bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Divided Treasons and Divided Loyalties: Roger Casement and Others: Read at the Society's conference 11 September 1981
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley
Published: March 2007

The problem of treason in the first half of the twentieth century is at its most acute for the historian of Britain in contemplating the Irish dimension. Treason against the realm up to 1922 meant treason against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The dissolution of that Union, and the subsequent progress of twenty-six of the Irish counties to the status of a Republic in 1949, has built up a retrospective assumption on both sides of the Irish sea that such dissolution was inevitable. The British Tory and the Irish nationalist, similar in many cultural attitudes, agree on this point: the perpetual irreconcilability of the two countries and the inevitability of their disunion absolves the Tory from anxiety that the causes of Irish separation may have lain in British failure, and that they have comparative significance for possible future English divergence from Wales and Scotland; while the Irish nationalist separatist, the child of the Easter Week Rising of 1916, insists that Ireland never accepted British rule, and that the insurgent handful who took up arms in 1916 were acting on behalf of a people who secretly had been demanding such separation since the Norman invasion of 1169 and would continue so to do until the end of time.
The Decline and Fall of Slavery in Nineteenth Century Brazil
Authors: Bethell Leslie
Published: March 2007

It is in my case a particular honour to address the Royal Historical Society. As president of the Society for four years in the 1960s, Professor R. A. Humphreys, the first holder of the Chair of Latin American History in the University of London which I have been privileged to hold since 1986 (and, incidentally, my teacher both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate student), gave a series of distinguished presidential addresses on aspects of British and United States policy towards Latin America, and Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America, during the nineteenth century. But it seems that I am the first historian of Latin America to present a paper to the Society on a specifically Latin American theme.
Marsilius of Padua and the Case for the Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy (The Alexander Prize Essay)
Authors: Lockwood Shelley
Published: March 2007

Taking William Marshall at his word, a comparison of hisDefence of Peaceof 1535 with the Latineditio princepsof theDefensor Pacis, printed in Basle in 1522, reveals that there is much need for ‘correction’ or rather, it reveals that Marshall had himself corrected and amended the original to suit his own purposes. What those purposes were, the nature of the amendments and their consequences for our understanding of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy will be the subject of this essay.
Parochial Conformity and Voluntary Religion in Late-Medieval England
Authors: Rosser Gervase
Published: March 2007

Much evidence has been brought to light recently to demonstrate the vitality of religious life among the English laity on the eve of the Reformation. Attention has been drawn to the fact that, in the period before the advent of Protestantism, lay men and women evinced a high degree of commitment to their church. The religious changes of the sixteenth century are as pressing a historical problem as ever; moreover, they provide a valuable litmus with which to test the qualities of the late-medieval church. Nevertheless, there is a danger that the fascination of the Reformation question, together with the bias of documentary sources on lay religion towards the latter end of the medieval period, may impoverish our appreciation of the ways in which, for a thousand years, Christians in Britain had been shaping their religious lives. To take a long view of religious voluntarism may help to put the developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a proper perspective. There has also been a tendency, in discussion of lay religious life in the late middle ages, to accept the institutional framework as given. Yet in practice that framework was both adjustable and expressive of a wide range of lay initiatives in religion. That men and women were prepared to lend material support to a variety of religious institutions is apparent from any medieval collection of wills or set of churchwardens' accounts. But what, exactly, was expressed by such support? This is not an easy question to answer. Any assessment calls for an understanding of the medieval parish, not as a legal abstraction, nor yet as a supposedly ‘natural’ community of inhabitants, but as a more or less adaptable framework shaped by, and in turn shaping, the lives of the members. The evidence of religious activity, from processions to church-building, is, so far as it goes, not hard to find. But what of the parochial structure which gave meaning to these gestures, and which could in turn be modified by them?
Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes
Authors: Colley Linda
Published: March 2007

Addressing a Society consecrated to the advance of historical studies is bound to be an awesome experience: it is a particularly sobering one for me because the central argument of this paper would have been familiar to British historians writing in the early nineteenth century. In his Constitutional History of England, published in 1827, Hallam asserted, seemingly without fear of contradiction, that

‘it must be evident to every person who is at all conversant with the publications of George II's reign, with the poems, the novels, the essays, and almost all the literature of the time, that what are called the popular or liberal doctrines of government were decidedly prevalent. The supporters themselves of the Walpole and Pelham administrations … made complaints, both in parliament and in pamphlets, of the democratical spirit, the insubordination to authority, the tendency to republican sentiments, which they alleged to have gained ground among the people.’1
Militancy and Localism: Warwickshire Politics and Westminster Politics, 1643–1647 (The Alexander Prize Essay)
Authors: Hughes Ann
Published: March 2007

Most discussions of political divisions in the counties controlled by parliament during the civil war have taken place within a very clear framework. Following the work of Professor Everitt on the ‘county community’, the main conflict is judged to have been between gentry who sought to defend the integrity of the local community and those who were prepared to sacrifice local autonomy to the needs of the national struggle. Within this polarity, moderate or neutralist gentry were the champions of localism while the more ‘extreme’ parliamentarians were nationally minded. Thus Mr. Pennington described how ‘Localism, compromiseand social conservatism opposed centralism, militancy and Revolutionary Puritanism’, while in The Revolt of the Provinces, Dr. Morrill coupled ‘conservatism and localism’. In one of the most recent formulations, Professor Underdown wrote of ‘the now familiar conflict between nationally minded militants and locally minded moderates [which] can be found in all the parliamentarian counties’. Only Professor Holmes has challenged this consensus.
Presidential Address: Collective Mentalities in mid Seventeenth-Century England: I. The Puritan Outlook
Authors: Aylmer G. E.
Published: March 2007

IT may seem unwise, if not downright foolish, and hubristic too, for someone who is not a historian of religion or the Church to choose such a topic as mine today. In mitigation of my offence, religion in the seventeenth century is in truth not only too important to be left to the theologians, but likewise too protean in its ramifications to re-main the exclusive preserve of ecclesiastical historians. Not that I wish in any way to slight the achievements of those scholars (some of them present this afternoon), without whose work I should not have had the temerity to attempt such a study as this at all. The problem which I wish to address is as follows: there are several interpretations of the different factions, parties and tendencies within the Church of England before 1640. There are disagreements con-cerning both the nature and extent of the differences between these groups, and the causes and significance of such divisions. There are many studies of the ecclesiastical parties and denominations which emerged on the anti-Catholic and then the anti-episcopalian side in 1641 and after, and of their part in the general history of the Civil War and Interregnum. Moving forward in time, there are studies of the restored Church and of the Dissenters or Nonconformists after 1660–2. In spite of all that has been written about Puritans from that day to this, especially about their theology, ecclesiology, liturgical practices, their moral, social and political tenets, less attention has been paid to the question of what constituted a Puritan in the first place.
THe Fear of Falling: British Politics and Imperial Decline Since 1900
Authors: Darwin J. G.
Published: March 2007

TO an outsider historians must sometimes seem perversely obsessed with decline. Certainly when it comes to dealing with empires, his-torians betray a fascination with decay that is almost pathological—and often not simply with the nature and causes of decline but with the exact moment when it began—a somewhat futile enterprise if an enjoyable parlour game. Of course the appeal of decay to the his-torical imagination is not simply the outgrowth of contemporary nostalgia for lost worlds and past times. In the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries the intellectual habit of ‘historical-mindedness’ and the particular tendency to search for a pattern of origins, growth, maturity, decline and fall were extremely influential over a wide range of intellectual disciplines and we might suppose helped to shape the world-view of those who managed the external affairs of Britain and the other powers. The search for historical laws of civilisation and decay was a characteristically Victorian intellectual preoccupation and an essential part of the way in which Europeans tried to make sense of the other civilisations into which they crashed during the nineteenth century. But how far were the leaders of the European imperial states and the circles of informed opinion in which they moved willing to turn on their own empires the analysis of growth and decay they had fashioned for the states and cultures they had overthrown? To what extent should we see the makers of British policy in the first half of this century as (in Gibbon's famous phrase) ‘musing in the ruins of the Capitol’? Was the Marquess of Lothian's remark that ‘sooner or later empires decay partly because they become rigid and rotten at the centre…’ a recognition that if history was the graveyard of empires, British imperialism had certainly reached retiring age? Or did Lothian and others like him assume that Britain's peculiarities made her exempt from such generalizations?
Coronation And Propaganda: Some Implications Of The Norman Claim To The Throne Of England In 1066
Authors: Garnett George
Published: March 2007

WHEN theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle(D)s.a.1066 described the submission ‘out of necessity’ of many of the most important members of the English nobility to duke William at Berkhamstead, which followed extensive ravaging by the invading army, the chronicler lamented the fact that it was only at this stage that the English did so ‘… after most of the damage had been done—and it was a great piece of folly that they had not done it earlier, since God would not make things better, because of our sins…’, implying that the spoliation of the countryside would have ended with a submission and acceptance of the new ruler inflicted as a punishment by God. He continued, ‘And they gave hostages and swore oaths to him, and he promised them that he would be a gracious liege lord to them, and yet in the meantime they ravaged all that they overran.’ The chronicler is clearly shocked by this behaviour on the part of William and his forces, which only seems to end, in his account, with the coronation. Well he might be, for when dates of coronation for English kings in the previous two centuries can be firmly established, they usually occur some considerable time after a constitutive royal accession. Thus, for instance, Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, Æthelred, and Edward the Confessor6 were all crowned in the following years.
Colonies— an Attempt at a Typology
Authors: Finley M. I.
Published: March 2007

IN her recently published diary of her first visit to Africa, in 1929, Margery Perham reported a conversation with seven degree-course men at the newly established college at Fort Hare. When, inevitably, talk got round to conditions in South Africa, they asked ‘terrible questions’. ‘Can England donothingthen?’ ‘But South Africa is the possession of England.’ ‘But theKing!He is King of South Africa. What does he think? Willhedo nothing?’
Presidential Address: Tudor Government: The Points of Contact III. The Court
Authors: Elton G. R.
Published: March 2007

WHEN on the previous two occasions I discussed Parliament and Council as political centres, as institutions capable of assisting or undermining stability in the nation, I had to draw attention to quite a few unanswered questions. However, I also found a large amount of well established knowledge on which to rely. Now, in considering the role of the King's or Queen's Court, I stand more baffled than ever, more deserted. We all know that there was a Court, and we all use the term with frequent ease, but we seem to have taken it so much for granted that we have done almost nothing to investigate it seriously. Lavish descriptions abound of lavish occasions, both in the journalism of the sixteenth century and in the history books, but the sort of study which could really tell us what it was, what part it played in affairs, and even how things went there for this or that person, seems to be confined to a few important articles. At times it has all the appearance of a fully fledged institution; at others it seems to be no more than a convenient conceptual piece of shorthand, covering certain people, certain behaviour, certain attitudes. As so often, the shadows of the seventeenth century stretch back into the sixteenth, to obscure our vision. Analysts of the reigns of the first two Stuarts, endeavouring to explain the political troubles of that age, increasingly concentrate upon an alleged conflict between the Court and the Country; and so we are tempted, once again, to seek the prehistory of the ever interesting topic in the age of Elizabeth or even Henry VIII.
Presidential Address: Tudor Government: the Points of Contact
Authors: Elton G. R.
Published: March 2007

The Tudor Parliament, I suggested to you a year ago, quite properly fulfilled a function of giving legitimate political ambition a chance to achieve its ends, more particularly because from the 1530s onwards, at any rate, experience in the Commons could put a man in the way of entering the royal Council. Of course, this would never be true of more than a few such knights and burgesses, nor was it either a sufficient or a necessary cause of their becoming councillors. Still, the link was there. I now want to turn to the Council itself and ask whether its history and membership similarly reflected a useful function in enabling ambition to be satisfied. Here we enter upon territory far less well known than the Houses of Parliament. The Tudor Council is not now quite so free from the attention of historians as it was even ten years ago; but while we may be really well informed about it here and there, and while indeed we all think that we have a fair idea of its place in constitution and society, it remains true that every time one asks oneself a question touching it one comes up against so far unillumined obscurities. The work of any governing body is always difficult to understand because only those there present actually know what goes on and because so much of what does go on never reaches the record; and the Tudor Privy Council made emphatically certain of preserving itself from scholarly prying by keeping no minutes of discussion at all.
Charles I, the Privy Council and the Parliament of 1628
Authors: Cust Richard
Published: March 2007

Those present in the council chamber around teatime on Friday, 4 April 1628 would have witnessed one of the more hopeful scenes in die politics of die late 1620s. Sir John Coke, Secretary of State, arrived hotfoot from die House of Commons to announce diat it had voted to grant die crown five subsidies. The king, who had been waiting for die news, expressed ‘joy and contentment, saying he was more happy than any of die kings his predecessors …’;
The Venetian Mainland State in the Fifteenth Century
Authors: Law John E.
Published: March 2007

On 15 April 1483, the young Venetian noble Marino Sanudo set out on a tour of thestato di terra, the Republic's mainland state, with his cousin Marco and two other Venetian patricians. Marco and his colleagues were travelling in an official capacity asauditori nuoviand syndics of the Venetian government, dispatched to hear appeals from the Republic's subjects, and to investigate the conduct of resident officials. Marino had no such responsibilities, but he left an account of his experiences in the work known as theItinerario con i Sindaci di Terrferma.
Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe
Authors: Wickham Chris
Published: March 2007

There is surprisingly little early medieval social history being written. In recent years, more specifically economic history has had a remarkable rebirth, thanks to the (largely unconnected) efforts of archaeologists on the one side and Belgian and German historians on the other; but the study of society in general, outside the restricted spheres of the aristocracy and the church, has been neglected. I speak schematically; obviously, there are notable exceptions. But it is significant that noone, in any country, has thought it worthwhile to attempt a synthesis of early medieval European socio-economic history as a whole that could replace those of Alfons Dopsch or, maybe, André Déléage. It would be hard; but people have tried it for the centuries after 900, with interesting (even if inevitably controversial) results. Why not earlier? Richard Sullivan recently lamented the conservatism of most Carolingian scholarship; in the arena of social history, he could easily have extended his complaints back to 500.
England in the Ninth Century: the Crucible of Defeat
Authors: Brooks N. P.
Published: March 2007

Historians, particularly medieval historians, are vulnerable to the charge that they concentrate their attention upon success—on the successful dynasties, institutions and ideas—and that they thereby misrepresent the past. Thus the political historian sees the ninth century as the crucial period in the evolution of a unitary English kingdom. The four powerful and independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existing in 800—Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex—had been reduced by the end of the century to one, Wessex. But this was achieved not through the assertion of West Saxon supremacy—the overlordship that Egbert won in 829 lastedbut a year—but by the destruction of the other kingdoms by Viking conquest and their partial replacement by new Viking states. Though it is clear to us with hindsight that Alfred's claim to be the ruler of all the English not under Danish rule was the germ of the unification of England under his descendants, no one can have known, when Alfred died in 899, that new Viking armies were not being raised in the Scandinavian homelands to crush the remaining English kingdom. At that time, for most Englishmen, the deepest impression must have been of the defeat and destruction of the English polity and culture.
The Seigneur and the Rural Community in Eighteenth-Century France. The Seigneurial Reaction: a Reappraisal
Authors: Hufton Olwen
Published: March 2007

Amongst problems in eighteenth-century history that of the relationship between seigneur and the rural community continues to intrigue the social historian. The simple fact that in 1789 rural France took upon itself the destruction of the seigneurial régime by widespread attacks on châteaux resulting in the burning of terriers and other seigneurial registers, attacks which constituted perhaps the most single-minded aspect of revolutionary activity in 1789, has presented subsequent generations of historians with a number of problems which have never been satisfactorily resolved but which, given their obvious import, have been periodically aired in light of recent research. Such is my purpose here. In the historiography of the peasant movement two works have shaped the historian's approach more than any other. The most consequential, and without doubt one of the most brilliant works ever written, was Georges Lefebvre's La Grande Peur (1932) which sought to analyse the mechanics of the peasant movement and to delineate a number of epicentres, such as Burgundy, in order to show the ripple of a panic movement along river valleys and significant arteries and to make apparent which parts of France, like the Seine valley and the Beauce, were quite untouched by rural revolt. In so doing Lefebvre raised the inevitable question which has beset historians ever since, that is, why here and not there? Lefebvre was himself drawing upon the researches of Philippe Sagnac, Quomodo jura dominii aucta fuerint regnante Ludovico sexto decimo (Le Puy, 1898). Although he did not invent the idea, Sagnac gave, in this work, some documentary underpinning to the concept of ‘la réaction féodale,’ a systematic attempt on the part, of the seigneur to increase his levies in the last decades of the old régime.
Some Uses of Literacy in Venice and Florence in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Authors: Hyde J. K.
Published: March 2007

Italy is reputedly the most regional of European nations, yet it is a regionalism of an unusual kind. In most countries, the regions are territories, often with well-marked natural boundaries, containing a variable number of major towns and cities. Behind them there is usually a long history of social and political identity, often leading back to a feudal kingdom or principality; quite often the region is thought of as the home of a particular tribe or people, and regional culture has deep roots in folklore and popular tradition. Typical regions of this kind are Aragon and Catalonia, Anjou and Brittany, Saxony and Bavaria; in Italy only the islands and the South, and the frontier area of Friuli conform to this pattern. Elsewhere, the modern regions or provinces have little historic reality behind them; the social unit was much smaller, and the strongest focus of loyalty was the union of the city and its territory on which both the classicalcivitasand the medieval commune were founded. Strongly ‘human’ rather than natural in character, the Italian city-regions were upheld by the in-tense particularism of the dominant classes rather than the populace. The more or less autonomous city-state was the natural political expression of this feeling, which nevertheless survived the establishment of the renaissance territorial state with little modification. The multi-centred regional culture for which Italy is famous depended on the sense of separate identity found in the dominant classes of the city region, whether it was politically independent or not; it was a matter of learned men and wealthy patrons rather than popular traditions.
Presidential Address: The Rise and Fall of English Landed Families, 1600–1800
Authors: Habakkuk John
Published: March 2007

There are two types of question that can be asked about estate-ownership. The first relates to actual families. What was the rate of turnover of landed families, i.e. what percentage appeared and disappeared in, say, each half century? What sort of families were rising and for what reasons? How many were old-established and how many were new? Which families were declining and how many were extinguished; and what were the causes of decline and extinction? Among such questions it is reasonable to ask whether the size of a family's estate made a difference to its survival, whether for example the great families of 1600 fared better or worse than the gentry in the following centuries.
The Religious Context of the English Civil War
Authors: Morrill John
Published: March 2007

LENGTHY reports survive of speeches by several members of the Long Parliament for 9 November 1640, at the end of the first week of the session. The future royalist militant, George Lord Digby is reported to have begun his address by saying that:

you have received now a solemn account from most of the shires of England of the several Grievances and Oppressions they sustain, and nothing as yet from Dorsetshire: Sir I would not have you think that I serve for a Land of Goshen, and that we live there in sunshine, whilst darkness and plagues overspread the rest of the land

The future royalist moderate Sir John Culpepper is reported to have begun: I stand not up with a Petition in my hand, I have it in my mouth, and he enumerated the grievances of his shire beginning with the great increase of papists and the obtruding and countenancing of divers new ceremonies in matters of religion. The future Parliamentarian moderate, Harbottle Grimston, said that these petitions which have been read, they are all remonstrances of the general and universal grievances and distempers that are now in the state and Government of the Church and Commonwealth. The future Parliamentarian radical Sir John Wray said:

All in this renowned senate, I am confident, is fully fixed upon the true Reformation of all Disorders and Innovations in Church or Religion, and upon the well uniting and close rejoining of the poor dislocated Great Britain. For, let me tell you Mr Speaker, that God be thanked, it is but out of joint and may be well set by the skilful chyrurgeons of this Honourable House.
Thomas Hobbes on the Proper Signification of LibertyThe Prothero Lecture
Authors: Skinner Quentin
Published: March 2007

‘CIVIL philosophy’, Hobbes declares in an oft-quoted boast at the start ofDe Corpore, is a science ‘no older … than my own bookDe Cive.’ As Hobbes explains inDe Civeitself, and later inLeviathan, the failure of all previous efforts has simply been due to their ‘want of method.’ The method hitherto followed, especially in the universities, has been to rely on the authority of selected writers and books. The universities, indeed, have come to rely so heavily on one particular writer that their teachings no longer deserve to be called philosophy, but merely Aristotelity. This approach, however, is nothing but ‘a signe of folly’, one that is ‘generally scorned with the name of Pedantry.’ The only scientific way of proceeding is to follow the methods of geometry, which requires its practitioners to ‘begin at settling the significations of their words’. Only by this means can we hope to avoid the insignificant speech of the Schoolmen, and thereby lay the foundations for a genuine science of political life. For ‘the foundation of all true Ratiocination is the constant Signification of words.’
Cromwellian Reform and the origins of the Kildare Rebellion, 1533–34
Authors: Bradshaw B.
Published: March 2007

Among the major political events in a century of momentous political change in Ireland the Kildare rebellion of 1534–1535 has been accorded a special significance by contemporaries and historians alike. The downfall of the most renowned Anglo-Irish noble family and the personal tragedies of the doughty old earl and his dashing young heir, gave the story an aura of romance that caught the fancy of the Elizabethans—it inspired an Elizabethan drama— and partly accounts for its prominence in popular histories. More scholarly commentators have emphasized its significance as a water-shed in the history of English government in Ireland. The subsequent course of events reveal it as a point of transition from the medieval to the early modern phase of Irish political history, the juncture at which the hold of Anglo-Irish feudal magnates on crown government was broken and at which the period of uninterrupted super-vision from England began.
Presidential Address: The Land Settlement and the Restoration of Charles II
Authors: Habakkuk John
Published: March 2007

Roger Whitley, a Flintshire royalist, outlining in 1658 the terms which Charles should offer the Presbyterians to induce them to join in a royalist rising, included a reference to the purchasers of confiscated property: ‘as for Purchases of Church, Crowne or other lands, they shall either peacibly enjoy theire possessions, or be reimbursed the charge …’. In the discussions and speculations in the two years preceding the Restoration, it was commonly assumed that the interests of the purchasers would exercise a major influence on the course of events. Some observers thought these interests presented an insuperable obstacle to a restoration; others supposed, like Roger Whidey, that in order to bring about a restoration it would be necessary to propitiate the purchasers by promising them either confirmation of their purchases or compensation. In the spring of 1660, when a restoration of the King on terms seemed the most likely outcome, James Sharp, the representative of the Scottish Presbyterians in London, thought that the indemnity and the purchases were ‘the most sticking part’ of the articles to be laid before the Convention; and the French ambassador believed that the confirmation of confiscated lands would be ‘one of the principal questions of the accommodation’. The purpose of this paper is to consider how the interests of the purchasers were dealt with in 1660.
Men's Dilemma: The Future of Patriarchy in England 1560–1660
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2007

PATRIARCHY was very old when Queen Elizabeth ascended the English throne. Historians have sought its origins in die Old Testament record of the creation of Jewish monotiieism and in the social conditions of Hebrew society. They have explored die contributions of classical Greece and early Christian thinking to its development and evolution. By the time that the Tudor dynasty ruled in England, the institutionalised male dominance over women and children in die family and die extension of diat subordination to women in society in general, die scriptural patriarchy with which I am concerned, had become so deeply embedded diat it has appeared immutable. Something so permanent, something that was so given, has seemed not to deserve scrutiny by die historians of early modern England. It was socialist and radical feminists who took up die notion of patriarchy in die 1960s because they needed a concept which would help diem to theorise male dominance. From dieir contemporary perspective also, patriarchy appeared immovable and monumental. There was a tendency among them at first to study it as such: feminist historians approached die past wim die premise diat there has always been an undifferentiated and consistent male commitment to domination and control over women in every sphere of life. The conflation of patriarchy with misogyny, I suggest, produced an unhistorical patriarchy as die staple of women's history. It is only fairly recendy diat historical studies of gender have broken free from diese shackles, diat historians have begun to penetrate die discourses and strategies dirough which men have—or have not— coerced, or oppressed or subordinated women through die ages.
Prince and States General: Charles V and The Netherlands (1506–1555) (The Prothero Lecture)
Authors: Koenigsberger H. G.
Published: March 2007

ON the 18th June 1902 the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, wrote to his government in London:

The fact is that your Political Committee and the Foreign Office have gone completely off the rails … Now, why could not the India Office trust me …? You send me out to India as an expert and you treat my advice as though it were that of an impertinent schoolboy.
‘Harvesting the Cupboards’: Why Britain has Produced no Administrative Theory or Ideology in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Hennessy Peter
Published: March 2007

MY purpose today is to do a kind of David Bellamy on the least promising patch of that unmapped, unloved bog-of-a-phenomenon we call ‘The British Constitution’. You know the sort of thing—‘this might just look like a boring old bundle of procedures and conventions to you, but there's life and insight in here!’

If ennui is already setting in, don't be upset. You are part of the grand tradition of our political nation. For my text today is from Mr Gladstone—his celebrated remark to the effect that:

If there are two things on earth that John Bull hates, they are an abstract proposition and the Pope.
Metaphors of the Middle: the Discovery of the Petite Bourgeoisie 1880–1914
Authors: Crossick Geoffrey
Published: March 2007

AFTER a long period of neglect, during which historians had looked towards the petite bourgeoisie primarily to heap upon it the responsibility for fascism, the last fifteen years has seen a growing research interest in the social and political history of die world of small retail, artisanal and manufacturing enterprise. The result of diis attention has been paradoxical, on the one hand establishing the petite bourgeoisie as a focus for sustained research, while on the other confirming how difficult it is to see the owners of small retail and manufacturing enterprise as a coherent social group or social class. The combination of the owner's labour and capital widiin family-centred enterprises might indicate a distinct position for the petite bourgeoisie within the social structure, but various forces militated against a social or demographic identity for die proprietors of small enterprise: the high rate of business turnover, die limited proportion of petits bourgeois who remain in diat position through their careers, and die low rate of continuity between generations. Although political struggle was important in die formation of any class, one could go further widi respect to die petite bourgeoisie and suggest that it was only at times of political crisis and action, only through die discourse and actions of its organisations, diat a petit-bourgeois identity might emerge. It is not surprising, dierefore, diat research has focused above all on diose years between die 1880s and the First World War, when die emergence of interest groups and increasing political mobilisation seemed to offer evidence of a real petit-bourgeois identity.
Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France (1385–1422): The Creations of an Historical Villainess (The Alexander Prize Essay)
Authors: Gibbons Rachel
Published: March 2007

Considering the high personal profile and influence of Isabeau of Bavaria during her time as queen of France between 1385 and 1422, it is extraordinary that she has not been the subject of more sustained serious academic study in the past, and that so little is known about her. The woman at the centre of such a turbulent period of Anglo-French war and internal conflict is far too often dismissed in the space of a few paragraphs; even then, what is written about her is often one-sided, two-dimensional and, in many cases, plain wrong. The history of Isabeau of Bavaria so far has largely been a fabricated mixture of gossip and propaganda which has been absorbed into historical tradition and repeated so often that, to many, legend has become indistinguishable from fact. For a mere two decades it has been accepted that: ‘Isabeau ne mérite point la réputation qui lui fut faite’, and it cannot be a coincidence that the few historians who have devoted any time to research on Isabeau all have come to the conclusion that her infamous legacy is not deserved. Yet, the movement for Isabeau of Bavaria's rehabilitation has not been as prominent as it might have been: Vallet de Viriville only wrote a few articles about her, Marcel Thibault never produced the promised second part of his biography and Yann Grandeau sadly died before his research papers could be developed into a complete work. The very first line that Thibault wrote in 1901 makes the claim that: ‘L'histoire vraie et complète d'Isabeau de Bavière n'a jamais été ecrite’ and, despite recent scholarly work, this still seems to be die case almost a century later.
Honour in Life, Death and in the Memory: Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England
Authors: Llewellyn Nigel
Published: March 2007

In the parish churches and cathedrals of England and Wales stand many thousands of early modern funeral monuments. Typically, these are elaborate structures of carved stone, often painted and decorated in bright colours and trimmed with gilding. Their complex programmes of inscribed text, allegorical figures, heraldic emblazons and sculpted effigies are set within architectural frameworks. With a few exceptions, such as the famous memorials to Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare or John Donne, these monuments are relatively little studied and little known. However, they were extremely costly to their patrons and prominently displayed in churches in purpose-built family chapels or against the wall of the sanctuary. Contemporary comment reveals that they were accorded high status by both specialist commentators, such as antiquaries and heralds, and by the patrons who invested in them so heavily. All-in-all, they represent what was the most important kind of church art made in the post-Reformation England, a period when there was a great deal of general uncertainty about the status of visual experience and particular worries about the legitimacy of religious imagery.
The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Dabhoiwala Faramerz
Published: March 2007

Notions of honour and reputation were ubiquitous and important in early modern England for a variety of reasons. They were part and parcel of how individuals in this society conceived of the relationship between the personal and the public, and between the projection and the perception of one's character. More particularly, they lay at the heart of two crucial issues: how people thought about social status, and about the differences between men and women.
The Limits of Totalitarianism: God, State and Society in the GDR
Authors: Fulbrook Mary
Published: March 2007

Historyis not an exact science. In describing and seeking to resurrect—or at least reconstruct—past societies, historians make use of concepts which bear a double freight of meaning. Unlike the elements, atoms and molecules of natural science, which—however much they are artefacts of the inquiring scientist's mind rather than natural ‘givens’ of the outside world—cannot answer back, the terms which historians use to describe the human world are themselves not only part of the way in which that past world was lived and experienced by the historical actors, but are also part of the way in which historians see, experience and act in their own social and political world. Historical concepts at any level of abstraction beyond the most basic and immediate empirical reference are also part of broader contemporary debates.
British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: March 2007

IN March 1802, the peace treaty of Amiens was signed, resulting in a two-way flow of travellers across the English Channel. Among those arriving at Dover was Joseph Fiévée, printer by trade,littérateurby vocation, and latterly politican by profession. It is said that he was commissioned by Bonaparte himself to report on affairs in London. In any event, his findings were published in theMercureand reprinted in a work whose title,Lettres sur l'Angleterre, et réflexions sur la philosopkie du XVIIIe siècle, challenged comparison with the most famous of French commentaries on England, that of Voltaire. It reads as polemic rather than analysis, confronting what Fiévée took to be serious errors made by his countrymen when they wrote about Britain. But little of the book was what one might expect of such a work. Fiévée was not primarily interested in British politics, law and government, but in the character and manners of the people. His conclusions may be summed up in one of his many generalizations. ‘If civilization … is the art of rendering society pleasing, agreeable and congenial, the English constitute the least civilised nation of Europe.’
Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of the Royal Frankish Annals
Authors: McKitterick Rosamond
Published: March 2007

HUMAN beings are in a perpetual dialogue with the past from their vantage point in the present. St Augustine put this most succinctly when he discussed what he thought of as ‘three times’, that is, ‘a present concerning past things; a present concerning present things and a present concerning future things. For these three are in the spirit and I do not see them elsewhere: the present concerning past things is memory; the present concerning present things is perception; the present concerning future things is expectation’.
England, Britain and the Audit of War (The Prothero Lecture)
Authors: Morgan Kenneth O.
Published: March 2007

THE award of the Booker Prize for 1995 to Pat Barker'sGhost Roaddid more than pay tribute to the latest powerful novel in the author's ‘Regeneration Cycle’. It also emphasised once again how much the historical and cultural consciousness of twentieth-century Britain is dominated by images of war. With the obvious exception of Northern Ireland, Great Britain has been an unusually peaceful and stable country in a century marked by revolution and upheaval. Yet our national experience has been shaped, almost obsessed, by two world wars in a way true of few, if any, other countries. Memories of 1914 and 1939 tower over us like Lutyens's massive monument at Thiepval. The war leaders, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, are commonly thought of as our two greatest prime ministers in modern times (though another, more recent, prime minister, victorious in the Falklands, still has her champions). Armistice day, Remembrance Sunday and the wearing of poppies retain their potency as all-powerful national symbols of sacrifice. The British Legion remains an influential pressure group. The eightieth anniversary of the battle of the Somme in July 1996 emphasised anew the enduring impact of the tragedies of the first world war. More generally, the fiftieth anniversaries of VE Day and VJ Day the previous year were nationwide ceremonies of remembrance for the sacrifices of the second. Almost every episode in current history, especially where Europe is involved, is commonly linked with memories of earlier conflict. Even the 1996 crisis in Anglo-German relations, such as it was, arising from ‘mad cow disease’ evoked comparison with 1939.
Place and Public Finance
Authors: Hoyle R. W.
Published: March 2007

READING over Elton's work afresh now, sadly, there will be no more, prompts a series of reflections. It is a great body of writing both in quality and quantity: but it is extremely narrow. Elton wrote about a remarkably short time range to which he repeatedly returned. He had little patience with Wolsey, no great interest in the history of the 1540s or 1550s and his excursion into the history of Elizabeth's earlier parliaments was not one which evidently brought him much pleasure. His first book established the reputation of Thomas Cromwell: one of his last pieces of writing considered how much or how little his view of Cromwell had changed, and the very last piece to be published was a defence of Cromwel from modern claims of corruption. It is hard to think of another major historian who has made so good a living from so short a temporal span. It is also striking how little of Elton's output is actually about politics: he was essentially a student of institutions and even ideas rather than of the interaction of men. His later interest in the law seems almost a rejection of politics.
Politics
Authors: Adams Simon
Published: March 2007

THE legacy of Sir Geoffrey Elton to the study of Tudor politics can only be described as paradoxical. For all his reputation as a doyen of what has been termed the Cambridge school of high political history, studies of politics comprise but a small section of hisœuvre. He never wrote a substantial account of an episode in high politics in the manner of Maurice Cowling or J. C. D. Clark. If one excludes his textbooks, political subjects are treated primarily in his essays. Even these, though, are not numerous. The section ‘Tudor Politics’ inStudiesI contains eleven essays and papers. Four are reviews, two are introductions to reprinted biographies, two are essays on Thomas More and two are the famous studies of Henry VII and Henry VIII (‘Rapacity and Remorse’ and ‘King or Minister?’), which are essentially analyses of personality. Only one article, the early ‘Decline and Fall’, deals with a specific political episode. For a man whose doubts about biography as an exercise are well known, there is a striking amount of biographical material here. Elton's real contribution is to be found in his later essays.Studies3 contains the ‘Points of Contact’ trilogy, ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and ‘Arthur Hall’. ‘Hall’, ‘Piscatorial Politics’ inStudies4 and the final section ofParliament of Englandform a distinct corpus of Elizabethan political studies.
Religion
Authors: Haigh Christopher
Published: March 2007

‘OH, A paper on Geoffrey and religion’, sneered a friend: ‘that won't take you long!’ But it did: it took ages. For many of us, I am sure, thinking about Elton's work and influence has been an autobiographical experience, surveying our own intellectual development in relation to his. For the first time, I read right through the fat file of twenty-five years of letters from Geoffrey (and I will be quoting from some of them). I recalled the first visit of the man my little daughters called ‘The Teddy Bear’, and how he delighted them with a description of Disneyland. Elton in Disneyland is indeed a thought to conjure with! And I was reminded of all I owed to him. Although this conference has been dubbed ‘Oxford's revenge’ and Geoffrey's graduate students are not giving papers, many here stand in his debt: my own life as a historian was a constant epistolary debate with Geoffrey, and it has been a lengthy and nostalgic business trying to sort it out.
The Age of Uncertainty: Britain in the Early-Nineteenth Century
Authors: Eastwood David
Published: March 2007

One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform’, ‘Ages of Revolution’, ‘Triumphs of Reform’, and ‘Centuries of Reformation’ exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating anidée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.’ Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or constructprocesses, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation’ orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture.