bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chartism in 1848: Reflections on a Non-Revolution
Authors: Weisser Henry
Published: November 2007

The standard interpretation of 1848 in Britain is that while Continental Europe reached a turning point and failed to turn, as the famous aphorism states, Britain reached its turning point in 1832, turned, and thus avoided revolution in that year of revolutions. The British middle classes, unlike their Continental counterparts, were loyal in 1848. They enjoyed a broader franchise, some reforming legislation already passed, and commitments to various welcome changes in the future made by diverse politicians. All of this gave the British middle classes great confidence in British institutions and their own future under them, as well as the belief that their country was fortunately different from all the other nations. Without the middle classes, the Chartists could have never succeeded with any kind of insurrection. So, while the capitals of Europe echoed with sounds of musketry and cannon, Britain was at peace because her Constitution was essentially better than anything that prevailed elsewhere.

Modern historiography has done little to change this interpretation of 1848 that was first proclaimed by self-congratulatory and relieved Victorians. All the accounts stress the fortunate uniqueness of Britain and the key role of middle class loyalty. Priscilla Robertson wrote, “During the days of 1848, England stood apart, unshaken, apparently unshakable. Her reformers were already in power. …” In a recent study of the 1848 revolutions, Peter Stearns focuses on the ways the middle class abetted Continental revolutions at the same time that they were instrumental in preventing revolution in Britain. These are really restatements of Elie Halévy's classic explanation. While John Saville's treatment of 1848 differs from traditional accounts in several ways, particularly in stressing the vigor of the Chartist left's resistance after April 10, his explanation for the failure of revolution does not. He concludes that the British government could count on “whole-hearted support” much further down the social scale than could Continental governments. Moreover, despite all the newer research on political violence, crowds, and revolution, the standard interpretation of Britain's fate in 1848 remains: middle-class support for the regime was too strong while Chartist support for an insurrection was too weak.
W. E. Gladstone and Liberal-Nationalist Movements
Authors: Sandiford Keith A. P.
Published: November 2007

Historians have traditionally emphasized Gladstone's support for liberalnationalist movements, especially in Europe. His great biographer, John Morley, saw him as being captivated by the new doctrine of “nationality” after one of his frequent visits to Italy. Philip Magnus described him as an enthusiastic champion of freedom; and Paul Knaplund made an extraordinary fuss over his gospel of “freedom and voluntaryism.” Even G. E. Buckle, who must be considered a hostile witness, conceded that Gladstone was much more sympathetic to national movements than his famous rival, Disraeli. Gladstone is generally depicted in Victorian historiography as the outstanding champion of liberal and national ideas, especially in Italy, Ireland, Greece, and the Danubian principalities. There survives a vivid picture of the Grand Old Man fighting to the end to save the hapless Armenians from the butchery of the Turks. This image of an unusually devout Christian striving against overwhelming odds to promote the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity is still an integral part of the Victorian mythology.

Yet, as long ago as 1961, Derek Beales did his best to show that Gladstone's approach to the Italian question was, at best, ambivalent. Even before that, S. Gopal had suggested that Gladstone's contribution to Italian unification was inferior to that of Palmerston, Russell or Sir James Hudson. Two Polish sympathizers have drawn attention to Gladstone's failure to promote the Polish cause. A. J. P. Taylor, for all his wit and wisdom, failed to put more than a minor dent in Gladstone's reputation when, in 1957, he dissected that statesman's foreign policy only to find incompatible elements of Cobdenism and Palmerstonianism. Modern scholars, like C. J. Lowe and D. M. Schreuder, have also argued that Gladstone's attitude towards nationalism was suspiciously flexible. But, in curious defiance of all this scholarship, the Gladstonian myth persists. It is the purpose of this article to put this myth to rest by demonstrating that Gladstone was cautiously conservative in his attitude toward nationalist movements and that he put much more store on order and stability than on national liberty.
Legitimacy and Usurpation in the Thought of Edmund Burke
Authors: Dreyer Frederick A.
Published: November 2007

In matters of public controversy the eighteenth-century Englishman displayed a cast of mind that was legalistic and unpragmatic. The first question he tended to ask was not what the benefits of a policy might be but whether anyone possessed the right to implement it. Public debate was legitimist in emphasis. There were few disputes where the issue of jurisdiction was ignored; very often jurisdiction was the only issue in contention. The great example of this is to be found in the debate over American taxation. The question was not whether the taxes had been voted for some improper purpose or whether the colonies could afford to pay. The argument turned on the issue of authority: did Parliament have the right to tax the colonies for any purpose whatever regardless of their ability to pay? The same emphasis on jurisdiction is to be found in the debate over the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. This act restricted the right of members of the royal family to marry whom they pleased. Opponents of the act condemned it not in terms of policy but in terms of right and jurisdiction. It was “repugnant to the natural rights of mankind.” It was “null and invalid.” Parliament possessed no authority to legislate such a measure, and it could be submitted to “only as the effect of power.” This eighteenth-century pre-occupation with legitimacy is evident even in the writings of its most radical and eccentric thinkers. Thomas Paine's chief complaint against the ancien régime in England was not that it governed badly but that it governed without legitimate authority. Whether it governed well or ill, it remained by Paine's standards an usurpation. Paine's zeal for democratic legitimacy may have been peculiar, but his method of debate was not.
Henry II and the Angevin Tradition of Family Hostility
Authors: Bachrach Bernard S. ,   William of Malmesbury,   Gerald of Wales
Published: November 2007

Those non-medievalists who had the opportunity to see the film The Lion in Winter may well have concluded that the intensity and extent of hostility among the members of King Henry II's family had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. It would appear, however, that the rivalries between Henry and his sons, and of the latter among themselves, provide a noteworthy example of an historical reality that was even more virulent than the fictionalized version. For example, in 1173-1174, Henry's sons, Henry the Younger, Richard, and Geoffrey, revolted against their father despite the fact that they were only teenagers at the time. The youths were joined in this effort by their mother, Eleanor. However, she was captured by Henry II, who imprisoned her until his own death sixteen years later. In 1182, Henry the Younger again threatened to revolt against his father. The next year found the youth at war with his brother Richard. This conflict widened when Geoffrey joined his brother against Richard, who subsequently was supported by the king. During this campaign Henry the Younger and Geoffrey appear to have attempted to have their father killed. In 1184, following Henry the Younger's death, Geoffrey and his youngest brother, John, went to war against Richard. Finally, in 1189, King Henry died while at war against Richard, who was supported by John.

Henry's family problems were not limited to hostilities with his sons, for on two earlier occasions, in 1152 and 1156, he went to war against his own brother Geoffrey. In a similar vein, Henry's sons did not only find themselves in conflict with their father but, as noted above, they fought against each other. This did not end with Henry's death: John and Richard were in conflict with each other on several occasions, and the former certainly was responsible for the murder of his nephew Arthur.
George Dangerfield: A Personal Account
Authors: Gollin Alfred
Published: November 2007

In March 1985 the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies devoted its annual meeting to honoring George Dangerfield upon the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his book, The Strange Death of Liberal England. Scholars from various parts of the United States and from several British Universities came together to pay their respects to Dangerfield, and to talk about his famous history.

The principal organizers of the meeting were Professor Peter Stansky of Stanford University; Professor R. J. Q. Adams of Texas A&M University; and Professor Dan Krieger, California Polytechnic State University. These organizers made two requests of me. They invited me to deliver an oral comment upon a paper about Dangerfield which was presented to the conference by Professor Carolyn White of the University of Alabama; and they also asked that I write this essay about “Dangerfield—the man and historian.” The idea was to make his personality known to a wider audience by recalling certain experiences and by relating certain anecdotes which illustrate the character of this remarkable scholar and man of letters.

The celebration of the anniversary of The Strange Death of Liberal England actually began a few months earlier when the Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. R. A. Huttenback, presented Dangerfield with a University Medal in commemoration of the book. At this ceremony at U.C.S.B. Dangerfield casually remarked that The Strange Death of Liberal England had appeared in nineteen editions and he thought, but was not entirely certain, that a twentieth edition was about to be produced.
“Poore and in Necessity”: Margaret Fell and Quaker Female Philanthropy in Northwest England in the Late Seventeenth Century
Authors: Kunze Bonnelyn Young
Published: November 2007

“He that stoppeth his Ears at the Cry of the Poor, he also shall cry and not be heard” was the warning of Thomas Lawson to Parliament at the time of Charles II's restoration to the English throne in 1660. Lawson, a Quaker school teacher and notable botanist, addressed his special appeal for poor relief to the Restoration Parliament. He, like other Quaker leaders of his day, urged those in authority “let not a Settlement for the Poor be forgotten.” The Quaker movement drew its members from a cross section of the social orders of seventeenth-century England, including a significant number of poor from the lower orders. Although appeals for poor relief were not unique to the Quakers, Thomas Law-son expressed a typical Quaker viewpoint of social obligation to the impecunious. The Quakers consistently addressed the problem of poor relief within their community in practical terms from their earliest organization in 1652.
The Workers in the Workers' Educational Association, 1903–1950
Authors: Rose Jonathan
Published: November 2007

The history of British continuing education has been written almost entirely as institutional history. The impact of the 1924 Board of Education regulations on the funding of adult classes has been thoroughly examined, and we know a good deal about the various district secretaries of the Workers' Educational Association. But we have yet to tackle a set of more fundamental and revealing questions about the WEA: Who were the students? Why did they enroll in WEA courses? What were their intellectual goals? What cultural equipment did they bring to their classes? What went on inside the classroom? Most importantly, how, if at all, did the WEA change the lives and minds of its students?

This article focuses on a controversy that erupted shortly after the WEA was launched in 1903, and which persists today: a question that can only be resolved by studying WEA students at close range. According to a number of Marxist critics, the WEA played an important role in steering the British working class away from Marxism. Roger Fieldhouse argues that the WEA'S emphasis on objective scholarship and open-mindedness “could have the effect of neutralising some students' commitments or beliefs and integrating them into the hegemonic national culture.”
The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women and the Problems of Empire Settlement, 1917–1936
Authors: Blakeley Brian L.
Published: November 2007

The “deluge” of World War I not only produced change within British society, but it intensified governmental and societal interest in the empire. This trend occurred for several reasons. Britain's wartime co-operation with her dominions led many Britons to assume that this new imperial unity could, and should, be cultivated in the post-war period. The imperial pessimism generated in some circles by the tragedy of the Boer War faded from the public's memory. Equally important, however, by 1917 the government was conscious of the serious economic and social problems Britain would confront once victory had been attained. One of several imperial solutions studied extensively during the war was state supported emigration. The government, which since 1914 had played an increasingly prominent role in solving society's problems, believed that emigration would serve a variety of useful purposes. It would alleviate the distress of thousands of British women, it would accelerate the economic and social development of the dominions, and it would strengthen the British Empire, giving it the power and self-assurance necessary to carry out its diplomatic and military roles in the post-war world. During the course of these deliberations during and immediately after World War I, the importance of women to any comprehensive strengthening of the empire was fully accepted by the government for the first time in British history.

The growth of interest in government sponsored imperial migration, including that of women, did not occur, however, in a vacuum. The 1920s and 1930s were, as it is increasingly recognized, “a great age of British Imperialism,” during which the “mass pheonomena of Empire—the Empire Shopping Weeks, the Empire Exhibitions and Empire Day celebrations” became a prominent part of the British social scene.
Courtly Culture and Courtly Style in the Anglo-Norman World
Authors: Hollister C. Warren
Published: November 2007

Two years ago, at an NACBS council meeting at the now defunct Shamrock Hotel in Houston, one of our officers—not me, I hasten to say—suggested that NACBS Presidents really ought to begin earning their keep by delivering presidential addresses. I objected that NACBS Presidents receive no keep, but I was ruled out of order. I therefore stand before you this evening as the first person ever to deliver an NACBS presidential address. This, I can assure you, is a daunting challenge. One provision of the council resolution was that the address should be published as a scholarly essay inAlbion, and withAlbion'sinternational reputation, this means that what I say here tonight will be read very critically—perhaps even scoffed at—by historians of medieval Britain throughout the world. I dare not be frivolous. On the other hand, we have all just enjoyed a splendid banquet. We have indulged in good wine. Some might now be in the mood for an hour's technical discussion of Anglo-Norman prosopography, but in actuality, I suspect that very, very few of you are in such a mood.

So the great challenge of the presidential address is to be amusing and significant at one and the same time—and I'm not at all certain that I am capable of squaring that circle. I was puzzling over the problem almost exactly one year ago, at our NACBS Annual Meeting last October, at the elegant and, indeed, unsinkable Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.
“To know this is the true essential business of a king”: The Prince of Wales and the Study of Public Finance, 1755–1760
Authors: Bullion John L.
Published: November 2007

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the growth of the national debt, the burden of the taxes necessary to support it, and the effect of this system of public finance on the politics, economy, and society of Britain, deeply concerned politicians in opposition. Their frequent expressions of concern were sufficiently persuasive to induce similar apprehensions on occasion in politicians at court. In 1753, when the national debt was a little over £74,000,000, earl Waldegrave, a personal favorite of George II, felt compelled to tell the House of Lords about a “consideration of very great importance, … the state of our national debt [and] the heavy taxes which are the consequences of this debt.” The situation required, he went on, “prudent measures of government, with that strict national economy which must be our only remedy.” Waldegrave did not go so far as to believe the nation was on the verge of collapse. As he pointed out, “a country and a government like ours has so many and so great resources, that we may bear a great deal and still be in a flourishing condition.” “Yet as long as this evil does subsist,” he warned the House, “we can never expect fully to exert our proper strength.” He concluded, “Till this burden is removed it will remain a check to our trade, will be still heavier on the landed interest, must lessen our credit and influence abroad, and will be a cause of discontent if not of disaffection at home.”
Morality and Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair
Authors: Hunt Tamara L.
Published: November 2007

The licentious career of Caroline of Brunswick, the most notorious queen in modern British history, was only exceeded by that of her husband, George IV, and the scandal that emerged when he attempted to obtain a divorce inspired one of the most unusual episodes of nineteenth-century British history. For six months the attention of the country was focused on the queen's trial; massive demonstrations in her support were familiar sights in London streets and news of the matter dominated the columns of the press. The popular outpouring of support for the queen often took the form of reviling the king and his ministers, and revolution seemed to be in the air, yet because no lasting political change resulted from this tumult, historians have tended to dismiss the affair as relatively unimportant. However, to view this interlude primarily in terms of party politics is to overlook the fact that the majority of the people who formed the massive crowds that so alarmed the government were neither radicals nor reformers, and many, if not most of them were unenfranchised. In order to better understand the implications of this unrest, it is important to identify those factors that inspired British men and women to openly denigrate their ruler and to heap opprobrium on the members of government in defense of a woman who, ironically, many believed to be guilty as charged. Such an examination makes it clear that this was an event of profound cultural significance and was in some respects the first wide-spread popular expression of the moral standards that have come to be labelled “Victorian.”

Any attempt to judge “public opinion” is fraught with difficulty. Most of the surviving journals, memoirs, and collections of letters from this period were written by members of the gentry and aristocracy; most of the middle and working-class people who actively demonstrated in support of the queen or who signed the numerous addresses sent to her have tended to remain silent and anonymous. Newspaper and other written accounts of the affair were often extremely partisan, for British society was sharply divided on this issue. Political caricatures, however, overcome some of these difficulties.
Seats of Honor, Seats of Power: The Symbolism of Public Seating in the English Urban Community,c.1560-1620
Authors: Tittler Robert
Published: November 2007

The use of anthropological methods and models to inform the conceptualization of social history is no longer a novelty by any means. Whereas the historian has long documented and interpreted the events and sometimes the material objects of past times, and placed them in causal relationships, in recent years anthropologists have helped historians to unveil the multiplicity of meaning in a particular sets of events or material objects. Common and effective applications of such collaboration have been made with regard to such concerns as kinship and marriage, the nature of personal honor, hospitality, and the ritualized expression of group identity. Yet historians have also employed an anthropological approach to the ritualistic or semiotic aspects of whole communities.
Predicting Civil War Allegiances: The Lawyers' Case Considered
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2007

Conrad Russell has recently asked, not for the first time, how far the divided allegiances of members of the Long Parliament were anticipated in the parliaments of the 1620s. Many who sat as M.P.s in the third decade of the seventeenth century had died by the early 1640s, while not all those who still survived were either sufficiently vocal before 1629 or politically active after 1641 to be classifiable for the purposes of this exercise. Nevertheless, Professor Russell manages to assemble a small bloc of members whose earlier politico-religious sympathies and civil war alignments are both more or less known. This group of twenty-six men splits neatly 50:50 between Royalists and Parliamentarians. According to Russell, all that distinguished one from the other in the 1620s, and the sole effective predictor of their later allegiances, was religion. More specifically, the crucial variable turns out to be commitment to further godly reformation, strong in the case of future Parliamentarians, weak in the case of future Royalists. But for Russell's explicit rejection of any “supposed correlation between ‘Puritanism and Revolution,’” the casual reader might conclude that something resembling the Puritan Revolution was sneaking back into historio-graphical favor.
“The Fac Totum in Ecclesiastic Affairs”? The Duke of Newcastle and the Crown's Ecclesiastical Patronage
Authors: Taylor Stephen
Published: November 2007

The Archbishop of Canterbury…sees he's a cypher who they will let have no influence, & will gladly lay any blame upon. The Minister [Newcastle] is himself the Fac Totum in ecclesiastic affairs, & a sweet manager he is, for what with the last Election, & his pitiful passion for the Chancellorship of Cambridge he has involved himself in promises of church preferments to the greatest degree of perplexity. There are now two vacant stalls; one at Durham, & one at Canterbury; & he durst not dispose of either of them. He torments the poor Archbishop of Canterbury for everything that falls in his gift, so that if a thing drops, he is forced to give it away the moment he is informed of it, for fear of the Duke of Newcastle. He is as great a plague to the other Bishops, asking even for their small livings. Ely gives him everything (they say,by bargain:) Chichester, Peterborough, Durham, Gloucester, Salisbury, &c., &c., are slaves to him, in this respect. Only London & Winchester give him flat denials, unless we are to add York, which is a point problematical. As to Lord Chancellor, it is a kind of bargain made with every one that enters upon that high office, “that the Minister shall dispose of most of the church preferments in his gift.”

Edmund Pyle's oft-quoted account, though particularly caustic, is not unrepresentative of the views held by both contemporaries and historians about the duke of Newcastle as ecclesiastical minister. In the most comprehensive modern assessment of his role, Norman Sykes, while admitting that Newcastle was anxious “to fill the bench with good prelates,” portrays him as weak, vacillating, and incompetent. Moreover, and of more relevance to the concerns of this article, Sykes emphasizes the extent of Newcastle's power and influence in church affairs: like many of the duke's contemporaries he agrees with Pyle that Newcastle not only enjoyed virtually unquestioned control of Crown patronage, but that he also encroached on that of the lord chancellor and the bishops.
“Battered and Shattered”: Lloyd George and the 1914 Budget Fiasco
Authors: Murray Bruce K.
Published: November 2007

In June 1914 David Lloyd George, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, capitulated to opposition from within his own party and withdrew from the Budget for 1914–15 his proposals to revise the system of Exchequer grants to local authorities and to establish land value rating. Withdrawal was a considerable political humiliation for Lloyd George. “His stock stands low in the party,” commented his friend, Lord Riddell, in his diary. “The Budget has been a fiasco.” What went wrong with the 1914 Budget is the concern of this article.

Lloyd George's 1914 Budget incorporated two distinct strategies. The first comprised a fiscal strategy designed to provide in a single “taxing” Budget for the needs of both the Navy and the reorganization of local government finance and taxation. The second constituted part of a wider political strategy intended to furnish a reform program that would enable the Liberals to make a powerful progressive appeal at the next general election, due by the end of 1915. The first was supposed to serve the second, but in the event had the opposite result. It prompted Lloyd George to abandon his original plan of building up to a major reform Budget in 1915 and to proceed instead to include in the 1914 Budget “provisional” grants to local authorities before he had prepared the groundwork, administratively, legislatively or politically, for a new system of grants and rating. At all levels, the enterprise was premature, and simply presented a group of discontented wealthy Liberals in the Commons with the opportunity to stage an effective protest against the direction of Liberal finance.
Scoto-Norse Kings and the Reformed Religious Orders: Patterns of Monastic Patronage in Twelfth-Century Galloway and Argyll
Authors: McDonald Andrew
Published: November 2007

Raoul Glaber, the Burgundian monk and chronicler, noted in a famous passage in hisHistoriarum Libri Quinquehow, about the year 1000,

throughout the whole world, but most especially in Italy and Gaul, men began to reconstruct churches….It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.

Although Glaber was writing primarily of the Continent, the tide of religious revival that followed the coming of the millennium eventually lapped upon the shores of the most distant corners of Europe. In Scotland, the great age of church-building came a century later, and it was the twelfth century, rather than the eleventh, which was notable for the foundation of churches and monasteries on a large scale. Nevertheless, by 1200 Scotland, too, had been cloaked in a white mantle of new churches, made up of cathedrals, parish churches, and monasteries. It is the latter with which this essay will be principally concerned.

The works of Professor Barrow are of the first importance for understanding the patterns of monastic patronage that brought the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and other religious orders to Scottish soil, and for the contribution these orders made to the medieval kingdom of Scotland.
Archibald Alison: Conservative Controversialist
Authors: Milne Maurice
Published: November 2007

Archibald Alison is perhaps more widely remembered from a brief-and disguised—reference inConingsbythan from any direct usage of his own voluminous writings: “Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read theQuarterly Reviewwith great attention; and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy's History of the late War, in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” The dubbing of Alison as “Mr. Wordy” was one of Disraeli's most unerring shafts. Alison'sHistory of Europe, covering the period 1789-1815, would have earned him that sobriquet on its own, to say nothing of the other books, pamphlets, and articles that flowed from his inexhaustible pen. The various editions of hisHistory, most commonly in sets of twelve volumes, made Alison a quite celebrated historian in his own day. Long neglected in the twentieth century, theHistoryhas recently received some critical attention. Without seeking unduly to resurrect a departed reputation, Hedva Ben-Israel does at least acknowledge theHistory'searlier success: “It was by far the best-selling history of the French Revolution in England and America almost to the end of the century, and was translated into most European and several oriental languages.” Some fruitful comparisons between Alison's work and the more enduring classic by Thomas Carlyle have been drawn by Clare Simmons.
What's New About the Restoration?
Authors: Harris Tim
Published: November 2007

When I first began my researches into later Stuart history as a graduate student back in 1980, the Restoration was a relatively underdeveloped field of inquiry. Although there were a number of scholars producing excellent work in this area, there was not the same depth of scholarship as characterized study of the first half of the seventeenth century: wide gaps in our knowledge existed, and for some of the most crucial episodes of the period we were dependent upon a limited range of studies and dated works. The best general entrée into the period was still David Ogg's classic two-volumeEngland in the Reign of Charles II, first published in 1934! A suitable modern textbook did not emerge until 1978, with the publication of J. R. Jones'sCounty and Court: England 1658–1714, a book that had neither Ogg's range nor lively analytical style. For our understanding of why the monarchy was restored we were reliant upon a study that had come out in 1955, which was supplemented only in 1980 by Austin Woolrych's book-length “Historical Introduction” to volume seven of the Yale edition of theComplete Prose Works of John Milton. On the Exclusion Crisis we had J. R. Jones'sThe First Whigs, which had appeared in 1961, although for the first Tories we still needed to use Sir Keith Feiling's 1924History of the Tory Party. For the Glorious Revolution we had a book written by a man who tragically died (at a young age) before he could complete the work, and another self-consciously thought-provoking work designed to raise questions and suggest future avenues of research—both excellent studies in their own right, but hardly the plethora of monographs that we possessed for the mid-century revolution.
The Virtuous and the Verminous: Turn-of-the-Century Moral Panics in London's Public Parks
Authors: Dreher Nan H.
Published: November 2007

Public parks offered many attractions to Victorian Londoners: natural beauty, healthful fresh air, facilities for sports and socializing, and grounds for civic pride. The efforts of individuals, private groups, and government officials increased the number of public parks in the metropolis from about a dozen at mid-century to more than 200 in 1898. Parks became integral parts of city life and stimulated the development of a diverse community of park users. These citizens did not hesitate to express their views about appropriate behavior for public space, demonstrating their role in the public sphere. While park users differed in class, gender, age, religion, and politics, most agreed that the city's public spaces should encourage “respectability” and good citizenship, especially as an example to children. When these values, vaguely defined though they were, seemed threatened by specific park behaviors, the community displayed a remarkable consensus. Two particular types of park use—public displays of affection by “courting couples” and the presence of “verminous persons” (mostly vagrants)—aroused public opinion in the 1890s and early 1900s to moral panic. Reluctant royal and municipal park authorities were pressured into passing more restrictive park laws in both cases, though the “problems” themselves did not disappear.

This article explores how these crises developed and why public reaction to them was so vehement. The material reality behind the “courting couples” and “verminous persons” crises, as far as can be determined, seems not to justify the level of outrage that occurred. The strength of public reaction must reflect the extreme sensitivity of a culturally unstable community in the process of redefining itself and its values. Public parks changed patterns of social interaction in the late Victorian city, bringing diverse citizens into proximity by creating new common spaces. Early nineteenth-century class discrimination against workers and the poor in public space then gave way to a new form of exclusion that emphasized individual behavior rather than inherited status.
Henry VIII's Greeting of Anne of Cleves and Early Modern Court Protocol
Authors: Warnicke Retha M.
Published: November 2007

The elaborate pageantry and festivities of grand public processions have proven to be of great interest to historians writing on late medieval and early modern Europe. The more limited ceremonies and protocol at court have attracted somewhat less attention, although on occasion they have been adopted as evidence of a monarch's personal feelings about his attendants and family members. A study of royal protocol and the social and political framework in which rulers fulfilled their roles as sovereigns is timely, for it will surely lead to a new and fuller understanding of how monarchs's public roles, such as those of the Tudors, related to their private motivations.

Greeting ceremonies, which were one aspect of the “law of hospitality,” require special attention, because they offer insights into the interactions of people of varying status who were of fundamental importance to the hierarchical communities of Europe. As Esther Goody points out, “Greeting becomes a mode of entering upon or manipulating a relationship in order to achieve a specific result.” How monarchs privately greeted their brides, the topic of this essay, not only offers insights into the complexity of the relationship of individuals who were wed by proxy before they had become acquainted, but also offers evidence of how the greeting ritual performed by monarchs differed from that enacted by their royal and noble relatives.
The Image of the Sea Officer in English Literature, 1660–1710
Authors: Glass Robert E.
Published: November 2007

They that go down to the sea in ships hold an ambiguous position in society. Though drawn from society, and molded by its beliefs and values, seamen spend much of their lives isolated from it. The sea is the sailor's home and workplace, the ship itself a society in miniature with its own customs, rules, and language. People ashore know little of the seaman's life and work, and what they do know is usually drawn from observing the seaman on land, where, out of his element, he often appears as a foreigner in his own country.

For this reason, the image of the seaman that appears in literature is frequently an inaccurate reflection of reality. Yet, it is the literary image of the seaman of the late seventeenth century that has held the imaginations of historians until quite recently. The traditional view of the sea officers of the age has been of two antagonistic groups based on social class, with little or no common ground in terms of education, tradition, values, or experience of the sea. One of these groups, the tarpaulins—the source of the popular nickname for the sailor, Jack Tar—consisted of those who had risen to command from the lower deck; bluff and coarse in manner, lacking in education, tact, and good breeding, but excellent seamen, who were brave, sober, and diligent. The other group, the gentleman captains—ignorant of seamanship and navigation, frivolous, drunken, and corrupt—are said to have pushed most of the tarpaulins out of their commands after the Restoration. This displacement of tarpaulins by gentleman captains is usually viewed as a disaster for the navy, leading to incompetence, undiscipline, and sloth, and an adequate explanation in itself for every naval embarrassment of the late seventeenth century. This view has come under increasing criticism as overly simplistic, if not wholly inaccurate, and one may hope that the recent work of J. D. Davies has exploded it forever.
The Concept “Fact”: Legal Origins and Cultural Diffusion
Authors: Shapiro Barbara
Published: November 2007

Facts are something we take for granted, at least most of the time. As ordinary individuals we assume that there are knowable facts, for instance, that the dog chewed the drapes, that England exists, that it rained yesterday, or that babies cry. If, as scholars, that is as historians, social scientists, and natural scientists, we are more aware of the problematical nature of “facts” we nevertheless tend to establish and use facts rather unselfconsciously in our work. On this occasion I want to look at the evolution of the concept of “fact,” and in particular the way “fact” entered English natural philosophy. I will attempt to show that the concept of “fact” or “matter of fact,” so prominent in the English empirical tradition, is an adaptation or borrowing from another discipline—jurisprudence, and that many of the assumptions and much of the technology of fact-finding in law were carried over into the experimental science of the seventeenth century.

My paper has three parts. The first discusses the nature of legal facts and fact-finding in the early modern period, focusing on the distinction between “matters of fact” and “matters of law,” the emphasis on first hand testimony by credible witnesses, the preference for direct testimony over inference, and legal efforts to create and maintain impartial proceedings. The second portion attempts to show how legal methods and assumptions were adopted by early modern historiographers and other fact-oriented reporters. The third section attempts to show how the legally constructed concept of “fact” or “matter of fact” was transferred to natural history and natural philosophy and generalized in Locke's empirical philosophy.
The Warrior Queen: Reflections on Victoria and Her World
Authors: Amstein Walter L.
Published: November 2007

The subject of monarchy remains more fashionable in the pages of People and the National Inquirer than among NEH peer review panelists or professional historians generally. To a surprising degree, indeed, the subject has been left to non-professionals or to non-historians. Yet, when one reflects on the fact that the best-known wedding and the most traumatic funeral of the twentieth century both involved the British monarchy in a very immediate fashion, then one can hardly contend that that institution is of no account in modern cultural history. In the course of the past decade, I have drafted, and in part published, a series of topical essays involving Queen Victoria as symbol, as personality, and as actor on the political stage, and this paper constitutes a consideration of yet another facet of her world. In the process of exploring Queen Victoria's world in both printed and unpublished sources, I have made two discoveries that may not surprise you unduly once I set them forth.

First, each major biographer of Queen Victoria—and there have been a great many—tends to react to the last major previous biographers. Thus Giles St. Aubyn in 1991 and Stanley Weintraub in 1987 drafted their works in the context of Elizabeth Longford's biography of 1964 and Cecil Woodham-Smith's life of 1972. The latter two wrote their lives in reaction to Lytton Strachey's biography of 1921 and Arthur Benson's of 1930. In the process, these more recent historians have at times unwittingly neglected a number of cogent conclusions reached by Sidney Lee way back in 1902.
To Play at Peace: Henry VII, War Against France, and the Chieregato-Flores Mediation of 1490
Authors: Currin John M.
Published: November 2007

Henry VII’s image as an innately peace-loving, war-loathing monarch was cultivated by his own court poets, repeated by early Tudor chroniclers, and affirmed for posterity by Sir Francis Bacon in his classic history of Henry’s reign. James Gairdner, one of the first of the modern historians of Henry VII, thus regarded Henry VII’s pacificism as a confirmed fact. More recently Joycelyne Russell, in her study of Renaissance peacemaking, posed Henry VII as “a man of peace” in stark contrast to his war-mongering son. Ian Arthurson, however, in an article about Henry’s planned invasion of Scotland in 1497, exposed Henry’s more bellicose side by showing a king intent on prosecuting a war against Scotland to its violent end, even out of proportion to the initial provocation, because at the time that seemed the best means to attain his particular political end. This essay will consider Henry’s inclinations to war and peace with respect to the mediation undertaken in 1490 by Leonello Chieregato, the humanist and bishop of Concordia, and by Antonio Flores, canon of Seville and papal prothonotary, who were charged by Pope Innocent VIII to mediate a peace or a long truce between England and France.
“The Account Between Us”: Honor, Reciprocity and Companionship in Male Friendship in the Later Seventeenth Century
Authors: Swett Katharine W.
Published: November 2007

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins posed the question, is a friend a friend because he helps you, or does he help you because he is your friend? Most cultures, Sahlins noted, could choose one of the two. Individuals in Tudor-Stuart Britain, however, would be hard-pressed not to reply, both. Thus, in 1577 after their children’s marriage Sir William Gerard wrote to Moras Wynn of Gwydir that he appreciated Wynn making the match out of “very friendship without respect of gain,” by which Gerard meant affection and goodwill, but went on to add that he understood Wynn now “expected friendship” from him, meaning practical assistance using Gerard’s Court connections. Friendship was both chosen and given, a fortunate accident or a tie strenuously worked for and assiduously cultivated. Ubiquitous and vital, friendship was an act as much as a state of mind: Richard Brathwait spoke to its scope in claiming “there is no greater wilderness than to be without true friends.”
An Enlightened Empire: Scottish and Irish Imperial Reformers in the Age of the American Revolution
Authors: Snapp J. Russell
Published: November 2007

In January 1773, Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the colonies, received a letter urging him to appoint no more Scots or Irishmen to offices in America. While the author claimed that, as a “Cosmopolite” he had no vulgar “nationalPrejudices,” he declared that “the English, particularly the Americans,” had conceived such Prejudices against the Scots and Irish, that it is greatImpolicyto nominate them for governors or for any Employ in America….” One cannot know exactly what public relations disasters might have inspired this strong advice. Nevertheless, recent changes in both the United Kingdom and the empire at large had clearly heightened age-old English prejudices against these “alien” groups. Never before had so many Scots and Irishmen held public office in Britain and its colonies, and Scottish merchants were making considerable inroads in imperial trade at the expense of their English counterparts. However, jealousy on account of this new-found power does not completely explain the widespread animus against these groups. Many Englishmen and Anglo-Americans also perceived that Scots and Irishmen approached imperial government in ways that threatened English liberty. While it would be going too far to accept the contemporary English notion that Scots, and indeed most non-Englishmen, were “tinctured with notions of despotism,” this stereotype points toward the reality that officials from the fringes of the British Isles took a new approach to imperial government: they emphasized metropolitan authority while, at the same time, regarding the Crown's diverse subjects from a cosmopolitan perspective.
Doctors and Patent Medicines in Modern Britain: Professionalism and Consumerism
Authors: Loeb Lori
Published: November 2007

In the late nineteenth century professionalism and consumerism collided in a vociferous debate over the commodification of health. In medical journals, before government panels and through independent publications, doctors condemned “quackery,” especially patent medicines—the Victorian appellation for over-the-counter drugs. They dismissed myriad pills, tonics and appliances as addictive, dangerous, or useless. This professional critique, doctors claimed, was an altruistic defence of patients. Their commercial opponents, patent medicine men (and frequently the press), countered that the professional critique was rooted in a pecuniary struggle to achieve monopoly. While ascribing different motivations to each other, both sides assumed that medical professionals were unanimous in their condemnation of so-called “secret remedies.” Peter Bartrip has shown, though, that professional opposition to patent medicines was far more complex and muddied by self-interest. TheBritish Medical Journal, while criticizing patent medicines, carried ads for them, which made the BMA the focus of allegations of hypocrisy in theJournal of the American Medical Associationand before the Select Committee on Patent Medicines (1912). At the organizational level, Bartrip has established that the financial interests of the British Medical Association undercut its opposition to patent medicines. This compromised position, I will argue, permeated the profession. If the British Medical Association could not resist the advertising revenue derived from patent medicines, it was equally true that many doctors could not resist recommending patent medicines to patients. Far from epitomizing professional altruism, the patent medicine question demonstrates the reluctance of doctors to abandon individual self-interest in the wake of consumerist challenges that would ultimately transform twentieth-century medical practice. In doing so, the patent medicine debate engages and complicates arguments about the role of collective social mobility in the history of the professions.