abstract: In 1809 the Memoirs of Prince Eugene, of Savoy<\italic> was published in Vienna. The book was written by Charles-Joseph de Ligne, a Flemish prince who lived seventy years after Eugene of Savoy, the general who commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire in the War of the Spanish Succession. Eugene's military career spanned fifty years and five wars, yet he is less known than his English counterpart, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The memoirs were only attributed to Eugene for a short period and then tossed aside as the creative musings of a cultured prince who left quite the written legacy. Though attributed to the prince, a contemporary reader would not have thought that the manuscript had been penned by Eugene. The memoirs were heavily inspired by a biography by El&eacute;azar Mauvillon, which was published only six years after Eugene's death. Few of Eugene's own letters survived his death, and he never wrote the memoirs of his own campaigns. Marlborough, by contrast, was a prolific letter writer, and the two generals spent some of the major campaigns of the war together with the result that Eugene has featured in much of the research done on Marlborough as a secondary character. Charles-Joseph de Ligne desired to be as good a writer as he was a soldier. His legacy included his own memoirs, which reflected the desire to be as successful as Eugene and to raise Eugene to the proper level of acknowledgement in military history. This thesis explores the historical memory of Eugene as perpetuated by Ligne's literary creation as well as the historical context in which Eugene rose to fame for his military genius and proves the historical accuracy of Ligne's mystification of Mauvillon's biography. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011

<p> Studies on historical representations of anarchists tend to focus on terrorist depictions and how they compare to the actual activities of the anarchist movement. Using British print media, this thesis explores other political, cultural, and social representations of anarchists in an effort to expand the field beyond a strict focus on terrorism. In addition, this thesis will also investigate the ways Cesare Lombroso and Havelock Ellis shaped discussions of anarchists in the British public sphere.</p><p>

This thesis attempts to use the exceptionally rich archives of the German Order to reveal something of the actuality of life in an aristocratic ecclesiastical corporation in society and under stress between c. 1410 and 1466. It differs from previous histories of the Order in that it attempts to combine analysis of longterm social change with a narrative of political events. The first chapter attempts to characterise German peasant society on the Marienburger Werder in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It seeks to give precision to social and economic relationships and argues that peasant communal organisation and powers of resistance to seigneurial coercion were not retarded in medieval Prussia. The final part of the chapter tries to suggest some of the major contrasts between German and Prussian peasants. The second chapter is concerned with the social origins of the brethren of the Order; the way in which power was exercised and finally, with the quality of life enjoyed by members of the Order. The third chapter begins with an assessment of the social, economic and political consequences for Prussian society of the four major wars between the Order and Poland of 1410-1433. It then considers the Order's increased fiscal demands and the severer insistence upon its rights occasioned by war and the consequently sharpened hostility of Prussian society to the alien regime of the Order. The fourth chapter attempts to bring precision to the view expressed in the fifteenth century as well as by later historians that the Order was in need of reform in the later Middle Ages. It tries to show what was considered to be wrong and how members of the Order---including the rebels in the three Chapters of Konigsberg, Balga and Brandenburg---planned to reform the corporation. Finally, chapter five examines the role of the Prussian Estates and the formation of an alliance of townsmen and the landed classes designed to safeguard their privileges against encroachments on the part of the bankrupt lordship. The sequel was rebellion against the Order and a longing for the long-range lordship of the Poles.

English matrimonial law until the mid-nineteenth century was administered by the ecclesiastical courts. The high legal fees charged by these courts restricted the number of matrimonial disputes which came before them. Moreover they were not empowered to grant divorce a vinculo. This matrimonial relief could be obtained only from Parliament but few husbands could meet the heavy expenses of a Private Act. The transfer of divorce hearings to a civil court in 1857 benefitted the middle class, though the mass of the people still remained debarred by inability to pay legal and court fees. Wives were additionally handicapped by economic and legal disadvantages. The need to provide working class wives with a quick, cheap and accessible means of protection from cruel husbands led to the establishment of the matrimonial jurisdiction of magistrates' courts in 1878. Study of the resort to divorce before the Second World War shows that it was the de facto non-availability of divorce rather than the lack of acceptable grounds that resulted in the great majority of broken marriages being dealt with in the summary court. Concern over evidence that the inability of working class spouses to obtain divorce resulted in the formation of illicit unions, led to the development of legal aid provisions culminating in the Legal Aid and Advice Act of 1949. This Act has been of special benefit to wives seeking divorce. Legal Aid, higher real wages and greater acceptance of divorce within the community have allowed an increasing number of broken working class marriages to be dissolved. Findings from a sample of 1961 divorce petitions show that social class and the rate of divorce are inversely associated. However, a broad breakdown into a non-manual/manual dichotomy hides variations within individual class groupings. Thus, white-collar workers have a higher rate of divorce than do manual workers. The social class of petitioners was also found to be associated with such demographic characteristics such as age at marriage and divorce. Although the divorce courts have been opened to all sections of the population, the criminal courts continue to hear the matrimonial disputes of the very poor. Evidence from a survey of maintenance orders held in magistrates' courts in 1966 suggests that some 165,000 marriages are neither martially united nor legally dissolved. Half of these separated spouses never seek divorce.

This thesis studies the development of the power of judicature which was exercised jointly by the two Houses of Parliament in the early seventeenth century. It examines this against the background of the medieval procedural inheritance from the century after 1350 when a somewhat similar power was being exercised by Parliament; and it also sets the seventeenth-century development alongside the growth in the jurisdiction of each House separately in the early Stuart period. This study is concerned primarily with procedural developments, but the political circumstances from which these are derived are not completely ignored. It is argued that there was, in the early seventeenth century, a general but cautious expansion in the judicial activities of both Houses, together and separately. In this expansion, the revival of joint judicature is probably the most important theme, but it cannot be isolated from the remainder, upon which, as upon the medieval inheritance, it is, to some extent, dependent. It is suggested that joint judicature developed in a flexible and varied manner, responding more to the needs of the moment than to ary long-term objectives, evidence for the existence of which is lacking. This thesis also questions the view that joint judicature was revived in ary very mature form in 1621. It is argued that this opinion conceals the very important procedural developments which occurred during the trials of the 1620s, developments which may point to a change in the type of procedure used as the trials of the period became more openly political in character.

The Harleys were the only major Herefordshire gentry family to give their committed support to Parliament in 1642. The personal papers of both Sir Robert Harley and his wife, Lady Brilliana, allow a detailed study of the modes of thought which led the Harleys to oppose the King. The Harleys were guided primarily by their religious beliefs. They were puritans, who hoped that the Long Parliament would undertake sweeping Church reforms, and they perceived the war as a struggle by the godly for true religion. The Harleys' stand in the 1640s was directly linked to their anti-pathy towards Arminianism. Sir Robert's fear that the Arminians would subvert the State and Church to Catholicism is evident in his speeches in the 1628 Parliament. By 1641 the Harleys believed that only the abolition of episcopacy could rid the Church of Arminian and Catholic influences. Before 1640 the Harleys' puritanism had not entailed overt political opposition to the Crown, as is illustrated by Sir Robert's parliamentary career in the 1620s and by his achievement of court office in 1626. The Harleys were also accepted within the official and social networks of the Herefordshire gentry community". Thus in 1640 Sir Robert was returned as senior knight of the shire to both the Short and the Long Parliaments. After 1640 the Harleys became increasingly isolated from the most influential Herefordshire gentry, many of whom would be either committed Royalists or moderates in 1642. The Harley papers illustrate how differing long-term perceptions and beliefs combined with immediate issues to split the county "gentry community" in 1642. Although the Harleys were genuinely concerned by county interests, their puritanism involved them in an alternative set of loyalties, which were stronger than their loyalties either to the local "gentry community" or to the county community.

<p> Some linguists in the nineteenth century argued for the existence of a &ldquo;Turanian&rdquo; family of languages in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, claiming the common descent of a vast range of languages like Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Mongol, Manchu, and their relatives and dialects. Of such linguists, Friedrich Max M&uuml;ller (1823&ndash;1900) was an important developer and popularizer of a version of the Turanian theory across Europe, given his influence as a German-born Oxford professor in Victorian England from the 1850s onwards. Although this theory lost ground in academic linguistics from the mid twentieth century, a pan-nationalist movement pushing for the political unity of all Turanians emerged in Hungary and the Ottoman Empire from the <i> Fin-de-si&egrave;cle</i> era. This thesis focuses on the history of this linguistic theory in the nineteenth century, examining M&uuml;ller&rsquo;s methodology and assumptions behind his Turanian concept. It argues that, in the comparative-historical trend in linguistics in an age of European imperialism, M&uuml;ller followed evolutionary narratives of languages based on word morphologies in which his contemporaries rationalized the superiority of &ldquo;inflectional&rdquo; Indo-European languages over &ldquo;agglutinating&rdquo; Turanian languages. Building on the &ldquo;Altaic&rdquo; theory of the earlier Finnish linguist and explorer Matthias Castr&eacute;n, M&uuml;ller factored in the more primitive nomadic lifestyle of many peoples speaking agglutinating languages to genealogically group them into the Turanian family. M&uuml;ller&rsquo;s universalist Christian values gave him a touch of sympathy for all human languages and religions, but he reinforced the hierarchical view of cultures in his other comparative sciences of mythology and religion as well. This picture was challenged in the cultural pessimism of the <i>Fin de si&egrave;cle </i> with the Pan-Turanists turning East to their nomadic heritage for inspiration.</p><p>

Negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny lasted from January, 1643, until his death in January, 1649, and were carried on from time to time in Paris and Rome as well as Dublin, Kilkenny and Oxford. Charles required troops, arms and money to enable him to defeat the English Parliament and the Scots: the Confederates desired religious freedom and political concessions. The operations of Charles' several agents were rarely co-ordinated; the Confederacy was split into factions. It is the primary object of this thesis to provide a full account of their complex transactions against the background of the war in England and the struggle for Catholic supremacy in Ireland. In view of its unique importance and the accessibility of numerous original sources, many of which are now in print, the history of the Confederation has been strangely neglected. The only would-be major work to have appeared, Professor T.Coonan's The Irish Catholic Confederacy and the Puritan Revolution (1934), is partisan, weak on relations with England, and based almost entirely on published material. In this thesis, use of the abundant sources available, including a number that are unprinted, and due attention to the English side of affairs make it possible to reconstruct several key episodes for the first time and to throw further light on disputed or imperfectly known problems. At the same time, received views of Charles' methods and character and of the Confederates' political inexperience, disunity, and failure to formulate a coherent policy are confirmed and expanded. The machinery used in the negotiations and the parts played in them by Henrietta Maria in Paris, Kenelm Digby in Rome, and the various Royalist agents in Ireland, are described in detail. An attempt is also made to assemble all the accessible evidence relevant to the Earl of Glamorgan's well-known mission, to discuss the theories put forward to explain his powers, and to suggest a novel and possibly definitive interpretation.

The object of this thesis is to present a reinterpretation of Adam Smith's philosophy. It works to show the pessimistic character of his thought that is so often overlooked by conventional analyses. The skepticism Smith holds for man can be seen in his theories on the accumulation of knowledge, morality, economics, and human progress. By emphasizing Smith's theory of man's subjugation to the natural order, an alternative interpretation is given of liberal economics. The role of God in Smith's philosophy will be shown to serve two purposes. God serves as Smith's final line of explanation, and it also provides humanity beneficial results through unintended outcomes.

For the Western allies the breakdown of the Council of Foreign Ministers in 1947 and the onset of the cold war precipitated the controversy over Germany's future and established perceptions of the Soviet threat. Through the investigation of British and French diplomatic archives, the aim of this thesis is to compare how Britain and France responded to the prospect of West German rearmament, why this issue challenged the entente and assess how their different objectives shaped the issue of West German rearmament and in turn the cold war. Echoing past diplomatic traditions, British and French perceptions of a future threat in Europe differed significantly. An analysis of this thread will demonstrate how the Foreign Office, although initially opposed the military argument in favour of using German resources for the defence of the West, eventually reached a compromise with the Chiefs of Staff (COS) in the form of the West German gendarmerie. At the Quai d'Orsay, however, French foreign policy, dominated by a fear of a future German threat and undermined by internal political innnobilisine of the Fourth Republic, refused to consider the possibility despite repeated warnings. In September 1950 the United States proposed to its NATO allies the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This controversial proposal brought the debate onto the international stage, highlighted the divergent British and French positions and raised tensions within the Western alliance. Britain accepted the American proposal in a bid to reinforce the Atlantic dimension of European defence. The French response, a counter-proposal for a European Defence Community (EDC), was an attempt to save the Schuman Plan and France's bid to define West Germany's role in Europe. Due the Britain's reluctance to reconcile her atlanticist tendencies with the French vision for Europe, Britain stayed out of the French plan. The thesis will examine why the EDC had a turbulent path to ratification and assess why, despite French pleas, Britain declined to join the project. In fact, as will be argued here, as the EDC faced criticism from various sides, including from the French military, the Foreign Office began to prepare alternatives in the event of the EDC's collapse. In August 1954 the EDC did indeed collapse, prompting the British-led solution of West Germany's entry into NATO in May 1955. Nine days later the Warsaw Pact was established thereby consolidating the cold war and providing it with some of its permanent features.