In the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.

This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.

In the run-up to the Second World War, the War Office agreed to organize territorial units that recruited specifically on the grounds of English Welsh dual identities. These formations, which comprised the 99th London Welsh Heavy Anti-Aircraft regiment and the 46th Liverpool Welsh Royal Tank Regiment, began recruiting in 1939 from English cities with significant Welsh populations. This article explores the mobilization and performance of English Welsh identities during the Second World War and reflects upon why, at a time of global conflict, some English men opted to enlist on the basis of Welsh antecedents. Relatively little attention has been paid to the plurality of British identity in wartime or to how the existence of what historian Thomas Hajkowski has called “hybrid ‘dual identities’” within the constituent countries of the United Kingdom informed the functioning of Britishness during the Second World War. Making use of previously unpublished and original life-writing sources, this article illuminates the significance of dual identifications across two nations at once—in this case, Wales and England—within the multinational state of Britain at war. Overall, by examining the intersectionality between subjective wartime constructions of kin, home, and nation(s), it points to how a sense of dual identifications could feed into recruitment patterns and potentially bolster combat motivation and morale. By highlighting the interconnectedness between constituent nations of Britain, and the complexities of identity formation within Britishness, this article adds to the literature that complicates the notion of fixed singular national identities and underscores the importance of dual identifications within and across the borders of the constituent nations in advancing our understanding of twentieth-century Britain.

Conventional typologies of lordship and its relationship with royal power in the territories of the English crown emphasize the precocious distinctiveness of royal power as against noble lordship, with the latter consequentially bound by an essentially restrictive territorialized model. Drawing particularly on the example of the kingship/lordship of the Isle of Man, this article considers the manifestations of sub-kingship from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries as a way of understanding the complexity of manifestations of sovereignty in these territories. It assesses the use of royal titles and associated ceremonial and issues such as forms of dating. Also considered are some of the practical manifestations of “sovereign” power, seen in rights associated with justice, taxation, and relations between princes, and in the capacity to exclude the intervention of others in these spheres. From the discussion emerges an understanding of royal power as more variable in its footprint and shared in many spaces by men conventionally seen as part of an undifferentiated aristocracy. The reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII have usually been seen as the final point at which centralization through the power and authority of the English monarch obliterated any remaining echoes of sub-kingship in the North Atlantic archipelago, ending once and for all the possibility of a shared space between kingship and lordship. In considering the historiography of this moment, and evidence for continuity through Henry VIII's reign, the article raises questions about lordship and its political and cultural boundaries in the late medieval and early modern periods.

After World War II, Great Britain faced major economic problems, which the government sought to rectify by reviving export markets and achieving a favorable balance of trade. One overlooked component of reconstruction was a decision to recognize tourism as an “invisible export,” a way to draw currency, especially American dollars, into the country. However, in a period characterized by scarcity, rationing, and austerity measures, the endeavor presented enormous challenges. The situation was exacerbated by the advent of the Marshall Plan in 1948. It required British participation in a European-based tourism scheme that jeopardized the success of Britain's own initiative and, ironically, could potentially undermine the economic benefits that Marshall Plan participation was supposed to provide. In exploring the history of British tourism policy in this era, this article shows the extent to which the Marshall Plan compromised an important aspect of British reconstruction policy. It can thereby better inform our understanding of the complexities of postwar reconstruction and of Britain's guarded response to aspects of the Marshall Plan—particularly the American initiative to promote greater European economic integration in the immediate postwar era.

Historians of radicalism have long held that following the repression of the English Jacobins in 1794–95, open agitation by plebeian reformers remained dormant until 1802, when they reemerged in a more clearly constitutionalist pose to fight a number of contests in that year's general election. According to this view, the contests led directly to Sir Francis Burdett's victory at the 1807 Westminster election, a foundational moment for nineteenth-century radicalism. This article argues instead that the previously overlooked English Jacobin intervention at the 1796 general election was the ultimate foundation for the 1807 election victory and far more significant than the contests evident in 1802. While this argument indicates that the Jacobin organizations for radical reform were not in a steep terminal decline by 1796, as is widely assumed, it also undermines the notion that the electoral politics of the 1802–1807 period was a major novelty. There was nevertheless not a clear-cut continuity from 1796 to 1807. This article demonstrates that in 1796 Jacobin political thought led to the development of a pure style of electioneering that rejected corrupt practices in order to turn the electoral process into a venue for the enaction of general will through the open use of sovereign reason. Between 1802 and 1804, this position was abandoned in favor of a more traditional, pragmatic and patricianly form of electioneering. However, this article concludes with a major revision of the 1807 Westminster victory by illustrating that, far from an innovation, it was a direct revival of the “purity” pioneered by the Jacobin contests of 1796.

The scholarly consideration of the marketing of luxury goods like paintings in Renaissance Europe has rightly concentrated on the Italian and Netherlandish experiences, while the discussion of an English retail market for paintings has focused on a later era. This article investigates the retail sale of painting in Tudor and early Stuart times. It asks what sorts of paintings were sold, who sold them, and what sorts of spaces accommodated such sales. Whereas conventional art historical research has concentrated on the production and sale of portraits, the discovery of an early seventeenth-century list of coat of arms painters holding retail shops in London adds additional support to the prominence of arms painting in such retail sales. This article considers the social context underlying the importance of displaying coats of arms and shows that arms painters engaged in the retail sale as well as the production of arms. The article proceeds to examine the varieties of retail spaces in which sales took place and concludes with a consideration of how retail sale of paintings contributed to London's role as a cultural center.