It has become fashionable to characterize Henry VIII's second queen, Anne Boleyn, as evangelical in religion and as a patron of reformers. But this rests heavily on the later testimony of John Foxe and of one of Anne's chaplains, William Latimer. Contemporary evidence of Anne's activity, under critical scrutiny, turns out to offer a different impression, as does an analysis of episcopal appointments in the early 1530s. A remarkable sermon preached by John Skip, the queen's almoner, a few weeks before her death, casts further doubt on the claims for Anne's reformist zeal.

The Tudor regime faced its greatest challenge in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century. The extension of royal authority had run into fierce opposition from a confederacy of Gaelic lords led by Hugh O'Neill. The Tudors stigmatized such resistance as rebellion but the fact that it was taking place in a dependent kingdom in which the monarch was not resident quickly rendered it a war of liberation. This prompts comparison with the other great independence struggle of the early modern period – the Dutch revolt. In both cases the language of faith and fatherland came to the fore. In Ireland this rhetoric was directed at the English-speaking descendants of the Norman conquerors whose support was crucial to the success of O'Neill's cause. Yet it fell on deaf ears because the confederates were unable to legitimize their struggle in the eyes of these catholic loyalists. The sources of political and religious legitimacy were stronger in The Netherlands. While the Netherlandish provincial estates were founts of popular sovereignty, the Irish parliament was an organ of the Tudor state. And whereas in Holland the source of ecclesiastical authority was the non-hierarchical Dutch Reformed Church, in Ireland it was externalized in the person of Clement VIII who could not be won over in spite of the efforts of Peter Lombard, O'Neill's agent in Rome.

The unrest in London during the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ filled Charles II with fear and foreboding of a new civil war. Yet although recent research has highlighted the important role played by the capital's inhabitants in the period, the evidence available for studying the groups of radicals involved has been sketchy and fragmentary. This article uses a new source, in the form of a mass petition, signed by almost 16,000 citizens, which was presented to the king in January 1680. It offers a unique opportunity to measure public opinion during one of the most turbulent periods of the Restoration, and to test assumptions about the character of the opposition to the king. After a discussion of the aims and conduct of the campaign, a prosopographical study of some of the most readily identifiable signatories provides the basis for a detailed examination of the political, religious, geographical, economic and social dimension of the petition. Finally, London's popular reaction to national politics is considered in terms of its effectiveness in altering royal policy, and its impact on the rest of the country.

For a commission brokers negotiated an exchange between those who had patronage to grant and those in need who were willing to give something in return. They received a fee for their help as intermediaries in the search for patronage. Brokerage differed from patronage in that it was a mercenary service which did not by itself create a personal bond. Noble brokers of royal patronage in the provinces and at court were prevalent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Provincial brokers included the governors, lieutenants general, intendants, clerics, first presidents of the sovereign courts, military commanders, great nobles, and any resident provincials related to, or well-known by, high-ranking court or government personages. Court brokers included all those regularly at court, and ranged from those immediately surrounding the king, as the fount of royal patronage, downward and outward in layers of influence calculated upon their distance from the king. Brokers in the provinces became less important during Louis XIV's reign because the king himself insisted on supervising the distribution of royal patronage at court. Patronage became more easily obtainable at Versailles than in the provinces, and, increasingly, nobles in need of patronage went to court to find it, aided in their search by courtiers acting as brokers. During Louis XIV's reign, an absolute monarchy sought successfully to centralize the brokerage of royal patronage at court, a hitherto unrecognized aspect of the process of social and political centralization known as early modern statebuilding.

The article draws on recently discovered manuscript sources to re-examine Joseph II's structural changes to the Catholic and Uniat church in the Austrian central lands between 1781 and 1790. In contrast to the extensive literature dealing with state policy towards church authority, or Josephinism, these changes have traditionally been the subject of guesswork and misstatement. Joseph has been credited with nationalizing the church, ruthlessly cutting down its monastic numbers, placing the secular clergy on fixed stipends, and financing a wholesale increase in bishoprics, parishes and secular clergy by extensive sales of monastic lands. The article presents new figures for clerical numbers and income before and after Joseph's reforms, and argues that while the latter were radical (though not always consistent) in intention, they were much less so in execution, partly because the church's resources, exposed by the emperor's massive investigation, proved less extensive than he had expected.

The attempted introduction of a new rationalist Lutheran hymnal into Brandenburg-Prussia in 1781 was largely a failure due to the successful popular opposition towards it. This opposition was inaugurated by four parishes in Berlin. They petitioned the monarch in January 1781 with the request to continue using the old hymnal. Similar petitions were submitted from the Landstände of Pomerania, Magdeburg and East Frisia. Frederick II immediately granted this concession to all parishes in Brandenburg-Prussia. The strength of this opposition – which also occurred in other German lands where new hymnals were introduced – indicates the limitations of the religious Aufklärung as a popular movement. Traditional religious beliefs could not be easily replaced by more rationalist doctrine that stressed only Christianity's ethical tenets. While Frederick was indifferent to questions of doctrine, he would not allow any religious reforms to be imposed upon his subjects. For the first time this central feature of his religious policy was influenced by the force of public opinion. He was persuaded to halt the implementation of a measure that enjoyed the support of both enlightened clergy and laymen.

An exploration of the origins of the Arbitration Act of 1698 and an analysis of court-related arbitration during the next century. Principal conclusions: (1) that the act originated at the board of trade, with John Locke drafting and drawing upon judicial practice of the later 1600s; (2) that use of the act's provisions was limited before the 1770s even though extra-judicial arbitration was proliferating; (3) that thereafter, with the Court of King's Bench under Lord Mansfield taking the lead, rules of court under the act multiplied; and (4) that arbitration under the act was increasingly ‘legalized’ in procedure and in the qualifications of the arbitrators.

The article attempts to show that Bonar Law had an effective and coherent strategy towards home rule. Previous interpretations have stressed his weakness and inexperience, either his ‘pandering’ to the extremists in the Tory party or his readiness to seek a compromise, when civil war began to loom large, in the autumn of 1913. Much of the blame for the political stalemate from 1912 until 1914 is directly, or implicitly, laid upon Bonar Law. Yet the tory leader was a more consummate politician. He sought to use the home rule crisis not only to reinforce his own fragile leadership but to return the Conservatives to office. This he proposed to do by allowing the political system to reach an impasse over home rule, by not helping the Liberals reach a compromise and yet inciting Ulster to resist the bill on its implementation. This left Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, with the impossible choice of imposing the bill onto Ulster (so provoking civil war) or of holding a general election when his government was perceived as unpopular. Bonar Law counted on Asquith preferring to hold an election though Asquith was saved from such a decision by the outbreak of war. It was, then, a ‘high-risk’ strategy to win office for the party he led.

This article analyses how, in the last half-century, scholars have differed over the nature of Italian foreign policy under the fascist regime. It examines the debate between orthodox and revisionist historians over Mussolini's foreign policy in general, and also over three specific areas of Italian policy in the interwar years: Franco-Italian relations, Italian participation in the Spanish Civil War, and the alliance with nazi Germany. The author concludes that much of the debate has arisen because of conceptual befuddlement; writers have been primarily concerned with questions of coherence and continuity, and not with understanding Italian foreign relations. Historians have also disagreed over whether Mussolini had a ‘programme’, but a closer look shows that many of them were engaging in a semantic debate, and did not differ over the nature of fascist policy.