On Friday, 18 July 1679, Sir George Wakeman, Bt., a Roman Catholic of an old Gloucestershire family, and formerly physician to the Queen, was arraigned before a special commission of oyer and terminer at the Sessions House, Old Bailey, charged with high treason, in that he had conspired to murder the King. He was acquitted, as were the three Benedictine monks, William Marshal, William Rumley and James Corker, arraigned with him.

Common destiny: dictatorship, foreign policy, and war in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+262. ISBN 0-521-58208-3. £19.95.

Hitler's Italian allies: royal armed forces, fascist regime, and the war of 1940–1943. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+207. ISBN 0-521-79047-6. £16.95.

The efforts of Charles V (1500–58) to consolidate and defend his hereditary possessions gave a powerful boost to the development of public credit in western Europe. To meet a scale of expenditure which surpassed anything seen before, Imperial agents had recourse to an entirely new series of financial devices, necessity providing, as it normally did, the spur to invention. Charles V's servants exploited the facilities of the Antwerp Bourse to encourage the investing public to sink its money into government debt rather than commercial enterprises or speculations in commodities. Additional funds were raised on the credit-worthiness of provincial taxgatherers in the Low Countries. Thanks to the ingenuity of his financial advisers, the emperor survived the dramatic collapse of his position in Germany during the spring of 1552; and he was able shortly after to attempt the recovery of the Imperial bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which the Lutheran princes had bartered away in their bid for French support.

Via an examination of the Labour party's approach to by-election campaigning in Scotland between the fall of the first Labour administration in October 1924 and the party's return to office in May 1929, this article explores the changing horizons of British radicalism in an era of mass democracy. While traditional depictions of interwar politics as a two-party contest in which political allegiances were shaped primarily by social class have increasingly been questioned, accounts of Labour politics in this period have focused chiefly on national responses to the challenges posed by the expanded franchise. In contrast, this article considers local experiences, as provincial participation and autonomy, particularly in candidate selection and electioneering, came to be viewed as an impediment to wider electoral success, and political debate coalesced around attempts to speak for a political nation that was, as the focus on Scotland reveals, indisputably British. Often portrayed as evidence of ideological divisions, such internal quarrels had crucial spatial features, and reflected a conflict between two models of political identity and participation: one oppositional in outlook, local in loyalty, and rooted in the radical tradition, the other focused upon electoral concerns and Labour's national standing.

Historians have tended to characterize the ‘white ethnic’ identity politics of the 1970s in the United States as a significant feature of the conservative counterrevolution, especially the rise of populist racial conservatism and its splintering of the Democratic New Deal coalition. Seeking to provide a broader, more representative portrait of white ethnic mobilization, activism, and institutionalization in government, with particular focus on the work of Rev. Geno Baroni, the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, and the Carter administration's Office of Ethnic Affairs, this article challenges that assumption. It posits that the politics of white ethnicity was a far more complex, diverse phenomenon, of appeal to liberals and conservatives in an era of considerable political flux. This reconsideration also reveals that the 1970s were not conservative in the United States, but a watershed decade of uncertainty, volatility, and experimentation, in which ethnic identities and affiliations were reshaped, political norms upended, and new forms of organization and mobilization trialled out, with great significance for today's ‘post-ethnic’ United States. White ethnic politics was of considerable importance to American political development in the late twentieth century, but not in the way usually thought.

There can be few nineteenth-century figures whose papers and writings are so frequently consulted and quoted by historians as those of Francis Place, yet who have been so sadly neglected as historical figures. The only full-length study of Place's life and work, by Graham Wallas, is seventy-odd years old.2 It suffers from numerous defects, the two major of which are a tendency to show Place in an unduly favourable light and to make enormously lengthy quotations from Place's manuscripts, with very little criticism or analysis of their content or of the part which Place played in any given situation. The failure to look at Place's career and influence in the light of the views of his contemporaries inevitably means that Wallas's study is one-sided and incomplete as a biography and is only really useful as a selection from Place's writing, illustrating a number of the campaigns in which he played a part.

A decade ago there appeared a volume of twelve essays on Lloyd George, written by a dozen young historians and edited by A. J. P. Taylor. These pieces, of varying merit and degree of interest, ranged widely from pre-1914 social reform to the Greek question and even to the Second World War.1 Yet strangely enough one of the most colourful patches of the huge canvas that was Lloyd George's life did not receive so much as a passing glance - namely his relations with the press. Taylor had hinted at the possibilities in that sphere when preparing a volume of his own essays a few years earlier. There he placed in sequence two entertaining chapters of quite unequal length and importance, one entitled ‘Lloyd George: rise and fall’ and the other ‘The Chief’.2 The latter requires a little explanation, for ‘ Chief was the style of address beloved of Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, the man who owned The Times, Daily Mail, Evening News, and a host of other newspapers and journals. Quite simply he was the greatest press lord of them all, and Fleet Street has known many. While it is manifestly impossible in a few pages to explore in detail the full story of Lloyd George and the press, we can profitably follow his relations with Lord Northcliffe during the years 1914 to 1918 when these two giants were at the peak of their power and their fortunes were intertwined in many and strange ways. During the war Northcliffe was frequently called (and with utmost seriousness) ‘The Most Powerful Man in the Country’, while at the end Lloyd George was ‘The Man Who Won the War’. Often it seemed that the stage was not big enough for both and the British people must choose between them. Not until 1918 did two events - the ‘Maurice debate’ and the ‘Coupon election’ - prove conclusively that in the final analysis Lloyd George's power was real while Northcliffe's was largely illusory. Perhaps none was more surprised at this outcome, certainly none was more relieved, than Lloyd George himself. The reasons will become apparent as the history of their wartime relationship unfolds.

The Eastern Question is a hardy perennial in historical research and writing. Years, indeed generations, of study seem to leave basic issues unresolved. One of the most persistent of those issues is the role of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at Constantinople, in the outbreak of the Crimean War. Temperley may have been exaggerating when he said it had long been a popular belief that Stratford ‘was the human agency which caused the Crimean War’ – a belief he spent some time in efforts to dispel – but that Stratford was less than helpful in the pursuit of a peaceful solution to the 1853 crisis was certainly a widely held belief at the time and has proved an enduring one. As late as 1966, M. S. Anderson, dealing with the question of Stratford's ‘guilt’, once more could only conclude: ‘Whether Stratford de Redcliffe, as has often been alleged, privately urged the Turkish ministers to reject the [Vienna] Note while publicly advising them to accept it, is uncertain.’ The Vienna Note was the settlement of the Russo-Turkish conflict proposed jointly by the Governments of England, France, Austria and Prussia and accepted in toto by the Tsar. There was, however, no lack of certainty in the minds of the British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Clarendon, and the first lord of the admiralty, Sir James Graham, that Stratford had been an agent provocateur. On 3 September Greville wrote: ‘Clarendon thinks that Stratford has encouraged the resistance of the Divan to the proposals [at Vienna] and that he might have persuaded the Turks to accept the terms if he had chosen to do so…’

The Manchester Progressive Municipal Programme of 1894 has been viewed as indicative of a new Liberal approach to labour and social questions, heralding the New Liberalism of the Edwardian era and marking a gradual transition to class-based politics. Rather than focus on the role of senior individuals, such as Manchester Guardian editor C. P. Scott, in fostering the change, this article explores the practical problems of grass-roots party co-operation and the problems that Progressive approaches brought to Liberals. Progressive ideas had already permeated much Liberal thinking before 1890 and the Progressive Programme was less of a departure than might be imagined. Progressive policies may have helped consolidate Liberal working-class support but they did little to encourage co-operation with the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Where senior Liberals attempted to forge alliances they were invariably rebuffed. When Liberal candidates stepped down in deference to the ILP, Irish and working-class Liberal trade unionists revolted and split the party. The 1895 general election demonstrated the dangers of being too closely associated with the ILP and the limitations of Progressivism as a political strategy.

The letters of Lord North have made us familiar with the portrait and the general posture of a Minister who was in the habit of behaving like a prisoner seeking release—a man “tied to the stake”as he once said—a Minister who repeatedly urged that his continuance in office would bring certain disaster upon the nation; who cursed the futility of what he privately called that damned American war; who complained of illness, depression of mind, loss of memory and general unfitness for his post.

Sandwiched between the Saint-Cyr law of 1818 and Niel's dazzling if futile effort to reform the army in 1867, the Soult law of 1832 has been sadly neglected by historians. Not only is the law a crucial piece of military legislation, but by studying its history one can trace the conservatism of the July Monarchy under the Périer Ministry.