bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Brood Hen of Faction: Mrs. Macaulay and Radical Politics, 1765-1775
Authors: Schnorrenberg Barbara Brandon
Published: November 2007

The middle years of the eighteenth century in England were on the whole a period when few women made any impact on the public scene. Writing gradually became a respectable way for a woman to earn a living, but women writers generally confined their efforts to the novel, belle lettres, or instructional works. The most important exception was Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay. She began to publish first as an historian and then turned to topical political pamphleteering.

Descended on both sides from Whiggish City businessmen, Catherine Sawbridge of Olantigh, Kent, married in 1760 George Macaulay. He was a Scots born physician who had wide connections in London, both among Scots and medical men, and among political radicals and non-conformists. Perhaps the most important intimate of the Macaulay circle was Thomas Hollis, a well-to-do republican barrister, bibliophile, and collector of objects of vertu. Other radical friends included several dissenting ministers, among them Caleb Fleming, Theophilus Lindsey, Richard Baron, and Richard Price, and several writers on historical and political subjects, including William Harris, Adam Ferguson, and James Burgh. Catherine's brother, John Sawbridge, was active in City politics, where he had connections both by inheritance and marriage. Thus the Macaulay household offered a meeting place for both theorists and active politicians.
British Politics and The American Revolution
Authors: Christie Ian R.
Published: November 2007

A paper of this title must inevitably be extremely selective. The subject is complex and the available material vast in bulk. As Paul Langford has recently shown with his study on the first Rockingham administration one could conceivably do justice to it at the rate of one volume a year for much of the period 1763 to 1776. I can do no more in the compass of this paper than pursue one or two themes which appear to be emerging from the mass of recent detailed scholarship. Moreover, I am going to take a major, though I hope justified liberty with my title, and treat of policies as well as politics. After all the second is not fully intelligible without the first. This paper does not adopt a “structure of politics” approach. Thanks to the initiatives of Sir Lewis Namier in that field we now have a pretty full knowledge of the structural framework of British politics during the revolutionary crisis, and this provides useful guidelines for understanding the ebb and flow of political controversy—as the recent work of Paul Langford and Peter Thomas bears admirable witness. But knowledge of political structure tells us little about the essence of the arguments connected with the American question. We cannot understand the politics unless we understand the policies which were at issue.
Ainsworth's Historical Accuracy Reconsidered
Authors: Ligocki Llewellyn
Published: November 2007

After Sir Walter Scott made the historical novel popular with his Waverley novels, many other writers, including the major novelists Dickens and Thackeray and the minor novelists Ainsworth, G. P. R. James, Bulwer-Lytton, and Reade, took up the form. But while the major novelists are credited with artistry in their use of history, the minor ones are generally regarded as hacks who used history indiscriminately in any way they wished in order to “make saleable novels.” The disparaging criticism of William Harrison Ainsworth's use of history exemplifies this unreflective critical tendency.

For several probable reasons, critics have not been inclined to credit Ainsworth with using history responsibly; however, none of the reasons is based on an examination of his sources: his rapid ascension and decline as an important literary figure, his popularity with the common reading public, and his failure to progress artistically after his first few good novels. His artistic growth seems to have ended in 1840, forty-one years before the publication of his last novel. These critics have seen him as a “manufacturer of fiction,” and therefore not responsible in his treatment of historical fact and his use of historical documents, even though time and place are of crucial importance to Ainsworth. One could hardly regard Ainsworth more incorrectly. A close reading of Ainsworth's historical sources demonstrates that Ainsworth's history is extremely reliable in both generalities and particulars; his alterations, usually minor, serve only to adumbrate his concept of history as cycle. Thus, even though he is a novelist and not a historian, the faithful revelation of the past is central to his work. He examines history carefully in order to present truths about life and in order to demonstrate how history reveals these truths.
Stubbs, Shakespeare, and Recent Historians of Richard II
Authors: Theilmann John M.
Published: November 2007

Richard II, one of the most puzzling kings of late medieval England, has been the subject of controversy ever since his forced abdication in 1399. He often has been portrayed as a tyrant or, at times, as a madman by historians. Recently the trend is toward a reassessment of Richard's reign free from the biased Whig interpretation of the past. R. H. Jones took a first step in that direction in 1968 with the publication of The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Middle Ages. Jones viewed Richard as a king inclined toward absolutism but lacking the taint of rancorousness or despotism ascribed to him by historians since Stubbs. Subsequently two books, a Festschrift, and several articles have appeared, delineating more aspects of the reign. Since May McKisack's volume in the Oxford History of England series appeared in 1959, the number of works concerning the reign has been steadily growing. The recent publication of Anthony Tuck's Richard II and the English Nobility offers an opportunity to reexamine the place of Richard II in history. The divergence of scholarship since 1959 from the traditional interpretations will be seen as the major constitutional problems of the reign are scrutinized. After first examining the influence of William Shakespeare and William Stubbs in shaping the historiography of the reign a chronological discussion of the period from 1377 to 1399 will follow.
The Literary Unity, the Date, and the Purpose of the Lady Edith's Book: “The Life of King Edward Who Rests in Westminster”
Authors: Heningham Eleanor K.
Published: November 2007

In preparing the Vita Ædwardi Regis…, the First Latin Life of King Edward the Confessor, for its convenient modern edition, Frank Barlow has subdivided the work into two internal “books,” which he sees as very loosely connected, to which he assigns dates of 1065-6 and 1067 respectively, and for which he editorially supplies the subtitles: Book I “Queen Edith's Family,” Book II “Edward's Religious Life.” Much of Barlow's work, not only on The Life but also on the whole subject of Edward and his times, is so good that it is not surprising that this division of the text has been widely accepted: even Sten Körner, who questions Barlow's dating, writes: “The Vita Edwardi is in two parts.…” Nevertheless, viewed in the light of this two book theory, the “work” remains, as Barlow has recently said, one “we now find most difficult to understand,” partly because we must see its author as changing his literary purpose during the course of the writing. It is my own purpose to show that a closer reading of The Life does not support the conclusion that the work has no internal literary unity and that, once this unity is perceived, both the dating and the evaluating of the text become easier. Indeed, when The Life is seen as one work all written during those “evil times” to which its anonymous author refers, its interest is much enhanced; through it we can then glimpse “Edith, the first gem in the middle of the kingdom,” covertly lamenting the fall of her kinsmen and the tribulation of her land during its first years under the victorious William of Normandy, yet at the same time refusing to believe that there was no future for the kingdom of the English.
Recent Developments in Victorian Periodical Research
Authors: VanArsdel Rosemary T.
Published: November 2007

Justification is no longer necessary for the importance of research in Victorian periodicals, nor for the clear and very special window which periodicals offer into the life and thought of the nineteenth century. The pressing problem is how best to use the plethora of resource which exists, and how to render useful to the scholar the mountains of material which remain essentially un-catalogued. If we accept as a temporary definition of a Victorian periodical “a serial publication, issued more than once a year, part (at least) of whose run falls within the span 1824-1900,” we find documentation to show that at least 16,000 of these periodicals were published during the Victorian era, and it is by no means certain that that figure is exhaustive. Within this framework can be found every conceivable variety of opinion, debate, political posturing and social commentary. If one were able to select one year, say at mid-century, and sample from each of the 16,000 periodicals what a kaleidescopic glance into an era would be provided. Since this is neither practical nor likely to happen until the humanists' use of computer skills becomes more sophisticated, it remains for the literary and historical scholars to develop other means of mastering the diffuse, and at times elusive, material.

In the past twelve years a number of distinguished men and women, both in the United States and in England, have applied themselves to initial problems of periodical research and as a result there have been at least four outstanding milestones laid on the pathway. The first of these, the very prestigious accomplishment by Professor Walter E. Houghton, of Wellesley College, was the establishment of the 15-20 year project, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (WI), the first volume of which appeared in 1966. (The second volume is projected for 1971, and the third for 1976, with the question of a fourth undecided.) This project was born about 1958, of Houghton's own frustration in trying to make use of periodicals while writing The Victorian Frame of Mind. As a result, he and his wife, Esther Rhoads Houghton, set out to provide a new tool to study Victorian men and ideas.
The Chimney and Social Change In Medieval England
Authors: Dresbeck LeRoy
Published: November 2007

The recent debate concerning the problems of ecology has focused our attention upon the relationship between man and his physical surroundings. For the most part, historians have been interested in such questions tangentially. ignoring the basic issue of the effect of the environment upon people. The rising interest in the history of technology is based on the realization that political and military events, the history of ideas, and changing social patterns take place within the physical world. The effects of the environment can hardly be ignored if one is to understand fully historic change. One problem which illustrates the interrelationship between human and natural spheres in history is the development and use of the chimney and fireplace in medieval England. Hitherto it has not been fully realized how the new heating technology affected the spectrum of society, and changed the mores of medieval life.

Early medieval buildings heated by a central hearth required a high ceiling to prevent sparks from causing fires. Thus, whatever warming might come by sitting around the fire in a circle was partly offset by the upward dissipation of heat into the large, high-ceilinged room. Moreover, when such rooms had louvers at their peaks to vent smoke, they also let the heat escape — a waste of fuel, as well. With adoption of the fireplace and chimney in many homes of the twelfth century, the number of persons sitting next to the fire was reduced by nearly three quarters, thus diluting the functional capability of large rooms. The chimney fostered the small room. Though heat loss still occurred through the chimney, it was much less than the loss from the open hearth. Moreover, with a chimney the danger of fire from sparks lessened. Rooms could be built smaller and with much lower ceilings, heating the area more evenly. When precautions were taken to exclude draughts, a smaller room heated by a fireplace warmed fewer people but with a better heat distribution than the larger hall with a central hearth, where most of the heat rose toward the high ceiling, and of course, no person benefited from it.
Popular Festivity and Consumer Protest: Food Price Disturbances in the Southwest and Oxfordshire in 1867
Authors: Storch Robert D.
Published: November 2007

This article will explore the interplay between a traditional fête in Devon and Oxfordshire, the celebration of the Fifth of November, and the last significant wave of English food price disturbances in 1867. Both popular culture and collective action mutated, of course, as underlying economic and social structures changed; but even in those regions where the pace of change was rapid, to neglect the factors of persistence and survival would lead to a history written according to a too simplistic formula. To say that culture and collective action changed in the nineteenth century as society and the economy changed can even become a truism, telling little about the processes through which these relationships worked themselves out. Without overdrawing the case, an effort has been made here to focus precisely upon persistence and survival, and to show how, in regions such as the southwest or Oxfordshire—and by implication, many other regions of Britain as well—the pace of nineteenth century cultural, economic, and social change was more leisurely than studies based exclusively on the industrializing north might lead one to conclude.

Besides remaining the celebration of the failure of the Popish Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes acquired a number of new meanings for those involved in nineteenth century Fifth of November manifestations, and some other novel “uses” as well. Annual celebrations all over the south were frequently organized and mounted by secret or semi-secret societies of “bonfire boys” or “Guys.” Members of the bonfire gangs usually concealed their identities with masks or soot and appeared in uniform or grotesque costumes to preside over the collection of wood and other combustibles, the begging or extortion of money from the wealthy, and the fabrication of suitable effigies to be ritually consumed on the bonfire.
An Early Stuart Critique of Machiavelli as Historiographer: Thomas Jackson and the Discorsi
Authors: Schutte Anne Jacobson
Published: November 2007

As historians have long recognized, the “perfidious Machiavel” of the stage was by no means the only image of Machiavelli in the minds of English intellectuals before 1640. Besides frequent denunciations of the Florentine as a devious, amoral politician and an atheist (most of them sincerel a few pro forma), one encounters in English works of theology, moral and political philosophy, and history two other approaches to Machiavelli the political scientist. Some writers, with or without acknowledging their source, mined II Principe and the Discorsi for detailed information. Slowly, tentatively, and sometimes surreptitiously, others worked toward a partial appropriation of Machiavelli's political analysis. The scholarly consensus, however, is that before Machiavelli's new paradigm could be fully accepted in England, a major shift in the political situation had to occur. Only with the coming of the Civil War would writers like James Harrington unreservedly endorse Machiavelli's rejection of the medieval world view in favor of classical political wisdom, which they held to be directly applicable to modern English circumstances.
Amateurs and Professionals in Victorian County Cricket
Authors: Sandiford Keith A.P.
Published: November 2007

Although sport and recreation are vital segments of human life and culture, they have generally been neglected by social historians. Serious scholars still know too little about these important subjects even in England, where a spectacular sports explosion occurred during the nineteenth century. Cricket is perhaps the most English of all games and has long been regarded as an important national symbol. Any careful study of it is therefore likely to throw useful light on the English mores and character. By focusing on such complex themes as status, class-distinctions, social mobility, paternalism, and snobbery, this paper will try to fit Victorian county cricket into a broader socio-cultural context. This study of amateurs and professionals will attempt to provide some insights not only into the basic economics of Victorian cricket (which deserve more attention than they have received hitherto), but also into the intricate relationships between masters and servants and the interesting English attitudes towards professionalism in sport.

Betting, corruption, and professionalism had been integral elements in English cricket during the Hanoverian age. The Victorians discarded the first two and kept the third, while for a long time trying to exclude all three from soccer. In the end, they failed and had to accept professionalism in Association football in 1885. Curiously, none of this soul-searching occurred in cricket where professionalism was always quite simply regarded as a necessary evil. First class cricket, in fact, sprang directly out of professionalism. It was the touring professionals who taught the Victorians how to play as well as sell the game. Without the work of the All England and United Elevens during 1845-70, county cricket might never have evolved as it did.
A Note on Corrodies in the Fourteenth Century
Authors: Harper Richard I.
Published: November 2007

The corrody is harshly judged by many medieval historians; it is condemned because it introduced into the cloister a distracting and often boistrous presence from the secular world. With sharp hindsight, they argue that the corrodies were poor financial policy and often saddled a convent with an unwelcome boarder who lived off its resources long after his original investment had been consumed. But the corrody was most often used, at least in the fourteenth century by bishops and archbishops, to reward a faithful servant or to provide care and maintenance for those who were unable to sustain themselves. In this article, the corrody and its recipients are examined in an effort to redress the balance and demonstrate its praiseworthy character as an institution of medieval charity.

But first things first. What is a corrody? Following the etymological derivation of the word made by A. Hamilton Thompson, corredium, corradium, corrodium and other variations are derived from conredum and conredium, which have “the primary connotation of equipage, and among others, it was especially applied to the provision made by a feudal vassal for the entertainment of his lord when he made his round. The corrody was the provender or prebend which was the lord's due …. [The[ corrody became first and foremost a grant of money or victuals, or of other means of livelihood, made by a monastery or other religious or charitable corporation to dependents upon its bounty.” According to one authority, the first usage of the word in this sense in England was in a deed of 1197.
Muggletonians and Quakers: A Study in the Interaction of Seventeenth-Century Dissent
Authors: Greene Douglas G.
Published: November 2007

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”
“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain
Authors: Lawson Philip , Phillips Jim
Published: November 2007

In March 1761 the diarist Horace Walpole complained that “West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals” were attacking every parliamentary borough in the general election. Although it lacked statistical proof, this sour observation became an accepted tenet in political histories of Britain written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the one full-length study of nabobs published in 1926 echoes Walpole's refrain; Holzman depicted them as a group ofnouveaux riches“determined to raise their power and position to the level of their credit. This precipitated a fierce class strife, which was signalised [sic.] by changes in the ownership of landed estates and pocket boroughs.” The investigations of the Namierite school have long since demolished the myth of an East Indian onslaught on English politics and society in the mid-eighteenth century. Only a handful of novice MPs were returned to parliament in the general elections of 1761 and 1768, and those elected did not constitute a concentrated and coherent East Indian lobby at Westminster.

Yet should Walpole's observation be dismissed so readily? This was an age of ignorance of the nature of the British presence in India, of considerable misgivings over the many effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain, and of a resultant lack of enthusiasm for an Asian empire. The leading historian of the British connection with India in the eighteenth century has recently pointed out that this reluctance derived in part from fears that it would upset not only the social and political, but also the moral underpinnings of established society.
The Origins of the Doctrine of Sedition
Authors: Manning Roger B.
Published: November 2007

Shepherds of people had need know the calenders of tempests in the state; which are commonly greatest when things grow to equality; as natural tempests are greatest about the Equinoctia…. Libels and licentious discourses against the state, when they are frequent and open; and in like sort, false news often running up and down to the disadvantage of the state, and hastily embraced; are amongst the signs of troubles…. Seditious tumults and seditious fames differ no more but as brother and sister, masculine and feminine; especially if it come to that, that the best actions of a state, and the most plausible, and which ought to give greatest contentment, are taken in an ill sense, and traduced….

When discords, and quarrels, and factions are carried openly and audaciously, it is a sign the reverence of government is lost…. So when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shaken or weakened (which are Religious, Justice, Counsel, and Treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.
The Spirit of Reform, 1832 and 1867
Authors: Wasson Ellis A.
Published: November 2007

The connection between political reform and aristocratic decline is central to an understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. No one denies that the landed elite dominated the institutions which passed the parliamentary reform acts of 1832 and 1867. However, historians continue to speculate about the motives that inspired these remarkable measures. Was the ruling class retreating, retrenching, being overthrown, or surrendering gracefully? The articles appearing in this issue by David Spring, Richard Davis, and Thomas Gallagher occasion an opportunity to reflect further on this question. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a neglected aspect of the reform process, especially in relation to the 1832 act, the first and most important step in the aristocracy's displacement. This element was the spirit of reform, a progressive force, that made the great reform bill something more than either a concession or a cure.

Professors Davis and Gallagher remind us of the extraordinary change in the political firmament wrought by the 1832 act. Those who argue, in response to the traditional interpretation of the Whig historians, that the great bill scarcely altered anything find it increasingly difficult to sustain their case.1 John Cannon, Michael Brock, and others have already undermined much of the ground upon which the revisionists, led by D. C. Moore, based their analysis. An extraordinary array of convincing evidence has been adduced to show that Earl Grey and his colleagues were not in the business of trying to cure the source of demands for reform in order to avoid yielding to the demands themselves. Professor Davis has been particularly effective in demonstrating Moore's anachronistic view of deference.
The English Exile Community in Italy and the Political Opposition to Queen Mary I
Authors: Bartlett Kenneth R.
Published: November 2007

Since the publication of Christina Garrett's The Marian Exiles in 1938, historians have had to look outside the confines of England and into the structures of the various exile communities on the continent in order to comprehend fully the significance of the reign of Mary I. Garrett's argument was that the large number of Englishmen who emigrated to the continent in 1553 and 1554 represented not a headlong flight from persecution but an organized migration of English Protestants seeking a more felicitous religious climate with the tacit approval of the queen's government. These men and women functioned as a church in exile, responsible only to their own governors, and cut off from the traditional authority of the Crown. Thus, on returning to England after the accession of Elizabeth, this group constituted a coherent faction, the Puritan opposition, which was hostile to the conservative nature of the Elizabethan settlement and dedicated to the establishment of a Calvinist polity.

However, instructive as this theory may be for the emigre communities in Germany and Switzerland, it does not answer a number of important questions which arise from the political activities of the Marian exiles; nor does it adequately investigate the composition and conspiratorial policies of the two other major groups of Marian exiles, the French and the Venetian. Indeed, Garrett does not even discuss the existence of a separate company of expatriates resident in the Venetian Republic, even though in terms of political and intellectual history this community of exiles played by far the greatest role in the organized opposition to the rule of Philip and Mary.
Lord Clarendon's Conspiracy Theory
Authors: Robinson Thomas H.
Published: November 2007

Lord Clarendon created his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by conflating a narrative history of the struggle between king and parliament which he had written between 1646 and 1648 with an autobiography, covering his life and times up to the Restoration, which he had composed—between 1668 and 1670—after his removal as Lord Chancellor and subsequent exile to France. The finished History, probably completed in 1672, tended—insofar as it was drawn from the autobiography—to be an apology for Clarendon's political career, his autobiographical work begun after completing the History and covering the years after the return of Charles II being unabashedly apologetical. To the extent that the History was drawn from the earlier, narrative history, however, it tended to be analytical rather than apologetical in nature. The original history, according to Sir Charles Firth, “was written with a definite practical purpose: [Clarendon] undertook not only to relate the events of the Rebellion and the causes which produced it, but to point out the errors of policy committed on the King's side. The trusty few who read it would learn from it how to avoid like errors in the future. …” This first version of the later History, however, contained not merely an analysis of the mistakes made by the king and his ministers, but also certain indications as to what were the motives and methods of those who had entered into rebellion against Charles I. Clarendon's conception of the opposition to the king, which was born in the propaganda tracts which he began writing for the king late in 1641 and which he expanded upon and refined in his later political and historical works, did not take the form of a general theory of the rebellion. General theories were not really Clarendon's style. He was an accomplished polemicist with a facility for dealing with matters of theory, but his instincts were those of a narrative historian.
William Webb Ellis and the Origins of Rugby Football: The Life and Death of a Victorian Myth
Authors: Baker William J.
Published: November 2007

In the sense that myth is a reordering of various random elements into an intelligible, useful pattern, a structuring of the past in terms of present priorities, nineteenth-century Englishmen were inveterate myth-makers. As liberal and scientific thought shook the foundations of belief, the Victorians erected gothic spires as monuments to a medieval order of supposedly simple, strong faith. While their industrial masses languished, they extolled the virtues of self-made men. Confronted with foreign competitors and rebellious colonials, they instinctively asserted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In classic myth-making style, the Victorians set about “reorganizing traditional components in the face of new circumstances or, correlatively, in reorganizing new, imported components in the light of tradition.”

Myth not only serves self-validating ends; it also provides a cohesive rationale, a fulcrum propelling people towards great achievements. If the Victorians were confident and self-congratulatory, they had cause to be: their material, intellectual, and political accomplishments were many. Not the least of their successes was in the sphere of sports and games, a subject often ignored by historians. Especially in the development of ball games—Association and Rugby football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf—the Victorians modernized old games, created new ones, and exported them all to the four corners of the earth. Stereotyped as overly-serious folk, they in fact “taught the world to play.”

Since sport, more than most forms of human activity, lends itself to myth-making, it is not surprising to find a myth emerging among the late-Victorians having to do with the origins of Rugby football. Like baseball's Doubleday myth, the tale of William Webb Ellis inspiring the distinctive game of rugby is a period piece, reflecting more of the era which gave it birth than of the event to which it referred.
British Conservatism in the Twentieth Century: An Emerging Ideological Tradition
Authors: Fair John D. , Hutcheson John A.
Published: November 2007

Lord Acton, one of the most formidable intellects of the last century, was a master of transforming seemingly complicated or contradictory principles into concise epigrammatic statements. Attempting to reconcile Edmund Burke's many liberal views with his reputed Conservatism, Acton asked why was Burke “not an entire liberal? How thoroughly he wished for liberty—of conscience—property, trade, slavery, etc. What stood against it? His notion of history. The claims of the past. The authority of time. The will of the dead. Continuity.” One of the most important lessons to be derived from Burke's writings—recognized by countless authorities as the wellspring of modern British Conservatism—is that Conservatism is not so much a system of thought or ideology as it is a general inclination and regard for history. The behavior of the Conservative Party has been governed by precedent and pragmatism rather than by rationalism and idealism. Words such as dogma, program, or even policy have never been part of its lexicon, whereas such words as spirit, tradition, or even “way“ have more aptly described its approach to politics.

By the twentieth century the Conservative Party's preference for lessons from the past (in accordance with England's common law tradition) to any scientifically derived formulas had gained for it the twin monikers of “the national party” and “the stupid party.” But Conservatism does not claim to possess the “keys or the Kingdom,” notes Ian Gilmour, an active politician and Conservative theoretician. “There is no certainty about the route and no certainty about the destination. As Burke said of himself, the lead has to be heaved every inch of the way.” Such is the way that modern British Conservatives, at least, have wished to perceive themselves.
The Quarrel Between Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel: Implications for Ireland
Authors: Knowlton Steven R.
Published: November 2007

In the annals of nineteenth-century Ireland, few disputes between public figures have been more rancorous or more significant than the fight that began in 1848 between two seemingly like-minded journalists, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel. In the mid-1840s, Duffy and Mitchel were colleagues on the most influential nationalist newspaper in Irish history, the Nation. But in 1847, relations between the two men became strained, and Mitchel resigned to start his own, more radical, paper. The former friends and colleagues soon became the bitterest of enemies. Their public quarrels over the next few years severely damaged each man's personal reputation — and also damaged the Irish nationalist cause in which each so fervently believed.

Unlike many running Irish feuds, which merely exacerbate old stereotypes about the Gaels being a fractious race, the Mitchel-Duffy controversy haddirect political fallout at a critical point in the development of political separatism in Ireland. The quarrel erupted just when Irish nationalists had an unusual opportunity to bring enormous pressure to bear on the British House of Commons. The Tory party of the 1840s had been shattered, first by Sir Robert Peel's turnabout on free trade in 1846, and then by Peel's death four years later. The modern idea of nearly automatic, lifelong adhesion to strong central parties was still some years off, and the two major British parties were scrambling for friends.
Humanity and Nature in the Steamboat Paintings of J.M.W. Turner
Authors: Rodner William S.
Published: November 2007

The year 1851 witnessed the Great Exhibition, Britain's celebration of technological achievement. Thousands of curious and excited visitors from the world over flocked to Joseph Paxton's futuristic Crystal Palace to marvel at the various exhibits which underscored, not only Britain's commercial and industrial preeminence, but also the Victorian faith in progress and the triumph of the machine.

Less noticed, late that same year, was the passing of one of the most perceptive observers of the new age, the veteran artist J.M.W. Turner. This great English Romantic, famed for his paintings of bucolic landscapes, storms at sea, and Alpine avalanches, also had drawn significant inspiration from the new forces which were then rapidly transforming Britain and the world. A notable body of his work, particularly the efforts of his later career, exist as complex visual commentaries on the reality and the meaning of nineteenth century industrialism. Watercolors of blackened mills, polluted skies, and steam locomotion capture the face of change, while great oils such as The Fighting Temeraire and Snow Storm—Steam–Boat off a Harbour's Mouth symbolize a dynamic new age.
Britain's Foreign Alliances in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Black Jeremy
Published: November 2007

One of the greatest problems in the discussion of eighteenth-century British foreign policy concerns the assessment of the influence of the particular character of the British political system. British foreign policy, and thus the country's alliance strategy, was conditioned by the subtle interplay of internal processes, the functioning of her domestic political system, and the international situation. As historians are concerned increasingly to probe the nature of the domestic pressures influencing the formulation and execution of policy, so it becomes more important to define the political, as opposed to constitutional, role of Parliament and public opinion. This is of obvious significance for the study of Britain's relations with her allies. Were these made more difficult as a consequence of the distinctive character of the British political system? There was no shortage of contemporaries willing to state that this was the case. An obvious category of discussion concerned the citing of domestic pressure as a reason why concessions could not be made to foreign powers, both allies and those whose alliance was sought. This was of particular significance when ministries explained why gains made during war could not be surrendered at peace treaties and gains made at the peace could not be yielded subsequently. Their defense of the retention of Gibraltar was based on this argument. Similar arguments were used by British ministers in seeking to persuade allies to do as they wished. Diplomatic pressure on France over the state of Dunkirk or on Spain and Portugal over commercial disputes made frequent use of the argument of domestic pressure.
Who Wrote the Preface and Notes for Henry Finch's The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, 1590?
Authors: McGiffert Michael
Published: November 2007

The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, Gathered out of the Worde of God is a seventy-seven-page octavo for which no one claimed public credit. The book appeared in 1590 (n.s.), as shown by the date of the preface, January 1, 1589, though the title page is misprinted 1599. No place of publication is named; in fact that book came from the press of Richard Schilders at Middleburgh. The author chose anonymity. He must have been known at the time but was not identified inprint until some thirty years later. He was Henry Finch (1558-1625), third son in a prominent family of the Kentish Weald, who became a member of Parliament, a knight, serjeant-at-law to James I, and a respected student of the common law. His stepfather, Nicholas St. Leger, was active in the puritan interest in Parliament, and Finch, too, had a puritanic streak that marked his religious writings from The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, his first, to his last and best known, The Worlds Great Restauration, or the Calling of the Jewes, a millennial tract of 1621 that put him at odds with the king.

This much is known: author, printer, date. What has remained obscure, even unguessed at, is the authorship of the long unsigned “Preface to the Christian Reader.” In addition, the work is freighted with glosses that sometimes squeeze the text into a corner or drive it off a page entirely. There are reasons to believe that these marginalia are largely the work of another hand than Finch's, in all likelihood the same that wrote the preface.
Evangelical Thought: John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards
Authors: Dreyer Frederick
Published: November 2007

Historians suppose that men are ultimately to be understood in terms of their own time. If the age in which people live makes no difference to the way we perceive them, then historical explanation becomes superfluous. The evangelical revival, however, is often regarded as a event that occurs out of its proper time. It is the step-child of eighteenth century studies. For Peter Gay it belongs not to the eighteenth century but to the twelfth. Leslie Stephen denied all affinity between the evangelicals and their enlightened contemporaries: “There could scarcely be said to exist even the relation of contradiction.” To be sure, an affinity with the age was not a claim that the evangelicals insisted upon. No one would wish to number Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley among the philosophes. The merit claimed by the evangelicals was the merit not of thinkers but of believers. Yet, like it or not, the revival is still one of the facts of eighteenth century history. It cannot be wished away or passed off onto some other period. It started in the eighteenth century and it prospered in the eighteenth century. In any census of the times, it is a fair presumption that the saints will out-number the sceptics. Moreover, the revival is something that has to be analyzed in contemporary terms. What John Maynard Keynes once said of ranting politicians in the twentieth century works for ranting preachers in the eighteenth: “Mad men in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Faith, like thought, is an historical event that occurs in a specific historical context and ultimately it must be explained in terms of that context. It may be our deepest wish to think like St. Paul, but it is hard to do so in ways that St. Paul would have understood. Few men can insulate themselves against the intellectual influence of their time. In the case of John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, the recognition of that influence is critical for the interpretation of their thought.
The Professionalization of an Elite: The Nineteenth Century Episcopate
Authors: Gibson William T.
Published: November 2007

A number of Victorian writers identified a change in the episcopate in the nineteenth century: Dean Burgon, for example, believed that a remodeled episcopacy emerged at this time. Historians have advanced the view that the changes were generated by the Whig ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s. Indeed it is part of the schemata of ecclesiastical history that bishops in the eighteenth century were fundamentally different from those in the nineteenth century. Yet, as C. K. Francis Brown admitted, there has been no attempt to establish a pattern of this in the career and social history of the nineteenth century episcopate. This is all the more surprising since a structuralist analysis of the Caroline and Hanoverian episcopate has existed for some years. The traditional view of Church history, that the ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s were the principal engine of change, have tended to overlook the structural changes in bishops' career patterns and that there was a change in the concept of the episcopal function. The context of this changed concept of episcopal duty is important. Recent work on the professionalization of the clergy has focused on the immediate impact of the Reformation and the development of the Church as a profession up to the early eighteenth century. Rosemary O'Day and Geoffrey Holmes have demonstrated that between 1580 and 1730 the clerical profession became increasingly stratified. The overpopulation of the clergy in the eighteenth century accelerated this trend, establishing a Church in which there were extremes of wealth and poverty. At the same time the clergy were subject to greater lay control than any other emergent profession. This tension between professionalization and institutions of the state has been examined in other occupations, but throughout the nineteenth century it grew stronger in the Church. From patronage of a living to nomination to a see, laity dominated the Church. In spite of Whig reforms of the 1830s and 1840s lay control established strict parameters within which the professionalization of the episcopate occurred. The effect of control from outside the Church was that the paths to the bench of bishops remained more numerous and varied than the limited paths to the elite of other professions like the judiciary. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw functional trends that brought about the professionalization of the clergy. These changes have been thoroughly analyzed by Anthony Russell. The self-conscious spirituality of the Tractarian movement also effected changes in the popular view of the clerical function, and the episcopate was not immune to these changes. By the closing decades of the nineteenth-century bishops were appointed whose careers had been touched by these trends. Equally important were developments within the episcopate that altered the bishops' roles.
Richard Lionheart and English Episcopal Elections
Authors: Turner Ralph V.
Published: November 2007

While Henry II and John's bitter quarrels with the Church have inspired much comment from both contemporaries and modern scholars, Richard Lionheart's relations with the English Church have attracted little notice. The lack of theatrical clashes with the pope or the archbishop of Canterbury has led modern scholars to assume that Richard I enjoyed fortunate relations with his clergy. Richard's most recent biographer has viewed him as “a conventionally pious man,” and contemporary chroniclers depicted him as fitting the Church's definition of the perfect knight whose financial exactions and other faults could be overlooked because of his crusader status.

Almost continuously absent from England, the Lionheart is assumed to have had little opportunity to assert his will in ecclesiastical matters. Yet, Richard I was as determined as his father and brother to defend English monarchs' traditional rights over the Church, because their mastery over such a powerful institution conferred many advantages. Their bishops were also barons who advised the king at great councils, who often held posts in the royal administration, and who owed feudal obligations, even quotas of knights. The royal right of regalia gave Richard custody of church lands during an episcopal vacancy and the right to authorize new elections and to approve bishops-elect.

Sir Christopher Cheney, a leading authority on the twelfth-century Church, observed that Richard I was “forever busy with the English Church.” An examination of the Lionheart's ecclesiastical policy proves him correct, revealing a monarch who had little respect for the Church's freedom and worked to preserve his royal predecessors's authority over it. Richard took care to oversee closely English episcopal elections.
The Swastika and the Shamrock: British Fascism and the Irish Question, 1918–1940
Authors: Douglas R. M.
Published: November 2007

The last fifteen years have seen an efflorescence of scholarly studies of British fascism between the wars. Once identified exclusively with the figure of Sir Oswald Mosley and dismissed as a wholly derivative imitation of its Italian and German counterparts, fascism in Britain is now understood as a complex and variegated phenomenon whose roots run no less extensively in British political culture than in external influences. As historians have probed more deeply into the ideological underpinnings of the British ultra-right, they have made increasingly apparent the numerous connections between this new form of political mobilization and long-standing tensions within British politics and society. While scholars continue to acknowledge the many important ways in which British fascism was indebted to its Continental equivalents, they can no longer maintain—as did Robert Benewick in 1969 in his groundbreaking survey of the radical right—that fascist policy was developed “with a callous disregard for principles” or that the distinctively fascist elements of British ultra-right ideology were imported en bloc from overseas.

It is all the more surprising that existing histories should have overlooked so completely one of the most important “indigenous” components of British fascist ideology - its preoccupation with the Irish question. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Irish sentiment became a principal theme of several leading fascist groups, exceeded in prominence only by anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, to which it was often explicitly linked. For these small, politically marginal societies, the formulation and dissemination of hibernophobic ideas held obvious attractions.