The Relations of William III with the Swiss Protestants, 1689–1697

1929 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
L. A. Robertson

Diplomatic relations between England and Switzerland have their beginning in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII, chagrined at the success of the French at Marignano, sent Richard Pace as his ambassador to the Cantons, with instructions to secure the participation of the Swiss in an invasion of the Milanese to be undertaken by Imperialists and Swiss mercenaries in the pay of England. Pace had little difficulty in recruiting some 12,000 men from the V Cantons of Uri, Schwyz, Zürich, Basel and Schaffhausen, and 2,000 from the Grisons, and in March 1516 a Swiss-Imperial army descended into the Lombard plain under the joint leadership of the Emperor Maximilian and Galeazzo Visconti. The expedition proved a dismal failure, and all efforts made by Pace to induce the Swiss to take part in a second invasion of Italy failed signally. The conclusion of peace between France and the XIII Cantons on 29 November 1516, deprived the English mission of its essential purpose—the utilisation of anti-French sentiment in Switzerland—and in the autumn of 1517 Pace was recalled. The diplomatic intercourse between England and Switzerland in the years 1515–1517 was occasioned purely by the political exigencies of the moment and was founded upon no permanent basis of common interest, political or religious. Hence the mission of Pace has little significance for the development of Anglo-Swiss relations in later centuries.

1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton

WHEN on the previous two occasions I discussed Parliament and Council as political centres, as institutions capable of assisting or undermining stability in the nation, I had to draw attention to quite a few unanswered questions. However, I also found a large amount of well established knowledge on which to rely. Now, in considering the role of the King's or Queen's Court, I stand more baffled than ever, more deserted. We all know that there was a Court, and we all use the term with frequent ease, but we seem to have taken it so much for granted that we have done almost nothing to investigate it seriously. Lavish descriptions abound of lavish occasions, both in the journalism of the sixteenth century and in the history books, but the sort of study which could really tell us what it was, what part it played in affairs, and even how things went there for this or that person, seems to be confined to a few important articles. At times it has all the appearance of a fully fledged institution; at others it seems to be no more than a convenient conceptual piece of shorthand, covering certain people, certain behaviour, certain attitudes. As so often, the shadows of the seventeenth century stretch back into the sixteenth, to obscure our vision. Analysts of the reigns of the first two Stuarts, endeavouring to explain the political troubles of that age, increasingly concentrate upon an alleged conflict between the Court and the Country; and so we are tempted, once again, to seek the prehistory of the ever interesting topic in the age of Elizabeth or even Henry VIII.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 132-145
Author(s):  
Lucy Wooding

Desiderius Erasmus was a significant figure in early sixteenth-century England, and many of his works were translated into English during the reign of Henry VIII. In the process of translation the original intention of these works was subverted as Erasmus's reputation was appropriated by his translators and their patrons for their own purposes. His works were recast in English form to serve a variety of different agendas, from those of Henrician conservatives to Protestants pushing for more radical religious reform. This article looks at some of these translations, showing how they illustrate the variations in religious attitudes during these volatile years and the competing claims for validation. In particular, Erasmus's pronouncements on the importance of Scripture translation were annexed and deployed in the debate over the English Bible, demonstrating how his views about translation were in themselves translated to reflect the political and religious needs of the English situation.


1990 ◽  
Vol 27 (105) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Burke

The destruction of the Royalist field armies at Naseby and Langport in 1645 did not end the English Civil War. Althought the king had suffered irreversible military defeats, Parliament was unable to govern effectively while politically important towns and fortresses remained in enemy hands. To ensure political stability Parliament’s army was forced to besiege and reduce a large number of strongholds in England, Ireland and Scotland, a task that was not finally completed until the surrender of Galway in 1652. In particular the war in Ireland was to test the army’s siege-making capacity more severely than any previous campaign. To complete the political conquest of Britain and Ireland the army and its generals were compelled increasingly to practise an aspect of warfare that had been traditionally neglected by English soldiers. In contrast, siege warfare was an area in which their continental counterparts had excelled.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European wars produced few set-piece battles. Conflicts were more frequently resolved by the assault and defence of fortified cities and towns. Consequently the art of siege warfare evolved rapidly. England’s political and military insularity during this period detached the country from advances in siege technology that had transformed the conduct of European warfare. No major siege had been undertaken by an English army since Henry VIII had invested Boulogne in 1544, and as there had been no siege of English towns or fortresses since medieval times, there had been little innovation in defensive fortifications. What improvements did occur were sporadic and unco-ordinated. In the sixteenth century a great fortress was built at Berwick-on-Tweed to counter Scottish infiltration and a number of coastal towns in the south-east were refortified against the threat of Spanish invasion. However, by the outbreak of civil war in 1642, even these were obsolete by contemporary continental standards.


1990 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 109-116
Author(s):  
Claire Cross

From the moment of Luther’s defiance of both Pope and Emperor at the Diet of Worms the sixteenth century became a period par excellence of cuius regio, eius religio, and of nowhere was this more true than for the very different societies of England and Poland. In England, for that time a highly centralized country, the nation’s religious fate oscillated wildly with the change of monarchs and their respective governments, mildly reformist under Henry VIII so long as Thomas Cromwell held power, indisputedly Protestant during the rule of the boy king, Edward VI, as indisputedly Roman Catholic in the equally short reign of Mary I, and then Protestant, as it turned out permanently, on the accession of Elizabeth. In Poland, where, because of its proximity to Wittenberg, Luther’s teachings began taking root at least within the German communities considerably earlier than in England, the spread first of Lutheranism and then Calvinism depended far more on the attitude of the nobility than of the monarch, though the succession of the more tolerant Sigismund Augustus in 1548 certainly accelerated the process. Apart from the five years between 1547 and 1553 in England, in neither country was life easy for converts to the Swiss version of Protestantism before 1560, and at different times both Polish and English Protestants suffered quite severe episodes of persecution: this essay traces the fortunes of the Poles who found a refuge in England and of the English who sought a temporary haven in Poland on account of their religion in the mid-sixteenth century.


2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Donald Beecher

This is a study of a Renaissance artist and his patrons, but with an added complication, insofar as Leone de' Sommi, the gifted academician and playwright in the employ of the dukes of Mantua in the second half of the sixteenth century, was Jewish and a lifelong promoter and protector of his community. The article deals with the complex relationship between the court and the Jewish "università" concerning the drama and the way in which dramatic performances also became part of the political, judicial and social negotiations between the two parties, as well as a study of Leone's role as playwright and negotiator during a period that was arguably one of the best of times for the Jews of Mantua.


Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.


Author(s):  
Richard Oosterhoff

The moment unfolded in this book unravelled in the following decades, partly because its students moved on, partly because Lefèvre took up a controversial role in the French Reformation. But his circle’s books continued to cultivate a particular approach to learning, and especially to the cultural place of mathematics, through the sixteenth century. This epilogue picks out a specialist strand of this influence in Lefèvre’s edition of Euclid, often reprinted and used in the republic of letters. A second strand is discernible in the pragmatic stance towards the utility of mathematics held by their heirs, Oronce Fine and Peter Ramus, which came to define European culture.


Aschkenas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Lucia Raspe

AbstractShimʻon Günzburg’s Yiddish collection of customs, first brought to press in Venice in 1589 and reprinted dozens of times over the following centuries, is often considered a mere translation of the Hebrew Minhagim put together by Ayzik Tyrnau in the 1420s. Another claim often made about the book is that, although it was first printed in Venice, it was intended less for the Italian book market than for export. This article sets out to test these assumptions by examining Günzburg’s compilation from the perspective of minhag, or prayer rite. Drawing on Yiddish manuscripts preserved from sixteenth-century Italy, as well as early printed editions overlooked by scholars, it argues that Günzburg’s Minhogim are, in fact, more Italian than has been recognized. It also points up their potential for a comparative history of Ashkenazic book culture across the political and linguistic borders of Europe.


1966 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Holden

If an important part of the political scientist's mission is to anticipate and explain “the critical problems that generate turbulence” in that part of the world which attracts his attention, then, in the study of administration, bureaucratic “imperialism” must be of compelling interest. If systematic data directly assembled for the purpose are lacking, and if there are some signal problems of theory which have been little investigated, there is still enough evidence from studies of other political problems that it seems worthwhile to set out some trial-run ideas in the hope that they will elicit further discussion.Bureaucractic imperialism seems pre-eminently a matter of inter-agency conflict in which two or more agencies try to assert permanent control over the same jurisdiction, or in which one agency actually seeks to take over another agency as well as the jurisdiction of that agency. We are thus primarily concerned with the politics of allocation and shall, except incidentally, bypass some other interesting aspects of inter-agency politics such as cooperation between agencies sharing missions, competition for favorable “one-time-only” decisions which do not involve jurisdictional reallocation, or the critical problems of the “holding company” administrative organization and its internal politics. For the moment, our concern with the politics of allocation leads to a focus on what would appear to be the likely behaviors of those decisionmakers who have both inclination and opportunity to look after the institutional well-being of agencies.


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