political movement, and its political objectives were anachronistic to the point of absurdity. Its intention to carry out a coup d'état could not be taken seriously when its leaders were so eager to find reasons for avoiding or postponing action.1 Critics of the movement rightly claimed, for this reason, that it did not deserve its name.2 Of course, the Action Francaise always claimed to have considerable political influence, but its very poor showing in the elections of 1919 and 1924,3 when what influence it had was probably at its height, only emphasized the movement's real complexion.

On the morning of 19 August 1772 Gustavus III seized supreme power in Sweden, overthrew the authority of the Estates, and amid the applause of almost all Swedes outside the circle of professional politicians brought the Age of Liberty to an end. On the morrow of the revolution he explicitly abjured sovereignty for himself; he promised his.subjects the constitution of Gustav Adolf; and he did in fact confer on them a liberal and tempered despotism, which may be described as being by Mercier de la Rivière out of The Patriot King. It was a revolution bloodless, popular, and uniquely clement; but it was profoundly disturbing to international relations. Twice in the next nine months it produced crises from which, for a moment, there seemed no issue save a general European war involving all the great powers. It might have been supposed, indeed, that England could stand aside from such a struggle: the countrymen of Wilkes and Junius cared little for Swedish liberty, and had but a dim and confused notion of a parliamentary system in some respects more advanced than their own. But by an odd combination of circumstances, the Constitution of 1720—which Gustavus had overthrown on 19 August—had for some years acquired the status of a major British interest; its maintenance had become one of the linch pins of British foreign policy; and its overthrow was a challenge to a whole system of ideas which had prevailed and grown stronger in the years since the Peace of Paris.

The Wyndham Land Act was the most important land reform introduced by any British government during the period of the Act of Union (1801–1922); and this article provides a new interpretation of the origins of this revolutionary legislation. Whereas previous accounts attribute the Act to the initiative of the Irish chief secretary, George Wyndham, this article locates the legislation in the wider context of both popular and ‘high’ politics. The state of the land question in fin de siècle Ireland is examined, as is the United Irish League's extensive agitation for compulsory land purchase between 1901 and 1903. Finally, the impact of the agitation on the British government is considered, and the article demonstrates that the Wyndham Land Act was introduced as a result of the United Irish League's campaign for land reform.

This article challenges the view that, in accepting the 1945 American loan and its attendant commitments to international economic liberalization, the Labour party easily fell in behind the Atlanticist approach to post-war trade and payments. It is suggested instead that Labour's sometimes seemingly paradoxical behaviour in office was driven, not only by the very tough economic conditions it faced, but also by a fundamental contradiction inherent in its desire to ‘plan’ at both domestic and international levels. This contradiction – the ‘planning paradox’ – is explored with reference to pre-war and war-time developments, including Labour's reactions to the Keynes and White plans of 1943, and to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. The decision to accept the US loan, and with it the Bretton Woods agreements, is then examined within this context. Finally, an assessment is made of whether, in this key area of policy, Labour's pre-1945 deliberations were effective in preparing the party for the challenges it would face in government.

Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil lost power in 1948 after sixteen years in office and the five remaining parties in the legislature formed a coalition government. Fine Gael was back in power. The last time the party had held office was in 1932. But they were now only the larger party in an inter-party government which included the Labour party, a splinter group called National Labour (which reunited with the parent party in 1950), Clann na Talmhan, and Clann na Poblachta. This was one of the most ideologically divided governments in the history of the state. It very soon became faction-ridden. Only one thing united this variegated political grouping – the unanimous wish to keep Eamon de Valera and his party in opposition.

William Pitt the Younger died in 1806 but had a long afterlife in political argument. Historians have argued that a reactionary cult of Pitt in early nineteenth-century toryism died with Catholic emancipation, but this article suggests that invocation of Pitt's character was more widespread and durable, because linked to the assertion and defence of party identities. Whig hostility to Pitt remained strong even in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lord John Russell attacked his character flaws to celebrate the continued vigour and distinctness of Foxite political culture within the Liberal party. Conversely, use of Pitt in argument about what the tory party should be like did not end with reform. In the 1830s, traditional celebration of Pitt as a stern opponent of revolutionary agitation survived within a supposedly moderate conservatism. In Peel's second administration, arguments about whether Pitt had been firm or flexible, liberal or intransigent, reflected and added to disputes about how much religious and economic liberalism Peel should endorse. It was schism between Peelites and protectionists, the article suggests, which broke the clear link between celebration of Pitt's character and one party, allowing a more wide-ranging, because less politically charged, appreciation of Pitt to develop.

This article explores mid-Georgian debates about the nature of citizenship by focusing on a key political scandal that has hitherto been overlooked by modern historians. In 1756, one of the many Hanoverian soldiers who were stationed in England was arrested for theft in Maidstone. The subsequent efforts to release him on the part of his military superiors and the British government created a political controversy that highlighted issues such as legal liberty, the abuse of executive power, home defence policy, and the moral state of the nation. In particular, this article argues that the furore gave weight to contemporary calls to reform the militia, not so much for instrumental military reasons, but for the supposed social and political benefits of an organization that relied upon the patriotic zeal and masculine virtue of the indigenous citizen. This article is therefore a contribution to the new cultural histories of politics that emphasize the roles of nation and gender in conceptions of citizenship, and argues that the Seven Years War was in this respect a moment of crucial importance.

This article aims to locate English republican thought and writing in a wider European context and to understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. It does so through the case-study of a little-known pamphlet published by the English regicide Edmund Ludlow during his exile in Switzerland after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Les juges jugez, se justifiants (1663) was a French translation of the dying speeches and other miscellaneous texts of some of the English regicides, produced in Geneva and subsequently printed in Yverdon with the help of Ludlow's local Protestant network. Rather than propagating a secular republican ideology, Ludlow offered his work to a European Protestant audience in the language of Geneva, promoting a primarily religious cause in an attempt to make martyrs out of political activists. It is therefore to Ludlow's Protestant networks that we need to turn to find out more about the transmission of English republican ideas in francophone Europe and beyond.

Visions of history, Irish and otherwise, ancient and modern, critically inflected through St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the National Roman Catholic Seminary of Ireland, are central to John Hume's intellectual formation. This can be dated back to his experiences as a seminarian at St Patrick's during the mid-1950s – particularly his schooling in history under Tomás Ó Fiaich – long before the ideological gestation suggested in the existing literature. There the emphases are on the wider evolution of nationalist politics in Northern Ireland during the mid-1960s, as opposed to Hume's early intellectual biography. Thus, a wider context to his influential thought is suggested, one supplied by a discourse on the concept of patriotism evolving amongst Ireland's Catholic intelligentsia during the 1950s, indicative of the modernization of Catholic thought on the island in the era preceding the convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Yet the article also situates Hume's once-progressive mode of nationalist ideology within a much older tradition of Catholic loyalism in Ireland. The conspicuously Platonic dimension of his thinking is likewise observed, facilitating a conceptually driven exploration of the relationship between Hume's vision of his native walled city of Derry, and of that larger partitioned entity, Northern Ireland.

Royalists of the Civil War period readily employed the English legal system to recover lost estates, even at the nadir of their political fortunes, namely the years just after the king's defeat. Rather than accept the verdict of a war lost, royalist and Catholic ‘delinquents’ successfully sought their own verdicts at law against former tenants for rents on lands that had been confiscated by parliament. The radical MPs staffing the Indemnity Committee respected the principles of due process of law and, ironically, given the fact that the committee's purpose was to protect parliament's supporters, upheld royalist claims to confiscated lands, thereby assisting the law courts in thwarting parliament's plan to repay war debts with rents collected from losers' property. So pervasive was the legalistic mindset in both the courts and the Indemnity Committee that royalists received favourable rulings against many on the winning side of the conflict, including famous leaders such as Sir William Brereton.

Between the Restoration in 1660 and the Revolution in 1688 the English public abandoned its century-long animus against Spain and began to identify France as its chief enemy. Historians often hold that the most significant intervention in shifting the balance of public opinion was the Dutch-inspired pamphlet, England's appeal from the private cabal at Whitehall (1673), written by the Huguenot Pierre du Moulin. It is argued here that an immensely influential earlier intervention was made by François-Paul de Lisola, in his Buckler of state and justice (1667), which, at a critical juncture, presented a rhetorically powerful body of arguments about the nature of the European state system. A Catholic in the service of the Habsburg emperor, who spent nearly two years in England in 1666–8, Lisola was an accomplished and versatile diplomat and publicist. This article interweaves diplomatic history with the history of geopolitical argument, tracing paths which led to Europe's Grand Alliance against Louis XIV.

Decolonizing history and anthropology is often presented as a theoretical enterprise, through which a more rigorous and inclusive framing of historical precepts will deliver a clearer and less Eurocentric understanding of the past. Yet it is arguably necessary to decouple decolonization from the broader practices of anti-Eurocentric historiography. Via an empirical assessment of the legacy of Hermann Klaatsch, a German anthropologist working on the colonial frontier, this article examines the possibilities and limitations of a decolonizing approach to settler colonial history. The article reflects upon its own study of colonial anthropology and the historical complexity of the repatriation of Indigenous human remains, and suggests that not all anti-Eurocentric interrogations of the colonial past are synonymous with decolonization.

The story of the Pardon of the Clergy in 1531 and all that it entailed has long been familiar to historians of the English Reformation; and despite the several gaps, not to say incongruities, in the accepted narrative, no writer has found difficulty in repeating the inherited version. Indeed, this most important episode in the story of Henry's overthrow of the medieval church has been distinguished by the unquestioning and brief, even peremptory, treatment which it has usually received. In the course of time, minor accretions have added to the first statement of events contained in the Chronicles. But perhaps because the Calendars are disappointingly reticent about public affairs during the winter of 1530–1, no author has seriously questioned that statement, however uneasy he may have felt about it on a priori grounds. The earliest version, therefore, compounded from Hall and Wilkins, still stands. According to it, shortly after Wolsey's death at the end of November 1530, the whole of the English clergy were indicted on a praemunire charge in the King's Bench by the Attorney General for having submitted themselves to the late cardinal's legacy. To escape from their dilemma, the two Convocations made a cash payment to Henry allowing him at the same time a new, if guarded, title of overlordship that was to prove full of consequence. Whatever the significance of the celebrated ‘saving clause’ and despite the reluctance of the clergy to concede any ground, the fact remained that Henry had won the first round with comparative ease and it was only a matter of time before he would proceed with confidence and equal success to the second.