Using a wide range of legal, administrative and literary sources, this study explores the role of the royal pardon in the exercise and experience of authority in Tudor England. It examines such abstract intangibles as power, legitimacy, and the state by looking at concrete life-and-death decisions of the Tudor monarchs. Drawing upon the historiographies of law and society, political culture, and state formation, mercy is used as a lens through which to examine the nature and limits of participation in the early modern polity.

The last years of Henry VIII's life, 1539-47, have conventionally been seen as a time when the king persecuted Protestants. This book argues that Henry's policies were much more ambiguous; that he continued to give support to Protestantism and that many accordingly also remained loyal to him. It also examines why the Protestants eventually adopted a more radical, oppositional stance, and argues that English Protestantism's eventual identity was determined during these years.

Providing fresh insights into the interaction between politics and business in twentieth-century Europe, this book indicates the complexity of the relationship--particularly in the environment of the 1920s and 1930s--when fascism was at its height. Distinctive contributions are also made regarding the contrasting behaviors of businessmen and institutions in response to the Great Depression; the rise of Hitler and the "Jewish question"; the role of business networks in the politics of Belgium and Greece; and the business-politics dimension in the formation of the Irish Republic.

Examining aspects of law, history, art, drama and literature, this study represents an original interpretation of a hidden culture: the arcane world of the early modern legal community, and its attempts to restrict governmental power during the period 1558 to 1660. Based at the Inns of Court in London, the legal profession regulated every aspect of its members' lives--dress, consumption, education, worship, entertainment, and even their dwellings--to represent the order of an ideal commonwealth, which it offered as a model for the government of the English State.

This book, first published in 2006, is a revisionist account of the monarchy during the reigns of the first two Hanoverian kings of Britain, George I and George II. This detailed study of early Georgian kingship and queenship examines the rhetorical and iconographical fashioning of the dynasty, evaluates the political and social function of the early Georgian court, and provides an extensive analysis of provincial cultures of monarchism. Wide-ranging in the scope of its enquiry and interdisciplinary source material, it rejects the contention that the Georgian kings were tolerated solely on...

This is a major study of the 1549 rebellions, the largest and most important risings in Tudor England. Based upon extensive archival evidence, the book sheds fresh light on the causes, course and long-term consequences of the insurrections. Andy Wood focuses on key themes in the social history of politics, concerning the end of medieval popular rebellion; the Reformation and popular politics; popular political language; early modern state formation; speech, silence and social relations; and social memory and the historical representation of the rebellions. He examines the long-term...

This volume provides a detailed book-length study of the period of the Protectorate Parliaments from September 1654 to April 1659. The study is very broad in its scope, covering topics as diverse as the British and Irish dimensions of the Protectorate Parliaments, the political and social nature of factions, problems of management, the legal and judicial aspects of Parliament's functions, foreign policy and the nature of the parliamentary franchise and elections in this period. In its wide-ranging analysis of Parliaments and politics throughout the Protectorate the book also examines both...

This comprehensive study of political and religious conflicts examines the challenge to Restoration institutions by Protestant dissent in the London of Charles II's reign. It presents liberty of conscience as the greatest political issue of the Restoration and explains how the contest between dissenters and Anglicans contributed to the development of parties in 1679-83 that unsettled the nation.

Proposing a new model for understanding religious debates in the churches of England and Scotland between 1603 and 1625, Charles Prior sets aside 'narrow' analyses of conflict over predestination, This book's theme is ecclesiology--the nature of the church, its rites and governance, and its relationship to the early Stuart political world. Drawing on a substantial number of polemical works, from sermons to books of several hundred pages, it argues that rival interpretations of scripture, pagan and civil history and the sources central to the Christian historical tradition lay at the heart of...

Wide-ranging and original re-interpretation of English history and national identity during the vital century (1660 1760) in which the country emerged as the leading world power and developed its peculiarly free political culture. Disputing the insular and xenophobic image of the English in the period, and denying that this was an age of secularisation, Tony Claydon demonstrates instead the country's active participation in a 'protestant international' and its deep attachment to a European 'Christendom'. He shows how these outward-looking identities shaped key developments by generating a...