‘A whipper whipped’ is a thoroughly new account of the 1634 Star Chamber case against William Prynne for publishing the seditious work Histrio-mastix. It is based upon a hitherto unused manuscript account that provides previously undisclosed information about the proceedings and especially about the intentions of the prosecution. This case is one of the most celebrated events of the 1630s, often viewed as the watershed event in the history of Caroline censorship. It has also become a prime example of Archbishop William Laud's attack against puritan conformists. This article argues that Laud played little role in the case; that the issue before Star Chamber was primarily the charge of sedition; and that Prynne received every possible legal advantage during his hearing. Through a careful reconstruction of the legal proceedings, the case is seen in an entirely new light. Though historians and literary critics have accepted Prynne's self-serving accounts of his prosecution, this fuller record demonstrates their inadequacy.

Charles I and his clerical supporters are often said to have been wary of print and public discussion, only entering the public sphere reluctantly and to comparatively little effect during the political crisis of 1642. This article challenges such views by focusing on the neglected role of official forms of print such as proclamations, declarations, and state prayers and their promulgation in the nation's churches. It traces the ways in which the king utilized the network of parish clergy to broadcast his message and mobilize support during the Scottish crisis of 1639–40 and again in the ‘paper war’ of 1642. The article argues that traditional forms of printed address retained their potency and influence despite the proliferation of polemical pamphlets and newsbooks. The significance of these mobilizations is demonstrated by the profound disquiet they caused among the king's Covenanter and parliamentarian opponents as well as the ‘good effects’ they had in generating support for the royalist cause.

From the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.

The work of the martyrologist John Foxe ensures that the burnings dominate modern accounts of the campaign waged again Protestantism in the reign of Mary I (1553–8). Drawing on other sources, this article examines forfeiture of property, a less noticed but more common penalty imposed upon Protestants. It describes the types of forfeiture that occurred and analyses their legal basis; it considers the impact of the penalty and highlights means of evasion. By examining forfeiture, the article extends and enhances the debate about the effectiveness of Marian religious policy and about the degree of support that the regime could command. Forfeiture, it is shown, could be a powerful form of coercion, but depended upon popular politics to be effective. Subsequent efforts in Elizabeth I's reign to obtain restitution substantiate the article's thesis that a deep-rooted belief in the rule of law constrained the penal religious policies of early modern England.

Processes for the identification of criminal suspects tell us a great deal about wider cultural assumptions and social prejudices regarding somatic difference; its causes, relative degree, and consequence. If early modern Europeans had something approaching a forensic science, it was astrology, which has recently garnered renewed attention from historians of ideas. Rather than assume astrology's seventeenth-century decline in the face of revolutionary natural philosophy, what follows suggests that English astrology remained significant for mundane bodily discrimination, in the context of both a more deliberate, gradual reform and the tenacity of centuries-old humoral physiology. More importantly, scrutiny of astrological practice, and the logic underpinning its lasting currency, can reveal much about the significance of bodily contrasts and the meanings ascribed to them by Tudor-Stuart folk.

This article examines the Irish fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century. It locates the Irish state within a broader imperial context showing how Ireland contributed to the wider British imperial project. In particular, this article looks at the development of an efficient tax-gathering apparatus, showing how the revenue board, the most pervasive agency of the eighteenth-century Irish state, extracted increasing levels of taxation from a sometimes hostile population. Drawing extensively on the records of the Irish revenue commissioners, a very rich if under utilized source, it demonstrates for the first time the levels of taxation raised in Ireland, while also exploring how these taxes were collected. It concludes that this period saw the expansion of an increasingly professional bureaucracy, challenging existing interpretations that have focused predominantly on politicization. The final section looks at issues of evasion and compliance, showing the difficulties faced by the Irish state in this period, as it expanded deeper into Irish society.

This article explores the role of the method of political arithmetic and political arithmeticians in the changing methods of raising finance during the Nine Years War. It discusses the actions of parliament-men in committees and their interaction with reports containing data, and the influence of projectors on the decision to introduce, and later abandon, the pound rate. Throughout this period, political arithmeticians were active participants, providing data, advice, and schemes to the treasury and parliament, and when they were not, ‘country’ MPs, in particular, were active in calling for data and leading its cross-examination. This article suggests that debates on public finance did not occur along party lines, with ‘county communities’ given fresh presence by the quantification of the inequality of the land tax burden. Political arithmetic is shown to have played an important role in the processes and negotiations that occurred over the setting of taxation policy in the ‘long eighteenth century’.

Jean Mabillon's De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European debate over the relationship among documents, archives, and historical or juridical proof. This article juxtaposes early works on diplomatics by Mabillon, Daniel Papebroche, and Barthélémy Germon against German ius archivi theorists including Rutger Ruland and Ahasver Fritsch to reveal two incommensurate approaches that emerged around 1700 for assessing the authority of written records. Diplomatics concentrated on comparing the material and textual features of individual documents to authentic specimens in order to separate the genuine from the spurious, whereas the ius archivi emphasized the publica fides (public faith) that documents derived from their placement in an authentic sovereign's archive. Diplomatics' emergence as a separate auxiliary science of history encouraged the erasure of archivality from the primary conditions of documentary assessment for historians, however, while the ius archivi's privileging of institutional over material criteria for authority foreshadowed European state practice and the evolution of archivistics into the twentieth century. This article investigates these competing discourses of evidence and their implications from the perspective of early modern archival practices.

The words and music of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ are synonymous with the expansionist, triumphalist, and imperialist Britain symbolized by fluttering Union Jacks on the Last Night of the Proms. This article explores the cultural and political contexts of the first performance of this important national cultural artefact as the finale of Alfred: a masque to suggest that this opening night served a very different purpose. The first audience was a court in exile from the metropolitan heart of London, popular amongst the general public, but without any prospects of government. Two of the most important members of this group of peers, politicians, poets and a prince had recently died, and with them any cohesive identity. Alfred is both a desperate plea for unity, a rallying cry which forcefully restated the key tenets of this group's identity, and a delayed expression of patriotic celebration occasioned by Admiral Vernon's capture of Portobello. Through addressing this performance, this article makes an important contribution to our understanding of Hanoverian political culture and highlights the continuing impact of Anglo-Saxon England on mid-eighteenth-century Britain.

Early in 1782, republican rebels in Geneva removed the city's magistrates and instituted a popular government, portraying themselves as defenders of liberty and Calvinism against the French threats of Catholicism and luxury. But on 1 July 1782, the republicans fled because of the arrival at the city gates of invading troops led by France. The failure of the Genevan revolution indicated that while new republics could be established beyond Europe, republics within Europe, and more especially Protestant republics in proximity to larger Catholic monarchies, were no longer independent states. Many Genevans sought asylum across Europe and in North America in consequence. Some of them looked to Britain and Ireland, attempting to move the industrious part of Geneva to Waterford. During the French Revolution, they sought to establish a republican community in the United States. In each case, a major goal was to transfer the Genevan Academy established in the aftermath of Calvin's Reformation. The anti-religious nature of the French Revolution made the attempt to move the Academy to North America distinctive. By contrast with the Irish case, where religious elements were played down, moving the Academy to North America was supported by religious rhetoric coupled with justifications of republican liberty.

During the wars of the eighteenth century, French prisoners on parole in Britain were placed in a paradoxical situation of captives with privileges. Instead of studying these men as if they dwelt in a world apart, this article focuses on captivity zones as a social laboratory, where people of different status would socialize. These spaces accordingly provide a lens through which to glimpse the repercussions of international conflicts at the level of local communities. The disputes which opposed these captives to the English population, which were the object of letters of complaints sent by the French prisoners to the authorities, shed light on the normative and moral resources which were used by eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen to legitimize themselves in situations of social conflict. As a configuration characterized by shifting social relations, the parole zone brought together local, national, and international issues, intertwined primarily in the rhetoric of honour. In these incidents, there was no systematic alignment of class and national discourses and actions, while the precise standing of these Frenchmen on the social ladder was constantly challenged and debated. The resulting quarrels therefore reveal a series of social inversions: dominant groups in France were in many respects dominated in England. Rather than being a mere reflection of pre-existing social hierarchies, such micro-incidents reinvented them.

Although the American Civil War is perhaps the most written about event in American history, the issue of desertion has often retained a neglected position in the conflict's dense historiography. Those historians who have studied military absenteeism during the war have tended to emphasize socio-economic factors as motivating men to leave the army and return home. The Register of Confederate Deserters, a list of southern soldiers who crossed into Union lines and took an oath of loyalty in order to try and return home, can provide a different look at these men. By studying the South Carolinian men on the Register, as a case-study, we can see that ideological, as well as socio-economic, motivations occupied the thought process of Civil War deserters. Moreover, the act of desertion was rarely a simple representation of the thoughts of the individual but of the opinions and feelings of his family and community as well. As such, studying Confederate desertion not only helps us understand the issues of loyalty and nationalism during the Civil War, but also the way in which nineteenth-century southerners conceptualized the world around them.

Robert Darnton's acclaimed 1995 work on the late eighteenth-century francophone illegal book trade, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France, has become one of the most cited and studied texts in its field. The culmination of thirty years' archival research and reflection, it roots Darnton's previous case-study-driven articles and monographs in a wide-ranging empirical survey of the order books of the Swiss printer-booksellers, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel. It claims to offer readers a picture of what illegal books went into bookshops everywhere in pre-revolutionary France. The first fruits of the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, a digital humanities initiative that has created an on-line database revealing the STN's entire trade, this article challenges Darnton's interpretation of the nature and utility of the Neuchâtel archive. It demonstrates that the STN's order books are an unreliable gauge of general French demand. It goes further. It argues for a nuanced polycentric understanding of the eighteenth-century Francophone book trade, and outlines a bibliometric digital humanities pathway that might lead us there.

This article engages with current debates about linguistic usage in a new way. It examines linguistic change, the shifts in frequency of usage of ‘aristocracy’, both qualitatively and quantitatively, at specific moments and over time, in print during the period 1700 to 1850. Digital resources are utilized to provide broad quantitative evidence not previously available to historians. The potential use and value of digitized sources is also explored in calculating the volume and frequency of keyword appearance within a broad set of genres. This article also examines qualitatively usage of ‘aristocracy’ by contemporaries and historians and concludes that historians have often used the term anachronistically. It reveals that for much of the eighteenth century ‘aristocracy’ was entirely a political term confined primarily to the educated elite but that by 1850 it had become a common social descriptor of an elite class. It also compares the trajectory of usage of ‘aristocracy’ with that of ‘democracy’ and accounts for the divergence in such usage. It is argued here that analysing the prevalence and usage of ‘aristocracy’ in contemporary contexts reveals an important narrative of linguistic changes that parallel shifts in political and social culture.

This article argues that the restaurant offers a useful site for mapping patterns of transnational and global exchange within late Victorian and Edwardian London. The dramatic expansion of public eating in this period was met in part by foreign-born entrepreneurs, and wait and kitchen staff drawn from a genuinely international labour market. Londoners and visitors to the metropolis were exposed to a variety of new, often hybrid, culinary cultures, which call into question simplistic binaries between Britain and the world beyond. The simultaneous presence in London's restaurant scene of French menus, Indian dishes, Italian cooks, German waiters, and Chinese and American diners reveals the complexity of the relationship between populations and places. London's ‘gastro-cosmopolitan’ culture reveals not merely the extent to which Britain's imperial metropolis was exposed to transnational forces, but that these influences were genuinely global and not confined to Britain's formal empire. London's cosmopolitan dining culture suggests that historians might be advised to move beyond the tropes of danger and anxiety when discussing late nineteenth-century London, and do more to acknowledge a range of responses – attraction and pleasure included – which more accurately reflected the metropolitan experience.

The Vatican is often cast as a marginal player in the reshaping of the European international order after the First World War. Drawing on new archival material, this article argues for a reassessment of the content and consequences of papal diplomacy. It focuses on the years between 1917 and 1929, during which time the Vatican used the tools of international law and state-to-state diplomacy to expand its power in both eastern and western Europe. The Vatican's interwar activism sought to disseminate a new Catholic vision of international affairs, which militated against the separation of church and state, and in many contexts helped undermine the principles of the League of Nations’ minority rights regime. Thanks in no small part to the assiduity of individual papal diplomats – who disseminated the new Catholic vision of international affairs by supporting anti-communist political factions – the Vatican was able to claim a more prominent role in European political affairs and lay the legal and discursive foundations for an alternate conception of the European international order, conceived in starkly anti-secular terms.

England was blighted by frequent agricultural depressions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Recurrent crises brought poor law reform to the parliamentary agenda and led to the passage of two non-compulsory pieces of legislation, Sturges Bourne's Acts of 1818 and 1819. These permissory acts allowed parishes to ‘tighten up’ the distribution of poor relief through two vital tools: the formation of select vestries, and the appointment of waged assistant overseers. Whilst previous studies have tended to represent the legislation as a failing reform in the dying days of the old poor law, we know remarkably little about the relief practices deployed by parishes operating under the auspices of Sturges Bourne's Acts. This article starts by detailing the genesis of the reforms before considering the provisions of the acts and their rates of adoption in rural England. Focusing upon administrative records from Wessex and West Sussex, the article proceeds to examine the inspection of relief claimants, and judgments made as to their ‘character and conduct’; the general measures taken to reduce outdoor relief; and their alternative strategies for allocating relief. It is argued that the reforms re-drew the distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, ultimately changing individuals' and families' entitlement to relief under the old poor laws.

The British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was raised in early 1922 by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, as a striking force and riot squad for Palestine. Through the agency of the Irish police chief, General Hugh Tudor, this British Gendarmerie was recruited almost entirely from amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division, then in the process of disbanding as part of the recent Anglo-Irish settlement. The international notoriety of the Black and Tans led to official efforts to obscure the fact that the force was to be drawn from RIC ranks but these were entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the British Gendarmerie itself quickly acquired a reputation for Black and Tan-type behaviour but an examination of its four-year career indicates that this derived more from preconceptions about the force's composition than from its actual conduct. In fact, in terms of force discipline and levels of police brutality, the British Gendarmerie's record compared very favourably with those of its ‘parent’ forces in Ireland, lending support to recent claims that historians have tended to over-value character-based explanations at the expense of circumstance-based assessments when analysing police behaviour both during the Irish revolution and the Palestine Mandate.

The French state expropriated an enormous quantity of cultural property from across Europe during the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon, but much was returned in 1815 after the fall of the Empire. This article examines contemporary attitudes to the displacement of works of art, antiquities, scientific specimens, and rare books. The seizures were controversial: since they occurred at a time when plundering the vanquished was already considered questionable behaviour, they attracted opposition and needed to be justified. The article identifies the resulting repertoire of attitudes, arguing that this repertoire evolved with changing circumstances and was more varied than hitherto maintained. By situating this repertoire in a larger historical context, the article also reassesses the extent to which attitudes were derivative and innovative. It contends that the disputation as a whole did not amount to a decisive rupture in the treatment of foreign cultural property during wartime, but that it was nevertheless remarkable in two respects: concepts from hitherto unrelated subjects were applied to considerations about cultural property; and the perceived conditions under which cultural property could be legitimately transferred were revised.

The article seeks to establish the significance of intercepted Greek diplomatic messages as both historical source and catalyst in Britain's Near Eastern policy in the crucial years of 1920–2. Specifically, the intercepts reveal how members of the British government, foremost among them the prime minister, covertly supported Greek expansion in Asia Minor even after declaring neutrality in the conflict. Such evidence confirms rumours that were dismissed as fallacious by those implicated and by their defenders in later historiography. Aside from their value as historical sources, the intercepts had an immediate and significant impact which has also been neglected. Intelligence regarding a distant conflict became central to a war at the heart of Westminster and helped mobilize a cross-party, transnational coalition against Lloyd George's foreign policy in the region. Although Lloyd George's opponents, incited by intelligence revelations, eventually succeeded in transforming British policy, this reverse did little to reduce the scale of the resultant catastrophe.