After more than five hundred years the political ideas of Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1476) retain the potency which has ensured that they have seldom suffered total neglect, even if much of the interest they have aroused has been ideological in character. It was perhaps only in the 1930s that Fortescue first received appropriate attention in the context of the history of political thought; and the varied consideration devoted to him by scholars over the past quarter of a century suggests that the process of appraisal is by no means complete. Despite much discussion of Fortescue's basic political categories, it will be argued here, important dimensions of his thought have been fore-shortened – notably in regard to origins, basis, and character of political society as such. Again, some of the perspectives in which the fundamental concept of dominium has been presented may be misleading if they are applied to Fortescue's use of that concept without full recognition of his specific political purposes.

Thomas Starkey's (c. 1495–1538) Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset is one of the most significant works of political thought written in English between Fortescue and Hooker, for several reasons. It gives insight into its author's intellectual background – Oxford, Paris, Avignon, Padua, Venice – which he shared with many of the other ideologues of the Henrician state. More than that, the Dialogue represents one of the first attempts to blend continental humanism of a Venetian variety, and perhaps Florentine as well, with native English traditions in the creation of a theoretical justification for what Starkey called a ‘mixed state’. In this and in the practical reform proposals which issued from it, Starkey went beyond Thomas More, however superior Utopia may be as a work of literature, or how much more directly it seems to speak to us. The work is also worthy of attention for Starkey's own standing, even if hisinfluence with Thomas Cromwell was shortlived. G. R. Elton has begun this sort of study by using Starkey'sreforms to explore the intellectual underpinnings of the Cromwellian reform. Aside from this effort, interpretation has not been very successful. The Dialogue is undoubtedly a daunting work, not because of the inherent difficulty of its arguments, but rather the extreme eclecticism of the author and his attempt to fulfil two apparently discrepant purposes. It is precisely on this last point that modern criticism has fallen down most seriously. I would like to suggest that placing the work in its proper context in Starkey's life allows not only the recovery of those two conflicting intentions, but also a sketch of the motives underlying them. This will involve an examination of the only surviving manuscript of the Dialogue.

Colonization, as a means of reforming Ireland, had been advocated by certain Anglo-Irish politicians and English administrators since the early sixteenth century. This policy had been activated in 1548. Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), a leading political and intellectual figure, contributed to the policy's development in the early 1570s with his colonial venture in eastern Ulster. Under Elizabeth, he served as ambassador to France on two occasions and held the principal secretaryship between 1572 and 1576. Smith is regarded as an important English humanist. His main works, A discourse of the commonweal of this realm of England (1549) and De republica Anglorum (1565) analyse respectively the economic problems and the legal and political system of the period.

The place where the University of Edinburgh now stands was once the site of the church of St Mary in the Fields or, as it is usually called, Kirk o'Field. On a February night in 1567, in the small house close to the church, there occurred what is certainly the most frequently discussed event in the history of Scotland, the murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, consort to Mary Queen of Scots. Much discussed it has been, but since it is still not properly resolved it merits another look.

If a revolution has taken place recently in the history of political thought, the name of Quentin Skinner must figure prominently in the vanguard. His work has been concerned with redefining the boundaries between philosophy and history; to put the matter briefly he makes a plea for ‘less philosophy and more history’. With regard to Thomas Hobbes his work involves two distinct – but related – projects: to revise our view of Hobbes's impact and influence on his age; and to clarify the interpretation of Hobbes's written work. Characteristically, the first project is presented as a guide to the second. History becomes the handmaiden of philosophy.

Let me start by making it clear that, taken at face value, my title is entirely a piece of mischief: I am not about to disclose the fact that there were actually no learned women in Italy in the fifteenth century. Indeed, this paper is built around the careers and works of five distinguished women intellectuals of that period: Isotta Nogarola (1418–66); Costanza Varano (1426–77); Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465–1558); Laura Cereta (1469–99); and Alessandra Scala (1475–1506). There is, however, a serious point to my choice of words in the title. The point is that the ‘learned lady’ of the Renaissance (the cultivated noblewoman, beautiful, charming, gifted, ‘gentile’) has a mythic place in the secondary historical literature on humanism. From Isabella d'Este to Sir Thomas More's daughters and the English Tudor princesses, the cultivated gentlewoman is the Beatrice or the Laura of some male humanist's circle, his hi adoring pupil, his inspiration, his idol. Scholars adopt a fondly indulgent tone when discussing the women, which carries the implication that their intellectual calibre, their actual standing as scholars and humanists, is not a real issue, is perhaps not in fact of any real substance (a figment, rather, of their male admirers' or suitors' imaginations). The single scholarly piece of any significance on the life and work of Alessandra Scala concludes with typical sentimental indulgence:Her noble and elusive aspect – for no portrait of her survives, unless perhaps she smiles at us, unrecognised, in the guise of a saint or a goddess, from one of Botticelli's canvases, or that of some other Florentine artist – yet that aspect shines forth from the shadows of the past, and casts a beauteous and gracious light upon the discordant chorus of Florentine humanism at the end of the fifteenth century.

Nineteenth-century Britain, it has been argued, harboured hostility to commerce and industry at the very period of greatest industrial advance. In this the schoolroom and university have been charged with particular culpability, even though it is not clear how new was the resistance to commercial studies. The following investigates the most distinguished eighteenth-century attempt to interest the English universities in the study of commerce. The episode highlights the misunderstanding and mistrust occasioned by the promotion of the Science of Trade in the mid-eighteenth century.

When we believed that Locke had written Two treatises of government to justify the Glorious Revolution, we could say a great deal about his purposes in relation to the events of 1688–89. The book served to interpret those events, to disclose their underlying meaning; philosophy and action were joined in such a manner that both gained lustre from the link. But, now we have generally accepted the view that Locke actually wrote Two treatises in the partisan heat of the Exclusion debate, and we have stopped saying very much of anything about the book's relation to William III and the events of the year in which Locke anonymously published it.

In a report on the state of Poland in 1766 the papal nuncio, A. E. Visconti, observed that the new king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, possessed ‘a burning desire to reform the whole country in one day – if only he could – and the entire nation, in order to bring it up to the level of other, more advanced nations’. The interregnum after the death of Augustus III in October 1763 and Poniatowski's election in September 1764 had inaugurated the most determined campaign for reform within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Union of Lublin of 1569. By 1763–4 there was little that did not need to be reformed. The accumulation of privilege by the szlachta, the nobility, had attained such dimensions that both the monarchy and the Sejm, the parliament, were almost powerless to govern. The most obvious expression of the impotence of the state and of the refusal of the nobility to submit to the discipline of any centralized authority was, of course, the liberum veto, the use of which, real or threatened, had consigned the majority of the Sejmy of Augustus II (1697–1733) and of Augustus III (1733–63) to nullity. Yet the veto's successful, widespread application was only possible because of a rough equilibrium of political strength between Poland's various magnate factions.After Augustus Ill's death, Russian military backing enabled the so-called ‘Family’, the party led by Michael Czartoryski (1696–1775) and his brother, August (1697–1782), to break through the stalemate. At the Convocation Sejm of 7 May to 23 June 1764, the Czartoryskis pushed through a series of unprecedented reforms aimed at conferring on the monarchy and the Sejm a degree of real authority over the country at large.

The Church of England has received little attention either as an issue or as a force in mid-eighteenth-century politics. The contrast with the immediate post-revolutionary decades, when the Church and churchmen were at the centre of political debate, is striking. This development has been explained in terms of the achievement of political stability, one manifestation of which was the transition from the whig–tory dichotomy of the reign of Anne into a court–country one by 1725, with the issues dividing the two parties losing both ideological and political significance. Among the debates which were ‘overtaken by events’ was religion which ‘ceased to be a central issue of political debate’. Indeed, Geoffrey Holmes has argued that the decline of religious controversy began with the Sacheverell trial, claiming that most of the eighteenth century was characterized by ‘spiritual inertia’ and ‘religious tranquillity, within the framework of an Erastian polity’. Such views accord well with the secularist interpretation of the enlightenment, epitomized by Peter Gay's portrayal of it as ‘a volatile mixture of classicism, impiety, and science’, and they have been little challenged by ecclesiastical historians. Norman Sykes may have vindicated the pastoral and administrative standards of the Georgian Church, but the overwhelming impression remains one of Stability and intellectual torpor.

Conventional wisdom has long maintained that eighteenth-century religious dissent was a significant source of opposition to the Hanoverian status quo. For Trevelyan, for instance, dissenters were ‘vigilant champions of liberty and critics of government’. The high political visibility of rational dissenters in oppositional movements in the 1770s and 1780s – in opposition to the American war, the Test and Corporation Acts, slavery and the slave trade, the existing electoral system – has been particularly noted. However in recent years the political significance of religious dissent has been questioned. Roy Porter warns that the zeal for reform among dissenters should not be overestimated: ‘Not till the 1780s, and then only amongst a hothead minority, did Nonconformity show a potential for political radicalism.’ John Brewer has argued that the dissenting group associated with Hollis, Price, Priestley and ‘the small, snug, dissenting coterie of Newington Green’ marks one tradition of political opposition in the eighteenth century. But, largely confined to intellectual critique, remarkably uninvolved in the day-to-day cut-and-thrust of political action even evincing a patrician alarm at popular direct action, its contribution to political change was far less significant than the Wilkite movement.

In his article ‘Semantics and historiography’, published in 1953, Richard Koebner invites historians to exploit the benefits which a semantic approach to history readily offers them. A ‘semantic approach’ he defines as a systematic ‘study of the career of political and historical expressions and slogans’. Koebner is convincing when he explains why such a study is so important – indeed indispensable – to historians who do not wish to become ‘victims of destructive ambiguities and…liable to mistake the expressions of popular historical consciousness for historical realities’. There is probably no period in history, Koebner argues, which may not be enlightened by a pursuit of these inquiries; ‘the semantic approach to history has something to reveal in all periods’

This was how the Public Advertiser greeted the passage of the Quebec Act through parliament in June 1774. It was a remarkable transformation from the ecstasy evident in newspaper reports that greeted the fall of New France in 1760. As early as November 1759 the city of Nottingham singled out the North American campaign as the glorious core of British strategy. Its loyal address congratulated the king ‘particularly upon the defeat of the French army in Canada, and the taking of Quebec; an acquisition not less honourable to your majesty's forces, than destructive of the trade and commerce and power of France in North America’. What occurred in those fourteen years to produce such a stark revision of views on the conquest of New France? The answer can be found partly by surveying the English press for this period. During these years, treatment of Canadian issues in the press displayed quite distinct characteristics that revealed a whole range of attitudes and opinions on the place Canada held in the future of the North American empire. No consensus on this issue ever existed. Debate on Canada mirrored a wider discussion on the future of the polyglot empire acquired at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. In ranged from the enthusiasm of officials at Westminster to spokesmen of a strain in English thinking that challenged the whole thrust of imperial policy to date.

Modern British counter-espionage effectively began in April 1907, when a joint conference of naval and military officials, formed the previous year to consider ‘the Powers Possessed by the Executive in Time of Emergency’, recommended both an immediate strengthening of the laws against espionage, and a War is Office investigation of ‘the question of police surveillance and control of aliens’. These recommendations were to prove an important initiative, and did much to determine the course of British counter-espionage before 1914, yet at the time they probably seemed little more than an airing of old grievances unlikely to find new support, for they were among the last remnants n. of the abortive ‘Emergency Powers Bill’ which the War Office intelligence department had been advocating to strengthen home defence ever since the invasion scare of 1888. The 1906 joint conference had in fact hoped to further the cause of this great legislative package, with its radically new powers of access, requisition and seizure but, faced with the Liberal administration's commitment to the ‘continuous principle’ that a full-scale landing was impossible, had been forced instead to confine itself to the purely naval and military aspects of home defence. As its report confessed in April 1907, in the prevailing climate of opinion the only hope for the great ‘Emergency Powers Bill’ was as a series of ‘small and independent measures’.

Among historians it is a commonplace to observe that outcomes are bound up in origins and that we can find the explanation of perplexing or startling events by looking at how those events began. Nothing appears more obvious, but in some historical problems nothing is more easily overlooked. The history of the Roman Catholic relief proposals and enactments and the violent opposition to them in the British Isles in 1778–80 affords an example. It still presents difficulties to historians despite much research and writing on the subject. Accounts of Roman Catholic relief and the reaction to it, which was sustained over several years and was ferocious in climax, still leave an unsatisfactory impression as to how such opposition could have taken place. Confusion and doubt will go a long way towards disappearance, however, once we look more closely at the origins of the relief plan, origins which historians have largely overlooked.

There were many passing phases in the eighty-eight years of Gladstone's life. ‘What did last, all through his life, was his overwhelming interest in religion and his incessant preoccupation with religious doctrine.’ ‘It is commonly supposed that there are things in life without religious significance, but this is not so. There is no human activity without its religious motives and its religious use.’ Such was the profession of the young M.P. for Newark in 1835. This article then is addressed, not to Gladstone's personal religion, which would have meant telling the story of his life, but to his attitude to religion – to his anglicanism.

In the last two decades, British urban history has flourished. The Tudor and Stuart periods have attracted particular attention, so that we are well informed on the party factions and politics of this time. There are excellent general accounts by Drs Clark, Slack and others; and notable local studies like Dr Evans' account of Norwich. However, it is interesting that early eighteenth-century towns are by no means as well covered, especially in the area of politics. We have studies of Norwich and the West Midlands, but these mostly concern the period after 1760. On the first half of the century, most of the available published material comes from incidental references in books on broader party politics and organization; for instance in works by Drs Holmes, Brewer and Colley.

‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?”’ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is very little ground for hoping that Christianity will be able to make its proper way unless we can establish a lawful commerce in the country’. Britain's part in forging the connexion was abundantly clear. It was effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries', giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labour’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be ‘a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.

David Lloyd George's behaviour in the crucial week between 27 July and 3 August 1914 has commanded much scholarship and more speculation. Nearly every member of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's Liberal cabinet, including the chancellor of the exchequer himself, has told the story of those agonizing days, by memoir, diary or letter. Yet Lloyd George's part in Britain's decision to declare war upon Germany on 4 August remains unclear; indeed it is less clear now than it seemed to be half a century ago. How could the ‘Pro-Boer’ of the days of the South African war, who had been the object of any number of dangerous personal assaults for his treasonable speeches, the enemy of the dreadnoughts, the slasher of naval estimates, indeed the man who most recently declared at the Mansion House and had asserted again in the House of Commons only six days later – the last coming on the day of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia – that powerful commercial influences in Germany and Britain were drawing the two nations so close that great arms were unnecessary, how could such a man become the supporter of intervention in a continental war on behalf of France?

Over the last two decades, noticeable progress has been made towards a more complete understanding of the political dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany. The older emphasis on the ‘high politics’ of Bismarck and his successors has given way to a much more differentiated picture of a political system in constant flux as it attempted to cope with the complexities of a rapidly industrializing society. Old orthodoxies concerning the weakness of German liberalism have been subjected to new examination and scholars have become increasingly aware of the potential of powerful interest groups to challenge as well as to buttress the Establishment. The overall effect of this general advance in the historiography of the Second Empire has been to direct attention away from the motives of individual decision-makers, at least at the ‘high-political’ level, and to investigate the structural constraints on the formulation of policy. Despite certain recent attempts to reinstate a more personalistic approach, it seems clear that no future history of late nineteenth-century German politics can afford to neglect these developments.