Andrew Marvell's country-house epic, Upon Appleton House, has long been understood as a meditation on conventional philosophical themes. An exact dating allows us to see the topical and polemical force of those themes. Moreover, situating the poem within particular chronological and geographical confines, the summer of 1651 and the household of the recently retired Lord General as well as the political geography of the vale of York, reveals the continuities and the patronage-afflicted contours of the poet's engagement with the crisis of the English revolution, a crisis he had so searchingly explored in An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland.

During the 1670s, the navy was the focus of increasingly critical scrutiny from parliament and the political nation. This article considers the causes and nature of this criticism, which had its roots in the perceived dominance of the catholic James, duke of York, in the field of naval appointments, and examines the political context of the various inquiries into the state of religious affection in the fleet. By so doing, the article identifies a dilemma which confronted the crown's opponents in the period 1678–81, namely the conflict between the requirement for a strong navy to oppose France and the risk that, because of York's influence over it, that same navy might in fact be an instrument of French and catholic designs. Finally, the response of the officers and men of the navy to the events of the popish plot, exclusion crisis and ‘tory reaction’ is examined, placing the navy in the mainstream, rather than on the periphery, of the political and religious history of the period.

Jean Barbeyrac is best known as the leading eighteenth-century translator in French of the major writings on natural law by Pufendorf, Grotius and Cumberland. This article attempts to expound and assess Barbeyrac's independent contribution to the natural law tradition as it may be recovered both from these editions of the works of others and also from other writings. It is argued that Barbeyrac's intellectual context in the Huguenot diaspora and his distinctive reading of Locke, Bayle, and Pufendorf led him to develop an original equation of the authority of conscience with the authority of reason. The rationalist natural law theory he developed inevitably identified the role assigned to God within it and the scope of resistance to legal civil authority as central issues for debate which remained problematic for Barbeyrac throughout his career. These important ethical subjects remained unresolved in the general development of natural jurisprudence in the early eighteenth century, as exemplified in Barbeyrac's attempt to refute Leibniz's telling critique of Pufendorf.

This article looks at the membership and organization of the opposition that emerged in the house of lords between 1720 and 1723 under the leadership of William, 1st Earl Cowper. The origin of this new opposition lay in the political reaction to the extensive corruption exposed by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, which brought together a coalition of dissident whigs and tones (both Hanoverian tories and Jacobites) who proceeded to attack the ministries of the earl of Sunderland and of Viscount Townshend and Robert Walpole for their supposed corrupt administration. The hallmark of the new opposition was the extensive campaign of protests against the opposition's defeat in votes, protests which were entered (with reasons) into the Journals of the House, and which were then published in the form of broadsheets, pamphlets, and newsletters as propaganda in an appeal to public opinion. This was the first time an opposition had indulged in an extensive and sustained campaign of influencing the public outside Westminster. This campaign required a high level of organization. This Cowper provided in imitation of some of the new management techniques being developed by the ministry to control the house of lords, plus a new feature – the daily pre-sitting meetings of the leadership to concert tactics. The legacy of the new opposition was the preservation of the concept of a loyal opposition as an acceptable part of British political life.

The eighteenth century is traditionally seen as an interlude between two vigorous movements of church reform. This article explores the problems and attitudes which underlay the absence of major structural reform of the Church in this period. To do so, it examines the failure of attempts, especially those of the 1740s and 1750s, to create an anglican episcopate in the American colonies. The leaders of the Church of England were agreed that the need for American bishops was pressing, on both pastoral and administrative grounds, and the 1740s and 1750s witnessed two proposals for their creation which were supported by virtually the whole bench of bishops. Both failed. The whig ministry resolutely opposed these initiatives, largely out of fear that any debate of church reform would revive the political divisions of Queen Anne's reign. The bishops, moreover, were prepared to submit to this ministerial veto, despite their belief in the necessity of reform, not through political subservience, but because they too feared renewed controversy about religion and the Church, believing that such controversy would revive both anti-clerical attacks from without and bitter divisions within.

The law had always been deployed by the police to regulate traffic, but the development of motor vehicles, travelling at much greater speeds than previous road traffic, constituted a problem of a new dimension. By the early 1920s the use of the law to control motor vehicles was jamming the magistrates' courts and creating friction, hitherto unknown, between the police and the middle classes. The paper explores the way in which, and the extent to which, the criminal law was used to control the motorist in the first third of the twentieth century. It takes issue with the whiggish view of law making, which understands laws as logical remedies for readily identifiable problems; it rejects equally the idea of seeing laws as inspired by class interest. Rather the motor traffic legislation fits better with the concept of the ‘policeman state’ which, according to V. A. C. Gatrell, developed from the late nineteenth century. At the same time the paper suggests that a scapegoat – ‘the road hog’ – was created as the focus for criticism in much the same way that other criminal scapegoats have been established; the offender thus ceased to be a member of society and became an outsider, threatening respectable law-abiding citizens.

Two very powerful stories structure the history of the changing roles of English women. The tale of the nineteenth-century separation of the spheres of public power and private domesticity relates principally to the experience of middle-class women. The other story, emerging from early modern scholarship, recounts the social and economic marginalization of propertied women and the degradation of working women as a consequence of capitalism. Both narratives echo each other in important ways, although strangely the capacity of women's history to repeat itself is rarely openly discussed. This paper critically reviews the two historiographies in order to open debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time.