What lay behind the anxiety of so many Frenchmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to defend the ‘liberties of the Gallican church’? In a stimulating essay published in 1971, Professor W. J. Bouwsma argued that Gallican ideas transcended any purely national setting, and that they should be studied (to borrow Febvre's distinction) from the standpoint of religious rather than of ecclesiastical history. Beyond the narrowly institutional concerns of traditional French approaches to the subject, Professor Bouwsma glimpsed among the upholders of Gallican liberties a certain cast of mind: a disposition towards religious renewal, an acceptance of the diversity of local church arrangements, and a corresponding distaste for the dogmatic certainties and standardizing ambitions of Tridentine Catholicism. So Professor Bouwsma argued.

In the immediate aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet, Political aphorisms, which purported to instruct its readers in ‘true maxims of government’. The identity of the author of this bold doctrinal claim is not known, and while it would be useful to have this knowledge, it is not, for reasons which will become clear, the most crucial element of the story. What is important is the historical significance of the role played by Political aphorisms as part of the process by which the ‘revolution principles’ of 1689 gained widespread acceptance in eighteenth-century England. In this essay, we offer one concrete illustration of the complex process by which political ideas are transmitted from one generation to another; and, we shall argue, the example provides a case study of the conscious effort to formulate an ideological defence of specific political principles and practices in order to preserve the historical meaning of a partisan perspective.

Ever since Lucien Febvre, in his classic essay on the origins of the French Reformation, characterized the sixteenth century as ‘ a long period of magnificent religious anarchy’, the nature of this ‘anarchy’ has remained somewhat puzzling. The question posed by Febvre - if Calvinist churches were only organized in the late 1550s, who were the protestants before this date?-retains all its interest while inevitably raising other problems. Can one make sense of this anarchy? When, if at any time in the sixteenth century, did it come to an end? Professor Mandrou has recently situated the period of anarchy between the first French manifestations of the Lutheran revolt in the early 1520s and the affair of the placards in 1534, with Calvinism bringing order to the general confusion between 1536 and 1540. But it is now established that Antoine Marcourt's placards, though important in the popular and official reactions they provoked, did not reveal protestant organization or doctrinal unity. Nor was Calvinism in a position to impose such uniformity until a much later date if at all. The rigours of Calvinist theology may have represented the logical culmination for the spiritual odyssey of a Farel or a de Bèze, but this was not necessarily so for the lower clergymen, artisans and even peasants who were attracted by one aspect or another of reformed ideas. Febvre pointed out the confusion of contemporaries, most of whom had no idea precisely what the different varieties of protestantism were: a confusion perhaps best shown in Florimond de Raemond's characterization of Lefèvre d'Étaples, Farel and Roussel as ‘Lutheran Zwinglians’. If the evangelical humanist intellectuals of the Meaux group caused such incomprehension, then how much more bewildering must have been the unsystematic beliefs and sceptical criticisms of the menu peuple, especially before the literate among them had the opportunity to read the French edition of Calvin's Institutes in 1542.

There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.

Most historians have agreed that only the death of Empress Elizabeth (5 January 1762) and the accession of her nephew, the prussophile Peter III, saved Prussia from destruction in that epic conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. Just when Frederick II's military fortunes were at their lowest point — by early 1762, numerous parts of Prussia had already or were about to come under enemy control — and total defeat appeared unavoidable, chance intervened in the person of the new czar, who, victor though he was, withdrew his forces from the front, offered an armistice and agreed to relinquish without compensation the gains (East Prussia and Pomerania) which Russia had made during the war. At a stroke, the great anti-Prussian confederacy dating from 1757 had collapsed.

According to a familiar interpretation, London was parliamentarian in the English Revolution, and was instrumental in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the English republic which endured for eleven years. London was the arsenal, the treasure–house and the recruiting ground for the revolutionary cause; it was the Paris of the English Revolution. In this article I shall argue that from early 1646 – a year after the formation of the New Model Army – London was deeply divided between those who wanted the terms agreed by the Houses to be imposed on Charles rather than negotiated with him, and those who wanted a speedy end to the war, a mutually agreed peace, the disbandment of the army and the imposition of religious uniformity. By 1647 the rulers of London were dominated by an implacable hatred of the revolutionary army, and bent their efforts to restoring Charles to his throne. In this policy they enjoyed the warm support of a majority of the City's population, who repeatedly demonstrated their anti-revolutionary convictions. in both word and deed. The army's political support in London was drawn mainly from the artisan and tradesman classes (many of them non-citizens), and from the suburbs. To a large extent it was the assiduous efforts of one man – Philip Skippon, major-general of the New Model infantry – which kept London in the parliamentary camp during the second civil war.

In 1591 Julius Caesar, then judge of the High Court of Admiralty, initiated ‘ an important experiment…in the Admiralty court's continuing quest for greater respect and authority’. Despite high expectations on the part of Caesar, however, the experiment, a circuit of the west and southwest of England undertaken ‘in hopes of forcing the local authorities in those regions to submit to the supremacy’ of the Admiralty, was abortive. Caesar, beset by corrupt local officials and profiteering inhabitants, abandoned his circuit when only half completed and after obtaining results far less than he had anticipated. Caesar's failure, according to Lamar Hill, the historian of the ill-fated experiment, was not merely that of one Westminster bureaucrat unable to impose his authority in the provinces.

Two points may be safely made about biographies of Robert Clive. One is that the first adequately documented biography, by Sir John Malcolm, published in 1836, has never really been superseded, because it was solidly based on family papers made available by Lord Powis. The other is that if the modern general reader has any acquaintance with Malcolm’s work it is likely to derive from the sonorous prose of the oft-reprinted review which Lord Macaulay originally published in the Edinburgh Review in January 1840. This magisterial apportionment of praise and blame does not invite the criticism which H. W. C. Davis levelled at Macaulay’s equally celebrated essay on Warren Hastings; that it was even doubtful whether Macaulay had read with care the biography of Hastings by the Reverend G. R. Gleig which he purported to review.

Perhaps some justification is needed for yet another study on the literary background of the Easter 1916 Rising. Certainly the ‘high’ literature, represented by such writers as Yeats, AE, Synge and the three insurrection poet-fighters (Pearse, MacDonagh and Plunkett) has already been extensively analysed by a number of scholars. However, it is usually forgotten that numerous ‘popular’ authors were also writing in the forty years before 1916; authors who might be expected, if only by virtue of their numbers, to command a considerable readership. Names such as Joseph Campbell, Ethna Carberry, Nora Hopper, Seumas MacManus, Alice Milligan and Seumas O’Sullivan are unknown today except in occasional references by literary critics, yet these writers produced a great deal of verse on national topics, and were close to the general public and its preoccupations. Their work deserves the attention of historians; for only by identifying common ground between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ literature can one explore with any confidence the complex relationship between that literature as a whole and Irish society during this period. This I hope to do in the following pages.

France has always envied Paris. A popular interpretation of the history of France has been of conflict between the capital and the provinces in which Paris was the victor, at least from the establishment of the system of intendants by Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century. Radical Paris took the lead in the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s, in 1830, 1848 and 1870–1. The conflict of the 1790s produced civil and foreign war and led to an even greater domination by Paris through the centralizing policies of Napoleon Bonaparte as military dictator. Under his rule and subsequently, all officials - civil, judicial, military, religious and educational - were appointed by the government in Paris. The Council of State was a corner-stone of this policy in the capital, the departmental prefect in the provinces. In 1830 the results of the July Days were acceptable on the whole to the French; but in 1848 provincial France roundly rejected the radical social revolution favoured by intellectuals and artisans in Paris; in 1871 the Commune of Paris was virtually isolated in its decentralizing and social-reforming ambitions and suffered bloody defeat at the hands of the regular army. Apparently, then, 1830 was the last, and perhaps only, time in the nineteenth century that ‘Paris led, France followed.’ Was 1830 so unique, and if so, why? The Revolution of 1830 was unquestionably Parisian, in that events in the capital determined the timing and location of acts of significant revolutionary violence and in that the major political and administrative changes which followed the revolution were enacted in Paris. Should one therefore assume that the provinces were passive, that they had little impact on events? This revolution may neatly illustrate the success with which Louis XIV, Napoleon and others had centralized France, but that conclusion needs to be based on evidence, not assumption. The most recent complete analysis of the revolution concentrated on Paris, but also delineated some aspects of provincial unrest in 1830, making use of the local studies written for the centenary of the revolution. Some provincial and departmental histories describe the events of 1830 and their local impact.

It is nearly twenty years since the seminal discussions of the English crowd by Hobsbawm, Rose, Rudé and Thompson, and almost forty years since Wear mouth's extraordinary catalogue of eighteenth-century disturbances.1 These studies established that if we examined the composition, organization, objectives and beliefs of eighteenth-century crowds, then we would find them to have been informed, disciplined, and in possession of broad notions of the necessity and legitimacy of their actions. Crowds were not ‘rabble’, or criminal, or ‘society's dregs’. Such conclusions were based upon the examination of the crowd in its most visible and vocal form: the riot.

In the final chapter of the final volume of his magisterial Commentaries on the laws of England, Sir William Blackstone sketched the’rise, progress, and gradual improvements of the laws of England’. Nearing the end of that chapter, he laid it down as his considered opinion ‘that the constitution of England had arrived to its full vigour, and the true balance between liberty and prerogative was happily established by law, in the reign of king Charles the second’. Now this is not a self-evident truth, for that reign is more likely to conjure up in our minds (along with Nell Gwynn and other not strictly legal relationships) unhappy visions of quo warranto proceedings against borough charters; the perjuries of Titus Oates; the double jeopardy of Stephen College; and Sir William Scroggs and Sir George Jeffreys blaspheming their undignified and brutal way through the pages of the State trials. Why should Blackstone have felt impelled to say such a patently silly thing?

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the Hungarian conservatives made a number of attempts decisively to influence the course of events in the Austrian empire and in the kingdom of Hungary, but failed on each occasion. What exactly had they wanted, and why did they fail to achieve it? How did they try to appear to others, and how did they see themselves? What political identity, if any, did they have? Was there anything special about the way their political activity and their perception of themselves bore on one another as compared to other nineteenth-century conservatives? What follows is an attempt to give answers to these questions.

In February 1842 a wealthy lay congregationalist named Thomas Thompson wrote to the secretaries of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society urging them to do more to interest the young and the working classes in the cause of foreign missions. Missionary advocates were needed, insisted Thompson, who could shew to our manufacturing population that Christianity Civilization & Commerce are only synonimous terms - that the extension of the former will do more for a World recovery - the bonding of distant nations with a Love of amity & good will & do more for the employment of hundreds of thousands, than all the Anti Corn leaguers can ever accomplish, even were they to realise all their members so fully anticipate, & we shall thus obtain the auxiliary aid of a class of countrymen, whom we have hitherto left to the worst foes of our species.

The history of ‘sociology’ as it has been written in the last generation is largely a history of fictions. It is characterized by the various mythologies that Skinner isolated in 1969 in his attempt ‘to uncover the extent to which the current historical study of ethical, political, religious and other such ideas is contaminated by the unconscious application of paradigms whose familiarity to the historian disguises an essential inapplicability to the past’. In a now familiar argument - that to Construct a truly ‘historical’ history of ideas we must concentrate on the actual intentions of historical agents, setting those intentions within their wider social, and, above all, linguistic context – Skinner anatomized the varieties of intellectual disfiguration to such an enterprise: the ‘mythology of doctrines’ where ‘the historian is set by the expectation that each classic writer (in the history, say, of ethical or political ideas) will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject’; the ‘mythology of coherence’, which substitutes a spurious unity and homogeneity for the fragments of an agent’s thought; the ‘mythology’ of prolepsis’ by which the actions of an historical agent are invested with retrospective significance unacknowledged in the actual intentions of the agent at the time; and the ‘mythology of parochialism’ where ‘the historian may conceptualize an argument in such a way that its alien elements are dissolved into an apparent but misleading familiarity’.

Of all the professions none has proved more resistant to the inclusion of women than the Christian ministry; no branch of the church stemming from the Reformation has been firmer in asserting the ‘disability of sex’ for ordained ministers than has the Church of England. The contemporary struggle to open the priesthood to women is the latest phase in a long movement of church feminism which permeated the Church of England from the very last years of Victoria's reign, a movement which, by 1930, had succeeded in considerably increasing women's influence and even ministry in the English Establishment although it had failed in its more radical aims. As they battled for the right to vote for (and sit on) elective church councils, as they sought equality of ministry with male laity, as they searched for vocationally fulfilling modes of pastoral care and evangelism which respected the ban against ordination, and as they assaulted that ban itself, able and ambitious church feminists have been continually frustrated by sexist prejudice, clerical exclusiveness, and entrenched religious tradition.

Whilst it would be wrong to claim that voluntary societies in Britain were new in the period 1780 to 1850, the growth of large industrial and urban populations was accompanied by an increase in the foundation and prosperity of such societies. These societies were diverse in their purpose, form, size and membership. Edward Baines, junior, one of the self-appointed tribunes of the industrial middle class, in 1843 described recent developments as follows:

In June 1907 Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader of the opposition, was visited at home by a group of civilian strategists. They were led by Charles Á Court Repington, the military correspondent of The Times, and had come to enlist his support for an official inquiry into the threat of a German attack on Great Britain. Balfour was presented with a lengthy memorandum of ‘Notes on Invasion…’ which explained their case, and described how the situation had changed since the committee of imperial defence had reported to him as prime minister on the French threat in 1903. This document explained that in the new circumstances invasion was not only possible, but could be rendered certain if Germany carried out her preparations in total secrecy and at great speed. Under the heading ‘Chances of a Surprise’, the paper noted that circumstances favoured Germany, because the assembly of an invading force could be explained ‘as part of the normal yearly training, manoeuvres, &c.’, and even the concentration of a strong fleet near Heligoland was no longer considered unusual.

The reasons for the decline of the Liberal party in Britain, and its replacement by the Labour party as the representative of the left, continue to be the subject of debate among historians of twentieth-century British politics. An important point at issue has been whether or not the Liberal decline had irreversibly set in prior to World War I; or if the war itself with the strains it placed on liberal ideology and the relationship among the party's most prominent leaders, and with the stimulus it provided for a more militant working class, was the catalyst for decline. There can be no question that the Liberal party was critically dependent upon the support of working-class voters for its viability as an alternative party of government.1 Thus, a major issue of contention among historians of Liberal politics has been the party's success or failure before August 1914 in retaining the allegiance of this crucial electoral base.

The conflict between secrecy and publicity is one of the most delicate issues in foreign policy. Not long ago, absolute monarchs were able to conduct diplomacy that was really secret and could make war and peace - not to mention less cardinal decisions-without explanation. However, in the age of mass armies and of total wars, public opinion has to be mobilized and the issues of foreign policy need to be elaborated, justified and defended, even by non-democratic governments. On the other hand, professional diplomats continue to claim that secrecy is often a crucial prerequisite for successful foreign policy. Modern international relations have thus posed a seemingly insoluble dilemma that will probably haunt governments in the future: negotiations can be flexible and successful only if they are kept secret, but they will be barren without popular consent.