EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Virginia’s boroughs before and after 1619 New material, deeper research and novel interpretations of the past inevitably alter the perspectives of historians and their readers. A good example of this can be found in the work of Paul Musselwhite on the establishment of urban corporations in the embryonic English colony of Virginia in the early seventeenth century. He has argued in his Ph.D. thesis, in a subsequent book deriving from that thesis and in an essay that the reforms adopted by the Virginia Company of London in the autumn of 1618 envisaged the extension of Sir Thomas Dale’s 1614 model corporation of Bermuda City to the three other major settlements of Jamestown, Henrico and Elizabeth City. The primary goal was to strengthen such corporate institutions in order to control private landholding and trade within local public communal bodies. This view has subsequently been reflected in the work of other historians. It is perfectly true that the wording of the instructions...

One of the puzzling features of the historiography of the settlement of Virginia in its early years is the emphasis placed on the provisions contained in the instructions given to George Yeardley in November, 1618 for the government of the colony and the protection of the rights of individuals there. These instructions are frequently attributed to the inspiration of Sir Edwin Sandys and his allies in the period immediately preceding his election in April, 1619 as Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London. It should, however, be noted that Sandys did not, prima facie, regard the instructions given to Yeardley as definitive. The Court Book of the Company for 12th May, 1619 noted that Sandys then moved for the appointment of a committee to constitute laws and settle a form of government "for all Virginia" (VCR, Volume 1, page 216). Similarly, the Court Book of the Company noted on 2nd February, 1620 (VCR, Volume 1, page 303) that a form of government for the colony had yet to ...

 I am very sorry to report that Sir John Elliott, the historian of early modern Spain, has just died. An obituary can be found  here  .

  Mark Kishlansky on Charles I’s attempt to exploit the Scots Covenanters’ letter to Louis XIII of France in the Short Parliament of 1640   In a conference held at Selwyn College, Cambridge after Mark Kishlansky’s death, Peter Lake described him as a ‘contrarian’, one of those historians happy to challenge old orthodoxies and received views in the interests of generating new interpretations. There was, perhaps, no better example of this predilection than Kishlansky’s analysis of King Charles I’s dealings with the Short Parliament of 1640. He presented Charles as an eirenic figure ready and willing to make a series of concessions to the House of Commons in his efforts to secure supply for his aim of defeating the rebellious Scots Covenanters who had overturned his rule in Scotland. His obstinate and obstructive critics, mainly in the lower House, frustrated him and doomed the Parliament to dissolution. [1] This ingenious hypothesis was explained in some detail. The ace up...

Between 1967 and 1973 when I was a postgraduate at the University of Oxford and just afterwards, I transcribed the notes kept by Walter Yonge, the Member of Parliament for Honiton in Devon on proceedings in the House of Commons between 1642 and 1645. There were four volumes of these notes in what was then the British Museum’s Manuscript Department (Additional Mss. 18,777-18780). I had been asked to do so by Hugh Trevor-Roper, at that time Regius Professor of Modern History, to assist Dr Valerie Pearl of Somerville College, Oxford in preparing an edition of Yonge’s notes for publication by the Oxford University Press. The Board of the Faculty of Modern History had granted her £1,500 for this purpose and I was paid £600 for my work in transcribing the volumes. Reading The Times Higher Education Supplement in 1975 alerted to me to the fact that Dr Pearl’s edition would shortly be forthcoming according to an interview she had given. In fact, nothing ever appeared. To my surprise, in 1990 a...