Recent scholarship has questioned the accuracy of John Foxe's depiction of Anne Boleyn as an evangelical and a patron of reformers. It has even been suggested that Foxe exaggerated or invented the material he presented on the evangelical zeal of Henry VIII's second queen. A thorough examination of Foxe's sources, however, reveals that he based his account of Anne on material ultimately derived from those who knew her or had benefited from her support. It can also be demonstrated that much of Foxe's account of Anne is confirmed by independent sources. Finally, careful comparison of the material on Anne in the different editions of Foxe's work printed during his lifetime, and analysis of their variations, indicates when Foxe acquired his information about Anne. This, in turn, reveals a great deal about the circumstances in which Foxe composed his account and the specific political and polemical purposes which influenced it. Foxe's account of Anne was one-sided and biased but the information he presented on her was, as far as it went, accurate and it should not be discounted in any scholarly assessment of Henry's queen.

The so-called Bye plot of 1603 is one of the best documented in that procession of treasons which confronted late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean governments. For more than a century, it has also been almost entirely neglected by historians. Through an examination of the cases made against seven suspects – William Clark, George Brooke, Sir Griffin Markham, Anthony Copley, Bartholomew Brookesby, Sir Edward Parham, and John Scudamore – the methods by which the state acquired and deployed evidence in advancing the prosecution are here detailed and analysed. Comparison of each man's fate also reveals how, although the crime of high treason carried but one penalty, the punishments handed down, ranging as they did from execution to discharge before trial, reflected both the prisoners' own conduct and the current political imperatives in a year of dynastic change.

Generally dismissed by historians as just an hysterical gesture by parliamentary whig leaders disappointed and angered over the failure of the second Exclusion Bill, the attempted impeachment in 1680–1 of Sir William Scroggs was in fact a complicated and important affair. Although a failure in legal terms (because King Charles dissolved two parliaments), it succeeded in political terms when the king dismissed Scroggs. A propaganda ploy to embarrass the duke of York and also the king of England, re-unite the whig party, and re-ignite anti-popery fervour to promote another try at Exclusion (contrary to recent revisionism), the proceedings provoked discussion of many central issues, but most importantly of the legislative authority of parliament, or control of the law; the affair provoked a ‘crisis of authority’. Print culture played an unprecedented role: four of the eight articles of impeachment against Scroggs were connected with the press. Press people, in effect, brought down a chief minister of the crown and severely embarrassed the government, an event of signal importance in the history of the press.

This article explores the domestic political aspects of the last great disaster of French foreign policy before the revolution: the unsuccessful intervention in Holland between 1784 and 1787. These have been largely ignored by historians, although much attention has been given both to the internal politics of the Dutch republic as well as to British involvement in her affairs during this period. The article argues that the increasing incoherence of French policy towards the United Provinces was caused by profound splits within the king's council. These culminated in a series of attacks on the diplomacy of the powerful foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, by his ministerial opponents. The Dutch affair reveals the fragmentation of foreign policy during the last years of the ancien régime, and also paints a wider picture of a deeply divided royal government on the eve of the revolution.

Henrion de Pansey (1742–1829) is an important but neglected constitutional historian whose views on the French past served as a commentary on the unwritten and written constitutions of his own age. A feudal lawyer before the revolution and an appeal judge under Napoleon and the restored Bourbons, he published a variety of works combining liberal sentiment with judicial traditionalism. His career illustrates the shift of moderate conservative opinion across the revolutionary divide. The alteration in his political thought is best understood through its conjunction with the three historical modes prevalent in his time: a discontinuous approach, accepting the past as a series of different regimes interrupted by revolutions; a developmental view, charting the progressive growth of institutions from seeds planted in antiquity; and a fundamentalist habit of thought that saw change as decline from pristine perfection. The jurists of sixteenth-century France remained Henrion's most admired models, and he used his roseate vision of the early modern French monarchy as a sometimes critical commentary on the constitutions designed in his own day. In prerevolutionary days he recast the ideas of the sixteenth-century rationalizer of feudalism, Charles Dumoulin, into Enlightenment terms. After the revolution, De l'Autoritéjudiciaire (1810) depicted the moderating role of the judiciary as defenders of past constitutions, and formed an oblique commentary on Napoleon's civil code. Des Pairs et de l'ancienne constitution (1816) appraised the charter of 1814. It accepted a measure of popular participation in government, but held judicial expertise essential in legislation. Des Assemblées nationales (1826) shifted the emphasis from judicial oversight to the separation of powers and representative government, although Henrion, like Guizot and the doctrinaires, remained critical of popular democracy.

The period 1929–33 was perhaps the most traumatic in the inter-war history of the British Labour movement; the ignominious collapse of the second Labour government led the Labour party to question not only the role of its former leaders but also its ideology. This article will reassess the role of the Oxford academic and socialist intellectual, G. D. H. Cole, in this period and will argue that his contribution to the reshaping of the party in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis and the formation of the national government was of much greater significance than has previously been acknowledged. In addition, it will analyse the effects that the political events of the 1920s and the failures of the Macdonald government had upon Cole's socialist ideology and will illustrate that his move away from his earlier guild socialism to a collectivist philosophy was more profound than he himself, and many commentators since, have been prepared to concede.

The main purpose of this case study of an abortive entente in the Lyon silk industry in 1935 is to show that corporatism, often depicted by historians as a vague intellectual doctrine with little or no appeal to real business, was in reality a key category, linking business, politics and ideology. It is suggested that the problems of the silk industry must be seen in the context of a crisis of the Lyonnais liberal tradition and of the economic and ideological contradictions of French society as a whole. These tensions help in turn to explain the authoritarian potential of corporatism in the 1930s and the attraction of many business people to anti-parliamentary political movements. The example of the silk industry also reveals that corporatism cannot easily be categorised in terms of a traditional/modern dichotomy and that the impetus for the transformation of the French economy originated as much in the ideas of business people themselves as in the actions of the elite groups emphasised by some historians.

This article seeks to demonstrate the structure of attitudes in British colonial officialdom through a case study of Mauritius from the governorship of Sir John Pope Hennessy to decolonization. It suggests that officials consistently saw Mauritians as a whole as ‘the Others’, while seeking both to divide and rule them – into an émigré French elite left over from the French colonial period at the time of British conquest (1810), a Creole community, and an Indian community – without assimilating them; and to suspect each in turn of disloyalty and treachery. By a grim irony, many of the governors and their officials were suspected by the colonial office of joining the Others. This is thus a story of an adaptable imperial paranoia.