Utopia, you are standing in it!

In France things were slower getting off the ground. The Vichy regime and the Armistice Army took some of the sting out of occupation initially and led to a degree of confusion as to who was actually the enemy, and where effort ought to be directed. Resistance grew up in both the occupied and the Vichy zones, but the simple existence of an ostensibly legitimate government served to make overt resistance a matter of argument. When the Germans occupied all of France after the Allied invasion of French North Africa the issue became clearer. The Armistice Army dissolved, Vichy was removed as an intermediary, and the French stood face to face with the conqueror. By that time there was already a cadre of resisters living in hiding, not only the normal underground resisters, but also the genesis of a partisan army, spawned by the labor draft and the roundup of…

The German conquest of Europe was intended to be permanent. The First Reich was the old Holy Roman Empire, and it had been laid to rest by Napoleon after the Battle of Austerlitz; the Second Reich was the Hohenzollern Empire; proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1871, it collapsed with the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918; the Third Reich was to last for a thousand years. At least so Hitler said, and so he meant. He was building for the ages.

Not everyone agreed with his concept of the Master Race and the inherent superiority of the Aryan peoples. In western Europe, though at first the Germans behaved themselves, the shock of conquest and defeat soon wore off, and as soon…

Jack Ketch in the Plotter’s Ballad (1678-9). Ketch is seen right of center holding a rope and an axe.

[From the archives] Jack Ketch, otherwise known as John Ketch or Richard Jaquet, began his twenty-three year career as London’s leading executioner in 1663. He was not the only executioner dispatching the condemned at Tyburn, but he was the most infamous, earning a reputation for brutality remarkable even for a man in his profession. After his death in 1686, his name became slang for any executioner, the devil, and even death itself. Over time, his reputation took on such epic proportions that he became a sort of bogeyman. So who was he?

Like many executioners, Ketch spent much of his early life on the wrong side of the law, and is known to have spent time in Marshalsea Prison. Little is definitively known about his origins. He is first mentioned in…

In the latest blog for the Georgian Lords, Dr Charles Littleton considers the way in which 18th-century elections were frequently decided on the results of petitions in Parliament, after the initial returns were challenged.

The weeks before this year’s election in the USA have been marked with commentary considering the potential for voter fraud, disenfranchisement, and the role of the courts. Although on a much larger stage, this USA election has had many of the features of the numerous disputed elections that came before the House of Commons in the 18th century. Attempts to reverse the results of elections were a normal part of parliamentary business, as every new Parliament began with a flood of petitions seeking to unseat freshly returned Members, either by trying to disqualify their voters or complaining of fraudulent methods at the polls. The high number of election petitions submitted throughout the first half of the…