Stuart

'Take but degree away... and hark what discord follows' was a Tudor and Stuart commonplace but the neatness and fixity of what we think of as their social order is a creation of historians.

J A Sharpe looks into the work carried out by social historians.

An embryo patron of the English Renaissance and a lost Protestant hero? Roy Strong examines aspirations and might-have-beens in a major new study of Charles I's elder brother.

Rosemary Day considers Oxford and Cambridge in the Tudor and Stewart age

At the start of the reign of Charles II, government was the King's business and factions contested for the monarch's ear. The constitutional changes in later Stuart England added a new, parliamentary dimension to faction. But it did not disappear.

In the third of our series of articles on faction, Kevin Sharpe shows how, in the early 17th century, the monopoly of patronage by a court favourite distorted the pattern of politics in council, court and parliament.

Gillian Williams on the promise of watercolourist and engraver, Wenceslaus Hollar, when he petitioned Charles II to allow him to accompany the British Ambassador on an expedition to Morocco, that he 'would examine all and take designs, and give his Majesty much better satisfaction'.

Whenever the nation went to the polls in eighteenth-century England, the small hamlet of Garrat staged its own mock election. But, as John Brewer shows here, this was not only the occasion for a riotous burlesque - it provided the vehicle for some radical political ideas.

Was power really devolved to Scotland in 1660, asks John Patrick, when the restoration of Charles II led to the recreation of separate Scottish institutions?

In the Georgian age the insane came to be seen not as a threat to society but as its victims. Roy Porter shows however that, in treating the mad with greater compassion, contemporary practice was often to deny the voice of the spiritual.