Welsh Journals

some of the legislation for Wales in 1534. The most convincing explanation for the making of the act of proclamations of 1539-that which presup- poses Cromwell's legitimist bent-receives due attention, but in common with most other historians Mr. Beckingsale fails to appreciate that this act was not the only place where the government sought to make good in statute law a right to issue edicts that was not only enjoyed but exercised by the king in council. The statute for Wales of 1536 (27 Henry VIII, c. 26) is an important case in point. Indeed, the account of the Welsh settlement found here is curiously old-fashioned, in contrast with the treatment of Cromwell's 'policy' in Ireland, which reflects the conclusions of recent research. Again, in the survey of other outlying parts of the realm, the reorganization in 1536 of the government of Calais receives short shrift, while Dr. E. W. Ives's interesting if controversial study of the putative links between office-holding and faction, connecting the court with the county palatine of Chester and with north Wales, does not even rank a mention. As an interim report on the state of knowledge and interpreta- tions concerning its subject, this otherwise worthy little book leaves much to be desired. P. R. ROBERTS University of Kent RISE OF THE HAMBURG EMPIRE, 1526-1815. By V. S. Mamatey. Robert E. Krieger, Huntingdon, New York, 1978. Pp. 182. This notebook on Austrian Habsburg history has the merit of compact- ness. By organising his four chapters into twenty-seven sections, and dividing these into about 140 smaller compartments, the author has been able to hop quickly from topic to topic. Dates, names, events can all be stored together without using up precious space in showing too precisely how or why one thing led to another. The work is, therefore, better suited to the needs of the teacher than the student. The former will find here, very conveniently, memoranda for Emperor Maximilian I's marriage plans, Croatia and the Counter-Reformation, the defenestration of Prague, the famous sieges of Vienna, the development of Hungary in the eighteenth century, Austria's share in the coalition wars against Napoleon, and other subjects. On the other hand, the book is too much of a 'cram' to be an education, and one must therefore doubt whether it is suitable for 'the beginning student of European history', whom Dr. Mamatey addresses. His own considerable knowledge and talent are rarely given a chance to illuminate the underlying aspects of his theme. The reader finds himself continually forced to move on, or zigzagging backwards and forwards between different bits of the Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms, and different phases in the history of international relations, each with a ration of half a page, one page, or two pages. Some of the entries are trivial (e.g. the 'characters' of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rulers, or the reference to the Thirty Years War), a great many are respectable; a few, admirable (e.g. 'failure in the Balkans', circa 1690, pp. 79-82, and 'peasant emancipation', circa 1780-90, pp. 132-35); but the general impression, if several sections are read in sequence, tends to be bewildering.