bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
British Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century: A Survey
Authors: Black Jeremy
Published: February 2004

Il est vray que dans un gouvernement comme celuy d'Angleterre, il ne faut compter sur rien. [Chauvelin (1728)]

Eighteenth-century British foreign policy has been a marginal subject for several decades. During that period much good work has been produced, particularly on the diplomacy of the first four decades of the century, but this work has not been integrated into the general scholarship of the period. The textbooks for the century, commonly written by experts in high politics, generally offer a hurried account of foreign policy, that is, a jumble of names and dates that are not related to the problems discussed in the rest of the work. Foreign policy is rarely perceived as a crucial problem of political management or debate. Eighteenth-century scholars complain often, particularly in conversation, about what they regard as the excessively detailed nature of foreign policy studies and their supposed failure to address themselves to problems of general relevance.

The strong diplomatic bias of eighteenth-century foreign policy studies has certainly led to the production of many works that have few points of access for the general scholar. The domestic context of foreign policy and, in particular, the extent to which policy was debated are subjects that have received relatively little attention. Partly this is a result of the development of the subject. The great age of foreign policy studies was the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, an age in which history existed to study the growth and exalt the triumphs of the nation-state.
British Labour and the Cold War: The Foreign Policy of the Labour Governments, 1945–1951
Authors: Weiler Peter
Published: February 2004

Labour took office in 1945 amid high hopes that its socialist message could be applied abroad as well as at home. Although Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and other Labour leaders had had almost as much responsibility as their Conservative counterparts for Britain's wartime foreign policy, it was widely believed that once on its own Labour would play a different role in world affairs.Let Us Face the Future, the party's election manifesto, pledged to “apply [a] Socialist analysis to the world situation.” Bevin's famous “Left understands Left” remark was widely taken to mean that Labour would be more sympathetic to revolutionary developments throughout the world but above all to the Soviet Union. For many in the Labour movement, a socialist foreign policy and sympathy for the Soviet Union also implied distrust of the United States and its attempt to create what theNew Statesmancalled a capitalist “economic empire.” For the Labour movement as a whole, the story of these years can be summarized simply: the reluctant abandonment of hopes of Anglo-Soviet friendship and the grudging acceptance of an Anglo-American alliance.

Labour leaders, of course, did not fully share the assumptions of their more enthusiastic followers, and they made clear from the start that they intended no radical break with the foreign policy of the wartime coalition that they had helped to shape. Ernest Bevin told the Commons in his first major speech as foreign secretary that he accepted the foreign policy of his predecessor, Anthony Eden. But a commitment to continuity in foreign policy did not immediately entail complete hostility to the Soviet Union or a special relationship with the United States.
Ceremony and Politics: The British Monarchy, 1871–1872
Authors: Kuhn William M.
Published: February 2004

Walter Bagehot divided the English constitution into two parts, the “dignified” and the “efficient.” The sovereign and the House of Lords were the dignified or the showy parts, imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress an uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the real work went on, where men of business transacted affairs of state using the authority obtained by the dignified parts. So he wrote in the years preceding the second Reform Bill, when it was conventional to speak of the rudeness and unruliness of an uneducated people and of the hazards of admitting them to the franchise. Yet his book, animated in such large measure by the debates on parliamentary reform of the late 1860s, remains a much-quoted authority on the English constitution today.

Perhaps one among the reasons for its enduring popularity is that he expressed so neatly a notion that certainly existed before as well as in his time and that survives today, namely, that governmental activity can be divided into ceremonial and political parts. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion is to reality, as artifice is to plain speaking. In affairs of state, the adjective “ceremonial,” when attached to words like “head of state” or “official,” has come to mean empty figurehead or powerless placeholder. Ceremonies of state—coronations, jubilees, openings of Parliament—are picturesque and pleasant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything powerful other than that which is powerfully sentimental, colorful, and evocative.
Redefining the Peasant Community in Medieval England: The Regional Perspective
Authors: DeWindt Anne Reiber
Published: February 2004

Historians of the medieval English peasantry have tended to assume that the history of peasants and their culture can best be revealed through the history of the village as a social and economic unit. As a result, the important recent advances in our understanding of peasant culture have been made by historians who, borrowing heavily from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, have written studies of particular villages or small towns. The mystique of the “village community” has retained a hold on the historian's imagination. Even as the peasant and his family now attract more attention from scholars, studies of family size, household structure, and inheritance and marriage patterns are usually carried out within the context of a particular village or small town, largely because collections of local records naturally coalesce around a parish name. These close examinations of specific vills have been made possible primarily through the exploitation of the village court rolls that survive from the mid-thirteenth century. Ironically, it has been these very village court rolls that, in the end, have forcefully demonstrated that the assumptions identifying peasant history with village history must now be abandoned.

The numerous studies of medieval English villages that have made possible the study of peasant family structure and behavior are now demonstrating that the history of the peasant family and the history of the particular village must part company. Certainly, the study of a single series of village court rolls makes possible the discovery within the village of family groups with characteristic behavior patterns.
The Secret History of the Tudor Court: The King's Coffers and the King's Purse, 1542–1553
Authors: Hoak Dale
Published: February 2004

In his presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, G. R. Elton drew attention to the “points of contact” in Tudor central government, namely, the relations of court, council, and Parliament. Among other things, Elton's discussion revealed the need to integrate more fully the often separately related histories of those institutions. Although such an integrated history obviously lies beyond the scope of this essay, part of the subject, Privy Chamber finance, introduces an important, if often secret, point of contact between officers of the royal household and officers of “state”—the management of the king's money. A declaration of money disbursed from Henry VIII's Privy Coffers in 1542–48 and an audit of Edward VI's Privy Purse for the years 1550–51, both discussed here for the first time, disclose some previously unknown aspects of early Tudor government and finance. Taken together, these documents should provide the basis for a deeper appreciation of the dynamics of the English Reformation regime.

I

Research of the past decade has revealed the place and importance of the Privy Chamber in the household and government of the Tudor kings. By 1540 a heretofore informal group of the king's body servants and boon companions had acquired wages and administrative functions to match their royally bestowed places and titles. The officers and staff of the king's private apartments now constituted a separate department of the royal household. Of the eighteen gentlemen in ordinary (i.e., in wages), two were honored by the title “chief” because of the intimate nature of their attendance on the king's person. One of them, the groom of the stool, became, ex officio, “first” gentleman.
Lord John Russell and the Church Rate Conflict: The Struggle for a Broad Church, 1834–1868
Authors: Ellens J. P.
Published: February 2004

In the election campaign of 1859, after twenty-five years of tirelessly defending the church rate principle that ratepayers of all religious denominations were liable to the rate levied for the maintenance of Anglican parish churches, Lord John Russell declared that he had come to favor abolishing church rates. The Tory Standard railed that the aging statesman had caved in to “senile ambition,” while another conservative critic charged that Russell had agreed to sacrifice church rates at the Willis's Rooms meeting in 1859 as part of a deal made to win the political support of Protestant Nonconformists. Spencer Walpole, the High Church chancellor of the Exchequer, was more charitable and more accurate, however, when after the election he responded to Russell's decision by acknowledging that the establishment was indebted to Russell for stalwartly having defended the church rate for decades as a bulwark of the church establishment.

Although Russell was too clever a politician to disregard political advantage or public opinion during his quarter-century fight to retain church rates, it was not his Whig politics but his Broad Church ecclesiology that best accounts for his long and dogged defense of the church rate. From 1834 through 1837, during the first four years of the church rate conflict, Russell's stance appeared to be that of the Whig statesman. First in Earl Grey's administration and then in Lord Melbourne's, he attempted to reform the church rate system sufficiently to satisfy Dissenters that they could count on the Whig party as the party of reform.
The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century
Authors: Shoemaker Robert B.
Published: February 2004

Shortened from the Latin phrasemobile vulgus(the movable or excitable crowd), “the mob” was first used to denote rioters in London during the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81). The term gradually entered the language Londoners used to describe disorder over the next few decades; justices of the peace did not commonly use it to refer to riots in the Quarter Sessions court records until the first decade of the eighteenth century. By 1721, 44 percent of the rioters who were bound over by recognizance to appear at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions were accused of raising, or participating in, a mob. Concurrently, the total number of recognizances for riot in urban Middlesex increased 520 percent between the 1660s and the early 1720s (table 1). These changes in the frequency and the language of London rioting recorded in the Middlesex court records around the turn of the eighteenth century raise several questions. Did the fundamental character of rioting in London also change? How (and when) did rioting become such a common occurrence on London's streets? What was the relation between riots prosecuted at Quarter Sessions and the larger, primarily political disturbances of the period that were first studied by George Rudé? How does urban rioting as a social phenomenon compare with rural riots such as food riots, riots against enclosures, and ridings, which have also been the subject of considerable recent research? What are the implications of the existence of widespread collective disorder for our understanding of social relations in London during a time of rapid population growth and socioeconomic change?
A Diet for Henry VIII: The Failure of Reginald Pole's 1537 Legation
Authors: Mayer Thomas F.
Published: February 2004

The triennium 1536–38 marks the crisis of Henry VIII's reign. The palace coup that toppled Anne Boleyn in May and June 1536 and apparently left Thomas Cromwell more firmly in control instead ushered in a series of further threats to both Cromwell and Henry. The upheaval of the Pilgrimage of Grace convulsed the north in late 1536 and early 1537 and looked for a time as if it would shake Henry's throne. The Pilgrims' calls for the upstart Cromwell's removal forced the chief minister to withdraw behind the scenes for a time, always a tricky maneuver. The battle of wits and wills between the king and his cousin and sometime protégé Reginald Pole runs as counterpoint throughout these dislocations. Pole's intemperate attack on Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, De unitate, arrived at the extremely sensitive moment of June 1536 and announced the beginning of an eighteen-month struggle that finally led to an irreparable breach between Henry and Pole. De unitate has often been taken to signal Pole's crossing of the Rubicon. It should certainly have discomfited Pole's potential allies just as many of his partisans thought they had jockeyed themselves into power by engineering Anne's downfall. In fact, the work had a minimal effect, mainly because the committee entrusted with reading it was heavily stacked with Pole's friends. Henry probably never saw De unitate. Despite its violent language, neither Pole nor his supporters were then quite ready to give up on Henry. Early the next year the situation changed. Paul III created the new cardinal Pole a legate and dispatched him to Flanders, traditional locus of plots against England.
The Whigs, the Church, and Education, 1839
Authors: Newbould Ian D. C.
Published: February 2004

The Whig educational proposals of 1839 are regarded as an important step in the centralization and growth of state control over the education of English working-class children. Introduced by Lord John Russell on February 12, the plan called for state supervision of education by a committee of the Privy Council, the erection of a nondenominational state normal school and two model schools, state inspection of all schools in receipt of the grants established in 1833, and a new system of allocation of those grants based not on the size of the voluntary contributions raised by the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) but on the local needs as ascertained by any “reputable” school society. Historians have viewed the proposals as the inevitable outcome of popular pressures brought to bear on government. Unable to resist their own Erastian urge to attack the privileged position of the church, and persuaded by Brougham, who figured prominently in the 1833 grant and had unsuccessfully proposed a national system as recently as the autumn of 1837, or alternatively by the Radicals J. A. Roebuck and Thomas Wyse, themselves supporters of the Central Society for Education's plans for a national secular system of education, the Whigs are regarded as having responded to popular, reformist demands. “In 1839,” wrote Halevy, “the cabinet yielded.” England was last among the Protestant countries in the matter of primary education; Roebuck, Wyse, and Brougham had failed in their separate efforts to promote the cause; and the government could do little other than propose a remedy for 3 million uneducated children.
Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared
Authors: Crawford Michael J.
Published: February 2004

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.

Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.
Edward III and His Family
Authors: Ormrod W. M.
Published: February 2004

The chroniclers and poets of the later Middle Ages credited Edward III with many successes, among which the production of a large family rated highly. The king had a total of twelve children, of whom no fewer than nine—five sons and four daughters—survived to maturity (fig. 1). Historians have not always been enthusiastic about the generous provisions made for this large family. Edward's very fecundity, viewed by fourteenth-century writers as a sure sign of God's grace, has been seen as a political liability because it exhausted resources, created a political imbalance between the crown and the younger branches of the royal family, and led ultimately to the deposition of Richard II and the Wars of the Roses.

It is possible, however, to view Edward III's family arrangements in a different and rather more favorable light. Since the loss of many of their overseas territories in the thirteenth century, the Plantagenet kings had come to regard their remaining possessions as an inalienable patrimony to be handed on intact from father to eldest son. Unless younger children were able to create titles for themselves in foreign lands, kings had no option but to reward their sons with English earldoms. This was not a policy guaranteed to benefit the crown: the bitter quarrels between Edward II and his cousin Thomas of Lancaster showed very clearly the dangers that might arise when cadet branches of the Plantagenet dynasty became bound up with the English aristocracy.
A Convergence of Ethics: Saints and Whigs in British Antislavery
Authors: Kriegel Abraham D.
Published: February 2004

There is a paradox in the legislative success of British antislavery that invites further inquiry. While one can hardly diminish the role of evangelical Christianity in the abolition of the slave trade and, decades later, of slavery in the empire, each bill was passed by an aristocratic government predominantly Whig in composition. The first measure, the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, was passed by the Ministry of All the Talents, a coalition of Foxite Whigs and Grenvillites, in a parliament that remained almost exclusively a body of the landed interest. While the first reformed parliament of 1833 may not have been quite so preponderantly landed in its composition, it abolished slavery in the empire under the leadership of Lord Grey's government, the most aristocratic of the century. Like the Talents Ministry, the government of Lord Grey was a coalition, at least in its inception. But its moving spirits were Whigs. Yet, with some few exceptions, the role of the Whigs in British antislavery has not received the attention it deserves. In particular, one must inquire how and why a group of worldly aristocrats, especially the older generation of Fox, Grey, and Holland, should have associated themselves with an evangelical crusade. Whig aristocrats, after all, subscribed to an ethic that Evangelicals disdained, particularly in its emphasis on worldly honor; and evangelical humility, in turn, often appeared to at least some Whigs as righteous humbug.
A Reply to John Morrill
Authors: Underdown David
Published: February 2004

As readers of the book will know,Revel, Riot, and Rebellionowes a lot to John Morrill. He asked the crucial question over the teacups; he has taught me a lot about localism and popular conservatism; and he has been an unfailingly generous source of advice and stimulating ideas. I am glad that he has considered the book so carefully and that when he is not entirely convinced by it he has expressed his reservations so temperately. It is gratifying to know that someone whose opinion I respect thinks that I have “changed the agenda of Civil War studies.” His review reinforces my hope thatRevel, Riot, and Rebellionmay indeed help to widen, rather than limit, the endless debate over the causes and significance of the English Revolution.
Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes
Authors: Lemire Beverly
Published: February 2004

The secondhand clothes trade was a vital reflection of consumer demand in preindustrial and early industrial England, one that has gone unrecognized because of the nature of the trade. It did not involve the manufacture, finishing, or refining of raw materials or the sale of new commodities. It was largely invisible trade, leaving few records and generating no legislation. Yet the trade in secondhand clothing was a common feature of English life and met the needs of much of the English population in a way that other manufacturing trades and industries did not. Historians considering the characteristics of the domestic market in this era have naturally focused on the new manufactures and the widening range of goods produced in response to domestic demand both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—everything from caps, stockings, and pottery to the products of the British cotton industry. The growth of these industries has been seen as a testament to a strong demand among consumers for varied, attractive, and inexpensive goods. But the extent of demand among the various ranks of people and the intensity of this demand cannot accurately be determined solely from the development of new industries and the sale of new commodities.

The demand for clothing, textiles, and other consumer goods was not the sum total of the consumer impulse. An equally powerful drive was manifested not through the purchase of new commodities but through the sale, trade, and purchase of secondhand merchandise. Joan Thirsk has noted that “the labouring classes found cash to spare for consumer goods in 1700 that had no place in their budgets in 1550.”
Patronage from the Privy Chamber: Sir Anthony Denny and Religious Reform
Authors: Swensen Patricia C.
Published: February 2004

Among the accomplished humanists who flourished in the court of Henry VIII, there were a number devoted to the promotion of the “New Faith,” which, with its emphasis on classical learning and rereading of the church fathers, also called into question certain theological truths of Rome as well as the authority of the pope. The most immediate and effective means for this promotion were the various types of patronage readily available to holders of government and household office, both high and low. There is a certain irony here as Henry had, after his split with Rome, declared that there would be no doctrinal innovation, simply that the head of the English church would be the English king rather than the pope at Rome. Yet members of his own court whose actions should have supported and carried out his expressed intentions were those who advanced the very doctrinal innovations he professed to deplore. The reason for this incongruity may be found at least in part in the actions of the king rather than in his words, as he did not develop and follow through with any consistent religious program. As a result, the signals sent to court members were at best mixed and open to individual interpretation. A remarkable latitude in personal policies resulted as members of both Protestant and Catholic factions jockeyed for power. Conservatives, believing they supported the royal wishes, opposed vigorously any further innovation in religious affairs. On the other hand, courtiers who were theologically curious quite easily could believe that, in patronizing sometimes extreme reformers, they were merely carrying out Henry's real but not clearly stated intentions.
New Light on Mansfield and Slavery
Authors: Oldham James
Published: February 2004

Popular history often credits Lord Mansfield with freeing the slaves in England by his decision in the Somerset case. That he did not do so is by now agreed and is a point featured in modern scholarship on slavery. This is the main burden, for example, of F. O. Shyllon's Black Slaves in Britain (1974). How extensively the popular history should be revised has not been settled. Newly discovered sources now permit a reassessment of this question.

When the Somerset case arose in 1772, it was brimming with portent. The largest specter was the supposed mercantile dislocation that would follow abolition. Additional questions seemed unavoidable, such as the legality of a contract between a slave and his master, and the implications for other contracts if the slave contract were invalidated. The protracted case was an occasion of high drama in which early abolitionist efforts (especially those of Granville Sharp) were pitted against vested trading interests.

Mansfield was caught in the middle. He was genuinely ambivalent about the subject of slavery. He accepted and endorsed the widely assumed mercantile importance of the slave trade, yet he doubted the validity of theoretical justifications of slavery, and he sought to redress instances of individual cruelty to slaves. By drawing on previously unexamined manuscript reports of the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield's trial notes, and newspaper accounts of the Court of King's Bench activity, this article will demonstrate the extreme delicacy of Mansfield's position and will establish more fully than has before been possible the ways in which Mansfield accommodated the various competing interests. In the process, the question of exactly what Mansfield said in his Somerset opinion should be put to rest.
Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson
Authors: Lake Peter G.
Published: February 2004

Robert Sanderson was a Calvinist, indeed, he was an evangelical Calvinist anxious to impart, through pulpit and press, the central tenets of Calvinism to the laity. He also hated Puritanism and said so loud and often. During the 1630s Sanderson cooperated enthusiastically with the Laudian regime. As a Royalist during the Civil War, he was one of the divines taken by Charles I to the Isle of Wight to provide spiritual counsel as the king struggled to save the church from its Puritan enemies. Nevertheless, during the 1650s Sanderson felt able to take the engagement and to give over the use of the prayer book in order to preserve his place in the ministry. At the Restoration, however, he returned to the establishment as the bishop of Lincoln, in which role he proved himself less than sympathetic to the nonconformists. In short, Sanderson's career is difficult to accommodate within many of the received categories currently in favor in the religious history of the period. As if to prove the point, Sanderson figures prominently both in C. H. George and K. George's attempt to demonstrate the homogeneity of English Protestant opinion before 1640 and J. Sears McGee's assault on precisely that proposition. Sanderson seems to offer particular difficulties to those of us committed to the notion that the English church was dominated by Calvinism down to at least the 1620s and that thereafter the confrontation between Calvinism and Arminianism represented the crucial division in English religious opinion before the early 1640s.
Blackstone's Science of Legislation
Authors: Lieberman David
Published: February 2004

In 1795, Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and reigning Athenian of the North, observed in a famous estimate of the career of Adam Smith that “the most celebrated works produced in the different countries of Europe during the last thirty years” had “aimed at the improvement of society” by “enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Among such celebrated productions Stewart included the publications of François Quesnay, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, Pedro Campomanes, and Cesare Beccaria and, above all, the writings of Smith himself, whoseWealth of Nations“unquestionably” represented “the most comprehensive and perfect work that has yet appeared on the general principles of any branch of legislation.” One of the more striking achievements of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century social thought has been to make sense of this description of Smith'sInquiryand to enable us better to appreciate why Smith chose to describe his system of political economy as a contribution to the “science of a legislator.” In a cultural setting in which, as J. G. A. Pocock has put it, “jurisprudence” was “the social science of the eighteenth century,” law and legislation further featured, in J. H. Burns's formula, as “the great applied science among the sciences of man.” Moralists and jurists of the period, echoing earlier political conventions, may readily have acknowledged with Rousseau that “it would take gods to give men laws.” Nevertheless, even in Rousseau's program for perfecting “the conditions of civil association”—“men being taken as they are and laws as they might be”—a mortal “legislator” appeared plainly “necessary.”
Moral and Physical Force: The Language of Violence in Irish Nationalism
Authors: Curtis L. Perry
Published: February 2004

In recent years Irish historians have begun to look more closely into the strategies and tactics of nineteenth-century nationalism, exposing some of the disunities and inconsistencies in a movement long considered monolithic by generations of patriots and ideologues. Although we may rightly claim to know a good deal more than our predecessors about the contours and contents of Irish nationalism, there are still a number of ambiguities and unknowns about its nature, not to mention its significance. Indeed, if K. T. Hoppen is to be believed, most historians have erred by concentrating on the nationalist campaigns of the O'Connellites, Fenians, and Parnellites while neglecting altogether the arena of local politics. Stressing the “deep and constant” importance of “the parish pump,” Hoppen insists that the Repeal and Home Rule agitations were simply “unusual superimpositions upon the deeply pervasive and enduring localist traditions of Irish political life.” Irish voters, then, especially those in the boroughs, lived by and for local issues, personalities, and parties, and many were willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder or the biggest spender.

Such a strong dose of historical revisionism may have its uses, but Hoppen's book, for all its massive documentation, verve, and erudition, does not provide any explanation for the huge outpouring of support given to O'Connell, Parnell, and other advocates of “national” as well as “nationalist” issues. Only an incisive and far-ranging study of political propaganda, ideology, and the mobilization of voters and nonvoters alike in nineteenth-century Ireland can hope to resolve this controversy over the priorities of local and national as well as nationalist issues.
The British State and the Structure of Political Opportunity
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: February 2004

The mid-Victorian state was a modest, and only moderately democratic, affair. It was modest both in its size and in what it set out to do. There was no pretense that the government could do much on its own to remedy or compensate for social ills, and there was no party in the land with a serious program of state intervention. This minimalist character of the state, whose restricted ambitions were underpinned by the constraints of Gladstonian finance, was reinforced by its inaccessibility. Political participation was the preserve of a distinct minority, less than 15 percent of the male population after the reform of 1832. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 widened the franchise further, to about 35 percent of men, but political citizenship continued to be denied to the bulk of the working class and to all women.

By contrast, few people—scholars or laymen—would attach the label “modest” to the state in the twentieth century, and, for all the flaws and imperfections that reduce its representativeness, it is obviously part of a highly democratic polity. The sphere of state action has expanded enormously since 1850, and, despite the recent efforts of Conservatives, the government still bears responsibility for numerous aspects of its citizens' well-being. Over roughly the same span of years the British political system has been democratized. Successive installations of reform in 1867, in 1884–85, in 1918, and in 1929 have brought first working-class men, then middle-class women, and finally all women into the formal political system. These two processes—the expansion of government and the democratization of British politics—constitute the major transformations in public life in modern Britain.
The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism
Authors: Kent Susan Kingsley
Published: February 2004

The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought to a halt the activities of both militant and constitutional suffragists in their efforts to gain votes for women. By that time, the suffrage campaign had attained the size and status of a mass movement, commanding the time, energies, and resources of thousands of men and women and riveting the attention of the British public. In early 1918, in what it defined as a gesture of recognition for women's contribution to the war effort, Parliament granted the vote to women over the age of thirty. This measure, while welcome to feminists as a symbol of the fall of the sex barrier, failed to enfranchise some five million out of eleven million adult women. When war ended, feminists continued to agitate for votes for women on the same terms as they had been granted to men, but organized feminism, despite the fact that almost half of the potential female electorate remained disenfranchised, never regained its prewar status as a mass movement. By the end of the 1920s, feminism as a distinct political and social movement no longer existed. This was due to the impact of the war on cultural perceptions of gender. Feminists' understandings of masculinity and femininity became transformed during the war and in the immediate postwar period, until they were virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists.

As I have argued elsewhere, prewar British feminists regarded their movement as an attack on separate-sphere ideology and its constructions of masculinity and femininity.
Popular Conservatism in Britain: Continuity and Change, 1880–1987
Authors: Pugh Martin
Published: February 2004

During the century that has elapsed since Gladstone's famous Midlothian Campaigns of 1879–80, the British political parties have had to adjust to a series of major changes and developments in both the structure and the substance of politics: the extension of the parliamentary vote to all men and women over the age of eighteen; the move toward the direct taxation of incomes; the rise of a “welfare state”; the steady, if unspectacular, decline of British industry; two debilitating world wars; the retreat from empire; and the loss of major-power status. At first sight every one of these changes represents a problem for British Conservatives: they appear to have been perpetually working against the grain of history. Yet in the general election of 1885 the Conservatives achieved a 43.5 percent share of the popular vote, while in the election of June 1987 they won just 43 percent. Far from being pushed to the margins by more adaptable or more popular parties, they appear to be as strong and as central in the British political system as they ever were.

Of course, Conservative support has not been quite as stable as a comparison between 1885 and 1987 suggests. Their vote has indeed fluctuated, though within a fairly narrow range; the minimum is usually 38 percent to 39 percent, and the maximum around 48 percent (table 1).
Advance by Retreat? The Formation of British Labour's Electoral Strategy
Authors: Wald Kenneth D.
Published: February 2004

Every step towards our goal is dependent on gaining the assent and support of at least a numerical majority of the whole people. Thus, even if we aimed at revolutionizing everything at once, we should necessarily be compelled to make each particular change only at the time, and to the extent, and in the manner which ten or fifteen million electors, in all sorts of conditions, of all sorts of temperaments, from Land's End to the Orkneys, could be brought to consent to it.

Now, anybody can see the difficulties which politicians must encounter when they are trying to get votes from the West End of London and South Wales at the same time.

Whatever else it might be, whatever its other functions or activities in modern democratic societies, a political party is first and foremost an organization that seeks control of government through the electoral process. Unless it first attains the legitimate governing authority that accompanies majority status, a political party cannot implement the policies necessary to realize its vision of the just society, nor can it fulfill the other roles assigned to parties by modern democratic theory. For just such reasons, it is commonly said that votes are to political parties what profits are to corporations; just as corporate behavior would be incomprehensible without reference to the profit motive, so party behavior is often inexplicable without recognizing the centrality of electoral competition. For parties with normative goals in countries with democratic political systems, the drive for electoral supremacy must be a constant concern.
From Municipal Matters to Parliamentary Principles: Eighteenth-Century Borough Politics in Maidstone
Authors: Phillips John A.
Published: February 2004

The deaths of three Maidstone Common Councilmen in 1787 and 1788 threatened the unthinkable—the destruction of the Corporation party's long local political hegemony. Although the Corporation party still controlled a solid majority of the twelve aldermen, the anti-Corporationists had won eight of nine seats at the Common Council election two years earlier, giving the ruling group their first genuine political fright in more than twenty years. The further weakening of the party's control over the Common Council as a result of the deaths of Thomas Stevenson, Henry Pocock, and Henry Cutbush, all longstanding Corporation supporters, forced the council to hold an election to fill these three seats. After scheduling an election for August 29, 1788, the Corporation party leaders spared no pains in trying to achieve their goal of replacing their deceased supporters with the similarly disposed William Wimble, William Town, and George May. The anti-Corporation party also worked diligently for its candidates, and together the two parties recruited almost 200 nonresident freemen to vote. Dozens of freemen were brought in from London and its environs, substantial contingents arrived from Chatham and Rochester, and even more came from Aylesbury and other parts of Kent.

Thomas Poole recorded the first three votes at the hustings, voting for all three Corporation candidates. At the end of the day, Sir William Bishop cast his three votes for the Corporation candidates. Along with Poole and Bishop, 648 residents and nonresidents cast their ballots. Fifty-five percent of the nonresidents cast strictly partisan ballots for the Corporation party, 36 percent cast straight-party votes for the anti-Corporation candidates, and only 9 percent split their support between the two contending slates.
John Stow and Tudor Rebellions, 1549–1569
Authors: Beer Barrett L.
Published: February 2004

In recent years, historians have brought into sharper focus the role of rebellion in the political, social, and religious life of sixteenth-century England. Indeed, the Tudor dynasty established itself on the throne in 1485 as a result of a successful baronial rebellion, and each succeeding generation experienced a major rebellion as well as numerous lesser stirs and riots. Until the revival of interest in Tudor rebellions, the majority of historians preferred to portray the century as an era of law and order in which a strong but popular monarchy ruled over grateful and largely obedient subjects. Although contemporaries living in the sixteenth century knew of rebellion and popular disorder, often through direct personal experience, the government quite understandably opposed anything resembling impartial and disinterested study of the rebellions. Government propagandists denounced rebellion vigorously in royal proclamations and manifestos, while the clergy echoed similar themes from the pulpit. Of the two histories of rebellion published during the sixteenth century, the first, John Proctor's history of Wyatt's Rebellion, was unadulterated government propaganda, and the other, Alexander Neville's history of Kett's Rebellion, was a polemic written in Latin to guarantee a select readership. Without specialized books on rebellions, the literate public had one primary source of historical information, the general chronicles that appeared with greater frequency and variety as the century progressed.

Although best known for hisSurvey of London, John Stow was the most prolific chronicler of the sixteenth century. Beginning with the brief octavoA Summary of English Chronicles, which appeared in 1565, Stow published no fewer than twenty-one editions and issues of chronicles in three different formats, the octavoSummary, a sextodecimo abridgment of theSummary, and the more substantialChroniclesandAnnales of Englandin quarto.
Culture and the Middle Classes: Popular Knowledge in Industrial Manchester
Authors: Wach Howard M.
Published: February 2004

God bless my soul, sir … I am all out of patience with the march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burnt down, by my cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge. [Thomas Love Peacock—Crotchet Castle (1831)]

The diffusion of knowledge preoccupied middle-class elites in early industrial England. While factory production promised a future of material abundance, an unsettled and menacing social environment threatened this vision of endless progress. Education constituted a cornerstone of the liberal creed embraced by the industrial middle class, and diffusing knowledge offered the hope of raising up the “lower orders” to social responsibility and respectability. A properly arranged distribution of knowledge held out hope for an ordered and orderly social existence.

But the diffusion of knowledge meant more than simply uplifting the working class. Its significance extends beyond the problematic historical question of “social control.” An utterly new society was rising in the industrializing urban agglomerations of provincial England. An expanding middle class of businessmen and professionals claimed this world as its own. They pursued political power on both local and national stages and fought for reform in economic and social policy. A strongly felt sense of stewardship prompted the industrial middle class to devote great resources and energies to shaping the new urban environment.
“There Must Be Some Misunderstanding”: Sir Edward Grey's Diplomacy of August 1, 1914
Authors: Valone Stephen J.
Published: February 2004

For over two generations, scholars have studied Sir Edward Grey's response to the Sarajevo crisis, apparently considering every aspect of his dual effort to find a diplomatic solution while convincing the cabinet that England must intervene in a general war. Historians have generally agreed that Grey's last hope to prevent war evaporated by the end of July, although the cabinet did not decide to intervene until August 2. In this light, the events of August 1, 1914, are only considered to be either a prelude or a postscript to more significant events. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that Grey pursued two distinct, yet interrelated, courses of action on August 1, 1914: (1) for as long as he was unsure of cabinet support for intervention, he sought to make a diplomatic deal with the German ambassador so that a neutral England could salvage something from the crisis, but (2) once confident England would enter the conflict, he sought to prevent the war altogether by applying diplomatic pressure on France.

Historians have overlooked Grey's diplomacy on August 1 primarily because of the cloud cast over the events of the day by the so-called misunderstanding between Grey and the German ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. The first Grey-Lichnowsky exchange took place that morning when Sir William Tyrrell, Grey's private secretary, brought a message to the German embassy. After subsequently receiving a personal call from Grey, Lichnowsky, at 11:14 a.m., sent a wire to Berlin in which he indicated Grey had proposed that, if Germany “were not to attack France, England would remain neutral and would guarantee France's passivity.”
The Theatrical Mask/Masque of Politics: The Case of Charles I
Authors: Maguire Nancy Klein
Published: February 2004

Britain now wear's the sock; the Theater's clean Transplanted hither, both in Place and Scene.

Martin Butler and Jonathan Dollimore have recently documented the importance of drama in English political life before 1642. Such scholarship, however, has stopped cold at the great divide of 1642. Except for Lois Potter in “‘True Tragicomedies’ of the Civil War and Interregnum,” no one has considered the relationship between politics and theater while the theaters were officially closed. Scholars have thereby missed a seminal question in understanding the discourse and complex political maneuvering enveloping the act of regicide in 1649. What is the relationship between the theatrical tradition and the execution of Charles I?

Even though historians frequently comment on the “tragic” nature of the execution of Charles I, thus far neither historian nor literary person has bothered to examine the immediate and popular reactions to the act of regicide. This is understandable. An odd mix of imaginative projection and verifiable fact enshrines the execution of Charles, and documentation is admittedly difficult. The available assortment of primary literature, however, indicates that many Englishmen responded to the execution as theater, more specifically, the dramatic genre of tragedy. A 1649 sermon (attributed to the Royalist Robert Brown) exemplifies both the tragic response to the act of regicide and the mid-century employment of the theatrical tradition: Brown describes the execution as “the first act of that tragicall woe which is to be presented upon the Theater of this Kingdome, likely to continue longer then the now living Spectators.”