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SPAIN AND SPANISH ITALY The last words of Lipsius' De magnitudine Romana (1598) represent one important way in which the Tacitist vision would now go – into a destruction not merely of the constitutional order within states, but (as he had foreshadowed in his De constantia fourteen years previously) of patriotism itself, in the interests of security. The insights of the new humanism had been applied by its first generation – men like Corbinelli or Pasquale, or Lipsius himself in his Politicorum – to the problems of their own states, riven by civil war or governed by the memory of it. But by the 1590s, Europe as a whole could now be seen as a society broken by civil war between nations, whose reconstruction called for a new imperialism. This was a message which – of course – a Spanish or Habsburg audience above all was ready to hear, and there is no sign that even in the troubled world of the 1590s it felt that the Habsburgs could not take on this role. In Italy, in particular, writers in this new genre in the 1590s began to make this theme explicit, and to expand their horizons from the small absolutisms of the peninsula which their predecessors in the 1580s had analysed. The first and in many ways the classic expression of this came in a series of works by a Piedmontese, Giovanni Botero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1870, notwithstanding the chaos which dominated the political panorama, Spain's theatres seemed to be healthy and thriving. According to El Entreacto of 4 March 1871, “Hay en España 335 teatros con 169.376 localidades, donde se celebra por término medio de cada año 8.000 funciones dramáticas, 1.000 de ópera y 3.000 de zarzuela” (“Spain has 335 theatres with 169,376 seats, where on average some 8,000 dramatic works, 1,000 operas, and 3,000 zarzuelas are put on each year”). Fifteen of these theatres were in Barcelona, eleven in Madrid (although Madrid had more total seats than Barcelona), four each in Cádiz and Zaragoza, three each in the Balearic Islands, Córdoba, Sevilla, and Valladolid, two each in Alicante, La Coruña, Granada, Lérida, Málaga, Salamanca, and Valencia, and one in every other provincial capital except Castellón, Logroño, and Toledo. There existed some 45 dramatic societies which promoted theatre in the provincial capitals. These statistics, if accurate, are extraordinary, for they reveal a lively interest in theatre and a significant rise in the number of playhouses from just a decade previously - 91 in capital cities (up from 74) and 244 in small towns (up from 219). Printed texts were also readily available and thereby increased public knowledge of and attention to the theatre. Several publishers dominated the industry of printing inexpensive editions of recent plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For God's sake have a strict eye to Mr S[ydney]. The Whigs have great Expectations of him. And when the Protestants of the Low-Countries were so grievously oppressed by the duke of Alva, why should they not make use of all the means that God had put into their hands for their deliverance? … by resisting they established a most glorious and happy Commonwealth, the strongest pillar of the Protestant Cause now in the world. Somme say the protestants of Holland, France, or … Piedmont were guilty of treason, in bearing arms against their princes, but [this] is ridiculous … when it is certaine, they sought noe more than the security of their own lives. Noblemen, Cittyes, Commonaltyes have often taken armes … to defend themselves, when they were prosecuted upon the account of religion. SIDNEY'S CAUSE The beginning of the end of the Restoration crisis came, as we have seen, with a re-establishment both in the King's Declaration and in the minds of most people of the historical necessity of the Restoration. What followed, from 1681 to 1684, was a replay in miniature of many elements of that earlier event. One of these was the punishment of protestant dissent, and it was this which re-established for the Discourses, and the practical design underlying it, the same general context as for Sidney's Court Maxims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

my desir of being … somme service unto my old father perswaded me to ask leave to comme over … but [he] … being dead within six weekes after my arrivall, I have noe other businesse heare then to cleare somme small contests that are growne between one of my brothers and me concerning that which he hath left me, and, if it please God to give [me] successe … have [only] … the desire of retiring from hence, without any thought of ever returning … carrying with me … sufficient to purchase a convenient habitation in Gascony, not farre from Bordeaux, where I may in quiet finish thoes days that God hath appointed for me. INTRODUCTION After eighteen years on the continent, seventeen of them in exile, Sidney landed in England in late September 1677. He may have arrived at the Castle at Dover, of which he had been commander almost thirty years before. From the Kentish coast there was not far to travel to Penshurst, where his father was to die five and a half weeks later. Sidney seems to have returned alone, though doubtless accompanied by the usual ‘domesticks’. Despite the later reference to a daughter, to marry his ‘valet’ from Nerac, Joseph Ducasse, there is no evidence that such a person travelled with him now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyone agrees that the Whigs possessed an impressive political organisation … Yet on the level of detailed information as to the operations of this organisation, the evidence remains scanty. Of course, this organisation did not appear on the surface. Attempting to preserve an impression of spontaneity the Whig press was intentionally vague. The Restoration crisis, from 1678 to 1683, was the second of seventeenthcentury England's three crises of popery and arbitrary government. It was therefore, from the perspective of the historian, linked to both its predecessor of 1638–42 and its successor of 1687–9. What follows is not an attempt to deny any historical links with the latter. Indeed seventeenthcentury England's ‘troubles’ cannot be understood without considering all three crises, and the relationship between them. What will be attempted in the following chapters is the recovery of the perspective on this crisis of contemporaries themselves. Contemporaries, obviously, could not predict the future. They did not hinge their political interpretations upon prophecy. But they could, and they did, remember the past. In the Restoration period they could not forget it. They could be, and to some extent they were, the prisoners of memory. Historians, on the other hand, have been more interested in linking the crisis of 1678–83 with the shape of the future: the future exclusion of James from the throne; the future birth of parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]